Entropy

We must find a magician, now. A magician with a spell, who knows a spell, who can go to spell lessons. The spell must stop Death. It must stop the bad winds that go around and around. It must stop earthquakes and the Hunters who hunt. It must stop people from dying and bring back the dead. It must stop hunger, and not having enough money for food. It must stop diseases that kill and sharp things that wound. It must stop the bad things and there must only be good things on the Earth. It must stop the cutting down of the rainforests and the spoiling of animals' homes. It must stop it, it must stop to all, it must stop it now, and there must be no more Death.

So that babies can continue to be born, it must make the Earth larger, and the Sun larger, and further away - the sky and space go on forever, so there will be room for a larger World. And there must be no more Death.

Heaven is not good enough. She doesn't want to die. She wants to stay here forever. She wants all the people to stay here. She wants to meet them, the dead people - we must bring them back. She doesn't want to die when she's old. She wants to stop the tiredness of old people so that they don't want to die either. She wants to bring them back.

And there must be no more Death.

Apart from that, Mrs Lincoln, how did you enjoy the play?

I ought to check, one day, how often I use that subject line.

This morning - after Linnea woke and Rob gave her breakfast, and then Emer woke and yelled for me to give her breakfast, but before I got dressed - the midwife came. We had a nice chat. My blood pressure continues to be ridiculously low, and my baby's heartbeat "sounds like a boy," but Emer knows it's a girl anyway.

I am, as I suspected, ridiculously healthy, and my life is going very well. If I can sort my SPD out I'll be laughing.

After the visit, I got dressed, and then came downstairs; Linnea said "What happens after people die?" and I said "I don't know, love," and then we had about an hour and a half of sobbing, running away crying with her hands over her ears, coming back to my lap, coming up with solutions and ways to stop Death, demands that I personally stop it, more solutions, more crying, and eventually exhausted yawning-and-sobbing-wordlessly.

Somehow I got everyone dressed and toothclean and cooked lunch, and shortly before two we headed off to the post office and the bus-stop.

The bus trip was complicated; my SPD means I can't go upstairs, but the bus was full, so Linnea had to stand holding a bar, I had to sit on the stairs, and Emer had to hold onto me. There were two buggies getting off at one point and so little space that I had to go up the (steep) step, and what was worse, I had to get back down again. My right hip does not like steps, especially not steep steps down. But after the town centre there were seats, after a fashion.

We got off without incident and went to the library to return books and pay fines, and then the short walk through the park to ERAPA, which included passing under a small avenue of trees in strong winds - a branch considerably longer than Rob is tall and thicker than my arm came off one, and clunked against the fence; thankfully it didn't so much as pass over our heads but I was pretty shaken by it. I managed not to alarm Emer, though.

Both children thoroughly enjoyed their time there; Linnea took on the Big Boys who had scared her and Emer last time and I think gave as good as ever she got, and Emer was much better able to evade them and report them, this time, and also to choose to play elsewhere. She spent a while doing GeoMag stuff (I must get her more GeoMag, she adores it) and we played a lovely ballbearing-fishing game with different lengths of strings of magnets, stealing each others' hauls and so on.

And for me, it was really, genuinely ok. I was so shaken by the flying bloody LOG overhead that I had no anxiety left for the social situation, so once I was able to speak properly at all I was able to speak to people, AND I remembered people's actual correct names and everything. Once I can start speaking it's almost always ok.

We were given an Aloe Vera plant in a yoghurt pot. I am hoping very much that instead of killing it, we can add it to our little array of growing things in the front room - we definitely have an avocado stone that sprouted (it will never fruit, of course), basil which is mysteriously not dying, the aloe vera, and some pots with seeds in - tomato and basil so far, and radishes to follow shortly. We shall have to see what we actually manage to grow, but it's the best light in the house, so you never know.

I never had potplants, growing up; my mother has a serious thing about wildflowers, uncultivated flowers, and just isn't terribly interested in cultivated ones, though she enjoys visiting gardens with them in. She has no interest in living with cultivated plants of any kind. About the closest she's ever come is transplanting wild bluebells in her garden on Aran.