“Burton & Swinburne: The Curious Case of the Clockwork Man” by Mark Hodder
It took a little while, but this book sucked me in. It was the foul-mouthed messenger parakeets that did it.
The rest of this review (including a sample) is at Comfy Chair, where I get paid for it.
Superpower
At the time of writing (last Saturday), I am the only person in the world who can make Louisette smile on cue (most of these photos were taken on the way in or out of a smile – it’s hard to catch the exact moment, but you get the idea).
Since then, CJ has discovered he has the ability too. Awesome x 2.
Leaving the House
Even at seven weeks of age, Louisette finds Mummy pretty boring after a while (heck, so do I). But if we have at least one outing every day (or, in a pinch, a visitor), she sleeps better. And I am a more interesting conversationalist for having done something other than housework and exercising my breasts a dozen times a day (which is still happening, and is the focus of every waking hour – right now it’s twenty minutes until the next feed).
As you’ll have noticed from yesterday’s blog entry (and I bet the parents noticed it immediately), CJ and I took Louisette to a Beethoven performance last Friday night. Breastfeeding in public is difficult enough for me, for Louisette, and for the public – but using a pump in public is far beyond that. So it was a good thing that the performance was due to start at 6pm – right on feeding time. Louisette generally feeds for 30-40 minutes (not counting up to ten minutes on the bottle) in absolute silence, and sometimes falls asleep immediately afterwards. She knows the difference between music and noise, and was unlikely to be enraged by the performance itself. Plus, the performance was free and in a public place (an acoustically terrible place, where no musical purist would bother attending). I’d practised modest breastfeeding at playgroup and my mum’s house, and both times were fine. All the fates aligned. . . and then failed.
Louisette refused to feed – something she’s honestly never done before. She was audibly grizzly, and refused the dummy (which has carried her on silent wings through grocery shopping and church services almost flawlessly). Rocking her didn’t help, and nor did wrapping her. She wasn’t hot or cold. And then she cried for real, and after another abortive attempt at feeding, CJ took her and fled.
To be fair, she didn’t make another sound for the rest of the performance. But Beethoven doesn’t mix well with sudden crying. A woman in the row in front of us turned around in her seat and glared at me pointedly for a prolonged period of time, while I carefully and desperately pretended intense focus on the performance. There were so many responses I wanted to make: To cry, to apologise, to glare back, to explain that the plan I’d made was as perfect as it gets, to point out that we were in a public foyer so if she wanted silence she should have paid for it, to tell her she was the kind of person that makes women stay locked in their homes until they get so depressed they want to kill themselves, to ask her snarkily if she’d ever had a cough while at a performance – and if so, did anyone glare at her?
But mostly I just felt like a bad, rude person.
I’m not sure how women with colicky babies survive. Do they just stay home until the kid is six months old – or more? Or do they endure the hate wherever they go?
Yes, sure, classical music is usually a place where people are more quiet than usual. I certainly wouldn’t take Louisette to a concert hall performance. But this particular outing had everything going for it – and it still failed. It happens. I just wish I didn’t feel so awful about it.
Today (I’m writing on a Tuesday) I went to playgroup for the second time. It’s brilliant stuff. I can be late, or leave early, or both – no-one is waiting for me, or needs me to do anything specific. I can breastfeed unselfconsciously, because everyone’s used to it and doesn’t care if there’s a little accidental flashing. Best of all, if Louisette happens to cry a little no-one cares – no-one even notices among the laughing and talking and playing of the other kids.There’s a whole crowd of kids under school age, and a lot of mums with a few dads mixed in.
This playgroup is a very very good one, run by my church (although about half the people don’t go to my church, and there are new people arriving all the time). There are a lot of great toys, a free morning tea, music time, and story time. The women are kind and supportive (not the “Is your kid walking yet? Mine is” competitive kind you sometimes get), and pleasantly international (I can talk in Indonesian or Chinese if I want practice, which is awesome). If you’re a parent and you live in Canberra, email me at fellissimo at hotmail dot com and I’ll give you all the details. I for one will be there every week.
I will absolutely keep taking Louisette to public events (after careful planning and thought – eg we don’t take her to movies), but it’s going to be a long time before I can be calm when she cries at the wrong moment. And I can guarantee there’ll always be one or two haters ready to lynch me for daring to leave the house with her. That will probably always hurt and terrify me.
And then there are the others: the ones who walk up to me in a mall to say how beautiful she is. And there are a lot more of them than the other kind. Can you blame them?
PS Although Louisette’s still underweight in relation to her birth weight, she seems to be doing well, so I’ve reduced her formula to four supplementary bottles of 50mL each per day. Wish us luck. . .
Speaking of luck: Last night she slept seven hours! Much squee! She’s slept six hours at a time so often it could be construed as normal for her. This is VERY good.
I haven’t lost any weight at all since week two, and I really haven’t been eating badly for the last couple of weeks. I just looked up the side effects of the domperidone I’ve been taking (which is meant to help with increasing milk production) and sure enough, weight gain is one of the side effects (that, and ravenous hunger – so eating when I’m hungry is not going to work). I will finish the pills I currently have and then stop (continueing to carefully monitor my milk production and Louisette’s weight), because looking three/four months pregnant and being ten kilos above my normal not-quite-in-the-healthy-weight-range-but-nearly weight is just too depressing. I’ve had a very similar experience when taking zoloft. It’d be nice to wear non-maternity clothes, and my wedding ring (yes, if you gain enough weight you do get significantly fatter fingers).
Enlighten Festival
Each year, Canberra has an Enlighten festival, with heaps of mostly free events including Ping Pong with paint, and a silent disco (dancers wear headphones. . . I heartily enjoyed watching them – holding a baby is an awesome excuse for being a wallflower).
On Friday night, CJ and Louisette and I went and saw some free Beethoven at the National Library, as part of the “Handwritten” exhibit currently happening there – including Beethoven’s own notes on some of the pieces played. How awesome is that?
After hearing and seeing some Beethoven, we walked outside to enjoy day one of the annual light sculptures (projected onto major buildings in central Canberra, and inspired by their contents) —
Then we wandered over to Questacon (that is, over the road) to see some more.
The festival (including light sculptures at the library, Questacon, Portrait Gallery, National Gallery, and Old Parliament House – all within walking distance) continues this weekend from 8pm Friday and Saturday night.
Pick your flaws
Having a child is a strange thing. I know I’ll be a huge, huge influence on her (and CJ will be too). Some of her future is mine to choose, some of it is mine to accidentally give her (and cringe when I see, later, what effect my actions have had on her). Some of who she is in the future will come seemingly out of nowhere.
But I can try and give her a good life and a good heart, so despite all the awryness of plans that will happen, I do spend time thinking about how to raise Louisette and who I’d like her to be. The other day, I thought, “If I could pick her faults, what would I choose?”
My first thought was that it’d be nice if she was overconfident – filled with unstoppable optimism.
But then I realised that could cost her the ability to grow up and function – if she was too far from rational, too blissed out to bother ever putting effort into anything. Or if it related to her physical limits (or ability to drive) it could get her killed.
So I thought, “How about vanity? What if she walked around utterly sure of herself, her looks, her worth?” But I know that would cause people to dislike her. A certain class of person would be determined to bring her down to earth, and would try to cause her to fail at whatever she tried to do.
But if she was insecure – if that was her flaw – they wouldn’t. No-one would hate or hurt her.
My thoughts crunched gears there, as I wondered if I’d just wished my little girl was insecure – because people hate a woman who’s too sure of herself, but they’ll accept one who’s not sure enough.
Later on, I thought, “What if she was an overconfident boy?”
I bet she’d do just fine.
On the up side, this is one little girl who will always know there’s one man who loves her unconditionally. That’s worth plenty.
Steampunk Dress: Outside Top
It’s not done, as such – but if I wanted, I could wear it as is. You can’t tell, but the buttons are steampunky, I swear.
I’ll be taking it in (but not until the rest of the dress is made, since it’s made to be worn over the top), and changing the neckline so the silhouette is symmetrical.
Crappy First Drafts
Speaking as someone who once wrote a 50,000 first draft in three days, I’m a big fan of the “just get it on paper and fix it later” strategy of writing. So is Lynn Price, as she writes here. When my students have to write a short story for school, I’m constantly telling them, “Stop thinking and write.”
Lynn says: “When I’m doing a first draft, I don’t worry about pacing and flow because I know I’ll hit that up once I have a solid foundation in which to build upon. For now, I simply need to barf it out there.”
“The Hunchback Assignments” by Arthur Slade
The Steampunk Scholar recommended YA steampunk writer Arthur Slade, and his taste turned out to be just as good as I’d guessed.
“The Hunchback Assignments” is the story of two orphans – the stunningly beautiful Octavia and the stunningly ugly Modo. Both were rescued (or is it captured?) by the mysterious and powerful Mr Socrates.
The rest of this review is now at Comfy Chair, where I get paid for it.
That’s not a poo-splosion, THIS is a poo-splosion!
I rarely use exclamation marks. This one is, believe me, deserved. Time for a daily awesomeness that uses the OTHER meaning of “awesome”.
Alternate title: The Bum-Gun.
Picture the scene: It’s 5:00am and all is quiet except for a stirring infant and her mother; a woman light-headed and blurry from lack of sleep. It’s time for a feed and – judging by the smell – a nappy change.
The mother cuddles the infant and places her on the change table. She skillfully scoops up a very full load of nappy without letting it spill and stain the baby’s clothes or wrap. She drops it in the nappy bin and reaches for the wipes with a smirk of self-congratulation.
That’s when it happens.
Pow! Blam! Squirt!
A stream of liquid poo shoots up (yes, up) and out (yes, out) at a 45 degree angle (yes, a 45 degree angle) hitting the mother’s hair and spraying across the carpet and furniture.
The mother emits an inarticulate noise of shock and awe. She freezes, thinking, “Did that just happen?”
It did. Oh yes, it did. There is no mistaking the angle of attack: The evidence lies, warm and pungent, half a metre above the scene of the crime. In my hair. So much for gravity.
Five centimetres to the left, and I’d have copped it in the mouth.
Is this the face that conceals a startling secret weapon?
It is. Oh yes, it is.
Six weeks in
Louisette is now six weeks old, which is about when I’m supposed to be fully recovered from giving birth. I was pretty much recovered by three weeks, but improvement has been slower since then. I’m now exercising four or five times a week, and have just started eating a little less chocolate (I hadn’t lost any weight for several weeks, and I have a good ten kilos to lose – particularly from my belly, which is big enough that I can’t wear normal clothes yet – and it prompts speculative looks wherever I go). I can do pretty much anything I used to be able to do, but I do take longer to recover afterwards. My breasts are still mildly painful.
As always, the crucial issues this week are breastfeeding and sleeping.
From Monday last week we had incontrovertible proof that Louisette needed more formula than she was getting, so we increased it at once. She’s meant to gain around 150 grams a week. Last week she gained 20 grams – but this week she gained over 200. In the last few days, she’s started to not always finish her bottles. That, and the slow increase of what I get from the breast pump, bodes well. Last week I said I was getting an additional 10ml of pumped breast milk a day. That was somewhat optimistic. It looks very much like I’ll need to take a whole lot of formula to China in a month’s time. I am still feeding Louisette 7-8 times a day, and using the pump a further 5-6 times a day. Generally, the largest amount of time I am free during the day is one and a quarter hours (although I move the pump times around a bit when I have stuff to do). It’s insane. It also means that “sleep when your baby sleeps” doesn’t work nearly as well as I’d like.
On the up side, she’s pretty good at sleeping at night. She usually sleeps 4-5 hours in a block. Without that, I’d be a wreck. People keep asking me if I’m okay, and I get the feeling that when I say I’m great they think I’m being nice. Regular readers will know I’m far more honest than nice. When I say I’m happy, you can believe it. It’s true that I’m low enough on sleep that I’m uncoordinated and sometimes light-headed.
I also have a life apart from Louisette: I’ve been able to do some sewing, and I’m editing a chapter of my steampunk novel each day. One of the things I truly enjoy about motherhood is the complete obsessive focus – but I still get antsy if I don’t do some writing every day (and blogging doesn’t quite count). Every day I do something outside of the house, and take Louisette with me. I enjoy being more mobile than I was when I was pregnant, and I think Louisette benefits too.
Louisette’s facial expressions continue to fascinate me. Here’s several photos from a single day – plus a couple of smiles and a pout for good measure.
