Category Archives: lucky

Working for Free, Full Lives: Our Family is Moving to Asia

On New Year’s Eve, 2014, our daughter Hazel was born at Wellington Hospital, by emergency caesarean section. Gosh, we were lucky. ‘You must be disappointed,’ a healthcare assistant commiserated with me the next day, assuming I would be sad that what started as a straightforward, natural labour had ended in the most dramatic of all […]

Read More

The Sacrament of Breastfeeding #6: Mastitis and the Trinity

Welcome! This is a reworking of an earlier post, from March 2013 (just so I’m not soliciting undue sympathy: I’m fine now!).  Being a woman equals being in community. The same might feel true for men (I hope it does), but I can’t write that blog post, being in possession, as I am, of two […]

Read More

The Sacrament of Pregnancy

Why a ‘sacrament’? The church has long taught that there are certain special moments where God is particularly present in our world. The ritual of baptism, the sharing of a communion meal. Different church traditions have argued about how many there are, but that seems to me to be a nonsensical question. God is particularly […]

Read More

Other People’s Grandkids [Guest]

A warm welcome today to my good friend Rob Kilpatrick, who wrote this reflection on Facebook yesterday and let me filch it for the blog. You’ll be glad you read it.   I’m incredibly lucky to be granddad to 11 wonderful kids. I don’t deserve to be but there you have it, grace upon grace. I […]

Read More

Facebook and the Silk Ring of Kvetching

This handy rule for when to complain and to whom has buzzed around my Facebook feed this week, with lots of passionate commendations: When Susan had breast cancer, we heard a lot of lame remarks, but our favorite came from one of Susan’s colleagues. She wanted, she needed, to visit Susan after the surgery, but […]

Read More

Mastitis and the Trinity

Being a woman equals being in community. The same might feel true for men (I hope it does), but I can’t write that blog post, being in possession, as I am, of two X chromosomes. One of the virtues of the mind-bending, paradoxical, beautiful, tricksy Christian doctrine of the Trinity (God is Three and One […]

Read More

Single #4: Honorary Aunts and Uncles

In Steve Biddulph‘s new book, Raising Girls, he apparently calls for an army of aunts to take their place in helping parents to raise resilient young women in a difficult era. The Guardian reports: It is a view about to be revived by bestselling author and psychologist Steve Biddulph, who is calling for an “aunties […]

Read More