Six Word Saturday (4/27/13)

Is It Ever Going To End?

Last Saturday my daughter went to a teen lock-in at a pizza place overnight.  By Monday, surprise, she was sick and complaining her throat and chest were burning when she breathed.  Well, ever since the kids went back to school after Christmas, she has stayed home from school pretty much one day a week (with a "headache," "stomachache," "someone's bullying me," "I'm tired," etc.), so I intended to make sure she was genuinely sick so she wouldn't get in trouble so I took her to the doctor.  She has a bronchial infection so the doctor ordered her to stay home the rest of Monday and Tuesday, and take some antibiotics.  Wednesday she cried and said she still felt horrible so I called the school and said I was keeping her home.  She did go to school Thursday, and they had a "snow day" yesterday.  Then yesterday, after not complaining all day and my husband went to hang out with his friend that afternoon, my daughter starts screaming like she's being stabbed to death.  It scared the hell out of me because five minutes before that she was laughing and watching a movie with her brother when my husband left.  She screamed that her ear hurt really bad.  I put some drops specifically FOR ear pain in her ear, she still screamed.  I was THISCLOSE to calling an ambulance!  My son had some painkiller leftover from when he got his tooth pulled and I gave her 3/4 of a dose of it.  It started working about 20 minutes later and she fell asleep for four hours, and I kept going in every half hour to make sure she was still alive (because the prescription wasn't for her and I felt guilty).  I was sure my husband was going to be mad at me for giving it to her, but HE didn't hear that girl screaming!  He actually wasn't upset except to chide me for believing her "drama queen" antics.  At any rate, it looks like I'm getting to take her to the doctor again on Monday if she's too sick to go to school.

In counseling, my therapist's cell phone keeps going off.  It distracts me.  It also "triggers" me to remember when my ex-friend J got a phone call once during our Bible study and she laid on the couch for 25 MINUTES talking to someone (who actually turned out to be my therapist since she goes to the same guy).  I hate my ex-friend, so now I just feel like running out of his office when his phone goes off.  Even if he doesn't answer it.  Even if he just glances to see who it is.  (When my ex-friend had talked for so long, I ended up leaving her house and peeling out of her driveway.)  I just can't do this, and I brought it up a couple weeks ago and his "solution" is to work with me on dealing with my reaction to his phone.  Get that?  It feels rude and abusive to me for his phone to keep going off during my session, so HE wants ME to learn to tolerate the abuse.  (Oh, by the way, he "can't" turn his phone off because it might be someone like his elderly parents having an emergency.  What the hell is his SECRETARY for?)

Lastly, commenting about the Gosnell trial.  Adding to the comments I made here last week, I agree with the comments by Lauren Kathryn McCall on the American Thinker website (her piece called "What difference does it make?"), which basically states that everyone is appalled that Gosnell's clinic was filthy and the staff was unprofessional but post-abortive women (like herself, and even myself) went to a clean clinic with a professional licensed doctor - but what difference does it make?  NONE!  All of us were scared and told an abortion would fix everything and we could go on with life as normal, but it was a LIE!  We will never be the same.  I also agree with another column I just read this morning by Matt Barber of WND titled "Much ado about nothing," which is full of complete sarcasm but actually made me feel better.  His tagline was "What do you think abortionists do, heal people?"  I wonder if maybe God is using Gosnell to wake people up.

Six Word Saturday (4/20/13)

Comments on Things in the News

1. Saturday night I found out the author Brennan Manning died on 4/12.  I had just gotten his book "Ragamuffin Gospel" from the library since I enjoyed reading "Abba's Child" a couple years ago.  He had been in poor health for a while so I can't say I was shocked to hear this.
   
2. The Gosnell trial, about that abortion "doctor" in Pennsylvania with the filthy clinic and performing late-term "abortions."  The details are horrible and it's been a ping-pong game of media finger pointing because the trial barely got any coverage but now it's getting a little.  Even if I agreed with my Facebook friends who post comments about it, I feel like I don't have a right to an opinion because I've had an abortion before.
   
3. The Boston marathon.  One of the two guys responsible is dead and the other is in custody (so we get to hear about him through all his trials for the next five years).  I wonder why the city officials told everyone to stay home cowering in fear.  Now the next dopes who decide to do something bad will know there won't be any resistance then either.  After 9/11/01, the people in NYC were told to go on with business as usual, and there are a lot more people there than Boston!

Six Word Saturday (4/13/13)

Not That Much Is Going On

Last Saturday night my husband took me and the kids (plus my daughter's friend) to Uno's for dinner.  We had wanted to go to Texas Roadhouse but there was a huge wait.  I still got a steak and a couple glasses of wine at Uno's though.

Monday we went to the library and there was road construction en route.  It was scary also because it was really windy that day.  My daughter ran the books in for me and helped find an alternate route home so I wouldn't be so nervous.  I didn't request any new books.

In counseling we're kind of doing "empty chair" therapy (where you pretend a certain person is in a chair).  My therapist's cell phone vibrated and I could hear it, so we talked about that, how I forgot I was supposed to ask him if I was important as the caller was.  I think it's strange that I have to alter my behavior like that for him instead of him just turning the stupid phone off and leaving it on the floor in plain sight (because he claims he's scared he'll forget to turn it back on when my session's over). 

I finished the assignments every day of Week 1 of the Mindfulness book I'm reading.  The short meditation focused on your breath, the routine activity I made myself fully aware of was taking out the garbage, and the "habit releaser" I used was sitting in a different chair than normal when I ate.  I read this week's chapter and the meditation is twice as long but I only have to do it twice a day for six days instead of all seven like the first week.

Right now my dog Hershey is at Petsmart getting groomed.  I don't know why they say his appointment's at 10 because we got there and they told me he'd be there waiting for three or four hours.  Next month after Princess gets her rabies shot, she will be getting groomed too, but maybe I will have it done during the week and there won't be such a long wait for her.

Six Word Saturday (4/6/13)

Easter, Extraction, Egg McMuffins and Mindfulness

We didn't go to church this Easter.  Well, I'm the only one who would've gone anyway but I watched Northpoint Online's service instead.  The pastor Andy Stanley made a really good point:  If you can believe that Jesus was "just" a good teacher, prophet, good man, etc., but maybe not the "son of God rose from the dead" part:  The very same people who saw him be a good teacher, prophet and good man whose testimony you believe are also the same people whose testimony it is that they saw him after he was risen from the dead.

My youngest son had a tooth pulled Monday.  My husband took him.  Before his appointment that morning, my husband was snapping at me even if I said hi to him and he would glare at me every time he walked past me.  Granted, he could have been nervous about our kid being in pain but he could have voiced that to me.  No, instead he was a six-foot-tall toddler being a jerk to me.  The procedure was very quick and they got home within an hour and then my husband was all smiling and talking to me like nothing ever happened.  Jeepers!

Every Saturday morning before my husband goes to teach, he stops at McDonald's to get an egg McMuffin.  Last week he found out there is a "breakfast sandwich maker" that you can actually buy.  You put the English muffin in two compartments, the cheese and ham next to the top one, and a special tray in the middle to cook the egg in - and in five minutes - ta-da! - your McMuffin is ready.  He ordered it off Amazon and I also got a DVD of the movie Zookeeper and a book by Prof. Mark Williams called "Mindfulness - An Eight Week Plan for Finding Peace in a Frantic World."

Sometimes I get so many thoughts in my head and I feel like I can't slow them down, and I had looked on YouTube for the shortest guided meditation I could find (since I have the attention span of a gnat when my thoughts are flooding me) and this actual professor personally narrates a three minute one.  It really helped me.  Next I looked him up on Google and found out he's a professor at Oxford and that he has written some books, and I found one of them on Amazon that looked good.  He has a lovely speaking voice - very gentle and soothing, with a soft British accent.  Okay, he's pretty good looking too.  Anyway, I've read the first four chapters that explain everything and today I'm going to work on Week 1's assignments.