Lifestyle

Whether they sting, smell, bite, or simply move around your house, when insects occupy your home, they can bring a slide of health risks with them. They can disrupt the foundation of your property by slowly destroying the structure. And they can also be as deadly as causing death due to severe allergic reactions. Along with insects, there are other mammals and rodents which conveniently find their way in your basement and walls.

10 things a new mother worries about, but shouldn't.

Martin Luther King Jr. called on us to judge others by the content of their character rather than the color of their skin. When it comes to raising children, however, attempting to teach “colorblindness”—that is, to ignore physical and cultural differences in an effort to treat everyone equally—can have adverse effects. That’s because kids don’t necessarily care about the color of someone’s skin, but they do recognize when it’s different from their own. Avoiding talking about it at home can make them feel like physical differences are taboo subjects, rather than something to be celebrated.

Christmas is certainly a time when family traditions are important and most of us have our own set ways of celebrating which were passed down to us from our parents and grandparents. But sometimes these old ways of doing things can begin to seem dated, irrelevant and stale; particularly in the climate of anti-commercialism and eco-culture.

It's what most mothers struggle with but never talk about. It's staying up all night thinking about whether you are a good mother, or not. It's thinking that you hurt your baby even though all you did was pick them up. It's crying without having a good reason to cry. It's postpartum depression. Depressing thoughts, harmful feelings, and a mother never thinking they are good enough. Postpartum depression is defeating, and it's something nobody can cure on their own. It will defeat you. You will not win, unless you get the help you need. The thoughts will never go away. They will either be there in full force, or they will be subsided with medications, but they never go away.

Finding out you're pregnant is such a whirlwind of hormone and emotion. A million thoughts of a potential future immediately flooded my mind. What will my baby look like? What kind of toddler will they be? What kind of mother will I be? I spent every day of my pregnancy wondering what our futures would hold. For every "I wonder", there came plenty of "I will never" as well, but let me tell you, unless you've lived through motherhood, you should truly never say never.