transposable element

i didn’t need this report to realize that if you haven’t been sleeping enough, you have a higher tendency of snacking to keep going.

but it’s not the snacking that’s the problem. it’s what you snack on. hm, let’s see what i usually have: chips ahoy, tim tams, vanilla ice cream, raisin rolls, brownies…

uh-oh. looks like i’ll be a prime candidate for diet pills. it’ll take ages til i lose these pregnancy flab and get back to my ideal weight!

how good is your english vocabulary? what if for every word you know, you could donate a spoonful of rice to feed a hungry person in a poverty-stricken country somewhere in asia or africa?

test and improve your english vocabulary online. for every word you get right, freerice will donate 20 grains of rice through the UN world food program to help end hunger. about freerice:

FreeRice is a sister site of the world poverty site, Poverty.com.

FreeRice has two goals:

1. Provide English vocabulary to everyone for free.
2. Help end world hunger by providing rice to hungry people for free.

This is made possible by the sponsors who advertise on this site.

Whether you are CEO of a large corporation or a street child in a poor country, improving your vocabulary can improve your life. It is a great investment in yourself.

Perhaps even greater is the investment your donated rice makes in hungry human beings, enabling them to function and be productive. Somewhere in the world, a person is eating rice that you helped provide.

i’ve so far donated about 2 thousand grains. is that even enough for a meal?

this is not a paid post.

yes, much as i hate to admit it, it’s scientifically established that women’s brains shrink during late pregnancy, and this is believed to be the reason why pregnant women tend to be more forgetful, more scatterbrained and less coordinated than usual. according to wisegeek:

Pregnancy brain is a condition that affects expectant mothers, usually during the first and third trimesters. Sometimes known as placenta brain or baby brain drain, the condition is usually characterized by short-term memory loss or forgetfulness. Some medical experts say that pregnancy brain is a myth, but evidence shows that many women have experienced this condition.

The effects of pregnancy brain vary greatly among women. They can be as simple as forgetting phone numbers that one has dialed for years or placing toilet paper in the fridge. One mother-to-be drove home only to find she had arrived at a previous home she had not lived in for six years.

not that my memory or organizational skills have been stellar in the first place, but i find that it’s gotten worse the last couple of weeks. unless i write something down, it’s like pouring water through a sieve. i also noticed it would take much more effort to understand instructions, manuscripts and some vocabulary. a website asked me to upload an avatar, and i thought “huh? isn’t that where wayward wizards are imprisoned?…or was that akavar?”

idiocy at its finest. oh well, at least i’ve an excuse. what’s yours? hehe.

jan is advanced in many ways — in speech, in reasoning, in gross motor skills, in maths — but if there’s one aspect where we’re still struggling, it’s potty training. he refused diapers early and he’s mastered number 2 long ago. and although he had a backslide when we first moved to singapore, he’s dry during daytime. but embarrassing though it may be to admit, at the age of five, he’s still bedwetting.

it’s been his achilles’ heel, and even as a toddler, his teachers in the daycare he used to attend in germany have already noted it. they believe it’s just something unimportant to him, relative to all the other interesting things he’d rather learn, and that his bodily functions are way down in the list of things he want to master. i’ve read up a lot on potty training for boys and tried several tricks including dr. phil’s strategy, restricted liquid intake in the evenings, sticker calendars, and various forms of coaxing, threats and emotional blackmailing, hehe… all to no avail. we’re even starting to think it’s a physiological or medical issue. according to dr greene, there are two things that are common among children with what is medically referred to as primary nocturnal enuresis, the most common form of bed-wetting:

Children who wet the bed at night both need to urinate at night and do not wake up when their bladders are full. These are the only children who wet the bed.

it’s either their bladders are too small or they produce too much urine in the night. and they are deep sleepers than other kids. the latter in particular applies to jan. he doesn’t even recognize he’s wet!

on the other hand, some nights are better than others. there are times he’d be dry several nights in a row and just last night, he woke me up twice to tell me has to go to the toilet, which i think is a major leap. i just hope it’d be dry nights from now on…. until the baby comes, at least.

some headlines i came across the last few days:

Weight Gain Between First and Second Pregnancies Associated With Increased Odds of Second Child Being a Boy– if this is true, the odds are, my next child will be a boy. hm, let’s wait and see.

If you want more babies, find a man with a deep voice — if this is true, i should have dozens of kids by now. no chance.

Is There Really A ‘Mommy’ Gene In Women? — if this is true, then i must have been genetically predisposed to choose motherhood in exchange for a career, lavish vacations and leisurely lifestyles. damn, and i thought it was free will at work. seriously, though, i’ve never realized motherhood and career/fame/fortune are mutually exclusive. for the sake of the future of humanity, i fervently hope this is wrong. can you imagine if all the intellectual, career-driven women achievers out there opt NOT to have children. what a loss to the gene pool!

as if this online journal is not enough to cover me, me, and myself, here’s me on blogging and again me on being pinoy… and yet again, me on fitness.

there’s a tagalog word that comes to mind: nakaka-umay. hehe.

who has never heard of the blonde jokes? and why do beauty pageants have a question-and-answer portion? isn’t it to prove that these beautiful women indeed have something between their beautiful ears? are beauty and brains really mutually exclusive? (i’d write that i am a living proof that it isn’t, but i’d like to finish this entry before thunder and lightning stikes me!)

beautiful women have been the common victims of such typecasting. the other way around is less common: how often are brainy people being ridiculed for not being pretty? as if it’s permissible– or expected?– that intelligent people are physically uninteresting. maybe it’s an indication that intelligence is a more redeemable value than beauty, and if so, then hallelujah, there must still be something going right in this world, then.

nevertheless, sterotyping still happens. let’s take a simple test.

think of a scientist and tell me first five words that come to mind to describe the image of the scientists you’ve conjured. most probably, the words “geek”, “nerd”, “einstein”, “eyeglasses” and “boring” belong to the top of the list to describe the unkempt, uninteresting dork-with-the-sex-appeal-of-cold-spaghetti that comes to mind, eh?

introducing: the sexy scientists (and no, i am not the author, dotruth). no, the phrase is not an oxymoron. scroll and browse at the photos (my eyes glazed as i tried reading their research topics) and see living proofs that some scientists are gifted not just with brains.

i should know, i married one. (i just felt i had to make that clear, hehe)

via: Coturnix

that men think with body parts other than their brains is already a cliche. now, a scientific study backs it up: the sight of a woman, or even handling a bra, affects a man’s judgement.

High-testosterone men fight hardest for a large cut, the researchers found. But the most testosterone-driven men were also the most likely to slacken their cash demands after viewing sexy women. Perhaps they relaxed and began to care less about money. Or perhaps, the researchers suggest, with a ‘mate’ to impress the men were driven to have some wealth, however modest.

ah, so those ads using women to sell cigarettes, alcohol and just about anything do make sense.

and what does this study holds for us, mortal women? that new pair of shoes that’s just perfectly right for spring? ahem, you know what to do!

of course, this strategy may only apply to men with high testorone levels. how do you know? according to the article: “a relatively long ring finger is a sign of a high-testosterone man.”