Congratulations on your pregnancy!

I can relate, because I'm (possibly irrationally) terrified of dying of cancer because my mother died from it. Now that I've started worrying about it, cue article after article, news story after news story, about different kinds of usually fatal cancers. Even the only soap opera (Coronation Street) I watch has a…

Thank you for saying this! I wish people would stop with the "eeww, how awful!" while knowing nothing about it.

So true! I would fail at Victorian ladyness on the cat hair and marks alone.

I haven't seen that movie in years, but I love it. I would watch it at least once a week when I was in high school. Alan Rickman's voice + Bach! I even liked that cloud mobile thing.

I think it's a pretty name! I have a (Bulgarian) neighbor named Vesna, which is what that means. If Mr. Chortcake didn't have a requirement that the little chortcakes all have names from his cultural tradition (I don't mind—I could name the next kid Genghis if I wanted to in that case), I would consider Spring.

My son is doing this these days (he's six months yesterday). It never gets old.

Mr. Chortcake and I named our baby a nice, traditional-for-both-of-us name that is either Muslim or Jewish-from-Muslim-lands. It's kind of unusual, but easy to spell, relatively short, impossible to turn into an embarrassing word, and we didn't think it would be a problem. But many people I know, like in my…

Hear hear! This reminds me of when I was told, "it's difficult to administer anesthesia to women over 71 kg." [Why?] "Because excess adipose tissue." [But what if she's tall and/or muscular and doesn't have much adipose tissue?] "71 kg is unhealthy because adipose tissue." [Would you say it was hard to administer…

Not where my family is concerned. My parents are hoarders, my uncle (father's brother) and aunt are hoarders, and my cousin's mother (my paternal grandmother's niece) is a hoarder. That same cousin's husband has a set of hoarder parents (mother and father—incidentally, he's a psychiatrist who focuses on hoarder…

I feel for your friend. For ten years, I spent every vacation, even the three-day ones, at my widower father's house (my mother was a hoarder, but my father is even worse), cleaning. He would both expect me to do it AND thwart my efforts with combative, passive-aggressive glee.

If your family and friends are accusing you of being a hoarder when you're actually something of a minimalist who has a few treasured objects, is it possible that they're projecting? I'm just asking because I was my hoarder parents' scapegoat and was supposedly responsible for their hoard, either a) because I'd…

Agreed. It's abusive to any children in their care too, no matter how good the hoarder's intentions are towards them. Children need to have hygienic, safe areas to live in, that they aren't afraid or ashamed to bring friends home to. They need to learn organizational and self-care skills to help them navigate through…

No you're not—you know your limits and you're not assuming responsibility for something that's totally out of your control. That's healthy, and very hard to do when you're the child of a hoarder.

My father is a hoarder of the extremely filthy variety (like, actual garbage and rotting things). My late mother was a somewhat cleaner hoarder with "band-aid" fixes like throwing limp, sad, unconvincing stained sheets over the towers of mess when guests came over. Both of them have/had numerous cluster b personality…

Next pregnancy, I'm going to do exactly what you're doing. All of this paranoia and food policing (and a prolonged bad experience with the place where I got obstetric care) basically gave me antinatal anxiety. I wish society and reputable pregnancy sites and Health Canada would STFU or at least dial it down a little.…

Aargh, yes, THIS. I have thick, wavy hair. It gets straight if it's sufficiently long and heavy (a little past clavicut length). If it's the length that is deemed appropriate for professional women/a length stylists like, which is shorter, it's quite wavy. I'm quite lazy as far as hair is concerned and can barely be…

Thirded! I have one. It's a size too large, and it's in "velvet orange." My husband bought it for me at an outlet last year when he was on a business trip in the US and wanted to find me a coat that would fit over my pregnant stomach (I started showing early and often, and couldn't fit into my many other coats, all of…

Thank you for saying this. I tend to worry about cancer a lot (my mother died of ovarian cancer), and articles like this scare the ever-living fuck out of me. I really appreciate your words!

You sound like me! I'm sorry, because it's not fun. On the other hand, Jezebel is not a very scientifically...astute...news source, and even an article like the original might be less anxiety-inducing accompanied by an explanation from a kind medical professional one can trust. Which I don't have yet, but I'm working…