Saturday, October 31, 2009

Los niños ven, los niños hacen

Hoy seré sincero (no quiero decir con ello que no lo sea habitualmente), este vídeo forma parte de un evento que ha llegado a mi bandeja de entrada en una red social a la cual pertenezco. Sí, una red social que ahora está muy de moda entre la juventud española, y en la cual se instalan menores, en la cual estos menores cuelgan fotos de todo tipo renunciando así a su derecho de imagen en esas fotos, pero ese es otro asunto que trataremos mas en profundidad en otro momento.

Este vídeo es solo un reflejo de lo que pasa en nuestra sociedad. Debemos estar concienciados de que los niños no hacen sino imitar el comportamiento que tienen sus mayores, esas personas a las que ellos adoran y quienes son su modelo a seguir. Por ello he elegido este vídeo en esta ocasión. Espero que sea impactante, o al menos que os ayude a reflexionar por poco que sea.

Making Jill-o-Lanterns

Aahh, pumpkin time.  What other time of the year will two little girls willingly stick their hands into a gooey slippery mess and smile about it?

This year we had a Mama pumpkin and a baby pumpkin.  The girls always sketch out the design and I do the cutting.  They do the gutting these days.

Always fun celebrating what one of the girls’ classmates calls “Satan’s Birthday.”

The pumpkin gutting has become quite the family tradition.  I clicked around on the old hard drive and found this little gem from six years ago.

I don’t care what the pagan origins of this holiday are.  It’s just fun.

Thursday, October 29, 2009

Dr. Kelly Sennholz Discusses: Don't Be SAD!

Life is precious and to be enjoyed.  The outward result of your life starts in a very warm, cozy place — right inside YOU.  Your thoughts create the feelings and ultimately the responses that you exhibit.  If you are happy, loving, sad, determined or any other state, it is the thoughts in your head that creates it (NOT the behavior or activities of others. Hmmm).  Have you ever loved something or someone and found out a negative about them and subsequently changed your feelings about them?  They didn’t change in that moment, you did.  With new information you made a decision to love or not love, to help or not help, to support or not support when there was no change of circumstance.  Your thoughts created your reaction.  You can work on being positive, simply by changing your mind.  Don’t let past decisions complicate your present.  Choose health, choose delicious, choose vigorous, choose restful.  It’s that simple. What one little new choice can you make today?

 Vitamin D and Mental Health

Volumes of studies are now documenting the relationship between vitamin D levels and mental health.  It is clear, most of us in the developing world have deficiencies of vitamin D that can impact not only our mental health, but our immunity, disease state, cardiovascular health and many other functions. 

Vitamins are generally known to be responsible for a single disease and appropriate supplementation should correct the disease. A hormone, on the other hand, goes to distant tissues and has multiple metabolic activities. Vitamin D is in a class by itself. Its metabolic product, calcitriol, is actually a secosteroid hormone that targets over 1000 genes in the human body. And as such, it should come as no surprise that vitamin D deficiency is also linked to behavioral and mental issues such as major depression and seasonal effective disorder…even possibly autism, Parkinson’s Disease and general cognitive function.

  •     Prevalence of vitamin D insufficiency in patients with Parkinson disease and Alzheimer disease. Arch Neurol. 2008 Oct;65(10):1348-52.
  •     Vitamin D deficiency is associated with low mood and worse cognitive performance in older adults. Am J Geriatr Psychiatry. 2006 Dec; 14(12):1032-40.
  •     Vitamin D receptor variants in 192 patients with schizophrenia and other psychiatric diseases. Neurosci Lett. 2005 May 20-27;380(1-2):37-41.

Current recommendations for Vitamin D intake are 2000 IU a day to prevent deficiency states.

Coping with SAD (Seasonal Affective Disorder)

Some of the ways to combat winter “blues” include letting more light in your house, taking walks, exercising regularly, getting proper sleep, managing the stress in your life and socializing.  Easy to say!!  Sit down and write out 5 things that are now stressing you and one step you can take to begin to ease the stress.  You don’t have to fix the problem all in one sitting.  If we make little changes in the directions of our dreams, the stress will lift.  Another great idea is to spend 10 minutes right before bedtime and write down the things you are grateful for each day. This is one of the most powerful mood stimulators known to man.  Give it a try!

To your health,

Dr. Sennholz

For further health recommendations, visit our site at www.Symtrimics.com.

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Any information, medical or otherwise, contained in this blog is purely for entertainment and is not intended as medical advice or medical treatment.  Please consult your own doctor for any medical advice or treatment. 

Single Mother.

You’re a single mother trying to raise 3 kids.
You feel like you messed up in life cause you got 3 kids that have no father.
But shouldn’t cause the father of these 3 kids doesn’t give a damn about his children.
And you do everything for your children.
You feel like the world has come to an end and you say to yourself it couldn’t get any worse than this.
But you show up to work to hear the bad news
To get fired cause of the recession.
You come home with a concern cause you don’t have a job anymore.
You feed your kid’s dinner and go to bed starving.
Cause your afraid they might not have enough to eat.
The next day you go out to find a job but no one is hiring.
Your out all day and come home exhausted.
Your kid’s ask you what’s for dinner?
But you can’t give them an answer cause your out of money.
And all you can say is i’m sorry and is run to the bedroom and start crying.
But before you cry yourself to sleep.
You pray to God for a miracle and to give you strength to take care of your family.
And when you depend on God for guidance, nothing can go wrong.

Tuesday, October 27, 2009

Wisdom Comes with Age

Reality is an evil place to live.  There’s a reason why the majority of society lives in denial of something.  For me, it’s my age.

It’s as if one day I was nineteen, thin, and knew the answer to all the world’s problems and then the next day…well, let’s just say I had to wear a fat outfit today, the kids I once babysat are now in college, and I’ve forgotten how to not only bring about world peace, but also how to mix Hillary Clinton with Donna Reed and get a perfectly successful, yet domesticated woman.

I’ve realized that I am aging and it’s been a shock to my system; however, with age comes wisdom or so they say.  So today I impart to you my newfound knowledge.

1.  Nail polish may not stay on nails, but it can be used to complete practically any school project.  It’s worked on everything from wooden box cars to turkey feathers, mainly because school projects don’t spend much time in Palmolive.

2.  If you eat chocolate until your blood begins to darken and you find yourself smelling like Nestle’s when you sweat, You Will Gain Weight.

3.  Never yell at your daughter.  She will always take it to heart.  This includes when she wakes you up out of a deep sleep to tell you that she needs to make turkey feathers for school tomorrow.  This includes when you tell her to give you five minutes to wake up and you’ll help her and she comes back after 35 seconds giving you a million reasons why you don’t know how to make turkey feathers.  This includes when after you’ve spent an hour gluing beans, pasta, candy wrapper foils, and little pieces of fabric to cardstock feathers, you find out the dang turkey isn’t due for TWO MORE WEEKS!

4.  Unless you plan on loosing your dog, selling your children, and locking your husband out of the house, don’t ever expect it to stay clean for more than two full minutes.

5.  Buy stock in silverware and socks, they constantly disappear.

6.  Our parents shouldn’t have told us that life is hard, they should have told us that life is not cheap.  Children drain you of every last cent.

7.  Kosher salt is like a lifeline to a hormonal woman.  I love it.  I’m not sure why this should surprise me since I am a huge fan of bagels, but it does.  I’m just sad I waited so long to try it.

8.  The quest to cover your gray hair will be more challenging than trying to cover your tracks when you were fifteen and didn’t want to be grounded.

9.    When you find yourself relating to Maxine cartoons, it’s probably time to stop fighting the progress of nature and just start clipping Depends coupons.

10.  God is always faithful.  No joke.

What have you learned with time?

Notice I didn’t say age?

I don’t like to make you mad at me.  I’m a pleaser by nature.

By the way, I’ve added a ‘Reviews’ page to my header, because sometimes people actually ask for my opinion.

The Tooth Fairy

Last week I had my first run in with the tooth fairy and I should kick her glitter butt from here to never-never-again-land.

Wait, back up.

A few weeks ago I reported to all my facebook friend’s that Kat was loosing her first baby tooth. *sob sob* another milestone *sob* what’s a friggin milestone and why can’t we change it to a kilometresign? *sob*

Lot’s of nice suggestions on how to get the wiggle tooth all the way out but the problem was no amount of wiggling was making a difference. Even watching The Wiggles while wiggling the tooth didn’t wiggle it out. In twitter terms that’s a #wigglefail.

All the while a massive white pointer that was literally white and pointy, was poking up from the fluidy pink recess behind Kat’s bottom teeth. Soon it was too large to be ignored. My daughter was growing in her adult teeth behind her baby teeth. She would have two rows of teeth and they would call her “shark girl”.

Deciding on a dentist is hard work too. I’m not a big fan of dentists, they tend to come at you while you’re wide awake with metal instruments and try and stick them in your mouth. It is barbaric. I don’t care how shiny those metal tools are.

A dentist was finally chosen with a website that smacked of unnecessary luxuries like the possibility of a cappuccino while you waited on red velvet lounges and could be entertained by a multimedia collection of your choosing while being massaged by Arabian monks.

Unfortunately cross referencing Saint Smiley Dentist with my insurance company revealed no joy. Kat would be booked into the local dentist/medical centre that boasted a 6inch plasma on the wall and free water.

Walking into that clinic for the first time was like walking into a familiar nightmare. I think parents have to be so brave for the sake of their children and it sux. There I said it.

“This is going to be fun Kat, you wait til you see all the um, fun stuff that the dentist will show you.”

Fortunately for both of us the dentist we lucked in with was lovely as was her assistant. They gave Kat some funky pink and purple sunglasses so she couldn’t really see the shiny steely metal implements of doom coming towards her mouth. These were not mentioned on the features list for this dentist and clearly should’ve been as Kat thought they were great.

So as her pleasure at her new look continued unabated I was told by the dentist in no uncertain terms that Kat’s teeth were coming in too early and would need to be pulled out one by one if her jaw growth didn’t catch up. Lovely dentist lady was quickly turning into Madam Dentist of Doom.

“So my daughter eats meat off the bone and chews leather boots for breakfast – of course she needs her adult teeth now and not 2 years from now. Can’t you accommodate that without pulling her teeth out???”

Apparently not. So my sweet girl had her first needle in the gum and plier pull. To her credit and my absolute amazement she didn’t cry/flinch or even declare that she hated me forever and would never go back to a dentist. In fact, she happily chatted through the whole procedure. Oblivious to the cruel manipulations going on in her tiny mouth.

“Here you go darling. I’ll put this in a little bag for you to take home to give to the toothfairy” – Dentist Doom says. Great now I have to contend with a fairy on top of nearly passing out when I saw you go in for the pull.

The excitement complemented with a kids magazine and a milkshake and a balloon or two, by bedtime the high fell quickly into a dead sleep. This also allowed that naughty fairy to come and take Kat’s tooth. Three x $1 coins all shiny and gold (to overset those shiny silver dentist tools) were left in a special tooth fairy pillow. And a very over excited and milestone marking fairy sprinkled her golden glitter all over the pillow too. Magic happens right?

 

Oh the heady magic of midnight activities.

So my first run in with the tooth fairy ended in the cool white light of morning reflecting off every piece of glitter that had “magically” spread from the tooth pillow into Kat’s hair, onto her sheets, all over the floor, right through the house, up into our bed and into my hair and David’s too.

Of course the bouncing giggling toothless grin of our four year old,
holding her bounty and the glitter coated tooth pillow was probably worth it all… but never never again.

 

 

Sunday, October 25, 2009

This Month in the Middle (September 2009)

I officially renamed this series “This Month in the Middle” last month and added the new graphics. Each month this entry provides a categorized listing of the posts from the prior month. So, here is the Monthly Round Up of the posts to Dad in the Middle for September 2009. Look for the new index page to Dad in the Middle coming soon!

What Kids Must Know About Sin Series
  • 5 Things Kids Must Know About Sin (Children’s Ministry Think Tank) [09/18/2009]
  • 5 Things Kids Must Know About Sin (#1 What Is Sin?) [09/21/2009]
  • 5 Things Kids Must Know About Sin (#2 Where Does Sin Come From?) [09/22/2009]
  • 5 Things Kids Must Know About Sin (#3 Who sins?) [09/23/2009]
  • 5 Things Kids Must Know About Sin (#4 What Are the Consquences of Sin?) [09/24/2009]
  • 5 Things Kids Must Know About Sin (#5 What Is The Solution For Sin?) [09/25/2009]
Come Ye’ Children Synopsis
  • Feed MY Lambs (Synopsis of Come Ye’ Children – Chapter 7) [09/04/2009]
  • The Child Timothy and His Teachers (Synopsis of Come Ye’ Children – Chapter [09/11/2009]
Children’s Ministry / Kid’s Stuff
  • You’re Losing Us! [09/03/2009]
  • You’ve Got To Love An Honest Kid (Children’s Ministry Moment #3) [09/06/2009]
  • I’m Busy! Do I Have Time To Care for God’s Children? [09/08/2009]
  • Talking to Kids About Death [09/15/2009]
  • Evidence [09/19/2009]
  • Best of the Best – Children’s Ministry Internet Resources [09/29/2009]
Children’s Ministry Blog Patrol
  • The Children’s Ministry Blog Patrol (August 2009) [09/01/2009]
Why I Believe the Bible
  • Why I Believe the Bible #04 (The Bible is Internally Consistent) [09/02/2009]
  • Why I Believe the Bible #05 (The Bible is Unique Amongst Books) [09/09/2009]
  • Why I Believe the Bible #06 (The Supernatural Survival of the Text) [09/16/2009]
  • Why I Believe the Bible #07 (Reliability of Transmission of Old Testament) [09/30/2009]
Monday Morning Prophecy
  • Monday Morning Prophecy #20 – The Messiah Would Come From the Lineage of Judah [09/07/2009]
  • Monday Morning Prophecy #21 – The Messiah Would Come From the Lineage of Jesse [09/14/2009]
  • Monday Morning Prophecy #22 – The Messiah Would Come From the Lineage of David [09/28/2009]
Just for Fun
  • Listen to Your Wife [09/05/2009]
  • How Great Thou Art (Carrie Underwood) [09/12/2009]
Misc.
  • Psalm 23 [09/26/2009]