Monday, May 31, 2010

playing in the rain

Patrick and I went out in a heavy downpour and had fun pretending to do all sorts of things. P picked up one of these leaves which I had pruned from outside Ollie's window and declared it an 'umbrella'. so we ran around with these on our heads for about half an hour before we both got so silly and muddy we had to come inside...

Saturday, May 29, 2010

Tears for this lonely story

There was once a woman who first felt the flicker of your life...

Who held that child, bursting with life and possibility, swelling with vitality, a flame
 inside her

Who named you. Who either thrilled to your presence or cried and died with the heaviness of responsibility and her own life altered, cut off or ripped from her

Who wondered what had become of you- who felt the empty carapace of her body once you had been stolen, or lost

Or who struggled to nurture the child to health and knowledge, thrilled to your triumphs and cried to herself with your failures

We, mothers, know this heaviness. For all mothers know this mass. For as surely as you now walk alone, once you were as inseparable from us as part of our own being- and neither could live with the other torn from them.

Because this burden we each know, we are responsible for all the children of every mother. Because if we do not repect the life that has been borne by another mother, then we forget our own that we have ourselves borne.

Tuesday, May 04, 2010

BRAAAAAINS... BRAAAAAAAAAAAINS

Zombies.

I am obsessed with them.

Mostly because of this but also because one day on the pain round, the nurse who was with me that day suggested we play "zombie apocolypse plan" where you each have to come up with a survival plan and critique the other's to keep the boredom of the pain round away (she was way ahead of me. Waaaaay ahead.).

And then on Monday while I was at the public library borrowing all the kids stories on CDs they had (Patrick has discovered we can make up stories and requests them continually) I spotted this book and couldn't put it down.

But. The annoying scientist in me keeps insisting that zombies can't exist because of the need to keep our ATP-dependant Na+/K+ pumps going. And even if a zombie virus somehow made that process anaerobic, what about muscle excitation/contraction coupling?

Sigh.