May 08, 2003
You Got'cher Treat, Right?entry,
I really did plan to update this little e-pistle on Monday in celebration of Web Comics Awareness Day, but it was a really, really busy weekend. Still, what with the footnote and the bonus comic, I don't think you needed me to mention the event in the entry for you to enjoy it.
I do hope you linked over to the hub and checked out a few of the WCA 2003 offerings. If you did, and you got a few 404s, those pages have been posted now. Apparently there were massive update lags on one of the KeenSpace servers... lag is gone now.
I mentioned my busy weekend. We blessed my son in church, and a brother-in-law and his family came in from out of town for the event. They arrived Saturday afternoon (the same Saturday on which I inked 12 rows of Schlock, lets-hear-it-for-me), and had a pair of foster children in tow. This meant that there were four adults and ten children under the age of 9 in my house. Five of them were under the age of three.
The 2-year-old foster boy broke my heart. He'd been taken from his home by social services for neglect, apparently, although he seemed healthy enough. Turns out he's healthy because he knows more about foraging and hoarding than most adults. I spent some time watching him carefully, and realized that he did not like being forced to sit in a high-chair to eat because it meant that he could not range freely and steal food to save for later. All that food on the table, and he couldn't get at it.
When I found his cache on the windowsill behind the drapes I nearly wept. Then I managed to convince him to keep a cup and a bowl back there, and he seemed pretty happy. Nuts, raisins, cheerios, banana chips... he ate it all. Oh, and he always made a point of making sure that his 1-year-old brother had something to eat. He took TWO of whatever was offered, and then popped one of them in his brother's hand.
I'll probably never see him again, but he taught me an awful lot about how fortunate I was to have good parents, and how fortunate my kids are to have me. It was a lesson worth learning. It's a crying shame it has to be taught at all...