Cancer Survivor, writing about Health and Fitness as you age

I was at our monthly book club meeting recently (and yes, I do go to those because it is in a 3-block radius of my home and it is after baby sleeps), and someone was talking about her sister-in-law's blog. She was shocked at the kinds of posts that make it to the blog. Me, not so much anymore. I can see my internal machinations creeping into my own blog. I started off talking a lot about what I did in the day, then I realized that my more recent posts have been about what I think. I know that people post for many reasons, and I initially started as a test to myself to see if I could write anything remotely interesting and then if I could sustain a blog or if I really only had like 2 ideas and that was it. A few months on, I think I am doing ok. (Still not so sure that this is interesting to anyone but me.) As a blogger it is very easy to view the post as your own personal diary, and to ignore the fact that any Tom, Dick and Jane could be reading it...and do! But then, you don

Sometime ago I read a BusinessWeek article that talked about how people with some chronic illnesses were using a social networking site to connect ( BW 12/4/2008, Health 2.0) . Basically they shared all their personal and medical information with each other and are able to compare experiences, diagnoses, treatments, etc. In a specific case talked about in the BusinessWeek, one person spear-headed a low-level clinical trial of a treatment that no doctor, hospital or drug company were interested in pursuing. Why am I blogging about this? This August will be 7 years since I lost my mother to breast cancer, and aside from the various monetary contributions I make, I signed on to The Love/Avon Army of Women site http://www.armyofwomen.org/ . It is a partnership between Dr. Susan Love and Avon. While not quite the same as a social networking site, it does use the power of the internet to reach out to as many women as possible who would be willing to support the ongoing search for the cure

Now I've always assumed that in polite society "people" are not going to ask certain questions, like "Are you going to have another baby?". I am constantly amazed that people feel that they know me well enough to ask me that question. I think they confuse friendliness with being friends. I was at a birthday party with Lucas and one of the other moms I'd literally just met, asked me that. Well, as you can imagine, my mind boggled with all the potential answers, none of them designed to be kind to the questioner. In the end, I did what I always do, I made some non-committal answer and turned the question back to her. I mean, who knows what I could have been going through! (I thought about bursting out crying at the question..) I have resigned myself to the fact that this is my peer group and since I don't want to alienate the parents of my son's friends, I will conform to the group's norms (meaning I won't shock them into beating a hasty ret

Over New Years I visited with a cousin M of mine. She was very interested in finding out if we still had Lucas on his regimented schedule. Apparently she thought that that was a bad thing (mind you, this particular cousin has no children). Now, even though I have 4 timers going in the morning to get us through the breakfast-dress-and-drop-to-school routine, I feel we are much less restrictive than we used to be. (Are you still stuck on the 4 timers?) As I explained to her, really the only thing we are basically uncompromising about is his sleep. He watches more TV, plays more video games and is forced to eat less of his food than his peers (or so I believe). But he has to be in bed and lights out by 8:00pm..maybe 8:10 on a weekend and if we are really crazy - 8:15 on holidays. (July 4th, sleep-overs and international travel are exceptions). Anyways, I thought about what M said, and it struck me, she said, "... we weren't on a strict schedule and we turned out ok."

A couple of days ago Lucas told me that I needed to cut Liam's nails because they were sharp and Liam was scraping him. So I told him that I did just cut Liam's nails. Before I had time to qualify by saying that sometimes, the edges can be sharp when they've just been cut, Lucas asked me, "Mama, is there a store or somewhere you can take Liam to get his nails cut?" The implication was clear, I heard it myself - my own son wanted to outsource me! So while I was shaking my head in woe and lamenting on how far I had fallen, I thought about what Lucas said and more importantly what prompted his question. Gunnar calls Lucas our "problem-solving" son. He has a very direct approach to most things and has a simple view of the world. He is also very innocent, I think, for a 7-year old. Case in point, he started dangling pretzel sticks out the side of his mouth, much like a cigarette. Gunnar was a little disturbed, but of course it was just "..tumblewe

And I'm not talking about the kinds of dreams where they wake up screaming at 2 in the morning and end up sleeping in your bed. All I know is that I hear reports of kids who are making bracelets to fund some project in their community or organizing care packages for the troops in Iraq or doing something to help reduce global warming.....Holy cow!! How did they get that way? When I was a child I was all "la..la..la.." in my brain, not much going on there. Why do some kids dream so big and others..well, not so big? I wish I knew what I could do to make my sons imagine the wild and wonderful things they could do in this world. The best Lucas might come up with would be being dropped in the middle of a "live" video game, I imagine. When I think of dreams I've had growing up, it's all about me. In no particular order, 1. Learn karate (or some other form of martial arts) 2. Speak a second language fluently (but by that I really mean a 2nd, 3rd and