Salty Zebra

 When I adopted my daughter from Liberia, West Africa, I was concerned that she would be hurt by careless comments and questions from others. Thankfully, those were few and far between and neatly handled by the list of replies I had dreamed up while lying in bed at night worrying about it 😏. What I never expected was how much of an issue it would become once she grew up! When she was little, most people encountered us with her in my shopping cart or holding my hand. It was clear that we were together. Now, however, when we are separated sometimes things go awry.  A couple of years ago, my daughter and I were flying home from a trip to Hawaii. We were flying standby and were not able to get seats together. My super-sweet daughter bought me a bag of my favorite popcorn during the flight and asked the flight attendant to bring it back to, "my mom, in row 17". I noticed the flight attendant walking back and forth a couple of times, clearly looking for something, and then I clued...

 Today would have been my Grandmother's 94th Birthday, but she passed away this fall. In her honor, I wanted to share today some of the memories I have of her and some of the lessons she taught me.  As far back as I can remember, my Grandma is there. One of my earliest memories is of looking out of her window eating frozen peas and hot dogs. Yes, they were still frozen when we ate them - it was a treat, don't judge!  She raised a family that stayed close in their child-rearing years. I got to grow up with all my cousins running around her house, inside and out. Grandma's house was filled with things that told stories: spoons on the wall, knick knacks from Japan, an extensive doll collection. What my cousins and I remember with a shudder was her dragon-headed foot stool. We all swore that thing was possessed, and it would reach out and bite your toes as you walked past!  I will forever remember Grandma's kitchen. I remember coming into her house and being met wit...

TLDR, just want to donate So this is a difficult post to write, probably even more difficult than figuring out how to tell people I had a brain tumor. I HATE asking people for money, for help, for most anything really - except prayer, I'm pretty good at asking for that! Here's the thing, I don't NEED money. I'm not looking for donations for a huge fundraiser like the 3-Day (did that a long time ago). I'm not going on a mission trip. But I am doing something new, something I can't do without help. In this eye of the storm season I'm in, I've become positively obsessed with travel. The thing is, travel is expensive and while I could just spend our savings to do what I want, that wouldn't be great stewardship of our future and hopeful retirement. So I've been learning about points and miles and the best way to get return towards travel with the spending we're doing anyways (like paying bills and buying groceries). The thing is, to really make th...

  I want to start out this post saying that I am not a complainer, and I went through all the proper channels to have my issue resolved before resorting to this. I am a HUGE NCL fan. I've been on ten cruises with them, and I have four more currently booked. That said, I am VERY disappointed in the experience I had with them this week and felt the need to post this PSA. Yesterday I was attempting to book a cruise that I have been wanting to take for a long time. It's a transatlantic from Miami to South Hampton, England. My husband encouraged me to take the cruise, even though I will be taking it by myself, more on that to follow in future posts. One of the main reasons I was booking it now was a Cruise Next Double Up promotion that was going on. Typically, you can only use one Cruise Next certificate on an inside stateroom, which was the category that I was wanting to book. On the current promotion, however, it allowed you to use two certificates on this type of stateroom. That ...

  “Blessed be the Lord God of Israel, because he has come to help and has redeemed his people.”   Luke 1:68 Not many people know this, but for a very long time, over a decade, I longed for another child. It was a deep and intense longing, one that never seemed to leave my mind. I couldn’t even walk past the baby department at Target without crying. I prayed, oh how I prayed! But in those prayers, whether I fully meant it or not, was the phrase, “Your will be done.” It was not God’s will to give me another baby. In the spring of 2016 I had to have a partial hysterectomy that sealed that option for good. Of course God is bigger than all that, but He hasn’t given me any indication that He has growing me a new uterus as part of His plan! I am so beyond blessed by my four children, and now their partners too. I have great relationships with them and enjoy every minute I get to spend with them. I am not lacking at all. In fact, in hindsight, I have no idea how I would hav...

 I've always trusted God with the safety of my kids when they were away from me, especially far away like on the other side of the state, or the country, or the world. But so much of that trust was conceptual, until last weekend.  Saturday, my youngest son, who is 21, worked a full shift at work and then headed out on a five-hour drive across the state to visit his brother for the first time by himself. He got off a little early with the express intention of getting over the mountain pass before dark, as this was the most intimidating part for him. The day before I had, in my most motherly way possible, gone over with him the signs of highway hypnosis and the ways to avoid it as once you get over the pass there is a three hour stretch of pretty straight highway that can get rather tedious. As much as I would have hoped for a text letting me know he was heading out, I didn't hear anything until his brother called me that evening to let me know that things did not go according t...

  Radical tumor removal is not always possible because of the critical brainstem or diencephalic locations of some tumors. Tumor progression and eventual death are likely in such patients. Stereotactic radiosurgery for pilocytic astrocytomas part 1: outcomes in adult patients Kano et. al.  So my posts are usually preceded by a scripture verse, often an encouraging one. Today I needed to give you an insight into what I've been experiencing. From the time I was diagnosed with a brain tumor, about a year and a half ago, I was reassured that it was a "WHO grade 1 benign" tumor. I, mistakenly, took this to mean that it wasn't a big deal. Even when I was told in June that it had grown "slightly," I thought that meant they'd zap it with radiation and that'd be the end of it. Guess what, I was wrong. When my June MRI revealed growth, I was referred to the Tumor Center for treatment. Fearing a long, drawn-out process, I was relieved when they scheduled all my...

Her clothing was strong and splendid; And she laughed at the time to come. She has opened her mouth with wisdom, with loving instruction on her tongue. Watching over the ways of her household, she would not eat the bread of idleness.   Proverbs 31: 25 - 27 Over the last few years, several of my traditional jobs have become impossible for me. I no longer clean the bathrooms, and don’t really do the thorough cleaning of the kitchen that I used to. I only vacuum occasionally and sweep even less. At times, I’m not even able to do the cooking or the laundry. There have been moments where I have questioned my role in the family, my worth and value. My husband is so gracious. When I approached him with my concerns, he shared with me that he believes my role in the family is the nurturer. I bring the softness. I help people feel loved and seen. I round out his rough edges and help the kids know he loves them too. In some ways it’s a tall order, in others, it doesn’t feel like quit...

Buckle in! This is a processing post so it is likely to be long and wordy and emotional and probably flawed in many ways. I thank you for your patience and anyone who makes it to the end gets bonus points in my book 😏.  Let's start with the info. I've been having progressively more intense, more frequent, and longer lasting migraines. Since my eye surgery in May, I've also been experiencing a great deal of nausea, almost daily. Sometimes meds help (with either), sometimes they don't. In addition, since the eye surgery, my double vision has intensified. My depth perception is shot, I'm regularly missing things I grab for, mistaking curbs for cracks in the sidewalk, bumping into walls or counters. Those are the three things that neurosurgery told us to watch for with regards to the shunt functioning properly: headaches, nausea, and vision changes. Now the vision changes were probably because of the surgery and the nausea was probably  because of the migraines, but th...

  He holds down the fort. He picks up my pieces when I drop them everywhere. But he has needs too. Who takes care of the caregiver? I think the most important thing is to recognize these needs from the get go. Don't wait until things get bad and then have to fix a situation. Know that we are all human and we all need to be fed physically, emotionally and spiritually. Figure out what does that for your caregiver, work with them, don't just assume.  For my husband we have identified different levels of nourishment. Regular, weekly feeding actually comes to him through service. This might be in the form of serving at our local homeless shelter or on their outreach team or for our church. Usually it's some combination thereof. And we're not talking an hour or two on a Saturday afternoon, he needs to serve about 10-15 hours a week to feel filled up.  In addition, he needs periodic breaks away from it all. He does this in the form of solo hikes out in the woods, usually on th...

  A question was posed to me yesterday, but I didn’t have the chance to write about it. “In what areas of your life do you feel most tempted to prioritize worldly gains over God’s truths?” I spent a little time thinking about it and I was a little surprised by my results. The typical answer to a question like this I would think would have to do with money. Maybe it’s just because God has provided comfortably for us in this area, but this is not a big temptation for me. He taught me very early in my walk to trust Him with our finances. We were living paycheck to paycheck, putting a little on the credit card but paying it off within a few months. He challenged us to tithe. I didn’t see how we could set aside 10% of our income when we were spending all of it already, but we started small and within a year we were up to the 10% mark we had looked towards. From that point on, we not only had enough to make ends meet, we had enough to save for the future as well! God has showed up for ...

Ok, guys. We’re going to get real today. This is a post I’ve avoided writing. Or maybe I have written it. Oh dear. That’s the issue. It’s about memory. I thought I was getting personal on Monday when I wrote about our marriage, but this is the inside of the inside of the inside of me. This is the stuff I don’t want to talk about with my husband, or my counselor, or even myself. Forget my upcoming surgery, this is the really scary stuff in my life. It started a long time ago, well before my brain surgeries. In fact, this was one of the symptoms that I hoped would be cured by them, but it wasn’t. The most dramatic incident took place just before we found out I had a tumor when we were in Disney World. As you can imagine, it’s a very over stimulating place and I struggled with that a lot. At a couple of points in the trip it hit a tipping point and I “blanked out” as my husband put it. In the middle of a sentence, I froze. I stopped talking, moving, anything. I stayed that way for a ful...