deja vu all over again

Funny, after the pictures I posted yesterday, that this picture should be featured as the image of the day on Wikipedia. In Gormley's version, the figures are submerged and revealed as the tide ebbs and flows. I like that idea.

I'm too bone tired to put together much of a post tonight, just a few random reflections. The fatigue comes mostly from my slow but steady re-entry into the world of ultra-inclusive fitness (and I mean this in the Darwinian rather than the cardiovascular sense). As my two teens re-enter my life after spending the past year with their mother here in Ontario, I find that my early mornings are filled with the frightening energy of two toddlers and my last few semi-cogent thoughts before collapsing in bed are filled with complicated discussions of the logistics and economics of getting my oldest child into and then through university. The middle hours (as in at this very moment) are filled with the more commonplace wrangling with "middle children" (what a hateful term that is) over such matters as whether one should be allowed to have cake and ice cream after 9 pm on a night before an early morning daycamp.

We met with our lawyer today to put together an updated version of our will. In preparation, I printed off a summary of my employment benefits that began with a list of my dependents. As the long list of offspring whirred out of my printer, I clutched my stomach. Can it really be possible that I have this many dependents? I'm not even a grownup myself! In the office, we had to walk ourselves through every conceivable grisly scenario. Both of us die at once. One dies, but the other is left in a terminal coma. Both die and so do some but not all of our children. It reminded me of the ghoulish wonder of those school accident insurance forms I used to bring home from school as a kid, with the schedule of benefits tallied according to which parts of your body were lost. My friends and I would try to calculate what combination of lost fingers, toes and eyes might be used to cobble together enough money to make a one way escape to a South Sea island. In the end, we concluded that if we all chipped in some body parts, one of us could make a getaway.