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Today's post is brought to you by Whymommy of Toddler Planet . Recently diagnosed with Inflammatory Breast Cancer and with one round of chemo on the books, Whymommy has already put into action an ambitious awareness campaign . As part of that effort, I am featuring her words here today. If you have a blog or an email account and haven't done so already, please consider putting the good ol' copy and paste function to work in order to help spread the message. From Whymommy: We hear a lot about breast cancer these days. One in eight women will be diagnosed with breast cancer in their lifetimes, and there are millions living with it in the U.S. today alone. But did you know that there is more than one type of breast cancer? I didn’t. I thought that breast cancer was all the same. I figured that if I did my monthly breast self-exams , and found no lump, I’d be fine. Oops. It turns out that you don’t have to have a lump to have breast cancer. Six weeks ago, I went to my OB/GYN b...

I was pulling out of the supermarket today when I paused in the parking lot to let two people traverse the cross walk. An elderly woman and the man I imagined to be her mentally disabled son plodded toward the store front, their pace naturally matched. He was large, she was small; they were both bent-shouldered over a shopping cart. One of the man's beefy hands joined his mother's on the cart while the other rested on her back. As I waited, I saw a lifetime of care make its slow way across the asphalt. Though it's hard to tell from a simple scene played out in front of Stop & Shop, I couldn't help but think that the woman's steps were buoyed by a constant source of comfort not available to parents whose children grow up and move out. Maybe she had spent all her years as a grown woman caring for this son with special needs. Maybe, with ninety years rendering her own needs more specialized, the tables were not so much turning as being pushed closer together. But t...

Roxie the family pet is making the rounds. Just today she was featured on a Web site catering to the automotive needs of women . If you're wondering what my dog has to do with female drivers, I'll tell you that the connection will become clearer once you stop over to say hi. And after you do that, you should cruise around the rest of the site for a look at the automotive world from a woman's perspective. The site has been featured in papers like the New York Times , the Boston Globe , and was recently a presence at BlogHer '06. As someone who has been reduced to a snot-faced, blathering mess at more than one car repair facility by technicians who were out to take me for a ride, I am all about a Web site devoted to helping women assume the driver's position when it comes to navigating the slaloms of car buying and car maintenance. If only Patty could also teach me how to merge correctly and not to hit curbs. Anyway, check it out. And tell them Roxie sent ya.