It takes a lot of time and you have to go through a lot of bad ones. Before I had a baby, I thought the simplest way to figure out what kind of gear I would need was to read reviews on sites like Baby Gear Lab and Baby Center (if only parenting were this simple.) As ergo was consistently named one of the best carriers, I felt fortunate when my sister-in-law re-gifted me her never used ergo carrier. Unfortunately, my baby did not feel the same way. I quickly discovered why the ergo was never used by my sister-in-law. Whenever I put my baby in the ergo, he cried. Not cute little kitten squeals, but full on pterodactyl type shrieks. So desperate was my little one to escape from the ergo that he would arch his back and use his feet to launch himself off of me in some kind of deranged baby suicide attempt. There was nothing ergonomic about the ergo for my baby or I, so we moved onto the baby k’tan. I loved my baby k’tan – it was soft, comfy, easy to put on and oh so cuddly. It rem...
I recently wrote a post citing a study that reading fiction makes a person more empathetic because they can imagine themselves in the position of the characters they are reading about. These skills then become transferable to a person's real life when they interact with others. How about other forms of fiction, however, such as watching a TV drama? We have long been told that watching TV rots our brain, but could TV actually be good for us? Some studies suggest that TV could indeed be good for us, though to be fair most of these studies are cited by Bustle and HuffPost , so make of them what you will. The most convincing argument I could find for why TV watching is good for us is that TV watching helps decrease levels of cortisol - the hormone associated with stress - especially in women. Researchers speculate that this is because TV watching is a passive activity that gives people a break from their over-scheduled days. This ability to disengage and de-stress actually ...