Today I was thinking about my many years working with kids. This may be insulting to some of you but a lot need to hear it. It's one of my pet peeves.

I worked in Respiratory Care for 30 years. Twenty three of those 30 years was in a hospital setting and at least 15 was in pediatrics with the last 10 being coordinator of PEDS, NICU and Mother/Baby. I was clinical educator and helped teach a Family Asthma Class.

You've probably been seeing a lot more food products labeled Gluten Free lately. Until few years ago I'd never heard of gluten, that is until I had a friend diagnosed with Celiac Disease and another with a gluten allergy. I thought diabetes was bad in counting carbs but how would you like to be looking for foods with no wheat, rye, barley or some food additives.

When you have a baby you go for routine well baby exams, if your child gets sick you immediately call the doctor. Is a vision exam also part that routine care. If not it should be.

We all take our vision for granted until something happens and we loose it. Most people feel if their baby is born healthy looks in their direction when talking to them their vision is fine. Oh, how wrong you might be.

According to the U.S Census Bureau about 4.02 babies were born in 2004. About 4% of those babies will develop Strabismus and 3% will develop Amblyopia. That's about 7% or 100,000 babies born each year at risk for eye and vision problems which may be serious.

Strabismus a eyes that aren't properly alligned. Crossed eyes is one type but the eyes can turn out or up and down. The eye muscles don't work together and this causes the mialignment. If left untreated Strabismus can lead to Amblyopia.

Ambylopia is the medical term for "lazy eye" If left untreated Ambylopia can lead to one eye becoming stronger and the weaker eye can become useless leaving that eye functionally blind.

In 2005 the American Optometric Association and The Vision Care Institute of Johnson & Johnson Vision Care Inc. launched InfantSee. InfantSee is a nationwide program to provide professional eye and vision care to infants. Infants between 6 & 12 months can be seen by an optometrist. This exam is free no matter what your income. Even at an age when the baby is unable to communicate verbally with the doctor or read an eye chart their eyes can be examined for serious problems and abnormalities. There are over 7,000 optometrists nationwide who volunteer their services to InfantSee. There is a Doctor Locator on their website. To find out more about Infant Eye Screenings and locate a doctor in your area visit http://www.infantsee.org.

Isn't it worth a free vision screening to insure your child's eyes will develop normally and he'll be able to enjoy all the beautiful things there are to see in this world.

The past couple of years I've been given a true wake-up call and realize that what I thought were "OLD PEOPLE" diseases or conditions really aren't.

With all the talk about the flu and H1N1 everyone's concerned and rightly so. Yes, you can control what you do to try to prevent catching and spreading the bugs but you can't control what other's do. This is something I've always believed but an incident involving a family member the other day really got me to thinking.

A cousin of mine told me how upset she was when she went grocery shopping and was getting some chicken at the deli. There was a young kid waiting on her and the meat was on the scale as he was preparing to bag it. He turned to the side and let out a huge sneeze without trying to cover his mouth. He continued bagging the meat, and walked off sniffling. A second person cut some more products and my cousin asked him to re-cut the meat and throw the earlier stuff away. She's now lost her appetite and is doing the "what if" game.