Featured Grownups Topic..... Write a letter to your Mother.  It doesn't matter if she is in heaven or on earth.

You can make it a simple list, your own poem, pictures, song or fairy tale, mystery, fun, serious; it's up to you... it's your blog! ~ feel free to use pictures, songs...you choose, we enjoy!

I get it. It's supposed to be a great topic right. The person suggesting this didn't think of all the people who didn't have mothers. Or all the people who have no relationship with their mothers. Or all the people who have abusive mothers.

Not such a wonderful topic anymore is it?

It is the topic though. And I am willing to do it. The last time I mentioned my mother on my blog though she sent me a nasty letter saying all sorts of nasty things (she never apologized, just acted like it never happened).

Dear Mother,

It is nice to have you in my life. You will never feel like a mother to me though. You were never there enough to feel like a mother. My grandmother raised me and when you say nasty things about her it pushes me father away from you. You say you dropped out of my life when I was 5 to make things easier on me. Do you really think getting out of your child's life when they are 5 is really easier on them? I lost my relationship with you and my father got remarried and I basically lost my closeness with him all at the same time.

Do you know what happens to a child that goes through all the stuff I went through at such a young age? They become messed up. They self-injure and all sorts of stuff like that.

You proved to me when you wrote me that nasty letter that you do not know me. I have been nice to you since then but you will NEVER be my mom.

You told me I need to grow up and take responsibility for my own actions. Hello... I am! I have three children, that unlike you I am raising. You have three children and hardly see any of them. I take care of my children. I read with them. I play with them. I sit with them nights when they are sick.

I grew up fast. Ask people who actually know me. People say that I was a little adult at age 7. I didn't have a lot of friends my age. Many of my friends were 30, 40, 50, 60 or 70. I still miss Orpha sometimes. She was one of my best friends, she died (she was old) when I was about 10.

You want me to take responsibility for myself and guess what I have a long time ago.

I don't know if you will read this. You might. If you do you will probably either write me a letter saying nasty things or not talk to me for a long time. To tell you the truth that's fine. I realize that you don't like to hear how I feel about all of it. You don't like to hear about how much I love my grandmother for raising me. You don't like to hear about how it feels for a child to be abandoned by their mother. And you don't like to hear how you may be my birth mother but you will never ever be my mother. You gave that up when you walked out of my life at age 5. Coming back at 18 does not make you a mother.

You say you love me, but do you know me? How much time do you spend around us? How can you love someone you know hardly anything about? If you would spend a lot of time around your grandchildren you wouldn't have to email me asking what kind of things they are interested in, for you to go get them a birthday gift. Gifts don't make a grandmother. I would rather a person who came over to visit once a month or more or went hiking or did stuff with us. That is a grandmother.

IF you read this Lois and do not wish to have contact with us anymore, well, that is fine and totally your choice.
But I think if anyone needs to learn to take responsibility it is not me.

If you want to stop talking to me you can. Granny is dead, so she isn't around to "hold" the family together anymore. If you do want to keep coming around please do it out of wanting to get to know us and be close to us. Not out of guilt of walking out of my life over 20 years ago.

Please keep my husbands ears in your prayers. He is having trouble with them. Please pray for healing.

Thank you

That is right babies. We had two female hamsters (Bonnie and Snowflake) both give birth this morning. Bonnie was a big surprise as she has been living by herself for 21 days (guess she was busy with her brother the day before she got her own cage). I know that she had at least 4 babies. I do not know how many total for sure though.

Then there is Snowflake. She lived with Clyde until after the birth today when we moved Clyde to his own cage.

After getting over the shock of seeing that Bonnie was having babies, I went to look in on Clyde and Snowflake and was surprised to see that she too was giving birth. (I wasn't too shocked as she was living with Clyde but both females on the same day was surprising)

Snowflake has had at least 8 babies. She may have had more then that.

When they are 6 or so days old and are moving around on their own, I hope to be able to take some pictures of them :)

The picture below isn't of my hamster babies, but it does give you an idea what they look like right now.

The Holocaust was arguably among the most fearsome tragedies that have befallen the Jewish People in its long history, in which six million Jews including one and a half million children, were murdered.

Before World War II began, the German government sterilized 375,000 people. 17,000 of them were deaf.

"First they came for the Communists but I was not a Communist so I did not speak out;
Then they came for the Socialists and the Trade Unionists but I was not one of them, so I did not speak out;
Then they came for the Jews but I was not Jewish so I did not speak out.
And when they came for me, there was no one left to speak out for me."

Martin Niemoller, 1892-1984

The Holocaust was a systematic, state-organized persecution of Jews and other targeted groups by the Nazi state and its collaborators. During the Holocaust two-thirds of Europe’s Jewish population was slaughtered which calculates to one-third of the world population of Jews. In addition, the Nazi’s genocide exterminated millions of Gypsies (Roma and Sinti), Soviets, Polish citizens, Catholics, homosexuals, handicapped, alcoholics, political and religious dissidents and Jehovah Witnesses.

The Holocaust is many times called by other names. The Nazi’s spoke of it as die Endlosung or the “Final Solution” for the Jew’s extermination. In the early 1940’s a Yiddish word churb’n, which means “destruction”, was utilized. Others utilized the word Sho’ah that means “catastrophe.”

Kristallnacht: “The Night of Broken Glass or Crystal Night”

On November 9, 1938, Adolf Hitler attended a dinner party in Munich Germany honoring Nazi party heroes. At the dinner he learned that Ernst vom Rath, a German diplomat was killed in Paris. Leaving the dinner, Hitler gave orders for a “night of terror throughout Germany, including German-annexed Austria and the Sudenland region of Czechoslovakia.

During the nights of November 9-10 more than 90 Jews were killed and hundreds of synagogues and temples were set on fire. Throughout the two-day period over 7000 Jewish businesses were looted without intervention by the police. Additionally, Jewish cemeteries were desecrated and over 30,000 Jewish men were placed under house arrest and sent to concentration camps in Dachau, Buchenwald, and Sachsenhausen.

Noted as the worst pre-war program, the streets of Germany were filled with shattered glass from the synagogues and store windows, creating the name Kristallnacht or the “Night of Broken Glass.” When the night was over, the German Jewish community was ordered to pay repatriations to pay for the damage created by the acts of the Third Reich. Blamed for the destruction, the Jews were fined one billion Reichsmark, which is equal to $400,000,000 in United States currency.

Protests erupted throughout the world surrounding Kristallnacht. In New York, protesters asked for an intensification of existing boycotts of German goods and services. Demonstrations called for an end to “Hitler’s bloody pogroms.” In Chicago, protesters burned swastika flags. Franklin D. Roosevelt, horrified by the actions of Hitler’s Kristallnacht, proclaimed his shock that such actions could occur in the 20th century and recalled the American ambassador from Germany. Sadly however, few Americans advocated for changing the immigration laws to increase quotas of Jewish immigrants from Europe.

Hitler had no intention of being intimidated by the protests or the boycotts. On January 30, 1939 Hitler declared that Germany was at war and “the result will not be the bolshevization of the earth, and thus the victory of Jewry, but the annihilation of the Jewish race of Europe.”

People killed
European Jews 5,6000,000 to 6,250,000
Soviet Prisoners 3,000,000
Polish Catholics 3,000,000
Serbians 700,000
Roma (Gypsies) 222,000 to 250,000
Political prisoners, journalists, teachers, activists 80,000
Handicapped & alcoholics 70,000
Homosexuals 12,000
Jehovah Witnesses 2,500

Like the Jews, the Rom Gypsies were chosen for total annihilation just because of their race. Even though Jews are defined by religion, Hitler saw the Jewish people as a race that he believed needed to be completely annihilated. The Rom Gypsies also were a nomadic people that were persecuted throughout history. Both groups were denied certain privileges in many European countries. The Nazis believed that both the Jews and Gypsies were racially inferior and degenerate and therefore worthless. Like the Jews, the Gypsies were also moved into special areas set up by the Nazis. Half a million Gypsies, almost the entire Eastern European Gypsy population, was wiped out during the Holocaust.

Daniel
	Laura Crist

And the child held her hand
A child tiny for almost eight,
Deep blue eyes that dominated his face,
When he explained new events to her,
     that funny doggy,
     that pretty rock,
And the freckles on his cheek,
No one saw a sunrise more perfect,
     to her,
She so vividly smells the fragrance of
     his hair,
     his ears,
     his breath in the morning
She vividly hears that little heartbeat,
     that was hers
     always hers,
     and the laughter,
     that raspy little laugh,
     when he caught her in a conundrum.
All this,
But this is merely the surface,
As she watches her little one sheared,
     and stripped,
For the gas chamber.