Unsolicited advice on pregnancy, babies and parenting

I get it, I really do. People love to dump their advice on you, they always know best. But still, it’s hard now to know whether what I say is considered advice. It’s funny, even though it was only 8 months ago, I can’t really remember how it felt when I was pregnant, having people start talking to me about pregnancy or birth when I hadn’t really asked them.

It’s hard too because there is so much I know now, given all the reading and research I did before the Dude’s arrival. And I’m keen to share it. I can’t help it, I try to keep an ion mind, but I worry for women having babies in hospital, especially first babies. Most simply don’t realise the potential risk of being butchered. They think that because they’re in hospital where there is equipment and doctors and doctors people with experience then things will go as well as they can. Baby gets a bruised head from forceps or has to stay in a humidicrib or the woman can’t go to the toilet without having to be on pain killers but just because the doctor tells them their baby would have died otherwise, they are thankful. Most of the time, complications happen because of too much interference. We know this, the cascade of interventions.

So I want to warn women, help them realise that birth as we know it is totally at odds with a good outcome. But I don’t want to force information on people. And I don’t think I do. But I’m sure people sometimes don’t mention birth to me because they don’t want to hear my take on it. They know I’m going to say something controversial and they just don’t want to get into it.

Anyway, this whole thing stems from something one of my good Melbourne friends Veg said when I was there. We were sitting around, she and her sister (Spanish Queen), and our other friends Perthie and Liv. We got onto the subject of Veg’s baby shower and it soon transpired that she didn’t want one. I said that if anything she could have it and just get lots of presents, especially given she and her partner Punker would be doing it really tough financially as she is the main breadwinner and he’s studying. But she was totally reluctant to even talk about it. Eventually someone suggested that she could have just a get together of her choosing, an afternoon tea or a dinner or a coffee session. “What would you stipulate?” someone asked her. “No unsolicited advice!” she said. I don’t think she was directing this at me but I immediately felt insecure about every conversation we’d ever had since she announced her pregnancy. I think I was being a bit dramatic but I couldn’t help it, I felt like I could never talk to her about babies again! It was weird.

On the plus side, she is booked into a midwife-run birth centre, so here’s hoping she goes into labour spontaneously within a week either side of 40, and that she is negative for all their stupid tests. I sincerely hope the birth is empowering and not medicalised, for her sake and for her baby’s sake. I can’t talk to her about any of it, especially as I totally respect her wishes about unsolicited advice. And she hasn’t asked me for anything, so that’s cool. I just hope she knows I’m here if she needs anything.

Clifftops to suburbs: moving away

Recently, instead of Rocky Raccoon, which got a little tiresome after some eight million repetitions, I’ve been singing Bjork to the Dude when I want to calm him. Specifically The Anchor Song. “I live by the ocean… And during the night… I dive into it… Down to the bottom… Underneath all currents… And drop my anchor. And this is where I’m staying. This is my home.”

What a simple yet brilliantly expressed sentiment from the awesome Icelandic goddess! I would think about how relevant it is, given we really do live by the ocean, with the clifftops overlooking the Pacific just across the road. And the Dude was born here, it’s his home, the only one he’s ever known. But we knew the day was soon coming when we’d have to move. We planned it for first thing in the new year, and we saw only one house, which we applied for just before Christmas. After some dodgy behaviour and lies from the real estate agent, we were informed we’d been approved. And I promptly had a meltdown.

I’m sure I’ve mentioned before that Sydney does my head in, and the idea of moving but not moving away was a bit much for me. I cried. I couldn’t keep up the pretence any more, being positive so as not to subject Mr Chewbacca to my pointless negativity. But I had to let it out. Once I was done, after he’d left the conversation in frustration and there was a tense silence, I stopped him walking past me through the house and just said, “ring the agent, tell them we’ll take it.”

We had to move, as the Dude sat up just before Christmas and was crawling a few weeks later. Our one bedroom flat was just too small. I went for more walks than usual when we agreed to take the new house. Never again would I have a clifftop walk and multi million dollar views across the road from my house. I took the Dude to the beach at Clovelly for the first time, in fact it was the first time I’d ever been there too. I went down the hill and got gelato, because I could. And I packed boxes.

By contrast, our new place is three bedrooms, an actual house, with a huge empty back yard (yes, it has a hills hoist, how could it not?), and no storage space. And it’s in the suburbs. This is not the arse end of Sydney. There are worse places here (like where some of my family who I avoid live), but it is true suburbia. Needless to say, I was very apprehensive. The security aspect worried me a bit, and the prospect of extra hot summers was not thrilling. No ocean breezes to cool things down, no beach up the road. Although there is a river and reserve nearby.

The move itself actually did happen last Saturday. And if it hadn’t been for good friends, we would have been totally screwed. Even in a small flat, we managed to accumulate a lot of stuff over two years living there. We decided to let our landlord organise the removalist for only $40 an hour, as opposed to $110 if we did it ourselves. And it would have been fine except it rained like buggery the morning of the move. So the removalist didn’t show. After our landlord yelled at him in Chinese for 15 minutes, he agreed to come, but didn’t turn up til 4pm! Poor Mr Chewbacca had to pack everything left up by himself and help load the truck, although thankfully a good friend was there to help. And the reason I wasn’t there to help, aside from having a very unimpressed eight month old to deal with, was because I had to go and sign the lease which Mr Chewbacca had already signed as Surly Biatch (as our real estate agent will henceforth be known) wouldn’t allow him to pick up the keys until I signed the lease too. I will no doubt rant at some more appropriate moment about Surly Biatch and her evil agency, but suffice it to say, she has an attitude problem, she’s rude, she’s ignorant, and she’s out to screw us over if given the chance. No, I do not trust real estate agents at all, especially rental property managers. They are like those aliens from V, flawlessly fake on the outside and evil slimy vicious monsters with no capacity for empathy underneath.

So I was the first one in the new place, closely followed by the jolly foxtel man. At least we’d have something to watch on TV, even if we had no furniture… I plopped the Dude down on the floor of his new bedroom, changed his nappy and let him have a crawl around. Soon our good friends with their monstrosity of a truck (named appropriately after a somewhat twee but consistently tough Greek mythological hero) rocked up with some essentials, and the girlfriend and I set ourselves up in their camping chairs in our empty lounge room, sipped from our water bottles, and had a good long chat while the Dude played and grizzled around us, and her boyfriend headed straight back to the Clifftop Mansion to help Mr Chewbacca.

Soon another lot of close friends rocked up with two couches and a coffee table in a borrowed trailer they’d kindly been storing for us. As they began bring them in, the neighbours (on the poor house side – yes, there are poor little fibro cottages on one side of us and an ugly ultra modern block of concrete render on the other) offered them a hand, which was really nice, says a lot for the kind of people we’ve got near us. Slowly the house began to fill with furniture and life. The husband of the couple who brought the couches set to putting away all our groceries and arranging things in the kitchen. Soon the guys from Harvey Norman rocked up with our bed, washer and fridge. They kindly installed the latter two, but the bed remained in pieces until my dear enthusiastic friend and Mr Chewbacca put it together later that evening.

What a dream to have a full size fridge! And new mattress! Soon Mr Chewbacca arrived with our friend and was promptly followed by a small Chinese man and his wife driving a truck which looked like it’d been abandoned in the back streets of St Mary’s with a big neon sign pointing to it saying ‘graffiti here’. But nevertheless it was our stuff, finally, about 6pm, 5 hours later than expected. With six adults and two kids helping take stuff into the house and Chinese guy and wife unpacking the truck, we were done in about 20 minutes. We randomly stood around outside chatting for no reason whatsoever.

I almost forgot something. We are going to be on a show in the UK about people going to live in Australia and just what happens, so camera guy was hanging around most of the day and interviewing Mr Chewbacca about stuff. He asked me what I thought when he noticed me standing by the truck directing people. I was shocking, kept looking at the camera rather than him, talked boring crap and was just generally stiff and nervous. I was surprised actually as I thought I’d be all charismatic and funny and interesting but yeah, shit. I’ll be shocked if they use any footage of me actually.

Beers were acquired, unpacking begun, food enjoyed, chats had, until our friends had to get home. Mr Chewbacca and I, despite being shattered, stayed up til 1am doing bits and pieces and debriefing. That first night was warm and restless, especially as the Dude’s cot wasn’t up yet so I had to sleep with my arm around him to stop him falling out of bed. Which he managed to do on the second night anyway! He’s fine, went straight back to sleep between us (not taking any more chances!) and now his cot is back in its sidecart position. I also managed to get him quite badly sunburnt on Monday so now the poor little guy has blisters on his arm and leg! I am terrible.

All in all, what seemed a nightmare move ended up okay. We’re here. It doesn’t suck too much. The suburbs are just okay. We’re rocking them. Just like Quiet Riot did.

Cabramatta and the refugees

I caught the first part of the documentary Once Upon a Time in Cabramatta on SBS last Sunday night.  It was well done and I’ll definitely be watching the next episode.

This area of Sydney features fairly prominently in some parts of my family’s story in Australia, and I found a lot of the stories told by the migrants about getting to Australia, how and why they came, and what their lives were like when they got here bore many similarities to those of my mum’s family.

The way the documentary was presented gave the impression that the ‘multiculturalism’ label was first applied when Malcolm Fraser gave permission for the Vietnamese migrants to settle here. It gave the sense that, because of the white Australia policy, multiculturalism and migration could not have existed previously. Which is if course wrong, because it did. Australia is virtually all migrants. And I know this because my family arrived from Germany in 1950. But let’s back up a bit here.

Watching and listening to the migrants’ stories of what it was like having to run from certain death in your own country, to possible death on the journey to a strange country you know little about and where you don’t speak the language, just made me cry. It was an absolutely gut-wrenching story. Who knows, for example, what traumas were experienced ever after by the young children and babies who were shipped out without their parents to this place. I can’t imagine the horror of the ordeal and my heart breaks for those people who had no choice but to endure it.

I also understand that this documentary was about the Vietnamese migrants and the creation of Cabramatta, a drug infested, dangerous slum full of gang members and other criminals, as we knew it (or as it was portrayed) in the 80s and 90s. I realise they had to stick to the topic at hand and I wouldn’t expect such a documentary to go off on tangents to explain the stories of other migrant groups in the area.  But I feel the need to point out that just because you’re a migrant whose parents spoke no English and worked 18 hour days and beat you up when they were drunk doesn’t mean you can join a gang.

I was 10 in 1988, and I was one of six flower girls at my cousin’s wedding at a church in Cabramatta. My grandfather was one of the founding members of this church, having mortgaged the tiny family home sometime in the 60s to finance its construction. The wedding began with everyone gathering, as you do in Serbian tradition, at the bride’s family’s house. In Cabramatta. John Street, to be exact. We had photos and got dressed and had our hair done and oohed and aahed over the electric blue polka dot organza the bridesmaid dresses were made of (1988, remember), we ate gibanica and icing-sugar dusted cakes, and tried not to mess up our hair while exploring the massive house. This was the family home, where my aunt and uncle brought up their four kids. It was the typical wog mansion: white stone balustrades, statues of lions on posts either side of the drive, and two flag poles, one for the Serbian flag and one for the Australian flag. Brown glossy patterned tiles covered the floor downstairs, there was a bar with miniature decorative opanke hanging on the wall, and the huge formal dining room featured lots of red plush velvet and massive pictures of romanticised mediaeval battle scenes in thick gilt frames dominated. This was Cabramatta for me. I knew nothing of the murders and drug deals going on just down the street.

These poor Vietnamese refugees were escaping from death in their own country, due to war. There were few places that would accept them. Australia was a good option because it had plenty of space and still needed more people to populate it. They spoke no English. They had nothing but the clothes on their backs. They worked hard. They drank to get through the trauma of what they’d experienced, and the hard life they’d come to know in Australia. They didn’t get much time with their children, of which they had many. Their children had to fend for themselves, and there was something of a void between them, especially given the fact that the kids spoke English and would carry on conversations in English so their parents couldn’t understand. Kids who spoke English often advocated for their parents. The kids grew up doing it tough, making do with little attention, bigger siblings caring for and lording it over littler siblings.  Everyone ended up better off financially in the long run, but they all suffered huge traumas and were significantly psychologically scarred, which manifested in various negative ways throughout their lives.  This is also my mum’s family’s story.

They came, as I said, from war-torn Germany in 1950 on a boat with hundreds of others. My grandparents spoke only Serbian and German, as well as a smattering of some other languages like Hungarian and Turkish, but no English.  They had four children, the youngest, my mum, not yet two years old.  There had been talk of going to America, or Canada, who were offering similar opportunities for migration at the time, but Australia was chosen  because some distant family members had less than favourable experiences migrating to north America.  There was nothing left for them in Europe.  They had been rejected by a landlord for a house because my grandfather was Serbian.  My grandmother got things for the family on the black market.  Money was worthless; my mum remembers cutting the pictures out of the big German notes as a child.  My grandfather was a strong, stocky, positive man, a shoemaker by trade, and a very talented, quick-witted man.  He had been poor his whole life, the eldest of 14 children, having left home at age 10 because his father abandoned the family.  My grandmother was from a slightly higher class background, although her family had been torn apart during the war, her mother tortured and killed in a work camp by the Russians, her sisters dumped somewhere in the middle of Eastern Europe, her father and brother taken as translators, others just slaughtered. She reluctantly left, with the children she had never really wanted to have, to a life she couldn’t imagine enduring, across the other side of the world.  There was an outbreak of some contagious virus on board the ship and my mum was taken into a quarantined area for some time; she still has nightmares about it, despite being so little.  Upon arrival in Australia, they were herded into a migrant camp somewhere round Liverpool for a few months.  Their eldest son, who was ten, spoke some English he’d learnt at school, and paperwork was sorted out and land was granted; temporary land, upon which my grandfather built a two-room shack.  Life was hard and Australia was a harsh, crude environment.  My grandfather barely saw his family six days a week, getting up at 4am to work constructing Sydney’s railways and bridges.  He worked so hard, and his only vice was alcohol, which he indulged in when pay day came around.  It wasn’t that he drank away all the money, far from it in fact, as within a few years the family were living in a larger house and the land was a fully functioning farm with food crops and animals, the picture of self-sufficiency, thanks to my grandmother as well who slaved away in the garden from dawn til dusk, all the while giving birth to five more children.  Alcohol was not my grandfather’s friend.  He became violent, uncharacteristically so, and the violence was arbitrary.  Needless to say, more trauma was experienced by his wife and children because of this, and I can imagine he felt incredibly ashamed.

This was the life of European migrants to Australia.  The White Australia policy may have still been in place, but it had absolutely no bearing here.  Migrants arrived, they had virtually the same experiences as the Vietnamese migrants of the 70s and 80s.  Yes, some turned bad.  But not all.  In fact, despite the traumas and psychological injury suffered, the rifts caused in the family, I can safely say that not one of my mum’s siblings or her siblings’ children became gang members or drug dealers or lived on the street.  I don’t want to downplay the experience of the Asian migrants to Australia, as in some ways it was worse than what my family experienced (although it’s all relative of course), but what struck me about Once Upon a Time in Cabramatta was that they were somewhat blaming their choices to join gangs and take drugs on their terrible experience as migrants.  They were ignored by their parents, their father beat them in an alcohol-fuelled rage, their parents’ spoke no English, life was hard, and they ended up joining a gang.  More than that, I got the distinct impression that the documentary would have us believe that it was Australia’s inherent racist nature that made life so hard for the migrants.  It made me think, is racism worse when there is more difference to be noticed?  So, okay, my grandparents didn’t speak English; but they were white European, their language was really the main difference, not the way they looked.  They ate a little differently, but they were Christians.  So they were not as ‘different’ from the Aussies as the Vietnamese refugees were.  Perhaps this made it that much harder.  My grandparents were used to discrimination, the rejection by a German landlord back in Augsburg because of my grandfather’s Yugoslav ethnicity a case in point, whereas the Vietnamese had come from a country where 99% of the population were the same race, colour, creed, religion, retained a very similar cultural identity.  So discrimination may have been even more of a difficult thing for them to deal with.

What I wonder is this: does the very nature of the Vietnamese culture, being perhaps significantly more removed from the Australian culture than the European culture, make the Vietnamese migrants’ assimilation as new migrants nearly impossible?  And therefore is it inevitable that Asians will have a more difficult time fitting in to life here?  Or was it the timing that did it, the fact that it was the 70s and 80s, drugs and gangs were more prominent, there to fall into?  Was it because they had to leave their country so suddenly in fear of their lives?  Or were us European refugees just lucky not to fall into that cycle of drugs and gangs?  I don’t know the answer.  But I must highlight this: migrants did it tough, no matter where they came from, and multiculturalism in Australia is far from real today.  We have a long way to go before we realise what a true multicultural society is, how to be civil to each other.  I myself use words like ‘wog’ arbitrarily, without even thinking; that’s a product of the society we live in today.  Maybe one day we will truly know what it’s like to truly embrace other cultures, assimilate without being forced out of our own identities.

Sydney is a bum

“Sydney is  hard to love. If it were a person he or she would have no stomach and heart and would eat and drink too much.  I see Sydney the way I always saw it from the very first day I arrived in 1968. Sydney is a derelict man, addicted to booze and clutching a bottle of cheap grog wrapped up in a  brown paper bag, camped out in Hyde Park; blighted and victimised, having lived a long time without a moral compass.”  This is what my dad wrote to me in an email recently, in response to my latest whinge about Sydney.  I like the analogy.

Image courtesy of http://abhishekdebsikdar.wordpress.com/2010/12/18/self-destructive-ways/

My dad’s family first came as ten pound poms in 1959 and then again in 1970 (he arrived about 18 months before them, long story for another post). It’s interesting to me that he says he saw Sydney the same way all those years ago, as I have a perhaps somewhat idealised view of this city and what it was like in the 70s, which I believe was its heyday.  So perhaps I should just realise that Sydney has always been the way it is.  I guess it comes down to how it began, as a colony, a penal colony at that, and mixing pot of criminals and unfortunates and misfits.  No one built Sydney because it was a fantastic place to start a fantastic city; no one planned it and dreamed it and made it beautiful.  It was never anyone’s utopia.

As I’m sure I’ve mentioned before, Sydney just doesn’t do it for me. But I’ve ranted and raved enough; am I ever going to shut the hell up and focus on where I want to be? It occurs to me that I waste a lot of energy thinking about the bad rather than looking for the good. In my life, that is.  As part of the email conversation that the quote above came from, my dad said that I should think about what really makes me happy and go for that.  But what does really make me happy?  I don’t think I know.

What I do know is that Sydney is not where I need to be, ever.  It’s not where my son needs to grow up, and it’s not where my husband belongs either, I know this to be true one hundred per cent.  He argues that, yes, we don’t like Sydney that much, but can we be certain we’d love somewhere else?  What if we moved to Melbourne and within a year I realised I hated it and wanted to move on again.  It’s true, there is no guarantee that won’t happen, that’s a risk.  But isn’t that what life is about, taking a chance, a risk, to get something better than what you’ve got?  What’s the alternative?  Continue to exist superficially in this mud hole of mediocrity?  Sell ourselves short for the rest of our lives?  We only have one (even though I do believe in reincarnation).

We’ve gotta get out of this place.  And please, universe, don’t let it be the last thing we ever do.

As it stands, it looks like we might be moving south west, but it’s not set in stone yet.  They have virtually offered us the place but there’s something about it that’s not sitting right with me or with husband.  We are considering our options over the weekend, as we’ve got to leave where we are because it’s too small.  We realise living near the beach is actually pretty fantastic, and maybe we want to keep doing that rather than moving to suburbia.  We’re going to pay through the nose anyway, so why not?

I’ll leave you with one of my favourites from the awesome Jethro Tull.  Makes me think of my dad’s Sydney analogy.

Nearly 8 months

It’s funny. Eight months doesn’t seem like a very long time, but for the little Dude it’s a lifetime.  And because my life has changed so much since he arrived, it’s a lifetime for me too.  He is now sitting up by himself, having just randomly done it one day a few weeks ago.  We’re now in a stage I didn’t expect where we wait for him to sit himself up, then place pillows strategically around him in case he falls backwards or to one side, which he’s done many times.  Without pillows he’d just fall and hit his head on the ground, and even with the carpet under him it’s still a shock and probably hurts.  He’s tall too so he has further to fall.  I shudder to think how hard it’s going to be monitoring him when he’s learning to walk!  It’s nice now he can sit because it gives him more to do and he can play alone for longer without getting frustrated, although he still puts himself on his tummy and then starts screaming like he’s a beached whale and can’t move, it’s really weird.  That’s usually an indicator that he’s tired.

Speaking of tiredness, sleeping has been reasonably challenging recently.  He sleeps well at night, generally right the way through, but that’s only because he’s right next to me and can have boobie whenever he wants.  Some nights I’m sure he sleeps right through without even a dream feed, but other nights he gets restless at 4am and will toss and turn and feed on and off for an hour or more, which can be a bit annoying, but not the end of the world.  I’ve not had to get up with him in the night, so I think that’s quite good.  He still has a really hard time actually getting to sleep, especially for naps, of which he has two during the day.  Or at least I try to ensure he has two, and preferably for two hours each, although that rarely happens.  Not that he doesn’t need it, he so desperately needs more sleep, but he just can’t wind down and stay asleep.  Recently he’s been dozing off still attached for an hour or so, and then when I think I might be able to detach him and creep away he wakes and starts smiling and playing even though his eyelids are drooping and it’s clear he needs more sleep and will probably scream because he’s tired in about half an hour… So my life these days consists mainly of trying to get the Dude to a) sleep and b) stay asleep, which he rarely does without me for more than about 45 minutes.  There have been occasions where he’s slept alone for an hour or even two, but those are extremely rare, so rare they’re just flukes I think.  I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, this child is freaking intense!  But I guess I shouldn’t have expected much else, given how his dad is, and the family history of insomnia on both sides… the poor little dude doesn’t stand a chance really!  Sometimes he’s thrashing about so much I wonder how it’s possible for him to ever fall asleep, but it happens, and when he finally relaxes deeply after a couple of hours he will sleep pretty soundly, or at least I think that’s the case, I don’t remember being awake to find out!

Of course he’s massive, as usual.  He’s actually off the growth chart all together in terms of his height/length, which at 7 months sat at 75cm (haven’t measured recently so not sure, he’s probably grown since).  He was just shy of 10kg at 7 months, and that’s the 97th percentile or thereabouts.  We’re predicting he’ll be at least 6’5″, as his dad is 6’3″ but I’m convinced his mum’s lack of prenatal care and his terrible infant nutrition contributed to him being slightly smaller, as his dad is 6’5″.  I also think his strange eyesight (being very short-sighted only in one eye, discovered when he was four) and his odd digestion are related to that too.  But that’s just what I think.  Anyway, the Dude is huge and thriving, of course, despite my ignoring the stupid doctor and not plying him with iron fortified rice cereal made with formula!  Speaking of the doctor, I’ve decided I’m never going back to her, as every time she just disappoints me, doesn’t help me, doesn’t listen to me, and says really annoying things.  I’m going to try a new anthroposophical doctor I’ve discovered nearby and heard good things about, so we’ll see what happens there.  I’m curious about what she’ll say about his skin.

Speaking of the Dude’s skin, it isn’t fantastic.  I know it’s definitely constitutional and something his body has to work through, but I feel that there is more I could do for him.  Sometimes it’s really quite bad and cracks a little around his right wrist and both ankles.  He seems to have more on the right side than the left, which just helps confirm its constitutional nature.  His skin on his bum is perfect, which was a real mystery for a while there, until I was bathing him and my mum was here and she suddenly suggested that having the nappy on was actually helping the skin retain its moisture, and so it’s a simple case of the skin being unable to retain moisture.  That makes so much sense, given how much worse his skin got when we were in (dry) Melbourne, as Sydney is so humid most of the time.  Husband said it makes sense to him as he actually has extra dry skin and has done for as long as he can remember and that’s why he slathers himself in cocoa butter every morning.  So now we have a bit more insight into what’s actually occurring with the skin, and when it was really bad I did relent and apply a little cortisone cream which of course cleared it up very quickly, but I’m really not keen to put it on all the time because I know all its doing is suppressing the immune response, which is just a quick temporary fix and not a long term solution, plus it’s not something I want to do.  The immune system is working, that’s good, I don’t want to block it.  So we’ll see what the anthroposophical doc says and go from there.  At some level I feel I could do more with my diet, but I just haven’t got the commitment; sad but true.  So his skin has red, dry patches around his wrists and ankles, and a few bits behind his knees, up his lower arms and under his chin, although it changes slowly.

Anyway, as far as other developments go, he’s really moving around a lot, although not technically crawling yet.  He can get up on his hands and knees briefly and rock a bit, but generally he sort of pulls himself along with his arms, and pushes off with his feet.  He’s still really shaky and it’s very scary watching him try and sit and pull himself up.  Because he’s pretty tall he can see over the coffee table, and earlier today I turned around for a minute only to turn back and find him about to pull a ceramic bowl of Christmas chocolates onto his head!  It’s pretty awful when he falls backwards or sideways and he’s already had a few bumps on the head but we just do our best to keep cushions around him or be down on the floor with him and always watching.  He’s extremely strong – I’m currently watching him pull a dining chair towards him across the floor with one hand… and yes, that’s a metal framed chair, quite heavy!

He’s recently begun saying ‘mum mum mum mum’ and ‘dthe dthe dthe’, and he also says what sounds like ‘yeah’, in addition to his ‘ngeng’ and ‘geh’.  He laughs and responds to peekaboo and tickling, makes his mini Chewbacca noise, screeches loudly for no reason in particular, and cries out of frustration ALL the time.  His eating is pretty good, I think.  We’ve been doing combination baby-led solids, so I often give him big chunks of fruit to eat straight off his tray table in the high chair, which he is very capable of doing.  Today he polished off about three quarters of a whole nectarine (his favourite).  I’m holding back on all the nightshades – tomatoes, potatoes, capsicum, eggplant – as well as citrus and other allergenic fruits like strawberries.  I’m sure he’d be fine with all of that, but it’s more about getting his body used to eating before we make it work extra hard to process this kind of food.  He eats rusks which have a tiny bit of milk and wheat in them and so far is fine with it, but that’s as much as I’ve given him of those two things.  He has also eaten a few crusts as well.  Other than that, I spoon feed him a bit, usually with an organic veggie, fruit, millet mix I get from the supermarket.  I’m a bit slack with making him food, and he loves the stuff in the packet and it’s completely natural and all organic and free of additives etc so I figure it’s all good.  We’ve discovered that, like daddy, he hasn’t got a sweet tooth, so he likes his nectarines much more than something like mango, which would be my preference.  He’s amazing with the nectarine actually.  I cut him off slices like little boats, and he eats the flesh and spits out the skin.  At first I was worried and was going to peel it but there’s really no need, he’s very capable of eating just the flesh.

So far he still doesn’t suck on a dummy, although I give it to him when we go to sleep.  He does like it to chew on and play with, but when it’s time to sleep he will get upset if I put the dummy in his mouth.  He doesn’t accept substitutes!  At some level it’s as though he knows it’s just not the same.  He’s like that with everything actually.  I’m sure he understands what I’m saying most of the time.  He looks at me so intently, listens to everything I say, and responds accordingly.  He has known his name for months now, and will always respond, even if it’s to just give a cheeky look and go back to whatever havoc he was wreaking.  Although usually he’ll pay attention and actually turn back, as though he knows exactly what I’ve said and is doing just what I’ve asked.  It’s pretty amazing.

Anyway, at the moment, five days off eight months, he is just about to crawl, beginning to say words, and just turning into an amazing little boy.  I wish he’d sleep by himself as I’d love to be able to stretch out in bed again and go to sleep and wake up whenever I want, but I know it will pass and eventually he will sleep in his own bed.  For the moment, he is how he is, and he is just perfect.

New Year’s Resolutions: 2012

I know, it’s not exactly an original topic for a blog post, but hey, I need to jot them down and by putting them here I feel as if I will need to stick to them more… or something.  Anyway, humour me, here they are, in no particular order:

1. Try to get the Dude into a routine.  This means getting his meal times a little more sorted out, as he’s a hungry boy but only when he’s not too tired, and also getting sleeps happening on more of a schedule, as I think he’ll respond better to that and I might actually get some peace. I’m getting closer to achieving this already, given that he now has 12 hours sleep a night (mostly) and a clear two sleeps per day, and I can roughly predict when they happen. Roughly.  I’d like to get him into going to bed earlier, as currently he goes down between 8 and 9 most nights, although saying ‘goes down’ implies that I put him to bed and he stays asleep for the night, which never happens.  He is slowly improving, but most nights I spend a good half hour to an hour settling him down the first time, then have to go in twice to resettle before we finally go to bed about 10:30 or 11.  My mum says I should just get over the fact that I can no longer be a ‘night person’ and go to bed early with him.  I’m still in denial.

2. Finish NaNoWriMo.  I’d like to finally do this, having attempted and failed for a number of years now.  I’m not sure what it will take.  Actually that’s not true, I know exactly what it will take: some discipline, daily targets, sticking to a routine.  Refer back to number 1.

3. Study.  I really want to do my Masters.  Probably Arts, probably creative writing or life writing.  I’m also thinking about finishing off the Grad Dip in Editing and Publishing I started a few years ago.  That way, I might actually be able to start working towards my dream job, editing books in a publishing house.  I realise that now I’ve left work to have the Dude, I have a once-in-a-lifetime golden opportunity to rearrange my career into something I actually want to do, instead of constantly being branded a ‘project management professional’ or being offered marketing jobs, which I’d frankly rather chop off an arm than consider.  The marketing and advertising machine and all who sail in her totally shit me.  Although I do like watching The Gruen Transfer.

4. Get a job.  Money is really tight.  I’m talking really tight.  Okay so it’s not to the point where we have to ration our food or stop eating meat or can’t ever have takeaway, true, but it’s not great.  And me not working is making it super hard.  It’s hard for me because I have this mortgage and all these bills to pay but no income.  Actually scratch that, I have Centrelink and their awesome $24 per week.  Strangely enough that doesn’t suffice.  So I need to start earning an income again and I really don’t want the Dude in care just yet as I don’t want him catching all sorts of colds and diseases from all the other vaccinated, non-breastfed, chemical-ridden kidlets, and I also don’t think it’d be good for him to be away from me for that long, so it’s going to have to be working from home.  Which is doable.  I just have to find the time.  Refer back to number 1.

5. Write more.  Yeah, this one always makes an appearance.  But it needs to be there because I do need to write more.  And by writing I mean working on actual stories that will one day be published, not blogging.  How I’ll ever find the time is beyond me, but I must have this one in the list just in case its presence helps make it happen.

6. Blog more.  I go through phases of being really good with blogging, but then I slack off or Christmas happens or I forget or the Dude has a hard few days or weeks or some other shit goes down and I forget I have a blog for a while.  I would like to blog at least once a week minimum, preferably more.  Again, no idea how I’ll find the time but I just have to.  I read all these blogs by all these other awesome mums and think, how do they do it?  But they don’t have the Dude.  Although The Feminist Breeder is one that I am pretty amazed by, her baby is currently not sleeping at all at night yet she still manages to blog and presumably do all her other stuff like work and study and be a mum to her other two kids and a wife to her husband.  But she might actually be an Amazon.  That’s what I think anyway.

7. Move house.  This isn’t much of an actual resolution, but I want to have it in there because it’s something big that will be happening next year and it represents something bigger for me.  I guess it represents a compromise, but at the same time it represents a new phase for us as a family because we’ll finally be in a new place, an actual house, and even though it’ll be in shitty Sydney it’s one step towards what I want.  A small step, but a step nonetheless.

8. Refinance the mortgage.  This has needed to happen for a while, pretty much ever since I let the fixed interest rate lapse and started paying way too much to a stupid finance company in WA who handle my mortgage from a bank in Adelaide for my house in Canberra.  Yeah, makes no sense.  I’m close to getting this sorted, although it means husband taking it on technically as he’s the breadwinner, but by marrying me he gets half the house anyway so I figure that’s fair enough.  Once I’ve done this, I’ll be paying so much less that the rent will more than cover it, so paying bills will be a little easier.

9. Discharge all debts.  This one is important, not just because I need to be debt free, but because I don’t want to end up with a terrible credit rating like my dad and be unable to ever get a loan.  I also hate the stress of bills and debts hanging over my head, and it’s particularly hard because what is hanging over my  head is automatically hanging over husband’s head and he doesn’t need all that.  He shouldn’t have to pay for my inability to manage my finances.  So I plan to get a little extra money when I refinance so I can pay off all the debts and consolidate.

10. Refurbish my house in Canberra.  I’ve needed to do this for a while, and just recently when the carport randomly collapsed I realised it needs to happen in the new year.  The house is nearly 40 years old, and although the kitchen and bathroom were re-done not long before I bought it in 2005, that was six years ago now, seven actually, so it’s definitely time to do something.  I shudder to think what it’ll cost to deal with the issue of the water leaking from the bathroom upstairs through the ceiling of the laundry below it, but that has to be tackled.  In addition there are a few other things like a pergola that I’d like done.  I need to speak to a real estate agent to gauge just what I need to do in order to improve the value without over capitalising.  As it stands, I have great equity in the place and excellent tenants, so I’ve done well.  But if I don’t do something soon it will all fall down!

11. Collect all my stuff from my shed in Canberra.  Back in mid 2007 when I went to London, I sold a lot of my stuff, but the stuff I didn’t sell or give away that I still wanted to keep; important stuff; stuff with sentimental value. I packed it all into my little shed in the front garden before I left and when I came back in January 2010 I peeked in.  It was all still there.  That’s as far as I got.  I haven’t been back.  When my tenant rang to say the carport had collapsed, I thought she meant the shed.  It’s not exactly the most stable building in the world, just a little tin shed someone bought from Bunnings.  I can’t believe it’s still standing.  And I wonder what state my stuff is in!  There’s so much important stuff in there, pictures and stories from my childhood, an Edwardian sideboard that was in my parents’ house which I always meant to refinish, some random art projects, all my artwork from my year at art school, probably even books that are no doubt damp, mouldy or eaten by insects… There’s so much stuff I can’t even remember half of it.  At some level I’m looking forward to going through it all, the process of rediscovery, but the thought of seeing just how much it’s been destroyed and then trying to work out what to do with it and how to get it where I want it is not appealing at all.  No doubt I’ll update about that at some point…

So that’s it.  Bloody long list!  Only I could write 1500 words on my new year’s resolutions…

Who am I?

This is something that always plagues me whenever I blog. In fact I hesitated about starting a blog for ages simply because of this. I really don’t want to reveal my identity on my blog, yet I have this (perhaps self-indulgent) urge to spill my guts.  I guess it’s kind of like any social media, we want to tell the world what we’re doing, who we are, and the world is interested because people are interesting; voyeurism is interesting.

What I’ve really struggled with, though, is the fact that I don’t have much to do with my family, on both sides, and I don’t really want them reading anything I write. That’s not to say they can’t, but I just want nothing to do with them, so thinking they might read my blog is kind of concerning.  Let’s get this straight: these are not normal people.  I tend not to hold grudges, it’s not just about that; these are people who have serious psychological issues, people who have been really nasty to me for no good reason, people who I can never forgive, people whose presence in my life offers nothing but stress and unhappiness.  These are the people I would move to the other side of the world to avoid.  And these people generally have no lives and like to gossip.  Not that I could give a crap whether they talk about me or what they say, but it’s more that it makes me really angry that they dare to try and invade my space even though they know I want nothing to do with them and they are the cause of that.

All that aside, I’m still not entirely comfortable with telling the interwebs about the details of my life; not because I am closeted or secretive, far from it, but because what if some psycho dickhead reads it and does some research and finds out where I live and comes to kill me or something?  I read some fabulous blogs of lovely people who identify themselves by name and with photos.  You can easily work out roughly where they live and I reckon if you were a real weirdo you could hang out at the local shops and follow them home… and I dunno, murder them or something.  But thinking about it, what good does knowing someone’s name and what they look like do you?  If you’re going to stalk and murder someone, couldn’t you just do that, without having to stalk them online first?  So what am I so worried about?

Anyway, the whole point of this post is to say that I like talking about myself a lot but I will mainly avoid identifying myself via this blog, at least for the moment.  Maybe when I get more into the swing of regularly posting and feeling like I know what my blog is about, and maybe if I get a following (yeah right) then I will reconsider.  But for the moment, I am Curiosikat, I am mother of the Dude, wife to husband.  My husband and I text in Yoda speak (spaghetti for dinner, I will make), the Dude won’t sleep for more than half an hour by himself, I don’t have enough money, we live somewhere I hate, but we manage.

I didn’t finish NaNoWriMo… again…

Ah dear. I tried, I really did. But I got to nearly 7,000 words and that was it, I was done.  It didn’t help that my little Dude decided to get six teeth from 30 October all through November, which meant he was more restless than usual and therefore even more difficult to help sleep.  And there was some real tough shit going down in the Curiosikat house that needed some serious attention, heated discussions about moving house and just general adjustments to having a child… yes, still.  So I bombed out with NaNo again.

The fridge where I used to live in London

I’m disappointed, but there have been some positives:

1. I realised that my ‘idea’ is very different in theory to what it is in practice. That is, when I wrote, I found myself just telling a long-winded story about myself and what happened and never really even got to the stuff that the actual main bit of the story was about! I kept rabbiting on… ‘and then I did this and that was pretty awesome, but then I did this other thing and that was also awesome…’ bla bla bla bla bla… So all it really became was a glorified hindsight diary entry.  It wasn’t good writing at all.  There were some good memories there, but that wasn’t why I decided to write about this idea.  I had grand plans, to come up with a really unique yet marketable real life story of… well, I don’t want to talk about it too much.  But suffice it to say, it’s a pretty awesome idea.  Or at least if I could write it, it would be.  I found myself absolutely hating what I was writing, as it was just ‘and then…’ over and over.  There was no real story there.  Frustrating, yes, but eye-opening.

2. I actually did manage 7,000 words, which for me, with a baby, is pretty good.  And some of those words were written 2,000 at a time, which means I’m more than capable of making that 50,000 in the month.  It was refreshing to just let myself blurt out words, even if they weren’t that wonderful, and I’m glad I did actually manage something.

3. I now know my idea a lot better. I know that there’s heaps of memoir type stuff floating about in my brain in amongst the ideas, and I think I got a lot of those out, which leaves more room for good ideas.  I also know that what I was planning on writing wasn’t just another boring self-indulgent diary entry; it was actually a good story, worth writing and worth reading.  So I will attempt it again, one of these days.

4. I can give some other ideas the go ahead, now I’ve done a bit of work on that one.

All in all, yes it was a failure, but not a dismal one.  And I will be back with a vengeance and some new ideas next year!

The rainbow quilt story

When I found out I was pregnant, I decided to get back into quilting and make one for the baby.  It’d been so long since I’d made a quilt I couldn’t even remember when I actually did make one.  I have a vague recollection of some textiles project in year 11 or 12, a massive appliqued monstrosity of a quilt with an ugly face on it.  I figured I wouldn’t go overboard, and it had to be something not too pink or too blue as I didn’t know what I was having.  I didn’t even really think about the size, even though there are standard cot sizes.  So I planned something 1.5 metres square, big enough to last. And I decided a rainbow gradient would work.  I didn’t think at all about the actual quilting part until I was sewing the thing together and I realised then that I knew next to nothing about actual quilting technique.

Practising piecing together to see if my design will work

The design seems to work!

Beginning to pin it together for real

All pinned in strips and laying out for the last time before sewing - I need a proper sewing area!

All top pieces sewn together - I realised later I should have done it as a professional quilter would have, oh well

Putting the top, wadding and backing together ready for quilting

Pinning on the cheap blanket binding I kind of regret using now

Hand sewing the corners

Final sewing of the binding

Now it's used as a playmat

So, although I used lovely (expensive!) bamboo batting in this quilt so it would be warm, and I backed it with flannelette, it still hasn’t actually been used as a blanket yet.  It’s been the Dude’s playmat since he was born, and it does well enough at that.  The only thing I forgot was to prewash the fabric, so who knows what’s going to happen with shrinkage when I do wash it!  I think hand or at least gentle washing is in order.  I shudder to think how the wadding will react!  It turned out well, especially with the actual quilting being an afterthought.  I didn’t do anything special, in fact I couldn’t remember which foot on my machine is the quilting foot, so I didn’t even bother to disengage the feed teeth, I just sewed in straight lines with invisible thread along the seams, so it’s just a simple grid.  It works.

Now I’m onto the next project… a cream/white themed baby size quilt for a friend who is due next month.  I was planning it for the Dude but he is past the stage of using a cot quilt, given he is not even sleeping in his cot anyway.  And I think the subtle, delicate patterns are a little too girly and babyish for him.  I’m going to try a little free motion quilting on this one!  I’ll be sure to upload some photos when it’s done…

Hindsight and commitment

One of the first things I did when I began my UK adventure four and a half years ago was take a nine day tour of the Scottish highlands. I’d been in the country about two weeks when I flew up to Edinburgh and, on the recommendation of a good friend, took a tour with a small but awesome company. The brilliant thing about the tours this company ran was that they were limited to small groups – maximum 15.

Image via Wikipedia

I knew no one, and I hated Edinburgh. But early one morning I ventured onto a Mercedes bus with an eclectic group of fellow tourists. There were two groups in two buses; the other group had been assigned a guide/bus driver who was a goody goody version of Ewan McGregor. Damn. I noticed a questionable looking individual in a kilt loitering nearby with a cigarette. He looked like he’d just come from fighting a battle against Vikings. When he stormed onto our bus, I realised he was our guide and driver for the next nine days! “Everyone like loud music?” he shouted over his shoulder from the driver’s seat. No one answered, probably terrified. “Well if you don’t you can fuck off!” and with that he put his foot down and we experienced his maniacal driving for the first time. I loved it. The bagpipe rock he had blaring, speeding past massive dawdling campervans on single lane roads as Kilt Man yelled “fucking Germans!” out the window. Others were confronted, amused, intimidated, scared, offended, unimpressed. Ewan McGregor told us later that he had a bit of a reputation with the ladies. At first I was too mesmerised by Ewan’s green eyes to understand why any woman would be attracted to that dark, hairy, swearing, chain smoking, argumentative storm cloud of a man, but soon I began to see the attraction. And he really looked great in a kilt. Although his penchant for flashing anyone nearby at any given moment was a little unnerving.

Pretty sure this was somewhere near Glen Coe...

I ended up having a little ‘thing’ with a very cute Spanish boy who was eight years younger than me. Kilt Man was six years older; I was never interested in older men. At one point, I said to my friend, “it’s going to be first come, first served,” and I meant it, although I’d decided if Kilt Man made a move, I’d have him. But he didn’t. And I shagged the Spaniard. Which lasted about eight minutes.

I’d always assumed Kilt Man was never keen on me. He was so confident, and I felt like such an amateur. Although I was surprised Spaniard was interested. But saying that, Elaine from Seinfeld had a point: “It’s like trash collection. As a woman you just have to put your trash out on the street and eventually the next trash man will collect it.” Something along those lines anyway.

I never saw Spaniard again after I went back to London, even though I came back to Edinburgh three weeks later for the Fringe. Kilt Man made friends with me on Facebook (or rather I friend requested him I think) and we had a few conversations here and there but nothing much over the last four years or so.

Then he sent me a message. He’d been chatting to one of the other girls from our tour and apparently my name had come up. He ended the message with a ‘X’. Which doesn’t mean anything. You know, some people call everyone ‘babe’, or sign off text messages with ‘xx’. It’s how some people roll. Like husband, for example, is very anti ‘xo’, but he’s a big fan of the smiley face. I tend to work out what others do and then go along with that, so if they do kisses at the end of an email, I might too.

It was great to have a little fun banter going back and forth with messages. I wondered, had he been keen on me? So I asked him, in a roundabout way. Turns out he had been but it would have been inappropriate of him to make a move, given he was our tour guide. I was chuffed. I looked over at husband and thought, I’m lucky, I managed to get a guy who is just as attractive (for many of the same reasons). I may have missed a chance for some fun with a hot Scotsman, but I’ve got a hot husband who can also do an awesome Scottish accent.

I thought we’d leave it at that, laugh about not having managed to hook up and that’s it. But it seems he didn’t have that idea. And he began to ask what I’d have done if we HAD hooked up back then! I’m only too familiar with this sort of thing, having done my fair share of Internet dating and suggestive chatting with prospective lovers… If I were single, it’d be different, fantasies up the yin yang! But I’m married. And my husband and our relationship are everything to me. So when kilt man said something just that bit too leading and suggestive, I had to bring him back to reality. My reality. I had been playing along and I do like the guy, so I didn’t just say, hey, I’m married, that’s not on. But effectively that’s what it amounted to. I basically left him to his fantasy. I prefer my reality.