HarefootedHind

Gratitude embodied, curiosity unbounded

[Jesse Genet @jessegenet]

This is homeschool social studies — color eink serving up famous paintings about Greek myths, kids listening to my curated AI explanations of the painting after we read D’Aulaires Book of Greek Myths 💕

The ‘future’ of education is already here and it’s epic tbh

[Anish Moonka @anishmoonka]

Mothers were given a set of t-shirts, one worn by their own newborn and the rest by other people's, and asked to pick theirs by smell. Ninety percent got it right after ten minutes to an hour of contact with their baby. Every mother who had spent more than an hour with hers got it right.

A separate line of work found it present six hours after birth, following one exposure, and no better at 48 hours than at six. Nothing left to learn.

Fathers, given the same test, could not do it. That asymmetry has held across several labs since the eighties, and nobody has settled why. Fathers can identify their newborn by touching the backs of its hands, and by photograph, and by cry. The one channel they miss is the one that works fastest for mothers.

Chemists went looking for what is being detected. Analysing volatiles from the heads of five newborns turned up 31 compounds, 15 of them shared with the mother's own amniotic fluid, and a pattern distinct enough to be individual from the day of birth.

A 2013 study put women in scanners with pyjamas worn by unrelated newborns. Reward circuitry lit up in mothers and in women who had never given birth.

Then the finding that changes the tone. Mothers with bonding difficulties, in the research of Ilona Croy, show altered olfactory perception. They cannot pick their child out, and they do not prefer the smell.

https://t.co/uAyz3nyQF2

[Michael Strong @flowidealism]

The depth of the mother child connection knows no bounds.

I expect we’ll continue to be surprised by such biological findings for some time to come.

“Mothers and their 3-month old infants were observed during face-to-face interactions while cardiac output was collected from mother and child. Micro-analysis of the partners' behavior marked episodes of gaze, affect, and vocal synchrony. Time-series analysis showed that mother and infant coordinate heart rhythms within lags of less than 1 s. Bootstrapping analysis indicated that the concordance between maternal and infant biological rhythms increased significantly during episodes of affect and vocal synchrony compared to non-synchronous moments. Humans, like other mammals, can impact the physiological processes of the attachment partner through the coordination of visuo-affective social signals.”

[Katie Miller @KatieMiller]

Why do moms only hear about postpartum depression or postpartum psychosis?

Why aren’t we talking about postpartum euphoria and postpartum joy?

Postpartum is too often conflated with a dark and stormy time after birth, when in reality it is beautiful, peaceful, and some of my life’s most fulfilling days.

Today I cuddled my baby, fed my baby, made dinner, read to my kids, and time just slowed down.

How grateful I am for this time in my life.

Evita is right—let’s talk about postpartum euphoria.

[Sarah Wilder @SarahHopeWilder]

since your timeline is likely full of women bellyaching about being a wife and mom, this is your reminder that lots of women like this still exist

[🇺🇸🇺🇸 MissyMiss🇺🇸🇺🇸 @MissyE2024]

This is too cute lol 😂

[Anish Moonka @anishmoonka]

Researchers at the Karolinska Institute put newborns face down on their mothers' bare stomachs after delivery and filmed what happened. Nobody helped. Within the hour, most of them had hauled themselves up the body, found the nipple, and started to feed.

The sequence turned out to be the same across every baby they watched, and it has since been documented in Sweden, Italy, Japan and the United States. Nine stages, always in the same order: a cry at birth, then stillness, waking, movement and a rest. Then crawling, using the legs to push against the mother's abdomen. Then mouthing and touching the breast, then feeding, then sleep.

The whole hour counts, resting stages included, which means a newborn who looks like he has given up is simply between steps and will start again.

None of this is learned. A baby in the womb has nothing to latch onto and no rehearsal. The equipment arrives assembled, which is ordinary in mammals and quietly astonishing in a species whose infants cannot hold up their own heads.

The finding changed delivery room practice, because hospitals had been taking babies away for weighing and cleaning during exactly that window. Later work found labour medication and separation both disrupt the sequence. Babies who miss it struggle more with feeding afterward.

An infant less than sixty minutes old, unable to see much beyond the length of an arm, knows where to go.

https://t.co/6cdG3JtBR5

[Skye @skye0xz]

They really don’t make baby toys like they used to 😂

[Anish Moonka @anishmoonka]

Researchers at Fred Hutchinson examined the brains of 59 women after death. In 63 percent of them they found male DNA, almost certainly left behind by a son. The oldest of those women was 94, and the cells were still sitting there.

Around week four or five of pregnancy, before most women have told anyone, a handful of the baby's cells cross into the mother's bloodstream. Some of them never leave. Scientists call it microchimerism, meaning you are carrying a few of another person's cells inside you. Doctors at Leiden University in the Netherlands checked organs from women who had recently been pregnant and found the baby's cells in every single one. Liver, lungs, thyroid, kidneys, bone marrow, skin, heart.

They do not sit idle. When researchers in Ireland biopsied cesarean scars from 70 women, they found the baby's cells living in the skin as ordinary skin cells, making collagen and repair proteins right at the cut. The child helped close the wound its own birth made.

At Mount Sinai, scientists tagged fetal cells with a glowing marker in pregnant mice, then damaged the mothers' hearts. The fetal cells went to the injury. They became heart muscle and the lining of blood vessels. Nobody has proven the human version yet, but doctors have noticed for years that women who develop heart failure around childbirth recover better than almost any other kind of heart failure patient.

In a study of 177 women, fetal cells appeared in the blood of 85 percent of the healthy participants and only 64 percent of the women who had a very early, non-invasive breast cancer. Nobody has worked out yet whether the cells are doing the protecting. The same cells also turn up in Hashimoto's, an immune condition that attacks the thyroid, so this is a gift with complications.

A French team looked at umbilical cord blood in 2021 and found cells belonging to the baby's grandmother in 5 of 28 samples. Cells that crossed one placenta decades earlier had crossed a second one. Three generations of women, alive in a single bloodstream.

Which means the pull a mother feels toward her child has a physical form. It sits in her liver, her heart, and often her brain, and it stays there for the rest of her life.

https://t.co/zy6gM4x5tl

[Daughter of Wolves @Alicia_Bittle_]

Being an evil psycho who doesn’t love your own kids is a skill issue

[Lauren Chen @TheLaurenChen]

I'm sick of seeing moms complain about their kids and lives

My children are wonderful and sweet, my proudest accomplishment is being their mom

I love seeing them learn new things, development their own little personalities, play with each other, and with my own parents

My days are filled with taking them to the zoo, the botanical gardens, the library, parks, different fairs/festivals

We have so much fun together, whenever I'm not with my kids, they're basically the only things I think of

Every night before I go to sleep I look at their pictures on my phone, and look for ideas to make their lunches more fun, for different crafts to do with them, or new activities for us to try together

Children are a blessing, and they deserve parents who are absolutely crazy about them ❤️

[Liz Churchill @liz_churchill10]

During a Tornado, Stephanie Decker shielded her 2 young children with her body, as their home was destroyed. A beam fell on her; she held onto the kids rather than freeing herself. Her children survived with minor injuries; she lost both legs and has no regrets…

[Que Ghizbari @KayLynGians]

"I grabbed my son and I held him as tight as I could to my chest and I gave him a kiss and a hug, and I told him I loved him and I jumped out the window"

https://t.co/qkLEX6Y85X

[Puppies & Positivity @Puppieslover]

Emma Schols ran back into a burning house burning 93 % of her body to rescue all six of her kids.

She was on a ventilator for weeks. Doctors said people rarely survive burns that extensive. When she woke up, the first thing she asked was whether her children were alive.

[Salty Girl @SaltyGirl09]

If your wife or girlfriend is currently creating these disturbing videos on TikTok, you should take immediate steps to remove your child from her care and consult an attorney to seek full legal custody.

[HarefootedHind @Harefooted41507]

More of this, less Lindsay

[One Wheel Forward👨‍🦼🥳 @OneWheelForward]

For the Mothers out There

[HarefootedHind @Harefooted41507]

@HannahWardEdu I just need someone to post the entire set to marketplace 🥲

[HarefootedHind @Harefooted41507]

My toddler when it is bedtime.

[Birch Brother 🪓 @BjorkBrodern]

This is the natural state of man, how we were evolved to live. Every man and women were able to do this until grain was introduced.

[HarefootedHind @Harefooted41507]

Big Dino starts young.

[Tiger Lily’s Ghost @tigerlilysghost]

I trust her more than anyone