When I was pregnant and preparing for a home birth, I inhaled every book about childbirth in my local library. Somewhere around the fourth or fifth month of my pregnancy, when I was getting too round to squeeze into jeans with zippers and the January rains were flooding down each night, I came across A…
It’s National TV Turnoff Week. I participated last April and wrote about it here and here. I had a wonderful, relaxing week last time, but I decided not to participate this week for a multitude of reasons. Most of all, I feel like I’ve found a balance between screen time and all the other things…
The first day of fall, or the autumnal equinox, is September 22 in the Northern Hemisphere. On this day, the sun hovers above the equator, and most of the world enjoys nearly equal amounts of light and darkness. In traditional agricultural societies, the harvest season was drawing to a close, and people were working overtime…
My baby pulls himself up now, teeters on a knee and one foot, and then plunks down. He’ll take his first steps soon, sway and totter across the living room floor, and join me in one of my favorite activities – walking. I’ve loved to walk for as long as I can remember. My parents…
We live in a plastic world. It’s hard to believe the substance only came on the scene about 150 years ago when Alexander Parkes, an Englishman, mixed collodion, camphor, and ethanol together. He exhibited his invention at the 1862 Great International Exhibit in London. Then in 1907 Leo Baekeland created an entirely synthetic plastic from…
My mom was no stranger to home remedies. She treated my sore throats with hydrogen peroxide and salt-water rinses, soothed my burns with ice packs, and she had a PhD in when to pop an acetaminophen or decongestant. But slathering aloe vera on my sunburns was about the extent of her herbal know-how. Likewise, in…