Baby Calvin's Birthday Party

I'm trying to get back to regularly posting summaries of my internet research on various treatments, but I've been busy and crashed lately, so we'll have to stick to personal updates for now.

We hosted my daughter's first birthday party over the weekend with thirty guests at our house.  The party featured all the usual amusing scenes of an infant's birthday party, including the obligatory photo-op of baby covered head to foot in cake frosting, and baby's interest in wrapping paper over the actual presents.  Naturally, my daughter was bewildered by the whole event at first, but seemed to relish the attention by the end.

I crashed again after the party.  I, of course, knew that I would crash, but made a calculated decision to enjoy the party and pay the price later.  I'm still on a bit of a mental high from the social aspect, which eases the frustration of the physical crash slightly.  At least this time, the guests all came to me, and not vice versa.

August has been a bad month for grandparents.  I started the month with 3 still living and am ending the month with just one.  On top of losing my paternal grandfather earlier in the month, I lost my maternal grandmother last week.  Ostensibly, this would require yet another out of town trip to the funeral - this time a one hour flight to San Jose on Saturday.  So far this summer, I've kept up with all of my family obligations and dutifully paid the price afterwards.  However, this might be the occasion where I finally say "no" and do what I need to do to get off of this push/crash cycle...at least for a while.

On the one hand, it's not fair to my mother and late grandmother that I made all of these other recent family obligations but might miss this one.  But on the other hand, it's just bad luck that my grandmother's funeral occurs last in a gauntlet of family obligations since the beginning of August:  funeral, wedding, birthday party, funeral.   I think my grandmother would understand...I hope.  At this moment, though, I'm still not sure what I'm going to do...

Finally, in recent weeks I purchased both a heart rate monitor and a far infrared sauna, and am enjoying some enlightening results from both.  I plan to write posts about both of them after I've had time to experiment further and draw more concrete conclusions.