May 9, 2011
It was 11 years ago this past weekend at the All State Music Festival in Rutland that I wooed Meredith with one of the best lines in my repertoire: nice socks.
I believe they had cows on them, or they were cow print.
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May 8, 2011
Specifically, the National Zoo in Washington D.C. because that is where Meredith and I first held hands and we haven’t let go since.
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April 22, 2011
We all have M names. Even the dog:
Marc
Meredith
Malcolm
Maura
And Merlin
We did have a fish at one time that did not have an M name. In fact, it never really had a name at all. Maybe it died in despair knowing that it was never really a member of our family because it lacked an appropriately begun name.
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April 17, 2011
Not long ago, my wife Meredith and I tried a diet to help us achieve a healthier weight. We talked to John Scaralia at BodyTech in downtown Rutland and he was very thorough in his explanation of how his diet worked. The premise behind the diet is feed muscle, burn fat. The plan seemed sound and we certainly would not have been starving on this diet. It features a balance of protein, carbohydrate, and fat elements of the diet with an emphasis on the protein as the muscle builder. Blah, blah, blah…diet. Moving on…
So, that started my foray into eating 5 eggs a day. Yes, five. Did you know that all of the fat in an egg is in the yoke? Yes, it’s true. Most of the protein is in the white. Who knew? (I’ve been saying that a lot lately, sorry.)
I don’t eat five whole eggs. I eat 1 whole egg with 4 additional egg whites.
It takes a bit of time to crack and separate 5 eggs in the morning. I tried the egg whites that you can buy in cartons and I didn’t really care for it. So, I am stuck with cracking 5 eggs every morning.
Once cracked, I usually just cook them omelet style. I don’t add anything because that would seem to take away from the “healthiness” of it. They taste good all by themselves. Plain. But, that’s me. Plain. I like vanilla, too.
As for the diet, it didn’t last long because it required me to eat 6 meals a day! I didn’t have time for preparing all of that.
The good news is that my weight is pretty healthy. So, here’s to the mighty egg!
P.S. In case you needed incentive to have a healthy weight, when I lost 30 pounds from my peak weight all of my cholesterol numbers improved dramatically. No special diet, just weight. I was stunned.
April 16, 2011
I have one.
Notice the lime green cast.
His name is Merlin.
He has his moments
He is a pug.
Are you lookin' at me?
He is also a Repuglican.
Patriotic Pug
The letter D’s theme was suggested by my wife, Meredith.
April 11, 2011
For some reason (I think mostly love for my wife) I have found myself motivated to attend to the lawn/garden of our house. As I nurse my aching back and sore shoulder I wonder to myself, “People actually enjoy doing this?”
I suppose when it looks good at the culmination of the work there will be a certain amount of satisfaction and pride (but doesn’t pride come before a fall…in home values?).
Of course, when you spend time in the dirt you meet some interesting folks, like Mr. Rose Flower the toad.
Maura gave him his name.
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June 29, 2010
Short hair is great!* There is something about short hair that is just, well, cool. Literally, that is, because I don’t know anything about figuratively cool as I seem to be very far from any hipster understanding of what cool is (which I expect to be pointed out regularly when my children reach the teen years…until then, my brother and cousins fill that accountability role nicely). Back to short hair…
I have to write a brief disclaimer: I’m not a particularly big fan of short hair on women. There. I said it.
Last night I enticed my four-year-old son, Malcolm, to have his hair cut…by me. Now, I know what you’re thinking: Surely, being a music teacher cannot possibly prepare you for properly shearing a young boy’s hair! And you would be right. But, I’ve been cropping my own coif for the last 13+ years with mostly good reviews from passers by and assorted members of the media. (Never mind that one of the few times I allowed a so-called professional to cut my hair in the last decade was just prior to my wedding. Just because she didn’t trust me with my own hair on the eve of our wedding doesn’t mean that she didn’t like my hair styling. Meredith has let me cut my own hair every other time since we’ve know each other.)
Back to last night. Malcolm allowed me, rather enthusiastically I might add, to cut his hair with the electric clippers. We set up in the bathroom and prepared a gallery for mommy and Maura to watch the proceedings. It went rather uneventfully, with the exception of spurts of tempered rage as I tried (mostly successfully) to contain my anxious aversion to messes. Everyone behaved well and no one was hurt (at least there are no visible scars).
At first, I set the clippers for #5 – which is the highest (or longest) setting. Malcolm was dancing in contorted fashion as he was trying to sooth the itching from the voluminous hair dropping on his bare shoulders. Despite wanting to be free of itchiness, Malcolm insisted that he wanted his hair shorter. So, I obliged. Not wanting to have to cut his hair a third time, I skipped guard #4 and went to #3. Well, well, well. Let’s just say his hair is short.
Well, I have little more to say and I expect this is what you’ve been waiting for. Here are a couple of pictures of Malcolm and Maura after they were cleaned up from the hair massacre:
* For the record, Meredith has said she wasn’t really crazy about the bald look that I had for a few months back in 2008.
March 16, 2009
Did you ever have one of those days where nothing seemed to go right?
Today was that day for me (you could argue that the last 380+ days have been like that for me, but I’ll put that aside for today’s story). Today’s story actually started on Friday afternoon. That was when I discovered that Maura had a fever of 103. The good news was that the fever responded to the Tylenol and she was in relatively good spirits. Friday night her fever spiked up to 105 in one ear and 103 in the other ear (yeah, go figure, I decided to take the average of the two).
On Saturday I decided to take Maura to the pediatricians just to rule out strep and see if they could pinpoint a diagnosis. Well, strep wasn’t likely and the flu was ruled out. So, she just has your run of the mill virus for which there is no medicine. Yeah!
Sometime on Sunday, Maura decides that she doesn’t like Tylenol any more. Grand. Her fever has been vacillating between normal and 103 throughout the day. She sleeps several times during the day at one and a half hour stints. Bed time comes early for my little darling.
Did I say darling? Oh no, I must be mistaken. Someone swapped my charming little angel for a Toddlersaurous Rex from – eh, hem – Newark. She didn’t want a bath. Understandable given her fever, but she cried through it to beat the band (and my ear drums). She didn’t want the eye medication prescribed to reduce the gunk that was building up. In fact, she screamed a scream from the 9th circle of you-know-where that just about peeled the skin off my face. Then she refused to take the Tylenol thereby dashing any hope that my sweet little girl might return and that I would be getting any sleep.
Well, I got Maura to bed and came downstairs to find Malcolm drawing on himself with a black marker. “Look, Daddy!” I stood there briefly with my mouth hanging open spewing nonsense about what I should do with my children, when finally Meredith knocks some sense into me and tells me to take the marker away. I take it away, he cries. Victory for the parents.
Fast forward to 10:30pm. Maura “spills” in her bed. Spill is Maura’s word for vomit. At first I panic and wrongly assume that the end of the world would be coming shortly and that I was woefully underdressed. Then after surveying the situation it appeared that Maura had merely coughed her way into “spilling”. I did a superficial cleaning and put her back to bed.
Fast forward to 1:30am. Malcolm comes trundling down the stairs*and whimpers something about not sleeping. Mommy hears him, tries to console him, and tries to get him to come into our room, but he is stunned by the darkness that he meets at the bottom of the stairs. I wake up halfway through this exchange thinking something is dreadfully wrong and I spring out of bed (like a well worn set of shocks, I might add), and dash toward the stairs without really knowing what’s taking place. Well, fortunately for Malcolm, it took me several tries to get my glasses on my face properly and at least twice to get my crocs on without breaking my ankles otherwise I might have bowled him over on the way up the stairs. By the time I arranged myself in some manner of midnight manliness, I realized what was going on and was able to approach my whimpering 3-year-old with some degree of 1am tenderness.
Muttering something about the dark and not sleeping in his room, I brought Malcolm back up stairs and tried to get him back to sleep. He wanted nothing to do with staying up in his room for some reason. I told him that I was going to sleep on the bottom bunk while he figured out what he was going to do. He promptly climbed into his crib and went back to sleep. Of course, I didn’t want to leave right away for fear of setting off a cry of alarm, so I stayed put in the bottom bunk. Tucked in nicely. An extra blanket on top. Mmm…
Fast forward to 3:30. Malcolm is asleep. And so is daddy…in Malcolm’s room, on the bottom bunk. I lay my head back down to sleep some more when I realize that I wouldn’t be able to hear Meredith if she needed to use the bathroom. So I got up quietly and glided down the stairs so as to attract the least amount of attention to me departure.
As soon as I hit the bottom step, I hear Meredith calling out for me to help her to the bathroom. Fortunately, she just started asking for me and was not stricken with a bladder infection from holding it for the two hours that I had fallen asleep upstairs.
The next day…well, my classes are a joy (sarcasm alert), I can barely contain my enthusiasm for teaching (sarcasm alert), and I spilled chicken noodle soup on one of my nicest shirts (just the facts). Gah!
The good news…our Federal Income Tax return came in the mail, today (the bad news about that is that I hate the fact that I loaned the government any of my money in the first place); Malcolm and Maura ate a reasonable dinner considering their battles with the fever; everyone is in bed except me and I will be there soon.
I know that you have days like these, too. My advice to you? Open the soup lid away from you.
Marc
*I have a story to share about Malcolm and his crib, but that will have to wait. As I mentioned, I need to be in bed soon, or else Tuesday will very likely be a repeat of Monday.
January 18, 2009
My eyes are still sore from all of the tears I shed last night while reading Jeanne Damoff’s account of her son Jacob’s near-drowning in Parting the Waters. If you’ll indulge me, I’d like to give a quick background of how I even became aware of such a book about a blessed family from Texas.
*
Back when I had just begun blogging I was looking to make comments on other people’s blogs in order to generate a little bit of interest in my blog. I stumbled across (Re)Publican written by Aaron in Kentucky (I am trying to convince Meredith that he’s okay in spite of being in Kentucky). I liked what he was writing, both as it pertained to current events and God-related matters, so I made some comments on his blog. He replied to my comments on his blog and read a bit of mine. And now we have each other’s blogs listed on our blogrolls (I prefer my blogrolls warm with butter).
I go back occasionally to see what Aaron is writing about and one time he had reviewed a book called, Parting the Waters. I made a comment on his blog about his review and looked into the book. He replied to my comment and encouraged me to get a copy to read knowing what my family is going through. I checked it out and thought it looked interesting, but I dragged my feet because I already have probably 100 books in the hopper waiting to be read and not nearly enough time to read them all.
A week or more went by and I get a comment on my blog from Tina Howard who asked me if I would be interested in receiving a free copy of the book so that I could comment on it while she prepared the book for a book tour. Not being one to pass up an opportunity for a free book, I accepted and agreed to move the book to the top of my queue so that it would get read in time for the book tour.
About a week ago I received a (signed, thank you!) copy of Parting the Waters. I carried it with me back and forth to school in the hopes that I would find a few minutes here and there in order to read it. I really wanted to honor Tina and Jeanne for the free copy with my speedy read and review. Well, I never got further than the back cover and the acknowledgments for several days. Finally, I read the first chapter. I wasn’t sure I would be able to read more.
*
My wife, Meredith, was discovered to have a mass in her brain on February 20th last year. Later we would discover that this mass was a cancerous tumor called a pineal blastoma. What ensued after the initial discovery defies summary in this post, but we are almost a year later with my wife’s life (and mine) having been forever altered. Jeanne Damoff’s book touched me on every page. There was rarely a chapter that didn’t reduce me to tears that needed time to subside in order to continue reading. Before I began the book I acknowledged that Jeanne had taken an incredible risk in publishing her account of her son’s near-drowning. It wasn’t until afterward that I realized it was not a risk at all but a fulfillment of an instruction from Paul:
Praise be to the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of compassion and the God of all comfort, who comforts us in all our troubles, so that we can comfort those in any trouble with the comfort we ourselves have received from God. For just as the sufferings of Christ flow over into our lives, so also through Christ our comfort overflows. (2 Corinthians 1:3-5, NIV)
It was as though Jeanne, and her husband George, had invited me into their home and tenderly told me about their turbulent life while putting their own arms around me to comfort me during my own tumultuous life. Even after two surgeries and six weeks of radiation, Meredith still has the tumor (albeit smaller and possibly shrinking) and we live from MRI to MRI not knowing what the scan will show us. In addition, the surgeries damaged the right side of her brain so that she has to contend with significant loss of mobility on her left side. One or the other would be discouraging enough on their own, but the fear of imminent death and the dramatic change of physical limitations have been difficult to bear.
The account of what Jacob went through after nearly drowning is nearly identical to what Meredith has experienced. (So identical that even some of the therapists have the same name!) It has been over ten years for the Damoff family and I know that they still face difficulties with Jacob’s recovery, but their perseverance has given me strength to keep going even as life’s difficulties threaten to engulf me. I would ask for God’s blessing on Jacob and his family, but is evident to me that He already has in countless, unimaginable ways. Instead, I’ll praise God for a work that, even though it defies human logic, is truly beautiful.
December 15, 2008
Is it okay to be angry with God? Is it okay to feel crushed under the weight of responsibility that He has placed on my shoulders?
I went to church with my family yesterday and by the time we got there, I was ready to explode in a fit of rage. I brought my wife and children into the sanctuary where the service had already begun and promptly turned around to find a quiet place to “vent” only to be pursued by my screaming three year-old son. When I got to the chapel, I held him in my arms and cried. Throughout the 10 months of Meredith’s struggle with a brain tumor and subsequent brain injuries, I have refused to ask God why. Why Meredith? Why me? Why us? Who am I to ask the God of the universe such a selfish question? Other than these musings, I still will not ask Him why. He will reveal that to me when it’s time.
Yesterday, however, I did have the audacity to tell God that I couldn’t take it anymore. I cried out that the burden is too great and I don’t know what to do. I wept openly with my son in my arms and telling God that it was too much for me to handle. Malcolm asked me what was wrong and I stuttered through and explanation of the truth in a language that a three year-old might understand. He empathized with me but did not understand. He brought me back to earth (and the responsibility of being a husband and father) by telling me that he was upset because the brass quartet combined with the organ and choir were too loud and hurt his ears. He led me back to the now quiet sanctuary and our family.
I don’t think I’ve finished my prayer of anguish. I know that God is not finished with me. He is sovereign and I remind myself often that I live to love Him and keep His commandments. That isn’t always comforting when you’re caught between a soiled diaper, a great deal of whining and crying, dinner boiling over on the stove, a hemiplegic spouse needing assistance to the table, and an ungrateful dog scratching at the door. God’s plan for us is unfolding and I have marveled at some of the miracles along the way. I know that He has given me strength to handle everything; otherwise I would have been crushed months ago by the weight of it all.
Am I angry at God? No, not really. Am I frustrated? At times, yes. Who am I to complain about burdens? He sent His son to die in order that I might live. Jesus bore the weight of the world on his shoulders. My burden is insignificant in comparison. More poignant to me than ever before is Handel’s setting of Matthew 11:30 in The Messiah, “For my yoke is easy and my burden is light.” In my distress, however, I’m not sure I am altogether aware of how to pick up His yoke and rest from my own burdens. God willing, awareness is not the only thing I’ll have when the God appointed time comes; I will be yoked with Christ and all of the glories and blessings that entails.
MW
Below is a random sampling of Handel’s The Messiah. If I had hours of time, perhaps I could find one that I liked more, but this performance is certainly adequate for my spiritual musings.
Our Daily Bread
Marc Whitman's Blog 