28% of children in my birth year died of a preventable cause.

Twenty-eight percent.  Just shy of 1/3.

1,566,900 of them.

 In the USA alone.

One million, five hundred sixty-six thousand, nine hundred.

In just one year: 1989.

From a completely preventable cause.

1,566,900 is a very large number. To give it a little perspective, consider that the total number of US service members killed or wounded in the Vietnam war (1964-1975) was 243,523.

This means that more than a MILLION MORE children died in ONE single year, than all the United States casualties in the entire ten-year Vietnam war.

I just…thought you should know.

I try to keep things mostly sweetness and light around here…but I needed to share this with y’all. It’s something I don’t talk about much, but live with every day. 

Joy

As you live your life, you may ask yourself what you will remember in the future, what moments will stay with you and what will vanish...and I don't have an answer for you.

But this year I had the chance to look at a photo album with my grandpa. He probably hadn't looked at the album in 60 years, some of the people and places were hard for him to identify with certainty. The minute we turned the page to this photo, though, he lit up. "you put a firecracker in the tube, and then a rock, and it shoots the rock!" I'd swear he had the same gleeful look on his face that he had in the photo...eighty years later. 

UFO Sighting...

So in around 1998 or so? I started an afghan. I was just beginning to learn to crochet and my stitch improved so much over the course of making it that it would not be flat in any way, let alone square. So I wadded it up and ignored it for 20 years. I now have better skills and was able to make it much flatter, if not much more square.

But now that it is over, I don’t know what to do with the rest of my life….

I wonder if the post of Dread Pirate Roberts is vacant...