While I sit here, Amy is hunched over her right foot beside me, blowing very serious raspberries at it. She has discovered that it is alive and is trying to drown it in saliva. Her face distinctly says, “DIE! FRICKIN’ DIE EVIL FIVE-TOED THING!”
Still it keeps wiggling. It taunts her.
I admit, I am a lazy slacker. If I could get away with it, the house would resemble a bombsite more often than not. When the house gets into that state I get horribly depressed thinking about how much work will be involved in getting it back to presentable again.
It occurred to me not too long ago that I get around this bad habit by inviting at least two people or groups of people each week to come round for a coffee, or for a playdate, or for dinner. Then I’m forced through obligation to get off my butt and wash dishes, do laundry, pick up toys and make beds. If I have two such occasions every week, the house is always reasonably neat and clean.
However, I know now what I can and can’t get away with. I can cram all the papers and junk we have lying around into the stereo cabinet or the kitchen cupboards. I can stuff Ethan’s clothes into a drawer. And people say, “Wow! Your house is so much neater than mine!” and I reply, “Trust me, it’s usually a pigsty,” and they don’t believe me.
Recently I learned a great trick: put a laundry basket in the middle of a room, and throw in everything that doesn’t belong in the room. Go from room to room with the basket, putting in things that don’t belong in that room and pulling out things that do, and putting them away. The house will be tidy within two complete circuits. Suddenly our living room looks relatively uncluttered, Ethan knows where his toys are, and I can see my bedroom floor.
It’s like a whole new world has opened up, a world of carpet and space and unlimited scope of vision.
Now I need a trick for the outside of the house.
Saturday: Sat on bum. Ate stuff.
Sunday: Day trip to Quail Island, ex-leper colony. Did not contract leprosy. Was much relieved. Did contract extremely sore calf muscles from pushing stroller around island.
Monday: Took Ethan and Amy to music in the morning. Both kids behaved like pod people: no crying, squealing or mad escaping. Had quick lunch, took Ethan to kindy, went and got photos developed. Monday was stinking hot — and the stinking was me — so we went to the pool for a swim between dinner and bedtime. Amy loved it so much that I now have to sign her up for Tiny Turtle classes.
Tuesday: Daycare! Ethan was gone for the day, so Amy and I went to the library and hung out all morning, then visited a neighbour and bought groceries we desperately needed in the afternoon.
Wednesday: craft group! I’m taking a free art class, and after dumping the kids mercilessly in the creche, I sat at the artist’s table. He bunged down a glass bowl of apples and told us to go for it. He’s Korean and speaks little English, so his instructions were rather cryptic. Mine were astonishingly good.
Today it’s cold and grey and windy and Ethan is sitting on the floor reading The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, part 2. Fortunately he can’t actually read, but I still fear that Hyde will give him nightmares, if the tripods don’t.
I recently read a piece on Ask Moxie about sleep regression (and if you have kids and you’re not reading Moxie’s advice blog, you’re crazy), and Moxie says this:
If he can’t sleep because he keeps waking up on his hands and knees rocking back and forth, you know it’s because his body is learning to crawl[...] Leading up to the actual new skill the baby is going to go through several weeks of intense brain work and prep that you can’t necessarily see. One of the side effects of this brain work is that they don’t sleep as well as they do during times in which they’re not about to master a new skill.
Guess what Amy’s been doing?
Today Amy took two feeds in a bottle. This is, truly, a landmark occasion. You all should go and write a note in your diaries. Right now. Go on. I’ll wait.
She is seven and a half months old. In the first four months of her life, she’d never, ever been offered a bottle. Ethan, on the other hand, was drinking expressed breastmilk from a bottle at about six weeks, maybe earlier, after I suffered the worst case of cracked nipples in the known universe. (When Ethan was drinking milk combined with blood, I sort of figured something was wrong.) Ethan, coincidentally, was completely weaned at 7 months.
I had made a vow to myself when I was pregnant with Amy that not only would I have the perfect labour on my second try, but I’d be a breastfeeding goddamn champion. And I have been. I sailed through the learning-to-latch process, the engorgement, and mastitis, but I have been tied to Amy and home for seven-point-five months, and I want to lengthen the string a little. I want to be able to go to my scrapbooking nights (yes, I am indeed a legendary domestic goddess, shut up) or the DIY nights at the hardware store without having to dash home at Amy’s bedtime to top her up.
Last week, without expecting much, I made up a bottle of infant formula and held it to her mouth. She played with it, chewed the teat, shook it around, wiped it in her hair…and finally drank 20mls. Twenty tiny cubic centimetres. And the world shifted and I felt a little bit relieved. Today she had 50mls at lunchtime, and 50mls again in the afternoon.
To celebrate, and because we’ve had a relatively mellow week, and because we had already chilled it in the fridge for Tim and Jess, we drank a bottle of our own, a nice sweet Mudhouse sauvignon blanc.
And I remember just how low my alcohol tolerance actually is. Oh dear.
Amy has little blisters on the back of her middle finger from sucking on her first two fingers when she’s sleepy. She now can sit up on all fours, but complains fairly quickly as her back starts to sag in the middle. I took her to Babytime on Tuesday and she adored it, bouncing her head to the music — headbanger! — and staring at all the other babies. The session lasted twenty minutes, just long enough, and she got a free book at the end. Afterward we went and shared a date scone in the cafe. My wee girl isn’t so wee any more.
Yesterday I got her out of bed and sat her in front of the big mirror leaning against her bedroom wall. We played at pretending a stackable cup was a hat, and she would grin and giggle when I put the cup on her head. She’d catch sight of herself in the mirror with the cup on her head and grin even wider. Then I’d put it on my head and that would cause more giggles. Yet she doesn’t have that full-body laugh that so many babies have, Ethan included. She’s a sedate giggler, more along the lines of “Oh, ho ho, isn’t that amusing?” tittering than a good baby chortle.
Ethan is tired and grumpy today after a hard week of playing.
Ethan: I don’t like my toys.
Me: None of them?
[Ethan shakes his head]
Me: Shall we get rid of them?
[Ethan nods]
Me: Shall we take them to the dump?
Ethan: No! I do like toys!
Me: [victory dance and nyah-nyah chant]
We have no camera this week: we loaned our SD card to Mike’s parents and haven’t gotten around to collecting it from Mike’s brother yet. And I’ve been thinking about ways to improve my photos too.
Love sort of snuck up on me. When I met Mike, we were students at university, first-years, both sort of nerdy. He was the quiet, studious guy that the rest of us thought was a thirty-five year old “mature” student. We placed bets on his real age. He carried himself like a much older person. He had a deep voice and an old face. And always wore a purple windbreaker. We called him Hopey most of the time, I think. I had a tendency (and still do) to call the males in my life by their formal names, so he was often Mr Hopey. We hung out occasionally, got drunk with our mutual friends now and then, went to movies, listened to music, played air hockey and Street Fighter.
In our second year, I had pretty much dropped out because I made the tragic error of choosing a social life and steady income over a tertiary education. Mike and I were flatting with two close friends, a couple. I was dating someone else, and went through a somewhat messy breakup in April of that year. Mike was witness to a lot of the crap that went down with that and I always felt sort of embarrassed because he’s not an emotional sort of person and I didn’t feel like he should be privy to that sort of behaviour. Drunkenness? No worries! Rampant crying and yelling and throwing stuff? Hell no!
Well, time passed, our friends continued as a couple (a bumpy couple, but a couple nonetheless), and Mike and I were both single. And we got free Sky TV for a month on some special deal involving, well, free Sky TV for a month. So while our flatmates were out doing couply things, Mike and I would huddle on our flat’s sofa, covered in a duvet to keep warm — being poor students — and watch free movies. Looking back now it was disgustingly cute and sort of inevitable. One night, after yet another evening of free movie-watching, Mike took my warm hands in his freezing cold hands (oh, I remember that well) and asked if I’d be his for a bit. Almost in those exact words.
I was…surprised. I think I just sort of nodded, or said, “Uh-huh” or something, gave him a friendly hug and went to bed to lie awake for a few hours, wondering if we were even remotely compatible as a couple.
Somehow we went from that awkward moment to being in love. And from love to marriage and travelling to California. And from there to having babies together, and buying a house, and getting to seven years of married life.
I don’t know how it happened. I don’t know why we don’t argue — it’s Mike’s inability to be fazed, I suppose, even when I’m in a shaking silent fury about some silly thing. I have no doubt at all that he’s the person I’ll be with for the rest of my life, and that is comforting. He complements me: where I would be furious, he is calm; when I’m panicking, he has a plan; when I’m sentimental and soppy he’s rational and mellow. I can dance for both of us when we go out, I can cry at cheesy movies without him laughing at me, I can tell the kids we love them while he shows them. We can agree not to buy each other flowers on Valentine’s Day because we know damn well that we don’t need to spend money to prove something we both know perfectly well.
Maybe tonight we’ll rent a DVD and haul out the duvet after the kids have gone to bed and do some…er…reminiscing.
So I heard about a study the other day that found that many kids with reading difficulties at school age were the same kids that never learned to crawl — that went straight to walking. The idea is that a crucial part of development that we gain through crawling is learning to coordinate both halves of our brain, crossing or eradicating the midline.
Imagine you’re crawling. Or do it. Right now. Get down on all fours, go on. When you crawl, your right leg and left arm move forward roughly together, yes? And vice versa, too. You’re using both sides of your brain to coordinate both sides of your body.
Now sit back up and look at this post: when you read, both your eyes follow the words from left to right (this being English). If you haven’t learned to crawl and work both halves of your body, your eyes will have difficulty reading all the way across. You might read the left half with your left eye, then switch to your right eye to read the right side. The two sides of your brain (and body) try to work independently of each other.
A lot of schools in Australia are introducing cross-body exercises to get kids to integrate the two halves. Good exercises to encourage toddlers are singing songs like “Skinny-ma-Rink” (one hand touches the opposite elbow, then switch), games involving cross-crawling, or marching on the spot while touching hands to the opposite knee.
I need a better title for this thing. Something that says “Hey there. I am mature, sensible, motherly and creative.” Something that tells a blatant fib.
I also need someone to explain to me why, on the days I want to leave the house early, Amy sleeps until 10:30am, but when I want a quiet morning to myself she wakes up at 6am, pulling my hair? Seriously, I’m going bald here.
Yesterday I took Amy to the new library for Babytime. We went last week and discovered it didn’t start until school holidays were done, so we went back yesterday once the kids were all back in school, only to find it was not only cancelled but the library staff simply hadn’t bothered to organise it: no room was booked, no staff member reserved for the job — all they were telling the score of mothers was: No Babytime today.
A group of us sat around kvetching for a while — one grandmother had brought her daughter’s baby from the other side of town, others (like me) had thrown clothes on themselves and their baby at the last second and sped to the library to get there on time. Amy enjoyed spending time with Amelie (10 months) and James (3 months). James’ mother watched Amy standing, leaning against a seat, and asked me how she could get James to crawl. Uh, hello? Your baby barely knows that he exists and you want him to go exploring already? I stressed to her that there is really no rush, that all babies develop differently and at different rates, and that James needs to get comfortable with what his body can do before even thinking about putting weight on those squishy little limbs.
Is this normal for a first-time mother? We all want our babies to be smarter and faster and stronger and more personable than the rest, but what are we doing with those expectations? What if James one day realises that he simply isn’t developing quickly enough to keep his parents happy? How would we have reacted if Ethan hadn’t walked until, say, 18 months? I get frustrated because Ethan still wakes up in the morning with poopy nappies, despite going to the toilet reasonably well all day. I get mad if he wets himself because I know he’s capable of taking himself to the toilet. Maybe my expectations are unfair. He’s barely three, after all.
Anyway, we’ll try the Babytime thing again next week. With Ethan, we signed him up for swimming classes, music groups, regular playdates with kids his age. So far we’ve slacked on Amy and I feel bad about it. It’s hard to squeeze all those things into one day, the day Ethan is in daycare. But now he’s at kindy, Amy and I can make a quick weekly trip to the pool, or find a music group for her age group so we can meet babies her age and give her the social opportunities that Ethan had. Equal treatment for both kids is more difficult than I thought.
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