Cancer Survivor, writing about Health and Fitness as you age

Where have I been? Well, to be honest, I've been in a turmoil, that's where I've been. On the one hand, I've been very grateful and inspired by the words and actions of fellow Americans, while at the same time I have been so confused, disappointed and frankly mad at the words and actions of fellow Americans. It's taken me a little time to get back my writing groove, but I am going to give it a try! Where do I start? I still have to do an update of my list of 50, which I will do in my next post most likely, but for now I wanted to give an  update on a bucket list item. Seems simple, but one of my bucket list items was having a vacation with my brother's family and mine. Just us. While the circumstances were sad (our father died), it did give us an opportunity to take that vacation together after all the commitments and ceremonies.  It gave us time to be together as a family and for the cousins to spend time together and share experiences. I also taught m...

I know there is probably a lot of research about the implications of the age gap between siblings but I wanted to share a few of my observations. Lucas is 6 years older than Liam. We didn't actually choose that big of a gap, it just worked out that way. In the beginning, Liam was so much smaller than Lucas that everything went well. Lucas played with his very baby brother as a big kid would play with a little kid. There was a gap in language, physical skill and size that made the difference between the boys clear. Now that Liam has more verbal skills, can have a conversation, is bigger and can "fight" with his big brother it is a different story. Now we are seeing the downsides of the big gap. The plus of the big gap: Lucas was independent enough not to require much attention when Liam was a baby. Allowing us to focus on the new baby. Lucas was old enough to help with Liam (bring clothes, diapers, etc.) and was able to understand when we had to leave reading with hi...