DUOFILIA

I just saw this article and just could not resist providing a link, in pure unabashed glee. I’m sure I’ll hear from my carcass-eating men friends out there….

So y’all think still think that the FDA is a loving, benevolent agency looking out for all of us, so we’ll warm and snug in our beds at night knowing that someone cares. Yeah.

Fred makes excellent points in his blog about one of the latest “discovery” by Western allopathic medicine. I sure wouldn’t want to take anything unregulated by the FDA.

Oh, and how about the FDA advising people to change their diet and lifestyle instead of being so blatantly attached at the hip with the drug companies?? [insert hysterical laughter here]

It takes a lot for me to endorse a product. I have to feel it’s something special and stands out for some reason. Today I tried a product that fits that special category and have to share it with you.

Celestial Seasonings Zingers To Go tea. Awesome. These little boxes contain 10 little brightly colored packets (ooh, shiny). The idea is to pour the packet contents into your bottle of water. Turns said water into flavorful tea. I tried this today and was very pleased for the following reasons:

1. I tried the Tangerine Orange Wave. Flavor exceeded my expectations. I prefer a brewed cup of herbal tea, but this works great when I want something different. They have two green teas (blueberry and peach) and two herbal teas (tangerine orange and wild berry). The herbals are caffeine free and the green tea, I would assume, has the low caffeine content of all types of green tea.

2. No calories. Works for me.

3. Natural sweetener. I am against artificial sweeteners of all kinds. If forced I will drink sugar over artificial sweeteners, and I am against refined white sugar and high fructose corn syrup, so that’s saying something. These Zingers are made with stevia, which comes from the stevia plant and is not only sweet and non-caloric, but nutritious. And not made by people in lab coats who have dark circles under their eyes and laugh maniacally.

4. Only natural ingredients. I hate it when a package implies that something is natural and then you read that it contains red dye #40. The Zingers are colored with purple carrot juice and paprika. Awesome.

I have a lot of patients and people to whom I’ve given health counseling who hate water. That’s usually because they never drank water as children and/or the water they grew up with was disgusting city water or their well water had some funky minerals in it. Getting some of my patients to drink more water is like trying to give my cats a bath. Actually, giving my cats a bath is easier because I can have someone hold them down while I do the dirty work. The State Board of Nursing and my employer’s ethics committee frown upon my holding a patient down while pouring water into his or her gullet. Whatever.

So, when I can’t get someone to change their habits, I suggest that they flavor their water, usually by filling a glass with 1/4 juice (100% only, of course) and 3/4 water. This works very well for many people. These Zingers could be very useful for those people in particular. (Although for the rest of you: Drink Pure Water Please! At least half your daily fluid intake should be free water.)*

And for the rest of us, when you want something different, tasty, but natural and calorie-free, I’d highly recommend Celestial Seasoning’s Zingers To Go instead of reaching for the poison, er, I mean soda.

*Just in case lawyers are listening (and I don’t mean my lawyer friends who would NEVER think such things), if your doctor has told you to restrict your free water intake because you have renal failure, please follow that advice. The rest of you have no such excuse. So there.

Many of you know I homeschool my children and have done so virtually for all their five years. Normally, I love talking to other parents and gaining ideas on parenting. But there is at least one topic that I’ve learned to avoid, and that is homeschooling. I enjoy talking about it to other homeschool parents or people who have open minds about it and/or have educated themselves on the subject. But now that the girls are five, it’s gotten worse. Especially with the extreme competitiveness that is occuring among parents these days to educate one’s child as early as possible. This is not about doing what’s best for the child, it’s about keeping up with the Jones’, it’s about competition.

Anyway, I digress. The opposition to homeschooling isn’t helped by things you see in the media, like the other day when I was sick I actually watched Wife Swap, which I despise, and one of the wives “homeschooled” her kids, which consisted of one hour of school and then the rest of the day was spent sitting on the couch watching TV and eating. Of course there are bad homeschoolers, just like there are bad schools and bad teachers. Doesn’t mean they are all that way. In fact schools, like Harvard and Stanford, for instance, are finding that the strongest (academically) group of candidates who apply are homeschoolers.

So lately I’ve been getting this:

“So are your girls in kindergarten now?” The questioner is visualizing a school building, so I say:

“I’m homeschooling them. They’re in kindergarten [which is the easiest to explain, since they are actually in kindergarten in some subjects and 1st grade in others, since I tailor their education to their speed, abilities, learning style, and biological readiness. They are not pushed nor held back.].”

Then I get The Look. “Oh. I see.” They say. Then I typically get stories about how they know kids that were homeschooled and turned out to be sociopaths and could only get jobs scraping gum off the sidewalk.

Then they ask the most popular question of all, “How are they going to get socialized?” I’m not even going to get into that one, it’s too long of a topic and while I understand how people can embrace that cultural myth, it still irritates me. Short answer: recent studies (and common sense) prove that there is either no difference between the social skills of adults who were homeschooled vs traditionally schooled, or, that the social skills of the homeschooled are above average. Google it if you want more, or email me.

But the other day I was asked one of the most stunning questions I’ve ever heard. Probably the most stunning. When one coworker asked me about how I was homeschooling my girls, another one piped up, out of the blue:

“Are you going to let them see other kids?”

I’m usually pretty calm and collected, but my mouth may have dropped open with that one. All I came out with was a stunned, “Of course!” But later (all the good comebacks come too late) I thought I could have said, “No, we keep them locked in the basement and the only time they get to see other children is if they get out of the duct tape.”

Ginny B. had a better comeback for me: “Only what they get to see through the veil.”

Ginny, I may employ you as my speech writer some day.

 

On September 11, 2001 I was asleep on the West Coast when the planes hit the towers. I had gotten home very early in the morning from work and didn’t arise until 10:00 am. We were in our old house and my parents lived with us. My mom had fed and changed my 3 month old twins once that morning and I would feed them again when I woke up.

I came down the stairs sleepily and my parents met me at the bottom with strange, tense looks on their faces. They said it straight out, “planes hit the twin towers in New York and the buildings collapsed.”

I partially got the part about the planes hitting the buildings. I recalled the B-52 that hit the Empire State Building in 1945, and my first thought it was some terrible accident like that. But two planes couldn’t be an accident. The part about the buildings collapsing was beyond me. I couldn’t wrap my mind around it. Did they fall sideways and land on lots of other buildings? No, they couldn’t have completely collapsed. Then news of the crashes in Pennsylvania, then Pentagon.

Then, like most other people around the world, I turned on the TV and became glued and stunned by the images that blew all our minds away.

Even for those of us Americans who were most sheltered from those events, history will be forever split between September 10 and September 11, 2001. All the unthinkables became ever present potentials. Step by step we lose our freedoms in the name of security.

Those buildings didn’t collapse because of those planes, you know. Oh, yes, when I first heard someone say that I snorted. Right. Conspiracy theory. Things were too painful to grasp when talking about terrorists alone, let’s not make it more gross and entangled than it already is, thank you very much.  Then I saw the videos. This is something beyond liberal/conservative. Even a few congressmen said in those early days that it obvious that the buildings fell in a very controlled demolition — although they keep strangely silent about it now. Decide for yourself, don’t just brush this off. Some very interesting video and information can be found here and here, among many other places.

Later this week I’m going to share with you all a story about the Patriot Act that may shock or at least surprise you. A story that is currently unfolding in the life of some friends of mine. You know I don’t tend to talk about anything political on my site, but to me this is beyond taking sides and is affecting every one of us, and I think you should know.