Counting down - minus 1 day til 30for30 challenge

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Today, I rested. Last chocolate! Last lazy day. Ready for tomorrow. Challenge, here I come!

Counting down - minus 2 days til 30for30 challenge

Resistance training

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resistance
poem for Catherine

I'm female, right?
Well, true.
But I was never having kids.

The atomic clock
tickticktick to midnight
bunkers in our dreams
not you.

One day I said
"why not"
a different ticking.
so we did:

you; my greatest irony.


Merilyn Childs, 30/12/2014

Counting down - minus 3 days til 30for30 challenge

Walking with friends in the bush this morning,
recovering from a backburn in October 2014

  Preparing

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I've been preparing for 2015 for a while. It only happens once that your deceased child turns 30, and symbolically, I was 30 when she was stillborn. So at 30 she may have also had a child (or not, her choice) who I will never know. That's how this story works - infant loss can be of the moment, as well as existential and emerging. But it strengthens me enormously to know and support so many strong, diverse, bright young women making their own life choices - maneuvering and articulating their own life stories - around me. Other women's children, surviving the first 30 days, is important!

I've also been preparing physically for the 30for30 challenge for 6 weeks. So I'm not coming at it "cold" as I'd like to end the 30 days without an injury.

Preparing
it feels possible
a sentence; controlled/
verb, noun, participle, colon
acts/dates/lines:
go that way.
then sun falls
burns grass/seers
the smell of charcoal
the smell of charcoal
smeered

Merilyn Childs
29/12/2014

Counting down - minus 4 days til 30for30 challenge

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Being an academic has meant a lot more sitting at a computer than is good for me! At present I can do 2 x 20 pull-ups at the lowest setting. My goal is to do 3 x 30 by 30th January 2015.




                           See below for a poem I wrote in 1994











heaven help Sarajevo

there is wind
wild on the mountain,
there are angels flying
there are angels with atlases,
compasses, helmets with lights,
picks, shovels, climbing ropes,
feathers for the night.

there are no angels
but the angels that are there
(peering between the crevices)
have wind in their bloodied hair.

Merilyn Childs, 7/2/1994

Counting down! Minus 5 days til the 30for30 challenge begins!

https://www.flickr.com/photos/artgrafx/ 

Poem I wrote within days of my daughter's stillbirth (1985)

Somewhere in the morning

between the first and second song

I still look for you, fledgling

Once broken winged, 

now, fully perfect in your flight

I: blind/eyed, see.

It's true: some babies die. The following award winning documentary was ground-breaking in its day - 1986. When my daughter was born in 1985, there were no materials about child loss in Australian hospitals, and certainly very little support. The film "Some Babies Die" was screened on the ABC and was important in my journey of grief. I cannot re-watch it  now. Watch the trailer: https://vimeo.com/ondemand/somebabiesdie [Warning: this documentary is graphic, sad, as well as uplifting].

Although "some babies die" for all sorts of reasons at birth, and in the first 30 days after birth - the world is a better place if they do not. Fewer babies die now from neural tube defects, for example, because of the ground breaking work that identified folic acid as important to the early healthy growth of a foetus. Raising money for World Vision is one way of helping improve infant health!

About my 30for30 Fundraising Challenge

Welcome to my 30for30 everyday hero fundraising blog for World Vision. I am joining World Vision’s 30for30 Fitness Challenge to help raise money for infant health. World Vision reports that 'weak immune systems and an inability to control regulatory functions – like maintaining body temperature – make newborn babies particularly vulnerable to infections such as pneumonia and meningitis. But 70 percent of those deaths are preventable'. We can help prevent them by raising money to help stop millions of unnecessary infant deaths. 

My reasons are also personal. In 1985 my first child died at birth. In 2015, had she lived, she would be turning 30. Some years later, my youngest child contracted viral meningitis at 6 weeks old. Fortunately, he survived. Unlike my daughter whose condition was incompatible with life, so many babies can be saved if given the right care - as my son was in a well equipped, modern western hospital with well-trained staff. Not all babies are as fortunate.

I'm doing the 30for30 challenge to raise funds to improve infant health - and to remember. Please consider donating by clicking here. I'll be recording everyday of my 30 days fitness achievements in this Blog!

About my challenge 

Fitness is as much about resilience of mind and spirit (whatever that means for you) as it is about the body. It is also about social well-being - and in my reckoning this means building a more socially-just world. My 30for30 fundraising challenge will therefore bring these things together, expressed each day through a physical goal as well as a poem.