Wibbly-Wobbly, Timey-Wimey Stuff

Spring has Sprung...yuk

2011-04-11T15:58:00.000-04:00

It is truly amazing how when the temps go up, I go down. Normally it's supposed to be the other way around. You know...S.A.D. (seasonal affective disorder) is supposed to be about Winter. When the temps go down, and the days are darker more people are pitching themselves off of bridges. This is when it's my turn. What sucks, for me, as a Catholic is that this is the time of Lent. NOT GOOD. So, what I end up 'giving up' tends to be God or Mass or Prayer. I don't think that is what the Magisterium had in mind.

I know this is a time of looking inward, but what I see in here scared the bejesus out of me so no thanks. It's a time of self mortification. Catholics just love suffering...apparently. Well, I think I should be exempt. I have something just heinous going on in my lower back and right hip. Some docs say Sciatic pain, some say Trochenteric Bursitis of my right hip, others say Piriformis Syndrome. Know what I say...it frickin sucks and I want it to go away or I want major drugs to anesthetize me. So, since I am stuck in physical therapy, which is making it worse right now (I can't get comfortable lying down AT ALL, which makes sleep nigh impossible) Why nigh....coz there are things like muscle relaxants and benzodiazipine type drugs that will shove me into unconsciousness. But it still sucks. So I am considering all this pain and lack of sleep my mortification because why on EARTH would I want to make it worse for myself??? I am trying to offer it up. But I am a taurus and I bull through everything. I just hope some of it counts for something.

I wish I knew what it was about all the sun and hot that gets to me so badly. You know how some of you out there just loathe Winter. That is exactly how I feel about Summer (and some of Spring too...the hot parts). Now, of course, because I live in the northern burbs of Atlanta it is amazingly beautiful here right now. The flowers, bushes and trees are blooming. Azalea's, Dogwoods, Forsythia it's all so pretty but it comes at the price of my sanity and spirituality. As I get older this seasonal bipolarity is getting really annoying. I mean I know it's coming. I try every little mental trick to move past it but still I am dragged into a desparing pit of depression no matter what. I feel like I am bilocating sometimes, like I can see myself from the outside and I know the problem is temporary but it feels SO REAL.

Combine all this with a lack of appropriate for me air conditioning because my house is an open floor plan so nothing ever really cools off well, except for a few bedrooms. I mean I could really crank it but it would cost damn near a 1k a month to do that and I just can't justify it. So, I spend alot of time in my air conditioned very cold minivan which helps in one way but hurts in another. Driving just kills my hip. I gotta go to confession before Easter. What do I say, "I confess I am losing my religion because it's hot out?"

Oy Vay!
Rach

See what happens in Winter.

2010-12-28T11:40:00.000-05:00

I'm back. I know, you missed me. Ha! Well, it's cold...and it even snowed on Christmas Day...here in Atlanta. It was awesome. A gift from above. "What is that, Rachel? Did you say, gift from above? I thought you were really pissed at God." Well, yeah, I was. And I still have stuff to work out with the Big Man Upstairs, but too many of you wrote really wonderful comments. And they got me to thinking. I started thinking about all my blessings, instead of all my perceived curses. And there are so many, that I realized I can't be that spoiled child that I was in my previous post. I actually had this epiphany awhile back, but didn't get around to writing about it until now. Suffice to say that I just had to have a reality check. Life is not perfect, I will not get everything I want, even if it's really 'good' stuff that I want. I am not talking about things here.

So, yes, I will always have friends who have tons of kids, and I'll wish I were one of them, but have decided to be content knowing that I am not. The upside is I have time to go out to dinner with my Hunny, like we did last night, and know I don't have to get home right away to nurse a baby. Yes, my nest is going to be empty a lot faster than some of my large family friends' are, but I'll find something fun and useful to society to do, when that time comes. And hopefully, someday soon (well sooner than later), I'll have grandchildren and will be young enough to enjoy them. It's a good thing God is so good and so much bigger and better than I am. He can take all my rantings and ravings and turn them into praising and thanking with the counsel friends, commenters, priests, prayers and, of course, the Mass.

I hope you all had a Merry Christmas and I hope your 2011 is truly filled with peace, hope, and love.

~Rach

My worldview turned on it's head. Some history and a RANT

2010-07-07T12:03:00.002-04:00

Okay. I have gone through phases like this before. However they are VERY short lived and usually only happen in the Summer. It is Fall now. The weather is much cooler. I can't get a whole lot happier than the season right now. This is when I am so tuned into God. And you know what? I couldn't be less. What is weird is that it isn't God who I am having a problem with. It's who every person in the world says God is: Jews, Protestants, Catholics, Muslims, Hindus, Bhuddists, you name it. Organized religion has got me down, waaaaayyyyyyyy down. I can't seem to reconcile who I am with any other belief system other than say, Deism, the beliefs of our Founding Fathers.
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I wrote the above statement in October of 2009. I just found it while looking over my blog posts. I realized that it was still a draft so I clicked 'edit' to see what it was. Needless to say I was kinda stunned because the content of that paragraph is exactly what I wanted to tackle today. I am kind of still in the same place. They tell me Mother Theresa went through this. I have not read the book about it, so I can't comment.

Here's my dilemma. First let me give a little background. I was born, baptised and raised a cultural Presbyterian. We went to church. I loved singing hymns, but that was all it meant. As a kid I was REALLY interested in spiritual things and my favorite book, which I still have, was a National Geographic title called Great Religions of the World. Fast forward and when I was 13, my dad 'Got Saved'. Suddenly he was talking about Christianity in a more personal way than I ever understood it. But he was really confusing, especially since he was talking about being a new creation in Christ and he seemed like the same ole dad to me. Fast forward to when I was 18. I think it was February, and my dad had talked my mom, brother, and me into going to a Billy Graham Crusade. I, being the idealist that I am, was bowled over, and walked down with throngs of people, at the ending 'altar call' to receive Christ as my Lord and Savior. Later that week, I would find a Church, as it turned out I went to Good Shepherd Methodist Church in West Palm Beach, FL. They had a very active and vibrant youth group. I made a bunch of friends there, deepened my new found faith, and even recently have reconnected with some of those folks through Facebook.

So, from 18 to 34, I remain a fairly active Evangelical Christian. As most protestants do, I dabbled in denominationalism. I went from the Methodists to the Episcopalians to the Lutherans- Missouri Synod, to Southern Baptists (where I was re-baptised), back to the Presbyterians- PCA. I tried some fundamentalist churches too, with their hands in the air and speaking in tongues. It scared the shit out of me! I kept trying to find the denomination that fit me. Some were too uptight, too legalistic, too liberal. Gosh, it drove me crazy. I tried to fit in and make friends and sometimes it worked for a little while but I never felt like I belonged anywhere. My parents even found a pastor who was churchless and we set up a home non denominational church in our house for a couple of years. We had 20 people coming to it for a while. (Tho it was just really a glorified bible study.)

At 34, my mother, who I loved more than God (being honest here), was diagnosed with colon cancer right after Mother's Day 2000; the day Autumn was baptised. Autumn was baptised in a Presbyterian church, as was Andrew, Ben was baptised in a Methodist church. Mom suffered for 5 months, the colon cancer had spread to both lobes of her liver...a death sentence....and then she was gone. She died just a few weeks shy of her 54th birthday, in a Catholic hospital (interestingly) with all of us surrounding her.

Okay, so did I pray that my mom, the best grandmother in the world, would be healed? Yes. Constantly. Did I pray that her suffering be relieved. Yes. Constantly. Did I pray that God help me to find a way to help her. Yes. Constantly. Was she healed? No. Did she suffer horribly. Oh yes. Was I able help her...like give her a lobe of my liver? No. Was I pissed? HELL YES! I was so angry at God. SOOOOOOO ANGRY. I joked with really good friends, who are Catholic, during Lent several months later, that I had given Jesus up for Lent (tho, I had never really celebrated Lent as a protestant...not really). Btw, I thought Catholicism was a cult and Catholics poor duped souls. I was always trying to get Catholic friends to leave the Church.

(Let me state emphatically right now...don't trust me...ever....I don't trust myself anymore. Believe what you want, it's none of my business.)

Back to my story (which I am sure is just riveting) fast forward again. I'm not going to church anywhere. I still mad. It's been a couple of years since mom died. Our Catholic friends (R&K) are over for dinner and K says I should come with them soon to a spaghetti dinner at their Church and after, if I am interested, I could go to this program for people interested in becoming Catholic. Que inner monologue "Who me? Catholic? Ha! Join that Whore of Babylon of a so called Church....Ha! Right? People actually BECOME Catholic? Why the heck would they want to do that? " So, I said, NO. And when they left, I promptly went up and googled 'Protestant Converts to Catholicism'. Needless to say, and another long story, I was blown away. The net of it was I did alot of reading. Went to RCIA, and after some roadblocks here and there, became Catholic in Novemember of 2003. (Note: I have written my conversion story to the Catholic Church and given it as a speech at several retreats. I have never transcribed it here, because it is long, and I am lazy. I am very convincing, very persuasive. I think due in large part to a dad who always played Devil's Advocate and my private prep school education. Word to the wise....don't listen to me.)

Since becoming Catholic I have learned all I can. Starting out, it was difficult not to throw myself into uberCatholicdom so, naturally, that is what I did. I went to all 4 years of a Bible/Encyclical study called FAMILIA. Some of my Catholic friends (R & K) probably thought I was pretty intolerable, looking back they were right. All in all, it was the first time in my spiritual life that I ever felt like I truly belonged. I was welcomed into the Church with open arms and have made truly wonderful friends there. The first and foremost being R & K, who I still completely love and adore. They were our sponsors coming in to the Church (Robert, who was raised Catholic never was confirmed so that is what happened for him, and then our marriage was convalidated).

Fast forward to about a year to 18 months ago. The disenchanment began, somewhere in there. I started to wake up to the fact that God always wins. Not that I want to win, but He always wins. If anything good happens, God did it. If anything bad happens, God allowed it and He will bring good from it (uh, I am still waiting for the good from mom's death...I have become estranged from my father (he went nuts when she died)...so I have lost both parents and my kids lost both their maternal grandparents...WOW...how 'good' is that!?!) Also, if I do anything good, it's Christ in me that does it, if I do anything bad...it's all me....all me and my sinful nature rearing it's ugly head. What about the many people I know ,who are really great, kind, generous, caring people who don't believe in anything....or believe in a completely different God, what then? And, again, just being honest here, both Heaven and Hell don't seem all that great to me. One is eternal suffering, the other eternally praising God. One sounds awfully painful and the other painfully boring.

Now, I have read ALOT of theology. I have read Church history. There is no denying Christ existed and there seems to be more historical proof that he not only existed but did what he did and said what he said, than there is historical documentation proving my or your existance. (And I'm not just talking about the Bible here, I am talking about other historical documents of the time). I also happen to believe that the basic celebration of the Eucharist of the Catholic Church (and even the Orthodox Church) is the closest we have to what the original Christians were doing. However, after all the shit that continues to come down in the Church I have become so turned off. And yeah, I know, the standard response (excuse) is that it's spiritual warfare....the Devil is coming against the Church. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Or maybe, just maybe, all these so-called leaders of the Church should be more properly vetted? Look, I am no angel, but I am no Fr. Maciel. Holy shit. What evil, twisted mo fo.

But you know, maybe priests should be able to marry. Have you ever looked into the history of how the celibate priesthood came into being? Without any kind of agenda-glasses on? It was for the church to make money and aquire land. Then they tacked on spiritual reasons later. The whole thing with the Legionaires of Christ and their lay apostolate Regnum Christi really sickened me. I got to thinking. How easily I could been duped by them? I went to their study group FAMILIA for 4 years and when you are done with it Regnum Christi makes a pitch for you to join them. I didn't. I'm glad. But how close I almost came to drinking that Kool-aid scares me. But it also makes me wonder how much other Kool- aid have I been drinking?

I'm really over the redemptive suffering thing and the reparation suffering thing. I don't see my suffering redeeming anyone or anything. And what is worse is that I have met people really into that and they dont seem happy or they are really judgemental. They show no love of Christ, no mercy, no forgiving attitude (only to each other in their little club) but for everyone else....just judgement...holier than though CRAP! I went to this Alliance of Two Hearts seminar given by this Fr. Bing dude. It scared me horribly. I mean, I left there thinking, "OMG, if this is Catholicism, what the Hell did I do joining this Church?" I mean, I felt like vomiting. I was so overloaded with a sense of guilt and shame and hopelessness that I almost cried. All it did was solidify what I continue to see all around me everywhere, people love to sit in judgement of everyone else. They want to think they are right and have the right answers and as a result, God is going to reward them and damn everyone else. I mean, for crying out loud, look at the Jihadist Muslims. How crazy are they? And they believe that what they are doing is what God wants of them. And so do so many Catholics, and Protestants, and Jews, Buddhists, Hindus, Sikhs, goodness...the list goes on. For what it is worth, I believe that suffering is suffering and suffering sucks and everyone suffers over something...get used to it....end of story.

Let me set up an example from my life: Long before becoming Catholic I was having a real problem with birth control. I think it is evil. And not from a religious point of view. Fertility is not a disease. Loading a woman up with artificial chemicals to render her a female enuch just so she is sexually available at all times is the height of mysogyny. And that women have 'bought it' that it is their right to chemically sterilize themselves is even more disgusting. I have been on those pills and shots. You know what they do? They make for a moody, fat, sexually distinterested woman who is prone to stroke and breast cancer. Sounds like the lotto to me! And condoms are no better. I mean, when we used to use them, way back, what differentiated me from any other woman? Sure, my husband loved me, and was committed to me. But, when you have an affair, wouldn't one use a condom? If I, as a married woman, am so special, well then, I shouldn't have to fill myself with chemicals or rubber stoppers filled with spermacide that only makes me itch. Nor should do I have to deal with a piece of synthetic material between me and my hubby. I don't cover the rest of my body in saran wrap when we are making love, so why cover one of the most important parts. Oh, so that leaves me with physical sterilization. Mmm, sounds awesome! No thanks. I have a cycle, I'll watch it. I'll excercise some self control for a bit which will only make it more fun later.

Whoa...did I digress or what....so, my example is this, one of the things I was excited about in regards to being Catholic is that the Church thinks birth control is bad, for most of the reasons I do. I thought that was pretty cool. Robert didn't, at first, but that has all changed. The Catholic Church also highly esteems motherhood (which alot of Protestants say they do, but they act like they don't), and believes children are a blessing. Well, I REALLY wanted another child. Specifically, another little girl, but I would happily take a boy too. I wanted Autumn to get to be a big sister and wanted a namesake for my mama. I was very involved with the FAMILIA program, at the time, and we were reading encyclicals about the merits of children. I PRAYED MY ASS OFF. I CRIED AND BEGGED FOR ANOTHER CHILD. I was using NFP, I knew when I was fertile. At first, I had to sell Robert on it. He wasn't wanting to buy. Eventually, he came around. But I never got pregnant. Now, there are those who never get pregnant. I have, at least, have 3 kids. Who was I to complain? But I know people with 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11 and 12 kids. Those are all seperate families, by the way. So, did God say NO? Did my body say NO? Why? Why couldn't I have another kid? Am I that horrible a mother ? (Ok, don't answer that.) I wasn't praying for a Porche or a Lake House. I wanted a kid. In a world which considers the conceptus of a man and a woman as something disposable, I didn't (don't), I think it's a person, and amazing one of a kind person. And I just wanted another one. I believed I was being led to want another one. What is so wrong with that? So, it wasn't God that wanted me to have another child? Or it was, but he just wanted me to be willing to have one, it's not like he promised it or anything? Or it wasn't God's idea and that is why I never got pregnant, because it was really 'my' idea. Heck, I almost had a tubal, and it was God (or was it) who prevented me from being able to get it done. Then he fucks with me like that and brings about the desire for another child(ren) only to give me a celestial 'Fuck You' later? Really? Do I want to believe in that God? (Note: If your offended go away. This is my blog. Oh, and I think the Creator of the Universe can handle a little obsenity. So get a grip.)

The bottom line is, I 'thought' God wanted me to have another child. I thought wrong. I have thought God wanted me to do or not do all sorts of things, and I can ALWAYS find some sign that He is guiding me in a certrain direction. When that certain direction turns 180 degrees then I have to find some reason God did that too. I don't know what he wants from me. Any of us could justify just about anything that has happened to us or that we are going through in the light of God's design. I'm just sick to death of it all. Really I am. Do I believe that God exists? Yes. I believe there is a creator. Do I believe that Jesus is the human manifestation of that creator? Yes. Did 'Jesus' ask me to follow all these stupid rules all the time and make myself crazy? No. What did He ask me to do? "Love others, as I have loved you." That's a tall order. I'm horrible at it. So, maybe I should just work on that one for a while, not ask for anything, and leave the rest to those more capable.

Peace out

~Rach

I really don't think I'm gonna make it.

2010-06-08T12:57:00.003-04:00

Okay, so I guess we are into our 3 rd week of Summer vacation and I am ready to wound myself in a near fatal way so that I can be in the hospital on a steady morphine drip. THAT is my idea of a vacation...a real get away...from reality altogether. I mean, I know that pretty much everyone with a soon to be 14 year old has dreams of suicide ( or homicide) , but when that kid is also bipolar well all bets are off. The kid is on meds, but it's not like they have developed anything that I know of that would give him an entirely new personality, let alone happier more stable moods. Of course, there is Haldol, but I am really not interested in hanging him on the bathrobe hook at the back of my closet door....hmmmmm...or am I???

And should I really be complaining at all? After all, didn't I bring this on myself...fighting with my younger brother all those years ago...I seem to remember my mom muttering a curse of some kind, that my behavior would be revisited on me. Well, shit, it really has!!! Autumn and Ben and their constant bickering over the dumbest things makes me wonder why I didn't have my ovaries ripped out before I was of childbearing age, like I'm going to have done to my puppy next week.

So, what I am trying to do, when I find that my 13 yr old son has surfed porn for the first ( and better be last) time on my iPad, (there was nothing like opening the browser that day...his PC is completely protected from him looking for it there) is trying to remember the sweet baby I nursed and carried in a sling and adored. And it's not so easy, because what I see in front of me is the greasy headed, smart ass teenager who is so hostile to his little sister and to me and his dad. He lives to bicker and argue and I want to send him flying out the window (without a net). There is no pithy cute happy ending to this post. It's gonna be a long Summer. I hate the heat to begin with, the only upshot to Summer for me is the ability to sleep in, but the new puppy has effectively ended that, sooo I figure I have a couple of months to perfect drinking heavily. But if you hear I'm in the hospital on a morphine drip, because of some 'freak' accident, don't be sad for me. Know that I am
probably enjoying the vacation of a lifetime..... in my head.

I've had a new puppy for a month and haven't blogged about it!!!!

2010-06-05T11:03:00.005-04:00

This is my first time blogging with my iPad. So far so good. The only thing is I don't think I have pictures of Tru, our new Husky pup, in my iPad picture folder, so I may have to add them later. Anyway, Tru is here. We got her the day before my birthday and she was actually born on Autumn's birthday, so I thought that was a good sign. Especially since I was picking her up sight unseen and had only reports from her breeder as to her temperament...with TiVo we got to meet his litter and he picked us. Anyway, it's been over a month and she is awesome. For the first month she only had eyes for TiVo and we thought show was never gonna notice any of us. But over the past 2 weeks she has come out of her dog centric world and is becoming attached to us...especially me, but then again, I'm the one with her all the time.

Tru has been great for TiVo. Siberian Huskies really are social dog and while they can be fine in a one dog family they are really happiest when there is, at least, one other dog. For the first 36 hours TiVo wouldn't let Tru move. He had to keep her pinned down and drag her around and show her who was the king of the house in typical Husky (quite wolf like) style. After 2 days they were in love. He still rough houses with her at least once a day to keep her in the #2 slot, but it is killer cute how they play and enjoy each other's company.

Tru loves the dog park as much as TiVo and when we first got her, she was 10 weeks old, and we took her there she walked in like she owned the place. No fear! I loved it. She is almost 4 months old and huge. TiVo is over tall for a Husky, but he is light...54lbs. Tru is already 27lbs! And she is a big girl. She may get close to TiVo's height which would make her tall for a female, but I would be cool with that. I love TiVo's gangly wolfy look.

Of course, the deal with Robert was that I had to rehome the kitties in order to get another Husky. TiVo had been trying to eat the cats since he was about 4 months old. I had a dream last night about all three of them. I miss them a lot. But they we were really unhappy with one dog...2 would have sent them over the edges. I had to split them up. Toonces went to one girl, and Milo and Ginger went to another, but I still crying jags over them. Don't judge me...I judge myself enough. But the dogs go with me everywhere, the cats didn't. The dogs get me out to exercise and meet new people, notsofor the kitties. So, I'm praying that St. Francis continues to watch over my kitties and keep them happy in their new dog free homes.

~Rach

It's been so long.

2010-04-25T16:54:00.014-04:00

Okay, so I have no idea what to say, except that facebook is so damn fun that I forgot about my blog. I started writing this as a way for my kids to see what a wacky mom they have. Then it kind of became a journal. I got alot out that first year and it was good for me.

This year so far has been pretty fun. In January, we found out that friends we had met on facebook were going to be in our area. It turns out Bill Mueller had a training thing for his job and it was right here in Roswell. He came first and then his wife, Terry, came a couple days later. We had a blast. I was really sorry to see them go at the end of the week. We introduced them to Doctor Who and they introduced us to Coupling. I took Terry all over Roswell, TiVo fell in love with Bill, and then, on Friday, Bill and Terry took us out to a fab dinner at Relish, along with 2 more facebook friends who live here in town, Loren and Tracy Peters (I went to high school with Loren). We had a really good time for 4 people who had never previously met in person. Oh, and we all survived (several friends of mine thought we were insane to invite facebook friends over...I mean what if they killed us). And here is proof that it all went well (Oh, and I now I have to figure out how I am going to get my ass to Illinois where they live.)

I met MUSE, my favorite band in the world and they were such nice guys. It is so awesome to meet people you admire so much and they turn out to be great. They could have been jerks...but they were not. Matt Bellamy, the lead singer, couldn't believe that Andrew was my kid. As if I didn't love Matt enough, I got a compliment. What a cool guy. Thanks to my Hunny and his friend Mike Greene, I got to see the most amazing concert of my life AND got to meet the band too. We chatted with them back stage for about 15 minutes. It was just the 4 of us, Robert, me, Andrew and his longtime pal, Claire. The latter two were virtually hyperventilating at meeting those Rock GODs...and it was adorable to see.
Robert finally got out of for-profit corporate life. A huge prayer was answered and he is now the managing director for internet & new media for the American Cancer Society. It's more a prestige position than a monied position...as most non-profits are. But, we can still stay in our house (we had it for sale for a 4 months) and he is doing something that matters. And that is what we have prayed for for so long. Robert is an amazing husband and stand up guy. He wants to take care of this family as sole provider, so I can be the hand that rocks the cradle at home, but he always wanted to get paid to do something that made a huge positive impact on those around him. So, here's a shout out to the big man upstairs...Thank you, GOD, for making this all happen!!!

Now, I am thinking of adding a new puppy to the mix. Before that happens I have to re-home our 3 cats. It's not something I want to do, but no one pays any attention to them, or takes care of them anymore and it sucks. I change their litter and feed them, but I am the primary carer of the dog, so I am in and out of the cats business pretty quickly. I love Toonces the most, will miss him desperately, but the cats were for the kids. They are growing up and don't care. Everyone loves TiVo and it's not hard to understand why. He is awesome, and loving and interacts with everyone. The cats interact on their terms...whenever that is. And those 3 fluffy idiots could have become friends with TiVo, but they would have nothing to do with him and now that he is big they are afraid of him. I'm kind of sick of living in the Gaza strip of my own home. There are zones for the cats and the dog and it's gotten really old. Before anyone gives me any crap, understand, I wouldn't give away a kid. These are animals. If they are not happy, I believe I should help them to be so. I love all animals....I really do. But when it comes down to brass tax I am a dog girl. I love walking TiVo, I love taking him to the dog park. I love all the social interaction he brings to me. I am an extrovert...and I believe cats are for introverts. NO judgement, just a statement. I drive around with TiVo all day. He comes with me everywhere. I can't take my cats anywhere. Anyway, that's what going on there.
On the spirituality front, the last year has been weird. Right now I am in a good place and am praying it sticks. I have gone through a lot of so called 'atheist phases' and I don't like them. They are very dark and dry and lonely...a great breeding ground for anger and selfishness. Sometimes life does seem pointless. I told Robert recently that it (life) seems like a giant hamster wheel we get on and have to keep running on and we only get to get off when we die. Translate that into me feeling exhausted...and bored. I need new things to shake me up.

Lately, I have re-committed myself to caring for myself and losing the few pounds I put on, over the last few months, this after having lost over 30 pounds. How easy it is to slip off the saddle. Luckily, it was less than 10lbs, 5 of which are gone...so I am on track. I am feeling so much better. It's not fun getting out of control and feeling that you can't seem to help yourself. I am happy to be back in the saddle and taking it day by day to stay there.

The kids are all doing really well. Autumn has been in a really cool homeschool co-op this year and the time off (for me) and added social interaction for her has been fabulous. Next month she has a jazz recital...they are dancing to All That Jazz from Chicago and should be adorable. Here is Autumn with the girl half of the her co op, there are 3 boys in it too.

Ben is almost done with his 7th grade year at the Cottage School and boy howdy do I love that place and everything it's done for our boy. Ben is really doing so much better this year, on all fronts, than he has in the past. I have high hopes that things are going to continue to change for the better, for 'the Bendamin'. Oh, and Ben's braces finally came off...look how handsome.

Andrew, my handsome vulcan son, is still working at Trader Joe's...almost 2 years. I am so pround of him. He has just a couple weeks left and will be done with his sophmore year at Georgia State. He is still living at home (which I love) and still plugging away at his post-rock band, Absence of Ocean. He has taught himself how to play guitar and writes alot of songs. All in all, he's pretty damn cool. I love him to bits...just wish he were a little more chatty....how is he my kid??? I mean, he looks just like me so I know he is mine....but talk about opposite. One great thing is that Andrew will be 21 in 6 months and then I can send him on booze runs for me and Robert....woo hoo!! LOL Below is Andrew's shocked, "I just met Muse" face.
I think I am gonna go bake something yummy now. I am off wheat again, due to allergies. I am thinking this time I should stay off of it for good, but we'll see. Wheat definitely bothers me most in Spring and Summer as it causes my eczema to flare. I have been off of it over a week now and my hand eczema is almost healed. You know what else is weird...I swear I am addicted to wheat. When I am not eating it, I don't have the insane food cravings I normally do...the very same cravings that got me into trouble gaining almost 10 pounds back of the 30 I lost. I wonder if there is something too that? All I know is that in 2 or 3 days time my hands will look and feel normal again and that is worth everything. Besides, I made a KILLER gluten free version of my favorite cake 'Tres Leches' and it soooooo frickin good, I dare anyone to guess it's not made with wheat flour.

Oh yeah, how could I forget a really cool thing...we now have a Keurig One Cup coffee making system and it is the coolest thing in the universe...and yes, I have even seen and played with the iPad. But really great coffee (which I don't need to roast, or grind or measure or brew) in a minute is freaking awesome when you are as addicted to the substance as I am!! My birthday is coming up this Thursday, the 29th. I love K-Cups...send me some!! ;-)

Later,
Rach

Funniest Hitler Parody Yet!

2009-10-10T14:00:00.000-04:00

WARNING!!! Foul Language and a very fed up blogger.

2009-09-06T11:20:00.001-04:00

Here's the deal (to coin a phrase from my youth).
I am sick and tired of the Olbermanns, Maddows, and the combined media outlets of MSNBC, NBC, ABC, CBS oh and the Bill Mahers and Jeaneane Garafolo's painting me as some fringe right wing idiot.

You know why I like Glenn Beck, because he acts like a regular dude who doesn't talk down to me. O'Reilly doesn't take shit from anyone, and Dennis Miller, having once been a wacked out Liberal, knows how to show them up for who they really are....and his insults are par excellence. I can't handle Hannity because he is too partisan. Plus, I am not a Republican. I am a pro-life Libertarian. Glenn Beck is too. He genuinely seems to want to know what the fuck is really going on, while so many people sit complacently in their EZ Boys figuring that everything will turn out OK.

Did any of my friggin peers read 1984? Do you really think any political party trying to get all the power in all 3 branches of the government, and co-opting most of the media is a good thing? You don't see conservatives out there trying to get Olbermann off the air. Yet, Czar Van Jone's group was responsible for pulling 50 advertisers from Beck's show. Geesh, are you Libs really that worried? Holy shit! Can't there be differing points of view or is it only yours that counts? So all you liberal scaredy cats are gonna try (it won't happen) and try to get Beck off the air. Am I not allowed to hear differing points of view. You mean I have be stuck with Olbermann, Maher, Couric, and that lot? Are you fucking kidding me??????

To that Garafolo bitch I would like to say that I am NOT a racist. I love Alan Keyes, I think Michael Steele is a cool son of bitch. Thomas Sowell is smarter than everyone at the Daily Kos put together. Condoleeza Rice is a bad ass, and she would be an awesome president. BUT somehow I am a racist because I didn't want a 'particular' black man as president. STFU, you stupid Hollywood skank!

Olbermann: I watch your show. Lately, you do and say nothing substantive. All you do is show clips from Glenn Beck and then act like someone slipped you some frigging Meth. Take a Xanax and calm down. Sorry ratings suck....but you do and that's why.

Bill Maher: the ONLY thing you and I agree on is that marijuana should be legalized and have the shit taxed out of it. I think alcohol is far more dangerous. Drunks kill people, start bar fights, cause domestic violence. Potheads laugh alot. So, I think my more strictly conservative friends need to lighten up on this issue. Geesh, just a little more than 100 years ago you could get cocaine at the drugstore. Other than that, Bill, I think you are the most smarmy, snobbish, asshole with the biggest superiority complex next to Obama himself. But you know what? As much as I loathe you, I will defend voraciously yor right to the airwaves and your free speech. Too bad your ilk is all behind the Fairness (NOT) Doctrine and want to kill my ability to listen to Rush, Laura Ingraham, Glenn Beck or Michael Medved.

Mainstream media: Catch this clue....your ratings are tanking because everyone believes you are so far up the Obama administration's ass that you will find polyps before his Proctologist does! I watched Maddow and she didn't have one, not one, conservative or libertarian guest. The whole show was skewed to the left and openly mocked those on the right. That???? is fair and balanced????? Yeah, right. You are all such LOSERS. The press and the media are always, always supposed to be there for 'the people' and constantly critique the powers in Washington. And this is not happening anymore. What is so hysterically funny to me is that Progressive Liberals have become 'the Establishment' that the original liberals from the 60's so hated. So whoopee, I am a bonified non-conformist!

I don't want the federal government in my local schools, in my healthcare (medicaid, medicare are fucked up enough and going broke...woo hoo...the government is SOOOOO GOOD at what it does...NOT) I don't want them in my churches, syagogues, mosques, temples, teepees..where ever. I don't want them insinuating themselves into the homeschooling of my children. I don't want them taking over or bailing out banks, oil companies, car companies any companies. You can protect the nation, build roads, dams and bridges and back off of everything else.

And last, President Obama, you know had it been 1973 when you were born, you might not have been. Thanks so much for you care of the unborn. Thanks for saying you didn't want either of your daughters to ever have to deal with the mistake of a unplanned pregnancy = BABY. I had a baby who wasn't planned. I had people tell me to get rid of 'it'. Hmmmm, surprisingly my 'it' is downstairs on the couch, getting ready for work, looking over some college work. Surprisingly, my 'it' isn't an it. It's not even a lump of tissue.... It's a human, a man. He is a man of almost 20. The world would be a much sorrier place without him. Though, of course, to you he was a mistake. You know what? YOU are the mistake America made when voting you in as President.

Keep your hands off my religion, and my guns (if I ever get any), and my Democratic Republic. Fire your Czars. There is no room in American for anyone with the title of Czar. Besides which, all these unvetted Czars are not constitutional.

Oh and would you like to know who I am.

I am a woman who gave life to my child when confronted with an unplanned pregnancy, instead of killing him for my convenience.
I am a woman who stayed home to raise my children because I see children as worthwile, not just things to aquire or DNA to be passed on.
I am a woman who breastfed her kids through toddlerhood, not just for a few days.
I am a woman who co-slept with her nursing babies instead isolating them to a lonely room in a little jail called a crib.
I am a woman who cloth diapered all of her kids. I washed them myself and hung them out to dry. How Donna Reed of me.
I am woman who does not like to be referred to, by my kids friends, as Mrs. Ross or Miss Rachel, Rachel is fine with me.
I am a woman who homeschooled her kids, not for religious reasons, but because I think school is a very dysfunctional system that is in no way based on the way people really live.
I am a woman who, as a homeschooler, was an unschooler, which meant my kids learned what, when, why and where they wanted to learn. No forcing of lessons here. My oldest is now a sophmore in college.
I am a woman who thought it was crazy that when her son turned 18 he could fight and die for this country, or get married, but wasn't allowed to have a drink. A drinking age of 21 is dumb.
I am a woman who was a devout Evangelical Protestant who hated Catholicism and then, 4 years ago, become a Catholic (don't tell me God isn't hysterical). I don't pretend to be perfect or all together because I am a serious work-in-progress.

I am a woman who thinks the theory of evolution takes far more blind faith to believe in than the theory of intelligent design. But if they are going to teach evolution then they need to teach intelligent design (which is different from the idea of fundamentalist creationism). Afterall, how many times can you through up flour, butter, sugar, and eggs and have it come down a cake....uh...NEVER. So if you know someone 'designed' your car, home, shoes, clothes etc....you better darn well get it through your thick atheist skulls that someone or something DESIGNED this planet.

I am a woman who is very committed to traditional marriage and values, but believes that the government needs to get entirely out of the marriage licensing business altogether. EVERYONE should receive a civil union license and then go on to get married at the religious or civic venue of their choice, provided that venue has no ideological problem with same sex marriage. If the Marriage Act is off the table and everyone gets C.U. license, then a gay/lesbian/transgender couple can't force any denomination which believes eclusively in man/woman marriage to marry them. Yet, they can still get married. That way everyone (and their beliefs) is protected.

I am a woman who loves my God, my husband, my kids, my pets, my friends, my country. I swear like a sailor, but I am a fiercly loyal friend. I love great coffee, great food, great sex (with said husbad), great conversations, a cool buzz (every now and again), alternative rock music, vampires, Catholic saints, apologetics, cute guys, Monty Python, SNL, Family Guy, staying up late and then sleeping in, cold rainy weather (snow is even better) and breaking schedules. I love to live my life on the fly and hate making plans.

I am a woman who WILL NOT BACK DOWN fighting for the right to be who I am and for the right for you to be who you are...even if we disagree.

DO I SOUND LIKE WHAT ONE WOULD PERCEIVE AS RIGHT WING EXTREMIST??

I am an American and proud of it. I will NOT apologize for wanting to keep my country free of an oppressively large, powerhungry, money-grabbing, and increasingly out-of-touch government.

Just one me

2009-07-01T14:24:00.011-04:00

Okay, so I may be ADHD out the wazoo, but I absolutely cannot focus on multiple blogs. They actually make me squirrelly (sp)? Anyway, my one and only blog here has to reflect everthing about me. I removed myself from one and deleted the other one. My love of my family, my love of unschooling, my love of the Catholic faith, my love of Siberian Huskies...TiVo in particular, my love of food, music, movies, books and yes...even hot guys.

So, I started blogging and then stopped because I become addicted to a facebook game called farmtown.

Let me tell you it is my own little piece of cyber zen. What is funny is how Robert has given me shit about it. This coming from a guy who played Ultima Online and Everquest for the first 7 years of our marriage. I was a gamer widow. He is now into his iMac, iPhone, audiobooks and facebook. So, I do see alot more than the back of his head these days...well for the last 5+ years easily. :-) Now it is his turn to see the back of my head. HA!

Also, as it typically my style, I am in the midst of reading 3 books. The first one is Memnoch, The Devil by Anne Rice. It's the 5th book in her Vampire Chronicles. The second book is Four Witnesses by Rod Bennet. He is a former Baptist now Catholic and this book is a compilation of 4 of the earliest Church Fathers. The last book is a food memoir and cookbook by Shauna James Ahern called Gluten Free Girl. It is soooo good. I have been gluten free for a bit now....with a few glutinous run ins...and do feel ALOT better without it. Go to Shauna's blog for awesome food, pictures and writing...no matter whether you eat gluten or not: Gluten Free Girl

Robert is still at Suntrust...amazing to still be employed by a bank after 2 years...especially now. They are doing stupid corporate team building this week and my Hunny just wants someone to shoot him in the face. He hates this stuff. I don't blame him. I went to a cocktail party with some people I didn't know and having to small talk was KILLING ME. I bolted early because I thought I would explode.

Andrew

Eric

Harrison

Andy is downstairs with his band doing some run througs as they have a recording studio session later today. Andrew (drums/vocals) and his band: Eric (guitar), Harrison (bass) are most likely going to change their name from Iconoclast (because there are too many of those) to Absence of Ocean. It is a fitting name as the trio have moved in a definitively POST ROCK direction. For those of you in the know think: Sigur Ros without the Icelandic.

Autumn is playing with Morgan, who is over for the afternoon. My girlie and I have recently gotten into My Sims Town on Wii and love playing it together. She also wants to go to the pool all the time. I don't mind as long as it is late. I hate the sun....something I have in commom with Lestat and Edward.

Ben is, as usual, perpetually plugged into the matrix. The XBOX 360 broke in late Spring (the dreaded red ring of death) but I sent if off and it came back within a week...all fixed up and saving my Summer! I also troubleshot the Wii and fixed that too. Pretty amazing since my husband thinks technology and I don't mix. However, he told me he was done with dealing with gaming systems, so I had to learn fast and on the fly. I am proud I did it. I, however, can't get into Ben's games. Right now he is into Far Cry 2. Thank God for Xbox Live so he can play online with his friends.

Last are my kitties, still pissed that Mr. Dog (TiVo) is still here and alive. TiVo is awesome, just awesome. He has turned into such a good boy. He is a big Husky too. These days he spends his days lying around in the AC where ever I happen to be. He is sound asleep right now because Andy's band practice just puts him right out. Meanwhile the cats are all having panic attacks at the loudness of the music. TiVo is also a regular at our local dog park and I know almost every dog there by name and most of the owners names. He has a bunch of Husky friends: Misha, Aspen, Ozzie, Max, Banshee, Darby, Luca, Darla, Dexter, Morgan, Sage, Simon, Tory, Kota. That is alot of Siberian Huskies. I don't think I am missing anyone. He has some other best dogpark pals too: Cosby: schnoodle (black schnauzer/poodle), Mirabelle: black/white harlequin Great Dane, Maya: caramel/white pitbull mix and Max: black/white Karolean Bear Dog (very cool). Then there are my friends dogs: Einsten (Kath's labradoodle/australian shepherd mix) and Danny and Doris (Lisa's mixed puppies). Last, across the street is Gretchen a shepherd mix. They play in Gretchen's yard together. As you can see TiVo is the dog about town. I take him to the dog park at least 5 days a week. Lately we go at 8pm coz it's alot cooler. It's really fun to watch him play.

Last Friday, in typical Husky style, Tivo, for the first time, escaped from our yard. It was 3am when we realized he was missing. The last time I actually saw him out front was 1am. (We have an underground fence system). Well, I didn't have his collar on snuggly enough so he ran right through the charge and didn't feel anything....and he just kept going. My husband took off on foot and I drove everywhere that I walk or take TiVo. Finally, on my way home thinking he was gone for good, I notice my husband walking him home on the leash. Turns out TiVo had run across the street behind the school to the huge park. He was muddy and wet and pretty darn happy. I am just glad he is safe.

I posted this on a sidebar awhile ago...then took it off. But it is worth keeping.

2009-07-01T14:16:00.001-04:00

"I’d encourage your youngest one to abandon kindergarten altogether. Almost everything I learned was learned outside the classroom, and school itself interrupted my education. Moreover, school locks you in with your peers. That is a mistake. One’s social circle should never include one’s equals. From my earliest years I found children uninteresting and always preferred the company of adults. This was an advantage, because I got to know lots of folks who are dead now whom I never would have known if I had waited until I was an adult. - So I have a collective memory - and oral tradition - that goes back to the eighteenth century, having spoken with people who knew people who knew people who knew people who lived then. - The only real university is the universe and a city its microcosm. That is why an expression like “New York University” is foolish. New York City is the university….Instead of school, children should spend some hours each day in hotel lobbies talking to the guests. They should spend time in restaurant kitchens and shops and garages of all kinds, learning from people who actually make the world work….One day spent roaming through a real classical church building would be the equivalent of one academic term in any of our schools, and a little time spent inconspicuously in a police station would be more informative than all the hours wasted on bogus social sciences. Formal lessons would only be required for accuracy in spelling and proficiency in public speaking, for which the public speakers in our culture are not models, and in exchange for performing some menial services a child could learn the violin, harp, and piano from musicians in one of the better cocktail lounges, or from performers in the public subways….So I urge you to keep your child out of kindergarten, because kindergarten will only lead to first grade and then the grim sequence of grade after grade begins and takes its inexorable toll on the mind born fertile but gradually numbed by the pedants who impose on the captive child the flotsam of their own infecundity." ~Fr. George Rutler

Originally posted by Peter Robinson via The Corner at National Review Online.

Gonna be so fun!

2009-06-09T01:37:00.002-04:00

EGAD! Gluten Free?! Me?!

2009-05-27T12:55:00.002-04:00

I know I am just not blogging enough. I was fb'ing with my friend Helen and she mentioned how she does alot of writing in her head, well so do I. I have always got something to say or that I want to talk about but never seem to have the time to really sit and write. Well, since Ben got out of school last Thursday at noon and Autumn used saved money to buy herself a pre-owned DS Lite, I might actually get some time to write in lieu of my micro-blogging on facebook.

So, what's new with me, I have gone gluten free. I have been at 90% compliance over the last 2 weeks, most days I am eating 100% no gluten and then on 2 occasions I had some. Why the Hell would you do something crazy like that Rachel? (That IS what you are thinking right?) Well, it's because I stumbled upon some internet articles regarding joint pain and gluten sensitivity (I am not talking allergy here). I was in a car accident 9 years ago and after 2 excruciatingly painful years of neck, shoulder and arm pain (only my right side) along with LOTS of chiropractic and Ibruprofen (which wrecked my stomach lining for about 2 years) things seemed to get tolerable and I was kinda okay. Every once in a while I would get flare ups of the accident pain. I was told by regular docs that I had myofacial pain (look it up if you care to) and that I was just going to have to deal with it off and on. Whoopie!

Fast forward to now. In the last year I have lost over 30 pounds. I got in shape primarily through walking. I didn't have the time or money for a gym. Then my right side starts to go again and I am in agony and waking up with headaches straight from the pit of HELL. Also, my knees and hips started fricking killing me. But wait, I weight less now....shouldn't they feel better? I went to a orthopedic guy and he confirmed there were no structural problems and that there was no arthritis or any kind of degenerative thing going on. He said it was probably some inflammation and to take some.....wait for it.....Ibruprofen!!! After being scoped every which way from sundown in 2004 and being on Nexxium for 2 years, I am not super interested in developing NSAID Gastritis again.

So, I am thinking what the heck to do. I start researching joint pain and inflammation and keep coming across gluten sensitivity. Okay, if you know me at all you know I love to bake. The last fricking thing I even want to consider is that gluten is making the pain from my accident worse than it needs to be, or contributing to my knee and hip pain. At first I dismissed it. However, at the same time I had gained back 5 pounds of the 33 I had lost. I was having the hardest time with maintaining my new weight. It is really different when you're losing because you kind of get into this zone. But when you hit goal you have to adjust things. Some of the stuff I wouldn't go near were allowed back on my plate. That stuff was all gluten based: french bread, pasta,pancakes, waffles, cookies, crackers, pretzels, cake. When I was losing weight I was not remotely low carb, but I ate mostly veggies and lots of fruit. I had grains but ate really high fiber low cal bread, whole grain pasta etc... because I was watching my total caloric load. So, I am at maintainence and having a helluva time with carb cravings. At first I thought it was sugar so I reduced that. It didn't help. Then I went to whole wheat only, tried staying off the white stuff. That didn't help either. Then I found I was just sabotajing the crap out of myself gravitating to more bread, bigger bowls of pasta, more cookies etc. All my healthy habits of eating lots of lean protein, fruit veggies and whole grains were slipping away and ALL I wanted to eat was wheat based food all day. I kep a food diary for a bit and nothing but bread, scones, pasta, cookies, etc was crossing my lips almost exclusively. Talk about GRAINDAMAGE!

I got to thinking and figured maybe my mostly wheat based diet and constant cravings for more wheat based things AND all this joint pain (which landed me back in the chiropractors office 3 times a week again) would go away or at least be significantly reduced. It was worth a shot. Well, I haven't been to the chiropractor in 3 weeks. Yes, I have pain, but it is stunningly less than what I was dealing with a month ago. But what is more profound than the reduction of pain is that I don't crave glutenous carbs like I did. I am not carb or grain free either. I have a little stash of gluten free chocolate chip cookies and I can eat 2 and feel fine. One regular choc chip cookie and I will eat them until I am full or they are gone. I have made GF bread (it tastes like corn bread but holds together better) and I just made gf banana bread and it is AWESOME! Another side effect is that Spring is when my hand eczema flares and it my hands were getting itchy and breaking out. They are presently clear.

Anyway, I am going to give a a couple of months. If things continue to markedly improve, I may just stay gf and discover a renewed passion for baking in a new way. However, since blood tests for Celiac Disease came back negative a few years ago (when I was having all the tummy trouble) I know that I will still be having a eeny weeny amount of gluten every week and that would be what ever is left in the host after being consecrated into the Eucharist. God's gluten I will never give up! ;-)

Peace,

Rach

29th day of April = 43 years old.

2009-04-29T20:40:00.003-04:00

Ok, I suck, I know. There I was just blogging along and then I got sucked into the black hole called Facebook. I have missed writing here, tho. However, since today is my birthday, I figured it would be as a good a day as any to start back up.

So, how do things stand for Rach, on this, the 43rd year of her birth?

Mentally, I am doing pretty well. We are heading into mid Spring and I feel 'up'. Unlike most people dealing with mood issues, I tend to start heading down this time of year. BUT, since I did that this past Fall (lucky me!!!) maybe there is hope, for me, that I am going to have a good Summer (which would be a first counting the last 5+ years). I have to give credit to facebook here. It is a great place for instant feedback. For instance, today, it's been a non stop flood of Birthday wishes. It's a great, drugless and free mood enhancer. Also, the fact that Ben has done REALLY WELL at The Cottage School, this year, helps too. Andy is doing great at GA State and Trader Joe's, Autumn is having fun homeschooling and is even enrolled in a cool new co-op for next year. And my marriage is spectacular...coz I have a great Hunny Bunny.

Physically, I am falling apart. This past year, I lost 30+ pounds. I have maintained that loss, but have done a fair job of screwing up my knees and right hip. I never got into a running program, only walked, but I think I was never really careful of 'how' I walked. Like, I never really was careful how I held my posture and/or came down on my feet when ascending or descending hills etc... So, tomorrow, I have my first appt with an Orthopedic doc. The first guy I am going to see deals with hips and knees. Then I have to make a 2nd appt to see one who deals with neck and shoulders. I was in a car accident 9 years ago. I had extensive therapy and chiropractic care for several years...then I thought I was fine. Well, no. I have been back at the Chiropractor for a month with not a ton of progress being made. Today was a horrible day, pain wise. I went to my Chiro and still felt horrible after my adjustment. He continued to work on me to no avail. Both of us were stumped. Normally, I get some immediate relief. I took some extra strength OTC painkiller and it's hasn't touched the pain. This freaks me out because I am worried if I don't keep up the activity I normally do that I am going to gain some weight back...and that will suck....any suggestions?

Spiritually, it's been a weird year. Very dry. I had been doing so well (the fact that I said 'I' is probably indicative of my problem...it's about Him, right, not me) for the first 5 years of my conversion to Catholicism. Now that I am working toward my 6th year, things are getting murky. That zeal I had has really ebbed away. It's bumming me out. I am feeling what I can only imagine is a mid-life crisis. I really thought I would have had another kid. Kids are great with giving someone purpose. However, I think my ovaries ran away. C'mon, who can blame them? Let's just say Robert and I have done our part on many an optimal occasion and I feel like Yukon Cornelius from Rudolph The Red Nosed Reindeer when, while digging for gold, he threw his ice pick into the ice, pulled it out, licked it and said, "Nothin!" So, I guess I am feeling aimless and purposeless now. Yes, of course, my hubby and kids still need me. But it's so much less engrossing than the needs of an infant or toddler. I kinda feel like I should be put out to pasture (trust me, I know this is just a feeling...but still). So, God is clearly working on this with me...and we shall see what happens.

Well, I guess I will just have to be hopeful that this new year for me will be one of physical and spiritual renewal.

Peace,

One very bad dude!

2009-03-03T09:15:00.004-05:00

This whole article was taken from Life After RC. It was so good I had to reprint her here. I hope those of you in RC realize that if you were to remove Catholicism from this scenario Maciel would be seen as a predatory con-man pure and simple. It is only our faith that muddles this situation. Like the author says, LC and RC really has no charism. It's just real Catholicism dressed up as a movement. Go back to authentic Catholicism and practice it in your home parish among your family and fellow man. Leave this group to wither like chaff. ~Rachel

A con-man

Glenn Favreau summarises our current understanding of Maciel:

I was a Legionary of Christ for nearly 14 years. I have been working with Regain for nearly 10 years now, and I have followed the genesis of the downfall of Marcial Maciel since the first Hartford Courant articles in 1997 more closely than most people. It has been my business to help ex-members as they leave the group, to counsel parents, and to provide truthful information both about my experience and about the group.

Over the years, I have come to an intimate knowledge of the workings of the Legion and the place that Maciel is given in these workings. I have carefully studied many diverse responses to the person of Maciel as his private life and public activities have come to light and been commented upon. I am of the opinion that Marcial Maciel began the Legion of Christ with no spiritual motivation whatsoever. He was a con man. He was a very good con man. Whether he was caught up in the typical con man's dilemma of believing his own con or not will probably never be known, unless he confided to this to individuals outside of the Legion of Christ.

If Maciel were of any other profession (outside of the Catholic Church) and committed this type of fraud in any other framework, we would call him a con man with out any hesitation. Unfortunately, we naturally try to save the perceived "spiritual" aspect since we share in it as Catholics. I say “unfortunately” , because if we could overcome our own bias in this regard, we could put this entire saga into the annals of the history of the greatest cons of our time, and make peace with the fact that we bought into it, we were mistaken, and we can move on.

When you compare the reaction that faithful Catholics have about the "gifts" that Maciel left to the Church, no one can beat Diogenes for an analogy:

[C]onsider a woman whose husband ingeniously hid his infidelities from her for many years. Once she realized she had been deceived, the gifts he brought back from his business trips would be understood to have been instruments in that deception. Far from cherishing the jewelry he gave her, she'd feel that the diamonds now mocked the affection and fidelity they symbolized. By the same token, Maciel's addresses will be spiritually kosher -- he was after all a highly successful deceiver. But those addresses dishonor the very truths they expound, and it's impossible that they can cause anything but distress and confusion in those who attempt to nourish themselves on them.

If we consider that the victims of Maciel (not the physical abuse victims, but the hood-winked rank-and-file) are in the position of the foolish wife who trusted a man despite the warnings of others, we will understand their trauma, their reaction, their fumbling about for explanations. Betrayal is a horrific thing and it takes tremendous grace -- especially humility -- to arrive at the fullness of truth. It takes grace -- and time.

If it helps, we can remember that he fooled the hierarchy as well (the one's he didn't pay off to help cover his game) and his cloak of orthodoxy is a "plug and play" for those who understand the faith. As his followers attest, the "charism" is nothing more than Basic Catholicism -- so he didn't even take the time to invent something new. What the Magisterium didn't provide, Stephen Covey did. A clever con, but only a con in the end.

February 18, 2009 in Deceit for the Kingdom

The nails continue to be driven into the coffin

2009-02-27T20:51:00.011-05:00

More on Maciel and if the LC/RC charism can really still be valid. The following was taking from this article. Below is an excerpt using not only Maciel's own words but a passage from the Gospel that LC used to use to defend Maciel and now seems to do nothing but damn him. Folks, this is looking worse with every passing second.

But consider these passages from volumes called Envoy, which publish selections of Maciel’s letters recommended as spiritual reading to Legionaries and Regnum Christi members. They demonstrate the problem the Legionaries will have in keeping them as part of their spirituality.

Purity of heart… is so foreign to the licentiousness and cult of sex all around us that it shows clearly you are committed to follow Christ… a great measure of your apostolic fruitfulness depends on it, since to a great degree our possession of God depends on this virtue. (Vitoria 13 August 1959)

We should never lie for any reason whatsoever. It is a mortal sin when God is greatly offended by causing damage against religion, the Church or Authority, or when the name and good reputation of other people is considerably damaged… “Lips that lie are abhorrent to Yahweh” (Proverbs 12:22). (Bermuda 23 February 1962)

If you want to convince others of the value of a certain lifestyle, you will attain little or nothing if you yourself do not demonstrate your personal convictions by your actions. Such is the wisdom of the popular refrain, “Actions speak louder than words.” (Rome 1 November 1991)

These are passages of Maciel that cannot now be read with a straight face let alone serve as spiritual nourishment. Will Legionary novices, as they have in the past, continue to learn the charism from daily study of the many volumes of Cartas de Nuestro Padre? (Can they still call him “Nuestro Padre”?) Can we learn from a hypocrite to hate hypocrisy? By his own words, his impurity, lying, and hypocrisy rendered Maciel’s ministry fruitless and abhorrent to God. His own words refute the Legionary claim to recognize the good that can come even from a flawed instrument.. And if we must discard some of Maciel’s writings because they have become inconvenient, what is the criterion for choosing and keeping any of them?

Maciel’s defenders always cited Matthew 7.20. Father Kearns wrote in 2006 after the discipline: “Vindication has always come, because the Judge's instructions to the jury have always been the same: By their fruits you will know them.” Father Neuhaus had based his “moral certitude” of knowing Maciel’s innocence by the fruits of his professed orthodoxy and the Legion’s impressive vocational statistics. But the argument was always circular: it excluded a priori from consideration those who were damaged by their experience of the Legion and Regnum Christi and became critics, including those who lost their faith or nearly did because in the name of Christ they had been manipulated and lied to. The accusers were always themselves fruits of the tree, even though they were not believed.

Now that they, not Maciel, have been vindicated, Matthew 7.18 comes into focus: A good tree cannot bear bad fruit, nor can a bad tree bear good fruit. As Legionaries confront their past and face their future, it will not be easy for them to account for these words of the Lord.

... honesty would make a healthier attitude for Legionaries to adopt than Father Corcuera’s “regarding the person of our Father Founder, I cannot but recognize all the good I received through him.” If Legionaries continue to claim publicly that a sexual predator and liar led them to faith and vocation, we must wonder how authentically Catholic and Christian that faith and vocation ever was. Is their Jesus our Jesus?

Vows of Silence documentary overview

LC/RC Talking Points re: Maciel

EXLC Priest's blog, Third Journey

The audacity of the Legion. I had an actual member of RC tell me that she wasn't going to talk about what Maciel did because that was a sin. HUH? Whah?

If you are in LC or RC, I have three words to say to you:

GET OUT NOW!

Ash Wednesday & Lent

2009-02-25T10:39:00.003-05:00

I hope everyone, who celebrates Lent, will have a blessed Ash Wednesday and Lent. Here is an amazingly wonderful prayer that I found while in Adoration. It is in the January 2009 edition of the Magnificat. I typed it here because it is so wonderful I want everyone who doesn't know about (or like me, subscribe to) the Magnificat to be able to use it. My friend Sara and I are going to say this prayer each day of Lent. We thought it was a perfect prayer for Lent, since it has to do with conversion. ~Peace

Litany of Ongoing Conversion

Response: Lord, give me the grace of conversion.

Lord Jesus,

When I look at my life from the starting point of my own insufficiencies instead if from the fact of your compassion, grace, and love for me. R

When I would prefer to live by my own thoughts and my own understanding instead of by your Truth which alone can set me

free, R

When I would rather brood over what annoys me than to turn myself over to you who always invite me to come to you, R

When I obsess over self-absorption, complacency, and self-assertiveness, R

When I get dejected about my sin, not because it offends you, but because it prevents me from being able to take delight in myself, R

Whenever I live in a dualistic way, as if my faith and my “real life” are two separate things, R

When I am deceived into thinking my happiness depends on something in the future instead of what you give me in the present, R

When discouragement and shame make it hard for me to be faithful, R

When I become distraught over the evil I would commit if left to myself, forgetting that I do not live according to myself but that I live in you, R

When self-doubt and fear seem to have the last say, R

When I miss the point of my fragility, a gift you give me so that I will be prompted to rely on you, R

When I am inclined to interpret my problems as punishment and my miseries as being abandoned by God, R

When impenetrability takes over my life, making me resistant to your beauty and all the little ways you ordain to give yourself to me, R

When I get distracted, my emotions, my passions, my regrets, R

When I get duped into thinking I must fix myself up in order to have a relationship with you, forgetting that you come to me with your love just the way I am, R

When I treat my faith like some answer to be sought instead of as a loving Presence to be affirmed, R

When I get discouraged by chronic or recurring sins in my life, R

When I would attempt to earn your favor by my achievements, forgetting that I did not choose you, but it is you who chose me, R

When scandalized by my own selfishness and self-assertion, R

When the oppressive nihilism of life makes me ignore or reduce the desires of my heart that lead me to you, R

When independence or self-sufficiency make me resist the companionship with others through which you will to give me your friendship and tenderness, R

Whenever I treat my preconceptions like idols that drain my life of wonder and simplicity, R

When the evidence of all that is wrong with my life leads me to become paralyzed, indifferent, or lax, R

When I get preoccupied with all my self-justifications try to convince myself that I am lovable, R

When I would rather live my life in a safe and sheltered way instead of living my life as a risk, putting your will first in all things, R

When the daily inner rebellion makes me cynical and negative about what really matters most, R

When my misgivings keep me from receiving the fresh embrace of love you offer me every moment, R

~ Our Father…

Wake up and smell the coffee folks!

2009-02-19T20:43:00.003-05:00

This is probably the best piece I have read on the Fr. Maciel/Legionairies of Christ/Regnum Christi Movement that I have read so far. There is no escaping the real problem of staying with, or even keeping alive, this 'Movement'. Hey, that very word gets freaky after you say it enough. I got this link from my friend, Sara, who is a newly minted Regnum Christi member, who may be newly exiting the 'Movement' soon. First, she feels God has her where He wants her...to make a difference to those entrenched and need help sorting this mess out...my prayers are with her.

What frickin mess.

Peace,

The World Over Interview with Legionary Priests. Worth watching!

2009-02-12T23:36:00.008-05:00

After watching these men speak, not only does my heartbreak for them, but I actually feel much better about the future of all the wonderful God fearing folks in LC and RC. This is absolutely worth watching. And I couldn't agree more with Fr. Morris' statements that if we just let Christ show us the way, and follow His guidance, He will take all the pain and suffering and evil and bring about a greater good. God does have a perfect plan here. We have to pray for that plan to be brought to fruition and pray we don't get in His way.

Part 1

Part 2

Part 3

Part 4

Finally, here is today's blog post from Raymond Arroyo's Seen and Unseen addressing this very issue.

Peace~

Very, very funny SNL skits

2009-02-12T01:48:00.003-05:00

Oh if I could only close Pandora's Box.

2009-02-11T14:32:00.007-05:00

I have been reading, from all sorts of sources, about Fr. Maciel, and I may be changing my tune about LC/RC. It is absolutely filled with wonderful people,to be sure, but Maciel's deliberate leading of a double life suggests real evil and hunger for power which he used the Church and very faithful people to carry out. It is not enough to say, anymore, that he was a saintly man being persecuted. I was reading St. Paul today, 1 Corinthians. He said said some very tough things about immorality in general and went on to talk further about the condemnation one brings upon themselves taking the Eucharist unworthily. Remember, even Christ told us that the Devil parades as an Angel of Light. To all my friends in RC, be prepared for the coming storm. It's going to be bad.

Instead of sticking one's head in the sand, I suggest these various websites to really investigate further the practices of this 'movement's' heirarchy.

Fr. Berg's letter

Parsing Fr. Berg's Letter

Fr. Alvaro's Letter to RC

Something I Missed

Former Consecrated woman of RC

More on Maciel

Maciel, Saul, Judas

Proper Forgiveness

20 Signs of Trouble

ReGain

Finally, I will end with St.Paul. 1 Corinthians 6:15-20

15Do you not know that your bodies are members of Christ himself? Shall I then take the members of Christ and unite them with a prostitute? Never! 16Do you not know that he who unites himself with a prostitute is one with her in body? For it is said, "The two will become one flesh."^[b] 17But he who unites himself with the Lord is one with him in spirit.

18Flee from sexual immorality. All other sins a man commits are outside his body, but he who sins sexually sins against his own body. 19Do you not know that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit, who is in you, whom you have received from God? You are not your own; 20you were bought at a price. Therefore honor God with your body.

It is one thing to commit sin and confess and try to do better. We all do that. We have all screwed up. But how truly evil would it be to continue you sin in secrecy. Tell others to keep it secret, and continue to run an organization trying to combat the VERY sins you are willfully committing? To continue in that sin in secrecy, when you are head of an apostolate, and not remove yourself from power, is beyond scandal. Also remember, if you are Catholic, that we don't believe that a person's sins affect only them, but the whole church. Look at what Maciel's sin is doing to so many. What a travesty!!!

Someone said that LC priests should just become parish priests within their particular diocese and that LC should just be dissovled, as well as RC should be disbanded. I am thinking that may be the best way to go since Maciel had developed such a cult of personality and LC/RC are more synonymous with him than even Christ himself. My 2cents, after my research, which is still ongoing, is to get out of RC if you are in it, while you still can. Oh, and if you have a kid in one of their seminaries, get them out! If they really have a vocation to the priesthood or the religious life, they will find it at any of the other tried and true Orders.

I know this post may make some angry. However, it's only intent is to make one think.

Peace,

Should have won Best Album of the Year.

2009-02-09T00:03:00.003-05:00

Whoever came up with the idea of having a marching band play 15 STEP was a genius. It highlights Radiohead's brilliance. Wish I coulda been there to hear it for myself. I bet it was awesome.

Regnum Christi

2009-02-08T14:27:00.004-05:00

I just want to say how heartbroken I am for all my friends in Regnum Christi and for the priests of Legionaries of Christ. I am not a member, but have been involved with FAMILIA (which is an RC apostolate) and loved every second of it. I know this is going to be a tough time for all those involved in the movement. All I can say is don't throw the baby out with the bathwater. The bathwater being Fr. Maciel. The baby being all the good that has come from LC and RC. As Catholics our sin doesn't only affect us personally, but affects us communally. So, there will be pain and suffering for LC and RC as all the details come out and they are inevitably raked over the coals. However, the Deciever LOVES this kind of thing. He loves to set up a leader to fall bigtime and then scatter all the good work that leader may have done, in spite of his sins. We are all imperfect. Like Christ said, "Those among you without sin cast the first stone." This doesn't mean we turn a blind eye to the alleged double life of Fr. Maciel. However, if Christ's kingdom has been advanced and families have more peace and love in them, and life is held more sacred, then maybe, Regnum Christi should be able to continue...beaten and battered...but possibly more anchored in Christ and stronger for the road ahead.

I am a convert to Catholicism. I was called to the Church during the terrible sex-scandals. I was thinking."What? Why on earth now?" But the Church of Christ has to be stronger and more meaningful than the sinners it is comprised of. If we were all so wonderful and perfect, then why would we need Her in the first place.

Peace,

Support for Unschooling in the strangest places.

2009-02-08T13:54:00.000-05:00

I want to encourage all unschoolers, whatever their religious ilk, to read Called Out of Darkness by Anne Rice. It is her spiritual memoir. However, she spends alot of time on how she was educated and she feels very strongly that school was not the place that her education truly occurred. She referred to school, in the book, as a prison. She talks, at length, about how she was not a reader, and actually struggled with reading most of her life. However, she took in the most valuable information she ever received through the myriad sensous experiences in life: stained glass windows and statues at church, conversations with her mother, stories told by teachers and friends, poetry, art, music, films, radio shows etc...

As a Catholic convert, I picked up the book to read about her re-version to Catholicism. I also love her novels and was curious as to whether Called Out of Darkness would cover her writing history. The book doesn't disappoint on either of those counts. However, I was overwhelmingly surprised, and quite vindicated, to read that as famous and voluminous an author as she is, she was never really a reader, and when she finally did tackle reading novels, it came to her late. One doesn't need to be a reader to be a writer. I loved that she found school a waste of her precious time, and truly believes she learned little there. I really encourage all homeschoolers and especially unschoolers to read this book. It is quite illuminating on all sorts of levels.

Peace,

At long last she returns!

2009-01-21T14:52:00.002-05:00

Hi all my buddies out there. I have been very lengthily distracted by finding old friends on Facebook. It has been SOOOOO COOL getting back in touch with all the people I have come across. It has been really interesting how re-connecting with certain people can give one a new perspective on how things really were all those years ago, or even how we were all thinking similar or vastly different things.

The other big thing I noticed was how my memories of the past came sliding in to focus like an avalanche. All of a sudden people from other times and places came charging into my head and I felt I just HAD to track them down too. It made me realize how the different paths in our lives take us in such divergent directions, but all the while we never intended to lose touch, yet somehow did.

Oops, I gotta go pick up Ben. But I wanted to encourage any of my friends out here in blogland or yahoogroups to get on Facebook. It is sooo fun putting a name to a face.

Gotta run!

Peace

Weirdest Advent/Christmas season ever.

2008-12-20T15:08:00.003-05:00

Okay, anyone who knows me knows that I haven't blogged because I, like many other friends, am now addicted to facebook. However, I felt compelled to write and say that I am having the most emotionally numb Christmas season ever. I LOVE this time of year, normally, but I have been dealing with a depression that keeps dragging me to the brink of despair, since late August. I am working with a trained professional to help me through it, so don't worry.

It's just that I look forward to this time of year as it is usually really motivating for me. I get all sorts of stuff done, I am excited to go places, do things, hang out with people. Now, all I really want to do is hide under a rock. I am the kind of person who starts watching Christmas movies in November. I haven't watched one yet. I have listened to Elf while the kids watched it in the van. I saw about 10 minutes of both White Christmas and The Nativity Story, but walked away uninterested. You know, I could totally understand if I was like this every year, but I am SOOOOOO not.

I haven't even listened to any Christmas songs. I love Christmas music, and often have it playing in the house now, but this year...nope. Not once have I played anything Christmassy. I feel indifferent to the whole thing as if I am watching it from the outside. Everything seems entirely exhausting to me. I am used to feeling that way in the Summer, but not NOW! At the same time I am feeling antsy, restless and bored out of my mind. I have lots to do, laundry coming out of my ears, crap to be picked up. I am a total neat freak, but that aspect of me is gone, for how long, I don't know. I am doing bare bones housekeeping. I usually care so much about keeping a nice house, but now, I don't care. I hate not caring. I feel like I am not me, but I don't know where I went. Anyway, it's all weird, weird, weird.

Well, I am not looking for sympathy. Nope. There are people in the world, and some quite close to me, who are really suffering. I am just writing my stuff down to refer back to. Kind of keeping track of my wacky-ass moods. However, if you want to pray for some folks, pray for Bonnie Sager & family, and Michael Summerville & family, for health, rest and healing.

Thanks,

Too Funny and so true!

2008-12-13T13:35:00.003-05:00

And let me tell you, that up until about a year ago, I was a die hard PC user. But it is true that once you go Mac you never go back.

This says it all.

2008-12-02T12:18:00.002-05:00

Here's a picture I just found in a box full of pictures (my mom's idea of an photo album) of my mom, me and my brother, Jon. I am probably 20 or 21 here, I think. Do you see how I loved my mother. I am not sad here. I am just lovin' my mama. I loved snuggling into her for no reason at all other than to be close. I really miss her.

I'm off to vote for Saxby

2008-12-02T11:31:00.006-05:00

Here's Zell Miller (okay it's SNL's Will Forte, but still) explaining why he is voting for Saxby Chambliss. You know, I can't help but agree. And I say we start working, right now, on Peabody Tittlecud's bid for the presidency in 2012!

Me and Sara

2008-12-02T11:21:00.006-05:00

Here is a Photobooth (a Mac app) pic of Sara and me. Sara's blog is Those That Wonder. She has recently updated the look and has some cool new pictures as well. This was taken when she just 'dropped by' a couple of days before Thanksgiving. I LOVE IT WHEN PEOPLE DROP BY!!! I really do. I am totally into following things on a whim. I am the perpetual 'drop by-er' it was fun that it happened to me. Anyway, I love Sara. She is a great friend and we share our conversion to Catholicism together. She is also a homeschooler of 3 kids too. I am hoping to just drop by on her today as I will be in her section of Roswell, in a bit. I am bummed that she is moving farther away. It's just an extra 10-15 minutes north...but it was nice knowing she was just across town. However, I have seen this new house and it is just what she needs, more space. If there is a person in life who needs just a little spoiling it is Sara. I think she deserves this wonderful new place.

Peace,

No, I am not going to sleep...I am going shopping.

2008-11-27T23:33:00.004-05:00

Robert and I have decided to attend our first ever Black Friday event. I have never gone shopping on Black Friday. At least not that I can remember. However, I HAVE worked Black Fridays before, when I was much, much younger and working in record stores. Well, this year, because of the flagging economy stores and malls (we are going to the latter) are opening at 12:01AM Friday morning. So, Hunny and I are off to see all the "deal hounds" and make fun of all the sheeple. There isn't anything at the mall we want. (Okay, maybe I would like a Twilight t-shirt.) Everything we are getting for each other or the kids or friends is easier bought online than in a store. I am thinking of this as a kind of warped cultural experience.

So, off I go. The only thing luring me is free coffee. Free coffee and great deals (which I won't avail myself of) are what the mall is offering for folks to drag their tryptophan induced exhausted selves out at midnight.

Off we go....

P.S. I hope you all had a Happy Thanksgiving.

Great minds are the same game.

2008-11-25T21:50:00.001-05:00

My blog/facebook pal Wendy and I are the same game...who woulda thought.

You Are Boggle

You are an incredibly creative and resourceful person.
You're able to dig deep and think outside the box to get things done.
You are a non linear thinker. You don't like following directions
You draw your inspiration from the strangest places sometimes. You're constantly inspired.

What Board Game Are You?

Remember the 80's?

2008-11-24T12:59:00.003-05:00

This is me when I was in New York testing for a big deal modeling agency. I am 16 and it is 1982. Check out the New Wave hair!!

This is during the same time, different shoot, different day, different photographer (actually it was the guy who shot the Cosmopolitan covers at the time). Anyone else remember those Norma Kamali bathing suits?

What Twilight Character Am I?

2008-11-23T01:29:00.007-05:00

Okay so I took this quiz twice. The first time I took it as if I were 17 years old again. I remembered what I was like and answered the questions. This is what I got:

Take the Quiz and Share Your Results!
You are straightforward, tenacious, and beautiful, but unfortunately aware of it. You are attention loving, and people easily flock to you, but deep down you are mistrustful of people in general. You can be judgmental and thoughtless, but you love deeply and are extremely protective of those that you hold dear.

The second time I took it, I answered the way I think and feel about things now. This is what I got:

Take the Quiz and Share Your Results!
You are thoughtful and care very deeply for your family. A loving home is of great importance to you and you always try to make people feel welcome. Although you have a great capacity to love, you also have a great capacity to hurt, so at times you can be sensitive. You're firm when you need to be, but people trust your judgment and appreciate the kind way you always handle things.

Tivo the Dowg

2008-11-22T22:59:00.006-05:00

My brother was over today with his awesome new camera and took these great shots.

I'm on crackbook ur...I mean...facebook.

2008-11-22T18:03:00.001-05:00

You can find me at Rachel Moore Ross.

Twilight at Midnight

2008-11-20T16:48:00.007-05:00

I am counting the seconds until 12:01AM when I will get to see Twilight (just 7 hours away...woo hoo!) Yes, it may be pathetic to you, of my friends out there, with more intellectual pursuits. However, these books got me back in touch with my inner 20 year old. Something I needed desperately. So, I will try to comport my self because of my age and not scream with all the young girls...though let's face it....I will be screaming on the inside. (FYI, If I were 17 that guy up there would be plastered all over my bedroom walls.)

Speaking of my 20's

2008-11-18T16:13:00.004-05:00

Here I am at the eternal age of 29. I think this is my favorite picture of my wedding. I loved all the kids around me and playing with my dress. They had all been really dressed up and sometime during the reception decided to get more comfortable (how I wish I could have joined them!). My Andy is the one in the middle with the white t-shirt and blue shorts. If anyone is wondering why my 6 year old is at my one and only wedding, well click My Baby Is Eighteen on my blog here, and you will know why. It was a perfect day, even though I was in Florida (don't like Florida), everyone I loved was there and love was everywhere. I wish life could be, forever, the way it was that day.

Below is my 2nd favorite picture. I love the expression on Andrew's face.

Fighting the urge to run

2008-11-17T17:43:00.005-05:00

...and I don't mean jogging. I mean run away kinda run. I have been praying and doing everything to stifle this urge to flee my current life. What is pathetic is that there is really nothing wrong with my current life. Okay, well, I *do* have a child who suffers from mental illness, which has in turn, made me a complete whack job, but everything else...to others looking in....would seem just peachy.

I, literally, have to get away from everyone and breathe really deeply, like Lamaze, until the overwhelming impulse to bolt passes. It scares me that I even feel this way. My conscience is working overtime to talk me out of insanity. What I wouldn't give to be in my early twenties again. I had my life stretched out in front of me, like a blank slate. Now, I have a past behind me with so many mistakes that it's like a bad essay a high school Lit teacher has hashed through with a red pen.

I am NOT having a pity party for myself. There isn't anything to pity, really. I am not looking for sympathy either. I just feel so stagnantly still, so pointless, it's as if moving would distract me and keep me on a trajectory forward so that I couldn't stay still and think...of all the mistakes, wasted time, fear, missed opportunities, and forks in the road where I so should have turned in the opposite direction of where I did turn.

I feel desperate to be alone, but I can't ever really get that alone time.

(insert expletive here _ _ _ _!)

This FRIDAY!!....AAACK! (Be still my heart)

2008-11-16T13:02:00.002-05:00

13 Years

2008-11-11T22:21:00.005-05:00

Me and Hunny Bunny at a friend's wedding. We are so cute, huh?

Today is my, and my Hunny's, 13th Wedding Anniversary. It is also the 5th Anniversary of the convalidation of our marriage by the Catholic Church and the 5th Anniversary of my conversion to the Catholic Church. All in all a good day in history for the Ross family.

To my Hunny.

You are all that AND a bag of chips!

I love you!

BSCB (only you know what that means. LOL)

I've completely HAD IT!

2008-11-09T19:11:00.002-05:00

My husband seems to forget the dog is a dog. And when my husband decided to leave a hamburger on a coffee table it is a mystery to him as to why the FIVE MONTH OLD dog will eat what he has left there. Then my Ben and Autumn are continually mystified why a dog would accidentally connect his teeth to their flesh when they reach down and get RIGHT IN HIS FACE to pet him, WHILE THEY ARE EATING DINNER (and smell like food). Tivo is not food aggressive. I can stick my hand in his food dish and swish it around while he is eating. When he has a rawhide or bone I will often go and slowly put my hands on it while it's in his mouth and hold it while he chews it, asking him in a soothing voice if it's yummy. (No, I don't expect him to answer.) Why is it that these other members of my family act like dummies and assume that a young animal is going to be anything other than a young animal. Tivo is a flipping puppy...not a Rhodes Scholar!

Now, if Tivo does become food aggressive I will break that habit in a snap. I also don't like it when he tries to be dominant over Autumn (because she is the littlest in the family and he's figured that out). So, I just went on screaming rant at my family because I have HAD IT with their expecting the dog to be anything other than what he is.

It's probably all the personification of animals that Disney movies had done. It's screwed up generations of people into believing dogs talk and toys come to life. Oy Vay!

Take That! Bill Maher (nine minutes of sheer brilliance!)

2008-11-09T16:17:00.001-05:00

WHAT HE SAID!!!

Help! My husband won't turn off Bill Maher

2008-11-09T13:38:00.003-05:00

Okay, I am just going to say it. There is one person I truly loathe to the very core of my being. That person is Bill Maher. I won't even tell you the ways I would like to torture him and see him suffer. These feelings bother me because this the way a lot of Liberals feel about Conservatives. I mean, look at what the put Sarah Palin through. Just let's say, if I came across Maher in a dark alley, only one of us would emerge: ME

Why do I bring this up? Because my husband ACTUALLY tivo'd Real Time with Bill Maher. I asked why on earth he would do that? He told me it was because he gets riled up, and he's so freaked out that Obama will be milking us dry soon, that he needed fuel to stay on top of his political game.

I am telling you, I am sitting here listening to Maher and his ranting and I can't stop screaming obscenities at the television. See, now I am all riled up with nowhere to take this seething anger! I am am going to Mass in 3 hours! CRAP!

Another blog!!!

2008-11-07T17:43:00.003-05:00

I know I told everyone about my blog, UFA, which is for unschoolers in Atlanta. However, that is just an info site for events. This new blog of mine is specifically about unschooling. That is it. I may double post some stuff, but this blog is really about me and anything I am into. However, I really wanted a place to dig deep into my ever growing unschooling transformation. Any hoo...feel free to visit Return To Shornhill.

A special thanks to Leonie...and she knows why.

No camera, can't forget

2008-11-07T13:53:00.000-05:00

I took Autumn and our dog, Tivo, to the park today, after it rained. Autumn told me she wanted to play at the park while it was wet. She has done this before but must have forgotten. I didn't remind her. I just said, "OK." SO off we went. Sure enough she had a great time sliding, or should I say shooting, down the slides. They are the new tubular slides so you don't see the kid til they are almost out. She literally shot out like a human canon ball. It was pretty funny. The sky was still gray when the rain stopped and the trees were just dazzlingly hued...definitely the height of Fall here in Atlanta. When she was soaked through from the slides she decided to investigate the very rocky rain overflow canal. It is usually dry, especially in 'drought Georgia', but it was wet...mostly big puddles but not running like a stream. Well, Autumn can't resist mud...ever! BTW, neither can Tivo. The two of them set to digging like you wouldn't believe. They were the cutest, MUDDIEST, creatures you ever saw. They would even switch holes and keep digging. When they were done we went to the actual creek and dragged Tivo through it to get the mud off. Siberian Huskies clean up really well. He is dry now and completely beautiful. You would never know he looked like 'Swamp Thing' this afternoon.

What I am bummed about is that I didn't have my camera. There were some award winning photos to be had, especially when they were both digging. Autumn was just filled with glee. My heart overflows with happiness when I get to see her like that. It was really cool.

Unschooling In the NY Times

2008-11-07T13:52:00.000-05:00

Okay, so I pretty much loathe the New York Times and most newspapers in general. However, I do so love it when cover unschoolers. Gotta love the title: The Anti-Schoolers.

Welcome to the U.S.S.A.

2008-11-04T23:45:00.003-05:00

Well, now that Obama is President-Elect, I just want to officially welcome everyone to the future United Socialist States of America. One tip, get your cash and put it in your mattress, because they'll be coming for it at the bank!

However, I think it *is* very cool that America has elected her first black President. However, I would rather have had the totally awesome Alan Keyes (who also happens to be black) become president. I voted for Alan Keyes in the primaries back in 2000. I hope he runs again.

I do want to say that now that we have our first black president, I don't want to hear one more gripe of "I am oppressed because I am a minority." Spare me, actually spare us all, were are not buying it anymore. Obama just said it himself...I can hear him on the news...saying something to the effect that he is proof that anyone can attain their dreams in America. Obama is now going through his litany of "Yes We Can!" So it's official...everyone can now shut the hell up.

UGH!

Unschooling Friends of Atlanta

2008-11-04T21:49:00.004-05:00

My new project (this was a long time coming): Unschooling Friends of Atlanta . The above photo, taken near our house last Winter, is the metaphorical image for UFA as we are traveling the unschooling road with friends. Cool, eh?

First music video from Twilight soundtrack! Woo Hoo!

2008-11-03T17:03:00.002-05:00

Paramore - New Music - More Music Videos

I don't really think one way or the other about Paramore, but I love the video and movie clips!

Why the 'Left' will always get it wrong...

2008-11-02T12:36:00.008-05:00

...because they say they believe in peace and tolerance but they proceed from the false assumption that abortion is perfectly fine. If a person doesn't start from the vantage point that all human life is precious, then the rest of that person's arguments for non-violence, no war, tolerance and peace crumble to dust. However, Mother Theresa said it best:

"If we accept that a mother can kill even her own child, how can we tell other people to not kill each other? Any country that accepts abortion is not teaching its people to love, but to use any violence to get what they want. This is why the greatest destroyer of love and peace is abortion."

National Prayer Breakfast Speech Against Abortion (1994)- Blessed Mother Teresa

Please vote, this Tuesday, for those who support the Culture of Life.

Peace,

Happy Birthday, Mom.

2008-11-01T14:47:00.003-04:00

If my sweet mom were alive, today would be her birthday, and she would be 62. Yup, she was a young mom, because I am 42. Do you know how cool it was growing up with someone who was 19 and half years older than you? It was very cool. My dad is going to be 63 the day after Christmas. I loved having young parents. My mom was my age when I had Andrew. I am so glad he had almost 11 years with her. They totally adored one another and he looks so much like her it is amazing.

And, per my tradition, which I started on Nov. 1st the year after Mom died, I have started decorating inside the house for Christmas, in memory of how much Mom loved Christmas. She really loved Jesus so I imagine she is pretty happy getting to be with Him all the time now.

Happy Birthday in Heaven, my sweet Mom!

Love always!

Your Rachie

Happy All Saints Day everyone!

For those undecided, or thinking that voting is pointless, read the following

2008-10-30T22:12:00.002-04:00

This is from my husband's blog and it is so very well said and so very important. We can't have one party (either of them) in total control of everything: house, senate and white house, especially the Democrats because of the the Freedom of Choice Act and the Fairness Doctrine neither of which is free or fair.

Peace,

School is ruining my life

2008-10-30T21:36:00.005-04:00

I hate school and I hate schooling. I am speaking here of school from prek-12th grade. So much of it is complete bullshit. Let me repeat that...BULLSHIT...big stinky hot piles of bull poo poo! (College is not compulsory. You either choose it or you don't. Andrew is loving college.) You know when people say to homeschoolers (which one rarely hears anymore), "What about your child's socialization?" Well, to be honest, THAT is about the only value I see to schools. I spoke with Andrew recently about high school and asked him for an honest assessment since he's graduated. He told me the only stuff he really got out of high school are 1) friends and the bands he formed 2) the video-broadcasting dept 3) Fencing. Two out of the 3 things were mostly social. The video stuff was what he always wanted to do. He said he would have been happy to go and learn about the video stuff, play drums and guitar all day, and occasionally Fence... if he had the choice. I asked him if he missed it at all. He said, "No."

I think it would be super cool if there were a place for homeschooled kids to hang out with a variety of friends of different ages, everyday, for a few hours. But not the way school does it, nor even the way many homeschoolers do it. I mean totally unstructured getting together just to hang kinda time. Even homeschoolers often only get together under the auspices of 'doing something schooly' UGH!!! JUST STOP IT ALREADY!!! Why do homeschoolers copy schoolers AT ALL!?! See that is where school has it all wrong. The socialization in schools, for the most part, is artificial. It takes place under the watchful eyes of 'authorities' and kids can't do what they are interested in. I would love to see a cool place with a big video game room with a bunch of geeky kids playing Halo 3 or Gears of War. Then there could be another room where kids were watching movies, one for art, one for reading, one for chatting and board games, a lab for experiments and on and on. Outside there were would be kids exploring the woods and some playing athletic games. A place like this could be staffed by the parents, each lending his or her special talents to helping kids learn and do whatever it is they are interested in doing whether that is accounting skills, knitting a sweater, designing a computer game, building a website, or baking a cake. How cool would that be? I know it's been done. Summerhill is a good example. So are Sudbury Valley Schools. They are Unschooling schools, but I am thinking more of a learning enrichment center.

So, Ben is going to his school just when the 'fun stuff' happens. He is attending the latter half of the day for a social skills class, lunch, and a fun elective (alternates between science experiments and indoor/outdoor athletics). This is a private school that caters to special kids. But they are still freaked out that Ben isn't being 'educated'. I think he's getting plenty of an education just hanging with these kids and developing friendships while realizing he can be away from the family (esp. ME) and not DIE. But all the hoops I have to jump through are just making me loathe any school: public or private they are all a pain in my ass! I thought, mistakenly, that when I started paying for a school that they would be more willing to work with me in the best interests of Ben. Okay, the private school is much better than the public school he went to (and I am NOT blaming teachers, I am BLAMING the administrators and the state/federal gov't for the public school's inflexibility) but the private school still has an agenda and we had to twist some arms to get what we have now. Let me be clear in saying that the private school administrators have been fabulously accommodating, but they still want it to go 'their way' when all is said and done.

Anyway, school has been ruining my life for years now. I haven't needed school for Ben. I have needed what I proposed above for Ben. If I had the money I would open such a 'place' myself. I think a relative would have to die and leave me money first, so I am not counting on opening any such 'place' anytime soon.

Leonie just sent me a copy of a book that only confirms all of the feelings I have had about schooling, and unschooling, and has me pining for a simpler life. Especially because of all the shit we have had to wade through these last years regarding Ben and school. I am just so tired of it all. At first things look like they will work, people make promises they can't keep, Ben falls apart and our family life explodes. I hate it and I just want it to stop!!! Yes, Ben can drive me absolutely out of my skull. However, school is driving him nuts so I am even more crazy. The stress is just insane. I am sick to death of all the frickin outside interference into our lives. I bet I could have gotten a homeschooled teenager to come and play video games with Ben a couple times a week for alot cheaper than his darn school costs. (Yes, I am getting about 2/3rd the tuition back in State vouchers, but not until the end of the school year will I recoup it all. So, we had to pay the whole 18K out of pocket up front.) I know I could have paid a teenager less and there would be far more peace in our home.

Man, I am an idiot. Will I ever learn what God has been trying to teach me for so long....to let Go and Trust. And to think I have the AUDACITY to get pissed at my kids for not "listening to me" when I tell them to do something a hundred times. How flipping long has God been telling me to stop trusting 'so called experts with my kids and start trusting my kids and myself. I am the best expert on my kids. I think God's been at this with me for 19 years. How wonderfully patient he is with me and how horribly impatient I am with my kids. Jeez, I really suck.

UGH!!!!

How I did it. (Lost weight, that is)

2008-10-29T23:31:00.006-04:00

So, a few of my Cyberpals have asked how I lost the weight...wanting specifics. Before I tell you how I did it, I need to tell you why I did it. A person can't lose weight for anyone other than themselves. It will NEVER work until you really want it. And I mean REALLY WANT IT. For me, it was my size 14 jeans getting so tight that I knew I was going to have to get 16's. I just couldn't do it. I knew I wasn't physically the person I was physically becoming. I was almost 42 and I realized I wanted to look more like I did when I was 24 and that the only thing standing in the way of that reality was me, my appetite, and my pathetic lack of activity. I had made excuses ever since my mom had died and my weight started climbing. I realized, that after 7 years, I had run out of excuses (the one's I told myself) and it was time to 'just do it'.

In one sentence 'how I did it' can be summed up like this: I KEPT MY BODY(METABOLISM) GUESSING.

Now to break down that one sentence.

I did reduce my caloric intake and cycled my calories.

I reduced my calories using this calculator at Free Dieting. At the bottom of the calculator one can click '7 Day Calorie Zig Zag' and that will keep one's weekly calories the same but altering the cals daily to keep one's metabolism revved up. A body gets used to the amount of calories a person feeds it when dieting. So, a steady does of 1400 cals, after about a month or so, slows a metabolism down. A body doesn't want to lose weight. It feels like it is starving. So, it will go into starvation mode. In real life people eat different amounts of calories daily. Calorie reduction done the same way helps keep a body out of starvation mode and feeds one's metabolism to keep it burning efficiently.

I did track all my food & exercise using Spark People. I can't say enough about how awesome, helpful, and instrumental Spark was for me losing the weight I wanted to. I really don't think I could have done it without everything I learned and all the support I got from Spark. It's free and better than any dieting site a person could pay for. I know, I joined Weight Watchers for a month and their online site can't touch Spark People. I do, however, love Weight Watchers' cookbooks and motivational books.

I did eat (and still do) Low fat, Low Protein, High Complex Carbs, High Fiber foods about 80% of the time and 20% was the so- called 'bad' stuff. I am not a vegetarian. I did not cut ANYTHING out of my diet. I just found that, for me, that combo worked best. I ate mostly veggies, fruits, whole wheat breads, I used cheeses as condiments in lieu of slathering them on everything. I switched to light butter. I learned to make favorite dishes low in calories by simple substitutions. If I screwed up during the week and went a little nuts eating something I shouldn't I just jumped back in the saddle and kept on going. I did NOT let a screw up give me license to just gorge on everything in sight because I'd blown it. That kind of thinking is LETHAL to weight loss. If you go overboard on some food, just make the next day a lighter day and maybe walk an extra mile. It will all work out in the end...kwim?

I did not drink 8 glasses of water a day (see article here). I drank when I was thirsty. I did switch from regular Coke to caffeine free diet coke. (I like being thin, so if I go nuts from the artificial sweetener, at least I will be thin and nuts....but wait....I *AM* already nuts....so never mind.) I drank my coffee with cream in it too.

I did not eat breakfast. Okay, this is strange. I know everyone says to eat breakfast, but when I do, I am hungry all day. When I don't my appetite is more stable. What is even weirder is that breakfast food is my favorite food. I secretly would love to be a short order cook. I love eggs, bacon, waffles, pancakes, ham, scones, muffins, bowls of fresh fruit etc...So, I would make lighter versions of breakfast foods for dinner, on occasion, and just have my breakfast at night. I did switch from my beloved real maple syrup to the sugar free kind. Or I will use all fruit jam on pancakes. (My kids LOVE breakfast for dinner.)

I did realize there are foods that I can't resist and will overeat. Oreos and homemade chocolate chip cookies are good examples. Therefore, I didn't buy them or make them. They were INO...it's not an option. I have other foods that are INO (though not so much now that I am at goal. Now it's more AIM... anything in moderation.) I also learned the best calorie bargains. So, if I wanted fries and a burger, I knew the best size at the best place for the lowest calories.

I did (and still do) walk, but I varied it, so my body couldn't get used to what I was doing. This worked really well too. I didn't read about it anywhere, though. Every book and website says to do exercise consistently. Well, I was consistent with the fact that I made sure I exercised, but intensity and length of time varied according to my schedule. Also, I never did weight training. I lift and carry stuff all day...including a 40lb/5 mos old Siberian Husky. I didn't have the time or money. All my money is being spent on food or the kids. So, I walked. I wanted to run, but I can't. Why? I wet my pants. I have total bladder control EXCEPT for jumping, sneezing, and RUNNING. So, I settled on walking. Some days I walked 5 or 6 miles really fast. Other days I walk 1.5 miles fast or maybe leisurely. The fact is that I walked (aerobic exercise) almost everyday. Then there were times I couldn't walk for a few days and when I finally got back out there I busted my butt on a long walk. That was always the way I broke through a plateu...(that and upping my cals a bit).

I did have a weigh in day which was also my pig-out (free) day. I picked Friday's to weigh in. I always weighed in on Friday morning, totally naked, after peeing. Sorry to be gross but I wanted the most empty true weight I could get. That way I got a double bonus. The first being seeing the scale go down (and I was happy even to see a 4 oz shift) and the second to know I could go out to dinner with Robert and/or friends and not worry about food. Fridays gave me something to look forward to that made the sacrifices of the previous 6 days worth it. The extra calories stoked my metabolism, and mentally I stopped myself from sabotage because I knew once a week I would get my fun food day. Also, I knew I had until the next Friday to adjust my calories and/or exercise to keep the weight loss going. Also, even if the scale didn't move one week, I still had my free day. Pretty much everytime I was stuck at a weight I would lose a pound or two the following week.

I did (and still do) choose to live much healthier. I made losing weight about a permanent healthy lifestyle change, in diet and exercise, instead of just a way to get skinny and then go back to my old bad habits.

At goal I started weighing myself daily. It helps me to keep inside my "weight box" and helps me to see the effect of how pigging out at a big party, or just having a salad and soup day, has on my weight. It also helps me to know when I need to eat lighter or if I am low enough in my weight box to feel free to eat what I want on a given day.

At goal I started tracking my calories less. I barely track my calories now, online or on paper. I was OCD about it while losing the weight. What was good about that was that I learned the caloric value of pretty much everything I eat. So, now I keep a loose tally in my head. I have been able to increase my calories, due to the calorie cycling, so that I can maintain my 33lb loss while eating close to 2200 cals a day. That is darn good! (Let's face it, it means more yummy goodies!) I have been maintaining between 135 and 138 for a month now. A few days ago, after pigging out big time at a parish party, I weighed 138.6 lbs. Today, after some extra walking and watching my eating I am back to 135.6

At goal I realized I will ALWAYS have to be aware of my weight and activity levels. A big mistake

that so many make, who lose weight and then regain it, is to get to one's goal and then abandon all the good habits one formed during the time one was losing the weight.

Last, but not least, PRAYER. I was tempted many times to just give in and give up. God helped me continue to fight the fight for my health. Yeah God!!!

I think that's about it.

Peace,

Another look alike

2008-10-29T13:48:00.008-04:00

Here's my Ben at 12 (I was 13 below), note the resemblance? Spooky, huh? We even had the same haircut. Yikes! Autumn, however, has my personality but Robert's family's features.

Here's Tivo, Autumn, me, and Ben.

Hair Horror Stories

2008-10-28T19:18:00.006-04:00

Okay, I only have 2 real stories. The first is when my mom's sisters would take me every Summer (in Southampton, NY) to get my hair cut (OFF) because they thought I was sooooo cute with short hair. Well, that all came to a screeching halt the Summer I was 12 and after getting my hair cut (OFF) my dad took me for ice cream and the guy behind the counter said, "And what does your son want?" I WAS SUPPOSED TO BE THE SON!!! I was a late developer okay!!! As you can see in the pic below (at 13 years old), I would have been a very pretty boy.
Proof that I have always had the same haircut (except for the shearing my aunts did to me) behold my baby bob below:

Oh, I almost forgot the 2nd horror story. I had had my hair highlighted. It looked really great. So, when it was time to get it redone I went and my stylist was gone. So, they stuck me with a new guy who left it on too long and the top layer of my head was blonde and underneath was brown...lovely! That was about 7 years ago...never had my hair highlighted since.

Peace,

A Muse B Side...FURY

2008-10-24T12:42:00.002-04:00

Why another Muse video? Well, because it's been a long time and there flippin' awesome, that's why.

It's Clark Kent...no...it's Tivo!

2008-10-24T00:16:00.005-04:00

He's just adorable, isn't he? He is wearing Ben's new glasses and we couldn't decide if both Ben and Tivo (in the glasses) looked like Clark Kent, Dr. Who, or Austin Powers. Thinking about it, I could see Tivo saying, "Do I make you randy?" "Yeah, Baby, Yeah!"

Below is a picture of Tivo about 1-2 weeks old. And now at 18wks. He is huge!

Peace,

Happy Birthday Andrew!

2008-10-23T17:34:00.005-04:00

I can't believe you are 19 YEARS old. It's seems like moments ago you were just 19 months old. . Each day you become an even more amazing human being. I am so honored and proud that God picked me to be your mom. I will love you forever and always, my sweet boy.

Mom

Thank you, God, for giving me such a wonderful child. He is a continued gift and I am so grateful he's mine.

Rachel

Urgent prayers needed!

2008-10-17T23:38:00.003-04:00

Please pray for Michael Summerville. He is only 21 months old and was revived from drowning ( Oct 15th) but is currently in an induced coma. Here is his Caring Bridge website: LoveMichael. Pray for him and put him on your church's prayer chain too, if you have one. Oh, they are a Catholic family so all you Catholics out there, offer a Mass (0r more) for little Michael.

Thanks!

Rachel

Finally! The official Quantum of Solace music video.

2008-10-10T21:10:00.001-04:00

Jack White and Alicia Keys being AWESOME!

Cool unschooling site

2008-10-10T20:58:00.002-04:00

I think this site originates from England. It is called The Parenting Pit. I found it at the Motheringdotcom forum. So far, I really like it.

8 Years

2008-10-08T11:16:00.005-04:00

(Mom & Me 1967)
Today it's been 8 years without
your voice,
your face,
your hugs,
your kisses,
your sense of humor,
your laughter,
your friendship,
your counsel,
your mothering,
your love,
You!
Today it's been 8 years without YOU, Mom!
I miss
our conversations,
crying in your arms.
your consolation,
snuggling up to you at 34, as if I were only 4,
how much you loved the kids
and how much they loved you,
the kids growing up without you,
me getting older without you,
hearing your laugh or just your voice,
I miss YOU, Mom.
God, how I miss you, Mom.
My heart aches like it wasn't 8 years ago, but 8 seconds ago
that you left us, me.
You were too young. The world lost an angel.
The kids lost their Mima,
Dad lost his wife,
Jon lost his mom,
And so did I.
I'll miss you always.
I love you.

Move over McCain & Obama

2008-10-07T21:10:00.001-04:00

Your result for The Presidential Capacity Test...

Presidential Success!

68% Values, 100% Charisma and 76% Judgment!

"In America, anyone can become president. That's one of the risks you take." -Adlai E. Stevenson

Congratulations! You encapsulate everything that a successful candidate should encapsulate.

Crack open the whiskey and break out the celebratory cigar. You are destined for success in the Presidential Campaign. You exude confidence and charisma. You exhibit true leadership abilities and demonstrate the ability to make snap judgement calls if the need arises. You are well-respected for your strong values and your steadfast stance on honesty and loyalty.

The USA needs a President like you. You are one of a select few deserving of the influence and recognition commanded by the Presidential title. Congrats!

Other possibilities:

Take The Presidential Capacity Test at HelloQuizzy

Expelliarmus

2008-10-07T13:12:00.004-04:00

Well, Ben didn't have a wand ejected from his hand but he was ejected from his private school today. According to them, and I have to admit they really tried, Ben is beyond their scope of support.

He is a homeschooler...for now. I really don't know what we are going to do....PRAYERS PLEASE!

Oh....and I forgot to mention that unless we can work something out with the school, we may be out 17K and during this crappy economy that is not something we can handle. Please pray, too, that the school is merciful and refunds the prorated amount of Ben's tuition back to us.

THANK YOU!

Stole this from Rob's blog because it is so darn funny!

2008-10-05T22:13:00.003-04:00

My new favorite site is

2008-10-05T22:06:00.000-04:00

Despair.com. Here are a couple of favorites that speak directly to what has been going on in my life lately. :-)

I knew it!

2008-10-05T21:59:00.007-04:00

Drinking water alone does not aid weight loss

Drinking eight glasses of water a day does not help dieters keep weight off, scientists have found.

By Jessica Salter
Last Updated: 10:56AM BST 17 Sep 2008

Instead those wishing to lose weight should try eating more foods which contain water, like fruit, vegetables, rice and soups.

In a study the weight and waistlines of more than 1,000 young women were compared with the amount of water they consumed each day from both food and drink.

Women who ate more water-rich food tended to have a slightly smaller waist size and lower body mass index, meaning they were healthier weights for their heights.

The study showed that drinking water alone had no effect on the women's weights, the science journal Nutrition reported.

"These studies suggest that when water is consumed as an integral component of a food, it promotes satiety and decreases subsequent dietary intake, thus possibly working to prevent obesity," researchers from the University of Tokyo said.

They said it could be due to the fact that foods that contain water are also high in fibre and so make people feel more full after eating them.

Earlier studies had suggested that people needed to drink eight glasses of water a day to stay healthy, keep slim and maintain good skin.

But the American scientists said there was no evidence to support this and most people get all the fluids they need from food and other drinks like tea and coffee.

article from Telegragh.co.uk

(I knew this just because this whole time I have been losing weight, I have always felt guilty that I wasn't drinking enough water. Yet, here I am 33 pounds thinner and I never got my 8 glasses in a day. I love coffee, and caffeine free diet coke, milk and yes I have water, but maybe 2 big glasses. LIke the article says though, I love soup, fruit, veggies...lots of high fiber high water content foods.)

How could I forget

2008-10-02T23:00:00.003-04:00

to thank My Hunny, most of all, for loving me, sticking by me, praying for me, and getting me through (even though I did not want his help) my recent crash. I had sunk to a place where I couldn't show him I love him (and I am not talking about *that*) I mean just a kiss goodbye on his way to work or a kiss goodnight, or an I love you at the end of a phone call. This may not seem like much to some, but I am a hugely affectionate person. I hug and kiss my friends and tell them I love them, and am even more loving to my kids and husband. Our little family is huge on saying, "I love you" to each other. We can even get Andrew to say it on occasion. :-) Heck, I kiss and hug my cats and dog. I love loving people, so when that all goes away, you know something is VERY WRONG! So, My Hunny, with enough crap going on in his life as sole provider and father, had to deal with not having his usually supportive wife through it all. Like I said, I just wanted to disappear. I didn't want to care about anyone or anything and I didn't want anyone to care about me. But, in keeping with the sacramentality of our marriage, he loved me through a dark time when I was difficult to love (or like) and, despite my protests to intervening, still talked to Rick (Dr.C) and got him to convince me to take the Lamictal and ( along with Robert) go and see him to work through all the stuff in my head.

So, My sweet Hunny. I love you. Thank you for loving me. I don't feel like I deserve it, but I figure God knows better than I do, so he must love me alot to have given me you.

Forever,

Better living through chemistry & a concert

2008-10-02T00:25:00.005-04:00

The Lamictal has literally changed my life in the last 72 hours. I owe my life (and I am not kidding) to Rick and his amazing knowledge and judicious use of pyschopharmacology.

I am feeling like the person I feel I really am. Which is a very good thing. Thank you, from the bottom of my heart, to all of my blogging and IRL friends who have been praying for me. I love you all for it.

Tonight, Robert, Andrew and I went to see The Raconteurs. They are an amazing band fronted by White Stripes' singer/guitarist Jack White. The show was AMAZING! We were 15 feet away from the stage. It was so incredibly awesome! Jack White is one of favorite guitarists. I was blown away by how totally fabulous he and the whole band was. Andrew took pics and video and I will get them on my blog ASAP.

Peace,

Full blown Radical Unschooling

2008-09-30T13:09:00.004-04:00

Suffice it to say, due to the nature of my cyclic downturn, Tumnal and I are just hanging...watching movies and I am reading Henry and Mudge to her. I am going to take her on a bunch of field trips...assuming I can find gas...and just get us out. The other pressure I was dealing with was my anxiety over her lack of reading. She can read...slowly. I can read and comprehend at the speed of light, so this drives me nuts. I used to be so trusing of kids' ability to learn. I did it fairly effortlessly with Andrew. Ben screwed me though, because he learns sooooo dfferently because he thinks sooooo differently. Anyway, I told Robert she has to go to a real school because I am not a 'homeschool teacher' and it's killing me to try and be that. We either trust her and keep her home or we don't and send her to school, but I am not going to fight for what I believe(d) in because I don't kow what that is anymore. I compare myself to so many other moms their kids and families and I feel like such a failure. I am trying to get my head around the fact that *I* am not like other moms and my family is not like other families. We have to do what works for us and keeps the peace, or I could very easily go AWOL.

Laying it out for all to see

2008-09-30T12:18:00.007-04:00

Okay, I am back. I don't know why I can throw around so easily that my son has Bipolar (BP 1) to be exact...and that I have such a hard to admitting that I have it too (BP 2...which means I don't lose touch with reality...at least not yet). What happened? I got a dog, I was euphoric and on cloud nine. Initially, Ben took to the Cottage School and Autumn and I were doing fun stuff. Then, crap started happening with Ben, the puppy became more of an issue due to the demands of housetraining etc...(I was cleaning alot of pee....luckily we have hardwood floors), then Ben started freaking out more and ran away from school and the police were called. I was not getting any sleep (and I am still not)which is lethal to me, and I started slipping away. All that energy just dropped away and I wanted to disappear and get away. I didn't feel like I loved anyone...ANYONE....mostly me. (I am still kind of there...but trying like Hell to fight my way back). Dr. C (Rick) has added a new med to me. I ususally just do with an antidepressant, but they don't work for me that way...the Prozac is more for my overwhelming anxiety (jeez....you wonder where Ben gets it from????). So, now I am on a mood stabilizer called Lamictal. I have only been on it for a couple of days and Rick has called a 'Team Meeting" (me, Robert & him) because he and Robert went out to dinner last night (yes, we are friends, not just patients) and tho they usually don't talk shop he could tell by Robert's face that something was up (me....or rather not up but down). So, Rick is worried . He told Robert he saw it coming, tho. A few weeks ago at our last appointment I was "On". So on that he saw the crash coming. Robert sarcastically said, "Thanks for the heads up! You could of warned me." (This is what Robert told me last night when he came home from their dinner).

I have a BP 2 dad and a BP1 kid but I figured I was just a QuADD (queen of Adhd) with a serious anxiety disorder, but crap, when I look back at my life it is plain as frickin' day. I was a super high energy kid, very precocious very early. Even though I didn't lose my virginity til I was 2 weeks shy of 20, I was hyper aware of my sexuality and boys. I could stay up for hours and never slept as a baby...according to my mom, and just like Ben, when I did sleep I could never wake up and would sleep the day away. I was and still am the quintessential night owl. I was never anywhere on time and still am not, I have no concept of time. I, like Ben, was scared to death that my Mom was going to die. I hated leaving her. I didn't move out until I was 29 year old. When I heard sirens out the window at my highschool I would be interiorly terrified that they were headed toward her and she was trapped and burning to death in a fire....or anything else horrible. When she died 8 years ago that fear of her death got replaced by fears for my kids. Yesterday, I sobbed out on the deck so desperately missing my mom, who died October 8th 2000. Today, when Robert and I came home from dropping Ben off at school I was so overwhelmed with anxiety about having to take care of the dog, the cats, Autumn, the laundry etc... that I really wanted to jump out of the car. I suddenly felt so sympathetic to Ben when he ran from school last week . God, he drives me crazy, but it's because he is so like I was. I just was less impulsive, though, even as a kid. I didn't deal so much with depression then. That hit really hard when I got that horrible eczema that covered my arms and hands and was excruciatingly painful for 5 FULL YEARS. Then, after Ben , I got full blown PPD and when Ben was 5 months old was planning on divorcing Robert for no other reason than I thought he didn't deserve me. I remember being so unhappy and NOTHING, NOTHING would make it better. Then it lifted. I could go on and on about all the things that happened. The unbelievable obsessive thoughts of my kids dying that played like unstoppable tapes in my head all during my pregnancy with Autumn that had me sobbing and begging God to make them stop in the middle of the night. Then Mom's death and Dad's going completely off the deep end, my car accident and the insomnia and constant pain. And I was alway SO angry...ready to rage at a moments notice. Then these last 4 Summers and now this Fall when I am "up and on" everything is great or at least manageable and then CRASH! Plus, everytime I head down I go through what I call my 'atheist' phase. But, I still believe in God, I just want nothing to do with Him.

I can't explain, like I said before, where I am now. I so don't want to be me. I so don't want to do anything, to go anywhere, to see or talk to anyone. I just want to sleep forever. That is how I feel. This is a cyclical thing and should go away. I am just holding on by my fingertips waiting for it to pass. Hopefully, the meds will help too.

More than anything I don't want people to pray for me. I feel like a whiny baby. I know I am not terminally unique and that everyone has shit going on in their lives and mine shouldn't take any precedence at all. Robert tells me he wakes up thinking of me and goes to sleep thinking of me. I think of no one. I think that I just want to go back to sleep...that I want everything to stop. That I want to run away...far away...but I can't escape me. I worry about what the hell this is doing to my kids and my husband, having a mom(wife) who at once so irritable, then so self absorbed, then so loving, then so insulting, then screaming and yelling, then withdrawn. WTF!?!?!?!?! And I can't seem to stop myself. God help them all. I feel like I have f*cked up so much stuff in my life and I have no idea where to begin to change it.

Okay, so that is where I am. Intellectually, I get that it is stupid and unnecessary. But, if you could feel what I feel and hear my inner thoughts, which I have no way of escaping, and that no matter what you intellectually knew you couldn't act on or feel, because your brain JUST wouldn't let you, you would understand where I am.

Peace,

Later Dudes,

2008-09-28T23:45:00.004-04:00

Hey all my peeps out there. Just wanted to say goodbye. I think I am going to take a break from blogging and it could be permanent. Life is just sucking rocks and nothing I could write would be remotely edifying for myself or any of the other 6 (maybe) people who read this blog.

Maybe someday, when I am not being sucked down in the rip tide of life anymore, and have finally made my way to shore will I be back to write.

Til then, keep up with Ben's progress at my husband's blog: Templars Tavern.

New York Times article on Bipolar Kids

2008-09-27T15:43:00.008-04:00

The following article from the NYTimes is an amazing article and peek into our lives. Except for the sexual stuff which Ben does not have (thank you GOD!) so much else is right on the money. He is not violent like he was, since the lithium....but, alas, he used to kick living crap out of me (just like the boy, James in the following article) and once, I gave him a bloody nose, something I can't seem to forgive myself for. Our whole family relates too well with the following parents. My prayers are with them...I know how alone they can feel. Welcome to my world.......

September 14, 2008
The Bipolar Puzzle

By JENNIFER EGAN
When Claire, a pixie-faced 6-year-old in a school uniform, heard her older brother, James, enter the family’s Manhattan apartment, she shut her bedroom door and began barricading it so swiftly and methodically that at first I didn’t understand what she was doing. She slid a basket of toys in front of the closed door, then added a wagon and a stroller laden with dolls. She hugged a small stuffed Pegasus to her chest. “Pega always protects me,” she said softly. “Pega, guard the door.”

James, then 10, had been given a diagnosis of bipolar disorder two years earlier. He was attending a therapeutic day school in another borough and riding more than an hour each way on a school bus, so he came home after Claire. Until James’s arrival that April afternoon, Claire was showing me sketches she had drawn of her Uglydolls and chatting about the Web site JibJab, where she likes to watch goofy videos. At the sound of James’s footsteps outside her bedroom door, she flattened herself behind the barricade. There was a sharp knock. After a few seconds, James’s angry, wounded voice barked, “Forget it,” and the steps retreated.

“If it’s my brother, I don’t open it,” Claire said. “I don’t care if I’m being mean. . . . I never trust him. James always jumps out and scares me. He surprises me in a bad way.”

I left Claire’s bedroom and found James with his mother, Mary, in their spacious living room, which has a sidelong view of the Hudson River. James is a fair, athletic-looking boy with a commanding voice and a restless, edgy gait. He began reading aloud a story he wrote at school called “The Mystery of My Little Sister.” It involved James discovering Claire almost dead, rescuing her and forming a detective agency to track down her assailant. He read haltingly, often interrupting himself. When his mother asked a question, the roil of frustration that nearly always seethes just under James’s surface, even when he is happy, sloshed over.

“If you listened on the first page, it says it!” he scolded her, then collapsed hopelessly beside the coffee table. “You don’t get anything. Now I lost my place. Forget it. I give up.” He crossed his arms on the table and rested his head in them. Mary waited quietly in her chair. Sure enough, a minute or two later James began reading us a list he had concocted of 50 ways to get rich. The next time his mother spoke, he bellowed: “I wasn’t talking to you! I’m not reading it now!” He threw the paper down and stalked out of the room.

The baby-sitter arrived, a 27-year-old preschool teacher whom Mary hired to come in a few hours each week and help maintain harmony when both her children were home. It wasn’t easy. There was a basic rhythmic pattern to the afternoon: James reached out, craving attention and engagement, then stormed away in roaring frustration only to return, penitent and eager to connect, cuddling and hanging on to his mother in a way unusual for a boy his age.

At one point Claire appeared in the next room, and James hurled a ball at her, missing. Claire shrieked as if she’d been hit, screaming, “What did you do that for?”

“Wow, I’m scared,” James said. “I’m scared, right, Claire?” He threw the ball at her again, then asked, “Want to have family time?”

“No,” Claire hollered. “I want James to get away from me. Get away!”

James made a series of loud, taunting sounds, which induced more hysterical cries from Claire. “James, you’re provoking,” Mary said evenly. “Claire, you’re overreacting.”

Claire rode out of the room in her wagon. James sat with his stockinged feet in his mother’s lap and played his Nintendo DS, though it rarely held his attention for more than a few minutes.

“The therapist says that Claire is in crisis,” Mary told me, referring to a social worker the family sees twice each week. “James is feeling better, James is feeling happier, so Claire, who has always been easy, is letting it all out now.”

James has never been easy. Like many children whose emotional problems are being diagnosed as bipolar disorder, his main symptoms are aggression and explosive rage (known in clinical parlance as “irritability”), and those traits have been visible in James from the time he was a toddler. Fifteen years ago his condition would probably not have been called bipolar disorder, and some doctors might hesitate to diagnose it in him even now, preferring other labels that more directly address James’s rage and aggression: Oppositional Defiant Disorder (O.D.D.) or Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (A.D.H.D.) — both of which have been applied to James as well. But since the mid-1990s, a revolution has occurred in the field of child psychiatry, and a mental illness characterized by episodes of mania and depression (bipolar disorder used to be called “manic depression”), which once was believed not to exist before late adolescence, is now being ascribed rather freely to children with mood problems, sometimes at very young ages.

The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (the current edition is referred to as D.S.M.-IV) describes bipolar disorder as a condition whose average age of onset is 20, but virtually all the leaders in the field now say they believe it exists in children too. What they don’t agree on is what, exactly, characterizes the disease in kids, or how prevalent it is; some call it rare, while others say it is common. Many clinicians say the illness looks significantly different in children than in adults, but the question of how it differs, or what diagnostic terms like “grandiosity,” “elevated mood” or “flight of ideas” (all potential symptoms of adult bipolar disorder) even mean when you’re talking about kids, leaves room for interpretation. For example, it’s normal for children to pretend that they are superheroes, or believe that they can run faster than cars, whereas in an adult, these convictions would be signs of grandiosity. Equally unclear is whether a child who is identified as having a bipolar disorder will grow up to be a bipolar adult. Work on the D.S.M.-V is under way, and discussions have begun on how to address the issue of bipolar children.

As Ellen Leibenluft, who runs the pediatric bipolar-research program at the National Institute of Mental Health, told me, “There definitely will be — and needs to be — more description of what bipolar disorder looks like in children, how one diagnoses it and some of the challenges.”

According to Mary, James was excessively cranky and active from babyhood (except where otherwise noted, the names of patients and their families used in this story are middle names). “By 7:30 every morning, I’d be in the playground with him,” she said. “If it was over 20 degrees I was out the door, because if he was inside, he would rage.” Still, James seemed at first to thrive in preschool. “I said: ‘O.K., this is my problem, not his problem. This is my parenting skills, my lack of discipline, my lack of structure.’ However, when I would pick him up from school he would scream and cry and rant and rage, sometimes remove his clothes, it would take me half an hour to get him out of the vestibule. I’d have to literally tie him in the stroller. He was 3. People were absolutely horrified.”

When James was 4 and Claire was a newborn, his pre-school contacted Mary in the fall and told her that her son seemed hyperactive and aggressive. After three days of testing, a developmental pediatrician diagnosed his condition as Oppositional Defiant Disorder, and prescribed Zoloft, an antidepressant. “We refused to give a 4 1/2-year-old Zoloft,” Mary said. They limped through the rest of the year, but in order for James to remain at the school for another year, they had to promise to hire a “shadow” — someone to be with James full time in the classroom — at a cost of $20,000 a year. Mary and her husband are affluent enough to afford this (her husband, Frank, has his own business; Mary hasn’t worked since James was born); otherwise, James would have had to leave the school.

Meanwhile, life at home was devolving into a nightmare. “James used to wake up every morning violently angry,” Mary said. “I used to wake up at 4:30 and heat his milk in his sippy cup so that when he woke up at 5:00 it would be exactly the right temperature. If it was too hot or too cold, he would take one sip from the cup, hurl it across the room and rage so loudly that it would wake Claire up, so that at three minutes after 5:00, I would be crying, Claire would be crying and my husband would be crying.”

She and her husband took James to a pediatric psychopharmacologist, who prescribed Risperdal, one of a new generation of antipsychotic drugs that have become popular for treating children with rage and aggression because it can blunt their anger and calm them down. These so-called atypical antipsychotics are less likely to cause abnormal movements and muscle stiffness than the earlier antipsychotics, but they can still prompt enormous weight gain and put children at risk for diabetes. Since James was underweight and oblivious to food, Mary and her husband were willing to take the risk.

“So we give him the Risperdal drops before bed, and he wakes up the next morning and he says: ‘Good morning, Mommy. I’m hungry. Could I have something to eat?’ I wake my husband and I say: ‘James is different. The medication is working.’ That day at noon, the Risperdal wore off, and he became angry, miserable, mean, frightening — everything he was before.”

But even with Risperdal and a shadow, James struggled in his second year of pre-K; with his anger under control, his attention problems became more visible. “He could not stay on tasks,” Mary said. “He couldn’t stick with anything. He’d go to the drawing table and make one scribble. . . . He was hopping around.” James’s condition was diagnosed as Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder, a problem that is said to afflict between 3 and 7 percent of American schoolchildren. Normally A.D.H.D. is treated with stimulants like Ritalin, which can temporarily improve focus, but the two stimulants his doctor tried made James nasty and angrier, and he couldn’t stay on them. (Note: Ben can't tolerate stimulants, they put him in a continously angry state. We tried him on 3 different kinds, because he was first diagnosed with ADHD and Anxiety at 6...the Bipolar came after his first psychotic epsiode at 7, due to the anti-depressants and stimulants he was taking at the time. He was taking Paxil when he tried to slit his own throat just before his 8th birthday.)In first grade he moved to a school for children with special learning needs, but by second grade he was having trouble even there. “He would cry every morning, and cry and cry and cry,” Mary said. “I now realize that that was depression.”

Home life was almost unbearable. “I couldn’t bring them to a playground together, because if he got behind Claire on the slide, he would push her down. If she walked by, he put out his leg to trip her. If they were watching TV and he became overstimulated, he would kick and punch her. . . . There’s never been a dinner hour; he’d push her plate. He didn’t like the way she was chewing. He’d rage. We never had any family meals. No family trips. Ever.”

As often happens with children on psychotropic drugs, James’s behavior began to “break through” the medication, requiring more and eventually different combinations of drugs to contain it. Along with the Risperdal, he eventually went on Depakote, one of several antiseizure drugs that are also used as mood stabilizers. Depakote was ultimately replaced with Lamictal, another antiseizure drug, and the Risperdal gave way to Abilify, another antipsychotic.

In spring of third grade, Mary was walking James and Claire home from James’s school when he demanded a lottery ticket. She refused to buy him one. “He started to scream and yell and rant and rave on a busy corner. We were crossing the street and the light was changing. Coming down 75th Street I saw this big white Hummer. James said to me as we were crossing the street, ‘If you won’t buy me a lottery ticket, I don’t want to live.’ He stood in the middle of the street and he faced the Hummer down. And the Hummer pulls over and the guy gets out and starts screaming.” At the psychiatrist’s office the next day, “James is speaking really fast and he’s mounting my leg like he’s in sexual overdrive,” Mary recalled. Pressured speech and hypersexuality are symptoms of mania. Shortly thereafter, when James was 8, his condition was diagnosed as bipolar disorder.

Later on the April afternoon I spent in their apartment, Claire was on the family computer visiting her favorite Web site, JibJab, when James came over and stood beside her. “Can I start it over, please?” he said.

“That’s nice asking, James,” Mary said. Claire replayed the video, and the children laughed, watching it together. A few minutes later, Claire came to her mother on the couch and put her arms around Mary’s neck. James followed, draping himself across his mother’s legs. Mary mentioned that she was concerned about some of the language she’d just heard on the video and mused aloud over whether to adjust the Internet filter to block JibJab out. “Mommy, please keep that one,” Claire implored. “That’s the only one James and I watch.” When Mary relented, the children cheered, seizing each other’s hands in a rare show of unity. A moment later, Claire, still giggling, said, “Ow.” James had pushed or hurt her somehow. “Ow, ow!” she cried, in real pain now.

“That hurts her, James,” Mary said.

“Get away,” Claire screamed. “Now!”

The children began to roar at each other. Mary took charge: “Don’t hit. Let’s separate our bodies.” Then, almost with surprise, she said, “We were having a nice moment.”

Last fall, James started fifth grade at a school designed to accommodate emotional as well as learning issues. It has a contract with the New York City Department of Education, which means that city children attend free as long as the D.O.E. deems them in need of its services. The first parent conference, last fall, was sobering for Mary and her husband; the combination of A.D.H.D. and anger was making it hard for James to function even in this new school. “He can’t start, he can’t stop,” she paraphrased. “He can’t sit in his seat. He can’t stop interrupting. He’s constantly provoking his classmates. He’s basically barely teachable. . . . It was like someone punched me in the side of the jaw.” Mary went to James’s psychiatrist for help. “I thought I was finally going to walk away with Ritalin,” she said. “Instead, we walked out of that office with lithium.”

Lithium is one of the oldest and most reliable mood stabilizers, but it’s a serious and potentially toxic drug, requiring regular blood draws to make sure that it isn’t becoming too concentrated. It can have unpleasant side effects: tremors, weight gain, acne and thyroid problems in the short term; kidney damage in the long run. But Mary and her husband felt they had little choice. And the lithium, which James took along with his other medication, helped. James settled down in his new school and began to learn, and even to make friends. He was happier. At which point Claire, perhaps in a delayed reaction to trauma dating back to when she was small, became hysterically intolerant of her brother. “The latest edict from the therapist is that Claire’s allowed to take her food and go in the TV room and eat by herself,” Mary said. “And now she’s eating three meals a day in there.”

James’s psychiatrist was planning to raise his lithium dose until he was fully stable, and then to try adding a stimulant to help with his A.D.H.D., so he could concentrate better in school. Mary’s hopes were riding heavily on this plan; lately, James’s psychiatrist had been floating the idea of a residential school for James as a possible solution to his learning issues and conflicts with Claire. Mary and her husband badly wanted to keep him at home.

“I used to cry five times a day, and now maybe I only cry once or twice,” she told me, her usual upbeat practicality briefly giving way to emotion. “So it’s better, you know? It’s better now that I don’t pick him up at school, and he doesn’t rage at me in front of all the other parents. He can rage when he bursts in the door, so no one sees how awful it is. It’s like a dirty little secret. It’s like having a husband who beats you, only it’s a kid. It’s your own.”

A study last fall measured a fortyfold increase in the number of doctor visits between 1994 and 2003 by children and adolescents said to have bipolar disorder, and the number has likely risen further. Most doctors I spoke with found the “fortyfold increase” misleading, since the number of bipolar kids at the beginning of the study was virtually zero and by the end of the study amounted to fewer than 7 percent of all mental-health disorders identified in children. Many also said that because bipolar children are often severely ill, they can proportionately account for more doctors’ visits than children with other psychiatric complaints, like A.D.H.D. or Anxiety Disorder. Still, nearly every clinician I spoke to said that bipolar illness is being overdiagnosed in kids. In Leibenluft’s studies at the National Institute of Mental Health, only 20 percent of children identified with bipolar disorder are found to meet the strict criteria for the disease. Breck Borcherding, a pediatric psychiatrist in private practice in the Washington area, said: “Every time one of my kids goes into the hospital, they come out with a bipolar diagnosis. It’s very frustrating.”

There are many possible reasons for the sudden frenzy of pediatric bipolar diagnoses. First, a critical shortage of child psychiatrists, especially in rural areas, means that many children are being seen by adult psychiatrists or — more often — by family doctors, who may lack expertise in child psychiatry. Managed care usually pays for a single, brief psychiatric evaluation (and it strictly limits the number of therapy appointments a year) — not nearly enough time, many say, to accurately diagnose a condition in a mentally ill child.

Then there is “The Bipolar Child,” a successful book published by the psychiatrist Demitri Papolos and his wife, Janice, in 1999, and referred to by more than one parent I spoke to as a “bible.” The Papoloses’ description of pediatric bipolar disorder was amassed partly by using responses to an online questionnaire filled out by hundreds of parents on an electronic mailing list, who said they believed their children were bipolar (and who often had strong family histories of the disease). The Papoloses’ diagnostic criteria include some idiosyncratic items — a severe craving for carbohydrates, for example — that are found nowhere in D.S.M.-IV. Nevertheless, many parents walk into doctors’ offices having already read “The Bipolar Child” and concluded that their children are bipolar. Because doctors rely heavily on parental reports when diagnosing disorders in children, these “prediagnoses” may have an impact on the outcome.

And of course, there are pressures and blandishments from the pharmaceutical industry, which stands to profit mightily from the expensive drugs — often used in combination — that are prescribed for bipolar illness, despite the fact that very few of these drugs have been approved for use in children.

For all the possible overdiagnosing of pediatric bipolar disorder, however, many in the field also say that a lot of truly bipolar children who could benefit from therapy are falling through the cracks. This is a critical issue; studies clearly show that the longer bipolar disorder goes untreated, the worse a person’s long-term prognosis. Between 10 and 15 percent of those suffering from bipolar disorder end up committing suicide.

Some studies suggest that bipolar disorder may actually be on the rise among young people. One intriguing hypothesis involves a genetic phenomenon known as “anticipation,” in which genes become more concentrated over generations, bringing a stronger form and earlier onset of an illness with each successive generation. Another theory is “assortative mating,” in which a more mobile and fluid society, like ours, enables the coupling of people whose mutual attraction might be partly due to a shared genetic disposition to something like bipolar disorder, thus concentrating the genetic load in their offspring.

Given these uncertainties, how does a doctor go about diagnosing bipolar disorder in a child? To understand that process, I spent several days at the Child and Adolescent Bipolar Services Clinic at the Western Psychiatric Institute and Clinic of the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center, the largest clinic in America devoted specifically to treating and studying children with bipolar disorder. It has about 260 active patients, most of them from Pennsylvania, eastern Ohio and West Virginia, and it evaluates between one and five new cases each week. It accepts managed care, meaning it operates at a loss, which is absorbed by the medical center. (Many child psychiatrists in private practice, who charge as much as $400 an hour in New York, accept no insurance; families who can afford to lay out these sums must collect what they can from their insurers after the fact.)

The three evaluations I watched consisted of what are called semistructured interviews of parents and children, separately and together, by an experienced nurse or social worker, to collect the child’s psychiatric history and determine which symptoms of mania or depression are present (parents are prescreened by phone to rule out cases that are clearly not bipolar, a process that eliminates roughly 50 percent of callers). Parents and child then have a lengthy meeting with either Boris Birmaher, who founded the clinic 10 years ago, David Axelson, its current director, or one of two other psychiatrists.

The first two evaluations I saw were of teenagers, a boy and a girl; the doctors felt they seemed depressed, not bipolar, and directed them to a clinic in the same building that caters to depressed teenagers. The third evaluation was of a 7-year-old boy named Joe (his first name): a burly, sweet-faced kid with long eyelashes and dark curls. He appeared quite depressed, leaning his head on the armrest of his chair and answering yes or no in a mournful monotone. His mother and grandmother described a child who sounded a lot like James — restless and overactive from birth, impulsive, requiring constant attention, but above all, wildly, explosively angry. His mother recalled tantrums lasting hours; a recent one, which took place in Wal-Mart when she refused to buy him a video game, resulted in her having to sit on Joe in an aisle until store employees could help her wrestle him into the car. Like James’s, Joe’s condition was diagnosed as O.D.D. and A.D.H.D. and he had taken various medications since age 4, including stimulants and antipsychotics, none of which really helped. A recent rampage at school concluded with a 20-minute physical fight with a police officer; Joe was suspended, and if his mother hadn’t been able to get there and calm him down, he probably would have landed in a psychiatric hospital.

His mother, who had Joe at 19 and is single, working the overnight shift at a group home for the mentally disabled, spoke through a frequent rattling cough. “He tells me he hates me every day,” she said. “He says he hates himself, and he wants to die. I don’t enjoy being around him. When I’m restraining him, he kicks me, punches me and spits in my face, bites me. Sometimes I don’t ride in the car with him, because I just don’t know what he’s going to do: if he’s gonna open the door, if he’s gonna reach around and punch me, grab the wheel.”

After several hours of interviews, Axelson told Joe’s mother and grandmother: “What is clear is that Joe is having mood difficulties. Whether that’s related to a depressive disorder or a bipolar disorder is hard to tell. I know that’s frustrating.”

What Axelson wasn’t seeing in Joe was clear evidence of mania, defined in D.S.M.-IV as a distinct period of an abnormally elevated (meaning euphoric) or irritable mood, accompanied by at least three out of seven other symptoms (four symptoms, if the mood is irritable rather than elevated). Those seven symptoms are captured with the mnemonic Digfast: distractibility, indiscretion (“excessive involvement in pleasurable activities” in D.S.M.), grandiosity, flight of ideas, activity increase, sleep deficit (“decreased need for sleep”) and talkativeness (“pressured speech”).

“I’m not seeing clear patterns of distinct periods of being accelerated and talking and moving and thinking with an intensity of mood that just overflows and then goes back to his usual state,” Axelson said. “The intense anger outbursts can happen in kids with bipolar disorder, but they can happen with other mood disorders, or with A.D.H.D. and severe oppositional behavior. He’s only 7 years old. This could be the very early signs of bipolar, and it may not be until two, three, four, five years from now that we’d have a clear idea. That doesn’t mean that he doesn’t need intensive treatment — he really does.” (Joe is currently in treatment at the Western Psychiatric Institute and Clinic, but the right medication has proved elusive.)

It’s possible that a different doctor might have identified Joe as bipolar. In an influential 1995 paper that began the paradigm shift toward bipolar disorder within child psychiatry, Janet Wozniak — the director of the pediatric bipolar-disorder program at Massachusetts General Hospital and co-author of “Is Your Child Bipolar?” — working with the chief of pediatric psychopharmacology, Joseph Biederman, revealed that 16 percent of the children who came to the clinic met the D.S.M. criteria for mania. This was shocking news; it was widely believed until then that mania in children was extremely rare. Wozniak reported that the children’s mania most often took the form of an irritable mood rather than an elevated one, and that the mood was often chronic: the norm, rather than the exception. All but one of the manic children in the study also suffered from A.D.H.D.

Wozniak told me that the discovery of mania in so many of the kids she was treating came as a shock to her too. “It was like I opened up my eyes: Oh, my goodness, these children have bipolar disorder,” she said. “And I realized that what I’d been treating them for hadn’t been working well. I was often treating them for bad A.D.H.D., using different stimulant medicines or higher doses. I was often treating them for their depression and not getting anywhere. In those days, the teaching was that we had a group of medicines that could be used for ‘aggression’ in children. What’s interesting is that these were the anti-manic agents; they were lithium and antiseizure medicines.” In other words, many of the children in Wozniak’s clinic went unrecognized as bipolar, but they were inadvertently being treated for bipolar.

The tricky part, diagnostically, is that out of those seven symptoms, three — distractibility, activity increase and talkativeness — are also symptoms of A.D.H.D. Which means that a severely irritable child who has A.D.H.D. could be, theoretically, only one symptom away from a bipolar diagnosis.

Does it even matter whether or not we call Joe or James bipolar, since the drugs used to treat irritable, aggressive children are often the same as those used for bipolar disorder? Critics of the more widespread use of a pediatric bipolar diagnosis say it does. For one thing, being bipolar makes certain medications extremely risky to use; stimulants can intensify a manic episode, and antidepressants like Zoloft or Prozac can make bipolar patients not just manic but psychotic, even suicidal. (NOTE: We can testify to this fact. Ben can't tolerate ANY anti-depressants as they cause psychosis and suicidal tendencies every time we've tried them and we have tried a bunch.) In fact, some clinicians say that a number of young patients who become suicidal while on antidepressants — occasioning the “black box” warning currently mandated for drugs like Prozac — in fact suffer from undiagnosed bipolar disorder.

Gabrielle Carlson, the director of child and adolescent psychiatry at the Stony Brook University School of Medicine, has studied childhood mania for many years and says bipolar disorder is uncommon in children under 10, revealing itself in the same discrete episodes of mania and depression that we see in bipolar adults — not in chronic irritability. According to Carlson, a large group of aggressive and explosive children, who in fact are “diagnostically homeless,” are being relabeled as bipolar, which is a development she says is unhelpful both to the children and the field. “Diagnostically it ends up being a very important consideration of what the kid really has,” she told me. “If he really has A.D.H.D. and it’s not mania, then you give him medication for his A.D.H.D. You also give him behavior modification.” One patient she saw that day, who was thought to have bipolar disorder, actually had autism, she said. “If you say, ‘Hey, his problem is bipolar disorder,’ then you’re not going to treat his language disorder, you’re not going to give the social-skills treatment he needs,” she said. Problematic conditions in a child’s home life are also less likely to be addressed if the child’s behavioral issues are attributed to bipolar disorder, Carlson said. “Many people, when they hear bipolar disorder, their brain slams shut.”

Afternoons at the Pittsburgh bipolar clinic are the time when ongoing patients come in for shorter appointments to assess the impact of their medication regimes on their mood and check for side effects. On my visit in March, Axelson’s last appointment of the day was with a pair of bipolar siblings: Phia, 9, and Lucas, 6, both of whom he had been treating for the last year and a half. They were a dynamic and appealing pair, if slightly overcharged; there was constant climbing and prowling in the small office. Phia, who wore a pink sweater, black cords and red wool-lined Crocs, had begun taking lithium just a few weeks before, after two different antipsychotic drugs produced an uncomfortable muscular sensation in her legs called akathesia. Now that she was on lithium and a lower dose of one of the antipsychotics, the akathesia had stopped, and both Phia (a family nickname) and her mother, Marie, agreed she was doing well. On the other hand, Lucas, a vigorous, bullet-headed boy who that day wore camouflage pants, was behaving oddly, Marie said. “Throughout the course of a day, there’s a shift from a whole lot of bravado to limp,” she told Axelson.

“Tell me what Lucas is like at the bravado times,” he said.

“We went to church, and what he had strong feelings about wearing was a glittery lamé vest on top of a striped shirt and a top hat.”

Axelson leaned toward Lucas in amazement. “A top hat!” he said. “Do you normally wear a top hat to church?”

The nurse found a pretext to take the children out of the room so that Axelson could question Marie further. “Is he talking differently when he’s in the top-hat kind of mood?”

“There’s no inhibition,” she said. “He’ll just run up to people on the street or in stores, go right up and start talking to them. He’ll say, ‘Hi,’ and tell them something that went on in his life in the morning; it could be his breakfast, it could be his Webkin. They may not even be paying attention to him, but he’ll persist.”

“Is he physically moving around more when he’s in that kind of mood?” Axelson asked.

“Yes, like touching the stove top, touching everything. But in a reckless way, where things are getting pushed off the counter and dropping and breaking. He thinks that he doesn’t need to wear a shirt outside. You obviously tell him, ‘You have to wear a coat, it’s 32 degrees,’ and he’ll have a fit. I end up carrying him upstairs to try to get him in a timeout to calm him, and I’ll hold him. And after that, it’s like the bottom drops. He gets limp. He’ll say: ‘I’m sad. It’s the kind of sad that isn’t for a reason.’ Or he’ll say, ‘Things aren’t right.’ ”

Axelson decided to increase Lucas’s Abilify dose but warned Marie that he wouldn’t be able to go much higher. If the manic symptoms persisted, they might need to consider lithium — not ideal for a child so young and something both Axelson and Marie said they hoped to avoid.

Later I asked Axelson what struck him as manic about the behavior Marie described in Lucas. “What would mania look like in a 6-year-old?” he asked. “They can’t have sex with strangers, max out their credit card or start new business ventures. But he can dress outlandishly, talk to strangers.” Lucas’s behavior also harked back to some of his premedication symptoms, which included grabbing strangers’ cellphones out of their pockets and trying to touch the guns of police officers. He’d slathered shaving cream on the furniture and drawn all over the walls. Then there were days when Marie couldn’t get him off the couch. He had difficulty connecting to other children; after two years of preschool he had never been invited on a play date.

Axelson’s diagnoses of Lucas’s and Phia’s disorders were abetted by the fact that Marie and her husband are both bipolar, too. There is clear evidence that the disorder runs in families; a recent study shows that children with even one bipolar parent are 13 times as likely to develop the disease. Marie, an artist, learned she was bipolar only recently, having been treated for many years for depression. Once her children were successfully in treatment, she told me, she was able to perceive how mentally uncomfortable she herself was. A psychiatrist, looking carefully at her history, determined that in her 20s, which Marie had thought were simply “awash in bad judgment,” she actually suffered from bouts of mania. The new diagnosis had prompted different medications, which she said had helped her enormously.

Marie’s history illustrates a trend toward a more inclusive definition of adult bipolar illness; little noted in the study that reported on the fortyfold increase in child and adolescent bipolar doctor visits was the fact that the number of adult visits had roughly doubled during the same period. This increase jibes with a recent population survey estimating the prevalence of bipolar disorder among American adults, long thought to be around 1 percent, at slightly more than 2 percent. The survey also projected that another 2.4 percent of Americans have a “subthreshold” form of bipolar disorder — less severe but still impairing. The author of the study, Kathleen Merikangas, a senior investigator at the Intramural Research Program of the National Institute of Mental Health, says that she does not feel that the number of bipolar adults is rising but that greater public awareness and diagnostic inclusiveness account for the jump. Still, that comes to nearly 10 million American adults with some form of bipolar disorder, only a small percentage of whom, the study found, were receiving appropriate treatment.

It was Phia whom Axelson first identified with bipolar disorder, and he described her case as “pretty clear cut.” Like James, Phia was overstimulated almost from birth. Marie couldn’t take her for a walk without Phia becoming hysterical in response to the sights and sounds they encountered. Marie couldn’t wear colored shirts; Phia couldn’t attend a play group. At times Phia seemed bizarrely overconfident for a toddler, pursuing men and flirting with them, showing no sign of fear or remorse when her grandfather, an imposing man, yelled at her. Marie began taking her daughter to a psychologist when she was 4. “I felt like I was doing something wrong,” she told me. Despite troubles with reading and an anxious habit of rubbing the soles of her feet against the bottoms of her shoes until blisters formed, Phia was able to function in public school. But from the moment she stepped off the school bus at the end of the day, it was bedlam.

“Everything set her off,” Marie recalled. “That wasn’t the snack that she wanted. She doesn’t want a snack. She’d want to be pushed on the swing, and it would be too high, or not enough, so I would push her a little bit more. There would be this screaming fit, kicking her legs, flailing on the swing. ‘I hate this, that’s not what I wanted!’ I’d be like, That’s it. We’re done on the swings. Then that would precipitate a fit.” It was impossible to keep Phia in a timeout; she would burst from her room laughing. Marie attached a lock to the outside of her door and cleared the room of things that might hurt her daughter as she raged.

Phia also had “silly” moods that quickly spiraled out of control, resulting in injuries: she broke her collarbone while diving over her bed in a silly fit; flailing, she would smack her arms inadvertently against the wall; she fell down the stairs repeatedly; she cracked her teeth on the edge of a swimming pool. Play dates were impossible; once, upset that a friend was about to leave, Phia told the girl that her father was beating her. She tormented Lucas; screaming at him, pushing and kicking him, once whipping him with a wand so hard that she raised welts through his shirt. And Phia herself was in agony. “She was asking for medicine for at least a year or so,” Marie said. “ ‘Isn’t there anything they can give me to help me calm down?’ ”

Much of Phia’s extreme behavior has eased with medication. When I visited the family at their two-story suburban home on the last day of March, a couple of weeks after their appointment with Axelson, there was an atmosphere of renewal: Marie was painting the kitchen cupboards; her husband (an engineer who works long hours; we never met) had replastered some damaged walls. Nowadays Phia has a best friend and goes to birthday parties. With her mind calmer, she told me, she loves to read and is fond of the American Girl mystery series. She and Lucas are lucky in that they seem not to have any other disorders, or “comorbidities,” like A.D.H.D., on top of their bipolar disorder. Both are doing well in public school.

I sat with Marie and Phia at a round outdoor table facing the backyard. Lucas was using a remote control to send an electric car roaring over the grass. Marie, a calm, gentle woman who chooses her words with care, told me that Lucas had improved on his higher Abilify dose. But Phia — surprisingly — had struggled since the appointment I was present for. After a blood draw, Axelson increased her lithium dose.

“My feelings weren’t really going that well,” Phia told me when I asked her about the previous weekend. “It was like all of a sudden, horribleish. Unexplainable mad, sad horrible feelings inside.” She blamed the several days of standardized tests she recently took at school, saying they made her anxious.

When Phia went inside, Marie told me she offered, the previous week, to take her daughter to the hospital. “She becomes fitful,” she said. “You have to physically hold her down, and that’s getting harder and harder to do. She’ll bang her head against the wall, she’ll bite herself. I brought up the hospital because she said: ‘I can’t take it anymore. I don’t want to be me. I don’t want to feel anymore. Why aren’t you doing anything about this?’ ”

As he played with his car, Lucas kept looking up, waiting for a little boy who lives around the block to appear on the other side of the wire fence that separates his yard from Lucas’s. Marie had repeatedly invited this boy over to play, but his parents always declined — she wondered if the mayhem they’d heard coming from her house before her children were medicated might be the reason. Toy cars and trucks were positioned along the fence from the boys’ prior meetings there. Sure enough, the neighbor soon appeared, calling Lucas’s name, and Lucas greeted him joyfully. Lucas hauled a supply of pirate weapons over to the fence and the boys divvied them up and began to play through the wire. Phia joined them, but when Lucas came over to ask his mother for another sword, his sister chased him down, upset; apparently, the neighbor boy asked who I was, and Lucas made some mention of meeting me at his doctor’s office.

“Don’t!” Phia implored her brother. “That’s our privacy. We don’t want them to know that we’re bipolar, that’s not their beeswax. That’s our secret thing, O.K.? That’s our family secret.” Only her good friends know that Phia takes medicine. “They don’t know what it’s about,” she told me. “They have no clue I’m bipolar.” She worries that if they knew, they would feel differently about her.

Lucas was reluctant to leave his friend for dinner; he waved and bellowed to him through the open window as he wolfed down his ravioli and salad. For dessert, Marie had placed small portions of leftover Easter candy inside Ziploc snack bags: one for each child. She was concerned about their weight, which had increased since they began taking medications — Phia’s especially. She wasn’t overweight, but her body had changed from slender to average, and her clothing size had increased from a 6X to a 12/14. “With all the emphasis on childhood obesity, it’s a daily worry,” Marie said. She dreaded comments about her children’s sizes from family members at a coming reunion; Marie says her parents and siblings don’t believe that her children are bipolar and disapprove of the medication. The school also has doubts. All these things make Marie question the diagnosis and medication.

“Their diagnoses are largely based on the history as I see it,” she told me. “And that feels like an incredible responsibility — how accurate am I?”

Eventually the children prepared to go upstairs for baths and bed. On the kitchen counter were four sectional pill containers, one for each member of the family. Marie put each child’s pills into a spoon and squirted a dollop of whipped cream on top to help them go down. Like any kid, Phia grabbed the whipped-cream canister before Marie could catch her and sprayed some into her mouth.

The next time I visited James and his family, a rainy day in May, things had taken a turn for the worse. The stimulant, which James’s psychiatrist had been planning to add for months when his lithium level was high enough, had made James manic — sleepless, talking incessantly, banging on radiators — and the school had immediately called and asked Mary to take him off it. This was a huge blow; both school and parents were counting on the stimulant to help James concentrate. Each year he has trouble in May (“Manic May,” Mary had dubbed it), and his hostility had reached new extremes; he wouldn’t shower or brush his teeth or do his homework without a fight.

One morning, when Mary’s husband was out of town, James stood on his bed and threatened her with a huge stick. “He said, ‘You’d better back down or I’m going to smash your face in,’ ” she said. “He was really beside himself. I looked at the base of the stick, and I thought, These are things you read about: he’s going to break my nose. And I knew I couldn’t show how petrified I was. So I stared him down, and he put the stick down, eventually.” (Note: When Ben was between the ages of 5 and 8 he told me a few times he was going to kill me with a knife and cut me into a thousand pieces and watch my blood run all over the floor. Since his meds of Trileptal, Abilify and Lithium, I haven't gotten a death threat from my own son, it's been 4 years.)

Another morning, James told Mary, in front of Claire: “I’m going to kill you. I’m going to slice you open with a knife.” Later, he apologized, distraught. But, for his mother, something shifted when she heard those words. “I always wondered what my breaking point would be,” she told me. “I thought maybe it would be if he accidentally hurt Claire, but the look on his face when he told me he was going to kill me, that was it.”

James’s dose of Abilify had been increased, which was helping somewhat. But Mary had also put in applications to three therapeutic boarding schools, where James might start sixth grade in the fall. The classes would be even smaller, and she said she hoped living at the school would help James with his behavioral issues. All three schools were out of state, and the family would initially have to pay room, board and tuition out of pocket — the prices ranged from $93,000 to $125,000 a year — and sue for reimbursement from New York City. Such costs would of course be prohibitive for most families, creating a terrible bind for those who can’t receive approval for in-state residential schooling yet are unable to handle their children at home. In some cases, these children end up becoming wards of the state.

James hadn’t yet returned from school when I arrived, but Frank, his father, was at home; he is a courtly man with reddish curly hair whose posture sagged visibly as we discussed the possibility of his son going away. Two of the schools had already expressed interest, and the third called while I was there; it, too, had a possible spot for James. This last was Mary’s favorite, based on its Web site: rural, all-boy; James could ride horses. She made an appointment to visit the school with Frank the following Thursday.

“Next Thursday!” he said, taken aback. “Oh, it’s moving fast.”

His biggest fear was that James would perceive boarding school as a punishment for behavior he can’t control. “He’s 10 years old, almost 11, and he still holds my hand when we walk on the sidewalk together,” Frank said. “So when he comes out with guns blazing and eyes popping out of his head, I know that this poor kid has a demon that’s just blasting its way out of him. I think what it’s like when I wake up on the wrong side of the bed and I feel angry for no particular reason, and I realize that this is James’s life moment to moment, every day.”

(Note: This is what we know about Ben, that his life is like this everyday, the anxiety, irritability etc...but at the same time he is physically attached to us, especially me. He still needs to be kissed, hugged and snuggled all the time. He either hates me or adores me. We couldn't send Ben to a boarding school, it would kill him.)

Shortly after James arrived home, cheerful and wearing a silky black track suit, Frank lay down for a nap. Mary asked her son to take his 4 p.m. Abilify pill; he refused. He politely asked to borrow my microphone and used his iPod to record himself singing. Then the sound of Claire laughing in the next room set him off. “Be quiet,” he suddenly shouted.

“Don’t talk to your sister that way,” Mary said.

“Be quiet!” he yelled at her.

“Hey,” she said, “you need to walk away. Now, it’s after 4 o’clock — ”

“I’m not taking it now.”

“Then you can go into your room — ”

James covered his ears and began to chant: “Sorry, sorry, nope can’t hear you, can’t hear you, sorry, can’t hear you.”

“It’s time for you to take your pill.”

“I’ll smack your face,” he said, brandishing his iPod earphones.

“Don’t threaten me with that or you’ll never see it again. Take your pill.”

James took the pill. Then he closed the door to block out the sound of his sister. “You open this door, Claire, I’ll pull out something really sharp on you,” he said.

“Calm down,” his mother said. “And no more talk about sharp things.”

“Sharp things!” James retorted.

He tried to play his iPod recording for us, but the speakers wouldn’t work. He became enraged and crashed out of the room, emitting animal yells that Mary had to translate for me: “I hate it! Never again! Never again!” A moment later he was back, whimpering, “I want Daddy.”

“Sweetheart, Daddy’s sleeping. Do you want him to help you with the machinery?”

“No! I want him! How stupid are you?”

“James, you’re being so rude. Are you hungry?”

“No, I’m not!” he howled, apoplectic. “I just ate raspberries. Why am I [expletive] hungry — frigging hungry?”

He threw himself onto a chair and began to play his Nintendo DS. A few minutes later, he curled, all 105 pounds of him, in his mother’s lap, his arms around her neck, head on her shoulder.

Later, when James was out of the room, Frank, now awake, spoke wistfully of a sense that he was growing apart from his son. They used to go to a diner together on Sunday mornings, just the two of them, but James rarely wanted to anymore. “He’s restless, but he doesn’t know what to do,” Frank said. “And anything you suggest is of no real interest to him.”

James came into the room and draped himself across his mother’s knees. “Sweetie pie, are you hungry?” Mary asked James. “Would you like Daddy to take you out for something to eat?”

James raised his arm, his head still buried in his mother’s lap. “Is that the thumbs up?” Mary asked.

“Mm-hmm.”

Frank looked startled, pleased. “O.K., I’m going to strike while the iron’s hot,” he said, rising from his chair. “Come, my little man.”

I felt an agonizing quiver of dread as father and son gathered jackets and wallet and shoes. Would James become angry? Would he change his mind? Would they actually get out the door without an explosion? When they did, it seemed miraculous.

In the abruptly quiet apartment, Mary and I talked about her son’s future. “It’s not that we even dream that James goes to college,” she told me. “We just want him to graduate from high school and be a functioning, contributing-to-society individual. Maybe he’ll meet a nice girl from Cape Cod and become a carpenter there. My biggest fear is that he’s going to become a loose cannon when he’s 18.” James’s psychiatrist reassured Mary that he would settle down after adolescence. “But she’s also the person who told me these were early-childhood issues and he’d be off Risperdal by the time he was 7 or 8,” Mary said. There was a long pause.

“It just keeps opening up like an inverted triangle,” she said finally. “The scope of his difficulties just gets broader and broader the older he gets.”

The most basic question about bipolar kids remains a mystery: Will they grow up to be bipolar adults? Because diagnosing the condition in children is still relatively new, no studies have yet followed a large number of them fully into adulthood. One fact is suggestive: bipolar kids are predominantly male, while the adult bipolar population skews slightly toward the female. The likelihood is that many of these kids will grow up to have mental-health issues of some kind, but which issues, and how chronic or severe they will be, no one really knows. A long-term study in Pittsburgh overseen by Axelson and Birmaher suggests that as children grow, the severity of their disorders can change; bipolar II, the less severe form of the disease, can convert to bipolar I, the more severe form. Nearly a third of subthreshold bipolar cases (BP-N.O.S., or Not Otherwise Specified, in D.S.M.) convert to the more serious forms.

Intriguingly, though, some of the bipolar children in the study appear to have gotten well. Roy Boorady, the director of psychopharmacology services at the New York University Child Study Center, told me: “Now that I’ve worked with kids long enough, you see some that had this mood instability or irregularity and were diagnosed as bipolar. But then you see them as they’re older, and they’re off in college and not having these labile mood swings anymore. You really wonder, What was it?”

Most clinicians say they believe that there will eventually be clear “biological markers” of bipolar disorder: ways to see and measure the disease as we can seizures, cancer or hypertension. Scientists are working to identify the genes (there appear to be many) involved in creating a predisposition for bipolar disorder. Brain imaging, still in its infancy, can already detect broad differences of size, shape and function among different brains. The hope is to know early on who is at risk so their condition can be diagnosed and treated as early as possible. Mental illness wreaks brutal damage on a life, crippling decision-making, competence and self-esteem to the point where digging out from under years of it can be next to impossible. And there is also a biological theory for why going untreated might worsen a bipolar person’s long-term prognosis. Epilepsy researchers have found that by electrically triggering seizures in the brains of animals, they can prompt spontaneous seizures, a phenomenon known as “kindling.” Simply having seizures — even artificially generated ones — seems to alter the brain in such a way that it develops an organic seizure disorder. Some scientists say that a kindling process may happen with mania, too — that simply experiencing a manic episode could make it more likely that a particular brain will continue to do so. They say this explains why, once a person has had a manic episode, there is a 90 percent chance that he will have another.

Kiki Chang, director of the pediatric bipolar-disorders program at Stanford, has embraced the kindling theory. “We are interested in looking at medication not just to treat and prevent future episodes, but also to get in early and — this is the controversial part — to prevent the manic episode,” he told me. “Once you’ve had a manic episode, you’ve already crossed the threshold, you’ve jumped off the bridge: it’s done. The chances that you’re going to have another episode are extremely high.”

Along with medication, Chang is exploring family therapy and other forms of stress reduction that might help fortify a child against a genetic proclivity for bipolar disorder. “If we wait too long, they will probably need chronic medication treatment,” he told me. “But if we can get in early enough, they may not need to stay on medication. So we’re hoping to get in and get out, and not subject them to the long-term side effects.” (As for short-term side effects, Chang says medications like lithium may actually be “neuroprotective” — i.e., might actually help a developing brain.) And while it is wildly unclear whether this picture of prevention will ever become a reality, Chang says he is a believer, and his hope is infectious.

Whatever the case, a synthesis is likely to emerge in the coming years. “There’s contention about lots of major scientific issues,” Leibenluft of the National Institute of Mental Health said. “People do the research and gradually, the data speak.”

Shortly after my last visit with James (who has begun boarding school and is doing well), I went back to Pittsburgh to meet Phia and Lucas at an appointment with Axelson. It was a beautiful day at the end of May, and the children were noticeably calmer than during my last visit to their doctor; Lucas sat quietly, making sketches of scenes from “Speed Racer” and “Star Wars” with a marker. Phia also made a sketch: two wavy lines, a pink one labeled “Am Now” and a purple line entitled “Should Be.” It was a mood chart. The lines were nearly superimposed.

Lucas, Phia and Marie all agreed that the two children were doing wonderfully. Phia had kept her cool even when she forgot to bring the music for a violin concert she was performing in. Lucas described a school project involving spring trees and talked fondly about his friend across the fence. Marie looked different; in the two months since I’d seen her, she had braces put on her teeth, updated her eyeglass prescription and had her first haircut in three years.

“We haven’t been to this spot before,” Marie said. “I have a hopefulness that there will be more to come.”

She and her husband bought a small grill, she told me, something they had never been able to do because the kids were too impulsive. And they hired an evening baby-sitter — another first — to go out on their anniversary.

“This is the goal, where we’d like to be,” Axelson said, shaking everyone’s hands as they left the office. “Hopefully we’ll be able to stay with this.”

Three months later, in mid-August, I heard from Marie that after more symptoms of mania in Lucas (which included opening the car door while it was moving), and increases in his Abilify, Axelson had finally recommended a move to lithium. Lucas had begun with a small dose — less than half what Phia was taking — but Marie had a feeling it would be gradually raised, as Phia’s had been since that first appointment I was present for in March.

She wrote to me in an e-mail message: “I re-experience some mourning or grieving for the kids with each medicine change. The unknowns are so daunting and somehow I feel so guilty for taking such risks. Putting them to bed at night seems to be the worst time for these feelings. I suppose because at that time they seem to be their youngest and most trusting and vulnerable. I pray for them under my breath.”

Jennifer Egan is a frequent contributor and novelist. Her most recent book is “The Keep.”

Copyright 2008 The New York Times Company
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New Bond Song

2008-09-27T14:40:00.003-04:00

The new song written and performed by none other than the man himself, Jack White, along with Alicia Keyes. Jack is playing not just the guitar here, but the drums as well, pretty cool! (He started as a drummer you know). Alicia is tickling the ivories and throwing down her awesome voice as is Jack. I wish they'd do a whole album together. This song is AWESOME! Just 4 more days until I see the man himself in concert.

Prayers

2008-09-26T10:47:00.005-04:00

I just want to thank everyone out there, who I know and who I don't, who has prayed for our family over the last few days. It is amazing. The prayers of others can be seen and felt. Ben had a miraculous day, at school, yesterday. He was telling me in the car, ON THE WAY TO SCHOOL, that he felt really happy inside. I told him I was thrilled to hear it and that it was because so many people are praying for him. When Ben got home, however, things weren't so great. But hey, at least it DID NOT have anything to do with school. We were back to being "the most unfair, mean parents ever" over something else entirely.

I, however, am still in the weirdest darn place. I can't even describe it. It is a like a slow emotional descent. Part of the reason *I* am dealing with stuff fairly well right now is that I literally DON'T CARE about much. It's like everything has been stripped away and so little really matters. I don't necessarily feel depressed or sad and I can still laugh and smile. I just feel kinda numb....just resigned. It's kind of like my vulnerability has a forcefield around it. I think I am unconsciously cocooning my emotions. Kinda like it is safer if they just stay shut up and away. My angry outbursts are starting to dissipate, which I think is directly related to not caring. If you don't care, you don't get angry. This clearly must be my mode of self-preservation, which I posted about earlier. I think I am just going to have to ride this out...there is no use fighting it.

I DO want to let everyone know that yesterday I prayed for the intentions of all those who have been praying for me. I hope you are all doubly blessed.

Peace,

Control

2008-09-26T10:38:00.002-04:00

The only thing I have control over any more is how well I take care of myself. Especially when it comes to the weight I have lost. Everything else can go to Hell in a handbasket (which is does most of the time) but I can still eat salad and fruit and go on walks.

Here is my new tummy. I am proud of it. It was a lot of hard work and still is.

Happy Birthday to Sara S.

2008-09-25T11:06:00.002-04:00

I just want to wish my friend, Sara, a very HAPPY BIRTHDAY. Sara has been and amazing friend and help to me. I love her alot and I think everyone shoule know what a gift she is. Give her a 'shout out' at her blog,
"Those That Wonder".

I love you Sara! Thanks for being such a wonderful friend.

Peace,

P.S. Today is also my friends' Lydia and Rebecca's birthdays too.

Self Preservation

2008-09-24T21:35:00.002-04:00

I haven't posted in a while because the shit has his the fan at the Ross house. Suffice it to say, read my Hunny's blog. I have no energy left to do anything. My tank is really empty this time. I want out and there IS no out.

I am a size 6!!!!!!

2008-09-18T09:17:00.004-04:00

I still haven't hit my goal of 135#, but the fact that I am a size 6 makes that a moot point. I was shooting for a size 8 so I figure I have exceeded my goals. My weight box (thanks, HB) is 135-138. I am safely within that limit. Here are 2 pics of me. The first is me in my size 6 Converse jeans. The second is up close au natural and I don't think I look 42...which I think is a GOOD thing. You tell me.

Peace,

So close to goal...I can't believe I have almost done it.

2008-09-13T14:51:00.004-04:00

It has been almost 5 months (it will be on Sept 16th) and I have lost over 30 pounds. I am a little over 2 pounds from my goal. I am really excited. It has been alot of hard work and will remain so...I am certain. I think maintenance will be a bit easier, but I will always have to watch what I eat and make sure I don't get lazy, but continue to remain active. I suck horribly at follow through yet, by the grace of God, I have finally followed through on something. And it was something that I didn't realize was so important to me until I started really working hard for it.

I am elated, to say the least,...tho Robert is less so because now I have a new found interest in clothes. :-)

Peace,

Bitten

2008-09-12T13:44:00.002-04:00

Sorry guys, I never said I wasn't a hopeless romantic teenager stuck in a 42 year old, because, well, I am. I just finished reading the first book in the Twilight series and you could say I am 'thirsty' for more. The fact that Stephanie Meyer (the author) loves and dedicates one of her books to Muse (my favorite band) certainly didn't hurt. Here are a couple of fangirl videos of clips from the Twilight movie with Muse songs.

2008-09-04T16:54:00.001-04:00

A STAR IS BORN

By DICK MORRIS & EILEEN MCGANN
Published in the The New York Post on September 4, 2008

PALIN: NEW KIND OF WOMAN POLITICIAN

ST. PAUL

With sass and wit, sarcasm and sincerity, courage and strength, Sarah Palin last night showed us a new model of female politician.

Her family stories were genuine and real. Her commitment to special-needs children was moving. Her contempt for special interests was obvious.

And her putdowns of Barack Obama's rhetoric and her praise of John McCain's character and achievements were welcome and well delivered.

Many women look bad when they attack their opponents, too often seeming strident and shrill. But Palin was funny and irreverant, with a biting wit and a joy of combat that was exhilarating to watch.

Sometimes she reminded us of the hockey mom she is. Other times, she was an American Margaret Thatcher - mobilizing humor and biting satire to mock the opposition.

Where Hillary Clinton has but two speeds - full forward and stop - Palin displayed a range of rhetoric, emotion and language that sometimes evoked moving patriotism, at other times hilarious irony - and, frequently, a strong dose of common sense.

If her style in attacking and mocking her opponent was Thatcher-esque, her range of rhetorical style was Rooseveltian. She is, in fact, one of the best public speakers in our politics today.

Now the Democrats are stuck in a trap. They've demeaned, patronized and smeared a woman who's well on her way to becoming very, very popular. Her speech will create legions of fans; the Democratic smears of the last few days will create, for Obama, legions of enemies.

This man who dedicated two years to stopping a woman from being president now has to answer for spending two months stopping one from becoming vice president - a task he hopes to accomplish using women's votes.

Remember: The swing vote in this election are single moms. Just as the soccer moms dominated in 1996 and security moms in 2004, now unmarried women, mostly with children, will determine the outcome of the 2008 race. And they're finding in Sarah Palin an advocate whose life isn't far different from their own and whose priorities mirror theirs'.

As withering in her contempt for the country-club elites of the Republican establishment as for the pandering of the Democrats, Palin stands in stark contrast to the inherited elitism of the Bushes, the Romneys and the Kennedys. She's a woman of the people.

Was this a Republican attacking big oil? Was it the nominee for vice president of a major party who laced into earmarks and lobbyists and PACs? Yes it was - and how refreshing!

In her sincere embrace of her family and her nonjudgmental introduction of her pregnant daughter, Palin won the hearts of many single moms. By evoking life in a modest, middle-class town, she established an empathy with voters akin to what Bill Clinton built when he ate at McDonalds'.

How are the Democrats to live down their assaults on Sarah? How not to seem the enemies of the very voters they have to get?

Strategically, Palin achieved the convention's core goal - to show how McCain is not a clone of George Bush, but a man of the people eager for change and demanding of reforms.

Now the gap between Obama and McCain is not so wide. Now it is clear that they both stand for change.

So now the fear of a naive and untried Obama leading the nation through perilous times at home and abroad can work to drive voters over the narrower synapse and get them to vote for McCain.

Mission accomplished, Sarah.

Apoplectic with Joy!

2008-09-03T23:46:00.011-04:00

I LOVE SARAH PALIN! SHE IS MY NEW HERO!!! She rocked the house tonight and she rocked it HARD. She threw down the gauntlet to the despicable Left and said, "Bring it!", but she did it with grace and poise. I am volunteering to work for the McCain/Palin ticket. I will call the local campaign headquarters tomorrow and ask what I can do. I have not wanted two people to win the White House this badly since Reagan/Bush in 1984 (the first time I could vote). There is so much I could say about real feminism and women's rights and how horrible the so-called Women's Movement (and their fanboys: the media) have been to Palin these last 5 days. All these chicks who have been screaming for years that women can do anything men can do, must have only been talking 'liberal' women and not 'all' women. Freakin' hypocrites all of them!

Sarah is a real woman, an amazing woman. Over the next two months she's going to be kicking ass and taking names. So, watch out all you elite media pundits, consider yourself warned. Also, watch out Democrats, I think Glenn Beck is right, Sarah Palin is Obama's kryptonite.

P.S. I just want to give a little shout out to Rudy G. Thanks for taking off the kid gloves and saying everything that needed to be said. Great speech!

Palin is an awesome mom!

2008-09-01T23:19:00.006-04:00

So, Sarah and Todd Palin's 17 year old daughter, Bristol, is pregnant and they will be grandparents soon. How cool is that? Pretty cool. Sarah Palin is 44. When I was 22, I became pregnant out of wedlock, and when my son, Andrew, was born my mom and dad were 43 and 44 respectively. Young grandparents are cool grandparents. I say kudos to Bristol Palin for being in love with the father of her child and planning to marry him. I couldn't even claim that respectability over my pregnancy. Unfortunately, it was too much wine, a beach and a cute coworker. He was cute, but, in the end, he was an asshole! He was Catholic and he and his mom came and asked me to "get rid of it". Hmmm, Andrew has ALWAYS been Andrew, never an it. I wasn't Catholic then, needless to say, it put a bad taste in my mouth for Catholicism for a long time afterward.

I applaud the Palins' dedication to the Pro Life cause and the fact that they are a Christian, loving and imperfect (aren't we all) family that sticks by their convictions, stand by each other and makes the right choices...in this case....the choice for life. I think it is wonderful that before us, during this campaign, one of the candidates daughters is underage and pregnant. Now with clarity we can see the huge divide between the Liberal and Conservative candidates. On one side of the aisle is a candidate who sees her daughter's pregnancy as a blessing. The other candidate has said that abortion should always be available because he wouldn't want one of his daughters being punished by an unplanned baby.

God Bless the Palins!

Peace,

From the Catholic News Agency

2008-09-01T23:07:00.002-04:00

McCain pledges to use Roberts, Alito as model Supreme Court nominees

Washington DC, May 8, 2008 / 06:12 am (CNA).- In a Tuesday speech that could have significant ramifications for the pro-life cause, presumptive Republican presidential nominee Senator John McCain pledged to use President George W. Bush’s Supreme Court appointees as a “model” for his own choices.

He also announced the formation of a committee to advise him on such judicial appointments, which have greatly affected the legal status of abortion in the United States.

The Washington Post reports that Senator McCain spoke on Tuesday before a crowd of several hundred at Wake Forest University. He decried what he called “the common and systematic abuse of our federal courts by the people we entrust with judicial power.” The Arizona senator also said that Chief Justice John G. Roberts, Jr. and Justice Samuel A. Alito, Jr. “would serve as the model for my own nominees, if that responsibility falls to me.”

Both of the justices appointed by President Bush are believed to oppose the 1973 Roe v. Wade Supreme Court decision that legalized abortion nationwide. Some observers believe only one more Supreme Court justice opposed to the decision must be appointed for Roe v. Wade to be overturned.

The remaining Democratic presidential candidates, Senator Barack Obama and Senator Hillary Clinton both opposed the nominations of Roberts and Alito.

McCain zeroed-in on Senator Obama for voting against Justice Roberts, saying the senator “went right along with the partisan crowd.”

“Apparently nobody quite fits the bill except for an elite group of activist judges, lawyers and law professors who think they know wisdom when they see it -- and they see it only in each other," he said, according to the Washington Post.

Obama spokesman Tommy Vietor responded to McCain’s attack, saying, "Barack Obama has always believed that our courts should stand up for social and economic justice, and what's truly elitist is to appoint judges who will protect the powerful and leave ordinary Americans to fend for themselves."

McCain said that he himself had voted for President Bill Clinton’s two Supreme Court nominees because, he said, he believed they were qualified.

Later on Tuesday, Senator McCain announced the formation of a conservative-leaning Justice Advisory Committee, which he said will advise him on judicial appointments if he wins the presidency. The group will be chaired by former solicitor general Theodore B. Olson and Kansas Senator Sam Brownback. Members of the committee include Robert P. George, a Princeton University professor who is a member of the President’s Council on Bioethics.

Besides legal abortion, a conservative change in the Supreme Court could affect other court decisions involving discrimination, civil liberties, private property, and other issues.

I have hit a goal. YIPEE!!

2008-08-30T14:06:00.011-04:00

My weight goals were twofold:
1) go from a tight size 14 to a loose size 8. I HAVE DONE THAT!(I got my first pair of size 8 jeans yesterday!)
2) go from 168 pounds to 135 pounds. I AM ALMOST THERE. Why not stop some might ask? Well, I want a 3 to 5 pound buffer or, as My Hunny likes to say, a weight box. The weight box is the zone I can safely stay within. So, if I want to pig out at a party and I am 135, I have the room to do so. However, if I am 138 I won't be pigging out at a party, I will be calorically lying low.

I am really proud of myself, and extremely grateful to God for the grace He has given me to do this. I would NEVER have been able to do it on my own. I am, notoriously, not one to follow through on much of anything...thus the reason I unschool (LOL). Up until my mom's death, I was between 135-140. I never thought about what I was eating and didn't exercise. But the depression that sank in upon mom's death, and all the craziness going on with Ben, and getting older, just did me in weight-wise. I think it happens to alot of women.

I have learned that I can't eat what I used to. I just don't have the same metabolism. I have learned to have mastery over my appetite (THANKS TO GOD!), and I have developed the discipline (ya like that Lisa B.?) of regular exercise. Thanks to Sparkpeople (see sidebar) for all the past and continued help. Also, I have to say that the way I have lost has been High Carb, High Fiber (mostly complex carbs grains, fruits and veggies) Low Sugar, Low Fat and Low Protein. When researching the way I eat it is reminiscent of the Pritikin Diet, the Rice Diet, & the McDougall Diet and Ornish Diet (though I am not a vegetarian).

My cholesterol is 180 from 220. My bloodwork is great, my blood pressure is on the low end (though that has always been true) my blood sugar is perfect. What I have been doing has been working. Yeah God!!

Peace,

YES YES! YES! Woo Hoo!!!

2008-08-29T14:35:00.006-04:00

I could NOT be happier! Today has been a fabulous day for conservative women everywhere!!! Go, Sarah, Go!!! And thank you, John McCain, for continuing to be the maverick you are and picking such a surprisingly wonderful and maverick (in her own right) runningmate! God bless you both!

He's HUGE!!!

2008-08-27T23:13:00.004-04:00

Here's Tivo at 11 weeks and he has more than doubled his weight. When we got him at 7 weeks he was a little over 9 pounds and now he is close to 20!!! Isn't he just gorgeous?

Okay, now I have to walk the dog and then it is really time for bed! :-)

National Weight Loss Registry (NWLR)

2008-08-27T22:27:00.009-04:00

The following was taken from the research page at NWCR, click post title to go to the site. They keep records of over 5,000 people who have lost weight and kept it off. Their findings are very interesting and only support why SparkPeople is such a fantastic site.

NWCR Facts

You may find it interesting to know about the people who have enrolled in the registry thus far.

80% of persons in the registry are women and 20% are men.
The "average" woman is 45 years of age and currently weights 145 lbs, while the "average" man is 49 years of age and currently weights 190 lbs.
Registry members have lost an average of 66 lbs and kept it off for 5.5 years.
These averages, however, hide a lot of diversity:
Weight losses have ranged from 30 to 300 lbs.
Duration of successful weight loss has ranged from 1 year to 66 years!
Some have lost the weight rapidly, while others have lost weight very slowly--over as many as 14 years.

We have also started to learn about how the weight loss was accomplished: 45% of registry participants lost the weight on their own and the other 55% lost weight with the help of some type of program.
98% of Registry participants report that they modified their food intake in some way to lose weight.
94% increased their physical activity, with the most frequently reported form of activity being walking.
There is variety in how NWCR members keep the weight off. Most report continuing to maintain a low calorie, low fat diet and doing high levels of activity.

78% eat breakfast every day.
75% weigh them self at least once a week.
62% watch less than 10 hours of TV per week.
90% exercise, on average, about 1 hour per day.

Time for Bed

How I feel about Obama in pictures

2008-08-26T11:32:00.007-04:00

Gag Me With A Spoon!

2008-08-25T21:22:00.005-04:00

This is why I have never and will NEVER EVER EVER EVER EVER EVER EVER EVER EVER EVER EVER...INFINITY...VOTE FOR THE DEMOCRATS!!!! What a disgrace to Catholicism Nancy Pelosi is and what a disgrace to Christianity Obama is.

You know what? I am not crazy about the war. However, the brave men and women fighting in Iraq chose to enlist in the military. I am far less crazy about abortion where, since 1973, we have legalized the killing of 43 MILLION Americans who were given NO CHOICE!

NO OBAMA, NO OBAMA, NO OBAMA!!! For the love of God and all that is Holy, NO NO NO to OBAMA!!!

STILL NOT CONVINCED? Read my Hunny's post and then READ THE FOLLOWING (while I am in the bathroom puking my guts out because of these heinous idiots):

ON THE SEPARATION OF SENSE AND STATE
A CLARIFICATION FOR THE PEOPLE OF THE CHURCH
IN NORTHERN COLORADO

To Catholics of the Archdiocese of Denver:

Catholic public leaders inconvenienced by the abortion debate tend to take a hard line in talking about the "separation of Church and state." But their idea of separation often seems to work one way. In fact, some officials also seem comfortable in the role of theologian. And that warrants some interest, not as a "political" issue, but as a matter of accuracy and justice.

Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi is a gifted public servant of strong convictions and many professional skills. Regrettably, knowledge of Catholic history and teaching does not seem to be one of them.

Interviewed on Meet the Press August 24, Speaker Pelosi was asked when human life begins. She said the following:

"I would say that as an ardent, practicing Catholic, this is an issue that I have studied for a long time.And what I know is over the centuries, the doctors of the church have not been able to make that definition. . . St. Augustine said at three months. We don't know. The point is, is that it shouldn't have an impact on the woman's right to choose."

Since Speaker Pelosi has, in her words, studied the issue "for a long time," she must know very well one of the premier works on the subject, Jesuit John Connery's Abortion: The Development of the Roman Catholic Perspective (Loyola, 1977). Here's how Connery concludes his study:

"The Christian tradition from the earliest days reveals a firm antiabortion attitude . . . The condemnation of abortion did not depend on and was not limited in any way by theories regarding the time of fetal animation. Even during the many centuries when Church penal and penitential practice was based on the theory of delayed animation, the condemnation of abortion was never affected by it. Whatever one would want to hold about the time of animation, or when the fetus became a human being in the strict sense of the term, abortion from the time of conception was considered wrong, and the time of animation was never looked on as a moral dividing line between permissible and impermissible abortion."

Or to put it in the blunter words of the great Lutheran pastor Dietrich Bonhoeffer:

"Destruction of the embryo in the mother's womb is a violation of the right to live which God has
bestowed on this nascent life. To raise the question whether we are here concerned already with a human being or not is merely to confuse the issue. The simple fact is that God certainly intended to create a human being and that this nascent human being has been deliberately deprived of his life. And that is nothing but murder."

Ardent, practicing Catholics will quickly learn from the historical record that from apostolic times, the Christian tradition overwhelmingly held that abortion was grievously evil. In the absence of modern medical knowledge, some of the Early Fathers held that abortion was homicide; others that it was tantamount to homicide; and various scholars theorized about when and how the unborn child might be animated or "ensouled." But none diminished the unique evil of abortion as an attack on life itself, and the early Church closely associated abortion with infanticide. In short, from the beginning, the believing Christian community held that abortion was always, gravely wrong.

Of course, we now know with biological certainty exactly when human life begins. Thus, today's religious alibis for abortion and a so-called "right to choose" are nothing more than that - alibis that break radically with historic Christian and Catholic belief.

Abortion kills an unborn, developing human life. It is always gravely evil, and so are the evasions employed to justify it. Catholics who make excuses for it - whether they're famous or not - fool only themselves and abuse the fidelity of those Catholics who do sincerely seek to follow the Gospel and live their Catholic faith.

The duty of the Church and other religious communities is moral witness. The duty of the state and its officials is to serve the common good, which is always rooted in moral truth. A proper understanding of the "separation of Church and state" does not imply a separation of faith from political life. But of course, it's always important to know what our faith actually teaches.

Charles J. Chaput, O.F.M. Cap.

Archbishop of Denver

James D. Conley

Auxiliary Bishop of Denver

My Hunny's blog

2008-08-23T09:08:00.002-04:00

My Hunny has written two great posts on his blog.

The first is about our son Ben, special needs kids, and folks with Bipolar. It is a very compelling post.

The second is about Andrew's best gal pal, Claire (daughter of The Responsible One), leaving the state for college.

Peace,

Ice Skating

2008-08-22T13:17:00.002-04:00

First, I have to brag. I know so many parents who can brag about their kids. Sometimes they do and sometimes they don't. When they do, they have good reason. I never think I have any good reason. But I do now. Autumn may not be reading at grade level or doing math at grade level either, but her first skating lesson resulted in her being moved up a class. She's only skated twice before the class, but the coach thinks she is a fast learner. I have always said that Autumn is my 'Jock' her body just gets anything she tries to make it do.

Today I took her to the public skate session and I joined her on the ice. The first and last time I tried to ice skate was when I was her age, 8. Then we moved to Florida from New York and I never got an opportunity again. Today I got out there, convinced I would fall all over the place, but by the time we needed to leave I was skating really well around the rink. I CAN'T WAIT TO GO BACK!!!

Bread of Life

2008-08-21T01:06:00.004-04:00

I am not a vegan or vegetarian, however, I find I don't eat a whole lot of meat since losing the brunt of my weight. I absolutely push the highly efficient clean burning carbs (starches...God forbid!) and I feel tons better when I do.

I found this article written by a very famous doctor, John McDougall MD, who though he would be considered a vegan doesn't like people to refer to him as such. (He even makes a point of having a slice of turkey on Thanksgiving to prove it). He says he advocates a Starch-Based Diet. He doesn't seem politically or spiritually motivated to be vegan, it seems totally health motivated. He suffered a horrible stroke at 18 because of a cholesterol level that was near 400. He was very overweight, but in med school he interned with Japanese docs in Hawaii and noticed how they were all so slim and ate mostly rice. He followed suit and lost weight and dropped his cholesterol to 150. Unfortunately, he still walks with a slight limp due to his stroke at 18. I think he is in his 60's now.

I could never be vegetarian, because I love cream in my coffee and an occasional burger, but I love that Dr. McDougall advocates for GRAINS. They have received such a bad rap since the Low Carbers hit the scene. If God Himself deigns to come to us in the form of bread and wine (and not steak and wine) well then, I think there is very important lesson there: Bread is the staff of Life (both physical and spiritual).

Peace,

An important truth about me

2008-08-20T16:42:00.003-04:00

I am brilliant at planning. I am fantastic at coming up with ideas. I TOTALLY SUCK at executing any such plans or ideas. I love the idea of things but not the actuality of things. I think is is why I come off as so interesting and knowledgeable, but deep down know what a complete fraud I am.

Just a little FYI. :-)

Attempted Homeschool

2008-08-19T20:31:00.006-04:00

That should be the title of my blog, but I have changed it so many times that I won't go there.

Before I launch into my 'attempted homeschool' I must say that I am writing to the wondrous tones of the pupster, Tivo, wailing behind me in his crate. I took him out for a walk and, in his inimitable Sibe style, he walked and plopped down, all four legs spread out (no kidding), head down and looked up at me with those striking blue eyes as if to say, "When it snows I'll go anywhere but, at this moment, you can forget it b**ch." So, we walked home. Okay, I walked home and he swept the sidewalk as I dragged him by his harness. He likes doing that at home. He's kind of like a really cool cat hair sweeper. Anyway, I digress. We get back to the yard and I unhook his leash and he hauls ass across the yard to a basketball. I love watching dogs try to get basketballs in their mouths. Cats would never stoop so low as to do something so ridiculous, right Toonces? (My kitty is nodding....from the basement... because he's too much of a pansy to come show this dog who is boss.) Well, I wanted to wear the Tivo out so he would stop using my arms as rawhide bone substitutes. Since he wouldn't walk and wanted to come in, he started to play: let's eat mommy. I don't like that game,so I told him he needed to relax and go sleepy in his crate. It's an odd sense of liberation to let a dog cry it out because I wouldn't have been caught dead letting a baby (human) do that. I guess I am an Attachment-Style mom and Ferber-Style dog owner. Hmmm???

Back to what this post was supposed to be about...attempting to homeschool. Yes, I am an unschooler. That is me in my soul. However, what worked for Andrew doesn't seem to be working for Autumn (and was a dismal failure with Ben...thus his attending a private school). Therefore, in an effort to try and get Autumn to put forth some effort, and with a little help from Aesop and the story of the Ants and the Grasshopper (moral: there is time for work AND time for play) , I have devised a little lesson plan. Autumn has OK'd this plan. And here it is:

English:

Stuff we read together.

Listen, Read & Learn (very cool books which I got from Sam's, for $7, that have a CD which reads classic stories. Autumn follows along and at the end are phonics, comprehension, writing, etc all related back to the story. It goes without saying this is great in the car.)

Math:

Mostly life

Progress In Mathematics (a very cool and colorful work/text)

History:

Whatever the heck we want to talk about

Science:

Cool stuff on Discovery channel

Catholic Stories from Science 2 from Catholic Heritage Curriculum (We both love this book!)

This is what she has going on during the week.

Tuesdays Home School Art class at the Parks & Rec, from 1:30-2:30pm, then we pick up Ben from school and go back to the Parks & Rec for Homeschool Park Play Day until dinner time.

Thursdays Home School Clay class at the Parks & Rec from 1:30-3pm

Saturdays Figure Skating Lessons from 12-12:30 (she is super excited about this and it starts tomorrow).

I am going to try and find more cool field trips to take and we will hopefully join our local TORCH group for some too. (The name means Traditions Of Roman Catholic Homes). Of course, I want to include as much fun, unstructured time with friends as I can too...oh, and squeeze in a Daily Mass once a week...at least. Oh yeah, and speaking of Mass, Autumn wants to take Alter Server training. I know for some of my more traditionally minded Catholic friends this might not sit too well. But hey, if it will draw Autumn more deeply into the Sacrifice of the Mass then I am all for it. Neither Ben nor Andrew showed any interest. Yet, when Autumn found out, after receiving her 1st Communion, that she would be able to be an Altar Server she begged me to let her. Mother Church says it's fine so Tumnal is on her way.

Now all I have to do is find the time to make all of this happen....hmmm....how am I gonna do that?
Here is Tumnal and her new 'do' after she cut out a brush which she got stuck in her hair. Pretty cute, huh?