My baby girl just turned 29 and to celebrate her birthday she went diving off the coast of Catalina Island. She and her husband Mike earned their certification about a month ago after taking dive classes all summer. Many years ago I tried to get mine but found out I couldn’t clear my sinuses below 15 feet (big disappointment), so I stick to snorkeling now. I worry about her because so much could go wrong and it is impossible to turn the Mommy gene off, but I do understand why she does it. I’m even a little envious. Last year she swam with the dolphins and this year she was one, what will she come up with next year. It was her little girl dream to be a mermaid, I think it came true. She took an underwater camera with her and this is what she saw.
This is my baby girl……. recognize her. I wrote “Little Girl of Two” about her…….who knew? Wave hello to the nice folks ‘80.
She was always fond of blowing bubbles. That tether rope doesn’t look too good. I’m going to have to talk to the Captain about that.
Add a little lemon and garlic and you have a good lunch
OH NO! Bad fishy! If I’ve told you once I’ve told you a thousand times don’t. play. with. the. Moray. eel. Scary!
A wonderful birthday but now it is time to head to the surface before mom has a stroke
Wave goodbye to the nice folks ‘80. You too Mike.
She wants to learn to skydive next. I may not survive…..
Colm was a generous man. He had been brought up to believe that the more he gave, the more he would be rewarded later in life or in the life after. As a child he had shared his toys with his friends at school, unselfishly. He had lent his things to people he hardly knew and often they didn’t come back. He didn’t mind. It was good to be generous and he was always popular with the children around him who loved to come and play with his things.
When Colm had money given to him by his parents, he made a point of sharing it with his friends too. It seemed right to share his good fortune. The money wasn’t his, it had been given to him so he could help make the world a happier place. Soon the young boy was surrounded by fair weather friends who loved to be in his company for as long as he had wealth to share.
In fact, they became accustomed to going to Colm’s house where they shared his money, his games, his books and anything else they could lay their hands on. He felt obliged to find new ways of supporting this generosity and went out to work early in the morning, every morning, delivering newspapers in order to continue to have the money that people loved to share.
His parents wondered about the number of friends their son had and worreid about the size of the presents he asked them for when his birthday arrived, and after that, Christmas. But they agreed to give him what he asked for because they wanted their son to be happy.
For a while he was happy. He was the centre of attention and always seemed to have lots of people around him telling him a wonderful person he was. His friends clapped him on the back and agreed that he was a good fellow whilst keeping one hand free to take the gifts that he insisted on pressing on them.
In his teenage years, Colm continued to fund friendship with generosity. He took up smoking in order to be able to share cigarettes. He took up drinking in order to be the first to the bar. He took up driving at seventeen in order to be able to give people lifts. He shared his first girlfriend with his best friend, whoever that was. At eighteen, he shared his identity so that his friends could buy alcohol at the local supermarket. At College he made his essay answers available for those in his group who had forgotten to meet deadlines. He lent all his money to people who were good at crying.
When Colm got his first job he quickly became the man people went to in order to get new supplies of stationery, to borrow a mug from, to sign in for if they were late back from lunch. He was the first person the Boss went to if he wanted someone to work late, to come in at weekends, to meet the impossible deadline. He had an inexhaustible supply of jokes and sent more office emails than any one else.
When Colm met his wife he promised her the biggest and best honeymoon and a couple of friends came along too. Later, when they had kids, he came home every evening from work with a present for them. Soon they expected this to happen and pursed their lips if he came home empty-handed. His wife loved wearing his presents and loved finding catalogues to enable him to indulge his generosity still further. His parties were the talk of the town and people said that you could make a whole new circle of friends at each one. Colm sometimes wondered who these strangers were in his house, but they smiled at him and clapped him on the back, looking for all the world as if they loved him.
The newspapers covered his spectacular parties and the gossip columns buzzed with what happened amongst the people who attended. Strangely, Colm did not appear in the pictures and his name was rarely mentioned. In the rare photograph that included him, he looked like a waiter, handing someone a drink, always smiling, never being smiled upon.
After paying for the graduation celebration, the wedding and the motor transportation of his children Colm was asked for a divorce by his wife. He agreed and there was a generous settlement.
Soon after, he suffered a serious heart attack and was taken to hospital. There was no-one to go with him. He was asked by the Doctor on duty who he was. He didn’t know how to answer this question because an identity in life is a contract between people with something to share. He had given himself away. Selflessly. To exist in other’s minds he had to first exist in his own.
It’s no secret that work is bad for your health. Apart from the industrial accidents which maim and kill thousands of people in the UK every year (it’s still far more dangerous to be a brickie than a squadie, it’s just that it doesn’t make the news when one of our brave construction workers die) for which no boss is ever prosecuted, most workers will have to put up with high levels of stress and anxiety which are known to cause heart disease, cancer, depression and neurosis. And still your P60 doesnt carry a government health warning! But recently published research shows that families where both parents work are unwittingly abusing their children.
Research on more than 12,000 British schoolchildren, published in the Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health, shows that children whose mothers and fathers work are less healthy than those with at least one stay-at-home parent. Children in families where one parent worked full-time and one worked part-time were still less healthy than those who had at least one full-time parent.
The researchers, from the Institute of Child Health in London, said: “Children whose mothers worked part-time or full-time were more likely to primarily drink sweetened beverages between meals (compared to other beverages), use the television/computer at least two hours daily or be driven to school (rather than walk or cycle) than children whose mothers had never been employed. [sic] Children whose mothers worked full-time were less likely to primarily eat fruit and vegetables between meals (compared to other snacks) or eat three or more portions of fruit daily (compared to two or fewer).”
The researchers called for more support for working families and concluded: “Currently, approximately 60% of women with a child aged five or younger in the UK or USA are employed. For many families the only parent or both parents are working. [sic]This may limit parents’ capacity to provide their children with healthy foods and opportunities for physical activity. Policies and programmes are needed to help support parents and create a health-promoting environment.”
But calling for more ’support for working families’ actually runs contrary to the findings of the report. What we really need is a system where both parents don’t feel that they need to work in order to support a family. What we really need is a social wage which offers more freedom to spend time together as a family. We need equal wages for men and women so that either parent can opt to spend more time with their children. And we need to recognise the fact that child-rearing is the most important job that anyone can do!
In the meantime we choose to put our kids and our health before our bosses every day of the week
The portrait sessions for my project to support the Ronald McDonald House Charities of San Diego are just about finished for the year. The next phase will be putting together the book. I am in the process of selecting the images from each session now. Here is a session I did recently with an adorable four year old and her big brother on the beach in Coronado. The late summer afternoon light was just perfect!
With big brother.
Digging in the sand.
Taking a walk.
Playing in front of the Hotel Del Coronado.
Sweet sandy fingers.
And sweet sandy toes.
Her smile says it all.
The sunset was beautiful!
The sun setting behind Pt. Loma.
A glorious end to a beautiful day!
The beach is my favorite place to photograph kids. They can just be themselves and have a good time while I just observe and capture them while they are relaxed, happy, and engaged in something fun.
Our sleeping is all out of wack because of Day Light Savings. We all woke up so late today for the first day of the holidays and Day One of the Spending Detox!
As I mentioned, my girls were not too enthusicastic about my “brilliant” idea! We later had a talk about whether they have ever done something that seemed hard or challenging, but then succeed, and how they felt when they achieved it. I tried to explain that, this week was going to be similar to that. It is something that may seem difficult, but we will feel so good when we achieve our goal. (not too sure what the drama is about, it’s not like I am a spending queen…hehehe)
The kids have been playing so nicely today. The 3 older children have been playing barbies (well, my girls were playing barbies and my boy was using his mobilo and playing with the girls and their barbies) My two year old just pottered around playing with the others, and following me around. She also enjoyed some water play in the sink towards the end of the day.
I started to make a list of things that we could do during the holidays that was free. I even found some free local events that we could attend if we wanted.
We had an early lunch and missed morning tea since we had a late breakfast. As I was cleaning up, I made a note to myself that if we were going to do various activities at home, it would be really important to make sure that we have as much space available. In other words, we all needed to pitch in to keep the benches clean (so that we could bake or do messy play in the kitchen if we wanted to) and keep the family room managable (I’m sure the clean space that was available to the kids this morning fostered their lengthy play there.) So keeping on top of the house is going to be an important challenge this week.
Oh! Another important challenge: to get plenty of sleep. I know when I am tired, I don’t have as much patience and the fun ideas don’t seem to flow.Wasn’t so tired today, so I’m sure that helped me have a good day.
After I cleared the bench etc, I made a batch of playdough. I thought it could come in handy if the kids got bored and came to look for something to do.
The two younger ones played with this, while the older girls continued to play dolls. Later on the older girls came and made all sorts of fun things. DD8 made an apple that opened up to reveal a smiling worm inside…cute!
After hubby came home, I went out with DD6 (darling daughter 6 year old) to go get her free DVD. (I asked my DD6 to write down the order of when people go out and choose their DVD for the day – the perk for her was that she put herself first!)
We didn’t end up watching any TV today. My DS4 asked to watch TV whenever he was bored, I managed to distract him by getting him involved in what I was doing or making some origami or printing him out some cut and paste worksheets that he started getting interested in yesterday.
How do you fill your time during the school holidays? Is it something that you love or dread?
September 11, 2009. Rennie and the boys arrive in Sandpoint (and I get a new new camera to replace the one that so valiantly gave it’s life in the line of duty as it fell out of my mouth at Burning Man.)
Here there is much contemplation happening as the pond is surveyed. Later Max will explain the myriad ways in which mad actively contributes to the delinquency of small children as it actually makes them go into the pond, especially when they are not supposed to get wet…
Last night I slipped into a little black dress and a pair of heels and made my way to Haifa for Israel’s version of the Oscars: The Ophir Awards.
Attending Israel’s upscale events is always an interesting venture. Because, compared to the U.S., they’re pretty scaled down and lacking pretense. Dress codes don’t rule and most anyone can get away with whatever their personal interpretation of gearing up or down might be. That includes nominees, as demonstrated here by Best Actor winner Sasha Avshalom Agronov for his role in The Loners. Dig the hat.
Also glaringly absent at these affairs are hulking bodyguards (unless government ministers are present). Sure, there’s security at the entrance but once inside, the press mingles with celebs and it’s a sort of everyone hangs out with everyone free-for-all at the bar and buffet kinda thing.
Which is why I was able to walk straight up to Ajami Producer Mosh Danon, congratulate him on taking best film and wish him luck at the Hollywood Oscars. I grabbed this shot of the film’s Israeli director Yaron Shani as he was being interviewed for radio. His Arab co-director Scandar Copti was, unfortunately, in Europe.
I also shook Lebanon film director Samuel Maoz’s hand and congratulated him on his Venice win. I felt truly sorry that his film didn’t clinch the top seed. Because imho, the movie based on his personal experience as a soldier during the 1982 Israel incursion into Lebanon, would have been a serious Academy Awards contender for best foreign film. I’m not sure about Ajami, a story about the crime ridden mixed Arab-Israeli neighborhood of the same name in southern Tel Aviv. Yes, it’s a microcosm of the Israel-Arab flashpoint conflict at large but it somehow feels too local.
But then, I’ve seen neither and am basing that rather broad opinion on trailers, discussions with colleagues and the reception for Lebanon thus far in the world arena.
Here’s a clip. A reportedly super intense film, it takes place entirely inside an Israeli tank in Lebanon. Last night the movie nabbed top honors for Best Supporting Actor, Best Soundtrack, Best Cinematography and Best Design.
A few notes about the ceremony: The high point was seeing Lifetime Achievement Award recipient Assi Dayan take to the stage. A legendary Israeli actor and director, he has been plagued by negative press throughout his career for drug abuse, mental instability and domestic violence. But he is talented. And his peers gave him a standing ovation.
Heart wrenching, on the other hand, was witnessing producer Uri Segev’s widow and two young children take to the stage to receive an honorary award in his name. 46-year-old Segev died last year of heart complications during the wrap of Lebanon. The audience, on their feet again, applauded warmly as his wife and children stood at the podium. And there was neery a dry eye in the house as his wife thanked the film academy with broken voice and his 8-year-old daugher sobbed quietly beside her.
A final note to self: MUST SEE A Matter of Size - a film about a diet club support group that decides to start up their own Sumo Wrestling team. It looks poignant, funny and visually beautiful. And Best Actress recipient Irit Kaplan made a distinct impression upon the uber looks-conscious crowd by advising in her acceptance speech that we all go beyond exteriors and start digging deeper to the core where it really counts.
“I think this is probably Neverland. Children are growing level- not up. Adults bring themselves back to young. Toys and costumes and Free Love and doing whatever we want to be us. Just be you. I’ll be me, and we’ll love eachother because of it; not despite it. And I can’t wipe the smile off my face because I’m walking around in simple happiness of just living outside of time and outside of worry. Nothing else matters…in the most adorable, happy way.”
“This Counsil Tree is cool and calm and the branches are so gnarly that sitting in it feels like we are in a cloud of air under the ground with the roots.”
“This is definitely Neverland. I met some people- mother and daughter from Dallas, and we were able to speak about the magic that exists here. Virgins feel it right away. All of a sudden we can do things we would never do elsewhere. We must have babbled like silly gossip girls but then Tony, who has been here 1976 took me to a group of people playing songs. Papa Ducktape, Will Shakespeare, Summer, and Tammy (on the flute) were all there. They sang a song by Ryan T. Bridge. I took some photos but I get the feeling that the click of the camera, even without a flash is like a too bright snap in people’s consciousness and I wouldn’t want to startle anyone out of their reality.”
“I am grateful that people respond to my happy glow and smile plastered across my face. I guess sincerity glows after all. Raina said that I am the bubbles in champagne. That’s the nicest thing anyone has ever said to me about me.”
“Matt was an alcoholic and he’s ok now keeping busy so he can stay out of his thoughts. He builds beautiful structures, and he hopes they will inspire a young boy to figure out where it comes from and how it works together. He keeps helping and doing good, but there is a melancholy layer underneath all of it, and that’s where doing good to distract and keep busy becomes just a bit tainted.”
“Tyler has a reputation of sleeping around. But he explained to me that he just loves giving pleasure so much that he is a sex addict. I am still trying to figure this out. I think in a way needing to give pleasure is a need to be wanted and needed, almost to the most extreme, possibly twisted extent. On the other hand I have observed the way he picks up responsibilities all over the place, and interacts with Julie and the kids, and it’s almost like his intentions- his remarkably eager to please, pure hearted intentions- make the vulgar, over the top parts of his personality quite possible to pardon.”
New Yorker are ‘children of excitement’ as I will call them from now on. They like morning TV, stars, talking about stars, police with machine guns (at least they don’t mind them), fast food and flags – especially stars and stripes (what better way to describe the flag?). Despite the feeling that half of the cars were taxis and the other half emergency vehicles the city felt quite clean and save. New York is a big city with over eight million people. In some parts it seems like half of them are tourists and the rest policemen – but honestly, NY was a great experience without any troubles.
There are thousand things to see: Central park, Times square, Staten Island, Statue of Liberty, Brooklyn bridge, Rockefeller centre, Empire State building, Flatiron building, Guggenheim museum (among hundred others), Chrysler building, Battery park, Grand Central station, the whole financial district and many more..
I tried the NY hot dog, but in my opinion it tastes kind of artificial and can’t possibly compete with one from Vienna. The soft ice cream and pretzels were surprisingly good though.
But risk a look at: Times square, Manhatten as seen from the Staten Island ferry, Chrysler and Empire State building from the top of the Rockefeller centre at night time, and Brooklyn bridge – over to Brooklyn – just before sunset..
After a week I crossed the Atlantic ocean over to Ireland, Dublin where I stayed till yesterday.
Our little village is a very windy place, and in winter it’s a very cold windy place, in summer it’s hot & windy, see how we distinguish the seasons? Our back garden has fantastic near-magical clothes-drying powers due to the wind and is great for running around in but LP’s playhouse hasn’t got much use recently as it is colddddd in there, brrrr…
So today during no-nap-time, myself & Littlepixie decided to bring her much neglected playhouse in from the garden and make it into an indoor hut for her. Cue a lot of water, washing down the whole house, removing countless slumbering spiders, and eventually disassembling half of the house in order to get it through the door. It was an early birthday present from my mum & dad, and LP kept telling me “Uh, grandad made that, you shouldn’t take it apart”!
It’s too big for under the stairs, so we have made a wee spot for it in the kitchen where her play kitchen and market live. She promptly moved the play kitchen and tea trolley (an old wooden vegetable rack!) into the house and stuck her head out the window to say” Uh, how do you know a princess lives here?”.
LP has decided that princesses live in houses with flags (we have a lot of local football fans around, there are always various team flags in gardens) so thus instructed, I scurried to my recently tidied fabric box, got the good old pinking shears, some ribbon and my stapler and made cute little pennants for the sides of the house. Then we scavenged around and found a couple of rugs, some cushions, a scarf draped over the top and many, many sticky hooks to hang up all her accoutrements and we were done! We put the market at the side window so we can play market shop too
I present to you… Arabia! (LP is currently an Arabian princess, it will more than likely have a new name tomorrow, I don’t decide these things )
My mum had the fab idea of changing the decor with the seasons, can you imagine how splendid it’ll look when the winter fairies pay a visit?!
Gosh, I’m exhausted now, hopefully LP will nap tomorrow
Oh yes, and with regard to my previous post, I’m fairly sure that the dictionary definition of “declutter” is not “the act of moving a perfectly functional garden playhouse into your kitchen to fill up even more space”. I am so bad at decluttering
I hate being used. I hate opening my life, my children’s lives and my home to people who turn around and throw it all back in your face.
I hate people who take, take, take and there’s no giving unless it suits them, or people who give and then remind you of it later. ”I bought food for your children”……wow, you offered and hey, didn’t you stay free of charge in my house for a month…..?
I hate people who invite you into their home because they happen to be at a loose end that night and then appear all magnanimous about inviting you…..into ‘their’ home…..
I hate a lack of respect for your elders. No matter how close you are to a person, age should have respect and when that is lost, everything goes down the drain. You don’t use the ‘F’ word to an aunt for example, you don’t insult your uncle’s wife, do you?
I hate women who think they can discipline your child by hitting him, when they have only just met him…….that could be a judicial issue…..and may be sorted out soon.
I hate lies- not little everyday lies, but major misleading , huge deception… the kind of lies that get other people into trouble, or get workmates reported, misrepresenting a situation to get people on your side when there was no real problem to begin with…..
I’m angry today, and it’s not at Patrick- he’s a pussycat really. But today I am angrier than I have been in a long time and well, that’s all.
So we had so much fun this summer I didn’t have time to write! Not only did we have fun but we sold our house and bought another! The best part of that whole process was the day we went looking at houses and the kids found a bunch of frogs in the back yard of one house. While Mike and I were agonizing about price, size, condition, location, and on and on, the kids showed us that we were missing the little pearls around us. The kids and that bunch of frogs they found had a ball! Do you know what it sounds like when two frogs kiss, what they look like when they dance or that they like to ride in pockets?
We didn’t end up getting the “Frog House” but we hope the will come visit any way!
p.s. Thanks to my friend Gabe, I decided that writing did not have to worthy of any literary awards or sound eloquent. I just needed to do it.
Halloween: the time of year that just about everyone associates with Witches, along with ghosts, goblins, and other scary "supernatural" beings. But I’ve been a witch for more than twenty years and I can tell you there is nothing either scary or supernatural about us. And there is nothing more to fear on Halloween night than on any other night of the year.
Each year as October approaches, self styled experts flood the media with dire warnings about the supposed physical and spiritual dangers of celebrating Halloween. They trot out the same tired old rumors of poisons and razor blades in trick or treat candy. They hint that your neighbors are probably child molesters. Lately they’ve been making the astonishing claim that Witches put curses on the treats they distribute, so that the children who eat them will be "possessed by demons."
There is no truth to any of it, there never has been!
Witches are actually rather ordinary folks; not a wiggly nose among us. We have jobs and families, we vote and pay taxes, and we want most of the same things you do: Peace, prosperity, a good world to leave our children. Unlike most people, though, we spend part of each autumn faced with open religious discrimination, based on needless ignorance and fear. Witchcraft, also known as Wicca, is a modern revival of the pre-Christian religions of western Europe. We are pagans, that is, we see divinity in nature rather than in a transcendent spiritual realm or an omnipotent being. We speak of our deity as the Goddess or Mother Nature, although to most of us the godhead is dual – both Goddess and God. As such, our beliefs lie outside mainstream Judeo-Christian concepts.
This does not mean however, that Witches are in any way opposed to Christianity. Like most religions throughout history, we grant that different faiths are right for different people. We oppose only the mistaken belief of some individual Christians that since they posses the only "real" religion, constitutional freedoms of religion do not apply to the rest of us. On the rare occasions that Witches find themselves in conflict with Christians, we see it as a civil rights matter, not a religious dispute. We are not interested in arguing "my Gods better than your God."
Wicca’s ethic laws are at least as stringent as those of other faiths: Our law says "Harm none," and that means not our neighbor, not our neighbor’s dog, and certainly not out neighbor’s child. It prohibits not only physical harm but such intangibles as violation of another’s free will. And it means ourselves, as well; a Witch should cultivate both bodily and mental health. This outlook on morality, because it does not rely on obedience to specific commandments, covers much more behavior: rather than worrying about sinning, we try to foresee the results of our actions so as to take the wisest course. While we may not share Christianity’s beliefs in heaven and hell, we do believe that all actions have consequences, and that whatever good or evil we do will find it’s way back to us. Our ethos comes from within rather than being imposed from outside or above. It is based on personal honor and responsibility, and by these principals we live and hope to live again on our beloved Mother Earth.
As worshippers of nature, Witches celebrate a wheel of eight Sabbats or sacred days: Ancient festivals marking the round of the seasons. The Christian calendar, as even some Christian writers have noted, borrows heavily from Paganism. This is no doubt because until very recently people of every faith shared the same experience of the land and the passing seasons. We share Yule, for instance, which is the old name of both the winter solstice and Christmas. Easter, derived from the celebration of the Spring Equinox, is even named after the Saxon fertility Goddess Eostre. And though Protestantism abandoned them long ago, both Imbolc (Lady Day) and Lammas (August Eve) have been retained in the Catholic year, as has All Hallows Eve -Halloween.
To witches, Halloween is a religious holiday much like Thanksgiving, a time to feast in praise of nature’s bounty. It is also our New Year’s day, time to let go of the old and look forward into the future. The old name for this festival is Samhain, pronounced approximately "Sow-un." This is a Celtic (Irish, Scottish) word meaning "summer’s end." Some writers have claimed that Samhain is the name of a Celtic death god, but Celtic scholars consider this a fabrication. In fact, Samhain is to this day the name in parts of Ireland and Scotland for the month of November.
Samhain is the last of three harvest festivals. August has Lammas, the grain harvest; In September was Mabon, Autumn Equinox and the apple harvest; and on the eve of November is Samhain, the cattle harvest. The idea of a cattle harvest is strange today. But in ancient times, it was essential. Though the Celts counted their wealth in cattle, they could not keep whole herds alive through the winter. Rather than let all of them starve, they kept the best animals for breeding stock, the rest were blessed, thanked, and butchered. This was not some occult "blood sacrifice" but practical animal husbandry, done with respect – essentially "pagan kosher." Every community held it’s own Samhain feat, and the people stuffed themselves with all the autumn goodies they would not see for another year, especially that great seasonal luxury, meat. They stored up food for the winter not in a refrigerator, but as fat on their own bodies. (We of course do have refrigerators. Our feasts come mostly from the super market.)
With the dying of the cattle and the seeming dying of the year, it was appropriate also to remember the communities’ human dead. The religious side of the feast of Samhain has always included recalling by name our loved ones who have passed over during the year, with prayers for their safe passage. This is the origin of the secular Halloween’s "spooks": the spirits of all the beloved dead gathering around one last time for our farewells. For us this formal letting-go is an important aspect of the grief process. Pagans in general, and Witches especially, do not share the horror of death which pervades mainstream culture. Because we are a joyful people , we hope to avoid death as long as is practical, but we do not particularly fear it. Witches see it as a transition, an alternate reality, which in it’s own manner serves life. Because we love life, Witches are healers and gardeners and artists, cooks and craftspeople and teachers of lore. Because we value balance, Witches honor Death at Samhain.
The part of Halloween that makes it Halloween to most Americans is of course, "trick or treat." Interestingly, this custom, though ancient, is preserved much more faithfully in North America than in the old countries. Large numbers of Irish and Scots emigrated here just before the old ways began dying out in the British Isles, in the period between Queen Victoria and World War 1. By then the celebration was far different than it had once been. The house to house begging processions that we now call trick or treat were not originally part of Halloween at all. From the Middle Ages right up through he renaissance such processions were a major part of Advent and Christmas; like most Yule customs, the true origin is lost in Pagan antiquity. Along with other Yule merriment, the processions were suppressed during the Protestant Reformation. But the people would not give them up, and took them underground by simply moving them to Halloween.
One feature of modern Halloween, though, has always been a part of it: disguises. The ancient Celts believed in fairies, as many modern Celts still do. And they believed that at Samhain the walls between our world and the realm of fairy grew thin, and that the fair folk could come over. The fairies were said to ride the mortal lands then, stealing beautiful human children to raise as their own. So, mothers "uglified: their children for the night: dirtied their faces, ratted their hair, dressed them in rags – whatever might make the fairies overlook them. And the children, kids being kids even in the middle ages, thought this was a blast! Eventually, as usually happens with folk customs, the reason for it was forgotten: today any kind of costume can be worn, or none at all.
So, what should a modern parent do? Is it safe to send your children out trick-or-treating? Though not as safe as it used to be, the truth is that it’s fairly safe if you use some common sense. Those horrifying tales of razor blades and drugs in candy have happily proven to be what is called an urban myth, like the sewer alligators and the ghost hitchhiker: you know someone who says they know someone it happened to, only no one actually does. Hospitals have offered free X-rays of Halloween treats for many years now, and have never found a foreign object. Only one case of Halloween poisoning has ever actually been substantiated by the authorities, and it proved to have been done by the children’s own father after they came home. It seems they were insured better than they were loved.
Nor are your children likely to have any spells cast on them on Halloween or any other time. While there are a few "wanna-be-Satanists" around who might like to cast spells on your kids, the truth is, they can’t. Magic has natural laws, just like any other physics or chemistry. One of those laws is that innocence is armor against evil. Another is that magic takes work. The kind of people attracted to "black magic" generally either are just showing off or think they’ve found a way to get what they want without work. Once they realize the enormous amount of effort it takes to violate the free will of even a child, they’re all through.
What the Witches on your children’s route are likely to do to them is make them mad: we tend to give out healthy stuff instead of candy. One Witch I know gives toothpaste! But real dangers do exist. Every year trick-or-treaters are hit by cars on dark streets, bitten by dogs, fall down stairs – any number of mishaps. Predatory humans, though mercifully few, are real. And excited, sugar high children are not careful. So the parents must be. Make sure that your children’s costumes enable them to see and be seen; if you can’t talk them out of going in black as Dracula or a ninja (or despite all I’ve said here, as the "wicked witch.") Make sure they carry a flashlight so they’re not invisible in the dark. Arrange with your neighbors for a "safe house" on each block; make sure your children know where it is and forbid them to enter any other house on their route. This could be a great PTA project. Best of all, of course, is to go with them.
Ration the sweets once they’re brought home. A heavy sugar overdose can trigger hyperactivity, hypoglycemia or in rare cases, even diabetes. In any case it’s bad for their teeth and hard on tummies. But don’t worry about your neighborhood Witches, we’ll be busy celebrating Samhain!
Dana Corby publishes pamphlets and booklets through her publishing company Rantin’ Raven Press.
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I received an email from my daughter’s new High School counselor. She is new to the school and she wanted to introduce herself to the parents and was requesting that parents fill out a brief online survey. She said “This year a decision was made to improve how our student’s emotional needs are met.” Then I opened the survey and it was asking if the school needed to address issues of cutting, depression, eating disorders, divorce, anxiety, and other severe emotional issues. I have to say my first reaction was for the school to focus on academics and leave these issues to the parents. The entire bent of the email was the terrible time teenagers are facing and that it required us to hire someone with extensive experience with “at risk” teens to deal with our high school.
My reaction: Let’s not address these issues to the entire student body because I don’t want to give kids that do not have these issues any ideas.
It feels like at times we focus more attention on labeling our kids growing pains and creating pathology in them rather than holding up a Christ-like leadership example for them to grow into. These opinions sanctioned the way for my 16 year old (who is in her first psychology class I might add) to explain to me the real situation. Here were the main points:
“First of all, everyone in high school already knows about all of these things i.e. cutting, depression, etc. Hearing it from the school is not going to give anyone ideas. If it isn’t an issue, the kids will just ignore it like half the other stuff the school talks about.”
“There ARE an abundance of kids who are right here in our school who do struggle with these things and they don’t have parents at home who notice or are around to find out.”
“Kids are not going to go and ask to talk to the school counselor on their own. They just don’t think that way.”
“Mom, your kids may not need this but others do and I know people I go to school with right now who have received help because a teacher brought issues to the attention of the counselor.”
After talking to my daughter, I deleted the email I was going to send to the school. I guess it is easy to forget that today there are more kids with significant challenges and that may truly be “at risk” even in our local schools. Families are breaking up at every economic level. And, in most cases, kids don’t have both parents, much less grandparents, and aunts and uncles involved in their lives.
I wish we did not need to have the schools take such an active role in the emotional stability of our children. If you have kids, I hope this opens your eyes as it did mine. We need to be engaged in our children’s lives, we need to provide them with a stable environment, and they need to know they can talk to us. But, just as important, we need to be the other adult who cares about our nieces and nephews, our kid’s friends, and the children in our church community. I appreciate that my children’s school wants to help, but I think it is difficult for the school to achieve excellence in academics, provide a Christian leadership example and now take an active role in our children’s emotional stability. [Note: that I did not state “emotional development”, rather “emotional stability”. School is a natural part of our kid’s “emotional development”. The email I received from this private Christian school was a need to take a more active role in the student’s emotional stability. The issues of drug use, self injury, and parental discord (to name a couple) are not developmental issues.
As my daughter pointed out, I as one voice cannot change the needs of an entire student body of children; however, I want to challenge my community. God has given us stewardship over these kids. Maybe together we can make an impact in our community!
For the superhero in your house get the Ben 10 birthday party supplies for his next birthday party. Your son can make believe that he is helping Ben make the world a safer place to live.
There are all sorts of supplies and decorations available to make your house feel like you are in the middle of a Ben 10 adventure. Everything is included from napkins to cake topper when you purchase Ben 10 birthday party supplies.
Your own superhero will love to send out Ben 10 invitations to invite everyone to his party. These “Come Party like an Alien?” invites are packed in sets of eight for your convenience.
If you are planning on making it a small party for close friends only then the deluxe party pack could be just what you need. The pack consists of eight invitations, Ben 10 tablecloth, sixteen napkins, dinner plates, activity placemats, forks, cups, mylar balloon, curling ribbon in two colours, centerpiece, twenty-four balloons in two colours, candles for the cake, star confetti and two different colour roles of crepe paper. Although you can buy each item individually, buying the pack does work out cheaper overall. The pack does provide great preparations for the adventure to come.
A fantastic extra are the desert plates, which are 7″ in size and will look great when you are serving up the birthday cake. The plates come with various scenes from Ben 10.
Items such as glow putty, Ben 10 themes disc launcher, Ben 10 mask, a box that looks the same a blue lightning, Ben 10 stickers, crayons and notepad are all included in the party favour box which is an essential requirements for any good party! This is easy to assemble.
Another firm favourite to include as a favor is the Ben 10 activity book which comes with crayons. This allows them to think about being part of Ben’s team as they do different tasks in the book. You can purchase the books either in packs of eight or individually.
You can also get various sizes of personalized banners wishing your Ben 10 fan a Happy Birthday! With one of these your house or venue would really be ready for a party.
You can choose from various sets of tattoos showing different Ben 10 scenes. These tattoos will go down a storm at any party.
Don’t forget to order then Ben 10 cake topper. Your superhero’s birthday cake would not be complete without it. Ben’s are can be make to move by pushing a button, his arm clicks the Omnitrix he wears. Three aliens are also included in the topper.
To round everything off nicely you can also purchase than you cards. Sending these to guests and their parents to say thank you for attending the party is a nice way to end things.
Have great fun with all of these decorations and supplies and turn your house or venue into an alien lair for the afternoon! Your superhero will love all the Ben 10 birthday party supplies.
Colin crawled into my lap this evening. He had a rough day at school today. During Library, he got “in trouble” and had his name moved from the Green to the Yellow light on the traffic sign. That’s a bad thing. When you get to Red, you are in deep doo-doo. It took him nearly an hour to let me in on what he had done to result in his traffic light changing. Library days are wonderful and he didn’t come home with a book…what gives?
HIM: “I was sword fighting with my book-finder. Me and Chorea were swordfighting and got in trouble and we got our books taken from us and we had our names moved to yellow and, and…..and I DON’T WANT TO TELL YOU!!!!!”
ME: “Thank you for telling me what happened. I’m sorry you didn’t get a library book, but I’ll bet you won’t sword fight with rulers again.”
HIM: “NOOOOO!!!! I’ll NEVER EVER do it again.”
Good.
Someone asked me this morning if I was ready to get back into the swing of things. I bit my tongue and smiled rather than telling them that my swing had swung far away many weeks ago.
I’m looking for it.
Three months ago I was working full time, swimming with my kids, admiring my husband as a stay-at-home caregiver.
Two months ago, hubby was starting a job and I was ready to be home to care for everyone.
Six weeks ago I was at the beach.
One month ago, we were asking Hospice to come care for Charlie as he prepared himself to take his final journey.
Three weeks ago I was managing medicines, phone calls, dr. visits, meals, bedtime, baths for young and old.
Two weeks ago, I was beginning to sit vigil.
One week ago I was planning for a funeral and sharing my home with extended family who rallied around to get through this.
Today, I said goodbye to the last of visiting family. I made calls to Social Security and insurance companies informing them of a death. I mowed the yard. I said goodbye to my husband as he left for a week away. I wiped tears, fed bellies, made beds, washed towels and felt very very lonely.
If this is the new swing….it’ll take some getting used to.
HIM: (On my lap) “Mommy…recently, I was really tired out.”
ME: “Yeah, why?”
HIM: “Cause I ate a whole green apple for supper.”
ME: “Good! I’m tired too.”
HIM: “Why?”
ME: “Cause I’m looking for my swing and I can’t find it.”
HIM: “Well, you can borrow mine.”
View of Seattle from the top floor of the Public Health Hospital
While sitting very high in the upper reaches of Safeco Field watching the Mariners play the Cleveland Indians, my attention was diverted to the expansive view of surrounding Seattle. In particular, I kept looking at the PacMed Tower above us on Beacon Hill, now home of Amazon.com. It seems like only yesterday when I spent thousands of hours in training inside the walls of this remarkable old building, but in reality it is over 30 years ago, back in the days when it was the Public Health Hospital, home for medical care in the region for the Merchant Marines, as well as many of the indigenous people of the northwest and Alaska, in addition for the local folks who needed affordable (as in free) health care. I had opportunity to work several rotations in this building as a medical student in Seattle, and to think of this place as the headquarters for Amazon makes my brain do twists. There was so much life and death inside those walls for so many years. Now it is corporate headquarters for a web giant, selling every gadget and gizmo under the sun and some days I feel like one of their best customers because it keeps me out of the toxic environment of the local mall.
I first walked in this building as a very green 24 year old med student beginning a surgical rotation, knowing only which end of the stethoscope to put in my ears and which end rests on the patient. The first day I was shown how to put on a surgical gown, masks and sterile gloves without contaminating myself and the people around me. I never have forgotten that sequence of moves, even though my opportunity to go into an operating room (other than as a patient) is rare these days. My chief resident was an exceptionally talented but eccentric man who worked himself and all under him around the clock. After becoming very prominent in a city known for its fine surgeons, he developed a drug problem for which he sought treatment and remains an authority on helping impaired physicians, assisting other providers to acknowledge addiction before they harm a patient. He could only operate listening to the music of Elvis Presley. I can’t hear any Elvis Presley songs to this day without smelling the odors of surgery–cauterized blood vessels and pus. It is my particular burden to bear…
Those were heady days and nights of experiencing the misery of the most vulnerable of humanity in desperate need of healing, and sometimes we succeeded, but often we did not. I still have a recurring dream of running up and down the staircases of the Public Health Hospital, bringing pint after pint of blood to the OR as our team operated on a Native American patient bleeding from her dilated esophageal varices, which had developed as a result of her damaged liver from her long alcohol dependency. We did not save her, nor have I saved her even once in my dreams over the decades, though I keep trying to run faster. Instead I’ve spent the last 20 years of my clinical life working in alcohol and drug treatment, hoping to prevent her fate in others.
Nor did we save a classmate of mine, on a rotation on a different service, the daughter of a beloved radiologist in this very hospital, who for reasons unknown, had a cardiac arrest while napping briefly during her 32 hour shift. Another medical student sleeping in the same room heard her odd breathing, found her unresponsive and all medical interventions were employed, to no avail. Even when all the right people, and the right equipment, and the right medicine is seconds away, death still comes, even to healthy people in their 20s. This was a shock to us all, and an extraordinarily humbling lesson to the pompous and overconfident among us. We can die, in our sleep, whenever it is our time. Years later, I remember that in my evening prayers.
There was also the young surgical resident who was hospitalized with jaundice and subsequently died of Hepatitis B, contracted from a blood exposure during his training. No vaccination was available in those days, but was developed soon afterward. And it was in this hospital we began to see unusual cases of young gay men with severe wasting, rare skin cancers and difficult to treat pneumonias, initially called GRID (gay related immune deficiency), part of the early front wave of AIDS as it swept across the US in the late 70s and early 80s.
One night in particular sticks out for me. It was Christmas Eve 1977, and a heavy snowstorm had brought the city to a standstill. We had very little to do that night in the hospital as the elective surgeries were all postponed until after the holiday and no ambulance could easily make it up the steep drive to the ER, so were being diverted to other hospitals, so our patient load was light. I was in my tiny sleeping room, on the 14th floor of the tower, facing out north to the city of Seattle, able to enjoy the view in the photo above, only everything was blanketed under snow, so peaceful and very quiet. The freeway, ordinarily so busy day and night was practically abandoned, and the lights of the city were brighter from the snowfall. It was an enchanting vision of a city forced to slow itself and be still, anticipatory on a sacred and holy night.
I remember thinking about how young and inexperienced I was, and how very little I knew. My chief resident thought I’d make a good surgeon–my heart told me that I’d make a better family doctor. The city held so many attractions and excitement with the potential of a big salary and notoriety, but my heart longed to return to a farm and a someday family. It was a wistful bittersweet night and I slept little, staying perched on that little bed overlooking the sleeping snowy city and wondering where my life would take me. If I’d looked just a little to my left, and some 32 years ahead, I would have seen myself, sitting with a man I had recently met but didn’t know I’d someday marry, and our nearly grown and flown family in the top rung of a new baseball stadium. There I would be, gazing back up at the younger me looking out the window of a classic old hospital building, reflecting upon who I was becoming on that night long ago.
I still am amazed at how little I know, but I do know this: for however long we’re on this earth, we do have purpose and meaning. Perhaps mine was to be snowbound on that Christmas day, unable to go home from my shift because my car was stuck in the parking lot, spending the day singing Christmas carols for all the patients who had no other options but to stay put in their hospital beds that day. Perhaps mine was the future blessing of husband and children on a little farm 100 miles to the north. Or perhaps mine is to continue to share a little of life’s lessons learned while gazing in the rear view mirror–these are the reflections from a life in progress.
La “brutalidad de la seguridad marroquí” continúa tras una semana de manifestaciones en el Sahara
Anoche se volvieron a registrar detenciones, torturas y desapariciones en El Aaiún. Los heridos y detenidos en la capital saharaui, Bojador y Smara se cuentan ya por decenas
El Aaiún (Sahara Occidental).- La “brutalidad de la seguridad marroquí” continúa en las principales ciudades del Sahara después de una semana de manifestaciones, que comenzaron en el Aaiún el lunes y se extendieron después a Bojador y Smara, durante la que se han producido numerosas detenciones, saqueo de domicilios y los heridos entre los civiles saharauis se cuentan ya por decenas, especialmente entre los activistas de Derechos Humanos, que “han sido blanco de intimidaciones, torturas y detenciones por parte de las fuerzas marroquíes”, informan diversas organizaciones al Servicio de Comunicación Saharaui en Canarias (SCSC).
Ayer, viernes, “las autoridades marroquíes continuaron con la violación sistemática de los derechos fundamentales de la población saharaui a causa de las manifestaciones pacíficas reclamando la independencia del territorio y el referéndum de autodeterminación” decretado por Naciones Unidas, afirma un comunicado del Comité de Defensa del Derecho de Autodeterminación para el Pueblo Saharaui (CODAPSO).
Anoche, a las dos de la mañana, tras una manifestación en la avenida Mohamed Daddach, en El Aaiún, capital del Sahara Occidental, “la ciudadana saharaui Izana Amidan fue brutalmente torturada en público y después detenida, ignorándose todavía su destino”, denuncia la organización humanitaria saharaui, que se solidariza en su comunicado con “los prisioneros” Berkan Mohamed, Abdallah Jday y Hamza Dkhil y, especialmente, “con el joven menor de 16 años Mohamed Ali Hadad, conocido como Alouta”, que cayó en manos de la denominada “brigada de la muerte” de las fuerzas de seguridad marroquíes, encabezada por el “verdugo” al que llaman “Moustache”, “el bigotes”.
Los activistas saharauis de Derechos Humanos denuncian también que los hospitales marroquíes “se niegan a prestar atención a algunos de los heridos” y, en caso de dársela, “rechazan darles los correspondientes certificados médicos de sus heridas para evitar que los afectados puedan recurrir a la justicia”.
Esta semana “de brutalidad” en las principales ciudades del Sahara ocupado por Marruecos comenzó en la noche del lunes, cuando una manifestación pacífica en El Aaiún, fue disuelta violentamente por las fuerzas marroquíes produciéndose decenas de heridos y detenidos. La activista de Derechos Humanos Sultana Jaya, que ya había perdido un ojo fruto de los golpes de un policía marroquí en Marraquech, sufría fractura en su brazo izquierdo y su compañero Mohamed Tahlil resultaba con la nariz rota.
Con posterioridad, mientras las manifestaciones se reproducían en la capital saharaui, especialmente en el barrio de Maatala, la población de Bojador salía a las calles para solidarizarse con las víctimas, siendo igualmente reprimida de forma “violenta y desproporcionada”. Los hechos ser repetían al día siguiente en Smara, a pesar de que la ciudad amanecía “bajo un total bloqueo de las fuerzas de seguridad marroquíes”, con el mismo resultado: “detenciones, violencia y saqueo de domicilios”.
Numerosas organizaciones saharauis como CODAPSO, el Comité de Apoyo al Plan de Arreglo de las Naciones Unidas y la Protección de los Recursos Naturales del Sahara Occidental (CSPRON), el Comité Saharaui de los Derechos Humanos en Gulimín (sur de Marruecos) o la Coordinadora de Defensores Saharauis de los Derechos Humanos (CODESA) han denunciado “enérgicamente la brutal intervención de las fuerzas marroquíes de represión contra los manifestantes pacíficos en las ciudades ocupadas” del Sahara.
Exigen en sus comunicados “una investigación justa y transparente sobre estos sistemáticos crímenes contra los indefensos ciudadanos saharauis”, “la aplicación y de forma inmediata de las resoluciones de la onU para la celebración de un referéndum para la autodeterminación del pueblo saharaui,” así como “la liberación de los presos políticos saharauis que permanecen en las cárceles marroquíes”
En España, la Liga Española de los Derechos Humanos, también expresó por escrito a algunos activistas y organizaciones saharauis su “pesar y su condena” por los acontecimientos.
Otras entidades como el Observatorio de Derechos Humanos del Colegio de Abogados de Badajoz condenaron “enérgicamente la represión del aparato de seguridad marroquí, que ejerce de manera sistemática y continua contra la población civil saharaui indefensa”, exigieron “al Régimen de Marruecos que cese las violaciones de Derechos Humanos que infringe en los territorios ocupados del Sahara Occidental y pidieron “a la comunidad internacional, como la onU, la Unión Europea y principalmente el Gobierno español, presionar al Estado marroquí, para que respete el derecho internacional, las resoluciones de Naciones Unidas que abogan por el respeto del derecho a la autodeterminación del pueblo saharaui, así como respetar la Declaración Universal de los Derechos Humanos”.
This Morning I woke up and decided to write a best selling childrens book this week using my social networking friends, how cool is that?
1)Looking for suggestions from my facebook social networking friends Monday-Thursday.
2) Write the book on Friday and publish on Saturday.
Episode 2
Imagine my surprise when Bianca that I met this week started to read our intro Friday morning before I even started to write. One of the messages from the book is together we can do anything I believe this NOW more than ever.
Episode 3
After writing this book with Bianca on Friday I waited almost 20 hours until I was inspired to add some gaps. This morning I decided not to force it (another message in the book) to meet the deadline on Saturday. Bianca and I are getting together on Monday and cross the finish line together.
Egypt: American wife of Embassy accuser speaks out
Bikya Masr
19 September 2009
Children in Egypt face uphill battle. -archive
CAIRO: The American wife of an Egyptian man who accused three Marines inside the American Embassy in Cairo of assaulting him last month has finally spoken out in a letter sent to local Egyptian newspaper Al-Masry Al-Youm in response to the incident. The woman, Lydia, said in her letter that she wanted to correct information she described as “false” that had been said by her husband, Ahmed Mohamed al-Takruri that “may distort” her image and reputation.
“I am a Muslim American woman who converted to Islam out of conviction of Islamic teachings of tolerance and found the psychological comfort in it and I got married to Mr. Ahmed al-Takruri in 2005. I already had a 7-year-old daughter from a previous marriage and we agreed to live in the United States, where we both work and where we have our house and lives,” she said, refuting her husband’s previous claims to the contrary.
“He promised that he would treat my daughter Jasmine well, but his promise was not fulfilled, as he went on to abuse her for no reason and started to mistreat me. He became very nervous, mad for any reason and would yell and swear constantly,” she continued.
Al-Takruir, a mortgage marketing company owner told police last month that he was beaten “severely, causing several injuries” before he was taken to a local hospital where his injuries were allegedly addressed.
Al-Takruri said in the police statement at the time that he is married to an American woman and that she had disappeared from their home accompanied by their daughter on August 5, after he refused to give permission for them to travel to the United States. He added that he had been “searching for them in vain” and that after a few days discovered her mobile phone, which had the Embassy phone numbers recently dialed.
Upon learning this information, al-Takruri went to the Embassy, where he claims he was met with force.
“I contacted the embassy and requested a meeting with Consul,” he said in further comments reported by Youm al-Saba’a newspaper.
“I went at the time given and entered the Embassy, accompanied by my mother and I was surprised by three Americans with pistols, [who] started to assault me; kicking me to the ground in front of my mother, who was also assaulted when she objected this treatment.
His wife, however, says that when she was asked by her husband to travel to Cairo to get to know his family, as his mother is Egyptian, she agreed, hoping that he would become better and improve the way he treated them. “He got better for a while,” then started to treat them in a very cruel way, she said.
“His severity with me and my daughter continued, and when I asked him to allow me to travel to the United States, he did not object, all he asked for is to let my family send me the money for the tickets. When I arrived in the States, I discovered that I was pregnant, so I called him and told him. Once he heard of this, he changed the tone of his voice, and talked to me in a very polite way, so I wondered why he changed all of a sudden,” her letter read.
Al-Takruri won a decision by Egypt’s family court to put his wife and two children on a travel ban shortly after the incident became public. The ruling means that the wife and children are unable to leave the country, despite no legal reasons to force them to remain in the country.
She says that the goodwill toward her and her children were short-lived. Upon giving birth to their second child, his attitude completely changed. Lydia argues that al-Takruri “asked me to forsake my child and leave him.” She refused this demand even though he offered her a sum of money in return, and it was then that he stole her passports, including the children.
“He threatened to kill us and vowed to bring me back to the U.S. and never allow me to see my child again,” she says, prompting her to take action on her own.
She explained that these circumstances compelled her to leave her house, with her children, after she felt threatened and after her daughter was beaten several times. “All I ask for is him to stay away from us and let me live with them in peace and that he can visit them whenever he wants without harming us.”
“Sei bewegt / Sei belebt / Sei Berlin,” (roughly: “Be deeply moved, be active/bustling, be Berlin.”) were the words on a flag waving outside of the Rathaus Schöneberg as I waited for 2.5 hours in the stale, bureaucratic Bürgeramt. Smug propaganda for a city that knows it has a lot of artists and movers-and-shakers all clustered together across a mess of parks, cafés and plazas. Then again, I am continuously surprised at the cross-section of an active society that this city offers me. In the United States, for example, people tend not to see children except in specific contexts: accompanied by an adult while said adult is shopping, hanging out at the mall, and near a school. Children are sheltered from random strangers and/or spirited around to various events in cars. In Berlin, you can absolutely tell when school is or isn’t in session. When it’s in-session, all the old people rush out to get their errands done, so one finds them everywhere on public transit and on the streets. When it’s out, however, the children take over and everywhere (because there are schools every couple of blocks) there are groups of kids hanging out, playing soccer, goofing off and listening to music. The schools are like lungs, the schools like breath – in and out, in and out comes the vibrant future of the City of Sand.
Today, a colleague of mine Anne and I met up by the Brandenburg Gate to attend a photo exhibit at the Akademie der Künste. The exhibit was called “Übergangsgesellschaft: Porträts und Szenen 1980 bis 1990″ and provided what was (to me) a nuanced panorama of people and their experiences in primarily East Berlin during the slow death of the East German State. I found a giant three-picture series by Matthias Leupold entitled “Kino I-III” most captivating, in which a man is standing up in a movie theater otherwise filled with people wearing 3-D glasses and mesmerized by the glowing silver screen. In a kind of mockery of the “hear no evil, see no evil, speak no evil” visual cliché, he is clamping his hands over his eyes in the first photo, silently screaming in the second and holding a gun to his own head in the third. Other parts of the exhibit included arrays of faces on the wall, contrasting photographs of faces with the interior spaces of their former workplaces, comparative photos taken of mothers and sons in the nude near 1989 and again in 2005, and a 1989 photo-collage narrated with stories of post-war struggle by Gudrun Schulze-Eldowy. There was also a room devoted to Thomas Heise’s work, a friend of the DEFA Film Library, but it was so cacophonous that few of the films could be appreciated on their own terms. What was also stunning was the film series happening simultaneously at the Akademie, which included Andreas Dresen’s Jenseits von Klein-Wanzleben (which I subtitled as part of the Silent Country DVD), Helke Misselwitz’s Wer fürchtet sich vorm schwarzen Mann? (which was part of our 2005 MoMA Retrospective) and Jürgen Böttcher’s Die Mauer, which we’d been selling for a while. 6 years after my last residence in Germany, all these artists whom I’d never heard of then and whom I got in touch with in the interim period were now in center-stage. 20 years after the fall of the wall, the East Germans finally get a significant voice. Must it always take 20 years?
In other news, I decided as a film student to splurge on a DVD player for our apartment, because I’ve got a pile of movies to go through and my laptop DVD players both don’t really work. On my way home with the DVD player, a dude was just lying on the floor of the S-Bahn, mumbling something about needing money for an apartment. Stellar urban citizen that I am, I immediately did the ethical thing and pretended not to see him, shuffling to my seat and minding my own business. This actually turned out to be less malicious than the giggling high-school students at my end of the car, who took copious cell-phone pictures of the man, and the old German couple across the aisle, who seemed to think he was mentally retarded. The situation became more interesting as a vile-smelling man with a cane arrived at our section of the train with a speech about living on the streets and needing some money, etc. The man on the floor, who had been totally despondent, suddenly sat up and essentially told the man with the cane to piss off: “Da gibt’s schon andere Wagen im Zug!” This, of course, reminded me of Peachum the Beggar King’s speech in The Threepenny Opera about the various flavors of fake misery. Ultimately, what I saw was a mild territory dispute.
Fantasy
Uncle Yanco (Agns Varda, 1967)
A short essay film on 35mm about Varda’s strange Greek-American uncle who speaks perfect French and lives as a painter on a houseboat outside of San Francisco with a bunch of hippies. A terrific meditation on identity and where film as a medium is able to portray its asymptotic qualities. The jarring cuts characteristic of the French New Wave show Yanco and people wearing buttons saying “Long Live Varda!” merge documentary with a kind of existentialist propaganda: that individuals script their lives, but derive an essential power from this script, just as an independent filmmaker has raw control over his/her film.
Black Panthers (Agnés Varda, 1968)
This is a film we kept meaning to see in Barton’s “1968 and Film” course in Fall 2008, but I’m not sure we actually got around to seeing. Again, it was fabulous to see it in 35mm and particularly illustrative of the film trends in 1968: use of documentary material coupled with shock edits and decoupled sound and narrative. Nevertheless, Varda plays it pretty straight with this documentary (unlike that of Uncle Yanco above), which politically situates her in the camp of Eldridge Cleaver, Stokely Carmichael and the rest. I’m sure she wouldn’t have disagreed then and now.
The Question of God (Catherine Tatge, 2004)
A 4-hour PBS documentary concerning the lives of Sigmund Freud and C.S. Lewis – representing atheism and deism respectively – of which I watched the first hour. Basically, Walden Media had this as a Lewis side project while they worked their way through the dull cinema of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe (2005) – or perhaps they felt a twinge of guilt about creating the same – and used it to address the serious issues of spirituality at the core of Lewis’ work. There are historical re-enactments of Lewis and Freud’s lives, actors reading their texts around, and a reality-television style group discussion hosted by eminent Harvard psychiatrist Armand Nicholi filled with a bunch of white American academics and a token black filmmaker Louis Massiah, who helped create the infinitely better PBS documentary series on African Americans Eyes on the Prize, about basic (i.e. tired) questions of theology. There are so many cues in the soundtrack and editing that heavy-handedly state “Hey, we’re having a deep conversation about meaning here!” that I grew steadily disillusioned with the ability of Tatge’s project to convince me of anything. It comes up often enough that our spiritual lives are totally relational (I’d go so far as to say socially constructed), in that we project God through figures we know such as mother/father, as Freud projects his atheistic philosophy through the same. I’d say that this film is totally relational as well, demonstrating the limits of white people’s understanding of religion, science and the critique thereof when they talk among themselves.
I spent much of last week attending the Fifth International Adventure Therapy Conference. Not surprisingly, narratives and storytelling have found their way into this field.
Paul Stolz (Evolve at Typo Station) and Cathryn Carpenter (Deakin University), both in Australia, spoke about their use of narrative therapy approaches to working with young people “in the bush”. I also attended a workshop that Paul Stolz gave which provided more detail on the subject and allowed us some hands-on experience with narrative practices.
I also attended a workshop specifically on storytelling, adventure therapy and outdoor education led by Tonia Gray (University of Wollongong) and Kaz Stuart (University of Cumbria). Tonia and Kaz talked a little bit about how they use storytelling in their practices in Australia and England respectively and then we got to do some storytelling, and storylistening, of our own. Tonia uses storytelling with her university-level outdoor education students and Kaz uses storytelling in adventure programming mainly with business groups.
It was one of those conferences with concurrent talks, and I was not able to attend every day anyway, so I only got a sample of what is going on in the world of adventure (sometimes called wilderness) therapy. There were probably other references to stories made in other sessions that I missed. For example, I missed Bonnie Dyck’s presentation on incorporating narrative approaches to working with families in Alberta, Canada.
I believe that stories are important to healing ourselves and our relationships with the more-than-human world. Adventure and wilderness therapies provide people with novel experiences, narrative approaches and storytelling help people to integrate those experiences into new stories of who they are and what they can do.
Parents who force their children to do good end up with good children.
Parents who let them free end up with lazy children.
This is a fact of life.
Children who have respect for the common good end up with more success than those who were let to be “creative” and “innovative”. They only end up creating and innovating tacky, out-of-this-world and impractical things and ideas. They are also the reasons why capitalism has gone haywire. They make everyone like things that are too fringy.
It’s often for the best that children only follow the status quo instead of trying to change things. The last generation has seen too many advances and so little time for people to catch up. Parents should from now delibrately disallow children to learn too many things and focus on being obedient, ready to take on orders instead of letting them make suggestions.
After all, we live in a democracy and the majority of the seniors rule, what with the aging population.
You may have remembered a while ago when I found an offer to download some free Putumayo songs. Well, I have found another offer to get cheap Putomayo CD’s delivered to your door, as AdventureBox have teamed up with Putumayo.
Putumayo kids is the children’s and educational division of Putumayo World Music. As one of the leading children’s record labels, Putumayo Kids is committed to introducing children to other cultures through music from around the world.
The offer is available at the AdventureBox homepage – when you subscribe to AdventureBox, receive 3 putumayo kids CDs (A family Christmas, Picnic Playground and Hawaiian Playground) throughout the year (December, April and July) at a very special rate: 25% off the regular price! The CDs will be delivered directly to your home. Good CD’s to have on in the car with the kids in my opinion, plus they are great for exposing kids to world music.
The alarm went off. Son 1 aged 4y 11m was in the Big Bed. I had a nice snuggy cuddle, and woke up 50 minutes later. Oh my ears and whiskers. Poor old Son 2 aged 2 didn’t get any stories. Got up. Breakfasted Son 1 and Son 2, showered, dressed, did face and hair, scooped up Son 1, gave him a toothbrush and told him to do his teeth in the car… and outta the door. Hellish traffic, but I have a Rat Run. “Have you cleaned your teeth?” “Yes.” We got to School in time to park up the Muddy Path. And then I saw the toothbrush. He hadn’t touched it. “Just clean them now.” “No.” He cried, he stropped, he dillied, dallied and dawdled. The doors were closed by the time we got there. And Son 1 was very upset. “It’s my fault,” I said. “For rolling over and going back to sleep.”
At lunchtime I went looking for Cookie Cutters for the party bags. It is a Scooby Doo party, and I’ve been after for one Nice, Lasting, Cheap Thing to go in the bags. They are getting Halloween cutters. I haven’t yet worked out how many children we have coming. Doesn’t matter. We like making biscuits in our house. We do, it has to be said, have a heck of a lot of boys coming. And two girls. I haven’t told the parents of the girls that we have a slight imbalance. Tra la la. When I picked Son 1 up I let him see the cookie cutters, and he of course wanted to do the party bags when he got in. Oh boy. As a friend said to me recently: “Why don’t you just try saying ‘no?’”
Son 1 does Activity Time with The Man each evening while I’m bathing Son 2 and putting him to bed. Then Son 1 and I read, him snugged next to me in the Double Bed, just ahead of popping him into his own bed, in his room, where Son 2 is already asleep in the cot. The Man’s being doing Son 1’s Jolly Phonics with him. We also have a reading book with a list of words we’re supposed to help hime learn. This week it is “I” “a” and “look.” Son 1 and I read The Enormous Crocodile. I tried to get him interested in looking at the “looks.” “I don’t want to. Just read it.” Then we got onto Bugs In The Blanket. “I’ll give you a chocolate button for each ‘look’ you can find.” I said. He went to bed with a pile of seven chocolate buttons waiting for him in the morning.
Seis niños intentan llegar a Tarifa desde Marruecos en un bote de juguete
La Guardia Civil no daba crédito a sus ojos cuando la noche del lunes localizó un pequeño bote hinchable que trataba de llegar a las costas de Cádiz con seis niños, la mayoría de unos 10 años y sin un adulto que patronease la lancha. Se trata del primer cayuco ocupado exclusivamente por menores que trata de llegar a las costas gaditanas. La embarcación, de poco más de dos metros de eslora, fue hallada a la una y media de la madrugada. Una patrullera del instituto armado salió a su paso y la interceptó a 1,6 millas al sur de Tarifa.
Los seis menores magrebíes -uno de ellos de 16 años y los otros cinco de entre 10 y 11- llevaban horas remando y habían recorrido la mayor parte de los 14 kilómetros que separan el Estrecho de Gibraltar en unas difíciles condiciones, ya que soplaba viento de Poniente de fuerza cuatro y había marejada. Los inmigrantes, que estaban bien y relataron que sólo habían pasado frío, fueron atendidos por la Cruz Roja.
El drama de la inmigración ilegal se trasladó a Almería y Tenerife. Al cierre de esta edición, Salvamento Marítimo trataba de localizar una patera a la deriva en aguas del Cabo de Gata. Fueron los ocupantes de la embarcación, un grupo procedente de Argelia, quienes alertaron por teléfono móvil a las autoridades españolas de que se encontraban perdidos frente a una población con faro, aunque no podían identificar la localidad.
Fuente original: http://www.elcorreodigital.com/vizcaya/20090916/pvasco-espana/seis-ninos-intentan-llegar-20090916.html
This week’s lesson brings another prediction of Jesus’ passion and another lesson on discipleship. Even if you preached from Mark last week, this scripture is nuanced differently enough to provide good material. It will be helpful as you think about the text to explore what Mark might have been meaning to say to his own post-resurrection community. What are some issues that he might have been addressing? Are any of those issues present in our communities?
9:30-31 Since I spent some time last Sunday on Jesus’ words about his suffering, death and resurrection, I probably will zoom past these verses in the sermon this week. If you will discuss the passion prediction, it may be helpful to note the correlation between Jesus’ hard words and his desire to keep them hidden from the general population. Perhaps only the disciples are ready to hear such things, though even Jesus’ closest followers cannot truly understand what he means.
9:32 This is a great verse, and it humanizes the disciples. Who among us hasn’t been afraid to ask for clarification from someone we look up to? Alyce M. McKenzie at WorkingPreacher.org wonders “what if” the disciples had actually asked Jesus what he meant. This could be a creative way of getting into the text. Would the disciples have left Jesus after his explanation? What might they have thought and felt? You might create an imaginative conversation among the disciples.
This discussion might help us to think through our own attitudes and feelings about Jesus’ passion and whether or not we are able to follow him. Often we expect more of the disciples than we would expect of ourselves. We say, “Shouldn’t they have known to trust him after all the miracles? How can they still be so dull as to not understand?” We cannot assume that we would have known any better. In fact, we should be certain that we do behave in similar ways. Our faith has its high and low points. But somehow we think the disciples should have done better.
9:33-37 The argument among the disciples seems to be a terrible parody of their Lord. He is preparing to allow himself to be treated as a criminal, and they are arguing about greatness. Perhaps that is Mark’s point, that he is using the disciples to contrast our human attitudes with Jesus’ own. It is true that they consistently misunderstand Jesus’ teaching.
You could focus on verse 35 about becoming a servant. The disciples’ ambition is to be the greatest. Jesus is asking us to refocus our ambition toward servanthood. Ambition itself is not evil. Sometimes we simply strive for the wrong things. Jesus reminds us that we and the kingdom are best served when our ambition is to serve others.
If you choose to build your sermon around verse 37, be sure not to confuse other sayings of Jesus about children. This verse specifically emphasizes welcoming children. And who are children? They are often unwelcome forces of chaos and disruption in our lives. Children bug us with their incessant questions and inability to be neat, quiet “little citizens.” To welcome them, Jesus says, is to welcome God. One of my colleagues noted that God is also often a force of disruption in our lives. God leads us to places we’d rather not go. God teaches us lessons we’d rather not learn.
I heard a true story about a preacher who was notorious for not allowing children to be in worship while he was preaching. Someone once asked him why. He said, “I can’t do what they pay me to do when children are present.” In light of verse 37, Jesus might have said to him, “Then perhaps you should be paid for doing something else.”
I woke up in the middle of last night with the thought in my head that I made a mistake in my post ‘Sadderdays’ (September 12). I wrote: ‘I don’t go out to work.’ That’s not strictly true in any sense. What I should have said was, ‘I don’t go out for paid work.’ I work at home, whether it is the dull grind of cleaning, cooking and caring for my family, or the much more fun round of writing poetry, critiquing the writing of others, and editing my long-in-the-making book. In the past ten years I took three A levels, a degree, and sundry other short courses. I am also involved in volunteer work at a local school and church. So when I said, ‘I don’t go out to work,’ I sold myself short.
This is not by way of being a post about how great I think I am, but about how the choice to stay home when my children were born was deliberate, and one I have never regretted; not even on dusting days. I am grateful to the women’s movement because it gave me that choice: if I had been born a decade or so earlier, it would perhaps have been forced on me. Would I have resented it? Possibly. I don’t and can never know. What I do know is that the moniker ‘homemaker’ irritates me almost as much as the word ‘gobsmacked’ or the grocer’s apostrophe (or should that be ‘grocers’ apostrophe’?).
Saying ‘homemaker’ implies that all of those women who choose or have to work are not homemakers. Presumably they live in expensive mausoleums. I have several friends in paid employment who would strongly object to that – and some of them have cleaner homes than mine, despite putting in a full shift every day. They love their own children and husbands as much as I love mine, and make warm and welcoming homes for them and their friends.
I also object to the term, ‘I’m just a housewife.’ The power of one little word to belittle a 24/7 job is incredible. I say 24/7 because those of us who choose and are fortunate enough not to have to go out to work, tend to do everything in the home. That’s the way of the real world. The Hub was great at looking after the kids when he was well and working and home, but he wasn’t often home: between travelling sub-Saharan Africa for weeks at a time, running his own business, coaching under-14s at football, refereeing, and setting up and running the MCFC Supporters Club of South Africa, he maybe had fifteen minutes or so a week for us, and a man’s got to relax sometimes, hasn’t he? All right, I’m exaggerating, but it’s true in its essentials: I did the housework, kids, etc., and he brought home plenty of dosh. That was the deal we made when we decided to have children, and it worked for us. Call us old-fashioned: I don’t care. We had agreed when we first got married that if we had children, one of us would stay home and one of us would work (whoever was earning the most); what mattered was that one of us would always be there for the children. Fortunately for me, the Hub was earning a lot more, so I drew the long straw.
I don’t know what I’m going to do when Spud leaves school. He doesn’t need me that much, even now, and it won’t be long before I’m applying for jobs and putting on my application form: made redundant from motherhood.
I know it’s not fashionable or pc to say – or even think – that I like being at home with and for my children, but you know what: I do.
What we pin our hopes on apparently doesn’t change much between childhood and adulthood – apart, perhaps, from an increase in desperation.
10% of seven year olds expect to have saved a million pounds by the time they reach 18, according to a Post Office survey of seven year olds. And 17% would buy a car if they had £2,000, 27% receive no pocket money at present, 12% want to become a vet, and 57% believe their parents are putting money aside for them when they grow up and leave home. Ah, bless!
And later on in life, despite only a 1 in 14 million chance of hitting the jackpot, more than one in four Brits pin their economic hopes on winning the lottery, according to research by the Institute of Financial Planning for Financial Planning.
The world keeps moving even if you feel sad on your birthday. You turn another year older, your children need you to get them breakfast and if you live in my house, your Frick and Frack are in constant motion. That’s the beauty of my life.
As I observe the commotion that surrounds me, I am reminded that joy and energy are all around. It starts as soon as Frick and Frack hand me my birthday card. It is has a Madagascar (an animated movie) theme and plays music when you open it (of course!). Soon, there is a veritable dance-party taking place in my living room.
I am soon overwhelmed by the dancing intensity and I make the decision to opt for some quiet. I head to the lanai to read my book club selection for the month (unfortunately, I’m not enjoying it). Not so shockingly, I have two visitors join me. Almost immediately, Frack orders Frick to push him up and down the length of our lanai on a too-small-for-him push car. This is a chaotic process and soon Frack is flying about and Frick is tumbling all around and laughter rises up and escapes through the screens into the atmosphere (a lovely, lovely sound).
After this activity has run its course, we are back inside. I am at the computer working on my blog and Frack comes up to me. He hands me a plastic ring that has a soccer ball affixed to it. He launches in to the pro and cons of wearing the ring on each finger eventually landing on the index finger as being the best (worn on this finger, you are able to form your hand into a fist with the greatest ease). He talks to me at length about this and it is hard for me to keep a straight face. He is so seriously passionate about discerning the BEST finger, that his forehead is deeply furrowed. Oh, how I love this little guy.
Mad Dog and I need to formulate our plan to get us all safely through our day until the boys’ bedtime. Mad Dog is at the table with the paper spread before him.
“How about this for an outing?” he begins. “At 1:45 they are having a showing of Thomas the Train at the cinema,” I immediately feel my heart drop to my feet (I am not in the mood, on my birthday of all days, for a train movie). Then, Mad Dog shocks me. “How about I take the boys by myself? That can be part of your birthday present.” Uh,….. yeah, you don’t have to ask me twice. All I can say is thanks Mad Dog; you’re a brave, brave soul.
Eventually, Frack is back in my face asking me what a Transformer that turns into a football is called. “I don’t know,” I counter, “F-Ball?” As soon as the words leave my mouth I realize that taken out of context, ‘F-Ball’ could be negatively construed. I make a mental note to tell Frack to only say ‘F-Ball’ in the house and to refrain from using it at school especially in reference to his classroom’s bully (you know who you are).
All this while, Frick is by the couch trying to do a headstand (without much success) singing “Uh-oh, Cheerios!” over and over again. What in the world is going through that two year old mind of his? Why a headstand and why sing about Cheerios?
I love that on an ordinary day (because unless a birthday is their own, the day is ordinary to them) my boys bring a liveliness to everything they do. They make ordinary days quirky and blog-worthy. That makes me feel like dancing (cue the Madagascar-card music) even in my old age.
AP came over last night and he’d purposely aimed to get here before the kids went to bed as both of us have been talking about him spending more time with “us” (as in me and the kids) recently. I had to smile because as soon as I’d let the children know AP was on his way over, both of them were watching out of the window for him! They both genuinely seem to like him as a person and accept him as my boyfriend/someone I spend time with/someone I love.
I am totally happy that their introduction to him was done slowly. First of all they knew that I had a “friend” but I didn’t ever refer to AP as “him” or “her” at that point – just “my friend” so that they knew I was spending time with someone. It was a LONG time before I let them know that my friend was a man, and by then I’d started talking about AP just dropping his name into conversation so it was a gradual process that I introduced him into their lives. Even then it was several weeks before they met him – I just started slowly talking about him a little more, and when they met for the first time it was on neutral turf at a local park. I think I was more nervous that day than my kids or AP were!!
Aaaaanyway the point of the backtracking is that they both do genuinely like him, and as I scooted the kids up to bed last night while AP was here, my 9 year old son asked me …
“Is AP going to be moving in soon?”
It totally threw me! It isn’t something *I* had really thought about let alone had an answer for! Obviously I’ve thought about the future with AP and imagined us together … but as to him moving in with us in the soon to very near future? It hadn’t really been something I’d seriously sat down and thought about.
I diffused the question by answering it with a question! ”What made you ask me that?” He replied that AP and I were a good couple and that we were in love. I asked him why he thought AP and I were in love and his answer was that he just knew we were! Apparently – according to my 9 year old son, AP is good for me! I have to admit I was stunned at how astute that boy can be!
I didn’t really know where to go from there, so I just tried to assure my son that although yes, AP and I are in love and we do love each other a lot, that he needs to get to know them and they need to get to know him before anybody moves in with anybody!! I told him that it was very important to me not to rush things in a relationship and before I had a chance to say anything else, he asked me if that was what happened with me and his dad. It was a tough one to answer but I told him honestly that yes, his dad and I did rush things, however, had we NOT rushed things and if things had happened differently then he and his sister would never have been born. I wouldn’t go back and change a thing if it meant not having them.
In an ideal world (from his point of view) his dad and I would still be together, but he does understand that we don’t live in an ideal world! Hopefully my kids will learn from my mistakes and make sure that they pay attention to the red flags that life waves at them. Hopefully one day I will too!
