Tag: childhood
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Inimitable Spider
Phiddipus audax, the Bold Jumping Spider, on a Prickly Pear pad. He was doing a threat display for me as I leaned in to take his portrait. The audacity of the wee beast! To take on a human thousands of times his size! You have to respect the unflagging courage of it. It’s no wonder…
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You can’t tell a horse
A friend and I were talking, and she was telling me her planned technique for wrangling a young steer. Farmgirl is using a variant on the Johnson method for horsebreaking, at least as I understand it, to get the steer used to her being on the end of the line, and in time and with…
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Scorpions and Cherries
One of the benefits of having been a military brat is having been there, done that. I was chatting with a colleague about the vagaries of military life, and assuring her that it had done me no harm to move while I was young. She is waiting for her husband’s first orders, packing house,…
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The Caution Bump
I was out on a lovely trail the other day when I came across temptations. The trail was parallel to another trail, and in between them was a small creek. At one point I thought I would be fun to cross over to the other trail as I was reaching my self-imposed time limit…
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Mother’s Touch
The hardest thing to do is to do nothing at all. I was reading an article about medicine, medical care, mental health, and psychotherapy, and the motto of ‘first do no harm’ which is part of the foundation of medical ethics. The Hippocratic Oath contains the phrase “abstain from doing harm” and the idea is…
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The Case of the Pink Stain
Early one morning, the scene of the crime was discovered by the woman of the house, who was alarmed by the color and persistence of the evidence. What follows is an accurate recreation of the investigation, interrogation, and ultimate outcome of the case. As I was cleaning the house, I came across something mysterious on the…
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Love is… Motherhood
I am a mother, four times over, so I can speak to the ways that love forms my relationship with my children, and how I’ve parented over the years. I’m not a father, hence the title. Some of these things may resonate with fathers, but men are different than women (quelle suprise!) so fatherhood is,…
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He’s Average Height… For a Boy
My blog readers know I have a son, who goes by the Little Man around here. He’s 11 1/2 now, and he’s all boy. I’m not saying that to say anything other than he’s a boy. It’s not that my girls don’t make fart and burp jokes, they do. They just aren’t… well, this morning…
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At the junction of Science and Motherhood
One of life’s little joys – and there are many such joys in my life, even the small, strange ones I can’t explain – is talking to my children about what I’m doing, and learning. I anticipate that continuing even when I’m not actively in classes. Learning doesn’t end when school does. Which is why…
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Beautiful America: Growing Up Outside
One of the ways I have been blessed is to have spent an inordinate amount of my childhood running wild in the out of doors. My children, for over a decade, grew up on a small farm in New Hampshire, and I was able to capture some great memories for posterity with my camera. Kids…
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Childhood Memories
To begin with, I was a military brat from the tender age of four days. We rarely lived anywhere for a full year until the year I was ten, when Dad left the military, and we moved to Alaska. Added to that my parents’ preference for rural life and I don’t remember living in a…