Spring Break 2011

Mayan’s last official Spring Break and she decided that she wanted to visit my parents who were spending some time in Arizona.

Since we used to live there, she has an attachment to the Phoenix area and spending time with my parents is something that she always loves to do! She was able to visit and spend time with the little girl who used to live across the street and her best friend forever, Katie as well as her Big Brothers Big Sisters sister Jen.

My mom sent me a couple pictures that I wanted to share:

Dad and Mayan

Mom and Mayan

Mayan with her "big sister" Jen

I might have another picture or two to share in the next few days.

The last time she was in Arizona was four years ago when I took her, along with Sunny and Mel, to Phoenix for Spring Break their senior year of high school. We had such a good time. I am forever grateful that we were able to spend that time together.

Eating for Life

A friend of mine called me just an hour before a nutrition talk at the local library. I had forgotten about the talk and was going to stay home, but she wanted to know if we could ride together. She is really good at getting me out the door!! And I’m glad that she did.

I didn’t know what to expect from the talk, but it ended up turning my thoughts (and life) upside down.

“Nutrition Series: The Importance of Dietary Fat”

Ask ten people what they believe is the healthiest type of diet and eight of them will say that a “low-fat diet” is the healthiest. This dietary myth has been perpetuated by the government, the food industry, and conventional medicine since the 1950′s. But this entrenched idea is based on incomplete observational evidence and bad science. This presentation will explain how fats work in the body (yes, just a teeny bit of biochemistry) so you can see for yourself how important dietary fat is to your health.  Ms. Westover will help you determine which healthy fats you should be including in your diet and which fats you should be avoiding.

Low-fat is a dietary myth? It appears to be so. I have been reading (googling, podcast listening, lecture watching) like crazy ever since, starting with Why We Get Fat, and What to Do About It by Gary Taubes as well as his Good Calories, Bad Calories. I’ve read Eat Fat, Lose Fat by Mary Enig and Sally Fallon and Sally Fallon’s Nourishing Traditions: The Cookbook that Challenges Politically Correct Nutrition and the Diet Dictocrats. I have become familiar with the Weston A. Price Foundation.

Things are finally making sense to me. I have been a dieter since the age of 12, repeatedly and ultimately unsuccessfully. Losing and then gaining more and more weight. Feeling like a failure. Probably messing up my metabolism and insulin resistance in the process. Several years ago, tired of dieting and gaining weight, I stepped off the diet train…and stopped gaining. What I’ve learned recently is that it wasn’t me, I wasn’t the failure.

I have made some big changes in my diet (but I still refuse to be “on a diet” ever again!), including adding virgin coconut oil as a supplement (in the nutrition talk Ms. Westover mentioned the connection between coconut oil and the reversing and/or halting the progression of Alzheimer’s. Which caught my attention and since then I’ve read many good things about it, so I’ve decided to make it a part of my life for now.), and plan to make more changes in the future. I’ve lost some weight, I am not feeling deprived. My blog reader is bulging at the seams with all the new blogs that I’m reading.

It’s been an interesting journey.

I don’t know where I will be in a month or in a year, but I thought that I would share a bit of what’s up with me NOW….today.

Also, on another subject: It was brought to my attention this afternoon that there was a glitch in my blog. I think I have it fixed, but my apologies for not noticing sooner!

Quiet

Things have been quiet around here. Which is good!

Snowshoeing

It wasn’t me. As usual.

Mayan (Starr), Sarah (Sookie) and friends spent a recent weekend in Estes Park and went snowshoeing in the mountains. I pinched a couple pictures off of Facebook to share:

The crew! Mayan is wearing the pink hat. Sarah in the blue.

The view!

Time for a Change

I started this blog just over three years ago. I thought that it might help me find a voice, or just speak the one that already existed but I was afraid to share, and as a desperate attempt to “get over” the death of Sunny. Cheap therapy.

So far, I don’t think that I have truly achieved either one of those goals. I do have things to say (I mean REALLY say), every day, but I don’t. I do take a stand once in a while, against hate, against intolerance, for love. As for Sunny, things are better, I feel the load lightening, but it is oh-so-very-slow.

Mostly what I have found are some awesome people who I am blessed to have met, who have shared with me, who have cried with me, who have laughed with me and shared the last three years of my daughter Mayan (Starr), growing up, experiencing college, finding her place (so far!) in this world, all with a great weight on her back. And the joy and support her friends Lexie (Skye) and Sarah (Sookie) have been to both of us.

After stumbling a bit with my erratic posting this Fall, I have decided that the blog is feeling like pressure. A should do, that is weighing heavily on me.

So, I am taking a break. A mental break. It is time to focus my “worries” on other things. Making art. My health. Finding me. Because as much as I love this blog and, even more, the connections that I’ve made, I feel like I have let “me” slide in the process.

I may become a once or twice a week blogger. I may just ditch the project right here. Or…I may come back to it seven days a week! I just don’t know. I might just post again tomorrow.

What I do know is that I am taking my mental “should” away from blogging. I am letting go of the stress of days when I have absolutely NOTHING to share!!

Pillow Flipping

“I never knew that flipping your pillow during the night to get the ‘fresh’ side was something that people did.” Starr explained to me the other day.

Her friend told her about the practice while they were in Vegas for the weekend.

“I’d never flipped my pillow over before. It felt really good when I did!”

Wow. All this time!?

Was pillow flipping a skill that I was supposed to teach her? Did I fail her? Laughing, I was wondering what else I might have missed. The little things that have slipped through the cracks. Where is the parenting master list??

A New Year (and a repost)

What I have learned, is that getting over the pain of Starr’s accident and Sunny’s loss is a very long process. Longer than I ever imagined, and I am beginning to feel that I may never actually be able to push through to the other side. However, I am not in the same place that I was last year, where I was slightly better than the year before. Slightly better is good, I will accept that and continue to work on my goals to live and breathe, to smile and learn to accept.

Here is last years post:

I just reread last years End of the Year/New Resolution post. Among other things, I said:

I don’t make New Year’s resolutions as a rule. Setting myself up for failure is something that I try to avoid. I believe that life is about learning and growing, fixing, changing, laughing, and loving…all the time. I try to make it a constant effort and avoid tying it to a specific day.

However, this year, today…not tomorrow…I am going to make a more conscious effort to allow myself to breathe, to live, to accept that I can’t fix this. To stop taking on everyone’s pain as my own. I have enough. It serves no purpose, it really doesn’t relieve them of any of their grief or suffering, it only adds to mine.

And to smile more and mean it!

Yes, Sunny is still on my mind each and every day. I miss her. I think about and send love to her family daily as well, as they still and will always carry the loss of their beautiful daughter. There are days that it catches up with me more than others, but I do think that I have moved forward in positive ways.

I do smile and laugh more and I definitely mean it!!

So, for 2010, I plan to continue…learning, growing, living, laughing, being silly, loving and healing. And I want to make more art.

Starr and Sunny, being silly, Summer 2005

mp3: “Raindrops” – Grand Hallway
“Oh the sound of life, oh the sound of love”
“Oh the sound of change, oh the sound of starting”
Buy it here: Promenade
Grand Hallway-MySpace

Christmas Morning

It is a little sad and quiet around here on Christmas. Starr and I keep our smiles on, but really with just the two of us, it is difficult to distinguish Christmas day from any other day. One thing that Starr wants is “something special” for breakfast. Often I make biscuits and sausage gravy, but this year I made Cinnamon Roll French Toast. We might have found a breakfast worthy of making it a tradition!

Yum!

I took a short road trip to Laporte Colorado and bought giant cinnamon rolls at Vern’s Place. These I sliced like bread, but thicker and drenched in my latest french toast batter, eggs, sweetened condensed milk, vanilla, cinnamon and a little salt. Amounts vary each time I make it, which isn’t often because oh-so-rich and dangerous! I slow cooked them in butter until done. Starr approved!

They are sinful, but I think we can handle it once a year!

A Snake Oil Salesman?

A member of my extended family was a part of a group of folks who gathered the history and stories of a few small communities in Southwestern Tennessee into a book and published it this Fall. I received a notice last August that the book was being published, but it was pricey and I hesitated.

I don’t know if I’ve mentioned it, because family tree stuff is truly boring unless it is your tree, but one of my hobbies is collecting family tree connections and research. So I was really curious about this book.

I was surprised and grateful to receive the book in the mail a few days ago. A gift from my parents who thought that we might enjoy it. They were right. After Starr spent about an hour pouring over it, I was finally able to give it a look though and in addition to new dates, facts and photos, there are personal stories which are a lot of fun! What a treat!

I might have mentioned in the past that my great-grandfather (Oscar) used to travel around curing cancer, skin cancer in particular. To do this, he left his wife alone most of the time to run the farm and care for their 7 children. He is also rumored to have had a second family out there somewhere, but I have found no proof of this. He called himself a Cancer Doctor, though he didn’t have any kind of medical degree. He, along with his father (John), developed a “cure” regimen after John suffered from a cancer that ate away part of his left cheek.

I knew that Oscar did this, but now I know more of the story, as he wrote it in approximately 1933. Thankfully someone saved it. They also saved this pamphlet, which includes testimonials. The names of some of the testifiers are familiar, I will have to pull out my family tree files and see if they match.

I am thrilled with this gift, the stories and the history that it contains. Which reminds me, I have a story that Oscar wrote that I’ve been meaning to share. I just need to transcribe it.

Squirrel Watching

Okay, my computer is finally back. HP technicians were unable to recover any of my data, thank goodness for my new external hard drive!! I have been busy putting it all back together. Fun!

In the meantime, we have been having some beautiful weather, it is not Winter-like at all. No snow. Warmer than normal temperatures. It doesn’t feel much like Christmas, but I’m not doing a lot of complaining!!

I opened the back door the other day for a bit of fresh air. The cats love it when the doors and windows are open! I took this picture of the cats (with my phone) while they were watching our resident squirrel “eat” (stealing the stuffing from) our patio chairs. I’ve mentioned him before, here and here. Stinker.

It’s nice to have things be almost back to normal around here. I look forward to checking in with all of you!