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Note To Self

April 22, 2012 By

 

I am participating in the Health Activist Writers Month Challenge, in which I publish a post every day for the month of April, based on health-related prompts.

April 22 – The things we forget: Visit http://thingsweforget.blogspot.com/ and make your own version of a short memo reminder. Where would you post it?

A few nights ago I was late getting home from work because of a delay on the subway. This meant that after a day that had already been long and frustrating, I had to compress the evening’s usual chores and and activities into a shorter amount of time. As soon as I got home, I started doing what I needed to do, without giving myself any time to unwind. I efficiently moved from task to task, supervising homework, getting the laundry on, preparing packed lunches for the following day, eating dinner that, thankfully, my husband had already made.

I was stressed about the time, trying to get everything done and still get to bed at a reasonable hour. When the kids were slow to put on their pyjamas, I was a little more brusque with them than I really needed to be. Later, after they were sleeping, I prepared the coffee machine for the morning, as I always do. While I was measuring out the coffee, I accidentally spilled a little bit of it on the kitchen counter.

And I totally lost it. That little bit of spilled coffee turned out to be the straw that broke the camel’s back on that particular day. I didn’t get mad and throw things, but I broke down crying. I sat down and put my head on my desk and just sobbed. For those few minutes that I lost control, the coffee represented the general disarray of my entire life.

When it was all over, I inevitably felt a little foolish. A meltdown over spilled coffee that took all of three seconds to clean up? What was that about?

The truth is that all of my concerns about that evening had been about inconsequential stuff. So what if I was half an hour late getting home? It wouldn’t have been the end of the world if the kids had been fifteen minutes late getting to bed. That load of laundry could have waited until the following day. I could have set up the coffee machine in the morning.

But instead, I allowed myself to get absolutely wound up over things that really didn’t matter. And when you consider all I have to deal with that does matter, that seems counter -productive. Very often I am so overwhelmed by my full-time-job-mom-of-two-with-special-needs-child existence that the slightest things can just feel like a major catastrophe to me.

Sometimes I need a reminder to pick my battles, and avoid getting stressed about things that, when it comes right down to it, have absolutely no bearing on the quality of my life. I need to learn how to let the little things go so I can devote more of my energy to the big things.

And I shouldn’t pet the sweaty stuff, because that’s just gross.

(Photo credit: Kirsten Doyle with a little help from http://wigflip.com/superstickies/)

Filed Under: Health Activist Writers Month Challenge, Letting Go, life, Meltdown, parenting, WEGO Health, Writing Tagged With: , , , , ,
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beauty without limits

April 21, 2012 By

I am participating in the Health Activist Writers Month Challenge, in which I publish a post every day for the month of April, based on health-related prompts.

April 21 – Health madlib poem: Go to http://www.languageisavirus.com/cgi-bin/madlibs.pl and fill in the parts of speech and the site will generate a poem for you. Feel free to post the Madlib or edit it to make it better.

When I read this prompt, I thought it would be easy. It turned out to be a lot more challenging than I had expected. The Madlib gave me a poem that was beautiful in some parts, nonsensical in others. I had to throw out the first couple of attempts, and I finally got something that I could edit into something I could like. As tough as this exercise was, it was a lot of fun. Everyone should give it a try!

quietly i have never run, softly beyond my heart
my son, your smile is full of love
in your most happy tears are things which surprise me,
on which i cannot speak because they are too deep

your beautiful look profoundly will move me
though i have tried to understand
you see things in ways that are beyond me
exploring your world thoughtfully, intensely

your potential reaches the stars and sun
i move my world for you so that you may fly
i cross the ocean for you to know no limits
your path is different and the road is challenging

nothing gets in the way of your growth
the strength of your shy wonder: my child
i smile at the beauty of your blond hair
your blue eyes bright and sparkling with life

i would run to the ends of the world for you
so the world can be yours
you are amazing: son, brother, friend
your heart is pure, your smile lights up the sky

By Kirsten Doyle with a little help from e.e. cummings

Filed Under: autism, Children, Health Activist Writers Month Challenge, life, Love, Poetry, Uncategorized, WEGO Health Tagged With: , , , , , ,
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23 Months In One Year

April 20, 2012 By

April 20 – Miracle cure: Write a news-style article on a miracle cure. What’s the cure? How do you get the cure? Be sure to include a disclaimer.

Try as I might, I was not able to get this prompt to work for me. Therefore, I decided to use one of the bonus prompts that were provided at the beginning of this challenge.

Best doctor’s visit or hospital stay: What made it the best? The news you got? The nurse/doctor/surgeon you saw? The results?

On a cool Spring day in 2010, my husband and I drove George, then six and a half, to an appointment with a psychiatrist. The purpose of the visit was to get the results of the assessment that had been done six weeks previously.

The anxiety we felt went beyond normal parental angst. We were both remembering the assessment that had been done a year previously. It had not gone well. George had been agitated and distracted. He hadn’t settled, refusing even to take his coat off. Throughout the assessment he had underperformed on just about every task. In the next room, I had answered questionnaires, checking the “never” or “rarely” box to almost every question about George’s capabilities.

It had been a dismal experience, and the results had shown severe deficits. Now we were back, one year later, to see what quantifiable effects his first year of IBI therapy had had. He had shown almost no anxiety during the assessment this time, and the specialists had emerged smiling from the room, but we knew that we just had to wait and see the numbers.

When she greeted us, the psychiatrist was as charming and soothing as always. She ushered us into her office and gave George some markers so he could follow his favourite pursuit of scribbling on her white board. He surprised us all by writing lists of words instead.

The psychiatrist could tell that we were nervous, and she was kind enough to dispense with that beat-around-the-bush suspense thing that so many doctors seem to take an inordinate amount of pleasure in. She cut right to the chase.

“George has made phenomenal progress,” she told us.

She showed us reports and charts showing gains in almost every area: cognitive, language, fine motor, gross motor, emotional regulation, behavioural, daily living skills… What this child had achieved in the last year was off the charts.

It was literally off the charts. The psychiatrist showed us a graph showing percentiles of progress after one year of IBI therapy, and sure enough, George’s accomplishments went way beyond the right margin of the page.

In his first year of IBI – in a single twelve-month period – George  had made no less than 23 months worth of gains.

That was phenomenal. Far from following the usual model in which autistics develop relatively slower than typically developing children, thereby falling relatively further behind, George had developed at almost double the usual rate. He was still behind other kids of his age, but he was far less behind than he had been, and in some mathematical areas, he had actually started outperforming typical kids.

It’s like starting far back in the pack at a race and being way, way, way behind the leaders. And then, while the leaders maintain the same pace they started with, you put on a hell of a sprint. You probably won’t cross the finish line first, but instead of being twenty minutes behind the guy who wins, you’re only ten minutes behind.

Before getting these results, we had seen changes in George. Progress like that cannot go unnoticed. But it was wonderful to see it in numbers, to see visual proof of what our boy had achieved.

That day, my husband and I truly started to see possibilities for the future, and we made a promise there and then to help our son reach the stars.

(Photo credit: Kirsten Doyle)

Filed Under: Assessment, autism, Autism Services, Health Activist Writers Month Challenge, IBI, Not Giving Up, Progress, Psychiatrist, WEGO Health Tagged With: , , , , , , ,
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Dining With The Stars

April 19, 2012 By

I am participating in the Health Activist Writers Month Challenge, in which I publish a post every day for the month of April, based on health-related prompts.

April 19 – 5 dinner guests: Who are five people you’d love to have dinner with (living or deceased) and why?

When I have people over for dinner, it’s always a very casual affair, from the planning right down to the execution. It usually starts when my husband or I casually mentions someone we haven’t seen for a long time. We call that person up on an impulse and invite them to come over that evening. And since we’re inviting this person, well, we may just as well invite that person. The more, the merrier, and all that. With the phone calls made, the husband goes out to buy alcoholic beverages to suit our guests’ tastes. I go wading in our big freezer and emerge with a giant store-made lasagna, those ones that take about seventeen years to defrost. I throw together a salad and make garlic butter for the bread. I’m not much of a cook, but I make a mean garlic butter. The guests arrive and we all dispense as quickly as possible with the business of eating. I get the kids settled into bed and then spend the rest of the evening drinking wine, which let’s face it, was really the whole point of having the dinner party.

My fantasy dinner party would have to be more carefully planned, simply because the people I would want to invite are kind of busy. You can’t just call them up and ask  them to show up at your house in the next two hours. You have to schedule their time, usually months in advance, and it’s a case of “your people calling their people”.

There wouldn’t be any frozen lasagna, and the whole thing would have some finesse to it. You can’t invite a guy like Nelson Mandela to your house and serve him frozen lasagna on the pretext of having a booze-up. No, I would hire a chef, a posh one who makes things normal people cannot pronounce and who knows what wine goes with what food.

My guests, assuming they all accepted the invitation (and, I mean, who wouldn’t?) would include the following five people:

Nelson Mandela. If you discriminated against most people throughout their early lives and then threw them into prison for twenty-seven years, they’d probably be a little bitter. It takes a very special kind of man to emerge from all of that and become a successful statesman, and to do it with grace, dignity and humility. Mandela is South Africa’s answer to the Royal Family, with one exception: everyone loves him, and with good reason.
What I have in common with him: we share a country of birth.

Terry Fox. The most iconic runner of all iconic runners, Terry Fox ran almost all the way across Canada with a prosthetic leg, while cancer was eating away at his body. His “Marathon of Hope” started a worldwide movement that continues to this day, more than thirty years after his death. If anyone had a reason to give up, it was him, and yet his absolute dedication to his cause and to his sport did not waver. His body was absolutely shattered, but his mind was super-hero strong.
What I have in common with him: I run for a cause.

Ed Mirvish. The world can be a peculiar place. Many rich people just want to get richer, regardless of the cost to anyone else. At the same time, a lot of the true humanitarians of the world are willing to give away what little they have for the betterment of their fellow man. Ed Mirvish was a rich old Canadian bloke with a landmark retail store and a near-monopoly on Toronto’s theatre industry. He had a truckload of money, and he kept giving stuff away to people who really needed it. While many rich people and corporations donate to charity for the purpose of making themselves look good in the public eye, Ed Mirvish did it because he really cared. You gotta love a guy who stands around handing out free turkeys to people who cannot afford Thanksgiving dinner – an annual tradition that has been continued in his memory.
What I have in common with him: I care deeply about making the world a better place.

Drew Barrymore. I’ve never been big on celebrities, but I confess to being totally in awe of Drew Barrymore. Like many people, I first saw her as the adorable child star in E.T. She shot to stardom so spectacularly as a child that her descent into a lifestyle of substance abuse almost seemed inevitable. It would have been so easy for her to live her life in the tabloid media by virtue of her addictions, but instead she went to rehab, sorted out her life, and established herself as an actress to be reckoned with.
What I have in common with her: I have overcome some intense challenges of my own – albeit ones of a different nature – instead of drowning in the events of the past.

Temple Grandin’s mother. Temple Grandin was a child with autism in the 1950’s – a time when autism was barely understood, much less known. She is now a highly successful adult, with a PhD in animal sciences. She done a lot of groundbreaking work in fields relating to animal welfare, and she is an outspoken autism advocate and educator. She puts much of her success down to her mother, who offered her unfailing support and mentoring throughout her childhood. It is a challenge to raise a child with autism in today’s world of IBI therapy and online support groups and autism advocacy everywhere. I cannot imagine what it must have been like for a mom back then, with far less knowledge and support to draw on.
What I have in common with her: I am the parent of a child with autism, who I would move heaven and earth for.

Who would be at your dinner party and why?

(Photo credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/lisa_nichols/3288476050/. This picture has a creative commons attribution license.)

Filed Under: autism, Celebrities, Health Activist Writers Month Challenge, Overcoming Difficulty, Philanthropy, running, WEGO Health Tagged With: , , , , , , , , , ,
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Finding The Path Of Healing

April 18, 2012 By

I am participating in the Health Activist Writers Month Challenge, in which I publish a post every day for the month of April, based on health-related prompts.

April 18 – Open a book: Choose a book and open it to a random page and point to a phrase. Use that phrase to get you writing today. Free write for 15-20 minutes without stopping.

My random phrase comes from a book called Watermelon, written my Marian Keyes – one of my favourite chick-lit authors. The sentence I pointed to with my eyes closed was strangely appropriate. “I was no longer carrying my humiliation like a weapon.”

I am a natural-born late bloomer. I have done many things in life after most people: I was 24 before I selected a career, my first child was born when I was 33, and I finally got married at the ripe old age of 41.

Now that I am old and wise, it doesn’t bother me that I tend to lag behind other people in some respects, but when I was in high school it was a great source of embarrassment for me. Socially speaking, I was streets behind most of my classmates. I was not exactly ostracized by my peers, but I was definitely not one of the “cool kids” either.

I got invited to parties from time to time, but I always felt so awkward when I got there. While my peers were laughing and chatting effortlessly, or retreating to private corners to snog their boyfriends, I was sitting by myself trying, and failing, to look as if I belonged. I could only really enjoy social gatherings if my best friend was there too. My best friend was the one who stopped me from drowning completely, and bless her heart, she is still my best friend today.

I had a couple of half-hearted boyfriends as a teenager, but compared to my classmates, I was geeky and socially inept. At an age where people are desperate to fit in and be accepted by their peers, it was painful. I was an unhappy teenager, although I never really admitted that to anyone.

When I graduated from high school, I went to a university 1400km away from my hometown. I figured that being among people I didn’t know would allow me to turn myself into the person I thought I wanted to be. I had always felt slightly inadequate and I didn’t like myself very much, and I wanted more than anything to reinvent myself.

Even though I made friends at university and had some kind of reasonable social life, the truth was that I was lonely. Never really a party girl, I tried to shoehorn myself into a party lifestyle because that’s what college students did, and I wanted so badly to fit in. And so I found myself immersed in a social group who were a laugh to be around, but I yearned meaningful contact. In those days before the Internet made the world a smaller place, I was not able to confide in my best friend. When waves of depression hit me, I had to get through them alone, with no-one to talk to.

And so, when a man started paying attention to me in my second year, I was flattered enough to fall for him. I do not want to share the details, but I will say that the whole thing was an absolute disaster from beginning to end. I was immersed in a situation that I had no ability to deal with.

The effect on my life was catastrophic. It was as if my future had been mapped out for me, and then a tsunami had come along and wiped everything away, changing the landscape of my life.

I floundered in the wake of this personal disaster. I completely lost all sense of who I was and what I wanted. I vacillated between depression and anger, and I blamed myself for having allowed my life to veer so far off the course I had planned. I drifted for a while, literally and metaphorically, and eventually washed up in a career, albeit one far away from what I had originally wanted.

One day, after having carried around the baggage of my past experiences for twenty years, I looked around me at all I have today. I have a solid job and my dream to be a paid writer is starting, in small but definite increments, to come true. I can run half-marathons in spite of not having a “typical” runner’s body. I managed to move halfway across the world and establish myself in a place I had never been to. I have a husband and two miraculous children. Although I make my mistakes, I think I’m doing well as the parent of a child with autism.

That tsunami that had swept so much away also created a new landscape with new paths for me to follow and new goals to shoot for.

This realization, when it hit me, was like a breath of fresh air. Although some scarred remained, I was no longer carrying the humiliation like a weapon.

For the first time, I felt that I owed it to myself to try to heal.

(Photo credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/kudumomo/3140538425/. This picture has a creative commons attribution license.)

Filed Under: Depression, Health Activist Writers Month Challenge, Letting Go, Memories, Mental Health, Possibilities, Second Chances, Social Anxiety, Success, WEGO Health, Youth Tagged With: , , , , , , ,
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Mother Knows Best

April 17, 2012 By

I am participating in the Health Activist Writers Month Challenge, in which I publish a post every day for the month of April, based on health-related prompts.

April 17 – Learned the hard way: What’s a lesson you learned the hard way? Write about it for 15 today.

I first started having doubts about our family doctor when he kept telling us that there was nothing that could be done about my husband’s sciatica. It was a very disappointing thing to hear: although not a life-threatening condition, sciatica had been giving my husband a whole new kind of agony for a couple of years, and now we were hearing that he would have to live with it for the rest of his life.

It seemed improbable.  What about physiotherapy, or if we were really pressed, surgery? What about a simple MRI scan or a referral to a specialist?

But my husband’s family had been seeing this doctor for years, and they seemed to have complete faith in him. My husband was resistant to my suggestions to see another doctor.

A few months later, when I was hugely pregnant, I took my older son to the same doctor for his two-year check-up. All of the vital signs looked good. George was in healthy percentiles for both height and weight and he was not showing any signs of illness.

With the main purpose of the visit accomplished, I said to the doctor, “George isn’t talking.”

Indeed, George wasn’t talking. The only words that he used in a contextually appropriate way were milk, juice and jump. Like all new parents, I had practically memorized the developmental checklists, and I knew that George should be doing far more at this age.

The doctor asked a few questions, and then agreed that George did indeed seem to be delayed in his speech.

“But,” said the doctor, “The range of normal development is so broad, particularly where boys are concerned. I will give you some speech exercises to do with him at home, and we will see where we are in a year’s time.”

Every instinct I had was telling me that the doctor was wrong, that waiting was not the thing to do. I knew, had known on some level since George was an infant, that there was something wrong.

Instead of trusting my instincts, I listened to the doctor. I did the speech exercises with George, hoped against hope that he would simply open his mouth and talk one day, and then felt extremely guilty when he didn’t improve. Had I not done the speech exercises right? If I had spent more time on it would I have seen results?

At George’s three-year check-up I finally got a referral for a developmental assessment. When the autism diagnosis came in, all I could think of was how the doctor had told us to wait, and worse, how I had listened to a man I already had reservations about.

I thought about the year that George had lost because of this. The year of speech therapy and other autism-related interventions.

The guilt just about killed me.

And I swore that I would never, ever go against my “mother’s intuition” again.

(Photo credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/truthout/3901813960/. This picture has a creative commons attribution license.)

Filed Under: autism, Autism Diagnosis, Autism Services, Doctor, Health Activist Writers Month Challenge, IBI, WEGO Health Tagged With: , , , , , , , ,
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Pinning Down Autism

April 16, 2012 By

I am participating in the Health Activist Writers Month Challenge, in which I publish a post every day for the month of April, based on health-related prompts.

April 16 – Pinboard: Create a pinterest board for your health focus. Pin 3 things. What did you pin? Share the images in a post and explain why you chose them.

When I was pregnant with my older son George, I had to stop running because my sense of balance went pear-shaped. Over the next several years, I tried to get back into it but there was always something that stopped me. Injuries, time commitments, illness, you name it. One day, an email from the Geneva Centre for Autism got me going again. They were entering a team of runners and walkers in the Charity Challenge of the Scotiabank Toronto Waterfront Marathon/Half-Marathon/5K event. After briefly considering the 5K, I went for broke and registered for the half-marathon. The opportunity to do something for my son and the rest of the autism community turned out to be just the motivation I needed. Although I will be doing my fourth Run for Autism this year, that first finisher’s medal will always take up pride of place on my mantel. Every step I take on my autism runs I dedicate to my amazing son.

Einstein was a pretty awesome dude. As a child he was apparently not the sharpest crayon in the box, but his mom never gave up on him and he turned out OK. He made many discoveries, came up with theories that I cannot begin to understand, and said a lot of profound things. This one is my favourite Einstein quote. It is a perfect encapsulation of the idea that society is enriched by people thinking in different ways. George’s autism comes with all kinds of challenges. There are times when I want to cry with sadness or frustration. Some days are downright overwhelming. I often wonder if George will ever be able to communicate with other people. Despite all of the difficulties, though, George’s autism makes him think in truly unique ways. He can problem-solve rings around the rest of us just because he sees things in such different ways.

Autism is like a kaleidoscope. It can change and evolve over time. The behaviours and challenges exhibited by an individual with autism can be different from one day to the next. There are so many variables – adherence to regular routines, the presence or absence of loud noises, stress levels in the environment, even the weather. Not only does the real impact of autism change all the time, it is experienced in very unique ways by different individuals. I don’t know who it was that said, “If you’ve met one person with autism, you’ve met one person with autism.”

(To visit my Pinterest board, go to http://pinterest.com/running4autism/hawmc/)

Filed Under: autism, Communication, Health Activist Writers Month Challenge, running, Thinking Differently, WEGO Health Tagged With: , , , , , ,
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Dream A Little Dream

April 14, 2012 By

I am participating in the Health Activist Writers Month Challenge, in which I publish a post every day for the month of April, based on health-related prompts.

April 14 – My dream day: Describe your ideal day. How would you spend your time? Who would you spend it with? Have you had this day? If not – how could you make it happen?

Summer 2008

My perfect day…

It is a hot day and the sun is shining brightly. We are on a beach with lots of soft white sand, and the sound of the Atlantic waves fills our ears.

It is our first proper family holiday. I am with my husband and my two children, who at 2 and 4 years, are the perfect age for children to really enjoy a day at the beach. My brother is there too, and so is my mom, who has flown in from South Africa to be with us.

George, who is almost five, has found a new hobby. He lies down on the slope leading down to the water and he rolls himself down, down, down until he feels the waves kissing his body. Then he jumps up, and squealing with delight, he runs back up the slope to do it all again.

Not only is this fun for him, the physical motion of what he is doing seems to give him some kind of sensory input – something that many children with autism crave.

Two-year-old James and I are sitting near the water’s edge, and I am teaching him how to build a sand castle. I use the little shovel to put damp sand into the bucket. I pack it down as tightly as I can, and then turn the bucket upside down. I lift it off and we are left with a perfect tower for our castle. James stands up, and giggling like it’s the funniest thing in the world, he turns around and lets his bum go Plop! right on the tower.

“Again!” he shrieks, laughing so hard he can hardly talk. “Again, again, again!”

So we do it again. And again, and again, and again. We are not making any progress with the sand castle, but we are having a lot of fun.

My husband is in the water, doing battle with the waves. His life has not afforded him much opportunity to swim in the ocean – real ocean with big waves that raise you up and move with you and crash over your head. He turns and waves; I wave back and laugh as a wave hits him side-on, knocking him down.

I see my mom and brother in the distance, returning from a walk along the beach. They meander slowly to me, taking their time, and sit down beside me, James and George, who has finally tired of his roll-down-the-slope game. My husband comes out of the water and joins us. We discuss dinner plans, wonder whether we need to stop on the way back to the house for wine, and bury the kids up to their waists in sand, much to their amusement.

We are together. We are happy. We are family.

Later, as I am riding the waves, I think that there is only one thing stopping this day from being complete, and that is the absence of my dad. But then, as the ocean swirls around me – the same ocean in which Dad’s ashes were scattered thousands of miles away – I look around me, at the sunshine and the white beach where the people I love most are clustered around a smushed-up sandcastle.

As the laughter of my children floats through the air and reaches me, I think that Dad is probably with us after all.

(Photo credit: Kirsten Doyle)

Filed Under: Beach, Children, family, Health Activist Writers Month Challenge, Vacation, WEGO Health Tagged With: , , , , , ,
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My Favourite Things

April 13, 2012 By

I am participating in the Health Activist Writers Month Challenge, in which I publish a post every day for the month of April, based on health-related prompts.

April 13 – 10 things I couldn’t live without: Write a list of the ten things you need (or love) the most.

When people ask me what one item I would grab if my house was on fire, I never know what to say. I mean, who can pick just one? I’m a woman, for Pete’s sake. Women need stuff, just like they need chocolate. It’s a scientific fact.

So in my hypothetical fire, I’m allowed to grab ten things. How I will carry them from a burning building while I’m simultaneously ferrying my kids to safety is not a cause for concern. When my hypothetical fire breaks out, all of the items are easily at hand along with a large duffel bag, I have superhuman strength and an extra pair of arms, and my kids are being fully cooperative.

The ten things I would save from the fire (apart from my family, who technically are not things), are as follows, in no particular order.

1. My Garmin training watch and accessories. I love this gadget. It combines my love of running with my love of technogeeky things. It is the coolest device ever. I can go for a run anywhere in the world, and when I am within range of my computer, it downloads a nifty little map of where I’ve been. The desktop app also tells me stuff about my pace and heart rate, and that appeals to my inner math nerd.

2. My smart phone. This thing does almost everything a computer can do, only on a smaller display. It functions as a camera, a Skype interface, an e-reader, an email client, a music player, and many other things. To be completely honest, I hardly ever use it as an actual phone.

3. My laptop computer. I would be lost without my computer. Seriously. I do everything on there. I don’t know how people like my grandmother coped without technology. Sure, that generation may have been more resourceful and better able to cope in a crisis, but they didn’t have Facebook or the ability to connect online with fellow autism parents when things were getting too overwhelming.

4. My notebook computer. I know, I know. I have a large number of technology devices for one human being. But I love my notebook. It goes everywhere with me. It’s a great little device for writing and web-browsing when I don’t feel like lugging my full-sized laptop around with me.

5. My coffee machine, along with ground coffee and filters. Because, well, obviously. My house just burned down in a fire. I’m stressed. I think I’m entitled to some coffee, and if it’s late at night the coffee shops might not be open.

6. A selection of my older son’s Mr. Potato Heads. George would be at a complete loss without his Potato Head family. These little characters have been with him since he was first diagnosed with autism. They were the means by which he started to tentatively explore language, and they were the tool that my mom used to teach him his colours. As a child with autism, George does not play in the way other kids do, but when he’s got his Mr. Potato Heads, he’s in heaven.

7. A selection of my younger son’s Disney Cars cars. When James first saw Lightning McQueen, it was love at first sight. Thomas the Train and his friends instantly got relegated to the toy box. Now it’s all about Lightning McQueen, Mater, Finn McMissile and all the rest of them. James would be heartbroken if his Cars cars got burned up in a fire.

8. My favourite shoes. Those who know me well know that I hate shoes. They are uncomfortable and don’t look good on my ugly, non-dainty feet. Shopping for shoes to go with my wedding dress was probably the most stressful part of my wedding planning. The only shoes I actually like are my running shoes. My mantra is: There’s no such thing as “too many running shoes”. I would grab my favourite pair and rescue them from the fire.

9. My purse. You never know what will be in my purse from one day to the next. Delving into my purse is like going on a scavenger hunt. It has all of the staples, of course. A little bit of cash, drivers’ license, maxed-out credit card, and the most essential item of all – a tube of lipstick.

10. A clean pair of knickers. From the time I was a little girl, I was taught to always have clean underwear with me. If I was in an accident and I was wearing dirty underwear then, you know, what would the ambulance men say? I would hope that the ambulance men would have better things to do than inspect the state of my knickers, but the lesson stuck.  Besides, if my house has just burned down, I don’t want to be wasting time worrying about the state of my underwear.

What are your favourite things? Share in the comments!

(Photo credit: Kirsten Doyle)

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Three Generations Of Cheese Lovers

April 12, 2012 By

I am participating in the Health Activist Writers Month Challenge, in which I publish a post every day for the month of April, based on health-related prompts.

April 12 – Stream of consciousness day: Start with the sentence “_______”just write, don’t stop, don’t edit. To select an opening sentence, I asked my Facebook friends to post suggestions. I put them all into a hat and drew one out!

How much do you really think about cheese?

Since I’m the second generation in what’s turning out to be a line of cheese-lovers, this is actually a valid pondering for me. Many of my musings about cheese are related to thoughts about my dad, with whom I shared many interests, like reading, running and yes, cheese. Going grocery shopping with him was a real treat, because the pair of us would spend ages at the fancy cheese display picking out our next great delicacy. Meanwhile, my mom would be sitting at home wondering what we were going to buy that would make the rest of the fridge contents smell funny.

One Christmas, when I was a young adult still living in the parental home, Dad received a cellophane-wrapped basket containing boxes of crackers and a variety of different cheeses. When I wandered into the kitchen a couple of evenings later, I saw Dad working away at the packaging of one of the cheeses.

“Would you like to try some Gorgonzola?” he asked me.

“Is the Pope Catholic?” I responded. Meaning, Yes please, I would love some Gorgonzola.

“Let me show you the best way to eat Gorgonzola,” said Dad, reaching for a cake tin on the counter.

Ten minutes later, Mom came back from wherever she’d been. She walked onto the front porch and saw Dad and I sipping glasses of red wine and happily munching on slices of Christmas fruit cake topped with thin slices of Gorgonzola. She was utterly horrified to see the Christmas cake she had worked so hard to make being defaced in such a manner, but it was absolutely delicious.

Now that Dad is no longer with us, I have no-one to share my love of stinky cheese with. Not yet, anyway. My older son George is a trainee cheese lover, but his autistic sensibilities limit him to plain old Cheddar. The smell, the taste, and frankly, the look of the fancy smelly stuff is more than a little off-putting to him. That’s not to say I haven’t tried.

“Do you want some cheese, George?” I asked him one day, holding my triangle of Danish Blue aloft as if it was an Academy Award.

He came closer to take a look, and then said, “That’s not cheese!”

Carefully hiding my excitement at this unprompted-yet-contextually-appropriate verbal utterance, I said, “It is! It’s blue cheese! Do you want some?”

George curled his little face up in an expression of distaste and issued his verdict.

“Yuck!”

And that was that.

Still, even though he only likes Cheddar, he likes it with admirable dedication. I have hope that, with a bit of time, we will make a cheese connoisseur out of him yet.

Filed Under: Cheese, Children, family, Father, Health Activist Writers Month Challenge, WEGO Health Tagged With: , , , , ,
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