Tag: 12 Months

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Weight Loss Exercise

Time Magazine Breastfeeding Cover


So what do you think? Are you shocked? This cover of Time magazine is sparking support and outrage all over the country and I guess for good reason. Everyone is a fan of breastfeeding until kids get a bit too old for their comfort.

Why is Breastfeeding Important?

Well first of all lets get to the root of the issue here. I have never seen a case where any study has said anything bad about the effect of breastfeeding on kids or their parents. Not only is breast milk very healthy for babies but it also helps to create that bond between mother and child helping them to protect the baby and to help the mother in the nourishing as well as weight loss aspects of child rearing.

No child can live for any length of time without some kind of milk product and the fact is that the American Academy of Pediatrics says babies should be breastfed exclusively for the first 6 months. Beyond that, the American Academy of Pediatrics encourages breastfeeding until at least 12 months, and longer if both the mother and baby are willing.

Breastfeeding a four year old?

Time Magazine Breastfeeding CoverSo the real shocking part of this whole story seems to be the picture itself, although I think that breastfeeding just kind of makes a lot of people feel uncomfortable. The woman on the Time Magazine breastfeeding cover is Jamie Lynne Grumet and she is actually standing in defiance while nursing her 3 year old (maybe 4 year old) son standing on this stool.

According to a poll this week 73% of the people who saw the cover felt uncomfortable with it. I am not one of these people. I saw the cover, was initially shocked at the pose, but them looked inside myself to see what was really wrong. My daughter was breastfed until 6 months, my sone was never breastfed, I have no issues with nudity, so the only thing that I think caused me to recoil initially was my own sense of self values in the media. I am sure Time magazine knows this as well.

This is a very important issue I think. Women are encouraged to breastfeed, but never in public, and then expected to stop at 6 months. What is they decide to go longer? Not going to hurt the kid, not going to hurt me. This has to be looked at as a civil right for women, no need for us non-women, non-breast feeders, to be judgemental of how someone wants to wean or not wean their child from the boob.

In the end I think this is just one more way that we need to look at ourselves and decide where our sense of morality is and why. Good for you Jamie Lynne Grumet

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Weight Loss Exercise

The Happiness Project

The Happiness ProjectThe Happiness ProjectWell I started reading this book called The Happiness Project. My wife bought it a while ago and after I stumbled through Eat, Pray, Love I thought it would be great to get another soul.empowering type book under my belt

Gretchen Rubin who wrote this book is a real pro in the writing game and seems to write biographies on famous people like Winston Churchill, and JFK so she seem to come from a completely different spot than most of the people in this genre. She points this fact out early in the book as well as her aims for her own Happiness Project.

What is the Happiness Project About?

The book starts with Gretchen Rubin telling us how she is not unhappy but still since there is not an easy way to benchmark happiness she knew that she could be happier, wanted to avoid a conversation on depression and instead see, through research, how someone could be happier in their life.

The book is divided into 12 months and each month has an overarching idea that Gretchen has built resolutions on, and the idea is that every month she will build on what she had done before this newest month, so constant improvement will happen.

The first month was to improve her health, the second month was to Remember Love and Marriage…

The idea that Gretchen Rubin has is not that you will follow her ideas exactly but that she can give you a framework to build your own Happiness Project. Cool idea!

Full of Research and Ideas to Change Yourself

Anyway Gretchen Rubin has a law degree, is a writer, and decided to do this book with her awesome research skills behind her. So in the intro chapter and first chapter I found that the Happiness Project was so chock full of her research and discoveries that were not just touchy-feely that there was just a lot to get through. I have decided to turn this book into more of a project for me, and maybe you should too?

I am not going to take a year to change my life through the Happiness Project but I am sure that over the next few months as I dive into one month at a time I will make significant changes.

You can check out some reviews of the Happiness Project if you are interested in learning more