Anyone else force themselves to go to sleep just so you’ll stop stuffing your face? Anyone?
“Where did you get your pirate leg?” — a seven-year-old boy to Aaron, at the playground. Aaron has found that kids really want to know WHERE the leg came from. After the kid was satisfied by Aaron’s answers, he commiserated with Aaron’s injury by showing off his own various scratches and bruises.
“Butter a piece of toast while peeing.” — Jason Good, on 22 new awesome things you will do as a parent.
“Zebras like to eat, but not be eaten themselves.” — what the internet told me when i asked the rather open-ended question “what are zebras like?”
[video]
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more moms through the ages
My mom’s own mom died young, just after I was born. She died so shortly after my birth there are only a handful of pictures of the two of us together. For most of my life this piece of family history—my grandmother’s early death—was just part of the catalog of things I knew but didn’t spend a lot of time contemplating.
Only in the last year of raising my own girls have I started to consider the impact of becoming motherless at 18, as my mom did.
I don’t know what my grandmother was doing while my mom was in labor with me, but she was probably too ill with cancer to do as my mom did, which was to keep vigil on the first floor of the hospital after I kicked everyone out of the laboring room. Several states away she wasn’t able to post a handmade Welcome Home sign for her granddaughter. Those things really mattered to me, as did learning how unexpected and unique and different and indescribable my mother’s love as a grandmother was.
I can’t imagine being a mother without having my mother a phone call away.
I can’t imagine not sharing Josie stories and Georgia laughs.
I can’t imagine not seeing my mom sprinkle leaves on Georgia’s head, comb Josie’s hair, dole-out ice cubes at their request.
How did my mom do it without her mom? How is my mom such a capable, loving, admirable, and show-stopping mother? I don’t know, but I am so glad to have her with me.
I wish I could give my mom more time with her own mom, so my grandma could see what a fantastic mom and grandma her daughter turned out to be.
…
Of this photo of me, my mom, her mom, and her mom’s mom, my mom says:
Why did we only take one photo? Gabrielle is howling and Gramma is looking sideways, concerned. Only my mom and I are looking dead on at the camera. It is February, 1976; Gabrielle is just born, two months old. My Gramma, Josephine, always said she was the year plus nine, so she is 85. I shared a room with her until I was 12. My mother was 44 when I was born, and she will be dead in five months. Her mother will live almost two years longer, until 1978. There are four generations on this couch on Prospect Drive, but why did we take only one shot?
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for udo.
Two brown hares (Lepus europaeus) boxing, and a third looking on, Hertfordshire. Picture: Mark Hamblin/2020VISION / Rex Features
(via allcreatures)
by Raymond Abiego & Jean-Claude Peretz (France, 1970)
3 models…divided into 4 parts…26568 combinations.
from Smoota’s Nightstand
Being bitten by a burro when I was around seven was my most important memory for several years.
I hold no grudge.
El Biblio-Burro. Es una iniciativa de un maestro (en mayúsculas), que se llama Luis Soriano Borges, que recorre los pueblos más escondidos de Colombia para enseñar los libros a los niños. El burro se llama Beto y la burra Alfa.
The Biblio-Donkey. This is an initiative by a teacher named Luis Soriano Borges, who travels through the most distant and hidden villages of Colombia to bring books to children. The male donkey is named Beto and the female is Alfa.
(via diaposon)
“The end goal is not facts about sharks. The end goal is the process.” — Shanon Greenfield, a teacher at The Blue School, where students chose their own curriculum and figure out how to learn it by “set[ting] goals: Pick an aquarium, figure out how to get there, plan what to do while there and afterward. By mid-January, they were pondering transportation options: school bus (free) or ferry (one student thought it was most direct). They set a deadline for the trip, and in February visited the New York Aquarium in Coney Island — by bus.”