Yes, because context matters. Exceptions don’t make the rule, and speaking generally about things is allowed when they are related.

So what is the exception here? You said, and I quote, “science is by nature unethical”. So you’re saying any experimental methodology in any school of science exploring any number of completely benign things is somehow unethical.

This isn’t debate club.

I see you’re new to the internet.

You said “science”, not any specific type or category of study, so if you mean a specific school of science is unethical you should make that distinction.

Why do you think that asking questions, making a hypothesis, testing that hypothesis and writing down the results is unethical?

Finally got around to the Demon Haunted World by Carl Sagan and it’s more relevant than ever. It absolutely predicted the world we’re in politically now and has some insight and analysis as to how and why and what to do to help. Definitely worth a read or reread if you haven’t read it or it’s been a while.

At this stage, truly and seriously be glad and grateful for those long sleeps and naps.

I had a ton of trouble with milk, and my baby had absolutely no interest in latching, so we did bottles supplemented with formula from day 1. There’s a perk to using the bottle, in that you, the non-nursing partner get that good 1 on 1 feeding time too. Mama can sleep and pump on her schedule, not baby’s. Consider it a blessing. If kiddo is feeding and gaining weight, you’re doing it right. As others said, fed is best.

For the first four months babies are basically Sims with four “needs” bars. They cry if they’re hungry, need to burp or their tummy is upset, if they’re lonely or if they’re dirty. They make pretty distinct faces and signals you can follow to see what they need, and you’ll get to know your kid and what those signals look like.

As far as having a smart kiddo, I recommend you try teaching them simple sign language. We started teaching our kid signs for things when he was about 5 months old, like “more”, “hungry”, “thirsty” etc and he picked up on it and started using his own signs and sounds to communicate with us when he was about 8-10 months old. It was invaluable to be able to understand and communicate with him and helped us bond and build trust very early.

There’s a lot of guff and hot air about how to make your baby smarter, but one thing that’s been consistently proven to give positive results is reading to them. Read to them from day 1 whenever you have the opportunity. Its good bonding time and they learn so much from hearing an illustrated story. My kid and I used to play “find the x” style games with the pictures on the page and he showed me he knew what an armadillo was, or a combine harvester was before he was 2, because he could point to the appropriate pictures. I never dumbed down or lessen my vocabulary with him either, and he’s proven that he’s a sponge for words.

Book recommendations:

How to speak so children will listen, and how to listen so children will speak. Some parts are dated but there are some extremely valuable tips and ideas in there too

Precious Little Sleep, Zubief, it’s a very relatable read for helping sleep train your baby when you get to that point.

I’m someone who can eat multiple pounds of blueberries in one sitting. Next time, try spraying them thoroughly with vinegar and letting them soak for at least 5min, 10 or even 20 is better. Then rinse thoroughly with water. There are some tummy upsetting molds and bacterias that are neutralized by the vinegar. This works for any berries or easily spoilt produce. It’s majorly cut down on the “consequences” of my grape and berry binges.

I’ve always been one that tries to fix before we replace, and that’s lead me to a few things like soldering some loose connectors on electronics, or basic small engine repair like an oil change and installing a spark plug. I like making things so I’ve been slowly expanding my experience levels with various interesting power tools. I can install insulation, mud and sand drywall, stain and refinish furniture, that kind of thing.

However, if I think about things that are truly flipping the script on gender roles, probably the most masculine “skill” I have is the ability to assertively ask for what I want and delegate tasks to others. It seems almost foreign to other women outside of a business context.

This was particularly noticeable when I lived in the American south as a caretaker for a family member. Some of the conservative biddies we had over to visit sometimes would make little passive aggressive snarky comments and the exchange would go something like this.

“Oh, I didn’t know where to put my trash, the bin is just overflowing with garbage so I left it on the counter”
“You’re right, we usually put the trash in the bin in the garage, spare bags are under the sink, just make sure to close the lid when you’re done”
“Oh, uh…” (palpable confusion)
“Thanks for helping out!” (direct eye contact, pleasant smile)
(flustered acquiescence)

It would throw them for a loop so hard it was consistently hilarious. They clearly expected me to bashfully apologize or get all defensive or shamed at the state of the house in some pecking order power play. Lol. You brought it up, have fun getting it delegated to you.

If you don’t know what you like yet, or what your style is, try going on FB marketplace or Craigslist and look for a closet clean out. This is the season for yard sales too. Try to find someone listing things in roughly your size (they sometimes will say “lots of XL clothes!” ) and then you can pick up giant bags or whole bins of random clothes for not even 10 dollars.

If you score a haul or two like that and get a chance to play dress up and experiment, you can figure out what you like on your body. What kind of necklines do you feel are flattering, what silhouettes, what length skirts or sleeves etc. Once you have a better idea of what you actually like on you, you can move on to shopping at thrift stores. There, you can keep an eye out for pieces that fit the profile of clothing you decided you liked. Not all thrift stores let you try on clothes and you might not feel confident enough to throw it on over what you’re wearing, so be prepared to buy, try, and maybe return.

Try to go for higher quality items made of natural materials. You should aim for as little polyester, nylon, acrylic or spandex as possible. Look for cotton, linen, and wool, rayon and viscose are ok too. Feel the clothes and see if they have weight to the fabric, and structure to them. Good quality clothing has construction and patterning that makes them fit a body better than just a sack or a rectangle. Look for clothes with linings and complexity.

Hopefully you will be able to build a starter wardrobe of some good core pieces that you love!

Goodwill is ubiquitous but if you’re in America, rural areas should have church thrift shops or animal shelter thrift shops. They rely on donations to raise money for good causes and while they won’t have as much inventory, they are extremely motivated sellers. Goodwill, Value Village and Savers are big corporate chains with a lot of stuff and variety, but sometimes you can’t beat a little church thrift shop for a bargain.

Yes, he said he didn’t like feeling like a kid next to me 🤷‍♀️

I’m proud of how I handled my anger over current events.

I got sick of just complaining on the internet and feeling powerless, so I volunteered for town government. It’s an unelected position, unpaid, but it’s in something I’m passionate about. It’s tedious and slow, but we’re making incremental changes to make things better. I have real influence now on my immediate area and it’s helping me keep my sanity(?).

I’ve personally only seen kids on leashes in the context I mentioned above, of a large, crowded event where a few bodies moving in the way of your kid will break line of sight entirely. Outdoor festivals, concerts, fairs, amusement parks etc. I have never seen a kid on a leash at a playground or park or bank or grocery store etc. Toddlers are small and if there’s a lot of bodies around it would be VERY easy to lose sight of them. If my kid ran off and broke my line of sight of him in a crowd I absolutely would have a moment of panic. Again, I’m not going to judge other parents for finding solutions to problems that don’t harm the child.

I got away from my mother at a large event, and left her panicking and organizing other parents to search for me. When they found me she spanked me and yelled at me for running off. It wasn’t the first time and wouldn’t be the last. Obviously hitting me was wrong, but she was terrified of what could have happened to me. If she had just used a tether it would never have happened.

Something’s lack of representation in media is not exactly a reliable metric of commonality, if it was, gay people sprang into being in the late 90s.

It’s normal enough. I saw a couple of kids on wrist leashes just this weekend at a very crowded outdoor event. The kids were probably about 2 and 3. I have a 3 year old as well, and didn’t have him on a leash because he’s responsive to my voice calling him and has decent (for his age) impulse control. I didn’t judge or have negative impressions of those parents. They were present and just trying to enjoy the event with their kids. It’s HIGHLY kid dependent. When I was a toddler, I was the type to just run off in a crowd and I could have saved my mother a lot of grief and panic if she had a leash for me. It’s just another tool available to parents.

It’s important not to project your feelings as an adult, because you have different assumptions, associations and contexts tied to leashes than a toddler does. Generally, toddlers are taught to have shame or be embarrassed about things, their default sentiment to most things is extremely pragmatic. A toddler on a leash will be focused on the tactile sensation of it on their wrist or body, the effect it has of limiting their movement, and not much else. Think about when you saw those kids on leashes… were they upset about the leash? Were they trying to get out of it? Were they asking their guardians to please take it off? Or were they just kinda being silly kids running around exploring?

Also to this:

If you are taking them to a place where it’s dangerous for them to act like children…*then why the fuck are you taking them there in the first place?!*

Sometimes you just have no other option. A fair price for babysitting is $20+ USD an hour. Not every toddler is in or has access to daycare. Not every family has grandparents close enough to drop them off with. Sometimes bringing them along to a place with you is the only way they’ll have supervision.

Just ignore us. Consistent eye contact, staring, or obviously paying a lot of unwarranted attention to us is way more threatening than just being big or burly.

Guild Wars 2, it can be extremely cozy in places. Beautiful environments, it lets you run around and just stumble across something to do, and you can get in a groove doing a map meta with a series of events leading to a big boss fight with 50+ people all participating and then you can just run off later harvesting leeks or whatever. I can just zone out watching a show on my other monitor while working on a collection or an achievement or getting flax or something.

Audiobooks have been an amazing hack for me to stay focused on every day household tasks. Listening to an interesting book engages my upper level thoughts (monkey mind) and makes things like folding laundry or dishes much more engaging. I still have a tendency to just fuck off when it’s half done but I can keep in motion and stay in the groove and circle around again after doing other necessities.

Simply the act of writing something down, with an actual pen on actual paper, really does help with memory. I know it’s a really common thing to suggest, especially in school and classes but I completely skipped it then and only started doing this in the past decade so it’s new to me. I’ve noticed such a dramatic difference in my recall of things that I wrote down vs things that were said to me, even if I never look at the notepad again.

Also, I absolutely hate this, but having less free time. I have less free time now than I ever have before and I’ve been astonished at how much I’ve been getting done. Every day I have pressure to do as much as I possibly can within a small window of time and it’s been great for my ADHD, but I resent it and grumble about it and wish it didn’t work so well.

They ARE evolving. My kid was born with a taste for spicy food. When he was about one he used to try to swig the spicy mayo bottle. When he was two he was doing the “more” gesture for more Sriracha on his burrito meat. He’s three now and regularly eats off his Dad’s plate when he has food that makes my nose run and eyes tear up. He will probably be snorting Pepper X by his teens.

Posted most of this in another thread but I’m glad to help share my tricks. I have managed to nearly eliminate Amazon entirely from our lives for the past two years. I usually find things by searching what I want to buy on DuckDuckGo and then adding “-amazon”, “-etsy”, “-walmart”, “-temu” and “-pinterest” as search modifiers.

A lot of little shops are perfectly legit, but watch out for:

Things being ridiculous bargains. Small shops will almost always be more expensive due to higher overheads and less bulk

Too much variety in product (unless they’re a marketplace with 3rd party vendors). A legit shop will have inventory that makes sense together in its theme. If they sell everything from bubblebath to uranium they’re either probably not actually selling it or drop shipping it.

Pictures that look like they come from lots of different sources, or no consistency in images. If they don’t have their own pictures of products or standards of presentation that’s suspicious

Some general recs:

For anything electronic or computer related: B&H Photo or Microcenter

For music stuff: Sweetwater, but there’s a lot of great small music stores, or you can use a marketplace like Reverb

For clothes: if you have any clothes you already enjoy, go directly to their brand website. If you don’t, go to local secondhand shops and touch, handle and try on some clothes to see them in person. I’ve discovered some brands I like by finding something in a thrift store that was well made but not my size or preferred color.

For house repair and DIY stuff: we order from a local building supply store, but there’s also hardwareandtools.com, 1stoplighting, Waysource, Lightbulbs.com, Timothy’s Toolbox etc.

For food items, local grocery stores often offer online shopping and delivery. If it’s a specialty item or imported the import companies sometimes have their own websites. There’s also Hive or GroveCo for some granola type B Corp goodness

For tea, coffee and spices, Adagio and its sister websites

For super fast, need it now shipping, Target has a lot of the same things Amazon does and even does same day delivery for an extra fee for certain items.

For something hard to find you can’t find another site for, try Ebay.

I do business with all sorts of independent retailers and have only had good experiences with them. These are sites that I’ve personally bought from but there are a lot of smaller sites just trying to make a place for themselves on the internet

I have never been, nor seem to be able to get motion sickness. No seasickness either. I can read books on all sorts of moving vehicles, and I love roller coasters. Whip me around upside down in pitch dark at 60mph and I’ll just call it a good time. My husband says I am squandering my powers because I can play as much of whatever motion intense VR game as I want, but I just end up playing Beat Saber most of the time.

Well, the nice thing is GW1 is still there. They decided to keep it going because the cost was minimal enough that it was worth it to them, so all of that content is still perfectly playable and there are still people running ATFH and Droks etc. It has a small dedicated following and is still a fun game in its own right. They’re different games but I enjoy both.