NOT sulking

In case you're wondering, I'm NOT upset that the Socceroos were beaten by Japan in the Asian Cup quarter final.

I'm NOT cross at Vince Grella for getting sent off, leaving his team mates to struggle on with ten men for a really really long time.

Really I'm not.

Let's just look at Winnie's favourite toy instead of talking about it anymore.



Scary, isn't it?

She looks up at that for ages and shakes it by its crinkly skirt.

She'd eat it if she could.

Twelve weeks old and already I don't understand her!

Mogblogging

Ok, I never thought I'd ever exploit my cat, GAFIC, for blogging purposes seeing he's not really able to give permission for the use of his image but, um, this is quite cute and I've been stuck on the same book for a couple of weeks now and that's far too boring to talk about just yet.

These two shots show GAFIC in his new favourite spot - under baby Winnie's crib. When I get up in the middle of the night to feed her, the cat gets up too to keep us entertained. First he rubs against my legs for a while. Then he runs up and the hall a few times. Then he jumps underneath the crib and plays peekaboo. Very cute.


This one shows his second favourite spot - in the middle of the baby's playmat, preferably when she's on it.

I keep telling him I'd be more impressed if he could only play with the toys the right way but he's far too dignified for that...

Anarchy rules

According to today's SMH from next year prams must be sold with tethers so if people forget they're pushing their precious bundles of joy around and answer their phones, their prams won't roll off into rivers.

This makes me so cross. It's NOT HARD to use a pram's brakes or hold onto it with one hand. It takes far far less concentration than driving. The first time I took Winnie out I was surprised how quickly the pram built up momentum downhill but two minutes of practice later and I worked out what to do.

The article says that parents are only going to be "encouraged" to tie themselves to the prams but I can just see the disapproving looks on people's faces if you dare to go out unrestrained. And heaven help you if you shop like me by leaving the pram at one end of the aisle in the supermarket while trying to find something quickly. You'd soon be pulled up short by your harness. Gives new meaning to the idea of kids tying you down!

I wonder if failure to tether will be grounds for Mal Brough to take away whatever tax concessions parents get.

Don't quite know why I'm so upset but such a small thing when incompetent terrorists have paralysed international travel for days. Maybe I really am
an anarchist after all.

IM IN UR CRIB WATCHING UR BABY

Be good if I could get a camera in my hand when my Geriatric and Fat Indoor Cat (GAFIC) jumps into the storage basket under Winnie's crib. So cute! So kittenish! Such an attention-seeking beast now there's a new member of the family who has all this STUFF in spaces where he used to laze about. Poor cat.

Over the past few days, in between laughing at GAFIC and feeding, cleaning and playing with the baby, I read In the Woods by Tana French. I bought it because I loved the cover and the way the edges of the pages are black. The photo doesn't show this or the lovely dual textures of the cover. It looks so SPOOKY and interesting that I didn't even mind paying full price (or not much anyway). It's a beautifully designed book.

For once, the inside didn't disappoint. This is really well executed police procedural set in contemporary Dublin. The thirty-something Detective Ryan is investigating the murder of a twelve-year-old girl in the same suburban remnant wood where two of his friends disappeared at the same age more than two decades earlier. He was with them but was left behind for some reason and he has no memory of what happened. He's convinced the crimes are connected and turns his world upside down trying to recover his memory and prove this.

What makes this book so good is the way French evokes the thoughtless animal joy of childhood and the atmosphere of suburban Dublin. The contemporary scenes are scattered with enough pop cultural references (Scissor Sisters, South Park etc) to make it seem part of the real world too - unlike many in this genre. I can only assume the stuff about how the police operate is true too. Ryan's central relationship is with his partner and this is really beautifully realised as the emotional and professional core of his life.

This is the sort of book where I have to put it down and do something else to avoid rushing through to the end pell mell and I was sad to reach the last page.

Competitive? Moi?

Winnie and I battled a deluge to get to the first meeting of our mother's group this morning.

Until today I thought those people who covered their expensive prams in clear plastic covers were being silly and over-protectve and possibly suffocating their young. But after walking a kilometre in the heaviest rain we've had for two years while trying to hold an umbrella over the open front of the pram so Winnie didn't drown and getting completely soaked myself, I kinda get it.

I also see why there is a baby shop right next to the Early Childhood Centre. Canny move that.

And I'm extremely grateful that they could sell me one of those stupid covers so that next time it rains I can struggle to push the pram while holding the umbrella over my own head. Of course it probably won't rain like that until Winnie's in school now...

Anyway, it felt strange to walk into a room full of sleep-deprived anxious new mothers and realise I was the most obviously bedraggled.

These groups are meant to make you realise you're not alone. That's great but I walked away worried that I wasn't doing about ten things right. Apparently we're meant to spend every waking moment staring into our babies' eyes and show them toys they're too young to see and talk to them all the time, even reading to them if possible. One woman said she read New Idea to her baby and the nurese said that was all right. I was too shy to admit that this week Winnie and I have been reading Fierce Invalids Home from Hot Climates by Tom Robbins. Or at least I've been reading the few bits to her that don't involve horny older men trying to get into bed with adolescent girls. Or taking psychotropic drugs. Or just plain silliness.

It's slow going (because I'm reading five pages at a sitting) but I'm enjoying it for it's show-offy pyrotechnic language and flights of fancy connecting odd things like Peruvian indians to the prophecies of Fatima and gun running to post-impressionist art. Robbins uses similar conspiracy theories and covoluted plots as Pynchon and Phillip K Dick in this book but it seems more lighthearted and less ponderous than their work. Could just be me though.

Mother's little helper

It's probably fair to say that before Winnie came along I was ridicuolously paranoid about the prospect of going a bit post-natal. I've been working full time for 13 years and I'm used to talking to adult people all day. I wasn't sure I'd cope with months and months of relentless nappy-changing and baby-feeding.

A few weeks ago we were watching The Collectors and this woman had sent in her collection of blue plastic objects she'd found in the street while pushing her son's pram around. While these things were quite a lovely blue colour (she couldn't bring herself to keep anything red or green even though she picked them up occasionally) no amount of calling it the art of the "found object" could disguise the fact that she was picking up crap from the street like a bag lady.* I looked at my Beloved and asked him to shoot me if I started doing stuff like that.

So far, I haven't time to feel sorry for myself even if there was anything to feel sorry about. Friends, family and community support people are ringing me every day to ask me how I am. This is lovely and heartwarming* and quite a bit different to my poor old mum's day when she was stuck in the burbs without a car and people apparently scowled when you tried to take prams on public transport.

But I thought I might have been crossing a line yesterday morning when I wheeled the pram into the bottle shop at 10:30. I was there to buy wine to go with the dinner I was going to cook and I had two enormous shopping bags full of food as supporting evidence... but so worried was I that the man behind the counter might think I was about to go home and drown my baby blues that I bought UNREFRIGERATED white wine.

* I have tried to call crap art myself. When I was 17 I went through a phase of picking up black shoes I found in the street. I thought it could be a sculpture project for school art but after I had a dozen or so shoes I realised I couldn't stand the smell of other people's foot odour anymore and threw them out.

**except when they ring when I'm trying to sleep (which is at least once a day.)

Another bad book for an anxious new parent

The night before I went into hospital, I started reading The Slapping Man by Andrew Lindsay.

I didn't get far that night. On page one a woman gives birth to a child with a monstrously deformed jaw. On page 2 she's worried he'll bite her boob off while breastfeeding.

Luckily that turned out all right in the end. The baby grew up up to be Ernie, a man with a powerful jaw that could withstand any amount of violence.

This book took me two weeks to read because I kept losing my place.* But this is exactly the sort of self-consciously odd book I find a bit irritating at the best of times. It's set in an isolated coastal community of indeterminate siuze full of "quirky characters". There's Ernie who makes his money from being slapped and his quirky parents and the quirky town butcher who wants to slaughter every different animal and the town publican who's scared of his brother the butcher and quirky Jean who sleeps with everyone but hasn't kissed anyone since her first boyfriend died and finally there's Vronsky the fake town shrink, the quirkiest of them all because he hears all the town's secrets.

It's structured around really short chapters focussed on one character that may not relate to anything else that happens. Some of these are quite poetic but it's impossible to work out how much time passes during the action - it could be weeks or a couple of decades. Yes, I realise this is probably the point.

Anyway I was surprised that even though there was heaps I didn't like, it wasn't that bad. Some of it was even pretty funny. Oh and I liked the cover.

*Admittedly, for most of that time, I WAS heavily medicated, sleep deprived and a bit excited about having a tiny baby of my own to cuddle and wrap up and try to tickle.

Good but not for the squeamishly expectant

A couple of weeks ago I read The Hamilton Case by Michelle de Kretser. Until just now I didn't realise it's technically Australian because the author has lived here since she was 14. This is a reasonably excusable oversight because the novel is set almost completely in Sri Lanka with a couple of excursions to England.

The action takes place from the late nineteenth century to the 1970s amongst the privileged Sinhalese class who were wealthy and socially powerful but never accepted by the Europeans as equals even though they sent their children to be educated at Oxford and Cambridge and bought their suits on Saville Row.

The central figure, Sam, is a very unhappy barrister who spends his whole life being rejected by both his mother and the society which unaccountably defies his expectations, rewarding people he sees as useless and denying him his just desserts. He can't bear Sri Lankan independence: at one point he laments that he has to put up with pineapple jelly when he'd been raised to appreciate marmalade. This unhappiness makes him very cruel.

I thought it was remarkably good. It starts off with Sam's account of his life and the case he thought would make his career. Mercifully, this is quite short because he has an overly fussy, ironical voice. Most of the rest of the book is narratged in the third person, some from other viewpoints so you can qury the reliability of Sam's version of events.

The blurb on the front of the book says that it is reminiscent of Remains of the Day. This is a fair enough comment about Sam's capacity for self-deception but there is a lot more going on in the story. The jungle is described magnificently. One character changes from a hunter to a proto-ecologist over time. There are ghosts of dead children and magical visions. It's a very fine read.

But I really could have done without reading about a stillborn baby when I was eight and a half months pregnant. I poked Winnie until she did somersaults after reading that bit.

Life without the interwebs

Back again. Strangely enough hospitals frown on new mothers using computers in bed. In fact, some of the midwives were a bit dubious about books too. One went so far as to say I wouldn't have time to finish the trashy novel I was trying to read between feeds until 2010.

My how I scoffed!

But 13 days later when I got to the last page and couldn't remember the beginning, I realised she had a point.

Anyway, the baby is delightful. We think she's the most beautiful thing in the world - far cuter than Princess Mary's newborn for instance. But I know that to the rest of the world she probably looks like Winston Churchill - except with a more boring hat.

Ch-ch-ch-changes

Lately I've been researching a new (to me) subgenre from the self help section of the bookshops, all about babies and birth and stuff.

This has been quite a revelation. I mean Kaz Cooke's Up the Duff does have a week-by-week narrative about the oddly named Hermoine* and her experiences with six different health professionals as her girth expands and there is a baby at the end (I sneaked a look at the last chapter) but, by and large, these books they lack a lot in the areas of PLOT and CHARACTER DEVELOPMENT and include a lot of things to give potential parents of a nervous disposition NIGHTMARES.

Worst of these is The CHOICE Guide to Baby Products.


Look at the gorgeous little thing on the cover. How cute. What a happy sausage!

This is exceptionally misleading. This book should be subtitled "3000 ways in which you can cause your child's DEATH or DISABLING INJURY by shopping poorly."

Indira Naidoo has been the face of Choice for the past few years. As I was reading each section about HOW PRAMS CAN KILL and SAFE BATHING I heard her dulcet tones in my head, telling me that I need to be vigilant all the time and I can't do something as simple as letting my parents send me the cot used perfectly safely by my grandmother, her brother, my father and at various stages by me, my siblings and my niece and nephew. If a cot doesn't comply with the Australian and New Zealand standard of 1998, sleeping could be FATAL for your baby. Apparently.

It's all a bit hard really. Luckily, I've got this far without major misadventure and, in a week or two, if all goes well, touch wood and fingers crossed, I should get to test my compliant baby transportation, storage and washing equipment.

In the meantime, I'm going to catch up on some books with plots.

*The MOST IRRITATING NAME EVER because everyone who's read Parade's End or Harry Potter or Greek mythology is used to seeing "Hermione" and I was hoping it was a typo from the first edition but someone gave a me a more recent copy** that STILL called her "Hermoine" and it's spelt this way on her website.

** Yes I have two copies of the same guide to having a baby. If you'd like one, please let me. Strangely, my friends without children are reluctant to take the spare just in case they might need it some day