Weekly Photo Challenge: Merge

 

I’m late with this one because the summer holiday weeks all merged into one.  

Rather like my children.

Take this photo:

I’m almost certain it is Spud because it’s taken from the left – my hospital bed was on the left wall when I had him and on the right when I had Tory Boy.

Is it terrible that I can recall the position of my beds after childbirth but not what my new children looked like?

The problem is that both boys looked like their father at birth which means they also looked like each other.  It’s been sixteen/twenty-two years and my memory isn’t what it once was, and that wasn’t much.  

I say Spud looked like his father and brother, but he also looked like someone else.  I had him by Caesarian and the anaesthetist (why does childbirth have so many aes?  Coincidentally, A+E stands for Accident and Emergency in the UK – the equivalent of the American ER – and accidents often result in emergencies that include childbirth nine months on.  Well it does in my family), a lovely man, held me up as the gynaecologist (see!) yanked him out.

What emerged was a fat, blue and crinkly Spud.  My first thought – I swear this is true – was, ‘Oh, he looks like the alien baby from V.’

Tell me I’m wrong:

 

V. Okay

I finally got to watch the new V last night.  It wasn’t bad.  I enjoyed it enough to sit through two episodes and set up a series link.  The hero is now a heroine (Mrs Clause, Elizabeth Mitchell) and the collaborating female journalist is now a collaborating male journalist (a creepy-looking Michael J.Foxonbotoxalike).  The vulnerable teenage girl is now a vulnerable teenage boy and…I think you might get where they’re going with it.  The priest is still male (we haven’t moved on that far since the Eighties) though he is much younger (Taken and 4400‘s Joel Gretsch).

I can’t decide if it was ripping off every sci-fi movie, series, game and cliché it could find, or paying homage to them.  The intro was straight out of Independence Day but there was a character who said as much.  There was also a scene at a warehouse with an address beginning, 44oo Whatever Street.  Spud said there was something from the game Resistance in it as well.  It could be fun spotting the references or it could become tiresome, but I suspect I’m going to watch it all anyway; though nothing could replicate (see what I did there?  Star Trek reference?  Just paying homage, honest) the shock of Diana and that jaw in the original series.

V is showing on SyFy.  You may not know the channel because, up until ten o’clock last night, it went under the name of Sci Fi.  They had a big launch that I missed because of my habit of fast forward(!)ing (don’t mind me, I am just trumpeting science fiction references in the style of the new V) the adverts.

As much as we all love science fiction, we never watch the SyFy channel; I don’t know why.  We might start, however, because there is a new series coming on called – wait for it – Painkiller Jane.  How cool is that for a title?

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Yesterday’s prompt required us to start a poem with a line from a choice of eleven, from the poetry of Norman Dubie.  I know I am supposed to take the prompts seriously but sometimes I can’t help myself.

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Poem Starting With A Line From Norman Dubie

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Her breasts filled the windows like a mouth;

her stomach blew up like yeast

and her chins went south.

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I missed my Dad yesterday so I wrote this one:

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The Last Time

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Last time I saw Dad

he lay in state, refusing

to laugh with me or

at me.  He gave me

away in that suit.  I gave

him away in that 

suit.  Too young to die;

too sick to live.  Cigarettes

did for him, at last.

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Have a great day!

Happy Birthday to My Baby (2)

I can’t believe I forgot to tell you about the first time I saw him – my memory is as bad as his.

He was born by caesarean section and the wonderful anaesthetist unexpectedly heaved me up as Spud was yanked from my body.   Did you ever watch V in the Eighties?  He looked just like the alien baby Robin gave birth to, all creased and blue and screaming; no forked tongue, thankfully.  He was a ten-pounder and there wasn’t much room in there, so it’s no wonder he was blue.  He was the biggest baby born in the hospital that week and I got loads of compliments because of it.  Odd, really, because I’m pretty sure eating for two piled the pounds on my hips, not his.  My first midwife (for Tory Boy) warned me that babies are parasites.  After twenty years of raising two children, I tend to agree.