April 25, 2008 by Barbara.

Remember when Rick Mercer and Belinda Stronach launched the Spread the Net (YouTube video) campaign? They wanted us to think of malaria but that seemed an exotic disease that happened to people far away. Well, it still is a disease that Canadians don’t worry about for the most part. Mosquitoes, for us, are an annoying part of summer, but they’re a deadly fact of life sub-Saharan Africa and elsewhere in the world. It’s World Malaria Day today. I encourage you stop by Spread the Net and make a donation to purchase a net for $10 or learn a bit from Roll Back Malaria.

Here are a few malaria facts from Spread the Net:

*  Every 30 seconds a child dies of malaria.
*  Malaria is the single biggest killer of African children under the age of five and accounts for one in five of all childhood deaths in Africa.
*  Malaria in pregnant women can lead to low birth weight, anaemia and a greater risk of death to their newborn babies.

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April 25, 2008 by Barbara.

Skirts have been the subject of a few conversations lately. I don’t recall how often Reid wore skirts when she was small enough to require assistance in the bathroom but I suspect it wasn’t often. Skirts seem to be “big girl” clothes to me and so I suspect she mostly wore dresses, pants and shorts. I’ve been thinking about these things because I noticed Reid pulling her skirt down with her tights one morning. I interrupted the process and told her to only pull down the tights. How can she be nearly 4 without knowing this? What other important woman-knowledge have I forgotten to impart?

With the unseasonably warm weather - though I’m not sure that we can say “seasonable” anymore with the wild fluctuations that we’re seeing - Reid wore a dress and her ever-so-cute white socks with lace at the top. She refused to have them cuffed over and so left the house wearing odd almost-knee socks and a big smile at having evaded the fashion faux pas I’d tried to foist upon her. I mention the socks because they aren’t so white anymore, more striped like a zebra from slouching down than their original pure white like a unicorn. This is what happened to all of her socks last summer, too. I knew it would happen to the fancy pair, too, but keeping the socks unworn in the drawer just so that they would be clean didn’t seem to be a viable option. When we picked Reid up from daycare that night, one of the teachers suggested that Reid might do well to wear shorts under her dresses to “keep things clean down there.” I don’t know why it didn’t come up last year but I hadn’t thought of it and no one had mentioned it. I’ve mentioned the need to Grandma Joyce and she’ll make up spare shorts. We discussed whether she should make bloomers instead but she thought shorts could be worn more often and I thought of the time it takes me to get just the waistband elastics sewn. Grandma Joyce leaves the waistband elastics to me since I have Reid right there in my house but I’m a procrastinator. Sometimes Reid outgrows her clothes before I sew the elastics. I think that might mean I’m a bad mother, letting her wear clothes with safety pins in them.

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