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Let’s put aside the question of whether or not you want to get the H1N1 vaccine because that is one spicy meatball, and for the time being assume you want to get it for yourself or your children. The first few flu-vaccine clinics last weekend were swamped with patients seeking the vaccine, waiting hours on line according to the San Francisco Chronicle. There will be more clinics in November, and only time will tell what the waits there will be like.Vaccine events vary in each city; you can supposedly go to your city’s public health department website (here is a list of California health departments) for more information. Many of the sites are all but useless, with a lot of information on covering your mouth when you cough but not much about where to get the vaccine they keep advising you to get. San Francisco’s site is typical in that it tells you to call your primary care provider and ask about vaccines, but the San Franicsco health department’s swine flu Twitter feed has more up-to-date information, and SF residents can also call 311 for updates. Contra Costa’s public health department site is a welcome contrast from SF’s, with detailed info on upcoming drive-through flu clinics.

Many Walgreens, Rite Aid, and CVS MinuteClinic locations also have the H1N1 shots; call the stores nearest you to ask. Kaiser patients can phone 800-573-5811 to find out where to go get the shot. Walgreens also has dedicated flu shot clinics. Flu.gov has a ton of information and links that will panic you and make you say “Just tell me where to get the shot! Argh!” Hmm, maybe you’re better off calling your primary care physician after all.

No parent likes to imagine the specter of disposable diapers piling up in the landfills when she chucks another used one into the Diaper Champ, but the eco-friendly options are so unappealing. Washing cloth diapers at home necessitates the touching of lots of nasty things (and probably a malodorous diaper pail in the bathroom); gDiapers aren’t as flushable in antique Bay Area plumbing as they could be; diaper-free can be a full-time job.

Sunnyvale’s Earth-Baby is a nice halfway alternative for the parent who wants to lower her carbon footprint without stress. For $29.99 a month the company delivers compostable disposables, and picks them up weekly when they’re um, full. You still have to pay for the corn-based diapers (about $12 for a pack of 22-44, depending on size) and wipes, but it still works out to be a bit cheaper than cloth diaper services. And everything you hand back to the company is either composted, recycled, or reused.

Earth-Baby serves San Francisco and South Bay/Peninsula cities as far down as Santa Cruz. Call 650-641-0975 or visit earth-baby.com.

Everyone made a big huge deal about the wife of Twitter’s CEO tweeting her labor last week in San Francisco, but her tweets, while amusing (I liked “Epidural, yes, please,” at 2:49 a.m.), added up to a mere three posts during the labor itself. What’s far more interesting at this point is to follow Sara Williams’ Twitter feed, as well as that of her husband Evan, to see a picture of a couple bowled over by their newborn. “Up to our ears in baby products. Favorites so far: the Woombie and Itzbeen,” said Sara two days ago, while Evan posted Monday: “Checking the Twitters with the boy.” Awww.

If you’d like to follow the Williams’ example, maybe you’d be interested in a project called the Kickbee, a prototype developed by a New York new daddy who wanted to be more immersed in his growing child’s development. Sensors strapped around the pregnant belly send wireless updates to Twitter: “Wow I’m being very active! I kicked Mommy 13 times at 03:44AM on Thu, Dec 11!” What better way to show your spouse the agony of constant fetal kicking than a whole bunch of Tweets?

Taking a CPR/emergency class for infants and children is such a pain…but not as big a pain as helplessly watching a child choke or stop breathing in front of you. CPR classes are offered daily all over the Bay Area, and many organizations will give lessons free to a group of parents. Make learning CPR the focus of your next mommy-get-together, or contact one of these fine civic organizations:

DayOne: This San Francisco parenting support organization offers several classes monthly for $45.

CPR Family: Classes in San Rafael and San Francisco run $35-75; pre-crawling babies are welcome.

American Red Cross: The paterfamilias of lifesaving organizations offers classes in most communities for around $50. Type in your ZIP code to find the location nearest you.

SafetyMax: Will give seminars for groups of 12 (minimum) in your Bay Area home or office.

CPR Education Seminars: Teaches safety classes all over the North and South Bay as well as in San Francisco.

Ask most parents their biggest hope for their kids and they’ll give the same answer: “I just want them to be happy.” But no one seems to know exactly how that’s done. Does it involve parents always being around or letting kids develop their independence? Is it all about limits and discipline, or should you merely ignore bad behavior and praise the good? If you give your kids dessert every night, are you teaching them to enjoy sweets in moderation or getting them addicted to sugar?

Well, Christine Carter’s Half Full blog probably won’t weigh in on that last one, but the first two questions are eminently fair game as this UC Berkeley PhD, whose specialty is the study of happiness in children, synthesizes social science research to provide sensible advice to parents. Popular past topics include “How Not to Raise an Ungrateful Brat” and “The Right Way to Praise Kids” (hint: praise effort, not innate qualities). Hey, now you have the science to back up your opinions. Nice!

Economic hard times have an unexpected beneficiary: kids, who suddenly get to spend more time with out-of-work Daddy. Eighty percent of recent recession layoffs have been male; that leaves an awful lot of fathers “getting thrown into roles at home,” says Jeremy Adam Smith, San Francisco author of new book The Daddy Shift: How Stay-at-Home Dads, Breadwinning Moms, and Shared Parenting Are Transforming the American Family.

But the new crop of homebound Daddies is just a continuation of several-decades-long trend in America, Smith told the New York Times‘ blog Motherlode: “Today, 80 percent of mothers work and a third of wives make more money than their husbands. In response, men have evolved, though many people fail to see it. Since 1965 the number of hours that men spend on childcare has tripled. Since 1995 it has nearly doubled. Fathers now spend more time with their children than at any time since researchers started collecting longitudinally comparable data.”

As Smith’s argues, never have American couples had more of a need for flexibility, with each pitching in on home, work, and childcare duties as needed. In response, dads are throwing themselves into the stay-at-home-dad job; and finding it as exhausting, exhilarating and demanding as their wives.

Last week’s horrific death of young Everett Carey, the four-month-old who died in a BART parking lot when his father forgot to drop him off at daycare and instead left him in the car with windows rolled up, underlines how tragic accidents can happen to anyone unwary. It’s easy to think that it couldn’t happen to you, that you’re more responsible and aware than that. But Alan Carey, Everett’s dad, probably thought that too.

The combination of a sleep-deprived parent, a busy schedule, and a rear-facing infant seat that holds a sleeping, silent baby can be a deadly one. As the San Francisco Chronicle reports, “Nationally, an average of 36 children a year die when they are trapped in overheated cars. Some get into the cars on their own and some are intentionally left by parents, but the majority are forgotten by a parent or caregiver who fails to glance in the backseat.”

What Washington Post writer Gene Weingarten calls a “fatal distraction” could happen to you. Some tips on keeping your kids safe, from kidsandcars.org:

– Keep a stuffed animal, preferably a large or eye-catching one, in your car seat and place it in the passenger seat as a reminder whenever the child is in back.

– Always put something in the backseat, such as a purse, lunch bag, or briefcase, that makes you have to open the back door each time you park.

– Tell your daycare provider to call you and other emergency contacts if your child does not arrive by a certain time each day.

Sure, we all love those “This Week In Your Pregnancy” emails where the writer attempts to make you understand the current size of your fetus by comparing him with a type of food (”This week, your baby is the size of a kidney bean/lemon/avocado/coconut”), but sometimes picturing the little kidney bean in your belly just isn’t enough. How’s a mom supposed to contain her raging curiosity between ultrasounds?

Download The Baby Ticker, available free from San Francisco’s Widgetbox.com, maker of the downloadable bits of useful software known as widgets. Input some simple information about your pregnancy, click to download, and poof! The widget appears on your desktop, with a countdown to the due date and a representation of what your baby should look like, given his current state of development. Each day, the widget-baby will move, grow and change, just like your own. Oooh, finger buds! Look, he’s sucking his thumb! It’s creepy-cool to everyone but a pregnant lady. For her, it’s magical.

But you’re not going to buy those hard, yucky, white-inside berries from the grocery store, are you? Get the very best berries, and teach your children a lesson about nature at the same time, with a trip to a local farmers’ market. The produce in Northern California is some of the best in the country, and the farmers’ markets are thus bursting with stalls selling fruits and vegetables so fine they’re the stuff of fever dreams. Carrots as sweet as apples! Peaches with juice that runs down your face and you don’t even care!

Picking through piles of produce can also help introduce kids to new fruits and vegetables. The delicate swirls of sweet pea shoots and mounds of emerald kale and mustard green are so beautiful, they must be tasty too, right, kids?

Some markets have prepared-food stalls too: honey, dips and jams, nuts, ethnic food. Or there are fish, egg, or fresh-poultry sellers, it’s not all about produce. But it is about buying food that’s as beautiful as it is healthy. To find out what markets are near you, visit localharvest.org.

Healthy-food-oriented parents whose kids attend a SFUSD school will want to be at Mission High School on Thursday night, at a special meeting organized by parents who hope to change SFUSD’s food policies. Here’s what the flyer says:

Are you interested in learning more about the food in SFUSD schools, and how to improve it? Do you want to see more fresh fruits and vegetables served with school meals? Perhaps you have heard about the food in Berkeley schools and wonder why San Francisco is different? Are you dreaming about locally-grown foods in our cafeterias?”

Why, yes! Yes, I am! I’ll see you there. This is just an evening of brainstorming; petitioning the SFUSD will come later. The meeting is at Thursday, May 21 at 7pm at Mission High School, 3750 18th Street (at Dolores) in San Francisco. Email lenabrook@yahoo.com or visit groups.yahoo.com/group/sffoodsystems/.

For more inspiration, see our earlier post on Ann Cooper, Director of Nutrition for the exemplary Berkeley Unified School District.