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I am a latecomer to blood donation . I regret this. I have always wanted to be a person who donated blood. The 4th grade teacher I idolized, Mr. Dunkley, took us on a fieldtrip to the hospital and donated blood before our eyes. He was so noble! so brave! I wanted to be like him. Later, in high school, Hawkeye Pierce and the gang, my M*A*S*H friends, were always ready to lie down and pull up their sleeves when someone needed them–and someone often did.
Well, I don’t live in a war zone, but the Red Cross tells me that every 2 seconds in the United States someone needs blood. I can donate as often as every 56 days, but my blood’s shelf life is only 42 days. In fact, last year a study suggested that patients who are transfused with blood older than 28 days are more likely to suffer infections. So, the fresher the blood, the better. That means the more donors the better. The difficult part is that donors are hard to get. Less than 38% of the U.S. population is eligible to donate blood. Of those eligible, most don’t donate. There are a lot of us who are squeamish and afraid of needles!
But if you are someone who can donate, consider the cancer patients, the new mothers, the car accident victims, etc., who may need your blood. Some day you could be the one who needs blood or your mom, sister or daughter, your dad, your brother, your boss, or your best friend. Or several of you. One thing is almost certain: if you can donate regularly, you will help people. The need for transfusions is rising 6% every year, and the number of donations isn’t rising that fast. We hope for artificial blood, but it’s still a hope for the future. Today what’s true is that if you can donate blood, YOU ARE NEEDED. If you can’t donate, you can help by volunteering, organizing a blood drive, or my personal favorite: babysitting for someone who wants to donate! (The donation process takes almost an hour start to finish and no one wants to take small children to a blood donation center).
I like the idea of often using this blog as a gratitude journal. But I don’t always feel sunny. January, for example doesn’t seem to have much to recommend it. Weather = bad. Anticipation = none. Children = back in school. Pdad = back to work. My goals for the vacation = unmet. I really like the days we had off of work and school, I just wish there could be more of them. And now, as so often, it seems like there is so much to do. I wonder how I can possibly get it all done. I’m not sure which strategy to choose: first get the house clean, then make returns? First make returns, then get the house clean? First do errands (carwash, preschool signup, grocery shopping), then clean house? Meanwhile, outside of this routine, where do I find time to work on the new things, the things I wanted to do better or spend more time on this year? If I get all or even a lot of these things done as I so much want to do, will it mean that I am messing up on something else? That when Kate and Duncan asked me to read to them, I said “later?”
At Church today, we were counseled to make and honor New Year’s Resolutions. I think of New Year’s as a secular holiday and of New Year’s Resolutions as a therefore secular practice. However, I guess there is no reason it has to be that way. Making resolutions is a practice full of hope. Hope than one can change and that things can be different. Hope can transform a slog into something else. It is January. I am desperate for that hope.
It is tricky to set resolutions realistically–high enough to be worth doing, but reasonable enough to be possible to accomplish. I find that when I consider all the possible resolutions I could resolve–fix dinner every night, fix dinners that include vegetables, stay current with the laundry, file all paper and keep it filed, learn windows 7, learn word 2007, be in bed no later than 11:00, read with Duncan every day, make time to play with the kids every day, read several books, exercise, be loving, stop criticizing, donate blood every 56 days, help my neighbor improve her English, read the scriptures every day, blog every day–it is discouraging. It is discouraging because if I am honest with myself I know I can’t accomplish all of those things. If I resolve all of those things, I will fail. But I do want to resolve them, because these are things I really need to do and really want to do.
How do I select between such worthwhile resolutions? Suddenly, making resolutions doesn’t seem secular at all. I can’t possibly sincerely participate in this resolution ritual without prayer. I can’t accomplish my resolutions alone. I can’t even decide what to resolve. Despite my misgivings about January, I am grateful. I have a father to to turn to, to ask for counsel, to pray to. I can put my anxieties in his hands and follow his paths.
Self-Deceived
I was craving something healthy. I’d spent the past few days silently snitching bits of birthday chocolate all day long. I can easily go a few days on cold cereal, yogurt, and chocolate, but then I wake up: What am I doing to my body?! Today was one of those waking days. So, despite it already being 6 p.m., and despite an evening of single-parenting ahead of me (attn ax-murderers: Pdad’s flight should land within the hour) I decided I HAD to make real food or perish.
It went surprisingly well. Duncan played sweetly with Kate. (Do you hear the choir of angels singing? I hope so, because it was a miracle). Amelia worked on her homework. I cooked. I made bistro salad–the number one best way to consume lettuce. It was past kid bedtime before we all finally sat down at the table. They hadn’t killed each other and I’d managed to keep them from spoiling their dinner or having hypoglycemic meltdowns with some carefully timed snacks. It was a good moment.
I said the blessing on the food. With great sincerity, I thanked Heavenly Father that we could sit down together and eat “real,” “healthy” food. I finished the blessing and picked up my fork. Amelia looked at me quizzically: “Why did you say that about healthy food in the prayer? Is Boursin cheese healthy?”
She got me!
For the uninitiated: Bistro Salad is mesclun mix coated generously with a thyme-mustard vinaigrette–plenty of oil, topped by bacon and eggs, and with a side of Boursin toasts. Healthy? On balance, probably not. Delicious: Oh yeah!
Question: If one only enjoys vegetables prepared in artery-clogging ways, is it still better to eat vegetables than not to eat vegetables?
To cover the garden with sheets or not to cover, that is my question. I have several nice looking tomatoes–nice except that they are still so green. I would like to save them, but they are ripening so much more slowly now than before. If we are to have just one or two days of freezing temperatures, followed by several warm days, then covering is probably worth it. If it going to be near freezing almost every night all month, then probably not.
I have become so disenchanted with the cucumber and so exhausted by the zucchini that I don’t much care what happens to them any more. I do play favorites– I would pretty much be willing to cover my basil every night all month if I thought it would work.
We did cover last night. It did work. Things that were covered survived (except for small branches on the tomato plants that broke off) and some of the things not covered shriveled (But apparently that cucumber laughs at cold!).
In other news, this is my birthday week. A sudden attack of paranoia prohibits me from revealing exactly when or exactly how much, but this is the oldest I have felt in approaching a new birthday in a long time (since I turned ten? eighteen? thirty?) I am not yet forty, but to me this particular birthday means “almost forty” and it is a weighty feeling. I wonder if when I turn forty it will still feel weighty or if I will be used to it by then?
Anyway, I am getting pretty old. I have seen the first few silver hairs. I am almost too old to have children. A lot of the milestones in my life are past. Weird. When did this happen? I wasn’t paying attention.
And what next? My zucchini is wilted and pathetic. Hopefully, I am not. What does my new season bring?
My mom visited all last week and it was great. I enjoyed talking with her and I felt like it was a wonderful opportunity for my children to get to know her better. Duncan, particularly, was like a purring kitten after a little extra grandma attention time.
The only problem with having my mom visit is that it reminds me of what a poor housekeeper I am (Despite some at times half-hearted, at times a lot more than half-hearted, efforts to be otherwise!). Somehow the neat and tidy gene that both my parents seem to have has skipped me. I inherited their desire for neat and tidy but not the make-it-happen part.
Anyway, one of the truly helpful things she did while she was here was to organize our games closet which had fallen into a state of entropy so complete that some of us doubted it could ever be restored. Et voila!
The Pfamily Game Closet: What a difference a grandma makes!
I was so inspired by the transformation that on Monday I tackled my own clothing closet and completely cleaned it out. Take that, entropy!
***
This post is about entropy and grandma appreciation. Come back tomorrow for a discussion of which games are good/fun and why. I’d love to hear what’s in your games closet!
I started writing this in reply to Julie’s comment [the 500th comment on this blog and by a new reader to boot! Hooray!] on the Shinguards Go Inside the Sock post and realized I wanted to put it up here as a separate post.
Julie, I think you make a really good point about how important it is to help your child celebrate who he is and what he is good at. All children need that. Actually, we all need that. In pushing one’s children to “fit in” so that they can find greater happiness, it is possible to accidentally send the message that not fitting in is truly terrible. This is a shame. I don’t need or want cookie cutter kids (and I’m not likely to have any). While I want them to feel comfortable socially if possible, I also want to teach them that they don’t have to be like everyone else to be wonderful. This is important for them to know because a) they aren’t like everybody else and b) they are wonderful. It doesn’t mean that those other kids aren’t wonderful as well, but clichéd or not, we are all wonderful in our own way.
I hope my children can learn to appreciate other’s talents and gifts without feeling that they are worth less because they didn’t get those particular talents and gifts. I also hope they will grow to feel mightily thankful for the gifts they have received, while keeping the perspective that being better at x doesn’t make you better, it just makes you better at x. I hope each of my children can find areas in which they are able to work hard and excel, because the discipline of applying oneself and learning the rules of any practice–whether it be soccer or swimming, storytelling or spelling bees, crocheting or kayaking–and then seeing improvement and ultimately success, is powerful rest-of-your-life preparation. We all like to feel that there is something we’re good at. We all want to know that if we work hard we can accomplish great things. This knowledge gives us courage and strength. It also gives us a secure position from which we are better able to appreciate other’s accomplishments and abilities.
I have received a wonderful inheritance from my father’s side of the family: my love of teaching, my curiosity about the world, and my heritage of faith. I also received baldness. It is easy to trace the path back from my father, to my grandmother, to my great-grandmother. Unlike my father, my grandmother and great grandmother bore the burden of being female. Baldness is not only more common in men, it is also better accepted. Both of my grandmothers wore wigs. They felt they needed to.
Since Kate’s birth, the thinning I’ve struggled with since I turned 18 has continued to worsen. I realized this the other day when I noticed that I never need a barrette to keep hair out of my eyes any more. Pdad reluctantly answered my questions when pressed and admitted that it’s pretty obvious. (I have trouble evaluating the situation myself because I can’t see the top of my head in the mirror). I hadn’t realized how bad it had become.
I haven’t decided for sure, but I’m thinking I’ll start wearing a wig. Not because I have to, but because I want to. We associate baldness in women with grim cancer prognoses, not a random turn of genetics’ wheel of fortune. But my insurance company would be happy to inform you that my problems are completely cosmetic (read: coverage denied). I’m healthy. Getting a wig would allow me to change my appearance to reflect that.
It’s scary though. I think that if I want to wear a wig, the best way is to go whole hog, no turning back. I don’t want people doing a mental comparison between my real hair and my fake hair all the time, and I think that means I need to wear the fake hair consistently. Then, hopefully after the initial, “Wow, she decided to start wearing a wig,” looking-but-trying-not-to-look, period, people’s attention will drift elsewhere. Of course, some people try to keep their use of a wig or hairpiece secret. I don’t think that will make sense for me. Getting a wig will change my appearance signficantly, I imagine. Since my hair is now painfully thin, the fact that my head is suddenly covered with hair should be rather obvious–isn’t that the point, after all? If it isn’t a noticeable change, then why go to the bother, discomfort and expense? And if the fact that I’ve decided to wear a wig is obvious, then why pretend? Why be ashamed? Hopefully, it won’t just be a change, it will be a change for the better (otherwise I hope I’ll have the sense to stop and change my mind and do something different). I am a balding woman. I’m not glad, but I’m not going to sit and stew about it either. This isn’t something I chose or something I did, it is just one part of the total package I got from my ancestors. There’s a lot to celebrate and a lot to rue in there. I suspect that for others it is the same.
I went to Recipe Group this evening. Since I nominally help lead the group (i.e., I call people and remind them to attend) and the real leader said she might not be able to make it, it was particularly important for me to be on time. I tried. I tried hard. I was stressed. But I wasn’t on time.
I’ve been musing about my reasons for always being late and always being behind. Two years ago I had a newborn and I was nursing constantly. Yes, I was always late, yes, I was always behind, but observe: I am caring for an infant. This will pass. Well, infancy and nursing have passed, but lateness and behindness haven’t, not for me. Now, I have a 2 yr old and I look at those with nursing infants (unfairly I know) and think, “Oh, that’s much easier. If you put that baby down it will stay where you leave it.” My baby no longer stays where I leave her. She tears around the house doing destruction and requires an awful lot of attention. In the past couple of months, trips to the potty (and yes, I almost always have the honor of being her companion) have often been more frequent than diaper changes were in the past. And of course, she still eats many times a day, although tablefood now suits her just fine.
Something tells me, though, that when she hits kindergarten and 1st grade, I will probably still be late and behind. Because, let’s face it, it isn’t any particular stage my kids are going through, it’s me. Comparisons aren’t wise, but they are human. I noticed that my hostess had several children including a ~2 yr old (same age as Kate). Not only did she host the recipe group, she also prepared two different recipes. And she works. I was home all day. I can’t explain it.
They came to visit and brought these small gifts:
