From the category archives:

illness

When Even Vacation Isn’t Easy

September 25, 2010

I am a bit of a physical wreck these days — sore right elbow, sore left wrist, aching hip capsule.  (“Hip capsule” is a term I learned from my osteopath brother-in-law so I believe it is something that exists, or at least I know I’m not the one who made it up.)  These ailments, as [...]

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The Best Balm (even works on yet more stitches)

August 19, 2010

The anxiety began, I’m pretty sure, a couple of Fridays ago, the day I took Lily to the doctor to check on the brand spanking new set of stitches put into her forehead by the lovely resident in the emergency room.
The doctor was a nice man, we had a nice chat, and he declared Lily [...]

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My Matching Set, or Our Second Stitches

August 3, 2010

I think Jake tells it best:
“Mommy yelled, ‘LILY!’ and she fell off the porch and all the blood came out of her head.”

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But We Got to See the Goats

May 23, 2010

We were on our way to the Dairy Goat Parade and Festival in Spindale, NC (where else would we spend a Saturday afternoon?) when it happened.
We were rolling around mountain passes, zinging like a pinball whacked between paddles, cruising through towns with names like Batcave and Chimney Rock.
“It’s too far,” Jake whined.  Until this moment [...]

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Full Circle

April 19, 2010

I’ve been writing YogaMamaMe since Jake was younger than Lily is now.
This makes me think a lot of things:  How quickly time passes when you have kids.  How scary it is to watch time pass so quickly, especially when you have kids.  And how I seem to be repeating myself.
Take last night, for instance.  I [...]

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The Triple Crown of Things That Make It Hard to Be a Parent

March 3, 2010

The triple crown of Things That Make It Hard to Be a Parent, as I have just now decided, is a marathon consisting of what at this moment strike me as the most frustrating parenting moments:
1)  Staying home with a sick child.  For a week.
2)  Staying home with a child who is finally well on [...]

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H1N1 Pays a Visit

November 3, 2009

Actually, I don’t really know that it’s H1N1 with whom we’ve tangoed over the past week.  But I’ve been told that right now anything that looks like flu must be of the swine variety.
Like most of the H1N1 lore I’ve been hearing, there’s no telling how accurate this information I’m spreading around is.  But no [...]

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Turn, Turn, Turn … or Not: What I Learned at Six Months

October 2, 2009

“Yep,” Mike confirmed the other day.  “Lily’s acting like a normal baby.”
He said this after our first sunny fall day in the park.  After Lily and I arrived with her pouting in her stroller because I decided that much as she was demanding it I was simply not up to the task of walking to [...]

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Are We There Yet? (Part One: Internal Version)

August 12, 2009

We got our first, “Are we there yet?” in the car on Wednesday.
Mike and I both grinned at each other like kids taking their first bite of a Quarter Pounder — thrilled but also queasily aware that we shouldn’t be.
The great, grin-inducing thing about Jake’s “are we there yet?” is that it lacked even the [...]

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Our First Stitches

June 25, 2009

When I was in eighth grade, my two best friends and I had an inexplicable obsession with the movie Kramer vs. Kramer.
We pined for Dustin Hoffman (must have been the feathered early-eighties hair).  Pre-VCR’s and DVD’s, we sat through it in the theater multiple times trying to memorize the dialogue.  We tracked down and then [...]

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Shouldn’t My Sick Child Be Crying for His Mommy?

September 21, 2008

Mike and I had one of those glorious Asheville Saturdays yesterday.  We took Jake to Plow Day at Warren Wilson College, a small school just outside of town with — as the Plow Day moniker would suggest — a working farm.
Yes, one year of living here, and I consider Plow Day at Warren Wilson College [...]

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A New Olympic Event — Caring for a Toddler While You Have the Stomach Flu

August 22, 2008

How about that Michael Phelps, huh? Single-minded determination, laser-like focus, conquering his body’s limitations. The ultimate competitor.
I’d like to see him take care of a toddler while suffering from a good bout of stomach flu. (Dara Torres has probably done it, but then she’s a goddess, being over 40 and an Olympic [...]

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Why Practicing Yoga Is as Simple as Sleeping with a Sick Child

July 15, 2008

I’m assuming there are women checking out the YogaMamaMe community who don’t practice asanas, don’t know what the word means (it designates the physical poses you see people practicing on the cover of Yoga Journal when you’re waiting in the check-out line at Whole Foods), don’t intend ever to practice them, and yet are kind [...]

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Monday Mornings, Sleeping Late, and the Clash of the “Should Do’s”

July 14, 2008

Jake slept in this Monday morning. I did too, for a while. Until Mike told me it was eight o’clock and suddenly my eyes were wide open like a Bush voter who finds out for the first time that Iraq had nothing to do with 9/11. One minute I was dozing blissfully, [...]

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A Little Grey’s Anatomy, a Little Kindness

May 30, 2008

I know how this sounds, but I’m going to say it anyway. Yesterday I paid more attention to Grey’s Anatomy than to my child. Just a little bit more. And just for a little while. And only because I really, really needed to.
It had, you see, been a rough week. [...]

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There’s Something Bigger Than Forgetting to Buy Antibiotic Ointment

May 9, 2008

It was plainly my fault. Because, I feel deeply, anything that distresses my boy is.
Bath time, these balmy spring evenings, has been a tad more fraught than usual. Mike has been arriving home right around when Jake and I sit down for his dinner. So we all head out for the deck, [...]

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Fixing Everything, Even When You Can’t, or How I Learned to Diffuse My Energy

May 7, 2008

Today my acupuncturist spent a lot of time diffusing my energy. And it got me thinking.
I was probably not thinking what you are — Acupuncture! Therapy! Yoga! This gal spends an inordinate amount of energy searching for the mindfulness in motherhood! And is maybe a little bit crazy to boot. But, [...]

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When You Absolutely Have No Choice But to Let Go

May 2, 2008

I was walking under a dogwood tree on the way out of my therapist’s office this morning when I noticed the blanket of pink flowers it had dropped on the brick sidewalk. The tree, I thought, was telling me to let go.
For a moment, I considered the prospect. I was already late for [...]

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When It Takes Effort to Experience Effortlessness

April 30, 2008

“I made that,” I marveled, not for the first time, as I watched Jake at school this morning. He was banging two farm animal puzzle pieces together, making a loud clacking noise appreciated by no one but himself. His eyes were clear and as blue as his shirt, which hung over the top [...]

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Respecting Your Body (and, of course, your child’s) in a World That Doesn’t

April 24, 2008

Boy, you think you’re a careful, concerned parent doing everything anyone could to ensure that your child will never contract autism or cancer or any of the other scary diseases that seem to lurk everywhere in our toxic world, and along come abundant assurances that you could be doing so very much more. It’s [...]

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