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Ten Pounds

I set out on my run this morning with a feeling of self-loathing, acutely aware of the 10lb that has crept onto my body in the last 2 years. Irritated and anxious to get back to the weight I feel best at, I laced up my shoes and started down the street. The music was thumping in my earbuds and set the tone for a pretty good run. Or run/walk, that is. I am out of shape. Within a few...

The Part Before “Fine”

When someone asks, “How was your day?”, you probably briefly look back and choose one or two words that summarize your strongest feelings about it. “It was exciting!” or “It was exhausting” or more often, “It was fine”. While this is what we have come to expect in our everyday short-form communication with one another, what we end up doing is burying dozens of other emotions that deserve a mention, too. This got me thinking about examining just one day...

Homework is for Parents

Last week, as I was sitting at my desk, mindlessly scrolling through FaceBook, I read that a former colleague, just three years older than me, met an untimely, rather sudden death, leaving behind a wife and two small children. Numb, tears rolled down my cheeks. I couldn’t believe it. On call over the weekend, I admitted patients much younger than me and watched their grieving parents as I told them there was nothing left to do; I admitted patients much...

The Alternate Ending

Saturday night was definitely not supposed to turn out like that! Scott and I and our two older kids hadn’t even made it to dinner when our poor babysitter back home was texting, asking how to troubleshoot the alarm that was going off. Our sweet sitter walked all over the house, pushing buttons and checking doors and smoke detectors. No fires. No broken windows. Just a loud alarm. We were sitting in traffic downtown, totally unaware that there was a Colts pre-game...

The Exact Opposite

Scott and I went away for a quick couples ski weekend and we left the kids in the care of Scott’s mom. We returned on Monday night to find that all four children remained alive and well. The house was exceptionally clean (thank you, Mawmaw!). The children had been fed and read to and loved all weekend. We started to unpack and rapidly assimilated back into our “parent roles”. We dumped out the kids’ backpacks to make sense of the homework we needed...