More odds & ends

• It's dh's cousin's son's birthday today. His 13th birthday. He is 7 months older than Katie would have been, had she been born as scheduled in mid-November 1998. (Another cousin's son was born the following April. At every family gathering, I look from one boy to the other, trying to imagine Katie right in between.) I went to his mom's baby shower just days after announcing my pregnancy with Katie, & everyone fussed over me almost as much as the guest of honour. The tables were set with pink & blue plates, & I remember SIL insisting that I eat from a pink plate, because she wanted a niece. : ) 13 years. A teenager. YIKES.


• Maybe it's just the age I'm at, being over the hump of (gulp) 50 now, but suddenly I am seeing books & articles about women over 50 everywhere. The latest is a collection of essays by Canadian women aged 50 & up, edited by Shari Graydon, called "I Feel Great About My Hands" (in a nod to Nora Ephron's book from a few years back, "I Feel Bad About My Neck"). The Toronto Star ran an interview with Graydon in the Saturday paper, along with an excerpt from the book, written by Mary Walsh. If you're not Canadian, you may not know who Mary Walsh is; those of us north of the border know her well from This Hour Has 22 Minutes, and particularly as her most famous character, Marg Delahunty, Princess Warrior. I can hear her voice in my head as I read. Priceless.


• Stillbirth is in the news: the respected medical journal The Lancet has published a series of articles on the subject. I haven't read them all yet, but I know about them, thanks to a page 3 article in last Thursday's Globe and Mail (followed by one on Friday in The Toronto Star. (Warning: even on a topic as sad as stillbirth, some of the comments are truly reprehensible.) My one quibble about the articles is that they tend to focus on the high rate of stillbirth among Aboriginal and developing world women. I don't want it to sound like I think that it's only worth writing about if it happens to white middle class North American women. It's important to reduce the number of stillbirths everywhere, & the rates are, sadly, much higher in these particular populations. But too many people think stillbirth is something that, if it happens at all these days (& many people are surprised that it does), it happens in developing countries. Newsflash: It happens. To all of us. Being a white, middle class North American may be a privileged position in many, many respects, but it's absolutely no guarantee that you're "safe" when it comes to stillbirth. A lesson that many of us have learned from bitter experience. :(