As a parent with two children who were both breastfed, I know how important breastfeeding is. The National Institute of Health has found there are many benefits to breastfeeding an infant, including fewer illnesses, a stronger immune system and healthy brain development. There’s lots of great things in breast milk that can help a baby grow into a vibrant toddler. Some women can’t breastfeed, that’s OK and nothing to be ashamed of.

It’s a very personal choice, but obviously a right that every mother should have the ability to breastfeed. The question that arose from the (dramatic and extremist) TIME cover was, “How long should a mother breastfeed?”

The simple answer: As long as she wants.

And then there’s the “opinions are like a-holes” category, which I’ll dance around for a minute.

The NIH studies say great things about breastfeeding for an infant to a toddler, but what about after that? Do the nutritional needs of a toddler change enough that breast milk doesn’t provide everything? I don’t have the answers to that, but the question is one that should be asked: “Is breast milk sufficient for the needs of a toddler? What about preschool age? Kindergarten? Grade school?”

Without hard data, it’s hard for me to say it should or should not be done. The thing I am worried about, from society as a whole, is how we seem to be raising children who believe that they are in control instead of parents taking authority. You see this a lot in helicopter parents. I overheard a story from someone who worked in financial aid at a university who had been overwhelmed with parents taking care of the business side of their child’s enrollment. Of course, the actual student isn’t anywhere to be found in these stories because helicopter mom or dad are taking care of it all.

My concern is the possible correlation between attachment parents and helicopter parenting. When do we let children be children instead of always hovering? Can a child’s creative mind be opened if they’re always protected? Will critical thinking come from a generation who hasn’t learn to fill out a FAFSA form?

In a way, I see the fringe elements of parenting kind of like smoking. You should absolutely have the right to do it (as long as it doesn’t infringe on others’ rights). But there is a huge warning label attached: The longer you do this, it might have undesirable consequences. Proceed with caution.

I will end this year with a story. Maybe it will help you think about where you’d like to be at this time next year. It has certainly given me pause.

Yesterday, one of my family members went to a funeral of a 41-year-old married father of two.

The deceased’s story goes like this: His plans were to give his two weeks’ notice after the first of the year, finally moving on from a job he no longer loved. He and his wife were taking their two kids to another state where they would both start new jobs, in a new home, with a new chapter in the family’s life.

His wife was to put in her notice on Tuesday, but during the middle of the night on Monday, death came.

It was my intention to write a few more posts before the year ended. I wanted to write about an update of progress of my goals for this year, two more posts on Joplin that I never finished, and an end-of-the-year post with my expectations for the new year (aside from the planet’s imminent destruction of course).

Instead, I’ll have to continue on next year.

I hope you have an excellent New Year. Be safe and enjoy your loved ones. Don’t hesitate to do that thing (or things) you’ve always wanted to do.

You never know when your time will run out.

It’s so slow around the office, and with so many people out of the city leading up to the Christmas weekend, I knew that busting across town was going to be easy. So, I took a quick break and headed home for my spectacles.

My wife runs a preschool in our home and this month she’s been teaching the kiddos about the different traditions as part of her curriculum. There’s been talk about menorahs, mangers, white-bearded gift-bringers; you get the gist. Today, they were discussing Kwanzaa.

That’s where I come in. I come in the house, interrupting the story time, apologize and go looking for my glasses. Have you ever interrupted storytime? It’s like stabbing a beehive.

Anyway, I search and find my glasses. As I’m making my way out the door, I turn and tell the kids “It was great to see you all again.  You all have a Merry Christmas.”

And then I add, “Or whatever it is you celebrate.”

My wife clued me in. “Everybody here celebrates Christmas,” she said.

And in less than one second, my oldest, information sponge brained, five-year-old daughter said, “Because we’re not black.”

Oh, dear heavens. Kids say the darndest things, don’t they?

Regardless of your race and all that jazz, Merry Christmas!*

* Or whatever it is you celebrate.

My contribution to a bathroom chalk board at lunch today.

How much time is needed to heal old wounds?

Me at 2301 Pennsylvania Nov. 25, 2011.

Related: http://www.ericjgruber.com/blog/2011/05/hell/

Not really.

One woman said she was taking an online course. She wanted to get out of teaching and into something in the medical field, perhaps even hospice.

The other woman agreed. “My sister works in hospice. She just loves it.”

That struck me as odd, but curiosity piqued, I eavesdropped some more.

The woman said her sister enjoyed seeing how people behave at the end of their lives. A lot of times, estranged relationships are mended. People put away their past regrets and the unforgivable sins and made things right for the moment, because there wouldn’t be many more moments to do so.

Not that reconciliations happen all the time, but often, she said.

If only we lived with those future thoughts all the time. I wonder how we’d live then?

Ed (in green) talks about the tornado.

Today is Ed Hanna‘s birthday. He’s 54 years old.

It’s kind of a big deal.

My wife, Amy, and I met Ed on May 29, 2011. We were going from place to place after the Joplin tornado looking for places to help out, and found a few people at Ed’s place cleaning up.

Ed lived just a few block down from my friend, Jeff Page, whose house was decimated in the tornado. We ended up on Pennsylvania Street because I wanted to go back to the scene of Jeff’s house. I was having a hard time letting go of a place I had so many great memories at when I lived in the area, and wanted to see if there was someone who could use our services.

There were two houses with a good amount of activity on the street that day, Ed’s, and another one a couple of doors down on the other side.

“Which one should we go to,” I asked?

My wife looked at Ed’s house, then across the street. Ed’s house was covered in this grey matter and looked like insulation had been ripped apart, hydrated, then blown across the surface of the house. The other house wasn’t exactly standing, but there were people working in hardhats, colorful vests, and seemed to be highly organized.

“I don’t know,” she said. “Maybe we should go to that one,” picking the well-orchrestated team across the way.

I didn’t blame her. We had been working all day. We were beat. We could have used a light duty.

“I guess we know where we need to go then,” I said.

And we made our way to Ed’s house instead. To paraphrase Seth Godin, whatever you’re afraid of doing, do that.

It was the correct choice.

The view from Ed's porch directly east. The house across the street was demolished by the Joplin tornado.

It was dark inside the house. Black plastic trash bags covered some of the windows, clear tarps on others. We made our way up a spiraling staircase and found three people upstairs working in a room covered with insulation. There was a gaping hole in the roof, covered by a vinyl banner, like the one you’d see hanging announcing a sale or the latest special at a deli. Water sat suspended in the tarp hanging through the roof, floating over the workers, threatening to undue the recovery that had been made so far.

And then I met Ed. He was working with a white air-filtering mask on, digging through a box of his things. His work was focused. The people working in that room were doing all they could to salvage, then move, items to the street where it could be taken to a safer location later.

We got to work carrying things downstairs over and over again to the shelter of outside. I remembered carrying down a box of records and seeing Springsteen and Paul McCartney. The covers didn’t fair the storm well, but one wouldn’t know for sure how they played until they were under a needle.

Eventually, we took a break and Ed told me his story. He has two dogs; both were sucked out of his kitchens windows during the tornado. He took shelter, but was sure he had lost his beloved canines.

The dogs survived.

His year-1907 home, with its hardened wood and stone structure, held up, saving his life. Looks like the story of the three little pigs and the house made of stone holds a bit of wisdom, too.

Apparently, Ed’s a mean pastry chef. I later learned we share a connection: he trained under a chef at the Old Miner’s Inn in Alba, Mo, for seven years. I too spent a lot of time near the Old Miner’s Inn while I was in college: my band practiced in the front of an old woodshop right next door three times a week for several years.

In July, Mennonites came and re-roofed his house and the arduous duty of rebuilding his home continues.

At least it’s without the threat of a water-filled tarp.

Ed and I stop for a quick picture after a hard day of cleaning. Ed (in green) is determined to rebuild his home damaged in the storm.

I exaggerate nil, by the end of the night these baskets were each full to the brim.

She was always welcome in our home. A friend of my sister Heather, and three years younger, the two were always tooling around. They were in the same class and Crystal lived right across the alley from us. Both her parents and mine still live in the same space all these years later.

That’s the way it is down there. People raise their families, work their jobs, live their lives, and grow together in small communities.

My remembrance of Crystal is that she was a fairly quiet person. But man, do I remember she and my sister hanging out quite a bit through the years.

As they do, times changed. Crystal got married and separated, and was raising her three children in Joplin, Mo., when the May 22, 2011 Joplin tornado hit.

On that evening, she was at home with her 3 children, Shante (10), Trentan (6) and Keana (4). She had no basement to take shelter in, so they huddled together. The tornado ripped Shante and Trentan from her arms.

Shante died during the tornado and Trentan sustained a traumatic brain injury and died the next day. Crystal was severly injured and has had several surgeries to remove debris from her wounded body.

In addition to losing her two children, she and Keana lost everything including the clothes off of their backs.

- Baxter Springs Helping Crystal Whitely – Joplin Tornado facebook fan page

The winds, tore.

The days and weeks that followed were filled with surgeries. Fractured ribs. Collapsed lung. Six days in the hospital. More surgeries, one that took out a piece of wood the size of your pinky. Then more surgeries.

And then, the darkness.

By July, things appeared to be hitting Crystal hard, as noted by her facebook posts:

Whomever came up with the phrase “time heals everything” never lost a child!

I miss the way your face lights up when u see me, the sparkle in your eyes when I smile at you, the warmth of your touch. I miss my babies

I would luv to have a day that i dont have a dr.’s appt or anything that has to do w the tornado … my depression gtn worse n my stress goin up…bout to my breaking point :{

Benefits from friends starting coming together, and her story was told in the local newspaper, The Joplin Globe: Mother of storm victims getting by ‘day by day’

Time wore on. Aug. 22 would have been the first day of school. Shante would have started fifth grade; Trentan in first. That was also the three-month anniversary of the tornado.

When you lose the ones you love, numbers are seared into your soul.

And, in an event like this, it brings a clarity most of us don’t have the ability to understand:

Be happy with what you have and be thankful not to take people for granted. Do you want people to disappear in your life and the last thing they remember is you being childish?

Crystal gets it. Do you?

Do I?

This is a terrible story. There are many, many more from Joplin like it.

So why did I title this post, “Hope?”

Her friends have given a tremendous outpouring of love and affection to Crystal and her daughter. They set up fund-raisers, organized fun things to do to help her cope (she loves football and came to K.C. to see a game recently) and let her know, consistently and faithfully, she is loved.

And on Oct. 19, Crystal found out she was the recipient of a new house from the ABC show Extreme Makeover Home Edition. After returning home from a trip to Disney World, she saw her new home yesterday.

Hope is powerful. Use it.

“The best way out is always through.” – Robert Frost