Solo Mother

First off, if you don’t read Susan Palwick’s Rickety Contrivances of Doing Good, you’re in for a treat. Susan’s not your ordinary, Bible-thumping Christian. In fact, she finds God in the most unlikely of places — stuffed animals, rocks, and the occasionally deranged patient passing through the OR where she is a volunteer chaplain. She’s also a teacher, an author, a wife, and a recently bereaved daughter. Her father passed away quite recently, and we’re no longer permitted the ‘luxury’ of mourning the loss of a loved one for a year, or however long it takes to find a place …read more

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If I’m not sick still — believe me, this is a treat to write with a fever of 100+ — then the King of Everything, my mother, and I will be tromping around in the creek, looking for ants for his science project, due on Wednesday.
I wish I could help him more with it, when he gets home from school in the afternoons. There’s just not enough time when I work more than full time.
But we’ve done some research, and have a cool set of instructions on how to make an ant farm out of two CD cases that will …read more

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It has been a lovely day, grey skies and all. The KoE and I are busy doing housework and a little bit of detective work.
You see, someone apparently was in a desperate fix for Mother’s Day flowers, and helped him- or herself to the ones left at my gate yesterday. Thankfully, a neighbor stopped by to ask if I’d gotten the flowers he’d seen there… and beat his breast in sadness that he hadn’t thought to stop and put them somewhere safer than right on the street where anyone could steal them.
Which, apparently, someone did.
I’m so grateful that someone …read more

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My kid has something up his sleeve for Mother’s Day. He and my mom have been making me a present for the past two weeks, more or less, and he comes home messy and painted and grinning ear to ear. He hasn’t even told me what the present is, which is a first for Mr. I Can’t Keep A Secret.
On Friday, I went to his school for Muffins for Mom, a lovely coffee-and-sweeties sort of assembly. I sat with the moms I know best from his school, and watched the classes perform such hits as “You Are My Sunshine”, “Skidderidink”, …read more

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If you’re going to buy someone flowers for Mother’s Day, consider ordering from Pro Flowers.… $10 of all Mother’s Day orders in the US will be donated to the March of Dimes, the US’s leadng non-profit organization for pregnancy and baby health.
I don’t usually post info verbatum from action alerts in my inbox but damn, here’s one we just have to read and act on now (thanks to Moms Rising):
Want to honor mothers this week? Take a moment to ask your Congressperson to co-sponsor the just introduced Family Leave Insurance Act of 2008 in honor of Mother’s Day.
If passed, the …read more

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The King of Everything is recovering from his surgery. He doesn’t know how to slow down, take care of himself, take it easy. He moves pell mell through life and doesn’t stop til he drops; the pain in his throat makes eating and drinking a chore he’d rather forgo. By six he’s wilted, his head on his arms at the table, trying not to cry. There is so little I can do to make him feel better, but those things, I do: I rock him and sing to him, I smile and say encouraging things to him, I make him …read more

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Just a reminder, Kate at Baby Lune is donating the proceeds of her blog from Mothers Day UK to Mothers Day North America–that is, March 18 to May 13–to a charity that benefits women. She’ll let you choose which one, and if you’re paying attention to her blog, you’ll get background on the organizations she is considering. All it takes is a click from you and yours on her website, and some group will be very lucky, indeed.
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And now, to bed. My train broke down. Yes. The train I was on broke. So we got off our train and onto …read more

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