Part One: Acupuncture & Wheatgrass

It happened again recently that I ran into an acquaintance who was doing acupuncture to help fertility. This happens all the time in LA, really, where many people believe in acupuncture, and where many, many women (at least in my circle) have put off having children until their late 30s or early 40s. I admit that I tried acupuncture myself, at a time when I was diagnosed with serious fertility problems. I spent a couple hundred dollars on sessions with needles and some pills with herbs. I never did take the pills, because I started some actual, medical fertility treatments and didn’t want to combine the medicine I was taking with an unknown element. And then, I decided the acupuncture was silly, so I stopped going.

My travails with infertility pretty much sealed the deal on my becoming a skeptic (or you could say a critical thinker, rational mom, or what have you), because I was embittered by my encounter with alternative medicine and supplements. » Continue reading “How Infertility Made Me a Skeptic”

Kids and the Internet!

There are so many fascinating things for kids to learn on the Internet. My kids (ages 7 and 5) know how to navigate around wikipedia both by clicking from one article to related articles and by searching for terms that they know or copy from science books. They like finding pictures through Google image search. They also like finding Astronomy movies on YouTube. I showed them the first two — the last one they figured out all by themselves…

On the one hand, I like for them to be able to take the initiative to explore their interests. On the other hand, I know I have to keep an eye on what they’re doing because it’s pretty easy to stumble upon stuff that’s not appropriate for kids. I’m not just talking about the sex (as I discussed here), but also violent or scary stuff, or just things that generally require a little parental guidance or discussion. (And once they learn to write well enough to “chat” we’ll have to have the talk about safety when socializing online…)

But the other day Nico was showing me the movies he’d found, and he showed me something I hadn’t even anticipated dealing with: conspiracy theory movies that (to a kid) look just like normal science movies!

Nico was watching movies on the relative sizes of the planets and stars (his favorite subject at the moment), and he found a film by a guy who claims that the Earth is growing! It’s actually kind of a cool thought exercise as he shows how the continents fit together perfectly (without the oceans) on a much smaller sphere: » Continue reading “Conspiracy Theories for Kids!”