How to Enjoy the Santa Story Without Lying to your Child
By presenting the “Santa Story” as fiction, you can still celebrate the fun traditions of the Christmas season while avoiding the downsides of deceiving your child. *This post was updated on 12/11/18 to include an FAQ section and some quotes from other parents. Every December, a few articles circulate with titles like, “How to Tell Your Kids the Truth About Santa Without Breaking Their Hearts.” They encourage parents to tell children they get to “become Santa” and thus “the Santa construct is not a lie that gets discovered, but an unfolding series of good deeds and Christmas spirit” (quote attributed to an anonymous Facebook post, which has been widely shared).…
Bringing Home Baby Without Breaking Your Body – How to protect your joints when you have arthritis and a new baby
Despite infants’ diminutive size and stature, caring for a new baby is a very physical job! Many new parents and caregivers experience joint or muscle pain after repetitive stress caused by lifting, carrying, diapering, and holding their baby. It’s estimated that between 25-50% of new parents experience DeQuervain’s tenosynovitis (or “Mommy thumb”) alone. It is also common to have pain in other areas such as the wrists, shoulders and back. These issues are of course exacerbated by chronic underlying illnesses such as autoimmune arthritis. From my experiences as a new mom with rheumatoid arthritis and from my training as an occupational therapist, I would like to share tips on my…
Bringing Home Baby: Tips for Meeting the Caregivers’ Basic Needs
It’s hard to put into words how simultaneously joyful, exhausting, transcendent, stressful, surreal, and miraculous the first few months home with an infant can be. Now that I’m emerging from the fog but the experience is still fresh in my mind, I’d love to share some tips and strategies that helped me adjust to parenthood* over the last five and a half months. While pregnant, I found countless resources for how to care for a newborn, from feeding to sleeping to swaddling to safety. However, there were less resources available for how to care for myself and other primary caregivers in the newborn days. Thus, I will focus on these…
Everything I Need to Know About Grit, Perseverance and Frustration, I learned from Soccer
Soccer is one of the most frustrating sports, which is why my husband and I hope our kids choose to play someday. You might wonder why on earth a prospective parent would actively desire that their child experience frustration. My reasoning is simple: frustration is an unavoidable part of life. By being chronically exposed to frustrating situations and learning to persevere through them, you develop grit and perseverance, which will be more beneficial long term than being sheltered from negative experiences. Additionally, recent research suggests that grit and perseverance are more correlated to lifelong success than traditional measures such as IQ or grade point average. Of course, all sports help…
Arthritis Humor and the Therapeutic Powers of Laughter and Social Media
Last week I started a GIF based Tumblr blog called “Arthritis Humor.“ My goal for this blog is to help patients with autoimmune arthritis (and other chronic illnesses) transcend their experiences via humor, and feel less alone by connecting to others through shared laughter. Why find the humor in arthritis? As a healthcare professional and patient, I will concede that there is nothing intrinsically funny about either category of arthritis: osteoarthritis (“wear and tear” arthritis, the kind associated with aging) or autoimmune arthritis forms such as rheumatoid arthritis (whereby one’s own immune system mistakenly attacks the lining of one’s joints and other body systems as well). However, as a patient with rheumatoid arthritis (RA), I believe…
How hard is it to learn swing dancing, and how can instructors best meet the unique needs of beginning dancers? Part 2 (of 2).
First of all, thank you all for your responses to Part 1, in which I explored the challenges of learning partner dance from the new student’s perspective. I was heartened to learn that so many others are passionate about beginning dancers! In this post, I will share my humble recommendations for the introductory/beginning dance teacher. These are outlined in the table below. Please note that I am focusing mainly on month-long introductory classes, not necessarily ½-hour “drop-in” classes. Recommendation 1: Apply motor learning principles. Motor learning is the process by which your ability to move in specific ways improves semi-permanently through repetition and practice. It’s colloquially known as “muscle memory.” The…
How hard is it to learn swing dancing, and how can instructors best meet the unique needs of beginning dancers? Part 1 of a 2-part series.
Teaching true beginners is different than teaching intermediate and/or advanced dancers As Rebecca Brightly recently wrote, it takes a while for most people to discover where they fit into the larger lindy hop scene. Like many others, I initially daydreamed about becoming a “rockstar” swing dancer/instructor. Through time, it became clear that my unique gift to the lindy hop world lay in the arena of teaching/encouraging beginning swing dancers at the local level. I also enjoy inspiring all sorts of fun shenanigans (and a few videos) in the process. I’ve greatly enjoyed teaching classes at Seattle-based HepCat Productions and Mountain View, California based Wednesday Night Hop. After teaching different levels,…
How to Keep Perspective (Even when Planning a Wedding): Converse with Your Past and Future Selves
Have you ever looked at a picture of yourself from the past and thought, “I’d like to actually talk to that person?” Even if you haven’t, I’d like to argue that there are sanity-inducing benefits to conversing with your past (and future) selves. I have found this approach particularly relevant as I simultaneously plan my wedding, finish graduate school, teach/organize swing dance events and attempt to retain a semblance of sanity. When I find myself stressing out about wedding details in particular, I actually imagine that my past and future selves are attending the wedding. I reflect in detail about what specifically they would find important about the event. I have…
Gluten-Free Pumpkin Muffins
So, I’ve been gluten-free for almost 2 years at this point. After reading endless blogs and one very good book, I’ve come to the following simple philosophy: eat foods that naturally taste good without gluten. In other words, rather than trying to recreate your favorite breads or other glutenous foods without their star ingredient, just eat foods that humans already decided were super delicious that happen to not have gluten in them. This includes Thai and Indian dishes, without the naan of course. However. Every once in a while I come across a recipe that not only recreates the taste of a glutenous item (such as a muffin or cupcake), but far supercedes…
My Biggest Wish for New Dancers: A Rational Optimism
After teaching beginning dance lessons for three years, I believe that one’s attitude is the most important factor influencing whether or not one sticks with the dance. Let’s be brutally honest: learning to dance involves lots of mistakes and awkward moments. It’s an athletic and musical skill that is learned in the context of touching people that one might be sexually attracted to, for Pete’s sake! In order to stick with it, you must accept some fundamental truths: You will make (MANY) mistakes. Along the way, your brain will want to attribute those mistakes to some causal factor. You will be the sole common denominator in all the mistakes you…