New Years Resolutions

Last year, I did really great about staying on top of my new year's resolutions.  I dropped the weight and focused more on my own little family, instead of trying to be super mom.  Yes, I still went to school, and found a million things that still needed done. But, I kept my focus so directed at the kiddos that I have good habits and will keep going how I'm going.

So, this year, I'm really focusing on being a better human - less waste, better practices - and teaching that stuff to my kids.  Because, after all, I don't just want them to have a better world to live in.  One day they will (hopefully) give me grandbabies.  Those kids need a clean world too.

I thought we were pretty good at it now, but oh how wrong have I been!  There's a million things I could do to make things better, and as I flipped through a simple google search about how to be more environmentally friendly, my mind started to spin.

After looking at a million things, I finally shut my computer down and just sat there, staring at the wall.  It was late at night, and the world was all asleep except save-the-world-Estelle.  Didn't I just spend a year trying to get out of the habit of conquering the world, and instead being the master of my tiny little corner of it?  Oh, how easy it is to back slide into old habits.

The solution here is to pace myself, so this is what I'm going to do.  I'm going to pick three things every month to make the world a better place.  They will be things simple enough that I can teach the boys, so that impact will not be just for today, but for the future as well.

Gasp!

I can save the world (a little)!

Opening up my computer again, I started to search for this month's three things with a little more careful direction.  It turns out somethings I was already doing.  For example, we wash almost everything in cold, except whites.  This cuts down on the water heater power, but you know what doesn't?  Bathtime.

Baths use up 2x as much energy and water as showers - and I'm as guilty as the boys.  I don't shower. I run a steaming bath and lay around with a book until I'm as pruney as I can stand.

But that's an easy thing to change and teach the boys.  There's number one.

Number two has to do with my coffee.  I do bring a refillable cup so I'm totally irresponsible. But I always fill my coffee, and then then mix in my creamer using those little sticks.  If you put the creamer in before you fill it, it mixes itself just fine, no little sticks needed.  This saves on manufactured materials, and landfill space. I often bring a kiddo for hot chocolate, and they do the same thing, so I'll teach them right way to do it.

Number 3 has to do with dinner time. We aren't big meat eaters, but we do eat some. It turns out that the kind of meat you eat can have a big impact on the environment.  Cattle, even grass fed, chemical/drug free, still have a huge impact on the environment.  They require a ton of pasture and release a ton of methane gas into the atmosphere.  If we cut down on our meals that include beef, we also cut down on that impact.  So, at least one meal a week meat free is number three.

Review: Mind Games by Kiersten White

I loved this book.

Like, couldn't-put-it-down-read-through-it-unbearably-fast-and-now-am-aching-for-the-next-one-in-the-series-kind-of-love.  If I could give it a twenty on a five point scale, I seriously would.

So, the gist of this is that there's people in the world who have psychic abilities.  You know - read minds, see the future - and they are brought to this school.  This isn't the usual school - but we're not talking x-men either.  It's a bad school with some really negative agendas.  The story circles around a pair of sisters with different abilities, and...

That's all I'm going to say.  Every piece of this book is fascinating and I feel like if I give anything more - anything at all - I rob you of the opportunity to discover it yourself.

That said, you should just read it.  Right now.  Get on Amazon - call in sick to your job - make you mom take the kids - don't go to school - whatever it is that you need to do to have a day with your kindle.

It's worth it.

Firing up the Doubt Machine

The semester is coming to an end today.  As in, I have to take that last Statistics final, provided I don't step in front of a bus first to avoid it. Then I can pretend I've never even heard of graduate school for three blissful weeks. Hopefully, the best thing will start - I'll even sleep at night.  I'll stop studying after the kids get to bed and I'll... dare I say it... sleep all night long - even past my 5:30 am train back to school. Angels will sing.  Quietly, I hope.

So, why does this not make me pile up the pillows, burrowing down under a pile of blankets while I have all the episodes I've missed of Grim lulling me to sleep?

Because now I have time to think about things unrelated to HR or being a mom.  Even Grim can't occupy my mind enough to stop the what ifs from drifting into my mind in the wee hours when my husband is snoring softly beside me.

I'm 80% done with book 2 of the Timeless Games series, and I have even started outlining the first of a completely different series.  I've finished a couple of novellas, and they are out to my betareaders. I've already contacted my editor - it's coming - get ready! But, I'm back to worrying - what if this book sucks?  What if no one else loves it like I do?  What if I step back one day and say, huh - indie writing was expensive and other than crappier clothes and some serious stress weight loss, I really am just not going to be able to hack it as a writer.

So where is the doubt coming from?

I'll tell you.

A couple of times over the last couple of weeks, I've had classmates say something along the lines of the following to me. Now, keep in mind... there's 33 of us, but only 5 are female.  The rest are male - a more gossipy group of males than most junior high girls, but they are still male.  So they say.

Them: So what is your book about?
Me: Oh, it's a YA novel. You wouldn't like it. Unless you're a high school girl (My subconscious is nodding here - yes, yes they are...)
Them: Oh, like Twilighty vampires or something?
Me: Oh, no! It's nothing like that.

Hard to display tone, but I've done a couple of things here.  First, I communicated that I would never lower myself down to write something like Twilight.  Never.  I am so much better then that, which is completely absurd, because I love Twilight, and devoured the series in a week a couple years ago, and then bought it in Arabic to read as well.  I would love to have thought of the idea, and had the chance to write their story.  Bella might have been a bit less of a pushover if it was me writing, but the whole love story thing?  Of course I'd write that because I already did!  Almost every movie I've seen/book I've read had some big love story as part of the core, so it's absurd to not assume that's going to be a major component what whatever I write.

Second, I made it sound like YA is obviously beneath my cohort because we are all snooty grad students, and would never read anything written for that age group.  PFFFFTTTTTT....!  Really?  With the exception of the Cousins' war series and WWZ, I've read nothing but YA for the last couple years.  It kept me sane when I was alone in Jordan and really needed someone else's problems to combat that loneliness.

So, if I can't even admit what I'm writing, then the quiet hours that are keeping me from the sleep already 16 weeks late in coming are sending a giant, pressing message.

I need to take a good hard look at myself.

YES, I write about high school aged characters, and so what?  There's a solid camp of people who say the high school years are some of the best in their life.  I also have some more adult aspects of my book that appeal to ... well people my own age.  A single mother, raising her kid alone.  Overbearing men and trying to live your life in spite of them - is that too teenie bopper?  I don't think so. Further, the books getting like over 4* from reviewers, and emails from folks saying when's the next one coming. Surely, I can't be a completely talent-free hack.

I think the problem with genre writing, especially with this genre, is that we get too stuck in the idea that it has to be a certain thing that only appeals to a certain kind of person.  We forget that, much like our own lives, things have complicated layers that appeal to far more people then we might first think - ask any mother who likes Spongebob more than their kids (Guilty!).  People are reading my book, and they like it - so I must be doing something right.

How do you know winter is bad?

When the car does this backing down a drive way.

To be fair, this house we were staying at has a heated driveway that wasn't working, which might suggest that this could happen.

But still.

Really?

My poor husband was going off to work, and took a picture.  Ya, boss... I might be late...

Puppies and Race Cars

Sunday is the day reserved for our family.  The week is crazy, but we find some place quiet, some place were we can reconnect together. Near my house is a canyon that is blocked off from cars - safe for the dogs to run off leash when other dogs aren't around.

Today I spent our walk stuck in reflection. My kids chatted with each other and my husband, but I was quiet - thinking - stuck in my own head.

My husband and I have been married for a while now.  One thing that has always been true about us is I've always had a small pack of dogs following me around, and he's found a reason to drag race whatever he was driving at the time.

Early on in our marriage we saw the first in the Fast and the Furious franchise with all our drag racing buddies. Every couple years there was another one, and I'll be honest - as much as I love being out in nature,  Friday night drags always have been big part of our life.  I'd bring a dog, and watch my husband race his baby, while I sat next to mine. Those movies felt like extensions of that experience - all our friends meeting at the theater with their loud little race cars.


Yesterday, when I heard that the Buster, Paul Walker, had passed, I was so sad.  At first I couldnt understand why I was so impacted.  I'm not into celebrity gossip, and while a celebrity crisis can seem like such a big deal to the public - they are just people with the same problems of everyone else.  Theirs is just more public than the rest of us, plastered all over the tabloids.

Life is too short to get wrapped up in a stranger's problems, so I've never got into that.  But this tragic death felt very different for me.

With this death, it feels like a piece of my marriage, my history, passed with him.  Sure, I can throw on a DVD and watch it again and again, and the drags are still there with the smell of melted rubber every Friday night. But, it's just not the same, knowing that that guy with that sweet, genuine smile isn't around anymore.

I didn't know the guy, but he seemed like such a nice guy.  He was active in his charity, and he loved dogs. Anyone who loves dogs has a special place in my heart.

This morning in the canyon, I couldn't help but wonder what the world will miss out on, now that Mr. Walker is gone.  Frank and the labs happily romped with the boys, and I felt so lucky to have them, to watch them play.  I couldn't help but think of Mr. Walker's family, and how a Thanksgiving passed for them, blissfully unaware that the end was so near. I hope that his family is comforted with that memory at this time.  I hope that his legacy of kindness lives on. RIP Paul Walker.

The Cousins' War

I recently finished the Cousin’s War series by Phillipa Gregory.  Now – full disclosure, this is not my normal genre.  I’m mostly a YA reader.  The same bad teen-aged luck that keeps horror movies in theaters is what keeps me coming back to YA books.  If the world is trying its very best to come to an end – so much the better.  The Cousins’ War series is a complete departure from that.

Queen Elizabeth was not only a real person, but my great, great, great (don’t know how many greats to throw in here) grandmother.  We trace our lineage through one of her daughters, though not the one who became a Tudor queen.  I love this time period, so when the White Queen series started playing this fall, I couldn’t help but start watching it.  Waiting a week for each installment was simply too aggravating, and I moved on to reading the books, burning through the series before the TV version of the White Queen had even finished.

I burned through all five books in less than a month.  They are well written, with a compelling historical fiction storyline.  They were so good, the Boleyn Series is on my radar for the Christmas break.  If you have the time, this is a series definitely worth the read.

Poison or Protection?

I love raw milk. It’s done wonders for my autistic son.

There I said it.  I’ve had cousins wrinkle their nose at me – as though saying I like raw milk is the same as saying I like dirty, bacteria infested fluids in my cereal.  And what kind of parent would admit to feeding their kids this kind of thing?  Don’t I love them?

Well, yes, I do, but let me back up and explain myself before someone comes and steals my poor defenseless children away!

My genius dad was the one to first  share milk’s benefits with me.  Doctor dad had been on a whole foods diet for over a year before he came to convert my family.  You see, he was convinced that American diets had been so full of over processed, refined sugars since the turn of the 20^th century that we could not help but all be sick way before our time.  He attributed conditions almost unheard of before 1900, such as diabetes and heart disease, to this cost-effective change in the food producing industry.  And the worst change of this time period was the processing of milk.

His theories were not baseless.  Besides his medical background, he also relied on such books as Real Food, by Nina Planck (great read – I highly recommend it).  According to this book, back in the day there was a legitimate reason for the need to pasteurize milk.  Cows were being fed the unsanitary leftover grains from the breweries.  They stood in their own filth, and were milked without the proper sanitization that exists today.  People got straight up sick to death, and laws were passed to destroy these dangerous microbes through the process of pasteurization.

But times have changed.

Strict rules govern the care and cleaning of our current milk supply, so while sterilizing of our milk is still done, there’s simply no reason for it.  And – we’re only getting half of what milk could do for us through this process.  The sterilization process destroys important enzymes and proteins.  Many of its delicious flavors are also destroyed, and we are left with a watered down version of milk.

Some would argue that milk is not even a necessary part of our diet. People can survive life without milk.  They also can survive on coke and chips every day, as I did almost all of my senior year of high school.  But that doesn’t mean that it’s good for us, and what’s more, it may be an important link in brain development.  Scientists have linked the timeframe where humans began drinking other animals’ milk with the somewhat sudden evolutionary increase of brain size.  This link may point to the continued benefits of raw milk in the growing child’s brain.

For my family, we started to drink raw milk because my dad felt that it might help with some of the behavior problems associated with Beckette’s rapid firing, autistic brain.  We’d had so many recent issues at his school that I had become pretty desperate.  So we tried it.

Beckette has gone from a boy with high functioning autism to behaving like a pretty normal kid.  He’s calmed down considerably, is sleeping better through the night, and overall, seems to be happier.  Is it the milk?  I think so.  It might be something else, but when our local supplier was out one week and he didn’t get his milk, his problems began to resurface.

Is it the answer for everyone?  I can’t say that.  Each family has to make the right decision for themselves, based on what they are comfortable with and what they feel is most beneficial for them.  In some states, it’s not even legal to sell for human consumption, but in many places you still have a choice. 

Choosing not to drink raw milk based on hundred year old information is just plain foolish.  Get educated, and then make whatever decision is right for you and the one’s you love.

How I know I'm a survivor

As posted in Gin's Book Notes

In my list of things that I’ve done with my life, horses have played a pretty decent role. At one point, I had five brood mares, and I was running a very small sport horse farm.  I had this one particular mare that was often a problem, needing frequent riding or she would get so out of the habit of having a job that she’d become dangerous. My mother had lectured me a million times on the importance of a helmet, and most of the time I was so certain I was invincible that I refused to wear one.  On this one particular day (and every day thereafter) I chose to wear one.

I’ve been tossed a million times.  I’ve never broken a bone, and other then a bruised ego, I always just hop right back on.  I’ve even had a horse lose his balance, somersault, and then I came to with him laying on his back and my leg pinned beneath the saddle.  I’m alive – didn’t break anything there – and that fall isn’t what this story is about anyway. The point is, I’d always been lucky, and who’s to say that would ever end?

So, this mare tossed me, and I landed on my head with a nice big dent in my helmet where she’d kicked me.  I found out later I’d the presence of mind to call my husband and my dad (the doctor). The first thing I remember was hours later, when I was evidently telling the nurse some terribly personal thing, while my mortified husband was hissing at me to shut it.

I had, and have, a TBI, which stands for Traumatic Brain Injury.  I suffered from post concussive syndrome, which meant that I couldn’t read (and comprehend) anything for three months, had a year long headache, and at the end of that year, I was told whatever I got back of my cognitive capacity was all I was going to be getting.To make a long story short, I did not get nearly what I had back.  I used to have a near photographic memory, and after the TBI I struggled with remembering what I had for breakfast an hour after eating.  I had started back to school just prior to this, and flunked out because the information from the beginning of the semester simply would not stay with me to the end. I could not accept that this was my life, so I did a little research.

Did you know that people who speak more than one language see a big increase in their cognitive ability? True story.  And, people have half their brains removed, and still come back from that as well. Between those two things, I decided I should focus on making myself learn, and if I was going to pick a language, I was going to pick one of the hardest, because if the point was to fix my brain, I was going to make it work its very hardest.

Fast forward – it worked.  I went back to school, and graduated with a fantastic GPA. I applied to over 100 scholarships so I’d have the money to go to the Middle East and become pretty fluent in Arabic (although you’d never know it from how my Jordanian friends make fun of me.) I am in graduate school, and have written a book with which I’ve got a great deal of pride. I’ve done all this while keeping my family close – even while in the Middle East.  There is nothing – nothing – I cannot do.  So what is the lesson here?

Sometimes life throws curve balls that really threaten to break us in two.  But if that happens, we get to keep both pieces, and it’s up to us what we do with them. I know of people who struggle with a TBI, and there’s no doubt about it – it changes you.  But the change can be for the best, even if it is wrapped up in a pretty ugly package.

And, if you have a problem that’s not as serious, but still serious to you, I would offer this advice.  You can beat it.  You will live to see another day after it, and it’s up to you what that day will look like. The only time you should lose faith in yourself is when you’ve quit, and that, too, is a condition we can all come back from.

Is She in Training??

When I had my first pregnancy, it was rough.  As in, so sick that I lost forty five pounds my first trimester, and Doctor Dad told me I’d better eat a stick of butter or I’d lose that baby.  I was on bed rest, and so afraid I’d have a disabled son – not because of him, but because of me.  I was afraid I was just… not enough.  Only great, amazing, self-sacrificing women could be enough to raise a child with a disability.

Beckette was born a happy baby, so smart that he was discussing abstract concepts of space and time with me on our way to McDonalds at the age of four.  He’d already started long division, and was quite a reader.  But we knew something was up with him.

We had behavior problems - as in, no impulse control and an inability to cope with too much noise and stimulation.  Friendships with other kids? Forget it. He didn’t have that because he could not understand how those other kids even worked.  They didn’t like him and wanted nothing to do with my confused, sad little boy.

Educators did not understand. At one school, a lunchtime meltdown included laying on the ground and screaming at the ceiling, resulting in his expulsion from school on the grounds that he frightened other children. I’d asked for an evaluation, and after spending every day for a month refusing to leave the board of education until it was done, he was readmitted.

Eventually, he was diagnosed with Asperger’s.  Like a lot of other people out there, I didn’t know what autism really meant.  I didn’t understand that eventually he’d be able to lead a normal life. .  But this, and a lot of other misconceptions, needed correction.

In our family, autism isn’t a disease.  It’s not really even a disability – at least not for Beckette.  I can’t speak to the experience with a less functioning child, but for us, Autism means the person afflicted just is wired different.  The hardest aspect of autism is the lack of human connection.  For an autistic child, they don’t understand the social cues. They are just as likely to interpret another child wanting to play as wanting to take all their toys.  Where you and I have that bit of information wired in, they have to study behavior before they’ll understand it.

I like to think of autism as just a skill set that needs learning like calculus.  Math and I get along fine now, but there was a day that I just couldn’t do it.  Like Beckette, I was frustrated to the point I did not care. I wanted to smack the very next person who told me it was not that hard – what didn’t I get? My eyes would glaze over as it was explained again just what to do so the x’s and y’s would play nice.

Being autistic means you’re different, but is that really a bad thing?  Adam Young, the founder of Owl City wouldn’t agree.  Neither would Daryl Hannah, or Jerry Newport (Mozart and the Wale was based on his life.)  Some have speculated whether even Einstein was autistic.  Each of these people think very different from the average Joe, and their outside-the-box thinking has impacted our society in positive ways.

Autism is a rollercoaster challenge, but so is calculus, and while we’re at it, so is Statistics (which is currently kicking my grad-student behind.)  These people are not a burden, but a gift.  Their different thinking might be the thing to change our world for the better forever.

Tomato Basil Soup

 November has started pretty nippy, and the stresses of being a graduate student endlessly searching for an internship have been weighing down on me pretty heavy. I’ve been needing comfort food, big time.  Lucky for me, comfort food is super easy to make when talking about this super delicious soup.

Now, I was raised on Campbell’s soup, so I still have to give it some love in regards to my childhood. However, it’s just not good when you’re old enough to know better.  In probably twice the time it takes to plop that soup-goop into a pan and measure out some milk, I can have something better bubbling away.  I got this recipe from a dear friend from Texas, so you know this is going to be good.

childhood.

Tomato Basil Soup – feeds 5

1 29 oz. can tomato sauce (nothing fancy – Hunt’s is what I use)

1 stick of butter

¼ cup dried basil

½ cup parmesan cheese

1 pint heavy cream

salt and pepper to taste

Put all of the ingredients together and heat over medium heat.  Once the butter is melted it’s done.  If it starts to bubble a little, you’re pushing it – don’t let it scorch!

Now, how easy was that? This soup is good for dipping bread, or even dipping other cheeses into. You can swap out the parmesan for other types of cheese – Kasseri is particularly yummy. 

So that’s it!  Enjoy!