I know I owe this blog a whole bunch of posts, but I seem to be permanently behind or too tired to form coherent sentences atm, so this is going to be another love you and leave you quick hit.
Yesterday we had our not-back-to-school picnic. It was fab – 8 families came, 4 times the turnout of last year 😉 It only rained a little bit and there were many bubbles blown, and some hardy souls even paddled! I have pics and vids, but they will have to way til I’ve checked who is in what and what I can blog.
Then afterwards it was rookie lifeguard. Tim picked Small up from the beach, and Big and I sauntered towards the swimming pool. Just as we got there she said ‘do you have a bobble? Oh and I need clothes!’
Aargh. So baby off hip and into wrap where she instantly fell asleep so that we could double time it up the hill into town and into Peacocks. She doesn’t have shorts of any description and that was what she’d been told she needed for swimming in, so we found a pair of pjs with shorts and a vest T shirt. £4. I did wonder whether it ought to be a proper T shirt with sleeves, but we decided they would do and hotfooted it back to the pool in time for her to be poolside and waiting at 4pm.
And of course, yes, the T shirt needs to have sleeves. Would it kill these ppl to write out the requirements at the beginning of the course and hand them out? Slightly cross now, although I daresay she’ll use the vest T for sleeping in, and she’s got other old Ts that she can swim in next week.
On the way home, eventually, we passed the local indian takeaway, which has a sign outside about the Pakistan floods. Mindful of both the #Blogladesh campaign, and Ellen’s recent article on children and the news we took a look at the numbers.
20 million children homeless. 6 million in severe danger of death through malnutrition.
They are big numbers. They don’t mean anything much to me, and they certainly don’t mean anything to Big. So we had a think about how we could think about them. There’s about 60 million ppl in this country. So if 20 million of them were homeless – that’s one in three.
1/3 rd of this country with nowhere to live. Big worked out the maths. She looked shocked. She worked out the numbers where the children were concerned as well and we talked about developing countries v the developed world. She’s rather fascinated by the Victorians and the industrial revolution, and brought up the comparison herself that perhaps developing countries are more like that historical period. Not like living in this country.
It didn’t hugely upset her. I think the numbers are too big to grasp, even when you make them into fractions that you can look at around you. It’s too remote, even when you look at pictures of starving children with flies around them. There are no magic wands we can wave, or incantations a la Potter world to rescue these ppl.
We give to charity, not least by buying lots of stuff from the local red cross and taking our stuff there to be recycled where possible. We try to tread softly on this world – downsized to one car which often goes days without being used, and we walk where possible. I know we have too many children – I am trying to minimise soa’s impact by using cloth nappies and handmedown baby stuff.
But it’s not enough. And I don’t know what would be.
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