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[crafty_name]

Well...my sister had her second kid on july 12. So I've been doing that stuff...goin' to women's hospital with mom, friends, sis's inlaws etc... They have this whole hospital just for birth. Its pretty weird...its like a machine, women everywhere with puffy faces in wheelchairs, on gurneys and standing around with IVs. People with balloons and

Comments

[karenleigh]

Congratulations on being an uncle again.

It's a tiger lily! I have some from my grandmother. You got the good camera. I'm all envious! I have a Canon PowerShot A70. I like it good enough though. I don't even use half the features. I'm looking forward to seeing your photos now! Take pics of everything.

[crafty_name]

Take pics of everything

Roger that. I'm up to 1000+ pics in the last 6 days. I'm rapidly runnin' out of harddrive...I'm taking about a gigabyte a day!!

[violetcontessa]

and finally caved

Say no to caves, unless you're certain their safe.

As for childbirth, if it were I giving birth, I'm with the Native Americans on this one. You don't hold anybody up, pop them out, pop the baby in the little carrier, and carry on. They are fine immediately after. I've seen it in person, and it's just amazing. You are exactly right - everything so technified ala birthdom. Eeek. My best friend had her baby in a - I don't know what's called - water birth. It was strange and it was beautiful, and she was fine, no meds, no IVs. O! Maybe she's a Native American, and her daughter, too ;-) as they were absolutely fine. Walking all around the "hospital" in 1 hour. It was something.

Congrats, Uncle Crafty.....

Beautiful photos, by the by. Ok - out for a strange movie with Johnny Depp with a girlfriend.

[crafty_name]

Yea caves are depressing..yet sublime. Living inside rocks and in holes is a really fertile topic. Its what got us here! I hope they had a good view though...or nice decorating.

My sister is toatlly all-natural - attachment parenting, vigilant over vaccines, big breast milk advocate..etc..on and on..
BUT Her two kids have been so huge she has had to have c-sections both times...and you can't really do those at home or in the swimming pool at the Y...if you get my drift..

And Thanks!

(disclaimer: I'm actually not as enthused as would be 'normal'...I tend to find little interest in the 'nominal' events of life..and more interested in some things ..some times...when they happen... ..if that makes any sense. Just my regular old knee-jerk disclaimer...my emotional reactions to things never seem to be voiceable...I instead mimic niceties. I find infants curiously small and pretty boring. Cutness seems to set in at 3 or 4 for me...I'm not into mute blobs. I just take their pictures and wait until they can talk.Its really not so gloomy...

[violetcontessa]

Indeed, caves *are* both scary and sublime, divine. I've often wondered about bears in caves.....how clever is nature! Natural decorating - tis so beautiful, and I'm certain they had a beautiful view, too.

Got it re the C-section. Youch.

Disclaimer: roger that ;-) I can't stand baby talk, either. I always try to look the other way and think of some stupid song in my head so I don't have to hear it when I *hear* baby talk....ugh.

[crafty_name]

More tiger lilys to come for many reasons...

And thanks!

(but read my benevolent curmudgeon disclaimer above if interested ;) its yet another disorder I have I call 'hyper-honesty' = a need to divulge all self-apparent deviations from what might be construed or expected as normal...its not as bad as it sounds...I hope!)

[violetcontessa]

Hyper-honesty is to be treasured.

[violetcontessa]

Beautiful. Ants are so clever things - do you know they "bury" their dead? Yep. They grieve - very interesting, as is this: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0061177/

P.S. Woody knows all :-)

[crafty_name]

Ants have very clever DNA and very groovy orginization and some of the trickiest tricks in nature. BUT I stomp on "grieving ants" like so many...little...tiny..ants. DO NOT DESPAIR..I'm am in no way unkind to them. Despite my cold atheism--I save ants from all varities of peril: they are provided escape routes from the wood in my fire; they are rejoined with their nestmates when hopelessly lost; they are rescued from treacherous foods...mostly sauces and liquids; they are warned when an area is about to become a deathtrap--like the sink before the water flows. How do you save drowning ants?...strain the liquid through a dish-sponge...ACT QUICKLY, EVERY SECOND COUNTS!

That said...ants, as much as I love and protect them, don't use emotions. They also don't have any appreciable free will--not just in the meta-physical sense but also in very measurable ways.... Ants have very few behavioural responses to stimuli. They only have so many 'options'. In some it has been shown that they truly have no choice (classic example=sphex wasp...in

[crafty_name]

Ants have a bunch of this too. I care for them for different reasons than I do for animals with true emotions (more on that later...smiley) . I have a few theories on body retrieval in ants..but nothing certain, yet another thing I will dig on. And even after emotions are present in an animal's psychology--grief is one of the rarest emotions (more etc..winky face). My gut reaction is its about recycling. There may also be a motive to discourge ant predation by other species--you don't let the local scavengers develope a 'taste' for your kind. There is data on things like this..so I will look around.

Another neat thing that demonstrates the highly programatic behaviour of ants and other insects is "social parasitism". Social parsitism is a term for manipulating the 'social' behaviours of a foreign species to serve your own. There are weird things involoved like slavemaking, 'mind control', and induced altruism. These are all names of methods by which insects (and even at least one fungus) 'fool' other species into working for them.