Something that I learned today: if you collapse into a fit of sobbing while you have a severe upper respiratory infection, you might start choking, which is uncomfortable, and also frightens cats.

Still, reading this story was more than worth the discomfort.

Thank you, Laural.From the very bottom of my tired heart.

(The BlogHer 5k Run, taking place at this year’s BlogHer conference in New York, is being held in Tanner’s honor, with the support of Tutus For Tanner, which means that I will be crying a whole lot more, especially if we can get Tanner there, which we’re really hoping to do, FINGERS CROSSED. So that he can see it. So that he can know. So that he can feel the love up close.)

(AND MORE WITH THE CHOKING.)

Friday’s as good a good as any for promoting a cause, right? How about two?

Cause #1: If you’re a Canadian woman, and you’ve had surgery, you might have been been given – while you were under anesthetic, without your knowledge, without your consent – a pelvic exam by medical students in training. It is, apparently, standard practice in Canada, and no, they don’t actually want to ask for your consent, because you might not give it. So they’ve settled for insisting that when you go in for surgery, you’ve implied that you consent to letting them do anything to your body that they like. You know, just like that time you accepted just one more glass of wine and got a little too drunk: you implied that you were just fine with whomever doing whatever to your body while you were passed out.

Gives new, sinister meaning to the phrase, trust me, I’m a doctor.

I ranted about it over at the Bad Moms Club yesterday, and posted an open letter/petition there in the wee hours this morning. Please leave a comment in support (and pass the link along!) – we (all women, and everyone who supports women – not just Canadians) need to raise our voices and say loudly and clearly that NO CONSENT means NO.

Cause #2: Most of you know about Tanner. Tanner is my nephew, my sister’s son, and he’s living with, but dying of, Duchenne’s Muscular Dystrophy. He’s really begun to decline in recent months. Our hearts are breaking while his stays strong – in love and hope, if not in muscle – and I’ve been feeling a powerful need to honor his strength and to meet his strength and to use that strength to move and to act, now, while he’s still with us. So I’ve decided to run for him, in the hopes that I can, by the end of a year, run in a marathon with his mother in his honor, to celebrate him – and, of course, to raise money and awareness for Muscular Dystrophy. I’m calling it 100 Miles For Tanner, and it starts with the Tiarathon at Walt Disney World in March (GM Canada has graciously lent sponsorship support so that we can make a road trip of it and really make it an adventure for the cause.) Find out more about it at Their Bad Mother, where I’ll be posting about my progress. And maybe think about clicking through the links to support the cause.

Thank you, always, for your awesome.

I don’t believe in petitionary or intercessory prayer. I’ve written about my reasons for this at length, but it boils down to this: I don’t believe in, can’t believe in, a God who responds to such prayer. As I said some months ago, ‘why should God help us find a cure for cancer, and not for muscular dystrophy? Find one lost child, and not another? Help the Red Wings win while leaving children dying in sub-Saharan Africa? If God is a god who lets bad things happen, the only way that I can understand that is if the point of letting bad things happen is to compel us to cope with pain and heartbreak and evil ourselves, alone, to better understand those things. And that idea of a didactic God doesn’t square with a picture of God as a moody patriarch who dispenses favors to his children on the basis of who supplicates most fervently.’

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Yesterday was a bad day. Another in a long stretch of days following nights without sleep, another with a teething baby who prefers nips to teething rings, another with a three-year old who is determined to seize control of this household and turn it into a socialist preschooler dictatorship in which all members of the household are equals but some certain very small members are more equal than others.

Also, it was National Pie Day yesterday, and I missed it and I was totally bummed about that until I realized that, um, hello, I’m Canadian, and National Pie Day does not apply to me. So not only do I not have a new, cool president, I do not have Pie Day. Which, you know, sucks.

So I took the day off of the Internet and did restorative things like get my eyebrows waxed and buy teething rings for the baby.

Oh, and I also set up this new project. Please go check it out. It’s a work in progress, but I hope that you’ll read all about it and consider taking part. If karma works the way that I understand it to work, participating will mean that we’ll all of us, at some point, get more pie.

(And, thank you, thank you, thank you to all of you who left such heartwarming and encouraging comments to my last post, the post about Tanner. I read every single comment, and my heart was touched by each one. I’ll make sure that Tanner gets those messages, so that his heart can be touched, too.)