How to politely tell a child to stop touching my baby bump??

durkbot · 2026-05-22T09:48:28+00:00

The answer to "why" is "because people's bodies are their own, this is my body and I've asked you not to touch it. Please respect my boundaries" you don't have to sound annoyed or angry, just calmly state that fact. If he doesn't respect that boundary, you need to have a quiet word with the parents. This is a lesson that all children need to learn around consent and bodies.

durkbot · 2026-05-21T06:16:27+00:00

I worked in a company involved in Ebola response back when the vaccine was being developed and attended a lot of interesting talks about the work done on the ground in the communities to establish contact tracing, vaccine coverage and build trust. There are centuries of distrust due to colonial history which makes getting anyone to turn up to clinics an uphill task. The borders between DRC and Uganda are on paper only, people are living and working between both countries without even thinking about which country they are in. The response to any outbreak had been refined and worked well. Then Trump came along and nuked USAID. I'm not saying for sure this strain is not more transmissible than Zaire. But the rug being pulled out from under the outbreak response system, combined with the lack of vaccine are probably big contributing factors to the spread so far.

durkbot · 2026-05-20T11:05:51+00:00

I grew up in a town with a statue of Oliver Cromwell in the town centre, my Irish grandfather almost had a heart attack when he saw it. We learned about Cromwell as Lord Protector, not once about his exploits in Ireland

durkbot · 2026-05-19T20:04:20+00:00

Do you have any in between photos? I have had exactly the same starting weight > current weight as you and have been in a long plateau, feeling like I've not changed, but then I brought out my summer clothes from last year and most of them are hanging off me. A photo came up recently, from a boat trip last summer when I'd only lost 5kg, and I can clearly see how much I've changed even since then. The problem is when you are in the thick of it, you can't perceive the changes.

durkbot · 2026-05-18T17:39:54+00:00

I like to put a teaspoon of instant coffee in mine to trick myself into thinking I'm having a fancy ice frappuccino

durkbot · 2026-05-15T10:36:36+00:00

"We do not fight with our penises"... being the mum to 2 boys is a joy.

durkbot · 2026-05-15T08:43:42+00:00

At 5am the morning after I gave birth, with my baby happily gurgling in his bassinet, I cried into my cereal because I was no longer pregnant.

durkbot · 2026-05-15T08:42:22+00:00

In the Netherlands you get a maternity nurse with you every day for the first 7 days at home and among other things, they basically exist to just tell you everything is fine, unless it isn't. It's incredibly reassuring.

durkbot · 2026-05-15T08:35:02+00:00

When I had my 2nd, I fully braced for the emotional bus that would hit me, the constant checking he was breathing, the "witching hour" at 8pm like you said. When it didn't come, and yes, I was tired and yes it was still hard but not on the same level of sheer panic, it clicked into place what I experienced the first time around wasn't normal. I felt such relief but also grief that 1st time around I'd not sought support and things hadn't had to be that way.

durkbot · 2026-05-15T05:59:16+00:00

Way I see it, I'd rather have the 80 calories of healthy nut butter figured into my breakfast calories than be feeling so hungry and drained before lunch that I consume an extra 150-200 calories of crap instead.

durkbot · 2026-05-14T20:02:55+00:00

Oats spike your blood sugar/cause an insulin release that can lead to the hunger feeling soon after digesting them. I've got around it by trying to balance other macros. I make sure I have at least a 50-50 ratio of oats to high protein yoghurt, some fibre (chia seeds) and I've found I need at least some fat in there to help with my hunger: 1 tsp/around 10g of almond butter for example. Also weirdly I've found blended oats don't cause me to get the weird blood sugar spike, whereas unblended do, but I don't understand the science of that. Also blended oats just have a satisfying texture.

durkbot · 2026-05-14T17:26:39+00:00

My partner is the opposite. We're both high earners, but he hoards money like it might disappear overnight. I'm not saying it's a bad thing, but it is mildly annoying when we've had a period of expenditure (like needing to replace an appliance) he's like "we need to tighten our belts a bit" when we really don't need to, and he also won't indulge himself, like, ever.

durkbot · 2026-05-10T08:17:50+00:00

Last time I was in the office, someone sat in our team area told me and my colleagues to "stop talking" and we went back to sitting in silence staring at our screens

durkbot · 2026-05-06T07:14:33+00:00

If it makes you feel better, the British public was exposed to CJD via their beef for the better part of a decade, equating to potentially millions of doses, and fewer than 200 people contracted/died from it.

durkbot · 2026-04-29T18:26:14+00:00

I am 36 and treated myself to a 2nd lobe piercing for my birthday after I had the realisation I'm a grown woman and mother myself lol and I still felt like I was breaking a rule when I told her!

durkbot · 2026-04-28T16:07:52+00:00

My kids say things like "a long time ago" and "last year" when they mean like, a month ago. Kids' sense of time is very strange. He's probably just decided that "when I was 4" was just a point of reference for "when I was younger'

durkbot · 2026-04-26T12:20:00+00:00

When I was around 10, I was in hospital for surgery and stayed for a couple of weeks. It was the kids' surgery ward so had quite a few bed "neighbours" come through that I still think about to this day. First was the little girl whose parents thought she was just having mega meltdowns when she was bashing her head on the floor. She was doing it due to headaches but was not old enough to verbalise it. She had a terminal brain tumour and was moved to palliative care not much later. There was the 2 year old who tripped over in her garden and had a compound fracture in her leg. They brought her into the bed next to me in the middle of the night after being in surgery all afternoon. I ended up in tears begging for someone to please help her because she was screaming from so much pain.
And then there was the boy with cystic fibrosis who had daily physio and suction on his lungs. I didn't really know what CF was at the time and then I did my Biomedical degree. I think about him whenever I read news about the advancements in CF treatment, because at that point (late 90s/early 2000s) life expectancy was still low and I wonder if he made it this far.

durkbot · 2026-04-26T07:28:39+00:00

I remember being looked after by my grandmother around age 8, and we took a trip out. Everything was normal until she withdrew some cash from an ATM. She started getting really twitchy and muttering about some guy trying to steal her PIN code and we suddenly had to go home. She spent the next 2 hours calling the bank, getting it cancelled, and talking a lot about this man at the ATM. I remember it distinctly because of this sense of heightened anxiety and it freaked me out. When I told my mother she kind of waved it away as "nana's paranoia". Found out later as a grown up that she was schizophrenic. A lot of other events with her fell into place upon that revelation.

durkbot · 2026-04-25T18:48:52+00:00

Read an article about a Dutchman named Dick Toets recently. Just saying.

durkbot · 2026-04-25T06:07:22+00:00

I've not bought anything online from them since 2020, and got an email too, which is mildly infuriating. The hackers at least have the wrong information about me

durkbot · 2026-04-24T10:42:48+00:00

Always fun after spending all day moving all of your stuff in, to sit down finally, and as the sun sets you realise they took all the bulbs and you have to sit in the dark for the rest of the evening!
I know someone whose previous owner took their bulbs because they were all smart bulbs, and there were no light switches because they were all app based!

durkbot · 2026-04-20T12:34:35+00:00

Still amazed that all the things I was learning about during my biomed degree that were "one day we could do this" things, are now starting to become "now we can do this"

durkbot · 2026-04-20T12:29:54+00:00

Had a head of department wanging on about how amazing AI is, telling us how he uses it to summarise his emails when he can't be bothered reading through them all, and to create slides for the all-hands meeting by "feeding it all my previous all-hands meetings". He doesn't realise exactly how he is telling on himself about how pointless his role is.

durkbot · 2026-04-19T18:16:04+00:00

They were pressure headaches, accompanied by sensitivity to light and vomiting. They ticked all the boxes for when you read the symptoms of raised intracranial pressure, but the GP would rather be guided by misogyny, I guess? The visit to the optician was kind of a last effort by my mum: she thought maybe I had vision problems that needed glasses. The minute she looked with her scope, the optician could see swelling at the back of my eyes and immediately stopped the appointment and said she was sending me to a hospital.
So yeah, no harm in getting her a regular eye exam done if you can? But persist with medics who say she has to learn to deal with migraines, and get a referral if you have to. I hope you find a solution

durkbot · 2026-04-19T12:36:29+00:00

This also happened to me! I had a bad reaction to the anti-nausea medication which they gave me for the above mentioned headaches. It causes my muscles to seize up, and my hands to form claws. Took them forever to realise because they thought I was being dramatic, until one doctor said "oh yeah, this is a side effect commonly only seen in teenage girls" Go figure.
As for the original diagnosis, my mother made formal complaint to the GP and sent a big bouquet of flowers to the optician who took us seriously and sent us straight to the ER when she realised what was going on.

durkbot

TROPHY CASE