A night at the Hampton Inn

I look forward to this time of year for a different reason many of you do.  This is the time of year we go to a spiritual assembly in the middle of nowhere Grantville, PA (15 minutes from Hershey Park).  We turn it into a mini-vacation and it has become a treasured event that the kids look forward to.  We've been doing this for eight years and have gone back and forth with the Comfort Inn, the Comfort Inn Suites, and the Hampton Inn.  I have to say the Hampton Inn is my favorite for many reasons. 

They have come along way since we were first here in 1999.  They now offer waffles and sausage with their breakfast selections.  The best the Comfort Inn can do is bagels.  It might sound weird, but I love that the Hampton Inn offers 24 hour access to coffee, tea and hot chocolate.  Julio loves the fact that they have free wireless internet (which is how I'm writing this).  But the number one reason I love the Hampton Inn is the indoor pool.  Since we first stayed here, we have tried many indoor pools that claim to be "heated."  What the hotel does is heat the air in the room, and the pool is freezing.  The Hampton Inn does both. 

The only thing better than a warm indoor pool, is an indoor pool devoid of people.  There's always an awkwardness when two or more strangers have to share a pool.  Or even worse, the pool is overloaded with people and you just stand there getting splashed to death.  So imagine my delight when we open the door and the room is empty.  Our family had a great time having swimming races and playing shark.  Madeleine refuses to get in the water and is quite content to sit on the steps.  So to interact with us, she starts directing.  Of course, isn't that what you would do?  She wants me to act like I'm drowning and Daddy comes to the rescue.  Then Daddy plays the mean guy who has Julian in his clutches.  She will distract him with a snack and I rescue Julian.  I could see how delighted she was to see the stories in her head come to life with the water as a new setting.  I felt like we were the only people in the world, even as we could see the trucks pass by on the interstate.  Then people finally showed up and it was time to go.  I mean, do you want someone staring at you while you're playing with your family?  So it was back to the room for free hot chocolate.  I feel relaxed and at peace.  Life is good.

A Medical Necessity

I'm not going to complain about my health insurance, because it wasn't that long ago when our family didn't have one at all.  I'm quite grateful to have one, and from what I hear Blue Cross Blue Shield Personal Choice is one of the best.  I guess our prescription plan is a separate entity from our health insurance. I can't help but complain about them.  They have tried to put up a red light at every opportunity to question if what a doctor prescribed is medically necessary.  Oh, okay.  Is the doctor wondering if it's medically necessary?  No, it's the greedy people at the top that we pay every month.  Do you know what I think is a medical necessity?  For those suits to lessen the weight in their pockets and go get their heads checked.  Then, they can be denied a prescription. Oh, but that wouldn't happen would it?

The Highlight of My Year

Looking back, it was a good year.  If I had to pick the one thing that blew me away or made an impression on me it had be the Decemberists in concert.  This was quite unexpected on my part, because I didn't know much of them. But when tickets became available, Julio insisted we must see them.  He tried to play me one of their songs before the concert, but I wasn't very interested in his song choice.  I was unaware of how diverse their music really is.  It turns out our favorite Decemberists songs are very different.  I had no time to blog when I did see them in July, so I'm finally able to share with you an awesome experience.

It was warm summer night at the Mann Music Center in Philly.  It's nice to think of that weather now being in December.  We had great seats.  The band had recently begun having a full orchestra behind them, since their budget increased with their popularity.  They are described as folk rock which does them justice somewhat.   Sometimes, they are very folk sounding.  Other times, their songs resemble folk only because of their storytelling nature.   I like how Stephen Colbert describes them as "hyper-literate prog rock."  This is because they make (sometimes obscure) historical or literary references in a lot of their songs.  Mostly, their music is touching, sometimes funny, and beautifully arranged. 

After the show, I was happy to have a husband who already had most of their music.  So when we got home, he could immediately download it in my music player.  The newest album the Crane Wife and Picaresque are my favorite albums.  There is no way to stay in a bad mood when listening to "the Sporting Life. " "The Crane Wife (part one)"  comes in a close second.  Even my daughter has come to love that song and we sing it together.  It is the Japanese story of a man who mends a crane's wing.  The next day, she returns as a woman and they marry.  You'll have to Wikipedia the rest.

It's worth taking a minute and listening to a live version of "the Crane Wife"  I have hand selected from YouTube for your listening pleasure.  The singer talks for a little bit and then the song begins. If you don't like this song, I'll bet there is a Decemberists song out there for everyone.  Don't be like me and judge the band based on one song. 

Just Rolling With the Punches

 I am a rock.

I am an island.

And a rock feel no pain.

And an island never cries.

--Paul Simon

 I have had to evaluate and re-evaluate myself more than I'd like to in a month's time.  Do you ever have everything hit you at once?  If things came, say a month at a time, they would be easier to handle.  So, I am an emotionally drained shell of a person that wants to hide under a rock in order to recuperate.  It's hard to recuperate in the open when another punch comes out of nowhere.  Where are these punches coming from?  All directions.  There is not one specific thing I can mention here because most of these issues are resolved unto themselves.  There is time needed to heal after a person goes through something emotionally traumatic.  I have barely had enough time to heal from issue number one when two through ten comes barreling on me.  I am trying my best to keep my blinders on and trudge ahead since there are no rocks nearby to crawl under.

At times like these, I think of the esoteric poet Emily Dickinson.  I have an insatiable need to read about the lives of poets, sometimes more than the poetry that made them famous.  I can't help but identify with some personality traits or threads that run through their lives.  With dear Emily, she was incredibly shy.  Well, it's hard to be a parent and still be shy. However, there is traces of shyness that will always run through my soul.  Emily never outgrew hers.  When her friends came to visit, she sat in another room and spoke to them from there.  Otherwise, she wrote them letters.  She felt the depth of their caring and friendship, even from such limited association.  She wrote the most exquisite poems on love, yet never had a beau. Could it be the fear of being hurt?  Yes, sometimes the fear can be more intense than actually being hurt.  That doesn't make it an easier emotion to deal with.  It's easier to have an ideal in place, rather than deal with harsh reality.  So Emily rarely left her house.  Some days, I don't blame her.  In order to interact with the human population, it's great to have a fortress guarding one's heart.  When there's an attack, there's no casualties.  You don't feel pain so intensely.  So since I had no fortress in place, the attacks caused some injuries.  Like all injuries, they need time to heal.  I need time to rebuild, but not in an Iraqi sort of way. 

Getting Up to Speed

My son was born with Supraventricular Tachycardia that would have killed him as an infant if it weren't for the meds Digoxin and Inderal (see poem).  His cardiologist weaned him from both by age two and said he should never have problems again.  The statistics at that time said a third of all children born with the condition would grow out of it.  I thought we were out of the woods until Julian was six and felt his heart race.  When he was born, the doctors at CHOP told me to take a bag of frozen peas and place it quickly on his forehead to shock his system out of the arrhythmia.  Taking that information to heart, I used it then with success.  I also immediately scheduled an appointment with his then Cardiologist at  DuPont.  He said the attacks weren't occuring enough to warrant medication.  Also, the side effects would not be worth dealing with.  He said to have Julian bear down (strain) like going to the bathroom and that should break the arrhythmia.  He started doing that the few times a year he would have the tachycardia always with success.  I thought everything was managable.  Then a few weeks ago, he was complaining of a racing heart and bearing down was not working.  After a few minutes, I thought of the frozen peas trick and got out a bag.  After two tries,  it didn't work.  I thought to myself--what else was there besides the ER?  And let me mention here, my local hospital/doctor knows nothing about heart arrythmias in children.  By the time I would wait to be transported to CHOP, it would be faster to drive there myself.  So I just kept trying to break it by shoving frozen peas in his face.  After a few more minutes, it worked.  That scared me.  I scheduled an appointment then with the DuPont cardiologist for January.  Then, Julian's therapist recommended I try CHOP and see if I can get in sooner.  It was the best advice I got this year.  They seemed much more on top of things there.  For instance, when I called to schedule an appointment, the receptionist said a nurse would call me to make one.  When the nurse called me, she reviewed his history.  She asked how I stopped the last episode of tachycardia.  I said after bearing down didn't work, I put frozen veggies on his face.  She laughed.  She said that's something they used to tell mothers to do to their infants.  The idea of a boy getting an old infant treatment amused her.  She joked, "Well, if he never eats vegetables, you'll know why!"  She said he needs to be seen not just by a standard cardiologist but an Electrophysiologist.  Here's a definition: Electrophysiology is the study of the electrical properties of biological cells and tissues. This is the first time I'd ever heard of one. She asked me when was the last time he wore a holter monitor (a device to monitor his heart rate for 24 hours)?  I said not since he was two.  It was something I was going to request, and it made me all the more confident for this visit that she asked first.  I'm excited to see how different this condition is treated since I was plunged into knowing about it as a young mother.  The nurse got me in for next week.  I have learned that sometimes it's better to go with the name brand (CHOP), especially when it concerns your child's health.  But now I have a problem...what am I going to do with all those frozen peas? :)

Remembering a happy time of my adolescence

I give you this title because God knows there weren't many.  There's a commercial out there right now where someone quotes a song from the band Air Supply that jogged my memory. Anyone remember that band from the 80s?  It took me back to how I loved them as a young teen.  All those romantic sappy love songs... I can play each hit and remember each guy I dedicated it to back then.  So having a Microsoft Zune pass with unlimited song download, my hubby added them to my Zune.  As I listened to them, another more pleasant memory came to me.  How would a young girl obsessed with Expose and Debbie Gibson even like Air Supply?  (Ok, I have to admit I had a weakness for the Carpenters that goes unchanged.) But I have my aunt and uncle to thank for liking the band.  They would load my cousins and I into their station wagon and pop in the tape.  It was bizarre to me that everyone in the car would sing the songs in unison.  In my family, we had the oldies station on in the car all the time because that was the only music my parents could agree on.  I didn't have an appreciation for that genre until I moved out of the house.  So, I'm in the car with my cousins and everyone is singing...how great!  Being a very dreamy romantically inclined young teenager, I loved their songs.  (It's later, I would become the jaded Alanis loving young adult.) So, soon I was singing along with my family.  One memory from that time was from the song "Two Less Lonely People in the World."  I remember my aunt saying that the song reflects her son who just started dating a girl in high school.  Well, it's 16 years later and they are still together.  Those times singing in the car lifted me up and made me forget my troubles. It made me feel part of a family when my home life wasn't so great. So today I'm listening to the "best of" album in the shower and I remember every word like it was yesterday.  I hadn't heard their songs in over 10 years.  It made me feel thirteen all over again. 

(Thanks Flo!)

My Inner European

Was there ever any doubt? ;)

Your Inner European is French!

Smart and sophisticated. You have the best of everything - at least, *you* think so.

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