HMT Blog

Have you been bitten by the Back to School bug yet? Are you feeling panicked by the barrage of marketing about just how “ready” your kids need to be, this month? Put your wallet away, sit back down, take a deep breath and relax. Make this August the time you take your own advice to “play outside” instead.

This might seem like odd advice, coming from a teacher (and maybe even odder, since I’m also the owner of a children’s clothing store) but I want you to seriously consider being less prepared this year, for Back to School. Repeat after me: “Back to School is not a real season.”

We often find ourselves caught in ''thinking traps'' –  ways of thinking that make it difficult for us to see different possibilities, alternative solutions to what we have in mind, based on our previous experiences. This is something we tend to do especially when we are stressed, angry or irritable. To learn how to step outside of these traps, it is important to be able to identify when we are in them. This helps us see them for what they are – thinking patterns that have been honed for years or decades that box us in and limit our capacity to see things from any other perspective. Here are six common traps we find ourselves in:

Jumping to conclusions:

We interpret things negatively when there are no facts to support our conclusion. This trap can take two forms: mind reading and fortune telling.

The Anatomy of a Healthy Period

Many of us in the healthcare community think of the menstrual cycle as a woman’s fifth vital sign. There are many resources available to us to determine what constitutes a normal and healthy menstrual cycle, but nothing that focuses on periods after pregnancy. Therefore, I created a survey last month to help better understand a woman’s experience. While only 41 women responded, the results have been interesting:

Being a Healthy Mom means something a little different to each of us. For lots of modern parents, though, creating a healthy home includes thinking about the environment around us. We may talk with our kids about recycling, bring our own bags to the store, read ingredients more carefully, and be a bit more conscious about what we put in our carts.

One of my favourite ways to minimize our family’s environmental footprint is shopping secondhand. In fact, our family rarely buys anything new anymore. Even better than finding a great secondhand buy, is opening a great bag of hand-me-downs from a sister, a neighbour or a friend from your moms’ group. It’s like Christmas has come early!

We’ve all heard about sleep consultants, and it’s possible one has even been recommended to you by a friend, if you’ve complained about your own baby’s inconsistent sleep. You might have even read some of the articles written on our own blog, by one of our experts, Lisa Kvapil of WeeSleep. What about hearing from an actual client, though? We decided that our readers might benefit from a deeper understanding of the process of getting help from a sleep consultant.

Here’s a short Q&A with a client of Lisa’s, Constance Hui: