This post will be nothing like those year-end holiday cards from acquaintances you may or may not have seen for a while that include a long list of accomplishments and highlights from the year. For me, 2014 was not a year of big travel, notable changes at work, or major fitness successes in …
Taking Time to Enjoy the Raspberries
We have a couple of raspberry bushes in our yard, and our neighbor has a tall one that hangs a bit over our side of the fence. While none of these could be considered copious producers, each bush steadily makes daily raspberries - a few at a time - from mid summer to early fall. At this point in …
Two Weeks of Waiting = Torture
The hardest part of doing IVF is this phenomenon known as the Two Week Wait. After an embryo is implanted, the pregnancy hormone HCG does not rise to detectable levels for approximately 10-14 days; thus, you have to wait two weeks to find out if the procedure was successful and you are actually …
Mindfulness Through Dirt
When I was a child, my parents had a small garden. In order to get us to help with its care, they would pay my sister and me a penny for each strawberry harvested from the berry patch. After hours of work in the Las Vegas sun with only a meager bounty to show for it in the end, I quickly realized …
Yoga for Real People
Is this "real people" yoga? Maybe for some... After a few years of largely ignoring yoga, I've returned to the mat. I was really hesitant to do so, but I'm very happy I did. The backstory: I had been practicing yoga on a fairly regular basis (once or twice a week) since the 90's. It was a part …
What IVF Taught Me
I recently completed my first cycle of in vitro fertilization (IVF). It is a long and detailed process, requiring lots of resources, money, time, and patience. The first stage involves, ironically, taking oral contraceptives to reset the hormone milieu and force all eggs into a senescent, follicular …