Be your own expert

Another Meagan Francis post about happiness, and how we need to trust our insincts more to be happier (happier than we would be worrying about every new headline or study).
Excerpt:
The truth, I learned, is that magazines and websites have to publish information that their readers are interested in, so the more people are talking about something, the more likely it is to get ink. Makes sense, right? But it’s a cycle: the more magazine covers, blog posts, and book titles are devoted to a specific topic, the more parents are going to talk about it, and the more they’ll start asking their pediatricians about it, and the more those pediatricians will start forming their own opinions (and perhaps write their own books) about it, and then those pediatricians will be interviewed for more magazine articles… and so on and so forth. A trend is born.
Sure, it’s great to bring certain information–like the need for babies to have strong necks, or ways to help babies and moms get much-needed sleep–to light. But the unfortunate side effect can be mommy/parent fear, concern, and guilt over topics that may not really be all that big a deal. That feeds into the pressure to buy more books and seek out products to solve the “problem”, whether the “problem” is a baby who doesn’t seem quite as advanced as his playmate at Gymboree, a newborn who hates laying on his belly (many do), or a 6-week-old who—surprise!—doesn’t want to sleep on a schedule.

A Happy Mom?

I liked this post by Meagan Francis on motherhood and happiness (the fact that it's good to admitt there are bad parts to it, but also to acknowlegde the good parts as well).

An excerpt: Whenever I bring up the topic of being a happy mom, I can expect at least a few people to react with disbelief, or with the Internet equivalent of rolling their eyes.
I know, I know. In the past few years we’ve all become much more open about the darker side of motherhood. We write about how angry our children make us, how we sometimes wonder if we should have had them. How our husbands let us down, how hard society makes it to be a mom today, how much we want to break free of the traditional trappings of motherhood and forge our own identities.
And all that’s great. That kind of honesty was a long time coming and I firmly believe we need to talk about the harder stuff and be open about the struggles.
But that doesn’t mean we can’t use the words “happy” and “mother” in the same sentence, does it?