A Dumping of the Brain

You would not believe how many blog posts I have sitting in my draft folding, with only one or two sentences written. Some ideas are from a year ago and others more recent. Some could warrant a post of their own while others do not. All of these drafts somehow give me the feeling of being weighed down so here is my attempt to dump them all into one extremely random post:

(source)

1) NurtureShock: New Thinking About Children. I read this book ages ago. I loved it. I wanted to recap it on my blog because I found it so very interesting, but of course, never got around to doing so. I actually took notes while reading (nerd alert) and probably bored my old boss, Katie, about it because I talked about it so much after I was finished.

Anyway, while reading another blog called hellobee, I discovered that one of the bloggers wrote their own recap about it. If you're interested in how children acquire language, learn about race, why they lie, or the inverse power of praise, read the book (or just the summaries). Really good stuff, in my opinion.



2) Limber Tail Syndrome. We brought Bama to the family cottage and after many hours of swimming his tail looked like this:

instead of the usual, this: 

I felt so bad for the poor boy and thought for sure he broke his tail while jumping off the boat into the water. It turns out that he had limber tail syndrome, which is caused by excessive activity, especially swimming. Certain breeds of dogs are more susceptible to this, including Labs. He seemed to be in pain and would whimper when he got excited because ya know, he wanted to wag his tail. He also had trouble sitting down. I'm glad I used my google-fu to learn about this syndrome rather than bringing him to the vet and spending hundreds of dollars. There's really nothing you can do and it went away in about a week.

3) My Love/Hate Relationship with Cloth Diapering, UPDATE.
Holy smokes, life is so much better when you don't have to share a broken washing machine with a bunch of other tenants, including one crazy lady, and one sorry excuse of a man. We went for months and months with a broken washer which involved me running up and down many many flights of stairs to wash Little m's diapers. Looking back, it was a huge source of stress for me and from start to finish, washing and drying the diapers took me all day. Now we have our own washer and dryer and yeah, it's amazing.


I also made my life a lot easier by deciding to dress Little m in a disposable diaper overnight. For the life of me, I could not figure out how to get the stink out of the cloth diapers that were on the baby for 12+ hours. By using one disposable a day, the stink is gone, and I am a happy camper.

4) We Moved! I love my house. I love my house. I love my house. Um, attached garages are WONDERFUL.

That is all for now. I feel lighter.