Wise words from Melinda Gates, via her 2016 annual letter about women and unpaid work
motherhood
Eight mindfulness tips for stressed parents
When we asked our friends about stress, a lot of them mentioned work, but we also heard a fair amount of anxiety about home life, parenting, and combos of money, love life, preschool and pregnancy. We reached out to an expert on mindfulness (who’s also taught preschool) to help frustrated parents and non-parents find ways to de-stress.
By Elizabeth Foley-Campos
As a veteran preschool teacher, I’ve witnessed parents going through good times and bad. It’s no easy task caring for a classroom of children, so if you’re one of those parents who’ve had a meltdown if front of your child’s caregiver know this: We totally understand you!
In fact, academic circles have reacted to parents’ and educators’ needs for stress management by researching and developing resources such as RULER or the Kindness Curriculum.
I’ve made the transition out of the classroom and into private practice to explore my personal interest in mindfulness. Simply stated, mindfulness means maintaining a moment-by-moment awareness of our thoughts, feelings, bodily sensations, and surrounding environment. …
Decisions: Why I don’t feel guilty for staying home
Decisions is a series dedicated to the choices we make in our lives and the factors that led us to our given resolutions. We welcome guest posts to this series to hear about how you’ve tackled a life decision. Email your story ideas to thesmartdomestic@gmail.com.
In today’s post, I’ll talk about why I chose stay home after the birth of my daughter even though I had a good job.
Home.
Staying home.
No commuting. No projects. No conference calls. No traveling to a different city every week for months. Just thinking about home. Taking care of my daughter, planning meals, organizing the house, gardening. It was so romantic and yet… so guilty-feeling.
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The problem with online mommy-groups
If you had created a Facebook group that morphed into an 18,000-person support group for moms, would you kill it after it became too much work? Or if some of the posts veered into controversial territory with heated discussion threads? If the mindless mommy chatter veered too far away from the judgment-free, discussion-rich environment you’d hoped to create?
Such is the case for Longest Shortest Time Mamas, a Facebook group that (as of last Friday) is no longer posting members’ content.
Farewell, Longest Shortest Time Mamas
Some background: The Longest Shortest Time is a podcast that calls itself “a parenting show for everyone.” On iTunes, it’s got 1,800 reviews and a five-star rating (which puts it at the top of the “Kids and Family” category). The creator of the podcast, Hillary Frank, also started a Facebook group. In her farewell post, she writes: “I started this group two years ago for two reasons: 1) to give listeners a safe space to support each other in non-judgy ways; and 2) to create a place where we could reach out directly to listeners for potential show content.”
But the Facebook group is shutting down….
Decisions: I gave myself shots to make a baby
Decisions is a series dedicated to the choices we make in our lives and the factors that led us to our given resolutions. We welcome guest posts to this series to hear about how you’ve tackled a life decision. Email your story ideas to thesmartdomestic@gmail.com.
In today’s post, I talk about how my husband and I decided to move forward with fertility treatments so we could have a kid.
Making a baby should have been easy. Birds do it. Bees do it. Even educated fleas do it! Teenagers do it all the time, according to MTV reality shows. And yet, this nice married lady with a stable job, common sense and a great husband COULD NOT DO IT.
I was relatively young (under 30) and otherwise healthy when I was diagnosed as infertile. But the facts are clear: My ovaries didn’t (and don’t) produce mature eggs without pharmaceutical help, and those eggs are essential to creating babies. I wasn’t going to get pregnant naturally, no matter how excellent my husband’s sperm nor how frequently we, ahem, practiced.
So my doctors prescribed pills, which were easy enough.
No response.
>A larger dose of pills followed. Then another dose, above the FDA-recommended amount. Still no results. As a last-ditch effort to try “the easy way,” my doctor agreed to try a different type of pill (typically prescribed to postmenopausal breast cancer patients but could also be used stimulate ovaries in younger women).
Nothing.
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