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!