7 Quick Takes, vol. 5

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I promise, this week I will return the blog to it's orginal purpose. I've had a lot of time to think about life, and family, and God, and faith this week. I just haven't had a lot of time to blog about it all.

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And if you'll pardon me for yelling, MY HUSBAND DID NOT HAVE A SECOND HEART ATTACK. Whooooo!!!!   Ha ha, fooled you, false alarm.

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On Tuesday we drove back to a bigger city, and saw an actual cardiologist. He was a bit perplexed by the facts of the event and decided that the safest path would be to do an angiogram to check things out.

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The angiogram showed ALL CLEAR. "Fantastic" arteries.  The doctor only wished his were as good. He suspects the Mike got really dehydrated, causing the dizziness, and then started to panic with his history of high stess and prior heart attack, and then the doctor here was trying to CYA. The stress test was a false positive and there was no heart damage.

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They now can do a heart cath through the wrist instead of the groin. Recovery is a billion times easier, the patient goes home the same evening. Highly recommended if you or a loved one find yourself in that position.

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As soon as we returned home yesterday, I completely collapsed. I took a 3 hour nap and woke with with an awful cold.  I can't sleep, my head hurts, coughing, runny nose, etc.  A reaction to the stress, perhaps?

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Thank you all for your thoughts and prayers, I really really appreciate it.

For more Quick Takes, visit Conversion Diary!

7 Quick Takes, vol 4

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I meant to write a real post this week. I even started drafting it. But then...

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On Wednesday my husband tried to have a heart attack, literally. And I got a bit distracted.

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He's been in the ICU for the last two days. He feels fine physically, and it wasn't a full blown heart attack, but it's close enough for them to keep him. He has to do a stress test today, and will hopefully come home tonight. Meanwhile he's bored and cranky and lonely (I have only been up once, for about 30 minutes, hard to find someone to watch your kids during the day.)

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He had his first heart attack 7 years ago at age 35, so it's kind of a big deal. How many chances do you get?

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I am tired and stressed and a bit worried. And a little angry (see #4). The kids are being crazier than normal, of course.

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The moral of this story is, of course, if you're busy thinking you'll start your diet and exercise plan next week, maybe start today.  Now if you'll excuse me, I have some kitchen clean out to take care of, and an exercise bike to dig out of the garage.

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(last year on Father's day)

For more Quick Takes, visit Conversion Diary!

7 Quick Takes, vol 3

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I have been remiss on this blog. Life has been so busy lately (with what I'm not sure) and it seems that I haven't had time to give this the attention I feel it deserves. I'm sure that says something about me, but that's deeper than I want to get into in a Quick Take.

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One of the things we did recently to stay busy was go out of town. I was invited on a work trip with my husband and my beautiful sister-in-law (the best Catholic I know) volunteered to keep my kids for four days so I could go. My sister-in-law does not have children of her own.

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The first thing she did, on the first day she was here, was take them to church. It did not go well.

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We did not go to church this week.  I typically work every Saturday night until 11pm or later. Then my husband usually works the next morning, which leaves us with 8am mass. And it's not a good excuse, but it's just so hard to get us all up and out the door for that. *insert whine*

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Did you read this absolutely terrific post on motherhood at Mama Needs Coffee? I'm sure you did, but I have to share it. I saved it to read again.

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And contrast that with this post at Dooce about living with a three year old. For us, three has been a million times harder than two, with both boys. The girl isn't yet two, but we'll see how that shakes out. (If you don't read Dooce, there is a lot of Language. You've been warned.)

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Last, this weekend is Mother's Day. I hope all the Mothers out there get treated like royalty. May you be as happy as a girl with a yard full of butterflies. And a Popsicle.

Quick Takes is being hosted here this week, stop by to join the fun.

A quick update

First, thanks for your prayers for my friend's baby. Ainsley had Group B strep and spent 10 days in the hospital. She's home now and doing fine.

Second, I've been sadly remiss on this blog. Life got too busy to think there for a while. I'm going to try to rectify that.

Third, I recently had the opportunity to travel to Colorado Springs with my husband. While he worked I was able to go on a tour of Glen Eyrie, which was built in the last 1800s and is now a Christian retreat center/ Bed and Breakfast owned by the Navigators. The Castle itself was fascinating and I highly recommend the tour. The giftshop is small and religiously oriented, as one would expect. I picked up a couple books there- The Message Promise Book , which is a book of scripture broken down by topic, and The Bible: Think for yourself about what's inside (TH1NK Reference Collection) which kind of breaks down each book of the Bible into themes and events. I haven't really had a chance to look at them, and I'm not sure how biased they are towards any given denomination (the website doesn't seem to claim any one in particular), but they looked interesting.

I hope you all are doing well, and special congratulations to Clan Donaldson on your new baby GIRL.

Prayer Request, please?

My friend's almost two week old baby is in the hospital with an infection of some sort.  She'll be there for the next several days. Can I ask you all to add her to your prayer list? Her name is Ainsley.

Thanks, the very idea of a tiny baby being sick makes me unsettled.

Taking notes on reading

I find it really hard to read about something I'm learning about, especially something as interesting and nuanced as religion, and not to want to make notes in the margin and dog ear pages. I just started reading Lewis's Mere Christianity (on the advice of most of you) and  while most of what I'm noting won't make it into my eventual review, there are a lot of things that I want to mark for when I flip through the book later.  The problem is that I end up marking a sentence here or there every few pages, and then can't find what I want to find later. I'm considering swapping from my light pencil to a darker pen, and even then making notes on a piece of paper or text file for reference. Is this crazy? Does anyone else do this? Despite belonging to the book blogging community for 5+ years, I don't know anyone who writes in books.

Rest assured, I will never be the person who highlights more than she leaves alone. When everything is highlighted/ underlined, how do you know which was the truly important stuff?

(source)

PS. Who knew that Sharpie had a blog??

7 Quick Takes, vol 2.

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Thanks for all the great comments last week! I'm even more excited to participate this week.

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One of my new visitors, jen, posted this thought provoking C.S. Lewis quote that led me down a wormhole of adding all the C.S. Lewis books at my library to my hold list. That's gonna be an ugly day when they all show up at once.

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This guest post over at Camp Patton on NFP made me think about pregnancy and birth control in a different light. I'm still light years from making that particular leap (and if I'm completely honest, I don't see myself being able to fully commit there), but it did present it in a way that makes spiritual sense to me. I've added it to the growing list of things peculating in my brain.

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I read the first 3 or 4 chapters of Catholicism For Dummies this week and I have to say, the Dummies books are really well done. I wish they were named something else though as I suspect the mere titles make people hesitate to pick them up. I can easily see myself reading them for a number of other subjects, but I can't see myself reading them at the gym.

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It is turning to spring here (usually we still have snow) and it's really easy to see the parallels to Easter with growth and life and all. It makes me wonder if I'm just looking for things to notice now.

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As a first time participant in Lent, I'm finding parts of it harder than others. It hasn't been hard to give up candy, but I did inadvertently eat some in the form of a McFlurry. My husband thoughtfully bought me one and I didn't occur to me at all that it had candy in it until I had eaten half of it. I decided that it didn't count since I stopped when I realized it. Yesterday was my husband's birthday and while we had a (shocking!) offer of babysitting, we choose not to go out to dinner because he really wanted a big steak and it was Friday. I hope that babysitting offer comes again!

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I didn't get this posted yesterday, it was a long week of illness in our family. Including my own, what exactly was the flu shot for, anyway?

For more Quick Takes, visit Conversion Diary!