Because natural isn't always possible — or easy.
Posted in Pop Culture, Research, Safety on Mar 26th, 2013
Does watching a lot of television make kids nutty and mean? The answer, according to a study published in the medical journal Archives of Diseases in Childhood, is yes. The report — Do television and electronic games predict children’s psychosocial adjustment? Longitudinal research using the UK Millennium Cohort Study — found that 5-year-old kids who [...]
I am not what you would call an outdoor person and yet some of my most treasured memories took place outside. My sister and I spent all of our waking hours running around our street, biking, playing games, or hanging out at the playground around the corner. We used leaves, sticks, and flowers as props. [...]
Posted in Environment, Going Green, Recycle, Reduce, Research, Reuse, Sustainable on Feb 8th, 2012
One of the things I am most proud of is our household ban on plastic. We don’t use plastic if we can help it. I take reusable bags on shopping trips to the supermarket and the mall, and we recycle any plastic that does come into our home. Every bread bag, every piece of [...]
Posted in Eating Healthy, Environment, Food, Going Green, Health, Research, Safety on Nov 16th, 2011
I recently participated in a food-related Twitter party. During our discussion about Thanksgiving turkey and whether or not stuffing is safe to eat, the host asked about cookware: what were people cooking their turkeys in? I immediately tweeted that I used to cook in a non-stick Teflon pan, but about two years ago I banned [...]
Posted in Health, Preventative medicine, Research on Oct 24th, 2011
Every so often — when I am not leaping up to care for children – I wake up, lie in bed, and wonder what kind of animal would have trampled me had I been born before the introduction of modern ophthalmology. Because someone like me with such a case of myopia (nearsightedness to me and [...]
Posted in parenting, Pop Culture, Research on Aug 12th, 2011
Dear Parent of the Kid in My Kid’s Camp: I dropped my daughter off this morning to your child singing away. What a beautiful voice she has, but holy crap, how does she know that song?!? Your little girl — what is she? Seven or eight? — was singing Rihanna’s S&M. What? You don’t remember [...]
Two women in my life have ovarian cancer. One is my sister’s sister-in-law. She’s in her 30s. She found her cancer by accident; she thought she had a hernia. The other woman is one of my closest friend’s mothers. Her cancer is pretty advanced. She found out thanks to a routine abdominal sonogram. They have [...]
Posted in Environment, Going Green, Health, Illness, Pregnancy, Research, Toxins on Feb 16th, 2010
I’m really mad at the Powers that Be. They have let us down yet again. This past month there has been a flurry of new research and lawmaking related to chemicals and toxins and their effects on our children. I want to know why it’s taken so long to figure some of these out. The [...]
The memory is burned into my brain. I was a shy, awkward 13. Pin-thin except for the fact that I was way too developed for someone my age. For someone twice my age. As a result, I walked around hunched over, my shoulders curling forward, my head down. One afternoon my seventh grade English teacher [...]