Up Up and Wobble

Rock Band

Strongly resisting the temptation to buy the remastered Beatles' back catalogue in HMV today I gave the nod to Simon to pop into Game to buy the Beatles Rock Band game!

It is fantastic, the graphics must have been a work of love and of course there is the genius of the Beatles music. We have already graduated from the Cavern to the Ed Sullivan show, with me on vocals, Si on drums and Tom on dribbles I've tried encouraging him to use one of his teething toys (he's not but seeing as he loves stuffing things in his mouth we got him some of the toys to nibble on) as a tambourine but he's more interested in sticking it in his mouth.

"Playing" the Beatles songs just make me want to go out and complete my collection but I don't want the fake stereo that they've put on some of the early LPs I want to enjoy it in the glorious Mono that it was meant to be heard it. And all they had in HMV was the stereo version. I'm also never quite sure about remastering as it's never quite about restoring an old master to it's newly printed freshness. There always seems to be a of unnecessary tinkling about on the edges so unless it sounds really muddy and murky there should not be any need to remaster it and George Martin was very good at what he did and I don't think my mono vinyl copy of With The Beatles sounds murky at all.

Toothless Squealing

Toothless Squealing, originally uploaded by Jane Goth.

Tom is becoming increasingly vocal with every passing day, but with each day his vocalisations change new things come in and other sounds are dropped. When he was very little he would make an "eh....eh...eh" noise when wanted feeding that's gone now. Currently he is developing his laugh, I don't think he's reached the final product as right now his laugh is a soft "grrrrus grrrus" sound that comes from the back of his throat, which just slays me. I played this video back to Tom straight after I had recorded it. Tom's reaction was fascinating, he was most perplexed at the little baby in the machine squealling in the machine and I think, while it was playing, a little bit disturbed by the baby noises however as soon as it ended he recovered his humour and it was as if nothing had ever happened.

Keep On Truckin

Keep On Truckin, originally uploaded by Jane Goth.

We had a modicum of excitement this afternoon with three very large oil(?) tanks on flat beds trundled down the road stopping the traffic. Police on motorbikes stopped the traffic in sections and further up the road work gangs from the 'leccy were hoisting up the power cables that ran across the road to make sure that the top of the tanks didn't get snagged.

Poetry Corner

I very rarely post poetry, I've done it once maybe twice, partly because I automatically skim when I see verses in blog posts, novels and newspapers so I assume everyone else does the same. Partly because it is often abusing someone else's copy write and also I feel it's lazy blogging to use someone else's words to try to state how you feel. Using song lyrics is lazy juvenile emo blogging but that's a rant of a different meter. Having said all that I'm about to indulge in some sentimental poetry (or possibly doggerel) blogging by posting this.

Song For A Fifth Child

Mother, O Mother, come shake out your cloth,
Empty the dustpan, poison the moth,
Hang out the washing, make up the bed,
Sew on a button and butter the bread.
Where is the mother whose house is so shocking?
She’s up in the nursery, blissfully rocking.

Oh, I’ve grown as shiftless as Little Boy Blue,
(Lullaby, rockabye, lullaby loo.)
Dishes are waiting and bills are past due
Pat-a-cake, darling, and peek, peek-a-boo
The shopping’s not done and there’s nothing for stew
And out in the yard there’s a hullabaloo
But I’m playing Kanga and this is my Roo
Look! Aren’t his eyes the most wonderful hue?
(Lullaby, rockaby lullaby loo.)

The cleaning and scrubbing can wait till tomorrow
But children grow up as I’ve learned to my sorrow.
So quiet down cobwebs; Dust go to sleep!
I’m rocking my baby and babies don’t keep.

- Ruth Hulbert Hamilton

Apparently the poem first appeared in the Lady's Home Journal in 1958. I can find out nothing about Ruth Hulbert Hamilton on the interwebs as almost every link to her name goes to a born again mommy blog. Disclosure time I first saw this on such a blog but I'm not going to link back as I don't want to give the poor woman the vapours.

This poem struck me as I have found myself fretting and feeling guilty about housework not getting done because I'm playing/soothing/feeding/cleaning/staring at Tom. There is a huge irony in this as I loathe housework and before he was born would have to force myself to chase the dust bunnies around the room and I hadn't ironed a thing in at least 8 years. Last week I found myself ironing some of Tom's miniature jeans as they looked "all wrong" crumpled.

I'm beginning to think I have been replaced by aliens - this is not me, I don't think like this and I'm more than slightly disturbed by it all. I was inordinately excited at getting a new slow cooker on the weekend, next thing I'll be doing will be wearing a pinny unironically. I think I need to order the Second Sex before it's too late for me.

Now the baby is asleep

He's flopped over my right arm snoring ever so gently, if I can get him to stay asleep when I put him down I might be able to put the washing on and wonder if we have all the ingredients for a veggie curry.

30 seconds later...

He's down and out, and I am free to use two hands again not only that I am up at the computer on the desk rather than struggling with the crappy PC laptop. (Rem to self must get in touch with the Apple Genius people to find out if it is worth getting the Mac laptop repaired. Buying a new one is not an option sadly)

It has been an age since I've blogged, but I am slowly coming out of the fog that is very new baby with colic, he is getting into more of a routine fortunately and doesn't normally wake up at stupid o'clock during the night, that is if you accept 5am as not being stupid o'clock.

I am now back behind the wheel after the caesarian, just being able to get about as I choose to have been so liberating even if I hardly go anywhere, my trips out have been mostly to the doctors or to the hospital. I have started to meet other people, my health visitor suggested going to a baby massage class which is run by the health visiting team. It's quite good if very small there are only 4 mothers at it although I get the impression they were hoping more would turn up and we have 2 instructors. It's roughly 15 minutes of baby massage and then 1 hour plus of chatting, mostly about babies so not scintillating conversation but right now I don't need scintillating all the time, just being able to compare how much our babies sick up and the day to day mundantity of motherhood is nice.

The next big adventure is mother and baby groups, I looked at the NCT website to see if they had any groups in the vicinity and the closest was Ely so that's no good, even if it does save me the cost of joining them. I will have to look at Mum's Net and find one that sounds friendly.

Hours later,

Finally got the washing on after he woke up, needing feeding and changing and playing with. I put him down on his tummy for some "tummy time" he coo'd for a bit then fell asleep only for him to wake up when I turned him onto his back so that I could sneak into the kitchen. He's now fallen asleep listening to Radio 4. Radio 4 is his "soap theme tune" I listened to so much of it while I was pregnant with him, the dulcet tones of Laurie Taylor seem to have a soothing effect on him.

Not Gone

Just no proper time for blogging

So Tired

I am so tired that almost every bit of me aches and I’ve gone past the point of wanting to catch up on my sleep. Tom is thriving even if he appears to have developed colic, he has taken to crying inconsolably for a few hours each day Sunday it was in the afternoon early evening, Monday he was besides himself with tiredness during the morning and cried for a couple of hours and he cried like billio for a while in the evening and today it was the afternoon for about three hours and a bit in the early evening too.

Problem with him crying like that during working hours is that I’m the only one here and I can’t carry him for too long to comfort him because of the c section and it’s distressing for the both of us.

Before that while Simon was still on paternity leave he spent a few days where he would cry miserably for a few hours because he wanted constant feeding which was very hard on me until I bought a book on breastfeeding in self defence Tom Tips for Breast-Feeding by Claire Byam-Cook which didn’t stop Tom from being a bottomless pit of hunger for those hours but the advice in the book did make it a lot easier to deal with while it lasted. I know it was only a few days but at the time and really still now it felt like it was going on for ever.

However I must be doing something right with the feeding as Tom was back to his birth weight by day 13 we also measured him and he was 59 cms long by the reckoning of the health visitor which threw her mighterly as that would put him above the 100th percentile for his age. She was so thrown that she refused to believe her measurement and left the measuring mat behind so that we could measure him during the week at our leisure. I did manage to do it again a couple of days ago and got a measurement of 57 cms and I wasn’t able to get his legs completely straight either so I don’t think that she was that far out. However 57 cms isn’t so bad as it puts him on the 91st percentile which is line with his birth weight. It looks like he’ll be towering over us at some point in the mid 2020s then I can get a cat so that I have something I can look down on.

Is six hours enough to Compo-cook an egg?

Is six hours enough to Compo-cook an egg?, originally uploaded by aroid.

One of my favourite flickrers is Aroid (Jim). He is an excellent photographer of plants and bugs, but at least half the photos are culled from his family's collected photograph albums. I stumbled across him by accident on flickr one day and was fascinated by his family photos from, especially, the 50s and 60s. What I found so interesting was the comparative difference in wealth between the USA and the UK that is shown up by the photos, for instance the number of mod cons available, that would not become common place here until the 70s and 80s.

Occasionally he experiments with compost heaps and eggs.

Living In The Moment

Tom has been with us only since Friday lunchtime, but it feels like he's been here forever, pre Tom time seems hazy and very far away. Thinking about it there is a good chance that tiredness has a very large part to play in this, I find that when I am shattered time flows very slowly but I think he's exerting his own special effect on the space time continuum although he weighs less than 10lbs and is less than 2 foot tall he's bending time around him.

Not all of this is a good thing, breastfeeding hasn't yet become the easy, joyful thing that it can be, so when the feed isn't easy it can feel like I've been attacked by a thousand minuscule sharp needles for ever, but then it is possible to swallow up hours just staring at him.

The forces of BST will reassert themselves tomorrow as we have to register his birth and we have to have an appointment to do so. We might also risk a quick trip to the supermarket as well, life does not get much more cosmopolitan than this at the moment.

Thomas

Thomas was born yesterday at 12:25 by an emergency c section. He is utterly fantastic 9lbs 4oz or 4.120 kg for those working in new money roughly 48 cm long. We are both still in hospital I'm not likely to be released until Monday Tuesday.

Action Stations

I was woken up by painful contractions a wee bit before 3, surprisingly enough it took me a wee while to work out that the contractions were fairly regular and worthy of timing. I was a bit discombobulated I suppose. Half an hour of timing later and I was on the phone to the delivery suite as I've hit the magic 5 minutes apart.

As you can probably guess if you are up at this unflyingspaghettimonster hour that I'm not in hospital. I'm to tough it out at home, with the help of a couple paracetamol and hot water bottle/warm bath until either it becomes unbearable, the baby arrives cos I'm that hard and miscalculate how long I've got before the baby arrives, or it's time to go in anyways because the plan was to induce me if I hadn't started labour.

Early morning TV is just as rubbish as when I was a student, the only difference is that there are now more channels showing rubbish and Hitman and Her is no longer running. Thank goodness for laptops and the internets, that's all I can say as I can't get back to sleep.

Stand At Ease

The contractions have subsided and seem to have gone back to being irregular so I don't think we'll be seeing any baby action in the immediate future.

A few hours later

I've been having regular contractions since about 10 am, they've gone from being about 25 to 30 minutes apart to about 15 to 20 minutes apart and still quite bearable. But rather than be a martyr I've taken a couple of paracetamol which have taken the edge off them. I had my last midwife's appointment today, I was supposed to get my membranes swept it in order to get things going but, obviously there is no real need.

Depending on how long it takes for the contractions to get being 5 minutes apart I will either be going in to hospital at some point tonight (when the magic five minutes has been hit) or sometime tomorrow morning to be checked over and if necessary be given something like syntocinon to speed up the dilation. I'm hoping that nature is speedy enough because being on a drip will reduce the number of options for staying active, however the main thing is that we have a baby at the minimum of risk to the both of us so if that means a drip and stuck on a bed then so be it.

Right now I'm a bit bored, we had a mad couple of hours this morning, changing bedding, cleaning things, doing more clothes washing to empty out the basket and the like, all that is left to do now is wait until things get a bit more painful.

The Inevitable Happens

V quick post as it's 1:33 am and I'm a bit knackered.

My waters broke sometime today but as it wasn't even a proper trickle I was very good at rationalising it away until about 11:30 pm yesterday. I ran up the Delivery Suite they said come in so we did.

I was checked over, an internal examination was done to confirm the membrane had ruptured and to see if I was at all dilated.

If I am dilated it's not very much at all so I am home again. If labour doesn't get established by Thursday morning I have to go in to be induced, so it is possibly all go. I will definitely have a baby by the weekend. Which is nice.

Today Is My Bloggiversery

Four years ago today I started blogging. In my first blog I finished up by saying.

...the chance I might meet or at least talk to suitable chaps who read the Guardian, scrub up nice and like real ale.

Who'd have thunk that I would have ended up marrying the person who inspired me to start blogging and I would be imminently expecting our first child?

As for the real ale? well two out of three ain't bad.

Reality TV Bullshit

Simon Mayo had an apologist (I didn't catch his name) for Britain's Got Talent on his show just now (I started writing this at about 2pm). The apologist was there to defend the programme against cries of the exploitation of children and of Susan Boyle. Now I have watched exactly zero minutes of Britain's Got Talent since the programme started running so I can not comment on whether children were mentally harmed in the making of the series or really say whether that dance troupe should have won or not. No what I did, which I think is like many people in my position did, is accidentally* read articles about what is going on in the broadsheets** or on an online new service.

I hope Susan Boyle bounces back very quickly from the stress that she apparently suffered towards the end of Britain's Got Talent and I hope that she is able to translate her success, for all that she didn't win she did have a great success, into a way of making money that she is comfortable with and can manage.

We all know as some level that the "reality" in these shows is highly manipulated and controlled. Loosing Big Brother contestants routinely complain that the programmes shown were edited either to show them in an unfairly bad light or to make the winner look good. In Susan Boyle's case the only people who did not know that she had a good voice before she started singing were the audience in the studio. Those looks of surprise and amazement that judges had on their faces were well practised and fake as a 3 pound coin. The producers will defend themselves by saying that they've got to create something that is interesting with a narrative thread throughout the series in order to get the viewers interested, and that's fair enough. No one objects apart from the person who feels they've been stitched up but there is a difference between creating a narrative thread and exposing someone to a huge amount of intrusive interest all in the name of publicising your programme.

Susan Boyle was presented to the public as a freak. She had the "Voice of an Angel, Face of a Minger" with a sweet back story of a quiet shy retiring life, a spinster who looked after her old mum and sang in the church choir. Added bonus she has a disability, not one that would be unsightly and put the viewing public off their dinner, but a little bit of learning difficulties caused by oxygen deprivation at birth so ready made sob story. I want to be clear here, I am not accusing Susan Boyle of exploiting her life history or do I think she's a minger come to that, but the producers must have started mentally counting viewing figures when they first heard about her.

Now they could have presented Ms Boyle to the public in many ways but they appeared to choose the method that maximised the public impact and crucially the media's interest too. Once going it was a juggernaut, I'd no interest in the programme but it was impossible to escape, even a cultural pseud like myself didn't stand a chance, the Guardian had features about how the Americans went bonkers for her and in the media/IT sections about how ITV were missing out on millions of revenue because of a dispute with You Tube. Radio 4 did its usual disingenuous thing of "reporting on the media coverage" as a fig leaf for reporting on Susan Boyle and the competition. The bloggisphere and twitterverse appeared to hang on every word. Even I cracked watching the You Tube video.

So when she didn't win and the unfortunate events of yesterday happened it was was not surprising that the parties who created the publicity monster in the first place were busy today distancing themselves from the carnage. I think the statement that made me angry came from the producer's apologist (remember him from the first para?) he said that there was no way that they could have expected the media feeding frenzy that descended on Ms Boyle.

I call this complete and utter bullshit.

We've had roughly ten years of the modern reality TV show with Big Brother being the big daddy of them all. All these programmes have relied on media hype for their publicity and the feeding frenzies that fell upon certain contestants, Jade Goody being the most famous case. It's not as if it's a new phenomenon. They should have had some idea as to what could happen so to claim it was unexpected is, in my book a sign that you're not fit to do your job.

*"accidentally" ranging from - your eye is drawn to the headline like it is to a zit in the middle of a beautiful face to "Oh whoops did I click on the article about Britain's Got Talent? I meant to click on the 10 thousand word essay about the renaissance of Bulgarian opera."

** Broadsheets - papers that pretend to have aspirations serious news reporting. Now mostly found in tabloid or Berliner sizes.

D Day + 1

I was in a really bad mood yesterday, I felt uncomfortable, tired and inconvenienced all day. I think yesterday's blog post showed that and I want to thank Brighter Schemata, Z and Clair for their nice words, they made me feel a lot better. One of the reasons I was in a foul mood was that after an early morning bath I decided to slather myself with a body lotion that I hadn't used in a while. Because in that while, it appears that my skin has become sensitive to it and within a minute my legs, arms and belly were burning. I ended up having to take a very long lukewarm shower in order to get the body lotion off and remove the heat from my skin. It was pretty unpleasant. I had a wee bit of a heat rash (I always get some on the back of my hands when the temperature goes above 17C) before but now my arms are almost completely covered with tiny blisters. It's not a good look.

Today was better, much better, I got what was a comparatively good night's sleep last night and though my arms and legs are still spotty they are not really itchy. The weather has been beautiful, we had a lovely time dropping in on my in laws as it is their 40th wedding anniversary today. Then we did a bit of DIY shopping and food shopping and took it very easy before having a gentle sit out in the garden in the late afternoon, under the shade of the garden parasol. Finally we had another bbq, steaks with chilli rub, lime and coriander marinated chicken skewers, salad and corn on the cob. The steaks were supposed to be small but they were huge, the size of side plates. It was all very good but our eyes were probably a bit bigger than our stomachs however nothing is going to waste as I've got chicken skewers for lunch tomorrow :).

Baby wise, nothing much happened today, a few braxton hicks, he's been pretty active during the day but that's about it. We'll see if anything happens tomorrow.

D Day

Today is the day that we've been planning around for the last 8 months, so of course with only a quoted chance of 5% of anything happening today, nothing has happened.

I've been having twinges all day but as far as I can tell the twinges are just that, nothing greater but I'm saying that with hindsight as well, I'm typing this rather than Simon twittering from the delivery suite. I've been rereading the advice and tips on labour. I think that the most annoying piece of advice that almost all the books and magazines give is that "you'll know when you are in labour."

How?

Does a small but perfectly formed marching band suddenly appear playing "Congratulations" in the style of an American High School Pep Band? When does a Braxton Hicks contraction stop being intense and starts being a proper true labour contraction? Saying that you'll know not giving advice as far as I am concerned. It's like birth plans - what position do you want to use? which drugs do you want? How do you want your birth partner to massage you? How do I know I've never done this before and have absolutely no concept of how I am going to react to the pain. I completed my birth plan today it's basically a list of what I would prefer in a vague order of preference but I'm thinking that birth plans are basically a plot to make new mothers feel bad because they didn't get the birth they wanted. The delivery suite had a long list of reasons of why the birthing pool wouldn't be available, or why you won't be able to get that desperately needed epidural. And that's before medical issues are taken into account.

Oh I know I am having a bit of a rant, it's just that I feel a bit cross with it all, I just don't like the not knowing when it's all going to happen or the lack of control. My sister in law had to have a Cesarean because of underlying medical issues, she knew for at least two months when the baby was going to be born. I like that sort of knowing in advance even if I don't particularly envy her the c-section.

Sleeping On It

I had a great blog post composed in my head this morning, but you are not going to see it because I composed it in my head while I was sitting in the bath at 5 this morning. The bath had it's welcome soperific effect and I did eventually get back to sleep and I've completely forgotten what it was I was gonna blog about. It was probably something to do with disturbed nights and sleeping.