Sunshine on My Shoulders

When I was younger, I never gave much thought to what getting older would look like. I figured I'd never make it past Y2K, being 40 and all. That seemed ancient. My parents were youngsters when they had me, so I was done married and having babies before they got their first wrinkle. 

I've been listening to YouTube videos about brain function (because I'd like to keep some of that) and aging. This week, I heard all sorts of theories and results from the virtues of Vitamin D. Did you know that it's not even a vitamin? It's a hormone or something like that. Either way, all these years, we've been hammered about wearing sunscreen. One of my doctors even told me to put it on me and my children every day in the winter. Now we are hearing that we are all D-deficient and that we need to get out in the sun. Once again, everybody on the planet should be doing most everything that old Dr. Leila Denmark told us to do. She was my children's first pediatrician and she lived to be 113 years old. I assumed it was because she had amazing genes, but it turns out her (many) siblings didn't live nearly that long. She advocated things like fresh air, feeding babies on a schedule, breastfeeding (even when it wasn't cool), and yes, putting your babies out in the sunshine. She told me to build a porch onto our house, screen it and to put my infants out there as much as I could. She also said that they should be out in the open sunshine at least 20 minutes a day, even in the winter. Another thing she advocated was to get off dairy completely, and that a weaned baby did not need milk. "We're not cows, why would we be drinking their milk?" That's what she said. She posited that if we got outside and got all that good Vitamin D, it would muster up the calcium in the food we eat and that nobody needed milk. Some people thought she was crazy. She once told me, when I whined about my baby fat, that I needed to go out in the yard in the morning, dig a hole, then fill it up (all to say that I needed to break a sweat in the morning). Then I was supposed to never snack, and eat only one carbohydrate per meal. Get out in the sun. Drink water, not tea or milk. Be happy. 

I got the "be happy" part right, but hardly anything else. I shoulda listened to her. Then I could be jolly and pain-free all at the same time.