Tortoise,Tortoise -- Did You Hear Me Say Tortoise?

The last few days' blog postings have been heavy and serious, so we are going to take a break from the Haitian earthquake to talk about parenting and pets today. I don't want any of you to think this blog is going to be all somber and thought-provoking. My goal in this forum is to mix up the funny and the serious. Because that's how life is.

Lately, my daughter has been UNBEARABLE in whining about how things in the family are unfair to her, because she is the youngest child. Her big complaints? She doesn't have a laptop computer, and she "is the ONLY one in the family who doesn't have a cell phone." She is ten years old. Boo-hoo. These types of complaints do not get her very far with me, but she is convinced her life is hugely unjust.

Meanwhile, each of my teen-aged boy complains non-stop about his lot in life--"How Cece gets EVERYTHING because she is the youngest and the only girl." I can not convey in mere words the drama and sorrow these three kids express. You have to hear the impassioned voices, see the pained looks, and observe the pouting lips. Everybody get out your Kleenexes.

Last week, after a particularly long session of whining, I finally lost it. I'll admit this was not my finest moment in parenting.

"I'll tell you what," I snapped at one of them. "Why don't you and Lindsey Lohan go cry about how terrible your lives are!"

Probably not the best choice of words--but it seemed to get the message across that I was done hearing their trivial complaints about the perceived unfairness of their lives.

Now, my daughter has a new cause. She is waging a full-on campaign for a new pet. I have to confess, I have a sneaking sympathy for this particular line of arguments. Our little dog Pal died last year at age 12, and my husband is adamant about not getting another major pet like a dog or cat. I love animals, especially dogs.

We have some fish in an aquarium, but quite frankly--none of us like them very much. Fish are boring. Fish can not be picked up and petted. Fish do not care if their owner chokes on a mouthful of hot dog and dies right in front of them. Fish do not call 911 for you, ever. Fish tanks require lots of cleaning and maintenance. Fish just aren't doin' it for us.

As a kid, I had all the small pets: gerbils, hamsters, and the like. Truthfully, they smelled bad. They often bit. They stayed awake making annoying noises all night on their little hamster exercise wheels. I really don't want any more pets like those.

Cece and I talked to our wonderful veterinarian neighbor and his wife about something that would make a nice, quiet but yet still interesting pet with not too much maintenance. He suggested a tortoise, and lent us a book called Turtles and Tortoises for Dummies.

My first thought was "ACK--SALMONELLA!" but I am apparently misinformed. According to the book and Dr. Chris, turtles carry salmonella, tortoises generally do not. Turtles live primarily in water, tortoises live on land. Turtles generally don't enjoy being handled, while tortoises do. Our vet friend has tortoises for his own kids and believes they make great pets. He even claims his tortoises come when you call them (which I'm not sure I believe--sorry Dr. Chris.)

Now Cece can not utter a sentence without the word "tortoise" in it. She is doing a full-court press for a tortoise. She talks about them at breakfast. She chatters nonstop about them when I am busily engaged in other things, especially talking to another adult on the telephone. "When can I get a tortoise?" are the last words she utters every night before bed. I may become deaf if I hear the word "tortoise" again.

I am trying to impress on her that we need to understand how to take care of a tortoise before we agree to get one. We told her that IF we get one, she has to pay for it with her own money and clean up after it herself. This has not deterred her. All parents will recognize these promises. In fact, I'm quite sure in the time of the cavemen there were little cave-boys and cave-girls who were saying, "Please Mom, can I keep him? I'll do all the work. I promise."

Yesterday I picked Miss Cece up from school. Before "Hi Mom" or any other such greeting, she said, "So about the tortoise: Is that a 'maybe' or a 'probably.'"

I have a feeling I know how this is going to turn out, don't you? I'll keep you posted on the Urban Family Tortoise Saga.

The Day The Earthquake Hit, Part 2

Chris Rollings -- the man in this picture -- was having an ordinary day in Haiti with ordinary problems (for Haiti) until the earthquake struck. Chris and his wife Leslie run a charity called Clean Water for Haiti. Chris had just gotten a loaner vehicle from a Toyota dealership near Port-au-Prince when the loaner truck broke down in the center of the road. The Rollings are Canadians who have lived and worked in Haiti for years--Chris for seven years and Leslie for four years. The Rollings have a little two-year-old daughter, Olivia, who is adopted from Haiti. They also have their own family blog, called Rollings In Haiti.

Chris was not pleased that the truck he has in his possession for less than a half a day had conked out, but these things happen in Haiti. He stepped out of the broken truck and called the dealership. While he waited in the street for someone to come, the the earthquake hit. Says Chris, "As the quake rolled on, I remembered the conversations I’ve had with the other missionaries about what an earthquake would mean for Haiti...it would be devastating. Construction materials and methods aren’t just shoddy, they’re suicidal..."

I am going to quote directly from Chris's blog entry for that day, because the story he tells is very, very powerful.

"I didn’t actually fall on the ground, but I stumbled around quite a bit," says Chris. When the tremors ceased, a large dust cloud was rising from the building a few doors down. A 3 story school full of teenage girls had collapsed. I stood around looking stupid for longer than I’d like to admit. I looked at the truck from Toyota, tried to call my wife (the service was out) and looked around me at people’s reactions. Virtually everyone reacted in strange ways. Eventually, I went to the school and started working to pull trapped students from the wreckage."

"The work was very hard because I was working by myself... I got one girl out, who was very frantic. I told her to stop shouting and pray for help. She was about 10 feet deep under the collapsed cement roof of the building. At one point I went and borrowed a hammer from someone to break up the large piece of cement that she was trapped behind. The aftershocks scared the crap out of me, and I really didn’t like being under that cement slab. There was an obviously dead woman under the slab with us."

"When the girl was out, I took my hammer and moved over to find the next trapped girl. All I could see was her face and left arm, and she frantically called out to me. I asked her to calm down because it would help me to work and asked her to pray for both of us. She calmed down and became very brave. I was having trouble seeing her where she was jammed under the slab. I pulled out a very large piece of rubble that didn’t really help Jacqueline at all (her name was Jacqueline). There was some sort of object behind that rubble and when I went to move it it turned out to be another girl’s bottom. The girl cried out but I could barely hear her – her whole head was underneath rubble."

"At this point I began to realize that I was in over my head. All I had was a hammer, and it was quickly becoming pitch dark with twilight fading and no electricity anywhere. I tried to borrow a flashlight, but it was impossible. I had a moment of feeling intense helplessness. After thinking and praying for a minute, I told Jacqueline that I had to leave her and find more help."

"I walked 4 or 5 miles to a place where I could get a bus, then got on one eventually made it home just after 9pm. On my way home, I resolved to return to Port au Prince the next day with 2 trucks full of tools and workers to do whatever we could."

The Rollings' charity builds water filters, so Chris had some serious power tools at home, as well as the gasoline-powered generators needed to charge the power tools. At daybreak, Chris and many of the employees of Clean Water for Haiti headed back to the school where Chris had been the day before. Chris went right to the spot where he had been digging for Jacqueline. Sadly, both she and the girl next to her were dead.

Chris resumes telling the story. "Some of the local people had been working through the night to rescue their loved ones. They had found lighting and hack saws and had already pulled some people out, including a lot of bodies. We joined their efforts with our power tools. Quickly, we pulled out two more living girls and then a third. The fourth and fifth were a lot more work and each had a severely crushed foot. After that, there were no more cries for help, even when everybody went quiet in order to listen. Lots of dead bodies were still stuck, but getting at them would require large machines."

Chris' story leaves me speechless. In the days after the earthquake, Chris suffered a great deal of survivor's guilt about those girls. He knows he did everything he was physically able to do to save Jacqueline and her classmate, and it wasn't enough to prevent their deaths. He had no tools, no other workers, and no light to help him work in the dark. He had to go get tools and help. He also needed to go check on the status of his own wife and daughter, who he prayed were still alive. (They were--the Rollings home suffered only minor damage and Leslie and little Olivia were fine.) But with his efforts, Chris was able to save one girl at the school the first day and five more on the day after the quake. That means a lot.

Because Chris was stranded in the middle of the street when the earthquake hit, no buildings fell on top of him--that broken-down truck may have saved his life. Perhaps Chris was spared so he could then save those girls. Who knows? In a situation as incredible as what he describes, I think he did an amazing, admirable job. Thank you Chris, for doing the hard work of saving the lives of those young students and preparing others for their next lives with Jesus.

Coming soon to this blog: The Earthquake, Part 3. The days right after...

The Day the Earthquake Hit

What is it like to live through an earthquake? Shortly after the Haitian earthquake on January 12, 2010, I starting reading the blogs of Americans in Haiti in order to understand. I needed the blogs to be in English. As it so happens, many of the Americans and Canadians who live Haiti are missionaries working for charities there. The Livesays--pictured above--are one such American family.

Tara Livesay, formerly of Minnesota, is a mom of seven children who with her husband Troy has been working in Haiti for four years. The Livesays have a combination of biological kids and adopted Haitian children. To read Tara's fabulous blog--The Livesay Haiti Web-log, follow the link at the right side of this page.

Troy and Tara work for Heartline Ministries, the charity I am supporting with this house-building effort. For more than 20 years before the earthquake, Heartline Ministries has been working with women, children and orphans in Haiti in many different ways. One thing that Tara helps Heartline with is to act as a midwife assistant/cheerleader for Haitian women in the midst of childbirth at the Heartline birthing center.

During the earthquake, which hit a few minutes before 5 p.m. in Haiti, Tara and Troy were in their kitchen at their rented home in an area very close to Port-au-Prince. The children were scattered all over the house and in other buildings on the property. Things began to quake. Everything--pictures, dishes, clocks, the jars of spaghetti sauce they had on the counter top--began falling and smashing. Tara remembers, "For me personally, the sound of the earthquake is what struck me the very most. Yes, we were shaking and yes the entire house was rocking, so much that you easily fell down as you walked. But the sound was deafening and it is what first registered with me when I wondered WHO could possibly want to bomb Haiti?"

After about 40 seconds the quaking stopped. During the earthquake, they had been trying to find all the children to get out of the house, but there wasn't time to locate them all while the shaking was going on. Their house had withstood the earthquake without collapsing. Says Tara, "The kitchen floor was covered in soy sauce and spaghetti sauce and glass. Troy was pacing. He seemed uncertain of what to do first. Upstairs the desks had vibrated out of their places to the center of the office area. Books had shaken free from their spots on the shelves. The floor was covered with office supplies, papers, things from the walls, and glass. The boys' "pet" lizard used the opportunity of a broken pickle-jar to escape once and for all. The walls were bare of everything that hung on them just sixty seconds earlier. Water leaked from the toilet that had been shaken out of its place."

Troy and Tara got their children and some guests visiting from the USA outside the house to their driveway. Everybody in the family was unhurt, but the kids were terrified and shaking. Soon after, an aftershock hit, which sent all the children screaming and diving for the safety of their parents' laps.

Phones and electricity did not work, so the Livesay family had no immediate way to know the totality of the devastation in Haiti. They knew things were bad and guessed that things were much worse in other parts of the city.

Soon, Troy decided he needed to go check on people they knew in other places--especially other missionaries and children at several orphanages. It had gotten dark shortly after the earthquake, and power was out everywhere -- so he was going out into chaos in total blackness. Tara says letting Troy go out into the post-earthquake apocalypse was one of the hardest things she ever had to do. They knew it was dangerous to venture out into the unknown. Tara told Troy, "If I never see you again, I love you so much. But PLEASE come back."

Tara fed the children, and put them down to sleep -- only to worry and sleeplessly pray for Troy until the wee hours of the night.

Troy didn't come back until four a.m. He described collapsed buildings and blocked roads that forced him to abandon the truck and walk, in some cases crawling over rubble and dead bodies. All the places they knew, for example the place where the family normally grocery shopped, were in ruins. Says Tara, "He cried as he told me the story of a young woman and her husband's cousin sitting outside of the collapsed St. Josephs Boys home. Her husband was trapped inside. The husband had been singing for awhile, they could hear him, but eventually the singing stopped. Troy asked if he could give them a ride, they were not ready to leave or give up on saving their lost loved one."

So Tara and Troy slept only about half an hour that night, and woke up to face Haiti, post-earthquake. Tomorrow, more stories from the day the earthquake hit.

Ten Pounds Down! Wahoo!

OK, it's time! The first ten pounds is off--goodbye and good riddance.

My clothes are fitting better and I'm finding it easier to do things like getting up if I'm sitting on the floor. (The real kick in the pants for me to get started on this weight loss thing was going to the beach this summer and struggling to get up off the soft, squishy sand. Oh the humiliation!)

What I really need is for you to keep reading. I also need brave souls who will recommend this blog to their friends in the real world and the Facebook world.

So, If you want to sponsor me on a per pound basis, it's time to open your purse or wallet. Now, let's discuss for a minute about how this sponsorship thing works. My original idea was having people sponsor at $1 a pound, $2 pound or whatever--with my goal of ultimately losing about 40 pounds. I was asking that every time I lose 10 pounds, it's time to pay up. But if that idea doesn't work for you, and you can only chip in $10 or $20 total, please feel completely free to do that.

If you think breaking up your contribution into four separate units to too complicated or annoying, by all means feel free to give just once. I just thought the per pound thing WOULD BE MOTIVATING FOR ME, because the more I lose the more money the people in Haiti would get and the more houses we would be able to build.

I would really like to see the Chip In Meter MOVE! Do you understand Chip-In Meter? By clicking on the orange button marked "Chip In" you will be magically and electronically connected to Paypal and right into Heartline Ministries' accounts. If you have a Paypal account, it is really easy. The money goes right to Heartline without ever passing through me. You can pay there with a credit card or with your Paypal balance and you are emailed a receipt for tax purposes. Many people have Paypal because it is the only way to pay for things on eBay. But many people also don't have a Paypal account.

If you want to send in a check, please make it out to Heartline Ministries and write "Pound4Pound" on the memo line. That memo line is important! Checks can be sent to: Heartline Ministries, P.O. Box 898 Sunnyside, WA 98944. It probably makes the most sense to write one check. You can wait until the end of the Pound 4 Pound challenge on November 1st if you want me to prove my weight loss determination with results. Sending a check will also get you a paper receipt for tax purposes.

Lastly, a few people have just handed me money or checks made out to Heartline Ministries. If you know me and see me in your daily life, I can get the check to the ministry for you. When I'm giving away my bucks, I like to give to charity directly with no intermediaries, but if you want to save a stamp and a little time for yourself, feel free to just hand your donation to me. (A check made out to Heartline, please.)

And if you can't support me, please, please do keep reading. What I plan to write about this week is Heartline and what it was like to live through the earthquake and what they are doing today. These people are AMAZING. I can't wait to go to Haiti in November and help them.

The Lady In the Shoe

You remember the nursery rhyme about the lady who lived in the shoe and had so many children she didn't know what to do? I'm identifying with that woman.

Yesterday was just nutso. I came home from the grocery store to find a man with a ladder on my roof. Turns out he was an insurance adjuster inspecting the house for hail damage. As I carried in my groceries and chatted with Roof-guy, I noticed a little blonde-haired toddler walking down the center of our street with no adult in sight. She wore pink snow boots and was pushing her empty blue jogging stroller.

That didn't seem right. I didn't recognize the little girl, who looked about age two, at all. The only adults anywhere were myself and Roof-guy.

"Hey Sweetie, what's your name?" I asked as she looked at me with sky blue eyes. Silence. "Where do you live?" More silence. But she seemed willing to toddle after me as I went from house to house on my street, asking if anyone if she knew where she belonged. Finally, someone did and I returned her home. Her name is Bella, she is two and a half, and according to her mom, she is an escape artist. The mother didn't even realize she was gone.

"Good thing you aren't a child kidnapper," I told Roof-guy, who agreed.

I 'm willing to grant Bella's mom some grace. Two-year-olds are some of the most notoriously unpredictable and difficult people on earth, and if they want to wear their pink snow boots in August, I say "Let 'em." I also know how sneaky they can be: you think your child is taking a nap in his crib, when really he is in the kitchen, painting the walls with Hershey's Syrup and mustard.

After Miss Bella was safely home, my two noisy teen aged boys pulled up to the house with five of their friends, in three separate cars. The boys all proceeded to go on a Ramen-noodle feeding frenzy in the kitchen. Shortly after that, my daughter arrived home with one of her friends from elementary school.

"Just how many children to you have?" Roof-guy asked, watching the parade of children going by.

"Ten!" I said. "Do you want any?"

So if anybody needs me, I'll be like the lady in the shoe--feeding them all Ramen, spanking them soundly and putting them to bed. Oh--cancel that spanking part. I'm not in the mood for a visit from Social Services.

Being Homeless: In My Experience, It Stinks

Ever since the Haitian Earthquake on January 12, I have felt a heavy, almost unreasonable concern for the people there. It's an urgent concern that doesn't let me go. I wonder if the aching I experience is because I was once in a similar situation. I lost everything I owned in an instant. I experienced a house fire, when I was in my mid-twenties. For several weeks, I was homeless.

Now, in no way was my fire experience as bad as what someone in Haiti is experiencing today. But I know what it is to be one moment living a routine life with a job, a humble place to live, and the rhythms of daily life. And the next moment, to be standing in the street with an overwhelming feeling of disbelief-- realizing that what you are wearing and carrying in your purse are the only things on earth you now own.

It was 1988 and I was working at my desk at a Boston newspaper where I was a young reporter. It was my first job out of college and I made a whopping $14,000 a year. Slightly after 5:00 p.m., I was getting ready to leave work and play in a casual softball league, like I did every Thursday evening. The phone rang--it was after hours, but I picked it up thinking it might be one of my softball buddies calling to cancel or change plans. Instead, it was a neighbor lady from the working-class area of Boston where I lived. Rents were cheaper there and my college roommate and I could afford a two-bedroom apartment in a small building, with our place being right above a street-level travel agency.

My neighbor lady asked to speak to someone else--anyone else she said. That was weird. So I handed the phone to a colleague who promptly turned white in the face, "She says your house is on fire."

"No it isn't." I said flatly. That was just incomprehensible.

It took a few seconds to convince me that this was real. I rushed out of the office, hailed a cab and headed for my neighborhood. "Don't panic, don't panic, don't panic..." I told myself as the cab maneuvered through rush-hour traffic. "Maybe it's a mistake, or not as bad as it sounds." I started to wonder about my roommate's location. Could Karen have been trapped in the fire? I whispered a prayer for her. Could I have left my curling iron or something plugged in: could I have accidentally started a fire?

The cab had to stop at the police barricades about two blocks from my building. As soon as I stepped out of the cab, I could see what was left: a big, black smoking skeleton--the remains of what used to be my apartment building. The building next door was about half gone too, and there seemed to be lots of police and firefighters for blocks up and down the street.

I ran up to the first fireman I saw," That's my house!" I said urgently. "My roommate might have been in there..." My friend Karen had an unusual schedule of graduate classes and I was never sure when she was home. "No, no one was hurt, Miss--we checked," The fireman said. "The fire started in between the two buildings and burned straight up the sides. Then it burned like crazy on the roofs. The sparks must have blown to other buildings because we've put out about four other small fires in other buildings around here." It was August, the wind was hot and dry in our faces--I could see how that strong wind carried embers that sparked other fires.

What followed was several hours of numbed chaos. This was the era before cell phones, so trying to find my roommate, my friends, or anybody to tell was difficult to impossible. My overwhelming emotion was disbelief. I felt surreal -- like I was watching a movie about someone else's loss. It's called shock.

"Do you have a place to stay tonight?" someone asked. "No, I guess not." I said. "Wow. I did, up until like an hour ago." I took inventory of what I owned: the pants, blouse, and shoes I was wearing. The contents of my purse. One set of sneakers and a pair of shorts I had planned to wear to softball. That was it.

A carelessly discarded cigarette that someone probably side-armed into the space between two buildings had sparked the fire. Nobody was hurt, but when the firemen took me inside the shell of the building, there was nothing left to salvage. Truly, I couldn't even find the remains of my bed or dresser. Everything was black soot and ashes.

I stayed with a friend that night, and for the next few weeks I stayed with various friends. (Today it's called "couch surfing." That term makes it sound like a lot more fun than it actually is.) Eventually, I was able to get a new apartment and slowly start buying the necessities of daily life--clothes, dishes, furniture.

The Haitian people today have it a lot worse than I did. Although I lost my apartment, I didn't lose my city. There were other apartments in other buildings around me I could rent. There were police and firefighters to respond to my emergency. In Port-au-Prince, the people did not have the luxury of finding other housing. I had these magical things called credit cards that meant I never went hungry or thirsty. I had friends who helped and sheltered me. The Haitian people had friends who were in the same or worse circumstances as themselves. They had rubble, devastation, injury and death all around them.

I know how hard it was for me to realize I had no home and nothing. It was something that took at least a year for me to fully process and something I still think about often, over 20 years later. It was a lesson: everything material can go away in an eye-blink. I don't know how I would endure months sleeping in an improvised tent, with rain and wind blowing in from all sides. I was a single woman at the time of my fire, how would I cope with caring for small children on wet, muddy ground surrounded by ruins? Could I survive in a tent camp -- the way over a million Haitian people have?

Wow, this is heavier than I intended. Strong memories. I am grateful to you for hanging in there with me. If you can, please donate any amount to Heartline Ministries to help build homes for these homeless people. People who remind me of me--being homeless.

I Am Charging My Children

I have instituted a new policy in the Urban household. From now on, any question that begins with,"MOM, where's my _________" (fill in the blank: backpack, glasses, homework, brain) will earn a fine of $1.00 for the Pound4Pound home-building challenge.

This should be a great fundraiser! In addition, any trip by me to the school with forgotten homework, lunches, gym clothes, etc. will earn a $5 fine in addition to the already required one hour of housework. Yep, the money should be rollin' in real soon.

Get your wallets ready. I'm eight pounds down since August first. When I hit 10 pounds, it will be time for folks to donate.

And speaking of children, my friend and the business manager of Springs Community Church, Ross Harrop, is so far my top sponsor at $5 a pound. I aim to make Ross cry like a little girl in his very thin wallet. For any of you that know Ross, you know talking smack is his greatest joy in life--and pretty much his only skill. Ross is actually a 13-year-old boy disguised in the body of a 50-something year old man. Ross, you are going to be very, very poor soon.

Why I Feel Like a Cancer Phony

One of the big reasons I want to lose weight is to lower my risk of a recurrence of cancer. I had breast cancer in 2003, and don't want it to come back. I don't like to mention it much. A lot of people I've met in recent years don't even realize I had breast cancer. I don't talk about it, because -- rightly or wrongly-- I feel a little funny about it. I feel like a cancer phony. I had an early and small stage cancer that was able to be treated relatively quickly. I had a lumpectomy and radiation. I did not have chemotherapy--which is by far the worst part of most cancer treatment. I never lost my hair or had the crippling nausea.

But I'll always remember the female doctor coming in with my very first mammogram in her hand. She didn't even say the word "cancer." She said, "I want you to see how small IT is." I was 40 years old and at that time my children were ten, eight, and three years old. We had adopted our daughter Cece from Vietnam when she was a baby two and a half years earlier. My brain's first wild thought was, "I am going to die and my little girl won't even remember me." Which is silly, of course, because I wasn't going to die--but you aren't exactly thinking logically at the very moment you are told of your diagnosis. My eyes welled up with tears and I could barely choke out anything coherent.

Instantly, my mind conjured up a really bad scenario. "Wouldn't that be just the supreme irony?" I thought. I was the earthly force that pushed for Cece's adoption (I am 100% convinced that our heavenly father put the adoption in place years before hand). But I wanted it, I did all the adoption paperwork, and I went over to Vietnam twice to work out the adoption process and bring her home. Did Cece really need to lose another mother? "It would be just like the rottenness of life to have me die and leave my poor husband with three kids to raise," I thought.

Well, it soon became clear that instead of imagining my death I had to make some serious medical decisions. Everything was on the table--I could choose anything from a radical double mastectomy to a small surgery followed by six weeks of radiation therapy. I chose the later. Cancers are rated on a scale from zero (least serious) to five (spread throughout the body). I had a stage zero cancer in one breast. I saw no reason to have radical surgery. Really, I had the best possible cancer diagnosis in the world.

So maybe that's why I feel like a cancer phony. Because, in my mind, the C-word brings up all kinds of dramatic associations. A few years back, I walked with a young friend for a year as she battled and eventually beat a stage four cancer in her knee. She really went through hell-- becoming so thin and bald she looked like death itself. That didn't happen to me. So I feel weird telling people I had cancer. I guess I feel like I didn't suffer enough to warrant their sympathy.

Which is not to say early stage cancer is a picnic in the park. Surgery and six weeks of daily radiation treatments are a trial, but they are manageable. Actually, the worst part of my cancer treatment was having to put Cece in daycare a few hours every day so I could get radiation treatments. I think something about being around the children at daycare reminded Cece of the orphanage where she spent the first seven months of her life, because she screamed, cried, and threw epic tantrums each and every time I left her there. It tore my heart out, and if I had been leaving her for any other reason I would have quit daycare. But I had to take care of myself. With good reason, toddlers can not come to radiation appointments, and there really wasn't another choice.

So, it's very important for me to get back to a healthy body weight. I never want to be the cancer lady again. Time to hit the treadmill.
P.S. If you know someone who gets an early stage breast cancer diagnosis, tell them they WILL get through it. It's been seven years since my cancer. Point them to this blog, I will talk to them or write them directly to encourage them if they desire that.

Why it's time to lose weight RIGHT NOW!

Come September, my husband Ralph and I will have been married for 20 years. Anniversaries are milestones, and milestones cause me to reflect. I know I weighed 128 pounds on my wedding day, and was 27 years old. And I was not super skinny at that weight. I'm 5 foot 3inches with a small frame. Well, I am embarrassed to admit I've gained over 50 pounds in those 20 years and it's time for them to go.

Oh I have excuses. Really valid excuses, in some cases...like a medicine I took for two months that made me gain 30 pounds. Question: Why can't there be a medicine that makes you lose 30 pounds in 2 months? My very wonderful physician, (who I'm hoping will sponsor me so I will mention again how totally awesome Dr. Reeves Bower is) will vouch that I have issues with my under-active thyroid that cause weight gain. But still, enough excuses already.

Truth is, I hate to exercise. Always have. But I've come to the brilliant conclusion that there is no way to age in a healthy way without exercising. My diet has been the typical American diet that we are constantly reading is bad for us. Too much sugar, too much white flour, too much meat, too much fat, and too few vegetables. I plead guilty, on all counts.

This is how I know it is really time to do something: I've started hiding behind my children in photographs! Let somebody pull out a camera, and I'll look to see how I can hide in the back row. So people will say, "Look at that adorable little girl, what a beauty," instead of "Wow, the mom has sure gained a few pounds."

Today I swam and walked over a mile and half. Game on! Let's build some houses, people. Give now, or give later, but let's get some families in Haiti out from under the improvised bed-sheet-shelters they are living in and into some real houses.

What is going on?

Did you ever find anything so fascinating and frustrating that you just couldn't stay uninvolved? That's how I feel about Haiti.

After the January 12 earthquake, many people gave generously to help the Haitian people recover. But after months and months of relief work, why are millions of people still living in tents and under tarps in teaming, muddy camps of homeless people?

Because the government of Haiti and the large non-profit organizations won't work together -- over seven months have passed and yet they stand around pointing fingers at each other. Meanwhile, Haitian parents have to stand up all night, holding their children in their arms as they try to keep the kids asleep off the muddy ground and out of the rivers of dirty water running through the tent camps. I want to help end this all-too-real nightmare for Haitian families, and here is how!

Heartline Ministries, a Christian 501c3 organization with over 20 years of working in Haiti, is getting things done. HEARTLINE is building homes for Haitian families who desperately need them.

The 15-year-old daughter of Heartline's employees raised over $50,000 by running a half marathon for Haiti. With the money that Paige Porter Livesay raised, Heartline is building 42 houses. This is my effort to raise $10,000 by losing weight, getting in shape, and having my friends and loved ones sponsor me at $1 a pound or more. If you will help me, that money will build eight houses for homeless families in Haiti. Heartline Ministries will oversee the building of the houses. Pictured at the top of my blog is a house Heartline constructed just a few week ago--it's done now and the family living in it is thriving. You can read all about Heartline Ministries and the houses they are building by following the links on the right side of this blog near the top. I plan on journeying to Haiti in a few months to see the houses we will build together. Will you help a family in Haiti build a house?

I'll announce on this blog each time I lose another 10 pounds and it will be time for you, the readers, to donate through the Chip In Meter. Between August 1 and November 1 I hope to lose up to 40 pounds. It will help me to diet and exercise, knowing for every pound I lose, more money will be raised for homes for Haitian families. I would appreciate your sponsorship and your prayers. Maxima SA, a Haitian building company, is donating one house to Heartline for every house we are able to fund through this effort. So for $2,500 (the price of one house) two families will have a safe, earthquake and hurricane resistant homes to live in. You can see the Haitian-style houses by following the Maxima link.

Let's build some houses! I already have my first sponsor at $2 a pound. To sponsor me through the Chip In meter, you must have a Paypal account. If you want to write a check, make it out to Heartline Ministries, write Pound4pound on the memo line (That's important!) and send the check to Heartline Ministries, PO Box 898 Sunnyside WA 98944.