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• After suffering seven miscarriages, Monica Kranner finally fell pregnant at the age of 53.
• Monica and her husband, Peter, are often mistaken for their son’s grandparents.
• The intrusive comments she receives about her age as a parent can still be hurtful.

This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with Monica Kranner, 56, a nutritionist based in London. It has been edited for length and clarity.

Having a 2.5-year-old when you’re 56, and your husband is 60, means everyone has questions and opinions about your life.

I’ve heard just about every comment you can think of, and it’s been going on ever since I was pregnant. I would be at the dentist, for example, and have to put on the consultation form that I was pregnant, only for the receptionist to do a double take.

One that really hurt was being out at a restaurant for a family dinner over Christmas, when the server complimented us for spending quality time with our “grandson.” The assumption that we are our son’s grandparents happens pretty much every time we go out, whether it’s to the park, a toddler group, or even while shopping.

We end up sharing our painful backstory with strangers

Sometimes I can keep my cool, but other times it really hurts that people just make assumptions, because we waited so long to have our son.

It becomes expected that we share our very painful, personal back story: that we have been trying to conceive since I was 39, and I have experienced seven devastating miscarriages. Our son is the miracle we were waiting for over 14 years. Having to share this with strangers isn’t easy, but it feels necessary.

All our son currently sees is two parents who love him immensely. He doesn’t see our ages, but I’m worried this will come when he starts school. I don’t want his friends to judge him and tease him for having older parents. It’s one of the reasons I am actually thinking of homeschooling him, to protect him from bullying.

As older parents, we don’t take our health for granted

Having a young child at this age means you don’t take anything for granted. I have been a nutritionist for over 20 years, seeing clients across London, where we live; Vienna, where I’m originally from; and Los Angeles.

Even though we ended up conceiving through IVF, I’m convinced that nutrition played a strong part in helping me fall pregnant at the age of 53, and getting through menopause when I started experiencing hot flashes when I was 55, delayed because of the IVF hormones.

And now, nutrition is what keeps me fit enough to match my son’s energy levels. It’s also not just about the present. Naturally, my husband and I want to live as long as possible to be here for our son, so that’s another reason we want to take care of our health.

As a family, we eat a fully organic diet, and I cook fresh meals at home as often as possible. I make sure every meal contains protein, vegetables, and either rye bread or rice noodles. A typical meal for my son would be a boiled egg with kefir, a fermented milk drink, some boiled, sliced vegetables, avocado, and a side of banana chips and rye bread.

Each week, I make a large portion of bone broth, cooking it for up to 12 hours before cooling it and decanting it into toddler bottles, which I then serve daily to my son. I’m confident it’s one of the reasons he’s hardly been sick. My husband Peter and I both regularly have bone broth too, and my elderly dad in Austria has also started having it. I’ve even gotten my nephew and his children onto it.

I also take several supplements. I’ve also taken up reformer pilates to build strength. And we try to get as much sleep as possible.

I really enjoy my time with my son

I’ve had a long time to think about how I want to balance work with spending time with my son, as it’s important to me to spend as much time with him as possible while keeping my nutrition business going. I took a step back from my business when my son was born, seeing clients only when they approached me — I didn’t do any proactive marketing again until this year. My husband runs his own small advertising agency, so he had some flexibility to step in and take care of our son when needed, and we also use a babysitter.

Now our babysitter comes for about half the day, and I take care of Lewis myself for the other half. That’s the other thing you have to think about when you start a family at this age – you can’t rely on grandparents to help. They have either died already or are too old to have the physical strength and mental capacity to take care of a toddler.

I really enjoy my time with my son, though, and I hope he does too. I take him to toddler activities like golf, gymnastics, and soccer. When he takes a nap, I try to lie down with him to rest and be near him.

It’s frustrating that so many people think it’s OK to make the insensitive comments that they do. You don’t know what someone else has been through. It’s nobody’s business how old we are. We are doing the best for our son, and that is what matters.

• Becca and Jess Stern launched a locker brand in 2018 with $25,000 and no industry knowledge.
• The sisters built an eight-figure global brand by refusing to chase trends.
• Their “think x 10” rule pushed them to make big operational bets early on.

Becca Stern loved buying vintage lockers, but found they weren’t very practical for home storage.

She and her sister, Jess Stern, had often talked about starting a business together and saw an opportunity to reinvent them into something beautiful and functional for people to use in their homes.

“Once we made the decision to start, things moved quickly,” Becca said. The sisters were working with no product development knowledge and no outside funding. They also overlapped for only a few hours each day, as Becca worked from Australia while raising her new baby, and Jess worked from the UK on the side of her full-time job. “There were lots of late-night calls and the feeling that we were always swimming in the deep end, constantly hitting new challenges and figuring out the best way forward,” she added.

Still, within a few months, they were in China meeting with potential manufacturers. They put about $25,000 AUD of their own savings into branding, samples, and a stand at a trade show in Sydney, officially launching their brand, Mustard Made, to the world in 2018.

They walked away from that show with over $200,000 AUD in orders. “That was the moment we realized we were onto something,” Becca told Business Insider. Six months later, Jess left her corporate career to go all in.

Since then, they’ve grown into a thriving global brand, spanning three continents with a team of nearly 40 employees and bringing in eight figures of revenue a year. The sisters told Business Insider about the two pivotal decisions that helped them expand their company.

They avoided trends

From very early conversations about the business, the Stern sisters decided they wanted to focus on timelessness over trends.

Given the “obsessive” amount of thought and energy they put into their products, they said they couldn’t imagine selling them for only six months before moving them to a sale section and phasing them out. They also questioned whether trend chasing really worked. “We’ve seen in the industry how hopping on trends can provide quick and exciting wins, but they can also date your product very quickly,” Becca said.

That clarity, they added, has helped them build a brand with a “cult following,” and a nearly 30% return customer rate that has only grown over time.

“When you see something go viral, it’s certainly tempting to think, ‘Should we be doing that too?'” Jess said, such as when “Brat Green” or “Barbie Pink” were taking over social media.

But the sisters said they want to stay close to the intentional design customers have come to love and expect from the business. They told Business Insider that they still sell every product and color they have ever launched, except for a limited rainbow launch in 2024 to raise money for an LGBTIQ+ organization.

“Growth can sometimes dilute a brand, but we’ve worked hard to ensure that every decision still feels aligned with who we are,” Becca said.

They built as if they were bigger from day one

On the operations side, the sisters applied an internal pressure test they call “think x 10.” This is when they ask whether any given process, system, or approach would still work if Mustard were 10 times its current size. “It has saved us so many headaches and allowed Mustard to grow and expand globally,” Becca said.

Early on, that question pushed Becca and Jess toward a decision that felt uncomfortably big at the time: signing with a third-party logistics provider instead of managing warehousing from a shipping container in Becca’s backyard.

“It feels ridiculous now, but at that point, engaging with a third-party logistics provider felt like a really huge step,” Becca said. The “think x10” philosophy gave them the confidence to take the leap. The risk expanded Mustard Made’s ability to meet demand and scale. Now, the business has four third-party logistics warehouses with plans to expand to the East Coast. “It always blows my mind to see that the scale that once felt unachievable has now become our norm.”

The same logic applies to hiring. “Bringing in great people early has been key to scaling the business,” Jess said, adding that hiring before they felt ready, particularly in areas where the founders didn’t have expertise, is what allowed them to focus on the strategic areas of the business.

Becca frames the business’s underlying mindset as a three-step cycle. “Be optimistic, then pessimistic, then optimistic again. You have to have belief and hope to get moving, then you have to break it down from every angle to find all the possible ways it could go wrong,” she said.

“Once you’ve planned for the worst-case scenarios, you lean all in and enjoy the ride.”

• Gabby Zappia, 37, started experiencing blood in her stool when she was pregnant.
• Her rectal bleeding was dismissed by her doctor as pregnancy-related hemorrhoids.
• When she got screened months later, she was diagnosed with stage 4 colon cancer.

When Gabby Zappia started experiencing blood in her stool for the first time, her obstetrician quickly reassured her. She was six months into her third pregnancy and was told the symptom was likely caused by pregnancy-related hemorrhoids.

So, Zappia returned to her busy life. Caring for her two kids, ages 4 and 5 at the time, involved nonstop carpools, lunches, laundry, and dishes.

“I still have a little bit of a hard time slowing down,” Zappia, 37, told Business Insider.

The day before her due date in June 2024, Zappia, who’s based in Mission Viejo, California, saw significantly more blood in the toilet, describing it as “blood diarrhea.” She immediately went to OB triage, where she said the staff seemed in disbelief, asking her if she’d taken any photos. After a vaginal exam found nothing wrong with the baby, they decided to induce labor.

After her son’s birth, Zappia wanted to focus on being with him. But when the bleeding persisted, she called her primary care physician and was put on a three-month waiting list to see a gastroenterologist. In December 2024, six months after she gave birth, Zappia was diagnosed with stage 4 colon cancer.

Zappia, who had no family history of colon cancer, had expected a diagnosis like polyps or Crohn’s disease. “I’m still shocked, honestly,” she said. “I was just heartbroken. I thought that I was invincible before this.”

A baseball-sized mass

Zappia said her GI was the first time she felt her symptom was being taken seriously. While she was in the office, he gave her a guaiac-based fecal occult blood test (gFOBT), performed on a card that turns blue when stool samples contain blood. The entire card turned blue, indicating a higher amount of blood.

He scheduled her for a colonoscopy, which involved another monthlong wait. It was then, in November 2024, that Zappia learned she had a mass so big that it nearly blocked her whole colon. She was scheduled for a colon resection surgery, a procedure to remove part of her large intestine, one month later.

“The mass was the size of a baseball when she ended up taking it out, which is absolutely insane because I’m a small person, too,” Zappia said.

It put in perspective how much discomfort she brushed aside in the prior months, including the extreme fatigue she chalked up to pregnancy. “The days when I felt the most sick, like I was in thick mud just trying to get my day started, were the days that I pulled myself together the most,” she said.

Zappia would always put on makeup and try to be her usual bubbly self — something she wonders may have made it harder for doctors to believe her. “If I was kind of looking sick, maybe they would’ve been more concerned,” she said.

Balancing motherhood with treatment

After her colon resection and a biopsy on her liver, where the cancer had spread, Zappia was diagnosed with stage 4 colon cancer.

After she had healed from the surgery, Zappia underwent a second surgery for her chemotherapy port, which provides a convenient access point for chemo treatments, before starting a chemotherapy and immunotherapy regimen. In between those treatments, she also underwent a liver resection and ablation surgery to remove tumors. Zappia also had a hepatic artery infusion (HAI) pump installed in her abdomen to deliver concentrated doses of chemo directly to her liver.

The mom of three young children said the hardest part of her diagnosis was being a patient while continuing to be an engaged parent.

“When you’re a mom, you don’t get to pause,” she said. “Your kids still need you. They still want snacks. They still want you to be there for bedtime.” While she said they pushed her to stay active, forcing herself to get up on days when she was recovering from chemo side effects such as bone pain and flu-like symptoms, it still made her experience extra challenging. For example, she was afraid to hold her kids out of fear of them accidentally pulling the tubing of her chemo pump out.

It was also difficult to find childcare on days she was at the hospital. Still, she had her husband.

“I am so incredibly lucky to have an amazing husband,” she said, who handled nearly all of her household and childcare responsibilities throughout treatment. “We’ve tried to tackle this as a team and work hard to normalize life as much as possible for the kids, keep things routine, celebrate the little things, and just make sure our home still feels safe and full of joy.”

Friends, family, neighbors, and people from Zappia’s church also chipped in to help with carpools and meals. “It really does take a village, and we’ve really needed to lean on them throughout this whole experience,” she said.

Bumps in treatment

After her liver resection, Zappia finished chemotherapy and rang the bell in September 2025 after having no evidence of disease. “It was an incredible milestone in my journey, but early,” Zappia said.

Three months later, a PET scan found some cancer activity in her liver. After the initial shock of her new diagnosis wore off, Zappia said she realized she’d have “bumps in the road.”

“It’s just important to focus on what I can control,” she added.

Zappia underwent a robotic liver resection at the end of 2025 to remove the affected area. But after an MRI revealed a new tumor nearby, she had the procedure again in March 2026 — marking her third liver surgery overall.

After multiple surgeries, her blood tests found no signs of disease as of April 2026.

Because colorectal cancer is now the deadliest cancer for people under 50, Zappia believes people should be on the lookout for symptoms like bloody stools, which is one of the most common signs of colon cancer.

“Sure, it might be hemorrhoids, and that would be awesome, but confirm that,” Zappia said. “Don’t just take the possibility that that’s what it is.”

• Apple detailed its long-delayed overhaul to Siri at WWDC 2026.
• The tech giant’s AI assistant is set to finally get AI-powered capabilities, some of which were initially teased in 2024.
• Apple announced a deal with Google in January to have Gemini power Siri’s AI.

Siri’s full-fledged AI moment is finally here.

On Monday, Apple unveiled its long-awaited, much-delayed overhaul of Siri as it looks to catch up in the AI race.

“Today, we are introducing an entirely new version of Siri, Siri unlocked by Apple Intelligence,” said Mike Rockwell, VP of engineering, said during the company’s 2026 Worldwide Developers Conference. “We call it Siri AI.”

The new Siri AI will exist within Apple’s software ecosystem but also as a standalone app. Siri AI will launch in beta later this year, but it will not launch in the European Union or China initially.

The underlying architecture of the new Siri is the result of Apple’s partnership earlier this year with Google. The new features will launch in English with other languages to come.

Rockwell showed Siri using a variety of AI-powered capabilities, including the ability to find previously sent addresses, photos from particular locations, and more, “using your personal context.” In one example, Rockwell showed how Siri could find specific photos he needed and share them with a group without ever opening the Photos app.

Siri will have a brand new voice experience “that enables Siri to sound incredible and a lot more expressive.” Rockwell said users can also customize how expressive they want Siri to be. Along with voice improvements, Rockwell said Siri is also getting a dictation improvement “with a major boost in accuracy.”

The Siri updates were just one part of the bevy of AI-enabled features Apple plans to roll out as part of its overhaul of Apple Intelligence, including the ability for iPhone to gather context during calls, reposition the framing of photos after they’ve been taken, and recognize faces with home cameras. Apple said some of the new AI features will have daily usage updates.

After encountering product development delays, Apple reached a deal in January with Google to have Gemini power Siri’s artificial intelligence capabilities.

Federighi detailed the company’s “deep collaboration” with Google.

“Together, we created the next generation of Apple Intelligence models,” Federighi said during the WWDC livestream.

In a statement, Apple said the Siri AI launch delay in the EU was due to disputes with European regulators over how the landmark Digital Markets Act applies to Apple’s AI capabilities.

For everyone else, Apple said the latest Apple Intelligence features and Siri AI in iOS 27 will be available on iPhone Pro 15 and later models, and iPhone 16 and later models. (A full list of the other devices that will be capable of using the AI features is here.)

Siri troubles lead to embarrassing delays

If some of this sounds familiar, that’s because much of it is.

In 2024, Apple announced a massive update to Siri, promising a more “natural” and “personal” assistant powered by Apple Intelligence. But then it ran into development issues.

By March 2025, Apple made the exceedingly rare move to announce that the Siri revamp was delayed.

That complicated Apple’s marketing efforts. Apple also pulled down a September 2024 ad featuring “The Last of Us” star Bella Ramsey that featured Ramsey using Siri’s AI to pull information from the calendar app to remember someone’s name.

Last month, Apple agreed to pay $250 million to settle a class-action lawsuit accusing the company of misleading customers about the availability of AI-enhanced features.

Tim Cook reflects on his last WWDC as CEO

This is Cook’s final WWDC as CEO, marking one of his last opportunities to close the chapter on Apple’s AI setbacks. Apple’s hardware boss John Ternus will take the helm as CEO starting on September 1.

Before the keynote presentation closed, Cook reflected on his time leading Apple.

“On a personal note, some of the greatest highlights of my time as CEO have been events like this,” Cook said.

“Sharing powerful new tools with all of you and then seeing what you create with them has been a constant reminder that imagination has no limits,” he said. “Over the years, you have helped people connect, create, learn, and experience the world in extraordinary new ways.”

• President Donald Trump’s H-1B visa fee is facing new legal trouble.
• A federal judge ruled on Monday that the $100,000 fee for new petitions is “unlawful.”
• The fee caused uncertainty among tech workers since Trump introduced it last year.

President Donald Trump’s $100,000 visa fee for H-1B applicants has hit a new legal roadblock.

A federal judge at a US District Court in Massachusetts ruled Monday that the fee violates the Constitution’s Administrative Procedure Act.

Judge Leo Sorokin found that the fee is “unlawful,” according to his ruling. Sorokin said the fee constitutes a tax and requires congressional approval to implement.

Trump’s implementation of the $100,000 fee for new petitions using an executive order last year “exceeds the scope of the President’s discretionary authority” under US immigration law, Sorokin wrote.

The fee has faced legal challenges since Trump signed the executive order in September.

The President has argued that companies have used the visa to replace US workers. Employees at tech companies are among the most common applicants for the visas.

While the battle over whether the fee is constitutional will likely continue, the order has already had an effect. The number of H-1B visa applications from Big Tech companies such as Google and Microsoft fell at the end of last year after Trump signed the executive order. Major AI companies, meanwhile, such as OpenAI and Nvidia, have filed more applications, according to federal data.

The fee was previously as much as $5,000 per visa before Trump made the change last year.

The Trump administration has also changed other parts of the immigration process. High-paid applicants now get multiple lottery entries, giving them a better chance of being selected versus those hoping to land lower-paid positions.

• After many years of living in New York City, I moved to the Connecticut coast.
• For a while, I felt I was thriving among beautiful views, fresh air, and lower living costs.
• Almost two years later, I missed New York City, warts and all, and moved back. I’m so glad I did.

The first time I set foot in Brooklyn was to look at an apartment.

I vividly remember the slow chug of the M Train over the Williamsburg Bridge — watching the Lower East Side shrink behind me, and the contour of the Kings County skyline approaching across the East River.

I was 23. I felt like I’d arrived and my future was limitless. I moved to that apartment. Shoebox would have been a generous description for my $900 a month room with Craigslist roommates.

For the next seven years, I bounced between North Brooklyn dwellings, my rent rising faster than inflation. By May 2023, I was paying $1,900 a month to live with two roommates in a basement that had a tendency to flood.

Maybe it was a third-life crisis, maybe it was the natural progression of the American millennial, but sometimes I felt like I just needed to touch grass. So I did what many people before me had done: I moved to the country.

My grandmother had died about six months prior, and her home on the Connecticut/Rhode Island border was about to sit empty for the summer.

This situation, my disdain for my job at the time, and the impending end of my lease seemed to be a cosmic sign that I was meant to go coastal.

I applied to a few seasonal restaurant jobs online and quickly secured employment. I sold my bed frame, desk, and dresser, loaded my late grandmother’s Jeep with what remained, and put New York in the rearview.

I’d officially become one of those people who used to live in the city.

For a while, I felt like I was thriving in the pink cloud of the Connecticut coast

Economic benefits aside, I took to country life at first. Waking to the sounds of chirping birds instead of honking horns was refreshing.

My commute was now filled with the smell of freshly cut grass instead of literal garbage, and I was beholden to tourist traffic and streetlights instead of the L-train delays.

I no longer needed to go to a public park to look at trees, and I could enjoy the weather from a golf course or waterfront. Of course, I could’ve played golf or seen the sea in Brooklyn, but the courses would probably have been more crowded and the water less picturesque.

My restaurant wages were lower than what I’d made at my corporate job in New York, but I no longer spent nearly half my income on rent.

I was spending less on food, too. I always enjoyed cooking, but the ease and temptation of world-class cuisine often meant I was eating out in New York.

There weren’t as many restaurants on the coast, and I frequently found myself in the kitchen, cooking local seafood and fresh vegetables from farmstands.

I even cooked fish I’d caught, which I suppose is also possible in New York (but only recently deemed safe).

After reckoning with the limits of my lifestyle, I realized I wanted to be back in New York

Although the culture shock was mostly positive for a while, there were signs that my new reality conflicted with my conditioning.

One night, I left work famished around 8 p.m. I looked up restaurants in the area and noticed most of the kitchens had either closed or would do so by the time I could drive there.

In a moment of desperation, I pulled into a Burger King, only to find that closed too. In Brooklyn, people would just now be heading to dinner — if I hurried, I might be able to catch them.

This was the first realization that I missed city life. Not long after, I found myself growing impatient with the line at a coffee shop, lamenting the price of gas, and the quality of the local bacon, egg, and cheese.

I visited New York a few times over that year. Leaving got harder each time. People on the coast often asked how “dangerous” city life was, but in reality, I often felt safer on the subway platform at midnight than I did driving on Connecticut’s pitch-black backroads.

I knew my new life had become unsustainable when I took the Amtrak down to the city on a hot August weekend. I exited Penn Station to the stickiness of Midtown and was greeted with thick air and a cacophony of horns.

I acknowledged the objective unpleasantness, and yet I felt at ease.

Maybe it was part nostalgia, but if I missed the disgusting chaos of arguably one of the worst places in Manhattan, then maybe this was where I was meant to be.

Shortly after that, I started applying to jobs back in New York and scrolling various apartment sites.

This time, I feel like I’ve returned home for good

By November, I had two restaurant jobs lined up and met someone on Reddit renting a cheap room a few blocks from one of my old apartments. I was going home.

I’ve been back in Brooklyn now for about as long as I was away, a little over a year. The first few months, I worked almost every day just to cover rent, and felt a rude awakening every time I looked at my credit-card bill or bank account.

I’m down to one job now, and while the financial pains are still real, at least I know where to get a cheap meal at midnight.

Sometimes I get a yearning for grass and fresh air. At the end of each month, I certainly yearn for cheaper living quarters, but not when I take the M train.

Even now, at 32 years old with a jaded lived reality and mounting bills, when I chug over the Williamsburg Bridge, I feel 23. I see the city lights on every side of me, and I’m filled with this childlike wonder and optimism.

I feel like I’m home, where anything is possible.