Hello, Mini-Me
Before I forget: The “me” in Mini-Me refers to whoever is speaking at the time. It works best with relatives, but all humans are pretty similar when they’re babies, so ultimately there’s a little bit of all of us in Mini-Me. Hence the name.
Today I’ll be calling Mini-Me “he” some of the time, and “she” some of the time. I won’t know which is true until the 20-week scan.
Yesterday, at an estimated 12 weeks and 6 days, CJ and I and every single one of Mini-Me’s future grandparents wheedled our way into an ultrasound room and took a good look through my skin.
Given the amount of medication I’ve been on, I was rather pleased to see that Mini-Me has two arms, two legs, and a perfectly normal spine and face. He wriggled and giggled and kicked and waved. There was rather a lot of butt-waggling, and I had to keep myself from giggling and making things even harder for the technician.
Mini-Me did headstands, and arched her back, and swam around like a little fish (at 13 weeks, she has plenty of room to move). He stretched and turned over and facepalmed. At 7cm from head to bum, she looks basically human – and she is. He even has teeth growing inside his gums, and ears and lungs and eyelids.
After taking various measurements and checking the heartbeat, the technician told us the new, more accurate due date. . . 18 January! Absolutely no change, which means Wednesdays will still mark the end of each passing week. Which also means today marks the beginning of second trimester.
Sorry, what’s that you say? You’d like to see pictures? Oh, if you insist.
As CJ put it: “There’s a HUMAN BEING in there!”
Piper’s Lookout
Way back in Summer, when CJ and I were on our way back from our Merimbula holiday, we stopped off about half an hour along the road to admire Piper’s Lookout.
Mr Piper was (by all accounts) an heroic busdriver who traversed the mountain road hundreds of times. The lookout is beautiful, with panoramic views and winding paths into the trees.
Captain Maxolon saves the day (ish)
Dear rest of the world (USA, I’m looking at you): Public health care is the best idea ever.
Yesterday CJ and I spent seven hours at hospital (in the past, I’ve waited longer than that in the waiting room, which is the down side of a triage system – the sicker people get treated first – but pregnant women are always a priority) getting looked after by a doctor and two nurses. The only thing we paid for was food.
We wandered through the usual labyrinthine passageways to get to emergency, where I was assessed almost immediately. Since both of the antenatal (“antenatal” meaning “while pregnant”) triage beds were free, another pregnant woman and I were wheeled up to that department.
That’s right: I said wheeled. Awesome.
I settled into the bed with CJ on a chair beside me (we’d brought two books each – I read “Soulless” by Gail Carriger, not realising that CJ was deliberately watching my face during the naughty bits).
The main doctor and nurse gathered more information, and basically pooh-poohed my pleas for a feeding tube (I was so nauseous I could barely drink water, and so nauseous/phobic of food that even a picture or mention of food made me feel ill). They prescribed counselling (which, sorry, has been tapped out long ago in my case – but of course I’ll attempt it again anyway) and maxolon.
Maxolon is a tiny, foul-tasting pill with the exciting side-effect that if you take too much you get lockjaw and (this is the exciting part) your head turns itself to the side. Somewhat offputting to those not in the know!
Unsurprisingly, it is somewhat more effective than over-the-counter ginger pills. In about half an hour the idea of food was appealing once more (and the idea of a food tube shoved down my throat somewhat less so) and I began eating for the first time that day.
For the first time in weeks, my body didn’t immediately punish me for eating (not for about an hour). Hurrah!
At around that time, I gave the first of what turned out to be four different urine samples. The nurse tested it, and came back in at once to tell me I had heaps of very large ketones. “Ketones” is pronounced “key-tones”, and sounds rather like a sweet jazz notation. Sadly, they actually indicate dehydration.
I was put on a drip and monitored for another few hours. The drip was awesome. I liked having a painless plug in my arm – even if it is utterly nuts to put water (or whatever it was) into my veins. How does THAT work? Over time, I got better at shifting position without kinking the tube, and at peeing in a cup after dragging the five-wheeled IV stand into the bathroom with me.
As far as I can remember, I’ve never actually been in a hospital bed before. I’ve had stitches, but no broken bones. I’ve had food poisoning every time I go to Indonesia, but it never occurred to me to go to hospital (even when one bout – ah, Bali, how consistent you are – lasted three and a half months).
So, here’s a photo commemorating my first hospital bed:
As CJ keeps saying, “You know we can buy you new socks ANYTIME you like, right?”
Rather sadly, socks and I just don’t get on. These are the only socks I have that can cover a reasonable amount of leg without cutting off circulation (I have begun making forays into diabetic-approved socks, which are much better than the norm, but still not that great).
So that was our hospital visit! I’m still nauseous for nine out of ten waking hours, and I still dread meals (even with Captain Maxolon on my side, I feel sick soon after eating), but for the moment I can manage. One week down. . . five weeks of crippling nausea to go.
Sidebar – if any of you says any of the following, I will hunt you down and kill you:
Every pregnant woman gets ill, dear.
When I was pregnant, I didn’t have time to be sick – so I wasn’t.
Try [random cure], it will solve everything.
Oh, when *I* was pregnant I was SO sick that I. . . .
———————————————-
Oh yes. . . there was one more thing.
The doctor did an ultrasound – mostly, I think, just because they can.
The amniotic sac inside me was a clear circle, and on one side our little baby was a blurry dot perhaps a centimetre across. It flickered to its own beat – the beating of a brand new heart.
Ever since the ultrasound, CJ pauses every so often mid-conversation, reaches across to touch my hand or shoulder or belly, and says, “Heartbeat!”
Science of dating
Here is a fascinating article on how to figure out if your date is a raving loony and/or compatible with you. It’s PG/M, because of discussion of romantic things (she says euphemistically).
Here’s the beginning:
First dates are awkward. There is so much you want to know about the person across the table from you, and yet so little you can directly ask.
This post is our attempt to end the mystery. We took OkCupid’s database of 275,294 match questions—probably the biggest collection of relationship concerns on earth—and the 776 people have given us, and we asked:
Love, sex, a soulmate, an argument, whatever you’re looking for, we’ll show you the polite questions to find it. We hope they’ll be useful to you in the real world.
First—define “easy to bring up”
Before we could go looking for correlations to deeper stuff, our first task was to decide which questions were even first-date appropriate. I know each person has his own opinion on what’s okay to talk about with a stranger. I also know that if I had to wade through hundreds of thousands of user-submitted questions like these verbatim examples:
Read the whole article here.
In the meantime, here’s Ana ignoring Gandalf (Gandalf is the fish).
And here’s something even more miscellaneous:
You know what’s interesting about that second photo? The orange fish and the striped fish are new today – and I haven’t told CJ. Will he see them for the first time when he comes home – or here?
*shrug*
*wander off*
*hope he’s pleased, not mad*
For batter or worse
In 2006 I decided to do nothing but write – mainly in order to discover if I could handle it (I can; I still write for a minimum for twenty hours each week). For a period of three months, that’s all I did. In order to keep going as long as possible before going back to the world of paid employment, I was EXTREMELY careful with money. I worked out later that I’d spent an average of $5/week on food and even less on transport (usually I walked up to two hours in each direction).
(For those who are wondering, this is not a recommended career choice for writers. 95% of us keep our day jobs for life – and that’s just the ones who get published.)
Previous poverty experience had taught me that if I don’t get three meals a day I stop being able to function. So I ate pancakes – generally twice a day, and sometimes three times a day. I had a regular schedule of three actual proper meals each week, which I relied on for my nutrition (I’d spend dinner with my parents – who of course didn’t know how badly I was eating – W, and another friend). Towards the end I staggered when I walked, and was hovering on the edge of illness. But I could still type, so I didn’t care.
(As you can tell if you know anything at all about CJ, this was before we met.)
The pancake recipe I used (really crepes, since they’re so thin they’re see-through) was:
Batter: Mix 1 egg, 2 cups milk (mixed from powdered milk), 1 cup of plain flour.
Fry pancakes in margarine and eat with sugar and lemon juice.
The astonishing thing about this piece of personal history is that I still like pancakes (although they absolutely must be fried in real butter these days). So for our monthly date this month CJ and I went to The Pancake Parlour for breakfast (expert’s tip: If you eat out for breakfast somewhere with freshly-squeezed orange juice, DO NOT brush your teeth beforehand).
The Pancake Parlour in Canberra is a subterranean wonderland of leather-padded seats, wooden booths, and brass fittings. The franchise began in Melbourne, and is found in most large Australian cities.
CJ had a full country breakfast:
I had a “Red Dawn”, which consists of two cheese pancakes with rashers of bacon cooked into them, served with a giant scoop of butter (it looks like the sun at dawn, see?), and grilled tomatoes. (As you can see from photos taken this week, that beanie is staying firmly planted on my head until Spring.)
I didn’t finish the tomatoes (just empty vitamins). I did, however, steal some of CJ’s maple syrup – because although bacon and maple syrup is gross, when served with a pancake it’s sheer gastronomical genius.
Mmm. . . pancakes. . .
Why not make your own this weekend?
Screams in the night
Welcome to the first ever miscellaneous Monday.
I was going to write about the twittertales (writing a real-time tale each month is starting to make me crazy*, so I’ve decided to start using regular stories, hastily cannibalised into a twitterable form. It turned out to work really, really well – as you’ll discover in April, when “Cinders” happens).
But I decided not to talk about that.
Before we were married, I slept in a single bed and CJ slept in a double. That partially explains why, when we go to sleep, I’m curled up waaaay on the very edge of my side of the bed, and CJ is curled up RIGHT up against me, with his arm around my belly.
It’s all very sweet and romantic until I want to move. How to de-spoon from CJ’s dead weight**? Who knew an arm could be so heavy? Where can I possible move to anyway, with only millimeters to spare and a wall of husband blocking all feasible options other than the windowsill?
But it’s fine, because CJ doesn’t just sleep promptly – he sleeps thoroughly.
So I simply turn over as well as I can, and he – without in any way waking up – instinctively turns over and shifts to his side of the bed. Easy!
Or so I thought.
Last night, in a haze of sleepy contentment, I began the usual nightly operation of mutual turning over.
CJ began sleepily turning over, as always. About halfway into his unconscious turn something in his mind snapped. He finished the turn at rapid speed – and kept turning, faster and faster until he fell off the bed with a scrambling thud.
I heard violent battle commence at once between CJ’s limbs, the floor, his bag, and his shoes. It sounded bad. I screamed. CJ won the fight, however, and charged for the doorway (after a brief but fervent altercation with the dressing table), where he slapped on the light before he was fully upright.
The lightbulb above the bed blazed into luminescence, and I saw CJ, still hunched from his flight, staring fixedly at the light. He spoke with the deep voice of a man still crouched ready to grab a weapon: “It’s. . . it’s gone.”
By this time I was sitting up in bed, very concerned the corner of our dressing table had brained my husband. “What is it? What’s wrong? CJ?”
He didn’t break his stare at the light, evidently not quite believing that the threat to us had passed. His voice was still deep, clipped, and utterly serious.
“Dragonfly,” he said.
I stared at him in disbelief, and he began to realise something was off. There was a long and mutual pause.
“. . . a big one,” he amended.
I laughed hysterically for the next hour, gasping for breath. My unconscious mind regularly comes up with ravening zombies, nests of vampires (not the sparkly kind), gun massacres, automatons with knives coming out of their fingertips, and so on.
CJ has a nightmare about a bug. A pretty bug. He assured me it was “as big as a pigeon”.
That didn’t help.
Next Monday: Top ten awesomenesses to play along at home.
*er
**He’s pretty much always asleep before me. Cue comments about “no rest for the wicked”, “guilty conscience”, etc.
#305: Leftovers
When I was a child, “leftovers” meant the unidentifiable frozen sludge freezer-burnt into the permanent ice shelf. One of the things CJ brought into our marriage was a habit of frequent leftovers, and I love it. Because as an adult, what “leftovers” means is super-fast preparation time and barely any dishes.
So here’s CJ’s lasagna – again.
I’m so happy I’m blurry.
And here’s Indah chilling out on CJ’s lap.
SUNDAY: The hot air balloon ride! Aieeee!
PS I just (moments ago) reached 10,000 words in my steampunk book. Emmeline Miller is on board her convict transport (the next chapter takes place in Australia), and has made a lower-class friend and an equally lower-class convict enemy. Having learnt plenty of new words from the former, she just called the latter a “sour-faced rusty-gutted mongrel” – among other things – and successfully beat him up with her Patent Steel-Ribbed Probability Parasol. It went fabulously – right up until the point he revealed that he knew her Terrible Secret.
OH NOSE!! WHAT WILL HAPPEN NEXT?!?!?!
#303: When he cooks
This is what it means when I cook: The food generally costs under $2.50 per serve, and takes less than half an hour to appear.
Here’s what it means when CJ cooks: The focus is on one thing – deliciousness.
Both of us are “good” cooks in our own way, but everything is more epic when CJ cooks*. Last night he made my favourite meal: Lasagna (by request from his parents).
The house still smells delicious. . . and, best of all, we have leftovers.
Today is 14 March, which means *drum roll* there are only TEN official year-of-awesomeness days left. Don’t worry – I won’t suddenly stop being awesome**. I will be making an announcement on Friday 25 March about the blog’s next manifestation. . . and I think you’ll like it.
*Including the dishes
**”Impossible!” from the chorus
#275: Fancy-Pants Restaurant
It’s not a holiday if you don’t spend way too much on sweeeeettt delicious fooooooodd. During our second honeymoon, CJ and I ate at the Merimbula RSL club, the Seabreeze Cafe (really nice battered fish), the Wharf Restaurant and Aquarium (I had the duck, and it was insanely delicious), and Wheelers Oyster Farm and Restaurant. This is Wheelers. 
It’s a beautiful building with lots of wood, glass, and stone. 
CJ drank a strongbow cider, and I had a raspberry lemonade. Can you guess what I ordered from my cutlery? 
And here it is. . . our appetiser. 
That’s what a mixed half dozen of cooked oysters looks like. Now here’s the thing: My Mum LOVES oysters, but she always eats them uncooked. It had never occurred to me to eat cooked oysters until I looked at the menu at Wheelers.
Those three oysters were the greatest oysters – the greatest three mouthfuls – of my life. If ever there was a time for florid prose, it was here. I carefully didn’t drink anything between the two courses – I just sat, quietly feeling the three flavours mingle like old friends. Then it was time to move on. But where to go from there? CJ had fish and chips. I had. . . 
Mmm. . . eyeballs. Inside the mound of food and sauce were three crabs that I slowly but surely broke open and ate. It was epic. The aftermath: 
We considered eating dessert – which of course would have been excellent – but I’m a purist when it comes to junk food (I look at the average chocolate cake and say, “Not enough lard!”) Thus, we bought candy for dessert on our way home. But I still remember my old friends Singapore, Rocky, and Plumrick. Don’t worry boys – we’ll meet again.
S#95: Paddle
“I’ve thought of something,” CJ said, “and now I’ve thought of it I can’t stop thinking of it.”
“What is it?” I asked.
“The wide sand bars here – they make the water warm up. Sharks like warm water.”
And so it was that CJ and I dressed in our fragile swimmers and walked hand in hand down the dark street to the black sea. It was a Wednesday night – a school night, here in Merimbula – and it was perfectly quiet. Hushed, you might say. Ominous.
We reached the sea and walked carefully across the springy grass – barefoot. This was the same night we drank a bottle of Moscato (mostly me, to be honest) and my imagination was on high alert. Also, since it was 11pm at night, my contact lenses were starting to pack it in and my vision was blurry.
Out of the quiet, we heard the lap, lap, lapping of tiny waves. The tide was high, almost hitting the base of the concrete steps. To the right was a long pier, deserted except for a single rescue boat (empty). A single light pole stood beside it, surrounded by a glittering halo of bugs endlessly circling.
All around, the hills of Merimbula rose up, sprinkled with lights.
In front, there was nothing but darkness. We clutched hands and ventured out onto a thin stretch of wet and compacted sand. Farther away from the rescue boat, we saw men shining torches into the shallow water, thrusting nets out ahead of them.
Something was alive in the water.
We half-stumbled forward, not sure where to find the water – feeling our way with our feet. I hit the water first, and a sudden slope underfoot where the shore was rapidly eroding. We walked out, moving smoothly – silent ourselves in the quiet scuffle of the waves. Standing still, I felt the sand trickling away under my bare feet.
The water was a pool of darkness, and cold. We didn’t drop hands. The sky was shrouded in clouds, cutting off the light of the stars.
“What was that?” said CJ. He wasn’t joking.
I screamed hysterically and ran for the shore.
We walked home in a reflective silence. But the important thing was that we lived.
PS I just found out that Rowena Cory Daniells plans to write another “King Rolen’s Kin” book after she finished the Outcast Chronicles. Yay!!!
Felicity Banks 