Recently I've been reading books by Atul Gawande.  He has written four books and I've read all of them.  He writes from the perspective of being a doctor, specifically a general surgeon based in Boston.  He has been writing for the New Yorker for a while so a couple of these books have come from collections of those essays. Here's my take: This is a great book for people to read as they think about how they want to make those end-of-life decisions.  Sometimes those happen a lot sooner than you think they will. The author tells the story of a fairly young woman who has just barely had her first baby and is diagnosed with a very aggressive terminal cancer.  They try to treat it without much success.  In the end, probably because she's so young, no doctor will tell her that she really doesn't have any time left so they continue to try to cure her in the hospital when a better choice would have been to accept the inevitable and stay home being mad...

One of the traditions I inherited from my mother is a breakfast schedule--every day had an assigned food for breakfast. It was a pretty deeply ingrained habit.  Shortly after I got married and moved away, we came home for a visit.  When I came in the kitchen for breakfast, my mother was serving oatmeal (we called it mush) and I said something negative about it, not being a big fan.  So my mother said, "Paula, if you didn't want mush, you shouldn't have come on a Thursday!" The breakfast schedule has actually been really helpful to me as I've carried on the tradition with my own children.  The advantages are no daily decision-making about what you're going to have for breakfast plus greater variety in the foods you eat.  I don't think I could handle eating the same thing for breakfast every day. Here's our schedule: Monday and Thursday:  oatmeal Tuesday and Friday:  eggs Wednesday and Sunday:  cold cereal Saturday:  waffles or panc...

Today I finished reading The Orphan Keeper by Camron Wright.  While it is not amazing writing, it is a very readable and compelling story and I had a hard time putting it down. You can read about it  here.   The book is considered fiction but most of the details of the story are true.  One of the most unbelievable details in the story that I thought was way too coincidental to be true, actually turned out to be real. The basic plot is that a young boy (American name of Taj) living in the slums in India is kidnapped (or perhaps sold by his father--we'll never know for sure) and taken to an orphanage.  He tries to go back home but he is told that his family didn't want him even though his mother has been desperately searching for him.  A couple in Utah decides to adopt him and thus begins his journey to feel like he belongs somewhere.  He doesn't feel like he fits in all-white Utah but neither is he Indian any more, having forgotten his language...

Unlike most of America, my youngest needs to gain weight. Being a micro-preemie and having kidney failure are both high-risk conditions for developing eating problems.  Basically, we've been working on this since she was born. A few months ago, things weren't going well so I decided to get more serious and I made a schedule. Here's the schedule: The scheduled daily goal is 1750 calories and 76 ounces of fluid. Every morning I give her Carnation Instant breakfast made with whole milk or Pediasure:  280 calories.  She also gets one box of Boost Kids 1.5:  360 calories. For dinner she has the high calorie chocolate milk from Costco:  210 calories.  Those three added together are 850 calories--about half her calories.  We try to get the rest of her calories in the food she eats at meals and snacks. Obviously she's not eating a lot of food.  I think her many medical issues have messed up her hunger cues.  Plus eating basically ...