What I Learned in April

Is it really May already? It seems like just the other day I was worrying about Nathan starting kindergarten, and now the school year is almost over – nineteen days are all that remain (and a year from now Sarah Kate will be preparing for high school!) It’s been a roller coaster of a school year – we’ve all learned a lot, and following are a few of the things I learned in April:

1. You can live in a sunny climate and still be deficient in vitamin D.

When I went for my annual checkup in early April, I brought a laundry list of symptoms to share with my doctor. He ordered a full panel of blood work, which revealed only one anomaly: vitamin D deficiency. It sounded kind of crazy. I mean, I’m a runner (and regular dog walker) living on the gulf coast where the sunshine is plentiful.

After talking with the nurse and doing a bit of research, though, it makes sense. I’m fair-complected so I try to run early before the sun is up, in shaded areas, and regularly apply sunscreen…all of which prevent my body from getting the vitamin D it needs from the sun. He prescribed a crazy-high supplement to take for eight weeks, then an over-the-counter supplement after that (basically forever). Four weeks in and I can already feel better.

2. A bail jumper now (or in the recent past) stayed in close proximity to our home.

Last week, some odd goings-on were going on in our neighborhood. Our subdivision is small, with only dead end streets, so we know when something is “off” here in the ‘hood – like three hitherto unknown vehicles. On Tuesday night, a black pickup first followed our neighbor’s teenage daughter home, then parked in the vacant lot just down from our house. Mr. Andi called the police department, who arrived quickly, stayed about two minutes, then departed. We confirmed later that the outsiders were bounty hunters in pursuit of someone in the neighborhood one street over. It could have even been a member of Dog’s crew, since he leased an office in our county last year.

3. Prince and his then-wife, Mayte Garcia, lost a son, one week old, due to Pfeiffer Syndrome.

Prince’s music was the soundtrack of my youth, but I never felt any real solidarity with the man who seemed so unlike me until I read about the death of his son, Boy Gregory, after Prince died. The death of a child can bring a couple closer together, or drive them apart; Mr. Andi and I were fortunate, while Prince and Mayte were not. I also learned that Mayte was born here in Alabama (a military kid), and was a high school classmate of one of my friends in Germany. The world is smaller than you think.

4. It’s good to be independent, until it isn’t.

Sarah Kate has always been incredibly independent, eschewing help unless she truly needed it. When she was younger, she always preferred boy helpers at school to girls, because the boys wouldn’t smother her (although I think one year even a boy got shunned for being too helpful). Through the elementary school years it was fine to resist help, because when help was needed it was always there, waiting in the wings.

Now that she’s thirteen and in middle school, however, things have changed. She doesn’t have a consistent group in her classes that she’s with throughout the day, and her peers are more… self-absorbed than in the past. The help has disappeared, and unfortunately she never learned how to ask for it when she needs it.

5. Sometimes discrimination is passive.

I always knew it to be the case, but we’ve never experienced it until now. We are accustomed to people not thinking about how certain situations impact Sarah Kate, and I generally don’t get worked up about it. If you haven’t experienced what it’s like to have limited mobility, you can’t really foresee situations like we can, so it’s understandable when people goof.

Recently, though, we’ve noticed a pattern with a particular individual’s interactions with Sarah Kate. Without going into detail, I’ll just say that this person – an adult, I will add – is either (a) incredibly, unbelievably obtuse OR (b) passive-aggressively acting in a way that will persuade Sarah Kate to give up and go away. It’s maddening, because I’m sure the situation would appear gray to an outsider, and therefore the only thing we can do is push back (probably in vain) or give up.

6. Forget Beach Body. Good workouts (and anything else) can be found for free on YouTube.

I am constantly amazed at the content available on YouTube. I’ve been struggling for eons to find workouts that would fit with my running. I’m not the type to do weight machines at the gym, group exercise classes are too inflexible for me, and home videos always seem to tack on a bunch of extra time to my running days (why do I need to spend ten minutes warming up when I just finished a four-mile run?) Tons of options exist for free on YouTube, with varying degrees of quality (production and otherwise), but I settled on something called Bodyrock recently and it’s working out well so far. The girl on the videos is so fit she looks like she’s computer-generated, but she doesn’t waste my time or money, so I can live with that.

7. Special Olympics is better than I expected.

Despite our prior involvement and my already-positive opinion of Special Olympics, experiencing it this year as the parent of an athlete was eye-opening. I’ll tell you all about it in a full post later this week.

Now it’s your turn to tell me – what did you learn in April?