Packing your hospital bag for labour and birth is one of the most exciting things you will do in pregnancy. It’s your last chance to take some control of the environmental stimuli you will experience during labour, delivery, and recovery. It’s your chance to access the creature comforts of home while you’re in a hospital setting. It’s an opportunity to feel as cozy, clean, relaxed, and prepared as you possibly can for the arrival of your little one.
Hate is the wrong word. I have what a psychotherapist once called “anxiety sensitivity” about flying, meaning I’m so afraid of it that I am even afraid of being afraid.
Obviously, I combat this problem like every other life hurdle: by over-planning, researching, and discussing until no one around me can stand it anymore. Control and information are my friends.
My parents always taught me that if something is hard, it means you should — no MUST — do it.
Supervision is a real letdown of a word. Super + Vision sounds like something that Wonder Woman has, and not something parents are required to do with their pre-schoolers, 24/7. Parents know that supervision is important - especially the supervision of preschoolers doing art. I learned this the hard way, recently.
In the quiet nights before our first daughter was born, I remember my husband asking “What are you most afraid of when the baby is born?”
I thought about the question, seriously.
Not knowing how to soothe a baby with colic? Being a good role model for my child? Raising a compassionate girl into a brave woman, who still has the lightness of spirit to laugh recklessly?
“I’m afraid of sleep deprivation,” he said, matter-of-factly, and rolled over to fall sleep. Soundly. With snoring. Those were the days…
I’m a manager, with a team of two. My job is challenging, and requires that I plan in advance and roll with the punches. There are some excellent networking opportunities, if I select the right settings, and introduce myself to like-minded managers. The highs are exhilarating, but the lows can be crushing. Like many difficult jobs, it’s worth the grind.
My role includes, but is not limited to, the following knowledge and skills:
It's election time! If you hadn't yet noticed the television advertisements, attack ads, candidate interviews, lawn signs, buttons, polls, protests, and voting cards you are not alone.
"Huh? There’s an election?"
Voter turnout in the 2011 Canadian election was a dismal 61.1%. Bluntly: nearly half of this country didn’t decide who runs this place, and how.
I’ve spent the last three years searching for a book, article, celebrity, guru, or Buzz Feed tips-sheet to tell me how I can have it all: fulfilling career, financial success, happy family, healthy parents, contact with friends, thriving kids and time just for me.
Post partum depression is complicated, painful, and – most importantly – an experience unique to its suffering host. For some, it is an incapacitating weight. For me it was a swirling of self-criticism, negativity, anger, doubt, fear, discomfort, and anxiety. I felt like I had “lost the plot” in my own life. I didn’t recognize what was unfolding before me. More than that, I hated the main character of this story (yeah, that’s me).
Remember dorm life? The newfound freedom, the exciting nightlife, the friendships, the ramen noodles. Remember the sticky floors and hallways that smelled like bad cabbage and B.O. and beer soup? Yeah. Dorm life is gross. The post-high school years meant figuring out how to live on your own. I did some pretty messy and domestically shameful things when I moved out of my parent's home, including (but not limited to):
Holidays, illness, visitors, acts of nature, bouts of malaise, Netflix binges: there are endless ways to let your life, goals, and housekeeping get off track. After the recent holiday with two sick kids, my own list of to-dos got a little loco. Everywhere I looked there were boxes, blocks, barf pails, and baskets of laundry to do battle with. Just surveying the post-holiday carnage was exhausting, and enough to make me want to throw in the (dish) towel.
In the wake of Christmas insanity – after all the wrapping and boxes have been cleared away, the guests have packed it up, and the street sweepers have moved in to deal with the messy present fallout – a feeling of blueness can settle in.
Here's a dirty little secret: I don't own a mop and bucket. I never have and I never will.
You shouldn't own them, either, and Jamie Lee Curtis would back me up on that. The actress has been profiled in magazines and on television as a modern domestic diva, who has meticulous organizing routines that include a flat-frozen soup filing system.
There’s been a lot of talk about how to handle the big, fat, jolly issue of Santa’s existence in our house. My eldest daughter is two, and suddenly aware of the folklore that accompanies Christmas.
We’ve sent humans to the moon. We’ve cured diseases. We’ve mapped the human genome. We've even put the lime in the coconut, and shook it all up.
Why can’t we cure colic?
When the doctor in the emergency room gave “colic” as the diagnosis for my first daughter’s ceaseless screaming, I wanted to scream right along with her. Why can’t there be a magic pill, or special blanket, or a tribal chant - anything - to sooth my baby? And what about my anxiety ravaged nerves?
The coupons, the immunization records, the defunct grocery lists, the Blockbuster cards. Their entire life, stuffed into a bulging slip of leather that’s begging for a merciful death. If you want to see how well this wallet worked out for George Costanza, read to the bottom of this post.
