Category: Joy

  • One nice thing

    I’m sharing more wisdom from the doctor’s waiting room. Just when I was about to lose my cool, tired and frustrated from trying to help take care of my very ill brother-in-law, I read this in the January/February issue of Web M.D. Before you climb out of bed in the morning, “spend 20 seconds thinking…

  • Wisdom from the waiting room

    I discovered this bit of wisdom in a magazine while spending a couple of hours waiting in a doctor’s office. I consider it wisdom because it confirms something I already knew to be true. It’s always good to have reminders. The wisdom? Setbacks are an essential part of learning. If you encounter a setback, keep…

  • Keep grounded

    In the middle of the second week of helping take care of my seriously ill brother-in-law, I was feeling completely overwhelmed by the craziness of hospitals and doctors, by trying to help keep track of 14 medications and the number of milligrams of sodium for a low-salt diet and by a patient who wasn’t always…

  • An expert?

    My sister-in-law Linda and I were patiently sitting in the waiting room at the hospital, wondering how my brother-in-law Bob was doing. We had been waiting for hours to talk to the doctor who had inserted six stints in Bob’s heart when we met an expert on heart surgery. He was a short man with…

  • “Gentle and kind, principled, ever curious”

    I just finished reading Anthony Shadid’s thoughtful book House of Stone: A Memoir of Home, Family and a Lost Middle East. Anthony, you may remember from an earlier blog post, is the son of Fayteen’s cousin Rhonda. He also worked as a foreign correspondent for The New York Times before he died in Syria earlier…

  • Happy spring!

    I saw some daffodils in the grocery store today and couldn’t resist buying them. I smiled and felt a little happier when I arrived home and put them on the kitchen table. As the Bible says in the Song of Solomon 2:12 (English Standard Version), “The flowers appear on the earth, the time of singing…

  • How to keep those pounds off

    I am happy to report that one of my weight-loss secrets is endorsed not only by Weight Watchers but also by The New England Journal of Medicine. What’s the secret? Step on your bathroom scale every morning. According to the October 2011 issue of Weight Watchers Magazine, a study from The New England Journal of…

  • What’s going into your mouth?

    I often eat breakfast while reading the newspaper or making a to-do list for the day. I generally consume my lunch at my desk while I’m busy at work on a project.  And, I have dinner and conversation with my husband. Too often, I realized recently, I finish eating and I don’t even remember tasting…

  • The cookie conspiracy

    Why does it always happen? The day that I decide to be Resolute—to stop the overeating for a few days and the dieting for a few days cycle—that’s the day that my order of Girl Scout cookies arrives. And, Girl Scout cookies arrive only once a year. Wouldn’t it be wise to postpone my back-to-healthy-eating…

  • I apologize

    I was not the perfect mother of two children. I confess that , more than once, I was not calm and reasonable. I yelled. However, whenever I lost my temper, I always tried to apologize. From a very early age, my son Jay learned how to make me feel even more guilty than I was…