I grew up in Kansas City, on both the Kansas and Missouri sides of the state line and smack dab in the middle of Tornado Alley. One of my earliest memories is of my dad, my three older brothers and me scrambling to get out of our station wagon and getting down into a ditch along the side of a highway to try and protect us from a twister ...

My mother was barely 15 years old when she began her first real job working the ticket window of a theater in downtown Kansas City, MO. One day, a group of soldiers came to the window and requested four adult tickets to see the latest hit movie. Newly trained and eager to please, mom did what she was told to do and passed four tickets ...

If you haven’t been vaccinated for the flu yet, it should be on your weekend to-do list. October is the unofficial start of flu season, and you don’t want to come down with the nasty virus — or have your kids miss school because of it. Only 46% of Americans get the flu shot every year, according to CDC statistics, but there are so many reasons why ...

  This fall, nutrition advocacy is hot. Last week, McDonald's announced a move to post calorie information on their menu at an earlier date than required by the federal health care bill.  In the same timeframe, New York City's Board of Health officially banned the sale of sugary drinks in excess of 16 oz. in restaurants. Few can ...

  50 & Pregnant It sounds like a Lifetime movie, but extreme middle age births are exploding. According to the most recent CDC statistics, 8,000 babies were born to women 45 and older. That's double the number since just 1997. Of these, an alarming 541were born to women age 50 and older, a 375 percent increase in the same time ...

This month, a mother in Texas was convicted of child endangerment after a second baby died of SIDS due to co-sleeping. In July 2010, Vanessa and Mark Clark's 2-month old son died while sleeping with his parents. Vanessa Clark had Xanax and Hydrocodone in her system. Less than a year earlier, the couple's 1-month old son died in the parents' ...

The Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices of the CDC is endorsing vaccinations against human papillomavirus (HPV) for boys of ages 11 and 12. This announcement comes on the heels of new research that reportedly documents the rise in cancers caused by HPV Research published recently in the Journal of Clinical Oncology shows HPV-16, the ...

I saw a news item last week about the Internal Revenue Service ruling breast pumps as a tax-deductible medical expense. The catch is most new moms will need to have a pretax medical spending account established to take advantage of the deduction. Otherwise, the expense is deductible only if the family unit's medical expenses exceed 7.5 percent of ...