Proud to be a part of this village

Earlier this week there was an Oprah show about mothers that featured some bloggers. Several of them I know and respect and I was curious how Oprah would handle it. My bloggers (Yes. My people. My bloggers.) were great and most everyone did well given the circumstances. The show itself, however, was mostly fluff. Really, when you only have 40 minutes, there isn't a lot of time for much more than plugging a new TV series, some books, playing with Skype and telling all the ladies in the audience to LOOK UNDER YOUR CHAIR for a new Flip video camera. Rich seemed annoyed that the show even existed because he said it just trivialized things and oversimplified a lot of what goes on for parents. We get it. You don't shower, your baby ran out of diapers two days ago and you haven't slept more than four hours straight in years. But we all knew that before the show even started. Rich and I had a bit of a heated discussion about the whole thing because I think that Oprah does a service for sparking people's interest in blogs and communities of parents even if it's all fluff while he was saying if they can't do it right they shouldn't have done it at all. Oprah didn't get to the root of why people blog.

On that same day on the other side of the country from us, a sweet little girl named Madeline passed away. Previous to this week, I had only heard of Heather Spohr from a few other bloggers and she hadn't made it into my RSS reader rotation. But she always seemed like a sweet woman and the people who call her a friend I consider to be a high caliber of folks. This week I have been simply blown away by the support that has gone out to the Spohr family. I can't imagine the heart ache of losing a child at only 17 months, particularly when there was little to no warning other than the same complications they have dealt with over and over from her premature birth.

The Spohrs had already intended on walking in the March for Babies walk this month for Maddie but since Tuesday alone the donations for March of Dimes in Maddie's name have gone from a goal of $3000 to over $22,000 (and still climbing). Because of the incredible amount of traffic, you can't actually get to Heather's blog. But other bloggers have linked to the March of Dimes page for donations, created heartfelt tributes to the family, setup PayPal accounts and mailboxes to help offset funeral costs and even organized volunteers to bring dinner to the Spohr family for the next several weeks. There have been YouTube video tributes and Blogher articles about it. The Today Show blog sent condolences to the family after hearing that Maddie (who loved her some Matt Lauer) had passed.

Maddie's death breaks my heart, but the community that has rallied around her family simply amazes me. How could you do that without the Internet? It's more than one church could do. It's more than one SCA baronial fundraiser could accomplish. It is the manifestation of how technology is used for good, to truly create a global village of people who don't even know you but care about you and are worried about you and want you to be okay.

If you'd like to get to know Heather a little, you can visit her Twitter page or her Flickr photostream until her blog is back up. And in the meantime, be sure to reach out to someone you love, either in person or through the magic of technology. For Maddie.

2nd trimester dance party!

Today was our second ultrasound appointment and I'm pleased to say we still have an active little fetus with an active little heartbeat, giant alien head and spindly limbs flipping about inside my belly. Even in utero, this child has decided to be obstinate in that it took us a good 45 minutes of moving around, coughing, lifting one hip and nearly doing jumping jacks to get the baby to move to the right position to measure whatever they were messing with. I was just happy to get 45 minutes of BabyCam while we waited.

I'm at 13 weeks 1 day, so the baby is still too small to really see a gender. I keep thinking of Robin Williams exclaiming "my God our kid is hung like a bear!" and the nurse saying "that's the umbilical cord, Mr. Williams." Feel free to peruse the photos by clicking on the image below. (And yeah, they do like space aliens at this stage.)

In other news I finally have back some of the energy that has been sapped out of me the last few months. I'm staying up past 9pm and I might even log onto World of Warcraft to run around with my woefully neglected hunter.

In commemoration of making it this far, I've created a playlist for us all. I figure since I finally have some energy back we should at least use it by gettin' our boogie on. I hope you enjoy it.

2nd Trimester Dance Party (created using OpenTape)

Shucking corn under the house

Thursday morning Rich flushed the toilet upstairs and the kitchen sink downstairs filled with water. I spent the morning bailing out the sink while he finished his shower. And then I sent an email to my father. Over Thursday and Friday my father and I spent a fair amount of time under the house. The plumbing issues involved moving the clean out from under the house through the foundation, using Daddy's auger to investigate the clog and cutting out a five foot section of iron pipe. But those details aren't very important.

The important parts of this adventure were all the little moments with my father. Daddy has a pretty intense paranoia streak so that when we met a significant resistance in the clean out line, he was convinced that our contractors from eight months ago had sabotaged our plumbing. He went down a list of every worker on that he'd ever had a conflict with, and that's not a short list.

We marveled at the strength of plumbers "back in the day" who could heft length of iron pipe around under houses. I waited while my father straightened pipe edges with the circular saw over and over and over until I worried there wouldn't be much pipe left. I learned that when my sense of smell is this keen, it's not the greatest to spend two days around raw sewage, burning PVC and iron and plumbing cement. And we spent a lot of time "shucking corn."

My father tells a story about a farmer that hired a farm hand to shuck corn. He told him to throw the rotten ears in one pile to be ground up and the ones that were still okay but not edible for people into a pile for the hogs. When the farmer came back at lunch, the farm hand had barely made two pitiful piles of corn. The farmer shook his head and decided to at least let the poor kid finish out the day but told him just to shuck all the ears into one pile. The farmer came back at the end of the day and the farm hand had made a mountain of corn! When he asked the farm hand why he had done so little that morning and so much that afternoon, the farm hand shrugged and said "all those decisions were slowing me down."

In any project our family undertakes we spend a lot of time deciding just exactly what we're going to do and then a smaller chunk of time painstakingly following through with those decisions. I spent a fair amount of time this week just observing and marveling at how my father and I work together.

My father and I never had a father-daughter dance at my wedding. We don't go out for fancy dinners to celebrate special occasions. But when he's lying in a ditch trying to find the plumbing cement I can tell him "Back. Over. Down." and he'll put his hand right on it.

These are the days our memories are made of.