Instinctive Philosophies

Check out this great article by my friend, Lorraine Murray, entitled Please Don’t Say you are ‘Just’ a Mother. Now, off I go to run the world (fyi: this really is only funny if you read the article).

By now, I imagine everyone has seen Time Magazine’s latest cover that shows an attractive young mother breastfeeding her three year old son.  I’m also certain that you, like me, have opinions about it.  But I bet you haven’t seen Matthew Schmitz’s posting on First Thoughts: A First Things Blog entitled The Horror of Time’s Breastfeeding Cover.  Check it out.  I promise, it’s not what you fear it’s going to be.

As a child there were few things during the school year that could offer as much comfort and sheer delight as a sick day.  Just the thought of spending an entire weekday lounging on the couch while my friends scribbled away in their Big Indian Chief writing tablets was all the motivation I needed to lick the hand rails of any public stairwell.  And if, for some reason, that wasn’t enough to muster the courage to get the job done I then only needed to recall the utter disdain on the faces of my brother and sister as I, still clad in my flannel pajamas and casually sipping a bottle of Sprite, waved goodbye to them from the window as they shuffled off to school.

Every sick day in our family was celebrated with a new coloring book and a new box of crayons.  Often we got to go to work with my father (he is, for those of you who do not know, a United Methodist Minister).  The secretary would always hunt down the portable television in an empty Sunday School room so that we could continue our animation marathon and church members would periodically pop their head in the door, look at us piteously as though we’d contracted a fatal disease and then gently reassure us that we looked positively angelic.  Sometimes they would even offer a piece or two of candy from their coat pocket to sooth our aching throats.  Let me tell you, a day like that is positively magical.  Yes, it was all well worth the price of vomiting into a plastic mop bucket.

One of my most vivid memories of being sick was the time when my brother, sister and I consecutively contracted chicken pox over a three week period.  For three glorious weeks my parents shunned their jobs, their friends and everything that meant anything to them just so they could dote on us in our time of need.  The child in me remembers this as a remarkably special time for our family filled with compassion, repose and, of course, Calamine lotion.  But as my own family enters the fourth week of dealing with a stomach virus I am certain has been sent to us directly from HELL I imagine my parents viewed those three weeks as the Great Chicken Pox Plague that robbed them of their vacation time, hygiene, sanity and any remaining will they had left to live.

I was in pretty good spirits when the stomach bug first descended upon our family, laughing about the fact that we were living on borrowed time when it came to illness since we hadn’t had a virus in a year and half.  But my good humor waned as the piles of laundry grew and my already few precious hours of sleep diminished.

Three weeks ago my prayers were fairly selfless. “Please, Lord, help my babies to feel better and please help me to remain well so that I can care for them and nurse them back to health.”  A week or so passed and I began to pray, “Oh, Lord if they can’t make it to the toilet or one of the many plastic buckets I have strategically placed around the house, please let them at least vomit on a tiled or hardwood surface.  I am all out of upholstery cleaner and it doesn’t look as though I’ll make it to the grocery store any time soon.”  God must have a sense of humor because just after I prayed this I found my youngest daughter dry heaving over the living room rug.  I caught her just in time to move her to the hardwood floor at which point she stumbled into the dining room and vomited into the air conditioning vent.  It was 90 degrees in Atlanta that day.  I’ll leave the rest to your imagination.

By the end of last week I was actually considering exorcism as a viable option.  My plan was to creep up to the children as they slept on the couch, lay hands upon them and then demand, “Be gone foul demons!  Be gone!” There are no herds of pigs that I know of within a 10-15 mile radius, but there are a few stray cats roaming the neighborhood.   I was going to send the legion into the cats, but then remembered seeing one or two of them occasionally sleeping on my front porch.  Realizing that all of this would only result in their being even more for me to clean up later I quickly abandoned the plan.  I am now out of ideas and the illness continues.  However, there is one thing that I am sure of; if sick days are at all magical their source is surely some dark, sinister and evil power.

My sister told me the other day that it is time to post some new pictures of my kids to this blog.  The only reason I haven’t is that I really don’t have anything good to post.  But my immensely talented friend, Bryan Stillwagon of Stillwagon Photography  ,does and he is kind enough to let me share some of them with you all!  Before you ask, Jack is not in these pics because on the day they were taken the pollen count was over 9,000 and his poor little eyes were swollen to the size of meatballs, which is really not something that we wanted to catch on film.

As if that wasn’t enough, Bryan also does travel photography!  Take a look at these pics he took on a recent trip to Ireland.

And here are a couple of stunning photos of Paris, France!

The thing is, I’ve visited both Ireland and France and none of my pictures look like these.  I’ve secretly thought about purchasing a copy of these prints and replacing my own pictures in my photo albums with these.  There’s nothing wrong with that.  Is there?  I mean, it’s not like I’m going to tell people that I took them.  But if they don’t ask…