1. Sex makes you smart. Sex helps you produce hormones and Oxytocin is one of them. This hormone not only gives us a pleasant and relaxed feeling, but also helps our memory and learning ability improve.
2. Sex is a painkiller. (“Do you have a headache, honey? I have a remedy!”) Another hormone that is produced is Endorphin, the happiness hormone and a natural painkiller. Endorphins work against headaches, muscle aches, etc and give us a happy feeling.
3. Sex is a great cardio exercise. During sexual activities our heart beats over a hundred times more per minute than normal. This means a nice rinsing of the heart and veins.
4. Sex is good for your self esteem. Sex is a confirmation that your partner finds you attractive.
5. Sex makes you attractive. Pheromones are released during sex and this triggers a physical reaction in others. (There are also perfumes available with pheromones to create this effect)
6. Sex makes happy. It is proven that people who have sex often are happier than people who are not sexually active. But a study also proved that semen makes happy.
7. Sex can help you sleep better. The exercise gives you a healthy tired feeling and hopefully a satisfied feeling as well. This helps you forget about worries for a while and fall asleep easily.
8. Sex increases immunity. Having sex twice a week ensures a high dose of Immunoglobulin A, which protects you from infections and colds. (However, be moderate, because when having sex more than three times a week, the amount of immunoglobulin will drop).
9. Sex makes you beautiful. Thanks to the production of Estrogen your hair and skin will look better. Sex even is a great remedy against cellulites.
10. Sex is good for your relationship. I covered this topic often enough, a healthy sex life is important in a relationship.

Is this convincing enough? I guess so. So, bring on the lubricants and let’s make ourselves smart, happy, beautiful and healthy.

Then this week I was reading about this study by Stacey Tantleff-Dunn which concludes that 3- to 6-year-old girls worry about being fat. About a third of the girls would change a physical attribute as their weight or hair color. I think that this is pretty shocking. I still can remember well being a little girl, and I did not worry about my looks until much older. I remember going to the market by myself at the age of 10, and one of the sales persons asking me about my mother. He said; your mother is the skinny lady with the glasses, right? And I wondered for a long time about the description of skinny. I could not tell the difference between skinny people and fat people unless they were morbidly obese. Was I that ignorant or are kids nowadays more aware of things around them?

The same research, however, also shows that the self-esteem of these little girls was not influenced by video clips of beautiful thin models (or princesses), like with older girls and women. Little girls seem to be more sensible and understand that Barbie’s impossible proportions are not realistic, and that you do not need Rapunzel’s long hair or Snow White’s complexion to look great. And these results are making sense to me, because what do we think of 3- to 6-year-old girls? Do we think that they are stupid? They understand that a cartoon is a cartoon, and a doll is a doll. Have you ever seen a real person with legs as long as Barbie’s? It has been estimated that the only way a human Barbie could walk would be on all fours, and even then she would need someone to support her head because her neck is twice as long as the average woman’s. And if someone has hair as long as Rapunzel’s, it would not be suitable to use for tower climbing. Even my 5-year-old daughter can see that! Ignorant as I might have been as a kid, I would have been able to tell that it are all fairy tales.

So, what makes these 3- to 6-year-old girls worry about their looks? The earliest influence on our body image comes from our family. The words parents use around a child have a tremendous influence on a child’s sense of self. Mothers who constantly talk about how fat they are are more likely to produce daughters who feel fat as well. When a mother asks a friend “Do I look fat in this” with the daughter around, she is already giving an indirect message to what is desirable and what is not. And I guess as wife of a gym owner/fitness instructor, the message to my girl has unconsciously been that if you are fat, but have the will power to work out, lose weight and get healthy, you deserve some respect and praise (and perhaps even a visit to the Oprah show).

My first daughter was what you would call a very fussy baby, high-need baby or spirited baby. No matter how you want to turn the words, she cried day and night and slept only 15 - 45 minutes at a time. Did I say cry? I mean screamed. Five houses down the road people would complain about sleepless nights. It took me five years to get over that. My second daughter, however, is a true sleepy head. She does not cry, but groans with every movement because all she wants to do is sleep.

If you ask me now what it is like to have a baby in the house, I can almost say it is a quiet, beautiful time. Surely it is still tiring, because even though she wakes up only once in the night, I sit awake waiting for her to wake up. But there was no shock, no frustration and apart from a few unfortunate things happening in the past weeks, we are quite fine here.

Unfortunate things? I recovered a little slower than last time, because apparently the doctor has been cleaning up inside me and not only took out a baby from my belly, but also my appendix and a few moles from embarrassing places. At least, that is what he told me. I do hope that my kidneys are both still in there… The other thing is that despite a scheduled C-section my mother could not come over to help me out because my sister-in-law gave birth to a little girl three days earlier and needed help too. And when my mum finally arrived a week after my girl was born, it was only a few hours later that she received a call that her mother had died and she had to turn around and fly the 12 hours back… The last thing is that my dad stayed here and decided to fix the roof of the house and put new tiles in the kitchen, and besides sleepless nights it is kind of hard to close my eyes for a bit in the daytime for all the drilling and hammering and sawing.

The few unfortunate things aside, we are living a happy time with our family. I am amazed by the amount of reactions of friends and family alike, the postcards and presents I received, and messages and emails that I have to answer. After being away from home for nearly a decade, no has forgotten me yet. Add to that the new friends that I have made offline and online.

I would like to give an honorable mention to Chris from ForBabyGifts.com. I impressed him by scheduling a C-section on Friday the 13th and he came over read my blog and blogged about it on his blog again. On the famous Friday he sent me one of the gifts from his website; a beautiful teddy bear baby blanket. I have tried to take a picture of it, because I said that the picture on the website does not do the teddy bear justice, but with my camera it is impossible to do a better job (why do you think I normally never post pictures?) I really love it! And I think Qaylah does too, because she does sleep very well with it. Thank you, ForBabyGifts.com!

Here is the latest addition to our family:

Qaylah

Born: 13 November 2009
Weight: 3250 grams
Length: 53 cm

We are back home now, but still resting a lot. The C-section went fine, but left me quite uncomfortable. All with the sleepless nights and lots of friends and family visiting in the daytime, posts on Without Dash will have to wait a bit…

I suggest you read some blogs that I like:

Confessions of a Baltimore Housewife
Successful Blog
Juliana’s Lair
Mature Not Senile
Womensselfesteem.com’s Blog
Workout Mommy
A Chronicler’s Life
Conversations with Moms
She Takes on the World
LuvemOrLeavem
Momma Wannabe
Symphony of Love’s Blog
The Boss of You
TheBloggess.com

These are the biggest misunderstandings about happiness. If you are unhappy, you will not be able to enjoy any of the things mentioned. Partners and children of unhappy people feel the pressure of the unspoken task: they have to make their parent or partner happy, because that person is not able to do it on his/her own.

A task like this will always fail. Be happy with yourself and do not compel others to bring happiness to you. Being happy is a choice. The hard part is finding the happiness in yourself by being satisfied with who you are and where you are.