hellobeautifulcreatures

Aside from Tylenol, there’s not much you can take during pregnancy. Fortunately, you can still fill the prescription for a good time. Simply follow a few of the prompts below and let yourself get lost in the moment. Repeat whenever you’re feeling blue over the next 40 weeks. 1. Go to morphthing.com or a similar site to get a glimpse of what your baby-on-the-way might look like. Just upload pics of mom and pop, click the button, and get some giggles. When that gets old, play around with celeb photos to make hilarious what-if babies. 2. Think of creative ways to break the big news to your partner, parents and friends. For example, why not send out pregnancy announcements in paper barf bags ? Or make an original home movie to share the surprise with personal flair. 3. Start a baby book by documenting details about your life and pregnancy. A blank book is great for those who are ultra creative; for those of us who could use a little help, the fill-in-the-blank varieties are ideal mem...

And if you were a nine-year-old girl at any point during the last 30 years, you are almost certainly familiar with American Girl. It very well may have been an essential part of your nine-year-old girldom. From the beginning, from the time it was a mere kernel of an idea scrawled on a postcard, American Girl was engineered for nine-year-old girls. It all began when Pleasant Rowland, who was working for an educational publishing company at the time, took a trip to Colonial Williamsburg. Rowland had had a varied career; she'd been an elementary school teacher , a TV news reporter , a textbook writer. History and education were her passions, and while she was in Virginia, inspiration struck. She sent a postcard detailing her plan to her friend Valerie Tripp , a children's author. As she recalled at American Girl's 25th anniversary celebration , it went something like this: "I've been down in Williamsburg this week and had an idea. What do you think of it? A series of...

This is a lesson for all communications specialists, public-relations practitioners, media aides, press secretaries, et al, who think their job is to control the message and to make reporters part of the PR process: the best stories come out of conversations. I was thinking this the other day as I interviewed three- time world NHRA drag -racing champion Larry Dixon , who’s going to be in Grand Bend, Ont., this weekend for the 18th annual MOPAR Canadian Nationals . I’d called Dixon at the behest of a friend who wanted me, essentially, to plug the event. What I got out of our chat was a lot more. Unlike a situation I found myself in earlier this year at the Grand Prix du Canada in Montreal, where I got to interview four-time world champion Sebastian Vettel , but only after I gave the questions in advance to his PR assistant at Ferrari, who gave only half of them back to me and then stood there to make sure I didn’t try to slip something in that she hadn’t “approved,” this interview wit...

Guinea trive members had never seen a white person before" /> New Guinea trive members had never seen a white person before ( ) Margaret Hastings " /> Margaret Hastings ( ) Lost in Shangri-La by Mitchell Zuckoff Harper When Margaret Hastings found her best friend dead, all she could think about were her shoes. “I ought to have cried,” Hastings wrote in her diary. “I just sat there in shock, and all I could think was: ‘Now the shoes belong to me.’ ” That’s what paradise had done to the Women’s Army Corps corporal — stripped her of emotion, survival was the only imperative. If she was to make it out of the jungle alive, crying was a luxury. As World War II was drawing to a close, Hastings was part of a group of enlisted men and women who crashed in the middle of a “Shangri-La,” a hidden valley, untouched by the rest of the world, in Dutch New Guinea. But this Shangri-La was a far cry from the utopia coined by the 1933 novel “Lost Horizon.” Of the 24 passengers, only H...

A t seven years old, Abdul El-Sayed sat in the eye of Hurricane Andrew, the most destructive hurricane in US history until Katrina. Living near Miami, El- Sayed drank juice while swaddled under mattresses between his father and stepmother, who was holding El-Sayed’s newborn baby brother just home from the hospital. The 1992 storm had taken an unexpected turn southward , and the El-Sayeds could not be evacuated. The wind made an awful rattling sound on the screens. The front door blew in. The wind and the rain whipped into the house, “as if the ocean was coming at you”. El-Sayed’s father, Mohamed, crawled on his stomach to shut the door, the rain whipping his face, the wind beating his body. The eye of the storm passed directly over them and the National Guard eventually evacuated them. At the moment, American politics feels a bit like being in the eye a hurricane. Donald Trump has stated America’s nuclear arsenal is “locked and loaded”, should North Korea make any false moves a...