Welcome to Small Humans, an ongoing series at Mashable that looks at how to take care of – and deal with – the kids in your life. Because Dr. Spock is nice and all, but it’s 2018 and we have the entire internet to contend with.

We’re not going to tell you that you can actually buy your way to better sleep with a newborn. If that was true, parents everywhere would have far less disposable income, but find it a lot easier to get out of bed in the morning and function like normal human beings. But sometimes the deep desire to try something, anything wins out and you fire up Amazon looking for a solution. 

The baby sleep gadget market is huge. You’ve got rocking baby beds and vibrating mattress pads. Noise and light machines more sophisticated than anything else in your home. And let’s not forget the cute plush creatures that take snuggling to a whole new level. Hopefully – and for the sake of our sanity, we must keep hope alive – one of these gadgets might just have the magic touch and turn your baby’s bedtime into the stress-free, harmonious operation you’re longing for. Or you might just have to wait it out the old-fashioned way. 

1. Infantino GaGa Musical Soother & Night Light Projector

This looks like a couple of sweet foxes but is actually an all-singing, all-dancing sleep gadget combining a nightlight, light show and range of melodies and nature sounds. The idea is that your little one will be so entranced by the soothing sounds and slowly drifting, colorful stars and clouds that they’ll soon nod off. 

Price: $29.99 at Target

2. Baby Shusher 

If you’re sick of the sound of yourself “shushing” – or simply too exhausted to do it anymore – hand the ropes to the Baby Shusher, which makes a sound that mimics you (and hopefully tricks your little sleep depriver into believing you’re still shushing away). Basically, it’s a white noise machine with a twist. You can pre-set the time and cross your fingers that by the time the noise fades away, your baby is asleep. 

Price: $34.99 at Amazon

3. Suzy Snooze

Aside from looking the part in any contemporary nursery, Suzy Snooze provides lights and comforting sounds and even acts as an audio baby monitor when you connect it to an app. When your baby wakes up, Suzy Snooze’s cry sensor helps get them back to sleep. For toddlers and older kids, it’s a great nightlight. 

Price: $149.99 at Amazon 

4. Galaxy Clock by MomKnows

The Galaxy Clock is packed with features to help you encourage good sleep habits in your baby – and it’s a hit with toddlers and older kids too. There’s a star projector (choose from a favorite color or a rainbow selection), white noise to mimic the sounds your baby listened to inside the womb, nature sounds to suit all tastes (forest birds, rainfall and ocean waves), and possibly the coolest, least-offensive alarm clock ever: the star projector comes up naturally to make your baby feel like the sun is rising and help develop a natural sleep rhythm. If that’s not enough, the Galaxy Clock is also a high-quality music player, compatible with iPhone, iPod, Android and MP3. 

Price: $33.45 at Amazon

5. Lulla Doll

The Lulla Doll by Roro caused a social media sensation when she first appeared on the scene, and for good reason. Parents swear this soft, sweet little doll has the magic touch when it comes to baby sleep issues. She works by playing a real-life recording of a heartbeat and breathing, for up to eight hours. Tip: hug Lulla close to your body for a few minutes before placing her inside or close to your child’s crib – your scent provides even more comfort. 

Price: $69 at Lulla Doll

6. Baby Einstein Sea Dreams Soother

This soothing device combines lights with the sounds of the sea to help get your baby to sleep – and ensure that she stays that way. As well as four different combinations of motion, lights and sounds, it has a “Drift-off” feature, which slowly darkens a room like the fading light of a sunset. It comes with a remote-activated start, meaning you might not even have to get out of bed to soothe your little one back to sleep. 

Price: $39.99 at Amazon

7. Hatch Baby Rest

Rest works with a smartphone or tablet app to let you set nap times, bedtimes and acceptable wake-up times (the clock changes color to let a toddler know it’s okay to get up). It can also play white noise or soothing sounds. The real beauty of Rest is that if you need to change your schedule (for example if your baby needs some extra time to fall asleep), you can do it from your smartphone without setting foot in the nursery – perfect for those of us who have a kid who’s wide awake as soon as you as much as breathe in their direction. 

Price: $59.99 at Hatch Baby

8. Cloud b’s Twilight Turtle

You can’t get a cuter sleep gadget than Cloud b’s Twilight Turtle, but this little guy and his sleepy plush face brings so much more than the “aww” factor. His hard shell has eight constellations that project on the ceiling in three colors, and when you hook him up to Bluetooth you can program a customized selection of melodies for him to play, for up to 24 hours. 

Price: $29.99 at Cloud b

9. Lulla-Vibe Vibrating Mattress Pad

If your baby likes motion to fall asleep, try the award-winning Lulla-Vibe Vibrating Mattress Pad from Munchkin. You simply pop it under a crib mattress or bassinet and let it gently vibrate your infant to sleep. It has a 30-minute timer that shuts off gradually to avoid waking your baby, a durable, easily cleaned cover, and is portable enough to take wherever you go. 

Price: $29.99 at Babyhaven.com

10. Marpac Dohm Classic White Noise Sound Machine

It might look like a smoke alarm, but appearances can be deceptive and this white noise sound machine is a favorite with kids and adults alike. This clever gadget is basically a fan inside a plastic casing, which actually produces white noise (instead of just playing a white noise track). When you turn the outer shell, holes open and close along the side, which lets you adjust the volume and pitch of the white noise. Hopefully, it will take your baby back to the comfort and calm of the womb – and encourage them to nod off along the way – regardless of the background noise in your home.   

Price: $49.97 at Amazon 

11. SNOO Smart Sleeper

If you really are willing to pay anything to make sure your kiddo sleeps through the night, check out renowned pediatrician Dr. Harvey Karp’s responsive bassinet, SNOO. This clever baby bed responds automatically to your baby’s cries, combining unique womb-like rocking and white noise to soothe back to sleep. It claims to calm crying in under a minute, so it’s basically magic – albeit with a hefty price tag.   

Price: $1,160 at Happiest Baby (you can also pay $96.67 per month at 0% interest) 

Read more great stories from Small Humans:   

• The parent founders of UrbanSitter and Primary.com on startups after babies

• 4 toys that teach STEM skills without screens

• 10 apps to help your kids learn to control their emotions 

Netflix really hedged its bets with this year’s Halloween fare, with plans to drop everything from Daredevil Season 3 to Sabrina in a matter of weeks – including a modern interpretation of Shirley Jackson’s horror novel The Haunting of Hill House.

SEE ALSO: Here’s the scary movies you should watch this month

At once veering away any prior adaptation of Jackson’s novel and paying tribute to staples of the horror genre, Hill House is an addictive slow burn of a binge that will have you biting your blanket in fear and tiptoeing in the dark. Yet even with all the ghostly frills of a horror classic, what stands out about Hill House is the haunting family drama at its center, and the questions of how the characters can escape the literal and figurative ghosts in their past. 

Hill House tells the story of one family’s disturbing summer at Hill House and its reverberating repercussions on them decades later. Though they only spent several weeks there, Hill House continues to haunt the children as adults, because of the unexplainable experiences they had there and their mother’s sudden death on the last night.

The series sucks you in with a promising mix of terror and trauma, investing as much in the relationships of the Crain siblings as children and adults as it does in the shadows and noises that set our teeth on edge. In moments it feels like This Is Us with paranormal trauma, all somber and quiet until something unexpected – though in this case, more terror than tears.

But when I say Hill House hooks you, it hooks you. At 10 episodes, it’s a standard season binge for Netflix, as gripping as Stranger Things‘ inaugural outing because you can’t fight the need to piece this story together. Each episode focuses on a different character – flashing between that fateful summer and the present day – allowing us to piece together Hill House’s many mysteries Rashomon-style, often seeing the same scene from different points of view or with new information. 

The Crains are cast particularly well, looking enough like siblings or like their younger/older counterparts to truly embed you in this family. Standouts include Violet McGraw and Julian Hillard as the young twins, Victoria Pedretti as the tortured baby sibling as an adult, and Kate Siegel’s rough but intoxicating adult Theodora. Carla Gugino plays mother Olivia as something of a manic-pixie-dream-mom – ethereally beautiful and kind, crystallized in the memories of her grieving children.

Most horror films and TV build on the mystery; you accumulate knowledge of the monster, what it looks like and what it can do, all of which make it clearer and sometimes less of a threat. In Hill House, you might spend more time clenched up and anticipating a scream then you will spend actually screaming. You’ll rarely experience the same scare twice; sometimes it’s a floating giant, a rotting corpse, a loud noise, a vivid dream. Even more unlikely is an explanation of what it was or why it happened. As a result, these uncanny images linger long after you turn off the show.

Perhaps as homage to the stage version, Hill House is filmed with immense theatricality. Modern horror often opts for quick cuts and shaky cams, but this is filmed with steady cameras, long takes, and slow zooms, used to hypnotic effect. One episode has a single take that lasts no less than 17 minutes, and it’s almost completely devoid of any ghosts or scares as the adult Crain siblings and their father let loose emotionally.

Watching this broken family unleash their inner demons elicits a reaction very different from anything else on Hill House. It’s the culmination of a tension built throughout the show, which is otherwise tricky to identify beneath our surface-level fear of ghosts and ghouls. 

Similarly, the family refuses to face their deeper issues by blaming it on the spooky stuff. Hugh Crain (Timothy Hutton) never explains his suspicions to the children. The elder siblings (Elizabeth Reaser and Michiel Huisman) fully embrace denial in a desperate quest for normalcy, while the adult twins (Pedretti and Oliver Jackson-Cohen) spend decades trying – and usually failing – to escape the things they saw and experienced at the house.

It’s hard to say more about Hill House without spoilers. If you’re a viewer who likes their horror with detailed explanations, concrete answers, and explicit rules, then perhaps this house is not your destination. The show is a constant interplay of time, trauma, and secrets, with the house’s nebulous powers as a backdrop and anchor for it all. 

This is as much about paranormal ghosts as it is about ghosts like addiction, guilt, and regret. It’s about the feeling of becoming a ghost in one’s own home, as each of the children and their mother do at some point as the house strengthens its hold on them. If you do love a good twist and a scare, if you can afford to shed a few tears for this fictitious family, then come on down. The door is unlocked.

The Haunting of Hill House is now streaming on Netflix.

Think about what you learned from the fairy tales you heard growing up. Scratch beneath the surface of those grand tales of bravery and everlasting love and you’ll see the gender stereotypes,  moral lessons, and a very black and white worldview.

Nikita Gill wants nothing to do with any of that. Instead, the Instagram poet and author wants you  to reexamine the fairy tales you grew up hearing and reading. 

SEE ALSO: If you prefer the Instagram version of yourself, read this book

That’s the point of her new book — Fierce Fairytales: Poems & Stories to Stir your Soul — in which she dismantles the gender dynamics and stereotypes in the childhood fables that have, for centuries, gone unchallenged. When Gill revisited stories she’d loved watching on Disney VHS tapes like a “proper ’90s kid” — stories like Snow White, Sleeping Beauty, Jack and the Beanstalk, and Hansel and Gretel  — and read them through the lens of adulthood, she was disappointed. 

It was the way that Snow White and Sleeping Beauty framed consent that sparked her urge to begin reclaiming and rewriting these narratives. If you don’t recall: both of these fairy tale princesses are fast asleep when they receive their true love’s kiss.

“Looking back I felt like, ‘What?’ This doesn’t seem right. There is no idea of consent!” Gill tells Mashable. “This is not something I want to just read to my children as is. It’s full of quite harmful messages.”

“We are teaching young people to respect themselves and take responsibility for their own choices and decisions.”

Gill didn’t want to just accept these narratives just because she used to love them. She wanted to turn them on their heads, turn them into tales about people being brave on their own terms, honest about their trauma, and vulnerable just like the rest of us. Tales she would want her future children to read.

In Gill’s fairy tales, everyone is their own fairy godmother: Sleeping Beauty is wide awake, and Cinderella’s mother begs her daughter to stand up to her abusers. Gill wants Tinkerbell to be allowed to be angry and Hercules to be able to cry. The moral is always the same: you must be true to yourself. 

“By taking back these stories and rewriting them for a post-#MeToo generation of young people, we are teaching them to respect themselves and take responsibility for their own choices and decisions,” Gill said.

A lot of fairytales are ancient and many people probably take these 250-year-old morals with a pinch of salt. But, according to Gill, some of the stereotypes put forth by old fairy tales are still very much perpetuated today. The narratives we expose young children to play a big part in how we teach them to view the world, who we praise and who we chastise, Gill says. 

Take the perfect damsel in distress, the beautiful woman waiting passively in a dire situation for a man to come and save her. But, is this trope really one we want girls to grow up believing in? Shouldn’t we be teaching them to be their own saviours? 

“We need role models that show that women can not only look after themselves, they can have flaws and they don’t have to be perfect.”

“I don’t know a single girl who didn’t read fairy tales when they were young, and we are all influenced by this idea that a prince is going to come and save us,” Gill said. “The idea is that someone will come and save you from your life and your problems, and that that saving is marriage. That is such a harmful thing to perpetuate for young girls.” 

The women in fairy tales, Gill argues, are often perfect, both morally and physical, but they are never in control of their own lives or fates.

“We need role models that show that women can not only look after themselves, they can have flaws and they don’t have to be perfect,” said Gill.  

One of the darker poems in the book, “Hunger: The Darkest Fairy Tale,” deals with another aspect of that very idea: that women are taught to long for physical and moral perfection. “Hunger” doesn’t take place in the magical fairy tale-sphere, but rather, it deals with eating disorders and body image, something Gill herself has struggled with. 

“You remind yourself, 

‘Hunger is not my friend,’

‘Hunger is not making me stronger ’

‘Hunger does not love me.’

A helpless chant as it rips through your brain.”

The relationship between women’s bodies, food and hunger has been a trope in literature for centuries, just as striving for thinness has long been closely tied to the feminine ideal. On Instagram — a platform where Gill has 458,000 followers — pro-eating disorder communities are common, as they slip past the AI set in place to protect users from harmful content. 

“Eating disorders are things that are pushed to us as a magical things, and girls believe the narrative that disease is what’s going to make them fairy tale-like and beautiful”

Gill included these very real issues – eating disorders and body dysmorphia – into her book of stories set in the magical realm to prove a crucial point about the values and norms we’re taught in real life. Just as you can rethink what was presented to you in fairy tales, you’re allowed to reexamine the messages the real world sends you as well. Such as the idea that being thin is the only valid form of female beauty, that the only route to beauty is through hunger. 

“Eating disorders are things that are pushed to us as a magical things, and girls believe the narrative that disease is what’s going to make them fairy tale-like and beautiful,” Gill explains. But as women, we are free to take control over that narrative. 

“As women […] hunger is something we’re told is actually good for us. But we can choose to villainise it, to have hunger be the bad guy,” says Gill. 

It’s not just the female characters and stereotypes that are problematic. The men in the fairy tales, the Prince Charmings, are also up against it in the realm of fairy tales. In Gill’s retelling of Jack and the Beanstalk, Jack is a victim of abuse who only uses the magic beanstalk to crawl away from his demons. 

“Men aren’t strong and stoic all of the time. These hyper masculine characters come out as a reaction to trauma of what they faced,” says Gill. “People are flawed, and they suffer. This kind of retelling will make people look deeper at the characters that they have been introduced to.”

By rewriting and reclaiming the fairytales, showing how to look differently at what was given to you, Gill is hoping it will inspire people to reclaim their own narratives. Her message is that your life is yours to shape. That we are not passive in our own trajectories. 

“Take charge of your life, fix your life, and do whatever you can to deal with what has happened to you,” said Gill said. “We are all influenced by the idea that a prince is going to come and save us. That someone will come and save us from our life and our problems. But the truth is we all need to grow up and save ourselves,” she said. “Write your own fairytale, and, regardless of your gender, empower yourself.”

Finally, Gill would like to offer an opposing narrative to the happily ever after trope, the idea that we need castles, dragons, and witches to be magical. She’s proposing that the real magic, the real stuff of fairytales is in human existence itself; in love, compassion, human resilience, and beauty.

That humans are capable of connection is the true “sorcery,” Gill writes in the poem “For the cynic.”

“And somehow you still 

genuinely think

that magic does not exist,

that fairy tales aren’t real, 

that way people

find each other 

at just the right time 

at just the right moment 

isn’t the most powerful sorcery,”  

“I’m a strong believer in the fact that every single one of us have the capacity to be magic in everything that we do,” Gill says. 

Jimmy Fallon has never been to Olive Garden.

Fortunately he’s in the safe hands of Post Malone, who is a big time fan of the Italian-American chain. The “Rockstar” rapper showed the late show host all the delights of Post Malone-style free breadsticks, which involves taking a bite and putting hunks of butter on it.

In a segment that’s apparently totally not an ad for Olive Garden, Fallon spent most of his time being shocked at how things like breadsticks and salad were free. “How do you guys make money?” he asked.

As per the Hollywood Reporter, when the pair finished filming, they headed over to an Irish pub where Post Malone got involved in a jam night. Sounds like quite the night out.

Banksy’s self-shredding Girl with Balloon has left quite the mark on the art world.

Not only has the work become the subject of memes, but it’s been described as the artist’s greatest work, and its value has likely jumped sharply following the incident.

SEE ALSO: Banksy’s shredded art stunt is a beautiful meme now

So it’d be mad if the buyer of the $1.4 million work didn’t decide to keep it, which is exactly what she will be doing.

“When the hammer came down last week and the work was shredded, I was at first shocked, but gradually I began to realise that I would end up with my own piece of art history,” the buyer, identified as a female European collector and a long-standing client of Sotheby’s, said in a statement.

Shortly after being sold at auction for three times the expected price, a secret shredder in the frame of Girl with Balloon was activated, and the work was cut into pieces.

Since the incident, the artwork has been given a cheeky new title: Love is in the Bin.

Banksy revealed how he installed the shredder an Instagram post.

Despite speculation of Sotheby’s collaborating with Banksy to destroy, or rather create another work, the artist’s former gallerist Steve Lazarides dismissed those rumours.

“I worked for him for 12 years, the idea of him colluding with an institution to pull off a stunt is the complete antithesis to his philosophy,” he said in a statement.