After trying Erki M.'s response I went here to learn more about waiting in Selenium:
http://selenium-python.readthedocs.org/en/latest/waits.html
The article mentions another alternative that is nice and simple:
from selenium import webdriver
browser = webdriver.Firefox()
browser.implicitly_wait(30)
browser.get("http://www.somewebsite.com")
From the time you specify an implicit wait time onward, the browser will be patient and poll the site to see if it can find the element you are looking for. This method avoids the need for extra imports and also the necessity of specifying what element you are waiting for ahead of time.
One thing that I should mention is that sometimes I still fall back to time.sleep(1), for example, after keying in an input. Implicitly_wait will give time for an element to appear, but it will not cause commands to wait long enough for the UI to be responsive.