$15

That’s the cost to recover one child in Malawi from starvation.  For the cost of lunch out for two, you can give a child a chance at life, and a full stomach for the first time since birth.

Please, take a look at Project Peanut Butter.  

Give up a couple of lunches.

Save a child.

To the Medical Imaging Technicians of the world:

If you are requiring me to come to a diagnostic procedure with a full bladder, it’s only polite to do everything within your power to ensure that you are not running behind.

Twenty minutes may not seem long to you, but I assure you that after drinking two liters of water within an hour, it’s an eternity on this end.

Thank you for your consideration.

Here’s a pic from mine:

Courtesy of rthrelkeld.

Why is it we feel compelled to cram so much into our “free” time that we end up needing a vacation after our vacations?

I am sunburned, sore, with a sprained knee and in need of about three days of continuous sleep.

Oh, yeah.

Good stuff.

I cut Harry’s hair recently because he was scheduled for the ubiquitous “school pictures” (really?  At THREE?), and “unruly” was almost too mild a term for the mass of tangles on his head. He has a crown in the back in the shape of a hurricane (ironic, for a Katrina baby), and as his hair grows it tends to take on the look of recalcitrant bedhead.  Cute, in a warm, sleepy, kind of way, but not really portrait-worthy.

I cut his hair because I am fundamentally cheap, but my ex-sister-in-law the stylist showed me how to do it.  It’s ridiculously easy and I am good at it.  Even so, I still put it off until my hand is forced by the school photographer.  My reticence revolves around my absolute conviction that I can watch Harry’s childhood falling into need reddish curls on the floor every time I take scissors to his head.   Every time I cut his hair, a layer of the toddler falls away, and a older boy emerges.  I am afraid that eventually that the young man he is destined to become will pop out fully formed and walk out the door leaving me holding the scissors and waving goodbye.

Haircuts are an emotional minefield.

If I just hold off a little longer, will the baby stay with the hair?  It has all gone by so fast – too fast – and I am not ready to give up my place as my son’s bestest playmate.  His prettiest girl.  

I have just enough time left to hold him while he sleeps and whisper in his ear “I will always be your Mommy and I will always love you.  More than anything.  Longer than time.”

Before time itself steals him away.

Okay, the men and younger women out there will have to take my word on this.

Perimenopause sucks.

If the fatigue or the mood swings (Oh my, the mood swings!) or the more un-discussable physical aspects don’t get you, the sheer emotional conflict will.

On one hand:

“Oh.  No.  I will never have any children again.  I am officially ‘Not Young Anymore.’  I am OLD.”

and

“Can we just get this freaking hell OVER?  Because Holy Batman, Uterus, you BITCH, make up your MIND already!!”

I am back.

In four days I assisted in the autopsy of 16 horses.

So tell me about your bad week.

Because me?  I’m tapped out.

Have you ever been in a situation where you were traveling and could not help but overhear a loud “conversation” <ahem, cough, cough, argument, cough, cough>, occurring in a seat behind you in which both parties were so simplisticly misinformed, that suddenly the term “sit on your hands” had altogether a whole new clarity of meaning?

I had to not just sit on my hands, but alternately sit on them and push them in fists against my mouth to keep myself from shooting it off.   The content of the conversation wasn’t important, but more that feeling that it engendered that seems so universal – the almost irresistible compulsion to insert myself where I oh-so-very-much DO NOT BELONG.

I managed to resist through a great effort of will.  This is a new skill that I am rather becoming proud of.

Do you want to know an unexpected, and somewhat amazing discovery?  A knitting woman is invisible.  She is more invisible even than if you are sitting silently immobile, or even thought asleep.  It is an information-gathering tactic that Eleanor Roosevelt used to great effect while growing up in – and later marrying into – the halls of male power, and she was right.   People have remarkably frank conversations over and around you as if you couldn’t possibly be paying attention.  You simply vanish, the minute you pick up your needles and start and Eleanor heard conversations that she never would have had access to had she simply been quietly idle in the corner.

We CAN listen.  And we inevitably ARE listening.

So beware, folks.  Those women meekly clicking their needles away in your midst hear everything.  And are silently smiling to themselves.

Stuff like this is why I knit compulsively:

and

Too much great yarn.   Too many fabulous projects.

 

Overheard at Chateau Awareness on Mardis Gras:

“Harry, you had better behave, or no King Cake for you!‘

“But Mommy! I AM HAVING!”