When pride and fear collide
Guess who’s climbing now?
….and falling off headfirst every darn time.
Yep, at a time when most babies her age are thinking, “Gee I sure wish there was some way to get to that toy that’s over a metre away” Louisette is not just crawling, but walking across a room (with her hands held). In fact she’s not just walking across a room with her hands held, she’s cruising – walking along and around furniture while holding on to it (no parental intervention necessary!). And, as I may have mentioned, she can now climb stuff. Her idea, not mine.
To be fair to all those other (patently inferior) babies out there, Louisette also excels in a Frodo-esque lack of self-preservation instincts. One of my best friends has a two-year old that has only just started walking independently. . . because that is a child that understood gravity and the potential for pain almost completely WITHOUT the usual lengthy experimentation/spinal injury period. Louisette is. . . at the other end of the scale. It’s the dangerous end, but it’s also the awesome end, and I wouldn’t have it any other way*.
She continues to love adventure and excitement, which is a good thing because I just got ANOTHER job! Between my two jobs (plus a little tutoring) I’ll be working full-time (and earning considerably more than I’ve ever earned before) from the end of October – probably for about a year. This will make a big difference when we buy a house next year**.
Louisette is presently for absolutely all of my work hours. And so the adventure continues.
*until my second child. They can learn to crawl when they’re four.
**fingers crossed. . .
Our weekend
On Saturday we took Louisette swimming at a public pool – and she loved it.
On Sunday we took her to the flower festival called Floriade via the castle playground in Commonwealth Park with various family and friends. I always love taking photos of Louisette and any of her cousins.
As a parent, any time I leave the house I win 🙂
Eight months old – and all’s well
This was the month Louisette had her skin tag removed (hence a couple of plaintive hospital photos), and the month it became impossible to hold her still in a standing position – she immediately starts walking (usually giggling maniacally as she does so).
Other months can be seen via here.
Generations back and forward
Louisette is eight months old this Saturday, which has a special meaning for me: her father has now stuck around longer than mine did (my mum remarried when I was two, and THAT worked out great). It is a peculiar gift my biodad gave me – I already have the sure knowledge that my daughter’s life first year of life is better than mine was. Isn’t a better life what all of us want to give our children? For all my failings present and future as a person and as a mum, I got marriage right the first time. CJ is the biz.
And now for some gratuitous cuteness: pics of Louisette with her month-old cousin (gotta love a suspicious baby, right?), plus a couple more photos just for luck.
“Morlock Night” by K. W. Jeter
What do King Arthur, H. G. Wells, and the lost city of Atlantis have in common?
Cool factor, and K. W. Jeter.
The rest of this review is at Comfy Chair.
Louisette
We’re home after about seven hours of waiting, surgery, and observation. Here’s a pic of her playing with toys in her hospital bed (you can see the small cut near her ear), and another from thirty seconds ago. All’s well, and she’s basically her normal self again (it takes 24-48 hours for the gas to completely leave her system).
Less and More
From next week, I’ll be reducing this blog to two days a week – Miscellaneous Mondays (anything from a rant on equal rights to a picture of a cat) and Louisette Wednesdays. I’m hoping this will result in an increase in quality. Either way, I’ve been blogging faithfully for many years as I wait for a book deal to come my way – knowing all the while that it could happen at any moment.
But it hasn’t, so far, and I finally have something better (hint: see Wednesdays) to do. Literally for the first time in my life. So I’m powering down the writing obsession, and delightedly replacing it with the (far healthier and more rewarding) obsession of looking after a little person (that I MADE) – combined with the heady excitement of actually having paid, moderately reliable work. It is the simplest thing in the world to power back up my writing career at a moment’s notice – right now, my best shot is the steampunk novel, which is currently sitting on the desks of three large Australian publishers, all of whom are reading it in full already.
As I power down, the famous slushwrangler “The Intern” has a real actual book coming out. Her blog is now “Real Actual Hilary” and it’s better than ever. In this entry, she writes about the final edit of her precious book. I definitely understand the obsessive joy of writing. And the pain of it, too.
“In my determination to put everything I had into this last chance, I lost my sense of taste and smell. If you asked me which clothes I was wearing, I wouldn’t have been able to tell you. If you asked me which plants had blossomed by the back door I barged in and out of several times a day, I wouldn’t have been able to guess. My body hurt, and by the eighth or ninth day a profound exhaustion made it harder to work for longer than an hour at a time, although I was wary of straying more than a few feet from the stack of paper on my desk.”
Surgery
My baby girl is going into hospital to have surgery tomorrow. Well, technically. In my view, if you’re not going into someone’s insides then it’s not really surgery. I suppose technically that’d be amputation, but that hardly seems right for an extra bit of Louisette that has no useful function – namely, the little extra bit of skin on her cheek near her ear. You can see it a bit in this sequence of photos from this morning:
As her mum, a little bit of extra Louisette is no problem – but if I can reduce the amount of childhood teasing she’ll get, then I’m in. And so CJ and I are taking her to hospital tomorrow, where she’ll have her first anaesthetic (she’s already had a tongue tie cut, but that didn’t need anaesthetic and thus didn’t require time spent in hospital to monitor for possible side effects). For me the scariest part is trying to coordinate up to four solid meals (using only types of food she’s already eaten several times, and including vegetables, starch, fruit, and protein), six bottles (we own four), a number of vomit or food-related outfit changes, entertainment that doesn’t involve letting her chew on electrical cords (the girl loves to get her new teeth into cords), and a near-infinite supply of nappies and wipes.
But tomorrow the deed will be done, and that’ll be a relief.
Felicity Banks 