To Train up a Child

There are few things in the world that bother me more than child safety, whether it is physical or emotional. I know just how deep the wounds can go and how long it can take to get over things. Time doesn't always heal all wounds. Some of us have a tough outer shell and some of us don't. I'm one of the don'ts... God made me sensitive.. why he did, I'm not sure. But, I FEEL for others.

Today, while out and about, I witnessed a woman with an 8 year old, another young child, and an infant (less than a year old) disciplining   hurting her infant. What I saw first was a harried woman, who was no doubt frustrated by having to shop with three young children. She was looking through the sale racks, while trying to make sure her 8 year old watched the younger child. I could tell they were about as tired of shopping as she was of watching them while shopping. In fact, they were going through the store yelling pretty loudly until they found the television area of the store, where the younger child promptly told another child sitting there to get out of the way, because that was his spot. I felt terribly that the woman had such a burden trying to shop for these kids all alone.

What happened next, though, was what changed my thoughts, and made me want to do something, to shake her out of herself, to make her realize that her actions were damaging.

Her youngest child was also clearly tired of being in the stroller. Perhaps he was tired of being in the stroller, perhaps he was hungry, perhaps he was just tired. Anyhow, he kept pulling on the dresses hanging on the racks and they kept coming off the hangers. Then, he gleefully watched as they hit the floor. The mother told him, two times, "Stop doing THAT! If you don't STOP that right now, I'm going to pop you."

That's when I stopped looking through the nearby boy's things and really payed attention to what happened next. When the baby whined and then pulled on another dress, and it hit the floor, the mother quickly grabbed one of the empty hangers and popped her son over the hand with it. He promptly started howling, with huge tears flowing down his cheeks. I don't know how hard she hit him, but it was enough to scare him and stop him from what he was doing for all of.... 5 seconds.

Then, he quickly pulled another dress off the hangers and it fell to the floor. She popped him again... it did no good.. he howled more and pulled off another dress. Finally, the woman gave up and went out of the store with all three children in tow.

I checked out and 5 minutes later I saw all of her children huddled up eating goldfish and the youngest draining a bottle very quickly.

This is the point where I wanted to shake the woman, to scream at her, to pop her on her hands. But I walked on, barely glancing at them, knowing that if I looked at those children long enough, I would want to scoop them up and cry with them.

You see, the children, they weren't acting out because they were bad kids. They were acting out because they had reached the limits of what they could do to keep themselves occupied, while they were HUNGRY.

From my experience as a parent, children act out for three different reasons:

1.) They need your attention. --- Whatever it is you're doing, you aren't providing them with enough attention, whether it is hugs, or talking, or engaging, or trying to ask you a question. I'm guilty of this one when I spend too much time on the computer. In my effort to try to complete my tasks at hand, I ignore my child's needs for interaction, just trying to finish what I'm working on. That's when the whining and acting out begin.. because it works to get what they NEED at that particular moment, that you've been trying to put off until a more convenient time.

2.) They are trying to understand how something works. -- My child spent a lot of time OBSESSED with the dishwasher. He's finally over that stage, but he spent a lot of effort trying to climb inside it (before he could walk) and take things out of it (some of them very SHARP), and trying to put things in it (that did NOT belong in there). While this was completely frustrating to me, to have this happen over and over and over every time I wanted to put something in or out of the dishwasher, I had to realize the reason for it: He hadn't figured it out yet. I could have spent the better part of 4 months screaming at him or popping him for this. It was, after all, a safety risk. Instead, I finally got it through my thick skull that he just wanted to figure out how it worked and understand it. So, I started giving him exploration lessons on it at certain times. I let him in there when it was safe and we practiced putting things in there that DID belong and taking things out that were SAFE to take out. His interest in it has mostly passed now. Now you might be saying, yah but that was something he could play with. Well, it wasn't always safe for him to play in. There were times when I did something called "Redirecting". I took him somewhere to do something else, instead of stay frustrated at his continued attempts to play when it wasn't safe.

3.) They are tired/ hungry/ both. -- It took me all of about 3 days to realize during the "Terrible Twos" that no matter what, you can't effectively discipline a child who is hungry and/or tired. It doesn't work. They are just not mature enough to handle putting their essential needs off to focus on the disciplining. Not only that, but both of the needs of being fed and getting enough sleep are almost 100% my fault as a parent. I don't put my child in bed early enough. I wake him up. I forget snacks. I forget to stop for lunch. I don't shop when he's full/ rested. Now, I know from my own personal experience that I have a hard time accomplishing tasks when I'm hungry and tired. How can I expect my child who is only a year out of the womb, to handle the same thing? I can't.



Now, at least from what I can tell from what I witnessed today, the poor little guy in the store today was most likely experiencing all three of these reasons. He had been put in a stroller, with little interaction from the busy mom. He was trying to understand why the clothes fell on the floor when he pulled sometimes, but not always. He also was obviously hungry and possibly tired.

And yet, she hit him. You might say that it wasn't as bad as smacking, or punching, or kicking. But, research says, the kid still experiences it the same way.

Studies show that children are unable to tell the difference in "for discipline hitting, popping, etc" and "genuine abuse". Very young children don't even understand the difference between fake things and real things. They just haven't grown the capacity yet. We assume children have the same ability as an adult to differentiate between abuse and punishment. It doesn't matter what the motives are, children interpret it with the same feelings of disappointment, shame, and hurt feelings no matter what the intensity is. If you touch your child in this way, they see it as abuse.

But, the worst condemnation comes from the hitting itself..... Research shows it simply doesn't work, especially when the above three things are happening. As evidenced by this mother, and my own experiences, discipline at young ages by this method doesn't work until long after the damage is done. Studies also show that spanking is not an effective method of discipline, by itself. If you are always going to need to use another method to discipline, why not forgo the abusive method, and only use the other method?

I think one of the things that disgusts me the most about this is that it is being taught and exemplified in by Christian writers and churches. The most famous example I can think of is "To Train Up a Child", by Michael Pearl. Here is just one of the sickening quotes from this book:

“My two-year-old will not stay in bed when I put him down. It seems like I am whipping him too much.  No matter how many times I whip him he still gets up.”  This is their recommendation: “If your spankings are too light to gain his respect, an increase in the intensity might be more persuasive.”   (IE: Spanking is not working, so you must not be doing it right.)


On many other pages, it recommends using switches and other methods to beat young YOUNG infants and to completely break down a 3 year old. There are many instances when the Bible is used to back up such behavior. Yet, the BIBLE NEVER ever condones hitting anyone, especially not a child. The Bible condones using the rod and the staff, as a shepherd would with wayward sheep: To gently guide them back to the straight path and to rescue them from going off a cliff. I can't think of a more loving way to treat your child. You see, if you used that rod to beat your young, helpless sheep, you would risk breaking him completely, putting enough stress on him to kill him, or physically damaging him.

The main question I asked myself is, "Would Jesus hit my child, in any way, to discipline him?" The answer is no, he would never do that. So, I can't justify it, not in any way.

So the research says that no matter what, touching your child in these ways has dire consequences, makes kids grow up not respecting, but resenting them, and the Bible doesn't support it.

I wish that I could have said these things to this woman, in love, and helped her to understand that her children weren't behaving that way because they're bad. They just weren't getting their needs met. But, for whatever reason, people tend to balk at this subject in unimaginable ways. They defend their right to spank their child like it is God-given. It is our right to sin, but there are consequences. If you are a Christian and want to defend your right to spank, I ask you to earnestly pray to God for the answer as to whether or not this is the right thing for your family.

I wish I could have been in that woman's life, to say to her, "I know this has to be frustrating. I will watch your kids while you take an hour to shop yourself." I wish I could do that for every parent, so that the temptation to give into frustration and take it out on their child would not happen.

A final thought today.. my child is prone to have the same behavior problems when I don't take care of his needs, I ignore him, and he's curious to figure things out. The lack of spanking or "popping" in our house doesn't magically fix anything. The best cure for behavior problems is simply taking care of their needs the best you can, being stern when needed, redirecting a whole lot, and realizing that one day they will be old enough to handle their feelings and needs better on their own.

And when The Baby (who is about to turn a whole TWO years old) is grown, I pray that he will look at me with respect, knowing that I didn't hit him to get him to listen, and that he listened because he respected. This will be a lot different than relationships that my husband and I have with our parents. But, then again, I don't know many people who were spanked and yelled at who have a great respect for their parents.



Links to studies and articles on spanking:
American Psychological Association
Time Magazine Article with Many Statistics
Psychology Today

When a Church Stops Loving...

A modern church and its congregation is like a ship. Some are more like cruise ships, a party and event for and theme for every day of the cruise. Some are more like a sailboat, drifting here and there, but only making progress when the winds blow in the right direction, reeling back when storms come calling. And then some are like an old tugboat, pulling mightily against a big barge, stuck in some sludge, very slowly trudging through the harbor. Some might even be like a slave-driven ship, with its oars being tiredly moved while the headmaster barks orders.

There are three ways ships usually sink. The first one could be a catastrophic event like an enormous unforeseen tidal wave, sweeping the ship completely over with all of its crew and members swept into the sea. The second is to assault the ship with many blows, some maybe large and some small, but eventually there are too many holes to plug and no matter how hard we try, it is a steady downfall into the deep. The last is a purposeful sinking. The kind where the ship is just worn out and there isn't enough money to keep her going. So we permanently dock her if she's lucky, a place where people come to visit, but not to do work. Or for the unlucky mass, she is sunk to the ocean, her doors closed forever.  She lost some crew members overboard and some of them have been lost to sea and some have been swimming in the murky waters alone now without a ship to rescue, and a precious few have been gently rescued by another type of ship. 

Churches sink the very same way... I have seen many enormous waves hit different churches, the cheating preacher scandal, the divorced pastor, the embezzlement scandal. Those are certainly unseen by all who are not committing the sin. They rock the church to the core and many times it will not ever come back. If the ship can be uprighted, there is much work to be done cleaning up the mess and debris.

The second assault happens blow by blow... it is so frustrating to watch. The decisions being made from sinful man's desires tearing apart the church piece by piece. Highly revered church-goers committing egregious sins and then people think, "If it happened to them, it can happen to me." A pastor makes a remark to a person judging their sin instead of helping them with it. An upstanding church member completely and utterly shuts people out of their life when discovering their sin. The congregation stops focusing on the true needs of their own and their community and starts focusing on, "How do we get more people coming here?" A minister leaves, because he's tired, tired of trying to bring needed changes that are shot down by prideful elders. A sense of pride envelopes members, and instead of thinking, "How can I help?" they think, "That person can't do this because of this, that, and the other that."

This type of sinking is difficult and painful to watch. It happens over such a long time that it may not be easily seen and then one day, another bomb hits, and it's to the deep she goes. If she's lucky, a new leader or congregation member, a mighty tugboat can bring her back to the docks to be repaired.

The third and last sinking is just as scary as the first two. After a long time, repairs and maintenance may not be done as needed to the church building. Emphasis isn't placed enough on the young and youthful, so the congregation is aging and losing interest. The church stops being a place of worship where people go to do the work of Christ. So sadly, the church becomes a hollow shell of what it once was. It is a place where people go to get their "Sunday fix", do their bench-warming, put on their "Sunday Best" and then they go home and don't think about Christ again until next Sunday. It is now a place to visit, not a place to repair and expand and keep working towards a goal. It is the dreaded "Dead Church". Eventually, this church may even close its doors forever, bought up by someone who liked the land.

A lot of people may think there is one reason for this, but is it the right reason to blame? We can blame the fall of man. We can blame our sin on our churches failing. But there is a greater reason, one we can all change. It is in our power, but our pride keeps us from doing it.

From Matthew 22:36-40

Matthew himself asked Jesus the question, "Teacher, tell me, which of these is the greatest Commandment in the Law?" He of course meant the Jewish Law.. the ten Commandments.

Jesus answered him, "You shall love the Lord your God with ALL of your heart, with all your soul, and with all your mind. This is the first and greatest commandment. And the second is, You shall love your neighbor as yourself."

As so many preachers preach on Sunday, repentance is not the greatest things Christians can do. It is only the first step. When we become Christians, our greatest commandment is to LOVE! LOVE your neighbor, who just had an affair. Love them and listen to them to find out WHY they ever did this in the first place. LOVE your coworker who you just found out is gay. LOVE your fellow congregation members who are struggling with love of money. And we are not talking about, "Hey, hi, how are you doing?" love... that is not love. Jesus said to love them as you love YOURSELF. He meant to give them the same forgiveness, using of excuses, and mercy that you give yourself. He also meant to help them as you would help yourself. 

Love all and be merciful. There is such a difference in preaching and teaching. When we preach, we are prideful in our ways. We tell a person that their actions are sinful, reprehensible, even that God HATES it. How can we bring that person to the Lord while telling them the Lord hates their behavior, and even them? I can't think of a more sinful thing than to go against God and his commandment to LOVE by doing this.

When we teach, we talk about our lost ways and how God has made a difference in our lives. We save the guilt and the conviction to God. If God doesn't like what a person is doing, there WILL be conviction, and we can't force that. 

Jesus told us to love for a reason. When we love people, we may see their sin, but we don't judge. We understand that it is only by God's grace that our salvation comes. Pride in Christianity brings destruction to churches. I am so THANKFUL I am a Christian, but it is not my doing. It is not from me that it comes. How dare I have pride for it?

How can love change all of this? Remember the first ship? She hit an iceberg or a tidal wave that capsized her. How could love change this? Her captain, the one in charge, could have been more alert to the goings on, in tune with either his own guidance or given better tools to the crows nest, to avoid the disaster, maybe not completely, but enough to keep the ship afloat. Remember the second ship? She was pelted time after time with blows from cannons or missiles. How could she have survived? By having the intelligence to know where enemy ships are, avoid them, run from them, or how to build up defenses against them. Remember the third ship? The last one became an empty, unused shell with no crew to maintain her. With a lot more love, investment, and work, she could have enjoyed many more years at sea.

Don't let your churches sink like these ships. Keep the love of your neighbor, your church, and most of all the LORD in your heart. Jesus commanded it to us, and more importantly, when we love other sinners, we are reminded of how grateful we need to be for grace upon our own souls.

The Long Painful Pause

I haven't written here since September!!! Before that, my attendance was spotty, and my last posts were dealing with chronic pain. Since that time, my brain has been busy trying to find a way to kill itself to endure the stupid back pain I've been suffering with.

I've been incredibly frustrated this entire time and my energy has had to go into survival mode. Eat, sleep, try to take care of The Baby (who is quickly growing into The Toddler). It is amazing how being in serious pain can zap you of energy. Your brain whittles itself down, just trying to endure... Other things like having fun, doing chores, celebrating events (even ones that mean a lot to you like Christmas) have to fall by the wayside. Your brain is in survival mode thinking of only one thing, and that one thing is, "How do I stop this severe pain?"

I've been in chronic moderate to severe pain for nearly a century a decade. I had a spinal fusion back in 2002 to correct a slippage of my vertebrae in my lower back. It worked! I was pain free for about 2 years. Then, I guess some changes happened and the disc in between the fusion started degrading. Nowadays, if you had the same surgery they would do it totally differently and would remove the disc which can become a pain source and use better methods to fuse the vertebrae together.

Anyhow, when I had The Baby, something changed and I went from pain I could manage to pain I could hardly live with. And by live with, I'm being serious. Suicide has been a common thought in my most miserable moments. But, I don't want to die. I really just want to be able to live, preferably with less pain,  or at least manageable pain.

Throughout this journey. I've really learned three things. 1) Most people cannot comprehend chronic (constant for me) severe pain. 2) Most people cannot understand the need for pain medicines and assume if you say you "need" them, you're an addict. 3) Most doctors are not genuinely interested in really finding out what is the real problem when it comes to back pain.

The first one is maddening, because people tend to associate certain sayings and thoughts with pain. Have you ever heard, "No pain, no gain." "Just tough it out." "Pain is temporary." "Time heals all wounds." "Pain is only what you allow it to be."? Seriosly, none of these comes close to applying to chronic, debilitating pain.

With chronic pain, there is no gain, there is no toughing it out, and it is certainly NOT temporary and time does not flipping heal it. Over time, I've tried to explain what it feels like but I have mostly failed, because pain is one of those things that is just hard to imagine. There are a couple of analogies I've used that help some. The first one, which is good for women who've bore a child: Imagine that you have the pain of late contractions (which unfortunately a lot of women have never experienced due to epidurals or csections) but their are no breaks between contractions. Also, there are no epidurals, and instead of lasting for a day or two (mentally easier to handle), there is simply no end. And there is certainly no release of fantastic hormones from seeing your baby, because all this pain is for NO reason.

If that analogy doesn't work, then if someone has had surgery for something extremely painful like a shattered bone or if they've had a kidney stone (both of which I've experienced), then they can have a better understanding. Except there is just no end in sight for the chronic pain and there are also no morphine pumps on hand either. And I've had some surgeries which were much easier pain-wise than the chronic pain I have! Give me a jaw surgery, meniscus repair or shoulder reconstruction any day over my back pain!

So imagine you shattered your ankle or had a kidney stone and you went to the hospital and they told you that you had to tough it out. They weren't going to fix it or give you any pain medicine. They also told you they weren't even really sure you have kidney stones although it kind of looks like you have them on X-ray. Also, that severe pain is going to be with you for the next decade.

Now number two on the list of things I've learned (on needing pain medicines) is more of a judgement problem. Because people can't understand how pain can be constant and severe, they can't comprehend why someone would need pain medicine on a daily basis. The cultural stigma on pain medicines is that if you take it when you haven't just had surgery or been injured, you are an addict. Plain and simple. But wrong.

One of the problems lies within the fact that most people don't understand the difference between dependence and addiction. Addiction is a serious psychological problem where the person escalates their drug use over time when there is no physical need. A person addicted to pain medicine will take medicine to feel something, not relieve pain. If that person continues their addiction they will need more and more pain medicine to get high. Addiction usually causes the person to take more pills in just a few days than a person in pain would take over many weeks. Also, the person in the grips of addiction will do things that negatively impact their relationships in order to get high. They neglect everything in pursuit of drugs. (Whereas a person who is in chronic pain neglects relationships due to pain and suffering and will do anything to relieve their pain.)

Ironically, it is very rare for a person who is in chronic pain to develop an addiction. In fact a lot of studies have estimated the risk to be lower than ONE PERCENT!!! However, people who are in chronic pain do develop a chemical dependence to medications if the dose is high enough and is taken often enough. Chemical dependence causes the brain to become accustomed to having the medicine, and this is actually a great thing for people who are in chronic pain. It is that mechanism that allows the body to stop experiencing so many side effects and so the person doesn't feel the euphoric effects or other side effects like a person who isn't in pain would, if they took those medicines. However, it does mean that if the person abruptly stops taking the medicine, they will have symptoms of withdrawal, much like an addicted person would, but usually it is far less severe since they don't take high doses abusively like an addict.

Now one thing to mention is that sometimes people who are in genuine need of pain relief seem to exhibit drug-seeking behavior, like going to multiple doctors if one won't prescribe anything, or asking family members for pain medicines. This is called pseudo-addiction. It happens because a person who is in real, severe pain, is not being treated properly for it. The key to distinguishing this from a psychological addiction is that when that person finally gets proper pain relief, whether it is medicine, injections, or surgery, they stop those pseudo-addictive behaviors. I can sympathize with this totally. When you a suffering so much, you will do anything to end it, and that's where contemplating suicide sometimes happens.

The third thing I learned was perhaps the most maddening thing of all. I learned that most doctors do not genuinely care about doing everything they can to help their patients, even of those patients have been seeing them for a very long time. After I had The Baby, things got dramatically worse within my spine. However, the doctor I had been seeing, and trusted, for the past five years, was very reluctant to help me figure out what was going on.

I went to a supposedly well-esteemed neurosurgeon affiliated with the University of Tennessee and was treated as if I didn't exist. His first words out of his mouth were, "Well, this has been going on s long time, hasn't it? Well, i see nothing on MRI that I can help you with." I had to spend time trying to convince the surgeon that a ct was necessary even though I had had an MRI before (MRI is very good at detecting soft tissue and ligament damage, whereas CT is better at showing bone structure and abnormalities.) A week later I got a call that there was nothing he could do for me.

If I had been less educated and less persistent I never would have gotten answers for why I've been in chronic pain for 7+ years and why for the last 15 months, my pain has been unbearable and constant.
After months of waiting and many doctors weeded out, I finally found a doctor here in Knoxville that knows what they're doing and is thorough enough to find out what the problem is, instead of putting me through useless procedures designed to run up my insurance tab but are just a shot in the dark at helping pain. The doctor I saw couldn't believe what the other doctors had missed on my radiology report.

In between my spinal fusion, they left the disc in. Well that disc is not just degraded. It is now herniated and bulging out the back and pressing on my spinal nerves. On top of that (literally) is a complete ridge of bone spur pressing on the herniation and also my spinal nerves. The best guess is I herniated the disc while in the last stages of pregnancy.

The new doctor I saw said that the only explanation they had for doctors not wanting to fix this is: the fix for this problem is NOT easy. It will take plenty of time in the OR and there are risks since I've had surgery before. Yet, not one surgeon told me anything that was even on my radiology report.
And so you see, the pain is not in my head... It has a cause... Just like I'm sure Every person who struggles with chronic pain. And yet we are humiliated by people who think they understand it. People who think they are just stronger or tougher than the person suffering. People who think they would not need medicine if they were in the same situation. Doctors who think we exaggerate the pain to get medicines, Doctors who don't do their job well enough to find the root cause. Doctors who don't read continuing education and medical journals to see that there are new pain mechanisms, thought not to exist, being discovered (in 2002 it was thought that a disc itself doesn't cause pain, which has now been proved false with extensive study).

If you are suffering and in pain and are having trouble getting answers I urge you to do two things. The first is to pray. It was through prayer that I was able to discern the right doctors to see and to listen to. The second is to become your own advocate. I learned that most doctors are really only concerned about their bottom line and liability. If you have something that doesn't have a straightforward cure, a lot of doctors won't help you. Keep searching. It isn't worth succumbing to the feelings of doubt and wishing to end it.

You never know when your solution might be just around the corner. I went from thinking I was going to suffer with this the rest of my life to learning I have something treatable within a matter of weeks after EIGHT YEARS of suffering. And lastly, if you are suffering, please contact me. I will help you as much as I can by praying with you or helping you get help.

Confessional: I'm broken

This is something I've been debating about writing about for a long time. It is easy to write about others and issues, but not so easy to divulge personal crap that I'm going through. You see, I'm broken.

Biological Misfit. Accident-Prone. The Klutz. The Most Clumsy Graceful Person I've Known. The Doctor's Mortgage Payer.

These are all nicknames I've owned, and still own in the case of the Doctor, except I've moved on from his mortgage and payed for a kitchen remodel, a backyard and pool remodel, and his new "day driver" Beamer.

Since I was a kid, my brain has always been getting me in trouble with my body. I am a daredevil by nature and like to act first and think later when it comes to fun things. It started with things like tree climbing, and walking ON TOP of Monkey Bars and jumping off of things. From there it evolved into things like figure skating, skydiving, and skiing.

All that fun has come at a price, though. It broke me. Literally. A broken clavicle here, a fractured tibia there, and a stress-fractured back there. Nobody bothered to give me one piece of advice when I was younger, that I really could have used though.

Those injuries... they may heal and feel great at the time, but they leave things behind: Damaged nerves, scar tissue, and ARTHRITIS. So, when you get "old" all of those "little" injuries are going to take a physical toll on you. And by "old", I mean THIRTY (which I already am).

So, I'm broken. When I was a figure skater, I fractured a little bone in the bottom of my spine. I was about 14 and I did it while doing repetitive layback spins. (I also had a genetic predisposition to having this kind of fracture which I did not know before it happened.) Here's a photo of me doing these spins... (I mean Sascha Cohen doing an impersonation of me doing these spins):

Photo Courtesy: Tom Theobald

That little broken bone caused my spine to go on a migration. That migration happened for about six years until it finally caused enough havoc that a doctor told me to fuse it.

When I first had this problem, they told me that it was a very low risk that anything would happen due to the fracture. They said it was only a 10% chance it would develop into Spondylolisthesis, which is a progressive slip of the vertebra.  Even if that happened, it would be a relatively small risk that I would even need surgery.

As with every other circumstance, it seems I'm always the 1% or 2% or THE ONE person that will have a bad outcome. I developed Spondylolisthesis and it eventually progressed enough for me to quit figure skating at the age of 20 and have surgery.

Nowadays, if you had that fracture, they would fix it immediately. But, that was not the case "back then".

At the age of 20, this is what my spine looked like (or what it would have looked like if they did an artist's rendering of it):

Unfortunately, when things start migrating in your body, you start to get impingement on nerves and the nerves start to get stretched out. The muscles go crazy and start spasming to try and keep everything aligned.

When nerves get pinched for a long time, they become permanently scarred and damage. They continue to send signals to the brain that they are injured long after the injury has happened and healed.

I finally had the spine bones fused which reduced the pain into my legs by 95% and reduced the muscle spasms a lot, but not totally. So, surgery wasn't a fix-all solution for me, unfortunately.

I keep hoping that one day, I can have something done or do some kind of therapy that will undo the damage I did to my body. I see a chiropractor, I've done tons of physical therapy, had multitudes of injections and blocks, and tried experimental therapies.

I recently (two weeks ago) had a procedure which burns the nerves that sense pain around the vertebrae. It's called an RFA (Radio Frequency Ablation). Nobody told me that a certain percentage of people who have this procedure have increased pain and spasms for WEEKS after the procedure. Of course, I'm that person and I've been trying my best to just get through it here lately. I'm tired of laying in bed and missing out on life, though.

With all of this, people often wonder how and why I still do all of the activities I do! I'm going to get into that in my next blog post, but the short answer is, "My spine is stable and there is nothing I can do that will further injure it (except, apparently, procedures which are designed to lessen pain) and so keeping my back as healthy as I can and having fun lessens the pain."

If I could take it back (the figure skating) I would... but since I can't, here's a photo to enjoy that actually is me:

The Dreaded D Word

This morning I did it.

I dropped my kid off at the dreaded "D" word. Daycare.

Speaking of "D" words, I was in denial. I was in denial that what I was really doing was really "daycare".

I said to myself, "This is just Mother's Day Out at church. It's no big deal. Just a few hours so I can get a few things done and have a break."

I was wrong. It was daycare.

"Parents' Day Out" just started back up at my church two weeks ago for the Fall session. I was supposed to drop him off two weeks ago. On that Tuesday though, he had a little sniffle and a clear, runny nose. So I kept him home. The next Thursday, he still had the sniffle so I said, "I'll keep him home till NEXT Tuesday. By then, he'll be just fine and he can start then."

Then, the next week came. I was having a lot of anxiety about having this procedure done on my back the following day. The Husband didn't have to do anything that day so he offered to watch him instead. Then, Thursday came again and I was having such a hard time recovering that I couldn't lift him at all. So, The Husband watched him again.

Well, here we are again. It's Tuesday, two weeks after "Parents' Day Out started and I finally dropped him off. The whole time I kept thinking, "This is just like Sunday School. It's going to be fine." I imagined a Utopia setting kind of like this (except my baby is smaller and he doesn't wear shoes) where my baby would get one on one attention and learn all kinds of things among all of the other babies:

Then I got there.... and there were quite a few babies and less workers than are present during Sunday School. It hit me: My baby is going to "daycare".

For me, "daycare" is this scary word that fills me with terror. It's a place where your kids go and pass germs around. Your kid may have to sit in a poopy diaper longer than normal because the line at the diaper station is long. They may not get to be scooped up right away if they're upset because there are only so many arms to pick up little, crying babies. They might cry because they're hungry and it won't be time to let them eat. They might just cry all day long and nobody will care because it isn't their kid.

This morning I felt like it was more like this:

I even felt like I should stay and help out. I kept asking if they needed help and if they were going to be okay.

But,  I'm proud of myself because I got over it and left. I trusted them and trusted that they had things under control. I'm sure it only looked scary because I was dropping him off for the first time and was a "wee bit" anxious.

I know that this is just the first in a long line of things my baby will do to become independent. Going to this program twice a week will give him other ideas of how to play with toys and how to interact with kiddos his age. He'll also hopefully learn that other people can meet his needs in different ways than Mommy and that is okay. Hopefully, it will also give me some confidence that his world will not end if he's not attended to with every need as soon as it happens. People call that patience I think.

So, I did it... and he crawled right in and started playing with a toy I had not seen before and never looked back. I'm so glad he's able to take these first steps in an environment he's already comfortable with, at our home church.

Now, excuse me while I try to distract myself and resist the urge to just go get him right away and destroy his opportunity for learning patience.

Why I Chose to Cut My Boy

Recently, there has been a lot of go 'round in the media about parents circumcising their boys. It all started in March of 2011 when San Francisco decided to BAN a parent's right to choose whether or not they could cut their little boys and hippies and others alike rejoiced and said, "LET them STAY the way they were BORN! Stop the useless CUTTING on the village children!". Or something like that.

Anyhow, October 1st, 2011 we made the decision to cast aside the risks and get our newborn baby's penis cut.

It wasn't an easy decision. I did research. Research that is finally making its way back into the media. You see, I read a preliminary study that said that boys and men who are circumcised have a MUCH less chance of contracting HIV. More about that later.

I'm not really into hurting babies or potentially harming them. However, when something can be done that could potentially save the life of my child (or seriously impact their quality of life), I take note and weigh the risks. My husband and I have done the same thing with vaccines.

The vaccines were an easy sell for me. About 10 weeks into my pregnancy with The Baby, my husband caught the whooping cough and gave it to me. We were both so violently sick with cough that we both thought we would die. We both thanked GOD it had not been the following year when we would have had a baby infant. That showed me how important it was to get vaccines. There's a reason why those illnesses need vaccines and I didn't want to take chances.

I still hate the thought of The Baby having a serious reaction to vaccines and something bad happening. But whooping cough (and other diseases like measles) that were almost eradicated, are making such a comeback that they've killed more children this year than they EVER did before the vaccines. Credit that for the amount of world travel that exists now and the scares that vaccines causes Autism (which has been disproved a hundred times over but it was so prevalent in the media that it still persists today).

Anyhow, the current rates of circumcision in the United States are about 58 percent. Eighteen states do not cover the procedure under Medicaid. But, I think that's about to change. The research I did before my baby had the procedure is finally coming out in a panel judgement. The panel of doctors from the CDC determined that the health benefits of circumcision outweigh the risks. There is clear evidence that circumcision helps prevent the spread of HPV and HIV. This story from NBC talks more about the results.

 As a parent I do not want to ever think about my child having sex. I'm just coming to terms with the fact that he has even discovered his genitals. But, one day it is going to happen. I pray that it is with his wife on their honeymoon and he never has to worry about those 3-letter diseases. But, if it doesn't go that way, I'm trying to do my part to protect him from what I can... from whooping cough to HIV. Of course we cannot get around the fact that the Bible called for circumcision in the Old Testament as a necessary procedure to become "clean". Although Jesus said it is not necessary for Salvation, perhaps the Old Testament has more relevant instructions to live by today than we realize.

I just want to say in closing.. these are my own personal reasons.  Whatever yours are, I just hope you have done your research before deciding to cut or not. I see both sides of the issue, and we parents should still be given the right to choose.

Delete This Post When Baby Can Read

In the past couple of weeks, something has happened.

And I've been delaying writing about it.

You know how baby books have those spaces in them for things like "Discovered Hands!", "Discovered Toes!", and "Can Grasp an Object!"?

Well, there's no entry in there for "Discovered and Grabs Genitals"!

But, guess what... just like every other milestone, it happens. And just like every other milestone, once it happens, they don't unlearn it.

In addition to not having an entry in a baby book for this milestone, nobody prepares you for this moment! At the last check-up with my pediatrician, she failed to ask me, "Has your baby discovered his penis yet?" She also failed to prepare me on how to handle this "milestone".

It happened for the first time a few weeks ago while I was changing The Baby's diaper. After I took his diaper off, he immediately reached down and grabbed IT. And then he laughed. And repeated it. And repeated laughing. And then he repeated it every single time I have taken off his diaper since then. And in the bath. And any other time he has access to IT.

Since he's only 10 months and just learning to label things, I told him what it was. But, now I am scared I might have said what it was too much. Or maybe I'm looking at him grabbing IT too much. Or maybe I'm not doing anything properly in regards to this matter.

So, I did what any fearful first-time parent would do: I Googled what the proper etiquette is regarding a baby's gender-bits. Be forewarned, if you do this... be VERY careful what you put into the search box. People are sickos. Anyhoo, the article told me to tell him what IT is in the proper words (ie. the P word and V word since I'm trying to avoid said sickos searching and finding my blog), never tell him "No" regarding touching IT and instead tell him it is private, and he needs to only touch IT when he's in a private setting, and that nobody else can touch it except mommy and daddy.

Well, that was really informative. Except... The Baby is not even a year old. He understands about 50 words and "Private" is really a concept that escapes him. Believe me, I tried to explain this regarding my use of the bathroom... and it didn't work! Also, how many times should I label this thing? His first real word that he uses without fault in the proper context is "Dog" (only it sounds like Dogmm). We barely ever even used that term. It was always "Puppy" and "Bear" as that's our dog's name. However, somehow he picked up the word "Dog" and it stuck. So, I'm pretty sure I do NOT want his second word to start with a P!

The article also did nothing to calm the sinking feeling in the pit of my stomach. My baby knows and likes to touch his IT. There is no going back. From this point onward, as in every man's life, that will be the center of his thinking in a short decade.

I can't believe my precious newborn baby is almost a year old. This milestone has been the first one that has really knocked me down into a little depression. I know that he was headed for this point from the moment he was conceived, getting older every day. But all I thought about back when he was a newborn was how I wanted him to be raised, not the fact that he was going to be raised and get older SOON.

People talk about how quickly the first year goes by and that it gets even faster after that, but you have no idea how quickly that really happens until you're an adult and in that situation. Days are chocked full of chores and things that HAVE to be done to maintain the household when you have a baby. It is really mind-bending.

This "IT" issue really got me thinking that once he does understand the word "Private" we are going to have to have some ongoing conversations, you know, the tough ones. As a parent (at least a decent one), you know one day that is going to happen but when they are a newborn it is literally the furthest thing from your mind (once you get over the novelty of having to clean those parts). This new discovery makes it all so real and scary to think about!

So, there is only one solution and that is to have another and just ignore the privates on this one! Just kidding. Sort of. Not really. I now know why that Duggar woman keeps having them. Anyhow, the real solution, I guess, is to embrace his getting older and concentrate on the ways he has grown. I need to also think about the future conversations and how and when we will give him information about his "IT". And keep that friggin' diaper snapped tightly.