Fluoride In My Drinking Water: Why I Don't Want It There

Originally published April 4, 2012

Dear Mayor and Council:

I'm writing to you today to ask you to reconsider fluoridating our city's water. I hadn't given it a great deal of thought as problematic until recently, when I was diagnosed with Hashimoto's thyroiditis, an auto-immune condition in which my body is slowly breaking down my thyroid gland. Researching the condition, I've been able to make a number of lifestyle changes that have alleviated a number of symptoms, but the deeper I dig into possible triggers and into foods and substances I'm now better off avoiding, the more concerned I am that there are still a few things I cannot really avoid without going to a great deal of personal expense, spending money that my family and I simply do not have. Fluoride is one of those substances, and it's in our water supply - and nearly impossible to filter out, definitely not with an average home filter. :-( When I researched and discovered that Rockville is one community that still adds fluoride to our water supply, even though there is an increasing number of other communities across the country and around the world who are in fact removing it from their municipal water supplies, I became concerned enough to write about it.

So what's wrong with fluoride in the first place? Why should it NOT be in our water?

Music Lessons - Is My Child Ready?

As a music teacher, that's a question I get a lot from parents of kids of all ages. Since a good chunk of my teaching is in the Early Childhood area, parents of younger and younger kids are asking these kinds of questions, so I thought perhaps since Information Is Power, I'd try to give parents a little more information.

So, some background: I grew up in a home where there was ALWAYS music. My mom is a music teacher: when she found out she was pregnant with me, she was teaching junior high band; she taught lessons one afternoon a week out of a spare room in our house when I was small, and when we moved to a new home when I was in middle school, she eventually expanded to 4 days a week. Over the years she would play in the local high school's pit orchestra when they did their Spring musicals and play the soundtracks for those musicals perpetually during the rehearsal window, so I grew up learning songs from a variety of musical theater classics. (Note to other parents: If you're going to play a soundtrack as background in your house and you have a small child who likes to sing along, find out the lyrics BEFORE your small child asks you about some of them in order to avoid uncomfortable questions you'd rather not answer. LOL) I learned a little piano in Kindergarten and then in first grade I tried a few of the instruments we had around the house, settled on the clarinet, and never looked back. By high school, I had a couple students of my own, and when I went to college, my plan was to become a high school band director. After 6 years in an elementary general music classroom and more time in elementary band, I finally got my chance to do high school band - it only lasted two years, and I learned that politics is definitely not my thing, but at least I can cross it off my Bucket List. :-) The place I always had felt least comfortable was in the elementary general music classroom; the younger the kids were, the more ill-at-ease I felt. Small kids were definitely NOT why I went into Music Education.