Well, shoot. Here I was going to say it wasn’t such a bad one to get wrong but the world goes and proves me wrong. That’s just heinous.

It’s entirely possible her baby died due to Chernobyl-related pollution from her inhaling radioactive dust after the blast, but it sure as hell wasn’t made worse by her caring for her husband. She was probably safer inside whatever isolation unit they had him in than outside, since it was cleaner. I can forgive the nurses in 1980s Ukraine for not knowing that but a TV series written in the 2020s should really not be furthering that misunderstanding.

It’s a shame because plenty of the other radiation-related stuff in the show was fine but that one was just so off base and clearly has had extremely negative real-world consequences.

I hate to say it because so much of this show was actually really excellent and accurate but in the Chernobyl miniseries they totally did the “radiation is contagious” thing and it is just not true.

Things and people that are irradiated/hit by radiation in a situation like a reactor failure or contact with radioactive waste do not become radioactive. They can have radioactive particles on their clothing/skin or inside their body if they have ingested/inhaled radioactive material, but they are not emitting radiation themselves. Furthermore, a thin sheet of paper or cloth will stop the kind of radioactivity that would be emitted by such material, if it is on the outside of a person’s body.

Anyways the point is that the woman whose husband was dying of radiation poisoning and then she went in and spent time with him did not lose her baby because she spent time with him. That’s just not how it works.

Lots of environmental contamination-related stuff in movies is inaccurate but that one is the most recent I can think of.

Kids love this shit as long as you keep it at the ELI5 level and stop when they are done and lose interest. My kid will throw around words like “microorganism” and “bioaccumulation” because I actually explain biology concepts when he asks. The other day he had a question about atmospheric composition and he was absorbed for about 5-10 minutes, complete with looking at molecular diagrams, and then he was done and went off to make his Lego people fight each other with flamethrowers.

If you have knowledge, share it with kids and let them see you enjoying science. They absorb more than you might think.

Yeah. ADHD mom here. Had a good cry tonight about my kid and all his challenges.

I try to keep on the happy face when he’s around but parenting a kid with severe ADHD is really hard sometimes.

Yep I get mad about this as well. Esp since my title isn’t Mrs. it’s Dr.

We always joke they should have addressed it Dr and Mr [my first name last name] but of course the real answer is they should just call people by their actual names and titles and not guess.

Lolol what kind of fantasy world do you live in? Salaried worker here and although my job isn’t 9-5 strictly if I don’t work at least 40 hours a week my pay will be docked. So I get to choose between 8-5 or 9-6 or I can work while I eat and get that cushy 9-5 life. Or if I miss work I can make up those hours by working at night. It’s a real luxury to be able to do that compared to shift work, but the hours are still being counted.

Also stop being so entitled. Most of your life necessities come from industries (groceries, power plants, gas stations, hospitals, etc) where people work on a timecard/shift basis so don’t you come out here and pretend timecard or shift work isn’t a “real” profession.

Yeah this is what happens with our kid (who, admittedly, has ADHD so maybe he’s a bit unusual). The first day or week after a cool experience he’s pretty meh about it and won’t volunteer much in the way of thoughts or feelings and then suddenly he’ll realize it was real again and all of a sudden he won’t shut up about how cool it was! Then eventually he settles down into a steady pattern of “hey remember when we did X thing wasn’t that so cool we should do it again” which is my favorite phase because that’s how I know what he really likes that stuck with him. : )

This 100%. We and many of our peers with a kid are one and done in the current system. But if we could afford college educations for multiple kids, get adequate parental leave, access to early childcare that doesn’t cost an entire paycheck? That would change the decision quite a bit.

But also I’m happy to have fewer kids and let more immigrant and/or refugee families with young kids move here too. Solves the labor shortage and provides a much needed influx of fresh ideas and culture, not to mention getting some folks out of dangerous situations. Somehow all of the people who want to “save the children” are extremely silent on that front when it’s children moving to another country for a better life.

I freeze soups, curries, and sauces in those plastic deli containers. If you’re freezing something that goes with rice, freeze a container with a portion of rice too.

Then just take the frozen container(s) and put it in your lunchbox- voila, ice pack plus food.

You can freeze nuts to make them last longer. Also bread. Also hot peppers like serranos. If you have lemons that are going to go bad before you use them, juice them and freeze the juice.

Some leaves and spices that you get in large quantities, like curry leaves or kaffir lime leaves or lemongrass you can freeze the extras in bags until you need them again.

Thank you for letting me know this was a thing!! Total game-changer.

Can’t quote the lyrics without sharing the awesome lyric video!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LbQSzs11euk

Used to sing this song to my kid at bedtime but he hasn’t asked for it lately. Maybe I’ll try to work it back into the rotation.

I have a child and I’d be the first to recommend not having one. It’s expensive, it wrecked me emotionally and physically, and I worry every day about what kind of world my kid will grow up into.

But all those things are worth it in the end to me because I really wanted to be a parent. My kid is an absolute treasure to me and I put up with the suffering because I do genuinely love parenting and love seeing him grow up. If I was any less enthusiastic about the process going in, I would have either run away or killed myself by now. That’s how demoralizing and traumatic parenting can be. Granted I have a special needs kid but so do probably 10% of parents so do you want to roll those dice?

All that aside, the fact is that parenting these days is filled with societal obstacles. With both parents working, you’re rationing sick days and constantly running out, leaving no time for vacation or personal days off. This leaves the option of either taking unpaid days off or reducing one’s working hours. Since no one is home doing housework all day, working parents spend their evenings and nights doing housework. If you need to run an errand or take the kid to a doctor’s appointment, that comes out of either your paid work time or your free time. Childcare is both expensive and hard to get, with wait-lists for daycares in some cities of several months. And once your kid is in public school, you have to find after school care, which is not guaranteed for every kid at every school.

And don’t even get me started about summer. Three months of cobbled-together summer camps and asking/begging family members and friends to watch your kid when their busy schedules permit. If your kid has special needs or requires trained caregivers, you are out of luck.

These are fixable problems, but they require massive government-subsidized investment in childcare and parental leave structures and the government is not doing that. Childcare salaries are so low that the supply of daycare teachers is basically dried up. Same with public school teachers and afterschool caregivers. Why work as an afterschool teacher when you can be an independent nanny and make twice as much per hour? As for parental leave, there is no requirement that parental leave cover anything beyond the bare bones of the time needed to give birth, leaving most new parents to burn through their entire year’s worth of sick time during their babies first month of life when there is a doctor’s appointment just about every week. Then blow through it again next year when the kid gets sick twice a month in daycare. My kid is six years old and this is the first year I haven’t run out of sick days before June.

Our society was designed for families with at least one full-time caregiver, and now that is basically impossible but the system has not been updated. This game is not designed for us. So why would anyone choose to play?

Sparse on details but she was with an older man who was not her relative so I’m not hopeful it’s a good reason. 😣

Found safe and alive! I wish they’d put that in the title of the article but of course they want you to click on it.

I didn’t know I needed Andy Serkis singing the songs in the Hobbit until I heard it, but it turns out I did. Dude has an amazing singing voice.

cries in working parent

My employer gives us 8 sick days a year. When we run out of those we are supposed to use vacation time. It’s downright depressing how fast we blow through the sick time in a bad winter season.

I’m very very lucky to work from home, so I can neglect my sick kid at home while getting work done and thus avoid having to burn through my vacation time as well. Others aren’t so lucky.

Pretty sure the shelter paid us to take our current cat lol. Or at least all the chipping and medical fees were waived. She’d been there for months and months and had already had one failed adoption.

She’s ornery as hell and never wants us to pet her but somehow mysteriously happens to be in the same room as us all the time. And she sleeps on us at night. Deep down it’s clear she loves us in her own cat way. 🥲

Also despite her…odd… temperament she is a beautiful cat! No clue why anyone would pay for an expensive breed when there are so many cuties like ours just wasting away in shelters.

This is the pet food equivalent of Dr Bronners.

When watching eagle nest cams, I’ve seen little birds and mammals hanging around eagle nests and scooping up scraps of leftover prey. I think in many cases a large raptor isn’t going to go chasing around a little birds when they’ve already caught something bigger and the little birds play clean up crew and take away scraps that would be too small for the larger birds. Not sure if that’s the case here but it’s a cool little cooperative situation to notice. You’ll also see little birds nesting under osprey nests, probably for the same reason.

They help significantly to combat the heat island effect in cities and provide shade and cooler microclimates for people to shelter in when it’s hot.

Just try going to a shady tree-lined path vs. a paved treeless path on a sunny day and you’ll be pretty clear on the meaning of this meme.

So yes we can’t stop global warming with trees alone but we can mitigate the local effects of it all while providing habitat for birds and shade for people and lots of other benefits besides.

This article has a pretty good review if you want to take a look at some of the benefits! https://www.mdpi.com/1660-4601/17/12/4371

And here’s a more plain-language website about urban trees: https://www.climatecentral.org/climate-matters/the-power-of-urban-trees-2023