Ice bucket challenge and home schooling

My wife, kids and I all did Ice bucket challenge for ALS. For us, it has a special meaning.

My mother-in-law died by ALS last November. And we were at her final moment. 

ALS is called Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis, or well-known as "Lou Gehrig's Disease". What happens is basically that nerves started sending less impulse, or eventually stop sending it, so muscles on all your body will decrease. You will feel weaker for no reasons. You will eventually have hard time picking up things, walking, getting up from the bed, swallowing etc...even hard time breathing that leads you to necessitate mechanical ventilation.

If you would like to know how an ALS patient feels like, there is a very interesting blog;

http://www.bostern.com/blog/2014/08/15/what-an-als-family-really-thinks-about-the-ice-bucket-challenge/

Obviously, teaching about ALS to our 5-year-old and 2 1/2-year-old is a rocket science. But my son does have vague concept of what death looks like now. After he saw my mother-in-law's final breath, he told us, "Memere died because she lost her voice." (Memere is a French word of "granny"; in some parts of Maine, there are French-Canadian population that still retain French as their primary language. In the case of our family, their grandmother is not of French origin at all, but she picked up the word "memere" as her own nickname.)

So, when my wife suggested that we all should do ice bucket challenge nearly 10 days ago, my son asked, "Why?" But soon he understood that we were doing to honor memere in our memory who struggled with ALS, not simply to have fun with this challenge.

My wife started first. Then my son, and my daughter. I was going to avoid the challenge...but how could I? So I got a bucket of ice water. It was just cold! I wish the day was hot...it was not as hot as we expected for mid August. 

As a medical worker(I am an RN), I want to include basic medicine as a part of homeschooling education; this is one of things which is actually fundamental in our daily life but has hardly been provided at school until high school or college, or not at all.

At the point of 8/20/2014, the donation to ALS association have reached 22.9 million dollars. But this number seems to be reflecting only on the one for American ALS association. So more donations might have been given to ALS associations in other countries, I assume. 

 http://philadelphia.cbslocal.com/2014/08/19/ice-bucket-challenge-donations-reach-22-9-million-to-als-association/

  

So goes our summer...