BRONZE, POTTERY, LINEN & CLEMANTIS

I don't love you as if you were the salt-rose,

topaz or arrow of carnations that propagate fire:

I love you as certain dark things are to be loved,
in secret, between the shadow and the soul.

I love you as the plant that doesn't bloom and carries
hidden within itself the light of those flowers,

and thanks to your love, darkly in my body
lives the dense fragrance that rises from the earth.

I love you without knowing how, or when, or from where,
I love you simply, without problems or pride:

I love you in this way because I don't know any other way of loving
but this, in which there is no I or you,

so intimate that your hand upon my chest is my hand,
so intimate that when I fall asleep it is your eyes that close.

~Pablo Neruda ... Sonnet 17~

Happy 8th Wedding anniversary, my love.

You're still the only one that feels like home.

RED NOSE DAY

As a mother, there is nothing that petrifies me more than S.I.D.S

Sudden Infant Death Syndrome.

Just writing it hurts my heart.

When I was 7, the reverend of our church and his wife, dear friends of my parents, lost their 9 1/2 week old son, James, to S.I.D.S.

It was heartbreaking.

James himself I don't remember, thought I'm sure I met him. You don't think to memorise babies "just in case".

But.

I remember the screaming silence of their house. I remember the "Please do not Disturb" sign on their front door. I remember my mother, devastated... she had loaned them the bassinette James was sleeping in.

I remember Alice... their three year old daughter. So very blonde...

And I remember when Elizabeth was born afterwards... and the machines they had hooked up to her cot that would go off if she didn't draw breath for a certain time frame. I remember the heaviness of unmentioned fear.

Paul Arnott, four years after the death of his only son James, wrote a book to help other parents who have to walk this horrific time. It sits on my bookshelf... a constant reminder of this dear little boy my family knew.

Two decades later, I heard about Angie's nephew Luke, who died at 10 weeks... only 7 weeks after sweet Audrey went to Jesus.

I hate how there is no human reason for these children to die. They just do. And it terrifies me.

Everyday, when I head to the cradle of my babe, I have to ignore the niggle of maybe this time. I know I and my children are not immune to the possibility.

No child is.

And that's why it sucks.

And that is also why there are foundations that are raising money to fund research.

Here in Australia, it's Sids and Kids. Since their conception, and the way they have raised awareness to certain contributing factors to 'cot death', the number of deaths has plummeted.

Awesome.

Their main way of raising money for this research is Red Nose Day. Every year, the last Friday in June is the day you go around looking like a dork with a clown nose on your face. Or on your car. Or, even, as they did a couple of years ago, on your house.

I am not making this up.

Since I don't leave my house very much, I chose not to buy a red nose. However, for the last three years, I have purchased magnets for my car, write James' and Luke's names on them, and leave them on my car all year. By the time the next June rolls around it's just in time... by then they have faded completely :)

It's becoming a tradition for us as a family... the yearly swapping of the noses, explaining again why sometimes babies die, but this is how we remember them and taking photos.


I like it.

For information on agencies and foundations in your area that work in the field of infant death research, click HERE.

SHINER

Eli came a-croppa two nights ago, taking a spectacular stage dive off the couch and landing face first onto a small chest of drawers. Of course, like the good, concered parent I am, I made sure I'd cuddled him and made sure his eye still worked etc etc...

And then tried to get photos, because it had already come up bruised, the foretaste of a wikid black eye.

Adam thought it sick, but I know you all know better.

Anyway, we here round these parts know how hard it is to get Eli to sit still for anything. Especially photos.

So today, two days after he did it, I finally decided to hold him down.

This is the best of two seperate attempts.

Please notice the strategy of Food as Bribery.

Please do not notice the self art.

Then, I had a stroke of genius.

I strapped him into his car seat.

It still took about eleventy three photos to get this one.

I'd say this is the first of many...

But it isn't.

He's already had at least 3.

Prayer Chain

At our church (and most likely yours) we have a "Prayer Chain", a phonecall based ministry that works on the premiss of "get prayer request, pray, then call the next person on the list to do the same".

At the present moment, the blogland twitterverse has been called to prayer action for a friend of a friend. Crystal Renaud, founder of Dirty Girls Ministries has asked for prayer for her friend Amy... a 24 year old dancer who suffered a severe stroke last Sunday.

She writes:

On Sunday, May 23, Amy Wooddell suffered a stroke and underwent 7.5 hours of surgery to remove the clotting in her basil artery. Additionally they found that her right vertebral artery was torn and was repaired with a stint. She awoke responsive and could even whisper her own name. However, a few hours later her brain began to bleed resulting in an emergency procedure to relieve inner cranial pressure. On Monday, May 24 she was comatose with brain function of only 3 (normal is 15) and it was uncertain that she would survive.

But she did.

On Tuesday, May 25, Amy was considered in stable condition and brain activity began to increase (between 5-7) but was still in and out of consciousness. Inner-cranial pressure had dropped from high 20s on Sunday night down to 1 on Tuesday night. She is responding through blinking (made direct eye contact with Jonny (her husband) on Tuesday night and on Wednesday morning blinked 5 times in response to “Amy, blink a bunch of times if you want Jonny to buy you lots of diamonds” and 3 times for “I love you”). And she is now breathing on her own 8 out of 18 breaths a minute.

But she’s been unable to move her limbs. A recent MRA is showing some blood in near her brain stem which is hindering motor skill movement.

Amy is only 24 years old and has been married to Jonny for 4 months. She is also an accomplished dancer.

While we are seeing God’s healing touch on Amy, we know she has a long ways to go and any permanent damage is still unknown. We are asking for your prayers for Amy’s complete healing.

More information can be found HERE or by following her husband’s updates on twitter.

Blank

Well, not really. Lots of thoughts and ideas, but no way of knowing if I'll be able to write them down coherently. I may have to write some drafts first.

I don't really want this to be another "mom blog". I want people to know me, the way I think, the way I feel, the way I over analyze, how I can pick one word out of a bible verse and wonder why they used that one, because it makes it so much deeper... I want to be authentic, I want this place to be somewhere people enjoy being, I want it to be fun and light-hearted, but with depth...

I want people to know God resides here.

And yet, I don't know exactly how. I read some amazing blogs. People who write beautifully. Some people are side splittingly funny. Some make me think. Others make me cry every time. Some people do all of the above.

Who am I in this online community?

I have the upside of being, essentially, a foreigner... in that most people who I read are American. I use words that make them scratch their heads, I sound funny and eat weird food combinations. So there's that, but is it enough?

Where do I fit? What does my voice sound like here? What's my niche? Would staying as random and flit about-y as I am naturally work in blogland, or do I need to have a cohesive and coherent platform?

(Anyone else have "free to be me" running in their head about now?)

And of course, now I'm second guessing myself, and whether I just sound like an attention junkie. Why am I even blogging?

Because I love the people here. Truly. And I want to be a part of the awesome things I know God has planned for everyone involved. If there is anything that excites me to the point of wanting to jump out of my skin, it's the thought of what we here in the blogland twitterverse have coming up in the next few years. What is our God up to?? It seems that all of a sudden, without my even trying, in the last few months, I have come across, and fallen into relationship with some of the most amazing, authentic, God honouring, exciting, anointed, world shaking history makers, and I feel something shifting, moving, and preparing.

I want to be a part of it.

But it feels just out of my reach, because I just don't know what my part in it is.

I don't want to miss out.

I Love a Sunburnt Country...

Photo credits: My friend Renee Orr (unless otherwise noted)

A land of sweeping plains...

Of ragged mountain ranges...

Of droughts and flooding rains.

Photo Credit: Australian Archives

Photo Credit: Brad Fleet

I love her far horizons...

I love her jewel-sea...

Photo mine

Photo mine

Photo mine

Her beauty and her terror...

Photo mine

Photo mine

Photo mine

Photo mine

The wide brown land for me!

(Stanza 2 of "My Country" by Dorothea McKellar)

Eli...

Never sits still.

Ever.

He has attitude.

He is determined.

He's silly.

Into everything.

But sometimes, he'll stop, give you attention

(I get a kiss every morning)

And then, sometimes, as an added bonus, he'll give me...

...this

to keep forever.

My Kid is Awesome.

Adam started Operation: Skinny-Up on Monday, and yesterday was his first work out session with my brother, who is a trained PT for the Navy.


He's a bit buff.

Adam called me on the way home and said three words

"He's a bastard."

Anyway, he got home and went promptly to the shower, sitting down in it with the stream of water flowing over him.

Eli, thinking that Daddy was having a bath, figured he wasn't doing it right, after seeing me have a few, and bought him a book.

How is that for awesomesauce?

Brown Paper Packages Tied Up With String...

These...


Are now on their way here, wrapped in love & frindship.

"Time or distance cannot touch

the friendships of the heart"

~Anon

This, that and the other...

I have no idea what was up with Blogger yesterday, but every time I tried to fix the spacing it got worse. Hopefully today will be better.

I was wondering... you know how over there on the left under that dapper and debonair photo of The Hubsand are external links to my Xanga from when I wrote out the A Thousand Times thingie I did?

Well, what would you say to me transferring it all over to here, much the same way? Once a month, there'd bee 100 things listed. I'd do it all in one hit, but for some reason, I can't copy/paste here, and it takes a.long.time. to write them all out :)

Just a thought. Would you be interested?

Also, I'm going to start a Aussie-ism Thesaurus type thing up, if I can decide which is the best way to do it. Should I, once a week cover a word, a phrase and a behaviour and put them under a category, or should I just keep adding to a single page in alphabetical order? What do you think?

I pick my camera up in a fortnight (two weeks, for the un-colonial) so I'll be able to take UP TO DATE!! pictures of The Multitude, and even show you a little of where I live. I love where I live. It's prettiful, in a rugged sort of way.

Adam began his new diet/workout It's-Time-To-Get-Skinny regime today. He's attempted this many times in the past, but this time, I truly believe he's serious about it. He's excited. He sat down with my brother, who is a P.T for the Navy and worked out (ha! get it?!) an exercise plan that will not only produce results quickly, but not over do it and cause problems which will set him back. Stress fractures are a high possibility for Adam at the moment if he does too much all at once, so I'm glad Rob is taking that into consideration. The last thing we need is for Adam to lose heart this time.

I've been having fun buying up new t-shirts for Adam to wear once he has lost his weight. He likes the cartoon ones, so it's been so fun trying to find ones that suit his personality, and in-joke status for us. So far, I've found Monty Python, Seseme Street, The Muppets, Transformers... all I need is Astro Boy and Smurfs.

Ummm.... this is just a brain dump post, can you tell?

My baby is adorable.

My twoandahalf year old is seriously pushing boundaries.

My oh-so-nearly 4 year old is beautiful... but becoming increasingly shrill in direct response to the twoandahalf year old.

My 7.2 year old is recovering well from surgery, even if it does sound like someone is pinching her nose when she talks.

My 7.1 year old is AT.I.TUDE.

My just-about 10 year old is hormonal and everything that goes along with it.

I need to tidy bedrooms and clean the bathroom.

I'll be more interesting tomorrow.