The Babies Are Coming

Two weeks ago, we met some new friends in person for (mostly) the first time. One of them was a baby. We’ve spoken of them occasionally since then, but not constantly, and not really of the baby. Then out of the blue today, Michael made up a chant and started singing it in the car:

Winifred – Winifred – the baby in California!

Speaking of babies,  M & J cannot get enough of these two videos:

(They saw this trailer before The Fantastic Mr. Fox – I didn’t take them to see it – Katie did. But I showed it to them tonight, and they exclaimed, “We saw this!”)

I’m going to make a modest prediction, right here, and right now: this Babies doc is going to be a huge hit, relative to other documentaries.. I’ve scanned a few websites where the trailer’s been posted and people are just crazy about it ( “I ovulated five times watching it….”) I love it, too. I love the babies, and I love the free-rangedness of it – the babies interacting with goats and roosters and sticking their hands in a dog’s mouth and being carried on a motorcycle and slurping water out of a stream and just smashing with rocks.

Everyone’s focusing on the babies, naturally enough. But I’m fascinated by the mothers’ faces too, what we can glimpse of them in the trailer.

(Who knows…it might even overcome my resistance to Christian-indie groupthink and prompt me to check out Surfjan Stevens for real)

Here’s the film’s website.

And the Facebook fan page.

Oh, and the Brian Cox Masterclass:

To be or not to be…that is the question..

Yeah…it is…

Speaking of babies and parents and life and such. A word.

I am starting to receive seasonally-inspired words of sympathy.  As in, people quite naturally and kindly thinking that because it is Christmas and because we are hitting hard up against almost one year, this must be dreadful and I must be depressed. I am appreciative and grateful.  But I’m not depressed. I get pangs and jolts and questions, but no despair or depression. I am thinking about a lot of things, I am extremely focused on helping my boys be excited and joyful about life, just as their dad would have it, because that’s how he was.  I am mostly centered on us all focusing, in gratitude, on God, on Jesus Christ, Lord of life and conqueror of death, the Word made Flesh.

In a situation like this, children make it the hardest – imagine  sitting down with your child and doing what I had to do the night of February 3 – perhaps you’ve had to do it. You know. But they also make it the best – the most clear  – on how to live from that point on.  Should their lives be defined by loss or by promise? You decide. Or better yet, let God do it.

‘Go back and tell John what you have seen and heard: the blind see again, the lame walk, lepers are cleansed, and the deaf hear, the dead are raised to life, the Good News is proclaimed to the poor and happy is the man who does not lose faith in me.’

–Gospel, 12/16/09