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May 21, 2013

I’m Kicking My Soda Habit!

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You may remember at the start of April that I made a decision to begin eating healthier. Less processed junk, more whole foods, etc. One of the goals I had was to stop drinking soda. I can’t even begin to tell you how frightening a prospect that was at the time.

It’s not that I wanted to give up caffeine. Oh sure, I know it’s also not good for me and I could probably stand to have a little less of it in my life. But soda was not the optimal caffeine-delivery-system, especially the diet soda I was drinking every day. Yes, every day, often several a day. After all, it was diet soda, so there were no calories to worry about, right?

I couldn’t continue ignoring all of the studies linking diet soda to increased obesity, metabolic disorders, and all of the other ways it wrecks havoc on the body. It’s acidic, it’s full of difficult to pronounce chemicals, and the artificial sweeteners are not exactly the best ingredients to line the inside of my digestive tract.

Crushed Diet Coke can

Photo credit: Caro’s Lines

So I said goodbye to soda. And it’s been hard. REALLY hard. I’ve been tempted to reach for that bubbly sweetness on more than one occasion and had to force myself to step away from the can and reach for water instead.

I’ve been drinking more coffee and tea now, brewed fresh without the artificial ingredients. I use a splash of real cream with my coffee, and a little bit of cane sugar, honey or stevia with my tea.

This past weekend I found myself in a situation where my only choices for drinks were soda or water for a meal. I was exhausted after barely sleeping the night before, so I broke down and asked for a small Diet Coke. I had gone 48 days in a row with no soda, and the temptation was too strong, along with my desire for caffeine.  I knew I was putting my goal at risk, and that reminding my taste buds of the soda that I used to drink daily might start me down that path again.

As we were eating, I took my first sip of soda, and I was immediately not impressed with the taste. It was…off. A little bitter on my tongue with a chemical-y sweetness layered on top. At first I thought there had to be something wrong with this soda, but with each additional sip I realized that this is the way it’s always tasted.

I’m not used to the taste now, and it no longer tastes good. (Skye, you were right!)

This is huge for me. I’ve been a soda addict since I was a teen, and a diet soda fiend since college. Nothing until now has managed to completely tear me away from my fizzy mistress. Until now.

It seems going cold turkey for a month and a half might have finally helped re-wire my sense of taste back towards natural flavors and away from soda. Well, that and eating a lot less processed food. It’s amazing how good real food can taste once you forget how processed food tastes!

There have been other benefits, too. Since many non-soda drinks I like often have some calories in them, I’m more conscious of how much I’m drinking and I limit myself to only one or two a day.

This has resulted in drinking a lot more water again, too, which of course is better than many other drinks out there. And I think my skin looks better from all of the extra water, too.

I’m gonna brag for a moment and say I’m proud of myself for giving up this bad habit!

Filed Under: healthy living ·


May 16, 2013

Being Rich And Entitled Is Not A Disability At Disney

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When we visited Disney World in February, I worried how Cordy would react to the crowds and the lines. She doesn’t like crowds, and she likes waiting in lines even less, especially when those lines are enclosed by barriers in tight spaces. She’ll get fidgety, anxious, and sometimes start to panic. She’ll repeatedly bump into others around her, and if the sensory overload lasts too long, she’ll be a wreck and unable to enjoy the ride when we finally get to the front of the line.

We were told about the Guest Assistance Card (GAC) before our trip and were encouraged to talk to Guest Services when we got to Disney. It’s fairly easy – you tell someone at Guest Services what the nature of the disability is in regards to what accommodations are needed. Based on what you tell them, they provide one of three different GAC passes. The pass is good for your entire stay at all parks, and allows the disabled guest and their family to stay together for any rides.

Disney Guest Assistance CardCordy’s GAC

I was nervous about asking for the card – while Cordy’s autism can make situations difficult, I worried that she wasn’t “disabled enough” to deserve a GAC. (The Guest Services folks were amazingly kind about the whole thing, though.) I was also a little embarrassed about using it at first, feeling like I was cheating by getting to use the Fast Pass entrance instead of the standard lines. I worried we were being judged.

But then I tried to remind myself that it took a lot more energy for us to go from attraction to attraction, and we often needed more downtime for Cordy, so we really weren’t getting to more rides and attractions than any other family in the park. And OH did it make the experience SO much better for our little ball of anxiety! Without that pass, we wouldn’t have been able to get through more than one or two rides at most before she would have felt overwhelmed and been done. Or worse – annoyed everyone else around her and ruined their day. And even with the pass it still wasn’t all roses and butterflies, but it was a huge improvement.

So I was horrified when I read a New York Post story stating that a new trend in visiting Disney for an elite group of rich NYC moms is to hire a disabled person to pose as a “family member” for the day, allowing the family to use that person’s Guest Assistance Card to “skip the lines” and enter through the alternate entrance.

Yes, you read that right. Moms and their families, all perfectly healthy, free of disabilities, cutting their wait times for rides to nearly nothing all because of their newly hired “distant cousin” who is handicapped and has the ability to bypass the general line.

Before you say, “But we all know that the rich can buy their way to the front of the line with anything, so what’s the big deal?” consider this: Disney already has a VIP Tour Guide service the wealthy can pay for that will provide a Fast Pass for rides. The VIP Fast Pass will get them to the front of the line nearly as fast as a GAC access. It costs a little more, but what’s a few more dollars to those with this kind of privilege?

(It’s also possible to reduce your wait time to practically nothing through using the free Fast Pass system and doing a little planning. But I suppose that’s too much work for them.)

No, I don’t think it’s about the money. Rather, it’s about the smug satisfaction of telling your fellow rich moms at the next playdate how you gamed the system and had your own pet “cripple” (ugh, I hate that word, but it gets the sentiment across) to grant you your privilege and make you feel even more special.

Because an official Disney VIP tour guide? That’s something anyone can get! Having your own disabled fake family member, on the other hand, is only for the 1% insiders who know the secret of how to hire them.

What kind of self-absorbed idiot would willingly and knowingly take advantage of an accommodation for the disabled for their own selfish reasons? I can’t wrap my mind around what would assure someone that this was a great idea, other than they’ve lost all shame and humanity in their black hearts. The Evil Queen would be proud.

Beyond that, I’m appalled at the message this sends to their children. They’re being taught that the rules of the world don’t apply to them, and that the struggles of others can be exploited for their own gain. That any obstacle in their way, or any special exception allowed to someone else but not them, can be bypassed by throwing money at it. Good luck when those entitled kids become teenagers and will do anything to get their way.

I worry that behavior like this will force Disney World to tighten its restrictions on the GAC pass, making it harder to obtain and possibly denying some people who really do need it. Few places offer accommodations with such generosity as Disney, but any increase in the abuse of these accommodations might cause them to rethink their policy.

I’d hope that the actions of a few despicable people wouldn’t affect those who legitimately qualify for it, and I also hope Disney can find a way to weed these folks out and shut them down.

Because as much as they’d like to claim it is if it would get them to the front of the line, being an entitled, elitist cheat is NOT a disability.

Filed Under: big issues, rant · Tagged: , , ,


May 14, 2013

Green-like Thumb

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When we bought our house, I was so excited about having our own yard. There were fantastic ideas in my head of beautiful landscaping and a garden in the backyard full of fresh herbs and veggies and a lush, green lawn for our children to play and walk barefoot on.

I don’t know who I thought would take care of all of these things – perhaps I thought we’d be wealthy enough to afford a landscaper? Because certainly I wasn’t going to be the one to nurture all of these plants.

My mom is the green-thumb in the family. She can keep nearly anything alive, even if it’s on the brink of withering away. I, on the other hand, am usually the one who can get a plant to the nearly-withered-away state. My ability to kill plants is nearly a superpower – if I were an evil villain, I’d probably be called the Wilter.

It’s not intentional, though. I try to do my best with our yard. I had a garden for a few years, and even managed to produce some broccoli from that garden. Cosmo has reduced my ability to have a garden now, thanks to his evil sidekick taste for young plants, but I did do some container gardening last year that was a semi-success. And (with help) we planted our little arborvitae evergreen trees out back last year, which have so far survived my care.

With my new mission to make this house a little more home-like, I’ve had to take a tough look at the outside as well. I don’t want to be that house in our neighborhood. (To be honest, it would be really hard to be that house with the number of rentals and foreclosures in our area, but I’m also aiming to not be in the bottom 50% either.) My project this past weekend was the tree in our front yard.

We placed a little ring of landscaping bricks around this tree years ago. Originally there was mulch inside the ring, but over the years it’s all disappeared and the ring has contained a mess of dead leaves and weeds. Our soil is also extremely hard clay soil, making it impossible for things to grow well, and that’s resulted in our tree’s roots staying close to the surface as well.

The first thing I did was scoop out all of the leaves into a yard waste bag, along with pulling most of the weeds within the ring. Some of those weeds were stronger than expected and tried to pull back. Then I carefully adjusted the woefully uneven bricks, trying to make them lie even again. I wasn’t able to get them to lie perfectly even because the tree roots have pushed some areas up, but most of the ring looks pretty good now.

No weeds or dead leaves, but not pretty.Tree roots made the back part of the ring bumpier than I’d prefer.

Next, it was time to fill in that ring. I emptied three bags of topsoil, combined with half a bag of peat moss, inside the ring around the tree and mixed it all up. At the very least, I hope covering the tree’s roots will help protect our red maple from the fate of so many other trees in the neighborhood. (Tree death is high when you live in a new subdivision that stripped all the topsoil off to sell before building houses on clay.)

Mira went with me on Saturday to pick out flowers to plant in the ring. A five year old doesn’t necessarily know the best flowers to pick, so I enlisted the help of a store associate. After describing to her my lack of skill with anything green, and my requirement that anything we buy needs to be easy to care for, able to handle some neglect, and preferably could handle itself like a weed, she pointed me to the right flowers. She didn’t even laugh at me, though, which I appreciated.

This was the final result:

Look! Pretty flowers now!Not a bad transformation compared to the naked tree above, right?

The light purple flowers are creeping phlox, and the bright pink ones (Mira’s choice, no surprise) are dianthus. And yes, I still had to look at the little cards that came with them to remember what they were and how to spell them.

There was nothing complicated to planting the flowers – I dug a hole with my hands, took the flower out of it’s plastic pot, and plopped it in the hole, filling the area back in with dirt. I’m not sure if I spread them out well enough, so we’ll see how they grow. I finished this project by covering everything with a good layer of mulch and a silent wish that they don’t die.

Can I keep them alive now?No really, please don’t die, little flowers. You cost too much.

And just like that, our front yard has a little bit of color now, hinting that someone actually lives in this house and cares about it’s appearance. The next step, of course, will be keeping these little plants from wilting away. Who knows – maybe if I can keep this little contained flower bed alive, I’ll add more flowers to other parts of the yard?

Filed Under: domestic zero, home · Tagged: , , ,


May 12, 2013

Happy Mother’s Day!

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How was your Mother’s Day? Mine started out far too early with the chirp of a smoke detector at 4:30am. At first I was dreaming and heard it in the dream. Once I realized that it was impossible for my car to have a chirping smoke detector, I woke up and then tried to determine if I had dreamed the whole thing or if it was real.

Chirp.

So then I began the process of positioning myself in different rooms, listening to determine which smoke detector had the low battery warning. Once it was found, Aaron replaced the battery and we both went back to bed. Only I slept poorly after that. Ugh.

When I finally gave up on trying to have any meaningful sleep hours later, Mira was ready to tackle me with a Mother’s Day hug. Homemade cards and gifts were part of the celebrations.

Skylanders are totally cool for Mother's Day, right?

If you can’t read Cordy’s card, it says, “Dear mom, Fire types are red. Water types are blue. Flowers are nice. And I love you!” That’s probably the sweetest Skylanders Mother’s Day card I’ve ever received. Bonus points for making it rhyme.

Aaron fulfilled my requests for a Mother’s Day gift that was practical and didn’t add to the clutter in our house. I received a membership to Massage Envy, so I can have once a month massages for my oft-injured back. He wins.

I’m never quite sure what to make of Mother’s Day as mom. Should I want to spend the day with my family? Or should I want to spend the day away from them, doing whatever I’d like? Since I also have a mother, I have an obligation to her, too, so then it isn’t my own day, right?

In the end, it’s always a day balancing family obligation and relaxing. It always goes by too quickly, too.

We visited with my mom and grandmother, going out for lunch together. My grandmother has slowed down since she had a stroke a few years ago, but she insists on being as independent as possible. She now requires someone’s arm to hold onto to steady herself while walking – a development that still seems so odd to me. She’s always been so strong and served as the no-nonsense matriarch of the family. But she still smiles warmly at my kids’ antics and lets them tell her the same bad jokes over and over. (To be fair, I don’t think she hears the jokes every time – that probably helps.)

I’m always happy to spend time with my mom, too. She was my rock growing up – the one person in my childhood that I could count on – and even though there’s plenty we don’t agree on, I still seek out her advice on practically everything. She gives far too much of herself to everyone else, and I worry that one day she’s going to completely exhaust herself by helping others and ignoring her own needs. But it’s hard to tell her to stop being so generous with her time and money, especially since so many people depend on her help.

I occasionally complain that she spoils Cordy and Mira too much when they’re with her, forgetting that she was fairly lenient with me, too. It’s no wonder the kids love to spend time with her – she encourages them to roll down hills, teaches them how to plant seeds, and lets them have ice cream with practically every meal.

Kids and grandma on Mother's DayWere it not so wet outside today, she probably would have taught them to pick asparagus with her.

After leaving my mom, we stopped to visit briefly with Aaron’s step-mom so the girls could give their Bubbie her Mother’s Day card. Like my mom, the kids love all of the creative pursuits they get to do with their Bubbie.

The rest of the day was a typical Sunday evening: a little quiet time, dinner, bedtime for the kids, and watching some TV into the evening while working on the computer a bit. Successful day? Absolutely.

But Mother’s Day, to me, is also about the two beautiful little girls who made me a mom. I’m so grateful that becoming a mother wasn’t the struggle for me that it is for some. We wanted children, we had healthy children…it was that simple. These two drive me nuts sometimes, they fight with each other and make messes, but they also give me purpose, shower me in love, and have taught me so much.

I’m so lucky to have my family.

Filed Under: being a mom, Family · Tagged: ,


May 10, 2013

My Entry for BlogHer’s Voices of the Year

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As many of you know, I’ve gone to BlogHer’s annual conference every year since I started blogging. Several years back they started a Community Keynote, where a handful of blog posts were selected and honored by having the writers read the posts out loud to the crowd during an evening keynote session. The result was laughter, tears, and a lot of thought-provoking moments. It was a wildly popular and brilliant idea. Since that time, the community keynote has continued to grow and develop into a fantastic showcase of the talents of our community, now named Voices of the Year.

I’ve submitted posts in the past, but have yet to be selected. (No, not whining here. Those who were selected completely deserved the honor and had fantastic posts.) But it’s always good to keep trying, yes?

So this year I’ve tossed my evil Furby post into the ring. Humor generally isn’t my category, but sometimes terrible things happen in your house that are simply too disturbing to not tell as a funny story. And that pink demon counts as both amusing and disturbing, depending on which side of our walls you live on.

I’ve told friends that if my Furby post is selected, I’ll be bringing it with me to BlogHer for the reading. Don’t worry, I’ll neutralize any threat by removing its batteries first. I can’t imagine trying to keep it from waking up for the entire trip.

furbys-sleepingShhhh…don’t wake the fuzzy overlords of DOOM.

Maybe if I’m lucky it’ll get lost in a pile of swag and be left behind to terrorize the city of Chicago? (You’re welcome, Chicago friends!) I’m sure I could offer Mira a trip to the Disney Store or Build-a-Bear to soothe any sadness over losing her Furby. Considering how it’s played with only once a week now, she might not even notice.

If you’re a member of the BlogHer community and want to spare a vote for my post, you can find my entry here. Votes don’t have any sway on the committee selecting most of the posts, but they do matter for the People’s Choice honorees. I’d love a vote if you feel up for it.

Eeeeevil Furby The Furby doesn’t want me to tell it’s story. Don’t let the Furby win, folks.

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