Aussie woman reveals how super realistic baby dolls 'saved her life'

An Australian woman has revealed how becoming a 'mother' to a set of ultra realistic dolls helped cure her chronic illness and now she's trying to raise awareness for the form of therapy. 

In an essay written for lifestyle site Mamamia, Patrizia Bartolomei explained that her life and health went downhill after she lost contact with her three sons, almost 20 years ago. 

"I grieve for my kids. They're not dead, but I grieve for them because I can't talk to them… I don't know what's going on in their lives," she wrote.

"I couldn't cope. I kept crying all the time. I would just cry and cry and cry." 

Bartolomei wrote that she struggled with depression and fibromyalgia, and was placed on 15 medications by her increasingly helpless psychologist. 

"[Then] three years ago, I got so desperate that one day I just typed 'realistic-looking baby dolls' into Google and [Reborn doll artist] Annette Kravchenko's videos popped up," she wrote. 

"I spent hours and hours looking at her tutorials and her babies that looked so real."

Bartolomei sought out an Australian artist who created 'reborn dolls', which are dolls created to resemble a human infant with as much realism as possible.

"The minute she put that baby doll in my arms I just burst into tears. It gave me a nurturing feeling, the feeling a mother gets when she holds her newborn."

Now Bartolomei "has quite a few babies" and she takes her dolls everywhere she goes, complete with a pram and car seat.

"It's changed my life completely. I'm down to three medications. Even my GP can't believe it," she revealed. 

"Just because I'm 64 and I have a pram and I have a therapy baby, it doesn't mean I'm crazy.

"When I'm out with one of my babies, most of the time, people think she's real. But my psychologist said to me, 'Don't fool people, because it's not right'. 

"If people say, 'Oh, your baby looks gorgeous,' I always say, 'Thank you. She's my therapy baby'." 

As an advocate for the form of therapy, Bartolomei has a YouTube channel where she documents her life and a Facebook support group for other 'reborners'. 

"There's about 20 of us and we meet up every three weeks," she explained. "I want people to be able to find a certain amount of peace, like I have."

There are several online retailers of reborn dolls in New Zealand and similar online support groups for Kiwi 'reborners'. 

Baby Talk: What to do when your child refuses to share with others?

DUBAI: It’s a situation mothers stand confused and embarrassed in the face of. No attempts to explain to the child help, and no reprimand works.

When a child refuses to share a toy with others, it’s simply because they’re defending what they consider an “extension of themselves,” and accepting to share that toy with others means, for them, that they’ve given up “a piece of themselves.”

The truth is that children under age three tend to consider every one of their toys their personal property, even in public play spaces, where they refuse to share them even with a friend. Therefore, quarrels among children are usually about ownership of things or games.

How can a mother behave in a situation like this?

At home, have them choose the toys and things that they like a lot, and agree with them that these are “just theirs” and will not be shared with anyone.

In turn, explain to them that it’s all right if some of the other toys are shared with the friends they love.

Don’t force them to share with other children when they refuse, but show them how wonderful it is to share by saying, “Okay, you can play with your truck now, but it’s all right if you lend it to your friend when you’re done.” When they do, hug them and say, “Look how happy he is that you lent him the truck!”

 Lay down a few rules for shared playtime, by saying, for example, “You can take the toy that no one is playing with; otherwise, you have to ask your friend to lend you the toy they have. If they do, lend them the toy of yours that they pick out.”

Use a timer if the competition for a toy gets heated between your child and another child. Tell them that each of them will have the toy for five minutes and will then give it to the other. Let the beeping of the timer judge between them. Children under three years old may not understand sharing, but they may like the game of exchanging toys at a certain time.

If the children continue to quarrel over the toy, take it away and say that they’ll have to make do with the other toys; then they’ll be obliged to accept the principle of sharing because they’ll find that it’s in their best interest.

Remember that you have to set a good example for your child on the subject of sharing, by dividing a sandwich with their father in the presence of the child, for example, or drawing their attention to your neighbor’s intentions, saying “Look, our neighbor will take the vacuum cleaner and will return it to us in a little while.”

The plastic problem with those Coles supermarket toys

If you’re planning on throwing your kid’s Coles mini-toys in your yellow-topped bin once the craze is over, think again.

While the packaging they come in is recyclable, the Little Shop toys themselves are not.

“While the mini collectables and accessories are not made from recyclable materials, our customers and enjoying and keeping them for the future which means they aren’t heading to landfill,” a Coles spokesman said.

“Customers are able to recycle the wrappers at their nearest store through our in-store REDCycle program.”

The toys have been a hot topic with some consumers, as the plastic toys were brought in around the same time as Coles removed single-use plastic bags from its checkouts.

The supermarket chain then changed tack, announcing it would offer free reusable plastic bags indefinitely, before again changing its mind and ending the free bag offer on August 29.

The spokesman said the idea behind the toys was they were kept and collected rather than thrown out.

“We are already finding Little Shop is popular with many of our customers of all ages and customers have said they are excited about being able to collect tiny versions of the products they buy every week,” he said.

The spokesman added that Coles customers have the option of not accepting a toy – one is offered for every $30 spent – at the checkout.

There is an online market for the toys, as people look to buy the missing ones to complete the set.

Online site eBay has thousands of listings for people looking to sell the toys.

Some of the more extreme prices include a $7000 asking price for a complete set, or $2500 for the miniature version of toilet cleaner or $500 for a tiny jar of Nutella.

There are some more reasonable prices too – like 50 cents for the box of tea or dog food collectable.

Ranveer Singh and Manushi Chhillar come together to promote e-commerce fashion brand, Club Factory

Publicis Beehive, the full-service ad agency from Publicis Worldwide has won the creative mandate of popular Chinese e-commerce fashion brand, Club Factory. As its creative partner, Publicis Beehive will play an integral role in launching the brand in India. To further the cause of the brand in India, Club Factory recently announced Bollywood’s leading star and youth icon Ranveer Singh and Miss World Manushi Chhillar as brand ambassadors. The two together star in a high decibel brand campaign that has been executed and conceptualised by Publicis Beehive. The film portrays the broad range of products available on the platform and how users can own these trendy & factory priced brands at just the click of a button.

Watch the spot:

A popular online shopping brand across the world, Club Factory has a strong presence in South Asia, Europe, the United States, the Middle East and other regions. What makes Club Factory unique is that it allows users to shop through millions of products that are trendy and fashionable and available at unbeaten prices.

Commenting on the partnership and the launch of the brand in India, Aviva Wu, Marketing Director, Club Factory said: “Club Factory has managed to carve a unique niche in the hearts of the consumers across various markets that we operate in. India is no exception with consumers, especially the youth, having taken a liking to the brand in a very short span of time. We have ambitious plans for the market and are glad Publicis Beehive is our creative partner.”

On winning the mandate, Paritosh Srivastava, COO – Publicis Beehive said: “The Indian online retail market is at an interesting juncture right now with a plethora of brands vying for some share of the customer’s attention and also his wallet. Though a late entrant, Club Factory is already a well-known brand and our task was to make it a popular & regular online partner of its patrons and keep them coming back for more. With the inaugural launch communication already out, we are confident of achieving that.”

Sharing her views on the film, Shyamashree D’Mello, ECD & Head of Creative Services, Publicis Beehive said: “It was great fun working on the Club Factory launch campaign, as it challenges the notion of fashion being the fiefdom of expensive brands. The bonus was getting the energy of Ranveer Singh and the elegance of Manushi Chillar, paired together for the first time ever, to do that. The light-hearted reverse snobbery they bring to the fore, really hits home as it’s all about being trendy and original in style choices, but paying a fair price for it. Fashion pundits be damned!”

The film has been launched on various digital platforms and has been receiving some rave reviews from the viewers. It has already surpassed 24million views on Youtube since it went live a few days ago. The campaign has also been launched across various platforms including television, digital, outdoor, print etc.

Campaign credits:

Client: Club Factory
Client Team: Aviva Wu
Agency: Publicis Beehive
MD & CCO: Bobby Pawar
MD: Srija Chatterjee
COO: Paritosh Srivastava
Creative Team: Shyamashree D’Mello, Avinash Parab, Savita Nair, Nikhil Warrier, Harish Iyengar, Shreyas Shetty
Account Management: Smita Das, Khushbu Hisaria
Account Planning: Binita Tripathy
Production House: Prodigious
Production Team: Vandana Watsa, Anup Das, Andalib Patel, Sajid Shaikh
Director: Karan Kapadia

Resource: https://brandequity.economictimes.indiatimes.com/

This disturbing theory will change the way you watch Toy Story forever

Toy story might be the most iconic and memorable animated movies of all times, but a child’s theory might just destroy all your happy memories of the film.

Baron Stigmund took to Twitter to share what his daughter had blurted out while watching the Pixar classic - and some people found it very troubling.

Baron Stigmund wrote, "My daughter just ruined Toy Story for everyone. She said if one of the toys died, Andy wouldn't know and he'd carry on playing with its corpse."

The brutal tweet left people horrified and freaking out.

While one user said: "Totally didn't just ruin my childhood or anything,” another replied, “Well that's just scarred me for life.”

Toy Story has been the subject of a number of bizarre fan theories over the years.

Fans have speculated that the heartbreaking scene where Jessie is ditched by her owner is actually Andy's mother.

There's also the theory that Andy's parents are mid-divorce and that's why his appearances are kept to a minimum in the film.

A Tiny Version Of This Physics Toy Is Revealing Quantum Secrets

SANTA BARBARA, Calif. — A simple toy is helping scientists understand new details of a mysterious quantum process.

The rhythmic click-clacking of the metal balls in Newton’s cradle has long entertained physics students. Now, scientists have re-created the toy on an atomic scale, using it to probe how quantum systems reach a balanced state known as thermal equilibrium.

Leave a mug of hot coffee on the counter, and it will gradually cool until it reaches thermal equilibrium, matching the temperature of the room. That process, called thermalization, is well understood on the scale of coffee cups. But at the quantum level, thermalization becomes murky.

“This is an area of physics that we fundamentally don’t understand,” says physicist Benjamin Lev of Stanford University, who presented the work June 26 at the Quantum Thermodynamics meeting at the Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics at the University of California, Santa Barbara. That lack of understanding of such a basic process means that “it behooves us scientists to investigate,” Lev says. So he and colleagues studied how introducing chaos into a quantum Newton’s cradle paves the way for thermalization.

Newton’s cradle consists of suspended metal spheres dangling in a row. Pull back one ball on the end and let it fall back to hit its neighbor, and a ball on the other end pops out before swinging back and repeating the process. This regularly repeating motion continues until friction slows the balls’ swing.

The quantum version replaces those spheres with a row of chilled, laser-trapped atoms. Lev and colleagues created an array of about 700 such quantum Newton’s cradles, each composed of around 50 atoms of the element dysprosium, and kicked them into motion with a laser.

For the quantum Newton’s cradle to thermalize, all the atoms must be moving randomly — akin to the jiggling molecules in a cup of coffee — instead of in a regular back-and-forth pattern. To achieve that randomness, Lev and colleagues took advantage of the fact that dysprosium atoms are magnetic. In addition to colliding with one another, the atoms tugged on one another magnetically. That additional interaction introduced chaos that scrambled the atoms’ motions (SN Online: 9/16/13).

By changing the orientation of the atoms’ magnetic poles, Lev and colleagues tuned the strength of the magnetic interactions and studied how the system approached equilibrium. At first, the atoms rapidly progressed toward thermal equilibrium, then switched to a slower advance, Lev and colleagues report in a paper published May 2 in Physical Review X.

The result could be important for designing ultrasmall devices (SN: 3/19/16, p. 18) and quantum computers, which could perform efficient calculations using quantum mechanics (SN: 7/8/17, p. 28). “If you want to have a quantum computer, it will be very far off equilibrium,” says physicist Jörg Schmiedmayer of Technische Universität Wien in Austria, who was not involved with the research. That’s because, in equilibrium, information is lost thanks to the scrambling of particles’ properties.

So understanding how quantum systems reach equilibrium is a rapidly developing topic of study. “In 20 years … we will have this completely different understanding of the thermodynamics of quantum systems,” Schmiedmayer says.

FUNKO ADDS IRON SPIDER AND MORE AVENGERS: INFINITY WAR TOYS

Much like Thanos‘ singular drive to get all of the Infinity Stones to complete his little pet project, we know there are many of you who will not feel complete until you own the entire line of Avengers: Infinity War toys from Funko. Well, just when you thought your collection might be done, the venerable toy company has announced several new additions to their existing Infinity War releases via their official blog.

Warning: a few of these figures can be considered spoilers for the movie, so if you haven’t seen it yet, you best get on that before you check out the pictures.

First off, there’s a new two-pack in the Vynl line, which features the Mad Titan Thanos himself, complete with a fully stoned Infinity Gauntlet, together with the kid who threw webbing in his face, Peter Parker, in his Tony Stark created Iron Spider armor. For the classic Pop! vinyls line, we have a bearded and rugged Captain America in a new pose (a Walmart exclusive), the Iron Spider (a Target exclusive), and the “Stonekeeper,” who we of course know better as Cap’s World War II menace Red Skull, who is a Funko shop exclusive. And the Hulk busting out of his Hulkbuster armor figure is available only at GameStop; it’s a six inch super sized figure. Hey wait…that never happened in the movie!

You can check out images of all the new Avengers: Infinity War Funko products in our gallery below. Each of these new toys should be hitting shelves sometime early this summer.

Which of these toys from the Infinity War line is your must have item? Be sure to let us know in the comments.