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Wednesday, July 26, 2006

Today's camp song:

Swimming, swimming
In a swimming pool.
Whenever it's hot,
Whenever it's cold
In the swimming pool.

Breaststroke, sidestroke,
Fancy diving too.
Don't you wish
That you could have
Nothing else to do.

Now if only we had a way to show you the gestures...
8:43:00 PM

Monday, July 24, 2006

Maya has a yellow belt in karate!
5:31:00 PM

Saturday, July 22, 2006

Several years ago, Bryn started telling us about her "memory book". It's a huge book, "all squished down to fit in my head," which she can flip through to look up all sorts of things she's stored there.

From time to time, she'll underscore how truly important something is by telling us where it is in her memory book. In a viscerally literal way, it's the ongoing story of her life, as she writes it.

Tonight, in the darkness at bedtime, she happened to mention how her story begins:

I always know how much you and Mommy love me. It's written on the very first page of my memory book. It's been there since before I was born. When the doctors first put me together, I wrote it down right away.

Wow. I never imagined that becoming a parent would turn me into a character from a Borges story.

Simply breathtaking.
9:18:00 PM

Tuesday, July 18, 2006

We're grateful that Kathy's brother is a pilot and that he calls us whenever he has a Providence overnight. Thanks, Chris!
5:50:00 PM

Monday, July 17, 2006

This weekend, Kathy flew out of town for a wedding. After she got back, we all headed out to the local dairy bar for some ice cream. Driving through the woods on the way home, the kids wanted to know:

Is someone being born somewhere in the world, right this second?

Ditto for getting married, and for dying. To each question, Kathy replied, in a simple, earnest, confident voice: "Yes." (It's a big world.)

Paul, being a geek, then decided to do some estimating out loud, as follows:

• Say there are roughly 6 billion people in the world.
• And say that, on average, they each live for 60 years.
• That means every year, another 100 million are born.
• Say a year has 400 days (to make the math easy).
• So there'd be 250,000 people born every day!

At this point, we pulled into the driveway, and the family -- blown away either by the hugeness of the numbers, or the tediousness of the calculations -- headed quietly into the house.

PS: A quick check with the US Census Bureau confirms that this envelope-free math wasn't all that far off the mark:

births	deaths
130,860,569	56,579,396	/year
358,522	155,012	/day
4.1	1.8	/second

It's a big world, and getting bigger every second.
3:36:00 PM

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