Every now and then you come across something that ...well...makes you feel happy. MacTech-Son, a loyal Mets fan - like his mom sent this to me. I know at least one blog-friend who will want to see this animation.
I love the Internet.
1986
If you want to know about the person who made this little animation read this.
Creator
When our kids were young, the family tradition on Easter weekend included an egg hunt. From the mid-seventies through the mid-nineties there were plenty of young cousins happy to scramble about some relation's yard in pursuit of plastic eggs filled with candy or money. Then it stopped. There were no young ones around. Easter time morphed into spring break for the college crowd.
The oldest cousins now have kids of their own.
2006 saw the hunt revived with five descended from three of the original crew.
The day couldn't have been more beautiful. Everyone was a winner. When all the eggs had been retrieved, each got a present to boot. It was like Easter, Christmas and Halloween all melded into one intense potentially legendary memory.
The bittersweet undercurrent to the day was this – it was the first anniversary of my nephew's death.
As the sun set, we all gathered around the tree where his ashes had been buried earlier that day. His mother and father spoke of their certainty that he was present – still communicating. Their pain is raw and wildly palpable.
Joan Didion who also lost her daughter last year, sent a note that was read aloud under the tree.
Celebrate and cherish the living for it is in that celebration that our love for those lost becomes clear.
Click here for a slide show Easter Saturday
The picture above is of many thousand year old cliff dwellings at Bandelier National Monument, NM. A while back Unwellness posted a link to a color-in map of the states - a record of those you have or have not visited. My map was appalling. I could only color in the edges. So last week we took a little trip to New Mexico. It could have been the moon. I can't say that I've ever seen anything quite like this geography. But what really struck me was the emptiness of the place. Hundreds of miles of sand and hills as far as one could see. It was very quiet. Listo? Is there any baseball there? Of course, as empty as the place was, wouldn't you know, I ran into a Burpie Cow Wow family in a restaurant in Sante Fe.
On the way back we stopped in Chicago to visit the boy for a few days. Good weather and good food and funny stories. That's all I need to keep me going for a few weeks at least.
Enough of the eye. I'm all better.
The much anticipated two week hiatus from the school children is upon us. Some of us are traveling to far away places. Some of us are looking down the road towards new and different possibilities. Some of us are just catching up and that is good too. I wish you all whatever you wish for yourselves.
I could use a a pair of those doggie alien contact lenses of Weasel's about now.
I've been pretty sick for the past two weeks but I've been coming to school because each day I kept thinking I was getting better. you feel a little better today, right?
Friday night I stayed at work to get my piles of papers in some order and update my school webpages and think about lesson plans for this week. Later, I met my husband and his friends for dinner on 5th Ave. I was feeling a bit off but chalked it up to a tiring week. By Saturday I felt a bit worse but figured it was the result of a sleepless Friday night after having gone to bed with a pounding headache. By Saturday evening it was written all over my face she's sick and sicker. While I managed to make an early appearance at a family cocktail party on PPW, the school auction was out of the question. Sunday dawned, I had a raging fever and pretty much every unpleasant symptom imaginable. I spent the day staying alive. By midnight, I could no longer see as my eyes were glued over with the same substance being produced by my respiratory tract. I really don't think I've ever felt this sick in my adult life.
I am home today waiting to (finally) see a doctor, not my own, mind you - he only sees people on Tuesdays and Thursdays.
Contracts are due today, I never did sign mine. I'm not sure I could even find it at this point. According to Listmaker's blog, they will officially start looking to replace me tomorrow.
Maybe we'll all get better.
You are Saint Francis of Assisi! You don't care what you look like (or smell like) as long as you can live simply and help the poor. You should be receiving your stigmata any day now.
Hey I already have it.
I was really into The Lives of the Saints in my early adolescence. My friends and I loved the story of Maria Goretti - most fascinating. She was "martyred" at the age of twelve refusing the sexual advances of her twenty year old neighbor. Why sainthood? I guess you had to be there.
My martyr obsessions soon morphed after the fab four landed at the newly renamed JFK Airport into something more like "to which Beatle would I want to lose my virginity?"
St Francis is perfect for where my head is right now. I could definitely see myself living in a simple cave in the hills outside of Assisi...as long as there was wireless Internet service.
Which Saint Are You?
brought to you by Quizilla
Daughter and Son-in-law McT. went away (Thursday to Sunday) for a much needed and deserved long weekend. I did the Mrs. Doubtfire duty, with help from the regular weekday sitter. Mr. McT and I had a fun-filled weekend planned for the tot but when he rose Saturday AM he seemed decidedly subdued and I thought he was beginning to miss his mommy and daddy. He had the hiccups. (odd for first thing in the morning) Normally a good eater, he refused to open his lips for either pancakes or scrambled eggs though he did drink a few ounces of watered-down juice.
Just as I was about to get him dressed fro the walk over to the pool for swimming class, he whimpered and threw-up the juice and what looked like the last meal I had fed him the night before. Uh-oh, diarrhea too. There won't be any swimming this weekend.
I cleaned the boy up from top to bottom and gave him a few small sips of water. A few minutes later that came up and the diaper needed changing again. Enough evidence for me to diagnose a case of whatever's been going around.
We bundled him up and brought him to our house for the day. After crushing a quantity of ice, Mr. McT was dispatched to the market to buy Coke, Gatorade, Pedialyte – fluids that have not seen the inside of our refrigerator in years.
Unfortunately, the day went downhill. He slept a lot and when he was awake he was inconsolable. He just didn't know what was happening to him. He couldn't keep down even small amounts of fluid. He was refusing to open his mouth for anything. He just cried and cried. I began to worry about dehydration.
We bundled him back up and drove back to his house. The ride in the car calmed him down and he fell asleep. (Whew) A call to the doctor was definitely in order and he couldn't have been nicer. He assured us that a kid of his size and general health could go a whole day with nothing and that we should just offer whatever we thought he might possibly like and eventually he'd feel better and take something. (I should know that, right?) He said that usually when he calls back the next day to check on a child with a stomach flu the child has bounced back but the adults are all sick.
Great. This was starting to resemble the flu episode in The Secret Lives of Dentists.
Saturday night was bad. Baby and I spent it on the couch watching Barney and Thomas the Train DVD's in between bouts of stomach cramps. He had a fever that was just high enough to cause misery. Would it suddenly spike? Was an emergency room trip a possibility?
Morning finally came. He took a few ounces of milk mixed with camomile tea. It seemed to make him feel bad again resulting in his refusal to open his mouth for anything for the rest of the day. He looked and acted really sick. All day he couldn't really even lift his little head off the couch. When we spoke to the doctor again that afternoon, he was surprised that things had not improved. We were to monitor the temp and be ready for the tepid bath plunge if he got too hot. In four hours we'd call him and if there was no change we'd be meeting at the hospital.
I was tired myself and realized that I hadn't eaten in the past two days either so we ordered in some Chinese food. When the door buzzer rang, the baby opened his eyes and said something (What he said, I have no idea)
When I spooned some wonton soup into a bowl, he said, "Soup? Soup?"
I answered him, "Yes. Chinese soup."
"Chinese? Chinese?" he countered with genuine interest.
This was the most life we'd seen in two days. He wanted the soup. He took it a teaspoon at a time with a bit of noodle and rice asking for more as soon as he swallowed and while this relatively enormous quantity of food precipitated some drastic intestinal reactions he seemed suddenly unbothered by it all and eager to eat more soup. The pains must be gone. He's getting better!
Daughter and Son-in-law McT. arrived home at 10:00 PM Sunday night. Baby MacTech was peacefully asleep.
