Amie Again Talks About Death

(It’s that dead bird again) Well, at bedtime Amie again asked to talk about the dead baby penguin. Again she wanted to know why there was no blood. Was it really dead? I explained that it died because it was too cold. Probably its heart stopped working. I explained that our blood needs to circulate …

Amie Talks about Death Again

In the evening Amie watched March of the Penguins. We had shown it to her about half a year ago but she wasn’t interested then. This time she was, going “oh so cute!” and so forth, but really paying attention when the little chick dies of exposure and the mother mourns over it. – what …

Amie Talks about Death and Jesus

I had three very strange conversations with Amie today. Part one Out of the blue (we were washing hands) she said: – Pooh Bear is very fluffy so he will never die again. – So you think if you’re fluffy you can’t die? – Yes. But I am not fluffy, so I am going to …

General Malaise Barely Evaded

Why do I even look at the news – my “consumption” of which is out of spiritual necessity minimized to reading the headlines in Google News? 8-year-old boy shoots himself in the head at a firearms expo, 7-year-old boy kidnapped then shot to death, Neo-Nazi plot to assassinate Obama. The places where my jawbone fits …

Sick: She Wasn’t Faking It

We’re all sick. Amie came down with a cold on Friday. She often has a bit of a runny/sneezy nose in the mornings, and Friday morning was no different, except that she didn’t want to go to school. She loves her preschool, but only gets “fully committed” when she is actually there, or after she …

Dinosaurs are Extinct: Death, Mourning and Our Children

I’m reading an interesting book called Talking with Children about loss, written by “Good Grief” counselor Maria Trozzi and co-authored by Kathy Massimini. I’m always picking up books like those. I read Hope Edelman’s Motherless Daughters, for instance, when I was pregnant, and got many comments, mostly in the vein of “how can you read …

Live Blogging: Amie wants Mama

I’m sitting in the living room, it’s 9:30 pm. And I am listening to Amie screaming that she wants Mama to lie next to her and that she wants to go see Mama. DH has been ill for a week so he has been sleeping in the guest room/study and has also not been putting …

US Cesarean Rate: 31.1%

News alert. This is in from the Childbirth Connection: Relentless Rise in Cesarean Section Rate The National Center for Heath Statistics has just released the preliminary U.S. national cesarean rate for 2006: 31.1%. This rate has increased by 50% in the past decade, reaching a record level every year in this century. The most common …