Do you ever notice how sometimes we can have a harder time dealing with the little inconveniences of life than the big things?  I’m trying to figure out how to do different things with my blog.  I am not very computer literate and this frusterates me to no end!  I just want it to be simple.  Of course in the big picture it really is not important. 

Also, summer is fast approaching.  Our family has many things going gon in the month of June.  My birthday is in June along with my daughter’s.  My anniversary is also in June.  I tend to worry if I’ll have the energy for all these activites.  I’m trying to take a new approach though.  I’m trying not to overextend myself.  I will ask for help.  I will not worry about the rest and I will not be overly concerned about what others think of my limitations.  Just enjoy what you are able to do.  Take a deep breath and enjoy all those little moments!

It is sunny in my part of the world.  I hope everyone is having a blessed Sunday.  I’ve had many thoughts running through my head lately. 

Even though we are a country filled with cell phones, e-mail, instant messaging, etc. it doesn’t appear to keep us anymore closely connected.  You would think that the church would be different.  Maybe they are a little different.  We reach out a little bit more, but then we go back to our lives until we meet again.  I have always wondered how we can do life a little more together.  Acts 2:44 says “All believers were together and had everything in common.  Selling their possesions and goods, they gave to anyone as he had need.  Every day they continued to meet together in the temple courts.  They broke bread in their homes and ate together with glad and sincere hearts, praising God and enjoying the favor of all the people.  I don’t have the answer.  I wish I did.  I do have some ideas though.  I will start with myself.  I will care a little bit more about others than I care about myself.  I will send someone an encouraging e-mail or note. I will pray for them.  I will ask what’s going on in their lives and really listen.  Let’s think of more ways we can be connected and “do life together.” 

Prayer for the day:

Dear God, I have never thanked you for my thorns.  I have thanked you a thousand times for my roses, but never once for my thorns.  Teach me the glory of the cross I bear;teach me the value of my thorns.  Show me that I have climbed closer to you along the path of pain.  Show me that, through my tears the colors of your rainbow look much more brilliant.

                                                - George Matheson

Lisa copen has put together a new and revised restministries website.  She also has a sunshine room that is just wonderful.  I have found so many helpful things there.  I am so grateful to lisa for all her time and skill despite her chronic illnesses.

I have been feeling kind of down the past couple of days physically and emotionally.  It’s hard not to compare yourselves with others.  It’s easy to feel that no one understands!  I have found a great book called Spiritual Sunlight for the Weary.  It is filled with devotions written by people who deal with illnesses that cause fatigue.  It has helped me to remember that i am not alone.  I found mine on www.restministries.com last year.  If it’s not found there anymore i think it can be found on www.amazon.com.

I hope everyone had a blessed Mother’s Day!

I am still trying to get use to having less time at home to get things done.  I feel overwhelmed at times.  Wouldn’t it be great if we could all afford a maid?  I only work three days a week and I still feel behind.  Laundry piles up, kids reports and homework need to be finished, dishes, cooking, grocery shopping.  The list goes on.  One of my most stressful things is feeling like I’m drowning in papers.  My kids seem to bring home tons of them.

I finally thought of some things to help steamline all the stuff that comes in.  Maybe some of these ideas will help you or spark your own ideas.

1.  My kids like to do their homework on the dining room table, but i was getting tired of it being clutered with everything.  I bought an inexspensive organizer with three shelves.  It’s short and freestanding.  I put it in the corner of my dining room.  I gor some pretty magazine holders from ikea and labeled one for both my children.  I put all their papers in there.  Once a week we go through them.  If they can’t find something I tell them to go there.  I also got a small plastic box and put sharpened pencils, glue, crayons, and scissors in it.  When they are done with their homework they can put everything back in the box.

2.  I also was having a hard time deciding what to do with my papers.  It seemed like everything I tried did not work for me.  I did not take the time to file papers in my filing cabinet.  Also I was afraid if they were completely put away I would forget about them.  I deccided to use the magazine holders again and put labels on them.  I used one for household things, bills, school papers, and health related papers.  Of course you could use whatever titles you wanted. 

Hope this was helpful.  Let me know of your ideas!!

I also wanted to share a website that I really like.  It is www.mommysavesbig.com.  Check it out!

Ever since I started my part-time job I haven’t posted.  It took me a few weeks to get used to working again, but it hasn’t been as difficult as I thought.  I work Monday, Tuesday and Thursdays from 8:30 t0 3:00.  I teach a class of ten preschoolers.  I team teach on Mondays.  I had been feeling pretty well the first few months of work and I was amazed. Well, this week I was very sleep deprived, so I had my first workday with feeling pretty horrible.  We had two snow days off so I was able to rest up on those days.  I was very thankful!!

I would be interested in hearing stories of working women with chronic illnesses.  Feel free to post.  I hope all is well with everyone.  I am planning on posting more often now.

I am also working on a book of devotions for moms with chronic illnesses.

Hello everyone!

Well, I start my new job on Monday.  It is only part-time.  It started out at twelve hours and now is twenty.  I am both excited and nervous.  I will be working in daycare and preschool.  We shall see how it goes.

Does anyone else have experience working with a chronic illness?  I will let you know how things go.  I came upon a website and book called Keep On Working Girlfriend!  I think the website is www.keepworkinggirlfriend.com./about/.   Hopefully it will be helpful to you!

Slash Your Grocery Bills

Are you looking for a great way to save money on your groceries? A Menu Planning Service can come to the rescue. These ingenious services help you plan, save on grocery costs and manage your dinner meals simply and easily.

Menu Planning services provide moms with a simple to follow dinner menu for each week. Not only do you get awesome dinner meal ideas including main dishes, side dishes and desserts that are satisfying, simple to prepare and healthy, but you also get a personalized grocery list to simply shop for the ingredients for the upcoming week. You can save loads of money, because when you know which meals you will be preparing and which ingredients you will need you won’t wastefully purchase ingredients and items that are not required.

Many people spend hundreds of dollars each year buying food ingredients that they don’t need. In many cases foods are wasted, because they sit around not being used in any meals you prepare. Once you find a meal idea for these ingredients, they are usually too old, spoiled or stale.

By utilizing a menu planning service you will also save on fast food and casual dining restaurant bills. Many families become frustrated when there is no food in their refrigerator. Instead of preparing a healthy and low cost meal at home, they opt for the ease of visiting fast food and casual dining restaurants that can easily cost $20, $50, $100 or more. If you are looking for a reason to keep you at home rather than at high priced restaurants, a meal planning service is an affordable and practical solution.

Another way you can reap the rewards from menu planning is with all the time you will save. Now that everything is planned out for you, you won’t have to spend time each day running back and forth to the grocery store to buy needed food items, you can have your whole week’s meals planned out and have a comfortable and relaxing time at home with your family.

If you are looking for an awesome way to save on your grocery bills, check out a menu planning service.
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Dine Without Whine is a great menu planning service for active families. Go to http://www.dinewithoutwhine.com/tanya  to discover even more rewards to menu planning.

I was tagged by a fellow blogging friend at fightingfatigue.com for this meme challenge so here it goes! According to the meme rules, I have to link to the person who tagged me and post the rules on this blog. I have to share seven facts about myself and tag seven fellow bloggers, linking to their blogs at the end of this post. So here it goes!

1.  I have been married for sixteen years.

2.  I have an elementary teaching degree.

3. I have a new puppy- a toy poodle named Toby who I adore!

4. I love to read!

5. I am addicted to scrapbooking.

6. My favorite dessert is cheesecake.

7. I go to the Jersey shore with my family every summer.

I am tagging the following blogs:

www.livingonadime.com/blog/

www.peptalkblog.blogspot.com

www.chefmichele.blogspot.com/

www.budgetdial.blogspot.com

www.adventuresoffrugalgirl.blogspot.com

www.fromonemomtoanother.com

www.rs.4030.com

I had a nice Thanksgiving day with my in- laws.  We just stayed for the day.  We got  our Christmas decorations out on Sunday.  I wasn’t feeling well so I let my kids decorate the tree.  They did a pretty good job.  Normally I would be upset if I didn’t get to do it the way I wanted it.  But I’m still learning to let go of control over certain things and just enjoying things as they are.

I urge you not to overdue it over the next month.  It will still be Christmas if cookies aren’t baked and every inch of the house isn’t decorated.  Have your children or a neighbor help if possible.  Make things as simple as possible.  I will have more ideas over the next month.  I hope everyone had a good vacation.

Tuesday, October 23, 2007

Melaleuca The Wellness Company

I have been shopping with Melaleuca The Wellness Company for a little over a year now. Some of my favorites are the haircare and facecare lines. I also love their mascara and lipstick. The products that have made the most difference to me nd my family are the cleaning products… ecosense. They smell good, do not give me a headache or make me sneeze and they don’t irriatate my skin. The renew lotion is my other favorite product. It has been proven to help with exzema and psoriasis. Here is some information about things that have been in the news.

Why we shop at Melaleuca…
Are Our Kids the Sickest Generation?

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More kids than ever before are diagnosed with bipolar, ADHD, allergies, and asthma. Why, and what does it mean for your child?

By Jean Weiss for MSN Health & Fitness

FDA Panel Recommends Ban on Cold Medicines for Kids
U.S. Schools Getting Better at Boosting Kids’ Health
New Drug Eases Asthma Symptoms
Search for More on ADHD on MSN Health & Fitness

Did you leave out the peanut butter sandwich when you packed school lunches today? Most everyone knows at least one family that has a child with a serious food allergy. Yet a generation ago, we’d scarcely heard about the problem. The same can be said for several conditions now on the rise in children. More kids are getting diagnosed with bipolar, ADHD, allergies, and asthma in this decade than in previous decades. Some attribute this increase to improved diagnosing, others to over-diagnosing. Still others view the sick-kid trend as the proverbial canary in the coalmine: More children are getting sick because they are fragile and affected by an increasingly industrialized world.
“I do think we are in the midst of an epidemic of these child disorders,” says Dr. Kenneth Bock, co-founder of the Rhinebeck Health Center and author of Healing the New Childhood Epidemics: Autism, ADHD, Asthma, Allergies (Ballantine Books, 2007). “I don’t believe it is all due to better diagnosis.”
Bock suggests that children predisposed to these medical conditions are more likely to manifest them after cumulative exposure to pollutants such as heavy metals, chemicals, pesticides, flame retardants, and chemicals from plastic additives to name a few. “All those kinds of things together are increasing the toxic load on children,” he says.
The simplest thing parents can do for their child is decrease their exposure to toxins, Bock says, whether it means eating pesticide-free food or avoiding heavy metals and harmful pollutants found in myriad products such as toys, computers, and clothing. “This is a recent phenomenon over the last 20 years,” says Brock. “We are living in a chemical soup, and it’s the kids that are the most susceptible.”
The link between environment and child illness is especially evident in conditions such as allergies and asthma. The tie to bipolar disorder and ADHD has been more complex to identify. Most experts in the field of pediatric mental disorders attribute the increase in diagnosis to a better understanding of mental illness, saying it could be that environment plays a small role.
ADHD: Up by a whopping 400 percent
Increased understanding of mental disorders in children has also led to a rise in the pediatric diagnosis of ADHD, by as much as 400 percent or higher over the last 25 years, according to some estimates. It is the most commonly diagnosed behavioral disorder in childhood, affecting between 3 percent and 5 percent of school-age children in the United States . Worldwide use of prescriptions to treat ADHD in children has increased by 274 percent, with the United States prescribing more medication for ADHD than any other country.
“More attention was paid to mental health issues in children during the ’90s when people realized that a lot of conditions that related to the brain start in childhood,” says Dr. Ben Vitiello, a psychiatrist at the National Institute of Mental Health and a leading expert in child and adolescent ADHD.
Vitiello says that some of the increase could be due to partial diagnosis of ADHD in children. He discounts the theory that environmental toxins are the cause of the majority of ADHD, though new research has been done examining whether food additives and coloring contribute to ADHD. “The impact of these environmental toxins is very small, if present at all,” he says.
Sometimes children with bipolar disorder are misdiagnosed to have ADHD. Children with sleep disorders can present with ADHD symptoms, so sometimes they are diagnosed with the mood disorder as well.

Bipolar Disorder: A 40-fold increase among kids
Bipolar disorder is another area in which kids have shown more susceptibility in recent years, a phenomenon experts attribute to improved understanding that mental illness affects children as well as adults.

A study published in the September 2007 issue of the Archives of General Psychiatry reported a 40-fold increase in a diagnosis of bipolar disorder over the last decade. The study isn’t comprehensive enough to determine the reasons why, but a snapshot view of the trend, says co-author Dr. Gonzalo Laje, an associate clinical investigator at the National Institute of Mental Health. “What this study could be suggesting is that there may be an increased recognition of the disorder and therefore it is being diagnosed more,” says Laje. “It could also mean it is an overdiagnosis, but we can’t in any way categorically say it is or it isn’t. Probably it is a combination of both.”
The study of serious mental illness in children and adolescence is more recent. “Twenty-five years ago people would even debate whether the diagnosis [for bipolar disorder in children] existed,” Laje says. “Symptoms of serious mental illness in children and adolescents are now recognized. Today nobody argues that this diagnosis exists.”

To identify bipolar disorder in children a physician still relies on an adult model of symptoms, however, so they are still defining how the symptoms manifest in the pediatric population. “We are catching up on our criteria,” says Laje.
There is also a noteworthy overlap in the pediatric population between bipolar and ADHD. According to Laje, 30 percent of children with bipolar also have ADHD, and it is an area for further study.

Allergies: 40 percent of children now have allergies
Dr. Asriani Chiu, associate professor of allergy and immunology at the Medical College of Wisconsin, says more children react today to allergies due to the interplay between genetics and environment. “There are genetic tendencies—we know that allergies run in the family—but [there are] definitely environmental triggers as well,” Chiu says.

Chiu says an increase in industrial pollutants, combined with cleaner living conditions, have interfered with the natural function of our immune system, which is meant to be exposed to germs and protect our bodies from illness. “Because we are not exposing ourselves to all of the dirt and the endotoxins that we would have seen, say, if we lived on a farm, our bodies have nothing else to do,” says Chiu. “Then pollutants make our respiratory tract more susceptible,” and our immune system kicks into overdrive—essentially overreacting to foods, or to other allergens, in children already prone to allergies.
Allergies are divided into two categories: food allergies and upper respiratory tract allergies. The later type of allergy is less closely associated with food allergies, and more closely associated with asthma (a condition of the lower-respiratory tract).
>From 1997 to 2002, child food allergies increased from .68 percent to between 2 percent and 4 percent; adult food allergies remained the same slightly more than 1 percent. And Chiu says there has been an increase in upper respiratory tract allergies, now affecting 40 percent of children. Another troubling side effect of allergies is the link to asthma: Two-thirds of patients with allergies affecting their upper respiratory tract also develop symptoms in their lower respiratory tract.

Asthma: Up by 160 percent
Asthma, an inflammation of the lower respiratory tract that creates coughing, wheezing, and difficulty breathing, is closely linked to allergies and has also been on the rise among children. Chiu says that asthma, like allergies, has increased due to an increase in environmental pollutants that irritate the lungs, making them more susceptible to inflammation and asthma. She also attributes more diagnosis of asthma to an increase in awareness of symptoms. “It could be that we are better at identifying these conditions,” says Chiu. “There are doctors and families and teachers noticing this more.”
Asthma rates in children under age 5 increased more than 160 percent from the 1980s to the 1990s. Of people with asthma, 70 percent also have allergies—and children, Chiu says, are more likely than adults to get asthma triggered by an allergic reaction. “More than 70 percent of people with asthma also suffer from allergies, meaning there is an allergic component to their asthma,” says Chiu. “We realize that there is a strong connection between the two.” So much so that an oft-used way to treat asthma is to first treat allergies. “It is the single airway hypothesis,” says Chiu. “If you can gain better control of the upper respiratory symptoms, then you have better control of the lower.”

Sleep Disorders: Difficulty Here May Be a Cause or a Symptom
Sleep, or rather lack of it, is a favorite topic among parents who incessantly ask each other: Are you getting any? Some childhood sleep troubles are normal. Others, it turns out, could be a red flag.

We now know that 25 percent of children have some type of sleep disorder, but data on whether this is an increase is scarce. “We haven’t been keeping statistics on sleep for all that long,” says Dr. Judy Owens, an associate professor of pediatrics at Brown Medical School in Providence , R.I. , who runs a pediatric sleep disorder clinic. “The few studies that have looked at prevalence of sleep disorders in general pediatric clinics show higher rates of sleep problems now compared to 30 years ago.”
Now that sleep is on the radar, researchers are discovering it plays a key role—both as a precursor to serious childhood disorders and as a side effect. Sleep issues in children have been linked to obesity, asthma, allergies, ADHD, and bipolar disorder.
Obesity, asthma and allergies in kids are risk factors for sleep apnea. The misery of allergies and asthma (trouble breathing, itchy skin, some medications) can also disturb a child’s sleep. But the relationship between sleep and ADHD, as well as other mood disorders, is just now beginning to be understood. “There is mounting evidence that sleep problems may be the early sign of psychiatric disorders,” says Owens. “Clearly sleep problems exacerbate mood issues, and mood issues make sleep problems worse.”

The link between bipolar disorder and sleep is less understood, except that children in their manic phase need less sleep. “I do see a lot of kids who initially get diagnosed with ADHD and the diagnosis evolves to bipolar, and those kids have tremendous sleep disorders,” says Owens.
It’s more common for children with ADHD to have sleep issues, she says, due to issues that often go along with the disorder, such as anxiety, depression, and behavioral problems. A subgroup of kids with ADHD has trouble regulating its sleep, just as it has trouble regulating its attention. But if your child can’t sleep, and is having trouble focusing at school, don’t worry yet. Conversely, Owens says, a child with sleep problems often displays ADHD symptoms, so it’s possible you just need to figure out how to get that kid more ZZZs.   I AM NO LONGER DOING MY BUSINESS.  YOU CAN STILL CONTACT WWW.MELALEUCA.COM FOR MORE INFO.