All Women Stalk for 2006 September

Archive for September, 2006

Nine Ways to Help Children to Cope With Loss and Grief

By Sally Sacks

www.sallysacks.com

The biggest problem children have in coping with their grief is the inattention and lack of awareness adults have in the need to talk about it, express all kinds of feelings around it, and to help children to find a way to compensate for the loss.

Often parents are ill equipped to deal with grief in their children, because they have a hard time dealing with it themselves. For example many stoic type families just held it in, enforcing the need to be strong. If you grew up in a family like this you would have no outlet to express your feelings. It would not be welcome and you would know it, so you hold your feelings in. These people become parents and the cycle is repeated. If you let the feelings out, it’s healthy, normal, and gives you a place to build from. Naturally, if you express your grief, you need to know where to go with it next, and again if you are a parent, you need to know how to direct your child.

I have dealt with many kids who have no way to connect to their deceased parent. I ask them how they keep their mom or dad’s spirit alive, or keep a relationship with them, and they say they don’t know. They are unaware that the relationship and image of another in your thoughts and in your memory never dies. The body dies, but the spirit does not. It is so strange how people can believe in and connect to a God that they have never personally witnessed or seen, but those same people can’t connect to a person they actually saw, knew existed and loved.

People all over the world connect to the spirit of God, regardless of the lack of empirical evidence. They can believe in what’s told to them to believe, but can’t make the connection on their own. Children need to learn to make a spiritual connection. They need to find ways to talk with their deceased loved one. Parents have to guide kids on this one, no matter what their age.

I had a young girl recently who lost her dad, and was unable to talk about him, even though I asked lots of questions. It was too painful. She needed to let her feelings out. She was channeling her feelings out in the wrong direction, being needy with boys, and always angry at her mom. When we worked together, and I helped her to understand that her dad’s spirit was alive, around her and in her. She began to think differently. She slowly began to focus on memories of her dad, and what he had given her, rather than focus outside herself. She became connected to him again in a new and different way, but a way that worked.

Pregnancy and Lower Back Pain: The Hidden Cause

By Dr. Thomas Sullivan
www.losethebackpain.com

The decisions of picking a name… The anticipation and excitement… Painting the new room… Clothing, diapers and family celebrations. The joy of a pregnancy is one of life’s greatest pleasures. Unfortunately however, for many women the later months of pregnancy can prove to be quite challenging. One common problem many women face is lower back pain.

Lower back pain can be a horrible interruption in day-to-day activities for a pregnant woman. More importantly, it interferes with their quality of life, not to mention the enjoyment of one of the most memorable times of their life.

The obvious cause of lower back pain is the biomechanical stress being placed on the mother by the added weight of baby. As the baby gains weight the mother is pulled forward. To compensate for this forward pull, the mother has to lean her upper body backward. This puts a tremendous amount of pressure on the low back and pelvis.

The “hidden” cause
This explanation of low back pain sounds complete. It is a true explanation but is only a small part the problem. The “hidden” cause of lower back pain is actually muscle imbalances. In fact, muscle imbalances are a common cause of lower back pain in pregnancy but they are also responsible for back pain in a majority of the population.

The strength and tone of the muscular system is an extremely important factor when assessing a patient with lower back pain. Unfortunately, muscle imbalances are not addressed properly by most health practitioners. But just because they are not trained in identifying and addressing muscle imbalances, it doesn’t mean you have to continue to suffer.

But before I share with you the solution to this problem, let me first explain in more detail what a muscle imbalance is and how it causes back pain and sciatica.

How muscle imbalances work
In a nutshell, muscle imbalances work like this. Muscles work together with opposing muscles to allow movement at joints. One muscle stretches while the other shortens. Each side should be of equal tone and strength. When a pregnant woman walks, moves, bends, twists or sleeps she will typically do so in an unbalanced and awkward manner to accommodate for her increased weight. In addition, various everyday activities and positions we put our body in create imbalances in the muscle groups and during pregnancy it only worsens.

Muscle imbalances then pull the pelvis and low back out of alignment and this places uneven and excessive stress on the muscles, bones and joints.

The spine is comprised of 24 moveable bones with a shock-absorbing disc in between each bone. This spinal column rests on three large bones called the pelvic girdle.

What’s for Dinner? Quick & Healthy One-Pot Meals

By Elizabeth Yarnell
www.GloriousOnePotMeals.com

Stephanie, a vice president for a venture capital firm in Denver, makes it a priority to get home in time to have a family meal with her husband and 1-year old son.

“I put a lot of energy into my job and then I get into my car at 5pm and realize that I have no idea what I’m going to feed three people for dinner in an hour,” she says. “That’s when a one-pot meal is just perfect.”

One-pot meals can be the solution to quick and easy cooking when no one really has the time to cook. While one-pot meals come in various forms, they all have the common concept of putting a variety of ingredients into a single vessel and cooking them all together. There’s no fretting about getting the timing right so that your broccoli is perfectly steamed at the same time as the pot roast comes out of the oven medium-rare and the rice is ready to fluff, which is a boon for all those who aren’t wizards at culinary planning. And, perhaps best of all, rather than a sink full of dirty pots and pans to scrub after dinner, there is only one pot to clean.

One-pot meals include everything from light stir-fries to hearty skillet meals to heavy casseroles made with cans condensed cream-of soup. Typically each forkful contains a little of each ingredient in the meal, whether it’s in a slab form or bite-sized pieces. Crock-pot cooking, where all the ingredients are placed in a crock-pot along with some liquid and then simmered at a very low heat for 6-8 hours until everything has disintegrated into a stew, is another popular method of creating of one-pot meals.

The only downside to each of these methods is that they are usually not a complete and balanced meal in and of themselves. Since the definition of a complete, healthy meal includes protein, carbohydrates and vegetables, stir-fries are typically served with rice, skillet meals with pasta, casseroles with a salad, and crock-pot stews with bread.

Infuse it
To have a truly complete and balanced one-pot meal consider “infusion” cooking. Infused one-pot meals are made by layering whole foods into a closed container– either a foil or parchment pouch or a cast iron Dutch oven—and then baking the container in the oven at a very high heat for under an hour. These dinners can contain everything needed for a full and balanced one-pot meal without having to prepare rice or a salad separately.

Low in fat and high in nutrition, almost any ingredients can be added to an infused one-pot meal to meet personal dietary preferences. Infused one-pot meals prepared in a Dutch oven can even accept frozen elements without any change in cooking time or flavor.

“I love that I can make my infused one-pot meal up in advance,” enthuses Stephanie. “I put it all together in the morning, keep it in the fridge, and then pop it directly into the pre-heated oven when I get home from work. Instead of fussing over a hot stove, I get to play with my kid while our dinner cooks. And they’re so healthy and tasty that my husband loves them too!”

YAY OR NAY WEDNESDAY

I think it's time for another Marian Keyes Yay or Nay, don't you? This time we're turning our attention to her non-fiction works, Under The Duvet and Further Under the Duvet (largely inspired by the fact that I bought the...

Chick Lit authors’ favourite TV shows

On her website Jennifer Crusie has a fabulous article entitled The Five Things I've Learned About Writing Romance from TV. I'm fairly sure I once read she said she'd learned more about writing from watching Buffy the Vampire Slayer than...

BOOK REVIEW: Twelve Sharp by Janet Evanovich

Twelve Sharp is the latest in Janet Evanovich's enormously popular Stephanie Plum series. I usually like to save Evanovich's books for a long journey or holiday and then read them in one sitting and while I didn't manage that with...

Ban More Books

By Elaine Viets

When I was growing up, I carried the Bible in my book bag. I kept it by my bed at night. My mother was delighted to find her quiet A-student in religious study.

Good thing Mom didn’t look any closer. I wasn’t reading the Bible. I was deep into a banned book, which I’d hidden behind a Bible cover.

I grew up in the 1960s, which were really the 1950s in Florissant, Missouri. My church and my parents had long lists of forbidden books.

I read them all.

Many of the books banned when I was a kid are still under fire, according to the American Library Association.

Banned Books Week is September 23-30. Schools and libraries can’t stop pulling classics like "The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn," "The Catcher in the Rye" and "Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl." They’ve added shelves of new titles to the banned list, from the whole Harry Potter series to books by Judy Blume and Maya Angelou.

Most books are banned for the finest reasons: to keep young minds unsullied by impure thoughts and bad language.

Please keep banning books. Yes, it’s wrong. It’s evil. It’s arrogant and un-American. But it’s the best way to get kids to read.

I believe in banned books. Here’s what they did for me:

(1) Banned books made me question authority.

How could any adult believe "The Grapes of Wrath" promoted Communism? That was the excuse my church gave for banning John Steinbeck. Once I read that novel, I knew the authorities were dead wrong. I figured they had to be wrong about other things, too. I was on the slippery slope to independent thinking.

(2) Banned books improved my mind.

Steinbeck, J.D. Salinger, Mark Twain, Harper Lee – I read all these banned classics. If a teacher had ordered me to read "Madame Bovary," I would have whined it was boring. Fortunately, it was banned. I reveled in every adulterous word.

(3) Banned books made me resourceful.

Or sneaky. Depends on how you look at it. I went to great lengths to conceal my beloved banned books. I read them by flashlight late at night, with a throw rug stuffed under my bedroom door.

Even the most trusting parent gets suspicious when a kid reads the Bible too much (some of those begats are pretty graphic), so I brought home piles of "age appropriate" books, such as "Little Women." They were good, but they lacked the zing of a banned book.

(4) Banned books made me strong.

Some of those suckers, especially the gloomier Brits and Russians, weighed several pounds. Hauling around weighty novels gave me real muscle.

(5) Banned books made me rebellious.

Banning books led me to more dangerous things, like racing semis on I-70 in Daddy’s Pontiac 444. Yes, there is a connection. Thanks to banned books, I thought rules were stupid, even good rules. After all, the same people who banned books made speed-limit laws.

My parents never guessed that their angelic A-student was having high-speed races on the interstate. I was lucky. The message in some of those banned books finally got through: I wasn’t immortal. I could wind up dead as any doomed heroine, if I didn’t take my foot off the gas pedal.

Don’t get the idea I only improved my mind under cover of that Bible. I read plenty of banned novels with no redeeming social value, including "Peyton Place" and "Valley of the Dolls." I didn’t always understand the sex, but I enjoyed the thrill of the forbidden.

Banned books were irresistible. I couldn’t stop reading them.

Banned books made me what I am today.

Think about that, next time you want to yank a book out of a kid’s hands.

****

NOTE: For more information about books that have been banned or challenged, check out the American Library Association at www.ala.org/ala/oif/bannedbooksweek/bannedbooksweek.htm

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