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'm still making up for not having many posts about my Trinidad trip, but this time I thought I'd talk about the flight down...alone..with Liam...on my lap. Austin check-in was slow since the person behind the desk didn't quite know how to handle the passenger-with-lap-child situation. By the time we got our boarding passes, Liam had had enough. He turned to me, scrunched up his little face and said, "Home". It was heart-breaking since we hadn't even gotten through security yet! Liam was very subdued on the flights and didn't run about on the plane, but each time we got up from the chairs to board another flight, he told me, "Home". "We're almost there, baby, we're going to Grandpa's home." I kept him entertained with my 'travel packet'. Shown below, everything fit in a ziploc bag (not shown - my toy of last resort, lent to a friend). The stickers were a life-saver! He kept sticking and taking them off the board I...

Yes, so I said "Crap!" out loud and Lucas, my 7-year old asked me who that was...so I had to explain that I used that term as an expression of frustration. My innocent Lucas. But it reminds me that I need to be careful about what I say in front of my baby parrot, Liam. I will be undertaking, the highly inadvisable, stress-inducing, international-flight-with-lap-child come the end of the month, and I expect that I will be inclined to use much stronger terms as I hustle through 2 airplane changes, customs and immigration. It will be 6 years since I was last in Trinidad and while I am excited to be back home, I cannot help but feel some degree of trepidation about the visit. Don't get me wrong, if it was just me, no problem, but I have a vague sense of unease about exposing my very American-sounding and American-looking children to a third world country in this present climate. It is very difficult to explain to anyone who has not been outside the United States how much...