President Obama's Spotify Playlist

Yesterday, fooling around with the hand-me-down iphone my children gave me, I clicked on a big S and found myself in a thing called Slate which proclaimed:

Barack Obama's Summer Spotify Playlist is Suprisingly Wonderful

This was amazing because I love surprisingly wonderful things.

So I clicked again.

Cutting the umbilical

We long for our children’s love and approval just as they long for ours.

But now: they are ascendant, we fading; 

Our stars passing

In the heavens before that long dark night. 

And just as our new selves are struggling to be born, their new selves are struggling to be born. 

We have always defined ourselves in opposition to each other and none more than that part of ourselves than grows outside us, independent and separate from ourselves. 

They are our light. If we shine, it is in their caressing luminescence. 

(As they shine in ours.)

The umbilical. It runs both ways: from us to them and them to us. 

For each of us to be free, each of us must be free.

- J. Chu (1932)

HUMOR: One is for Orange Juice, One is for Milk by Susan Richardson

There is only one thing more exciting, more educational and more frustrating than a first pregnancy, and that is explaining the second, third or fourth pregnancies to the end products of the previous ones.

a humorous essay on motherhood

One is for Orange Juice, One is for Milk

 by  Susan Richardson

       There is, first of all, the classic, time honored method of making the big announcement to the other children. It usually goes something like this,

       “Mommy and Daddy have a wonderful surprise for you. There is a baby in Mommy’s tummy!”  I told them with great enthusiasm. Rock, intent as any two year old in his Karo syrup based homemade play-doh, look up and said, “Did you eat one?”