There was another story of a woman who claims she had no idea that she was pregnant, giving birth on an airplane over the Pacific recently. Video footage of the passengers erupting in applause made its way around TikTok and while everyone was delighted by the happy story, I was perplexed. The woman claimed she didn’t know she was expecting and if I’m being honest, I find that hard to believe.
I cannot possibly be the only person who reads a story like this and says, “Nope. No way that lady didn’t know she was pregnant.” But here I…
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A few months ago, I wrote this piece on what science says about parents who yell. It was directly inspired by my utter frustration with my children because no matter what I tried to do to get them to listen to me, our communication would inevitably devolve into a yelling match over screentime or chores.
Yelling at my kids doesn’t feel good, and it has never solved any problems, so why was that my default method of parenting? And if science was telling me that yelling is considered as harmful as hitting, how much damage was I causing my family…
Don’t worry, your kids will be ok.
It’s a Saturday afternoon and I am in the kitchen looking up recipes on Pinterest for “easy kid-friendly dinners” and I come across a healthy version of McDonald’s chicken nuggets. Score! I have all the ingredients and the time so, I whip up a batch of golden, baked (not fried) nuggets that I used ninja cookie cutters to shape. This will win over my kids, I tell myself. But when I serve dinner only one of my three kids is happy. The other two? …
I’m not sure when I first read or heard the mantra, “it’s none of your business what others think of you,” but I can tell you that it has been popping up in my newsfeed for a while now. I hear it on TikTok. I see it on memes on Instagram. I listened to an author the other day talking about her writing process on some podcast, and she mentioned it. It seems to me that the universe truly wants me to drill the meaning behind these words into my head.
“It’s none of my business what others think of…
It’s easier and cheaper than you might think.
The past 15 months of living through a pandemic have taught me many, many lessons about what is essential in life. Reading books instead of scrolling Instagram ranks pretty high. But the one lesson that sticks out is how safe and relieved I feel to have a fully stocked pandemic pantry and freezer.
Not being able to go to the grocery store during some of the worst months of the pandemic sent fear through me. We ran out of disinfectant when the news told us that we had to wipe down our food or get sick, but no local or…
It’s not as hard as you think.
You probably have no idea who I am, but you’ve likely read my words. I write 5,000 words a day for a variety of publications that are primarily in the parenting, women’s lifestyle, health, and science spheres. When those areas intersect, I beam, and the work explodes out of me. My name is hidden behind the words “staff writer” or is erased altogether for some of my clients for whom I ghostwrite all their content, but trust me, you’ve probably read my words.
To get to a place in my career as a freelance writer where I can reliably churn…
See? Not all art history is boring.
Abraham Lincoln once said, “don’t believe anything you read on the internet just because there’s a picture with a quote next to it.” I’m just kidding. The historical quote is actually, “believe nothing you hear, and only one half that you see,” and was written by Edgar Allen Poe in a short story he published in Graham’s Magazine in 1845. But thanks to internet culture, words and famous names get jumbled and slapped on memes, then shared around the world. It becomes impossible to decipher what is real, what is based on realness, and what is just plain made up…
Many parents will lovingly observe their child and wonder, is my kid gifted? After all, not every kid can learn all the words to that Frozen song by two and a half. And indeed, not every kid can memorize the names of more than a hundred dinosaurs by age four. By the time my middle child was three, he left adults in stitches with his wild puns and jokes that seemed a bit advanced for his age. By the time he was five, he had solved a Rubik’s cube on his own. …
For weeks I set aside fifteen minutes in the morning to sit, crisscrossed on my bedroom floor with my eyes closed, just breathing. Meditation devotees (my New Age friends who are further attuned to their inner peace than I am) assured me that it would be uncomfortable at first, but it would be worth it. The sales pitch was that I would cultivate mindfulness through meditation that could soothe my high-functioning anxiety and even help sharpen my creativity.
Every day during those God-awful weeks, after about three minutes that felt like three hours inside my head, I’d begin to feel…
Yes, you read that right. A chainsaw was used to help deliver babies.
The modern chainsaw we as know it was not invented to cut trees. It was designed and developed to cut women’s pubic bones in half during childbirth to make the birthing space wider for the baby to get out of the womb. And yes, it was a grisly as it sounds.
Between the years 1783 and 1785, two Scottish doctors, John Aitken and James Jeffray, invented a “flexible saw” that included a chain with serrated teeth. This medical device would be the first iteration of a modern chainsaw. …
