Happy New Year!

Like it happens every December, the year is coming to a close. As a kid I found this time of year exciting; my sisters and I would try to stay up late to watch the ball drop on TV, as a teenager/young adult I'd go to parties with friends. Now, working full time, married to a woman who works full time, with two small children at home, Dec. 31 is just another day on the calendar. Sure, it's a new year. But it's just a ball slowly being lowered in NYC. It's been the same since long before I was born. And a lot of people use the night as an excuse to dance, party and get plastered, when in reality most of those people do that on the weekends anyway. I'm all for finding a reason to party, but you can get drunk and watch balls drop every Sunday during Cowboys games. No need to stay up late on Dec. 31 for it!

One part of the New Years season that I've never put much into is making new years resolutions. As much as I like hearing women who are not overweight complaining about their goal to lose weight, I've always found it silly to wait til the new year to make a change. I've heard a few people in my life claim they want to stop smoking and they're going to start at the new year. Same thing with losing weight. And I've always thought: Why wait? I understand that Jan. 1 is a good time to start anew, because the calendar is new, the year is new, and most people will spend another 30 days writing 2014 after the date, but what makes Jan. 1 any better to start a goal than Aug. 23 or March 4, or April 31? (Who caught that...? If you plan on starting a new goal on April 31, your goal should be to buy a calendar.) If you want to begin living a healthier life, give up bad habits or whatever you want, do it whenever you're ready, and make that date special to you. If you don't wear your seat belt in a car and you decide sometime in March that you want to begin, do it, and suddenly you have an anniversary to look forward to every March. Make yourself a cake, with a little car on it smashed into a tree made out of whipped icing, and a little person made out of sugar standing next to it and have it say "you're still alive" in your favorite color. Then eat it all. (Then in April you can begin a new goal of not eating so much cake, fatty.)

New Years Eve can be fun. But be considerate of others. When you finally cross that line and start puking before the clock strikes midnight, leave the bar. Nobody in the bar wants to see that. And if you've been begging your girlfriends all night to let you do karaoke and they finally give in and let you, don't. You probably suck and your friends finally gave up on saving everyone's ears in the place. Seriously though, party and have fun but don't drink and drive. Too many innocent people get hurt because of the stupidity of drunk drivers. Know your limits, be smart, let your local police, fire and EMS personnel have an easy night since they'll be on duty, and welcome 2015 with a bang!

Happy New Year!

Where have you been??

Hello again. I'm back!! Some of you may be wondering "why haven't you posted in the last three weeks," and I wondered that myself. I thought maybe it's because I was stuffed from the Thanksgiving feast. But that's not it. My pants are tighter now though... Perhaps my absence is because I was busy as my alter ego, saving the big city and getting the girl. But no. Little Rock is not a big city, and super heroes pants aren't snug. I was actually touring the mid-west United States with a traveling wild-west show as the horse poop cleaner/rodeo clown. I tried to do both jobs at the same time one night during a show, got trampled by a bull and underwent a brain-replacement operation at the state hospital in Phulaschit, Nebraska. The TRUTH is, we've both been working a lot and the two times I sat down to write in the past few weeks, I've had a completely blank mind. Writers block. (wild-west story was better huh?!)

I read an article earlier this year that I found very interesting, but I also found it is a very touchy point for some people. The article was here on Time.com and entitled "ADHD Does Not Exist." See, touchy and controversial right there in the title. A good, interesting read if you have five minutes, but if not it is a behavioral neurologist with over 50 years experience in the field, (dude must be OOOOOLLLLLDLDDD) who has practiced under the thought or pretense that ADHD doesn't exist and that by curing underlying issues, the symptoms of ADHD go away. Now I'm not here to start a rally or upset friends who have kids who, or themselves, have ADHD, so calm down. There have been enough 'movements' started in the last few weeks that we don't need another one. I just read the article and did some more googling (because that's what amateur research is these days) and found that treating underlying issues to cure common symptoms is not an uncommon practice at all. So I took to google and my local yellow pages (again, via google) and thought about applying that to my TS.

I know through my own experience and research that TS is often associated with anxiety and OCD. Exactly how they correlate seems to be a foggy area that 'experts' don't seem to agree on 100%, but they agree the conditions do correlate. So I connected with a Psychologist and spoke with her about what behavior therapy is and how to use that to treat my tics. Knowing the anxiety that I have as well as some of the obsessive-compulsive tendencies I have exhibited in the past, our sessions have been her digging into my brain (figuratively of course. I do enough literal brain digging through my nose sitting at red lights) and asking open ended questions to literally figure out what makes me tic. Since I met my wife 4 1/2 years ago, when I try something new to minimize my tics I will ask her if she has noticed a difference, and the answer has always been no.

As I've been seeing the psychologist I've learned more about myself, and even more about Tourette's, and have been given all kinds of pointers to help combat the anxiety and the OCD. While I'm not cured (that wasn't my expectation anyway) I finally had my wife say that I seem to twitch less recently! After all the punches I've thrown and the eyes I've poked, hearing her say that I felt like this:

So while I still twitch, it was nice to feel some improvement, and even better to have someone else who sees me every day to acknowledge it as well. And I'm sure my kids appreciate how much better I've become at not blowing air into their faces!

I like to continually learn and try to improve, not just with TS but with everything. I strive every day to be a better husband, father, brother, firefighter, Christian and every other aspect of my life. Life is hard. My sister just told me this morning that being a parent is hard. (amen!) But it's all part of life. Better yourself so you can help better others.

And finally. My beautiful little girl turned 3 this last week. Happy Birthday Cutie!! She can't decide from one minute to the next if she is Doc McStuffins, Queen Elsa, Sleeping Beauty or one of the Bubble Guppies, but I love all of her! And I'm not ashamed to admit I can sing along with all the aforementioned songs. (I may even sing "Let It Go" better than Queen Elsa herself...)