Very interesting that although you claim to be agnostic you practice yoga. You would think that such a strong self-avowed aggy would not be “saluting” and aknowledging the sun as her god. Do a little research, yoga is inseperable from the hindu religion which has a pantheon of gods. Why does every pose have the name of a prayer .Double standards people!! At least just call it stretching if you want to retain your cred.

We’ll pray for you…

Whether you like it or not.

Rob, how sad that you feel you must exclude something healthy from your life just because it’s originators wrapped it in religious hindu beliefs. I do not believe the hindu gods exist. But I can recognize the physical benefits of the exercise. When I do sun salutations I am greeting my morning and welcoming a new day. The “prayer” is symbolism and nothing more.

And why would I “just call it stretching” when it is more than that? The difference between you and me, Rob, is that you feel a need to run away from other gods and hide from them. I suppose you fear them. The gods mean nothing to me. I can enjoy my yoga and have no worries about accidentally praying to them because they’re not there.

It’s been a horrendous week. How much more blunt can I get? And to end it, now that the trauma is subsiding, the kids started their fall break so I won’t have any real recovery time until they are back to school on Monday. That is, of course, as long as we don’t have any more urgent health crises.

Trinity had a severe reaction to her medicine last Wednesday (itching hives from her ankles to her cheeks, welts that covered her entire thighs). When I called her neurologist, the secretary gave me a punch in the stomach when she informed me that Dr. Thinks-He’s-God won’t see us now because we got a second opinion. Once we got Trinity stablized and on new med’s with a new doctor’s prescription (it was a horrible three day process), I thought all was well again until Blake had an asthma attack like he’s never had before. Asthma is what killed my husband’s uncle (who is my age) a couple months ago. Blake’s breathing treatments weren’t helping so we’ve got him on a steriod for five days. He’s a little better tonight, having missed school for two days.

I tell you, every day of my life is consumed with doctor visits, pharmacy drive-thru’s, phone calls with a nurse, and the dolling out of medicine. The good news is that with both chronic illnesses, I now know the buzz-words to bypass long waits on hold: “has asthma and is wheezing” or “seizure.”

Anyway, now that I’ve started this party of pity, please don’t feel like you can’t comment on my article about ghostly fears! I’m curious to know your thoughts on the article.

Although I dreamt Trinity had a seizure last night, she has not had a third one yet. She panicked at the zoo last weekend, though, because she felt like she was about to. It was too hot and she finally burst into tears. Dramatic tears. So of course, we jumped to her rescue and got out of there.

With her type of seizures (Partial Complex) they typically have what is called an “aura” which they recognize as a signal before the seizure. So it’s hard to know if what she was feeling at the zoo was the warning aura, or if she just wasn’t well and it reminded her of the beginnings of that first seizure.

Moving onto other subjects, last week new license plates came in the mail. I left them unopened for my husband, as I figured they were his.

“They’re yours,” he told me. “Open them.”

“I didn’t know my plates were expiring. Why didn’t they just send me tags for my old plates?”

And then I noticed a funny look on my husband’s face. So I opened the package, pulled them out, and there were brand new personalized plates just for me with a nick-name a few of you have called me in the past.

Now on the back of my car, for everyone to see, are the capitlized letters, AGMOM.

How cool is that?

And, since that posting she had the second seizure. This time it was in her sleep so we didn’t see it. I just knew something wasn’t right when, after carrying her sleeping body into and back out of the car, sitting her next to her active and chatty older brother in said car, taking her temperature, and wiping her face with a wet cloth I still couldn’t wake her up.

Finally, with the nurse on the phone, I rubbed Trinity’s sternum, which I learned from the parademics after the first seizure. This drew a response and partial consiousness. Still, she laid there abnormally motionless, with her eyes dazed and her normal self far far away. The only movement or acknowledgement I could get from her was if I asked her if she was okay. She’d nod her head, make a barely audible squeaky sound, but that was it. According to the neurologist, her brain was “re-booting” after the seizure. She remained in this almost, but not-quite, conscious state for forty-five minutes. She doesn’t remember it.

We went to ER again where they gave her an EKG (which monitors the heart), which also had an abnormal result. So, in addition to all the neurological testing, we will also see a cardiologist next month for a more thorough heart exam. Okay, it’s called an echocardiogram but I don’t know if I’m spelling it correctly and I just don’t feel like looking it up. Sorry.

Hopefully her heart is fine (because it is quite unlikely to be related to seizures at her age) and with luck the EKG was just showing signs of stress.

A few days after the second seizure I took Trinity back to the neurologist who surprised me by prescribing anti-seizure medication. Already. I just wasn’t expecting that to happen so soon. Having done my research since that pill-prescribing appointment, I realize that we were quite thorough according to industry standards and it is typical to start medicating at this point, if not sooner. But with the doctor’s approval, we are waiting. He said he expects she’ll have another seizure within six to eight weeks of the last one (meaning four to six weeks from now. And yes, I am watching the days). At that point, if she has her third one, we really need to get her medicated.

If we are lucky, and she doesn’t have a third one for many months, she just might grow out of them. So right now, we are waiting. And I am reading. I am learning about seizure disorder and the medication. I am researching the various options. We are also trying to round up all the test results from three different institutions to send to a second neurologist for another opinion. Just to be sure. I hate to mess with my little girl’s brain. There can be side-effects to the medication. And the medication is only supposed to help. It doesn’t necessarily eliminate seizures. I think it has a fifty-fifty success rate if I remember right.

And that brings us to why I have not been blogging. The usual topics on this blog are often serious, heavy, or require research. My brain just doesn’t have the capacity to juggle these topics in addition to seizure disorder. For the sake of my emotional health, I need to spend my extra time with something that calms me down rather than riles me up. So I’ve been focusing on my number one love and sanity-saver: scrapbooking.

I will continue my monthly column with HNN and will post here to let you know when it installs. I will probably pop in with short blurbs on lighter topics here and there. And who knows, maybe sometimes I will even have something more typical of me.

No promises.

Then this morning Israel said, “You know, someone was just telling me that in Portland the government put a bunch of yellow bikes around the city so that anyone can just grab one and ride it to where ever they’re going, then leave it there for someone else to use.

And I thought, Wow, yet another reason to go visit Portland.

I’ve been dreaming of a vacation to Portland for a long time now.

When his comment drew my positive response he smiled and added, “I remember a time, a number of years back, when you told me about that bike program and you talked about how wasteful the government was to be buying bikes and handing them out for free.”

Suddenly the idea became familiar. That’s right, I did say that!

That was back in my Rush Limbaugh days! Back when Rush’s Word was the other Word of God. Back when I thought that if global warming really was real, it would just be a part of God’s second coming and the destruction of the earth.

Nothing to worry about.

Tackling pollution was not a priority to me. I guess the ability to see the mountains from my home was not a priority, either. And I didn’t realize my son would have asthma, so there’s another effect of pollution that would have meant little to me.

Thank goodness for the freedom to change our minds.

Note: After doing some minimal research, I have found that it was a non-profit organization that started the bike program. It later received government endorsement and the contribution of a warehouse. All bikes, repairs, and other services were a donation. This should provide solace to any conservative readers who may now be raging at the idea of a government-run bike program.

I envy Europeans in cities where walking is a life-style. I would love for my town to adopt biking as a major mode of transportation, the way Amsterdam has done.

Let me name a few benefits off the top of my head. . . better health, cleaner air, and lower stress levels. Those are just the obvious ones.

In the United States, we did not make ourselves a walking/bicycling society. But given the current climate of social, political, and health trends, maybe now is the time to train a generation of bicycle-commuters.

Last Mother’s Day my husband gave me the gift of my dreams. We went to the bike shop and equipped the entire family with bikes (as much as my three-year-old wanted a bike, and as much as he surprised us by riding circles around the store, we attached a trailer to my bike for him to sit in).

Every weekend we go out together. I take the lead, the kids follow me, and Dad monitors from behind. We leave our neighborhood and cross the major road which leads to an elementary school parking lot, where Dad teaches the kids bicycle tricks, or we go to a greenbelt with sidewalks that wind around. On the way we teach the kids the rules of the road:

1. The side of the road to ride on.
2. Hand signals.
3. Right-of-Way.
4. General traffic rules.

During the week when my husband leaves early to work, I take the kids around the neighborhood. Since Dad is not here to watch from behind, I take up the rear and my eight-year-old son gets to play the leader. Because of this we have always stayed within our own neighborhood and avoided the major road.

I was so proud recently when, after only a few weeks of this practice, I felt Blake was ready to lead us across the main road to the other side. It was a risky venture, but we tried it and succeeded! He did great! We are now one step further in my plan to raise a generation of bicycle-commuters.

We will keep practicing through the summer and then I will take the next step forward when the kids are back to school. I’ll leave the comfort of these two neighborhoods and begin biking my youngest to preschool. I have already made a practice trip to verify the route is bicycle friendly.

Next I will begin making my way down the major roads to learn which have bike paths. I will start training myself to commute to the coffee shop, the scrapbook store, the grocery, and wherever else I think I can ride to. In the meantime I am making note of which roads have bike-paths and which shopping centers have places to hook up the bikes.

Once I’m comfortable biking around my town, my husband and I will start leading the kids around. We’ll teach them how to commute. And we’ll start commuting as a family to our favorite places.

My major goal is for the family to bike the two-and-a-half miles from our house to Tropical Smoothie. We’ll rest for a nice, cold drink, and then ride back home again.

So what do you think? Will you join me in my mission to raise a new generation of bicycle-commuters? Do you think we can transform the American way of getting from Point A to Point B? It doesn’t require a move to Amsterdam. It is a choice.

And if my dream to see bicycling become mainstream is unrealistic it will not take away from the benefits and my own pleasure at being a bicycle commuter. Even if it means being a lone one.

I remember his walk. It was a shuffle. His feet didn’t lift off the ground. He held one arm at the elbow with the other arm. He mumbled some unintelligible words. We played at communication for a while, before he left the room in exhaustion.

Next, my companion and I commiserated with the wife. She drowned us in the tragedy of becoming the caretaker of a very needy man who is nothing like the one who once helped her raise the children.

That day, in that little house, meeting Parkinson’s Disease for the first time, I never anticipated getting reacquainted ten years later.

My dad has Parkinson’s Disease.

It is April and April is Parkinson Awareness Month.

What does Parkinson’s Disease do to a man who is an always-doing, always-helping, likes to be self-sufficient kind of man? It changes him.

When my dad was a student at BYU he passed a room of practicing singers and decided to investigate. Despite having minimal training in vocals, he gave the group a few performing pointers. Somehow he become their producer and director and formed a group called “The Sounds of Freedom.” They made records and gained national attention when they got to perform on The Ed Sullivan Show.

When I was a kid my dad worked for the Boy Scouts of America. He was a hyperactive kid-man. But this didn’t stop him from supporting his family of seven. He worked multiple side jobs and, having had a carpenter as a father, was always renovating one part of the house or another. He also found time to help us with school projects and other things. My dad liked to keep busy.

His creative work in the field of non-profits led him to a position with the American Cancer Society. He continued to challenge mediocrity, create new visions and lead in unexpected directions. My dad became a CEO of this well-known organization.

And now he has Parkinson’s Disease. Since he lives in a different part of the country, I only see him a few times a year. It is striking to find a man so different in many ways from the one who visited me the last time. Fortunately, medical advances and American prosperity has protected him from most of the symptoms that overcame the Filipino husband I visited with over ten years ago.

My mother talks about the personality changes she witnesses. She has had to switch plans for their retirement. They are now selling their dream home early in order to move into a smaller one before my dad becomes completely incompetent. Or worse.

All diseases are horrible, but people expect Cancer. We expect Heart Disease. We expect Diabetes. We do not expect Parkinson’s Disease.

April is Parkinson Awareness Month. If you feel inclined, you can click here to learn more and make a donation.

My children are also not the manic type, driving people out of every store we enter, or making our friends wish they had never invited us over. No, my kids are in-between on the energy scale and the babysitters seem to love them.

They have their times, though, when energy seems to have built up for weeks. We recently had a volatile day like that. I had all kinds of errands to run. Any amount of errands with 3 children at your side, even well-behaved children, is enough stimulation to send you to a mental institution to beg them to make the voices stop.

On this particular day, as I was pushing a cart full of groceries through the parking lot toward our car, I swear to you my kids were shooting bolts of energy from their heads, fingers and feet. In a moment of spontaneous recklessness, and despite her knowledge that we do not run in parking lots, Trinity burst into a full-speed run, down the lot, between the rows of automobiles, straight toward an old man and his oncoming shopping cart. The spastic energy of her body was overriding the signal to her brain: WARNING! Head on collision ahead.

Somehow, by what I would call a miracle if I believed in them, Trinity’s legs propelled her to the right, just missing the poor old man with the frozen look of fear on his face, his brain receiving the WARNING! message, but his body too old to react with adequate speed.

That was it. My kids needed to pull it together. They needed to slow down, just enough to make time for their little brains to register the existence of the other people and objects in the vicinity. As we got in the car, I issued a warning threat of my own, “I am going to sit you all down and teach you how to meditate so you can learn to observe before you act.”

“You already did!” piped Blake, as he and Trinity locked their legs into the Criss-Cross Applesauce Position. For all of you old enough to read this, but young enough to not have kids in school yet, Criss-Cross Applesauce is the new Indian-Style.

I do NOT remember teaching them to meditate. Deep-breathing, yes. A little Yoga, yes. But meditation? For children under the age of eight? No. Yet there they were, putting their hands in the cupped position. Giggling.

So I got them started with something to focus on, and began the drive home. It was enough to get us away from that scene of chaos in sheer quiet.

I’m not really good at meditating yet. The Autobahn in Germany takes second place after my brain in terms of the velocity of its contents. Thoughts race through it, out of control. And I can rarely get away to do it while in a house with three children. The longest I’ve been able to meditate is four minutes. I couldn’t believe that much time had gone by. It was a record. A proud moment in my life. Still, I’m working on it. I want to learn to slow my brain down. I want to learn to observe rather than react.

I bet some of you readers are the meditating type, and the rest of you probably think I’m a nut. For those of you who regard meditation as mystical fluff, here is a little science that should convince you otherwise. Recent multiple studies have concluded:

Meditation increases your immunity.
Meditation improves mental acuity and responsiveness. It affects the structure of the brain, increasing thickness in areas dealing with attention and sensory process.
Meditation changes your brain physically, reducing stress, increasing focus, and helping you deal with difficult situations.

The best article on this is one from Time Magazine about research that shows meditation helps you get smarter. This article has now been archived, and you have to pay a small subscriber fee to get access.

In an upcoming post, I will provide more information on meditation. Until then, breath deeply and slowly, and be mindful.

The charge: because of a lack of religion, which would otherwise instill higher values in me, Physical Health has risen to one of my greatest values of all. Dennis says health becomes like a religion to the secularist and he speaks truth. After Family and Loving Others, Health really is my next greatest value.

Perhaps it is because my healthy habits give me more energy to make it through the day, to feel happy around my children and husband, even providing me greater ability to serve others. I want that fix. But it’s a vile habit, this constant concern over my health.

In December, Jesus’ birthday swept me toward religious gluttony, as I was spending most of my days shopping for presents and baking unhealthy Christmas goodies, of which I would normally not partake. I was moved by the spirit of that holy day, and turned away from my health-vices.

But now that the spirit of Christmas has subsided, I find myself ever more enticed to return to my old ways of daily exercise.

Paganistic traditions are calling me with a sweet, subtle temptation to return to Mother Nature and take the time to prepare meals from whole foods for my family.

I am finding a desire to allocate half my meal portions (you heard me, HALF) to the vegetables. Only one quarter of my plates contain an animal, which we know from the Holy Bible was given to man to have dominion over.

So yes, dear Dennis, you are correct. The loss of religion has rearranged my priorities, making a value as lowly as Health, one of my great priorities. Please forgive me.