I am not a religious person. I was raised a Quaker, which has directly influenced how I feel about religion. I understand people have faith, I respect it, I just don't.

But when I read about the family in WI who allowed their daughter to die due to untreated type 1 diabetes, preferring to pray for God to heal her instead, I was absolutely livid. How could you allow your child to stop talking and walking and just think that's ok? Just think that God will make it all better?

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We try really hard to stay away from high fructose corn syrup around here, although, man, that stuff is in everything! Even bread. I think there are two or three brands that don't have it.

Olivia used to drink a lot of diet soda. I'd buy a couple of 2 litre bottles every week for her, in addition to drink mixes like Crystal Light. Sometimes I'd make diet Kool-Aid, using Splenda instead of sugar. One week, I added up how much of my grocery money was going towards diet drinks and was apalled - it was easily $10 or $15 a week.

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Thanks for the input on my issues with Olivia's teacher. I'm going to follow up with her when they return to school this week, to see if the guy is still being a pain in the butt about it and if so, I'll contact him again. This is the part of diabetes that I hate - the beating it into people part.

For the last couple of weeks, Olivia's been having some major drama with her father. He doesn't see her, in spite of only living an hour away, and it's making her nuts. He'll call her, but he has one excuse after another as to why he can't come out here or why, if we happen to be out that way, she can't stop in for a few hours. It's really crappy.

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Yesterday was Earth Day and, as usual, I'm late to the party.

Diabetes care does generate a lot of waste. Olivia's on a pump, so she has tubing, cartridges, insulin vials and test strips that all wind up in the trash. For the last couple of years, I've been trying to figure out how, or even if, I could recycle any part of that waste.

For a year, we saved insulin vials. Last December, I popped out the rubber seals on 50 of them and strung them on some tiny, battery-operated Christmas tree lights. I'm thinking of doing that again this year and giving them out as presents to people - it would definitely be making a statement.
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Olivia hasn't had too many problems with her teachers over the years. Most have been very accepting of her diabetes and the care she needs to take with it while she's in class. I have a packet of stuff I give to all of her teachers at the beginning of each year and thus far, that seems to be sufficient.

This year, though, she got switched a couple of weeks into the school year. She got a new English teacher and I just assumed that the old one would pass along the diabetes info. Wrong.
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Olivia has two half-sisters, whom I refer to online as Boo and The Bug. Boo is 3-1/2 years old and The Bug is 20 months. Both are healthy, although The Bug concerns me sometimes. There's nothing concrete there, it's just this vague, nebulous cloud of worry. Well, maybe not too vague; she does drink an inordinate amount of water. No ketones, no peeing thru the diaper on a regular basis, but the drinking incessantly thing niggles at the back of my brain.

Anyway.

When Boo was born, we participated in the TRIGR study. That study is finished, but the TrialNet study is ongoing. Every year, at camp, there is someone there from TrialNet, trying to get people to have their children tested. I haven't done it.
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