Velvet skies will linger

The Orange Sweater of Doom

2007-11-02T20:38:00.000-04:00

Nearly six years ago I stopped knitting. I don't know why. The knitting muse just left me. I had the hem and collar left to do on a Norwegian ski sweater; it has sat, unfinished, in the closet all this time.

In late 2005 a knitter friend was with me in a yarn shop, and she encouraged me to buy yarn and knit something new. Dave was along too, and he chose some Peace Fleece in Glasnost Gold (a nice heathered orange) for Chad's Pullover (it's there, scroll down). A nice simple knit in worsted weight yarn. Nothing taxing, just something to get me back into the knitting groove.

I used the recommended yarn on the recommended needles, and was done with the back and more than three quarters of the way up the front before I finally had to admit that it was so small that there was no way it would ever going to fit him. So I ripped the whole thing out and started again, on far, far bigger needles, this time making the biggest size. I got the back and most of the front done again, and then, sick of moss stitch, put the thing aside for more than a year.

We live in a condo with limited storage space for my yarn stash. The knitting muse came back in earnest when I was pregnant with Clara last year, and as we were making room for her I decided I needed to finish some long-dormant projects if I was going to have anywhere to put the yarn that had started coming into the house again. So: the front of the orange sweater got finished, and soon there were shoulder seams, and a collar, and about a third of one sleeve, knitted downward from the edge of the body. Then the whole thing went back into the closet again, because holy fez the moss stitch was going far too slowly and small, instant-gratification baby things needed to be made! Twitch!

When the weather started turning a bit cooler this fall, I decided to dig the thing out again and work on it in the car as we went on our autumn roadtrip. You know what? Working on a sweater means that progress gets made. I finished the first sleeve; Dave tried it on and deemed it too short; I pulled out the cuff and made the thing longer. Yay. First sleeve done.

Picked up stitches along the other side for the second sleeve; knat along for a while; realized I'd screwed up a decrease somewhere. Hunted and hunted. Found it about 4" back. Ripped. Put the 4" back. Spent the better part of a day hunting for a missing ball of yarn, having horrible visions of having left it at an Econo Lodge somewhere outside Rochester, NY. Found it under the bed. Continued to knit. Finished the cuff. Looked at it and realized I'd forgotten the decrease row before the cuff. Ripped out and reknit the cuff. Sewed the side seams. THANK CROYST IT'S DONE I CAN KNIT SOMETHING ELSE. Presented it to Dave, who tried it on, and sheepishly (heh) complained that it was too short.

Balls.

Adding length from the top would involve ripping out both sleeves. No. And I'd put in too damn much work on this thing for him not to be able to wear it. I decided that, for the first time ever, I would cut a garment to fix it. I thought: I'll just snip a stitch, pick out a row, add length on top of the ribbing, and then graft the f*cker back together again.

[Apologies are due to the non-knitters reading. It gets even more technical from here. Reader's Digest version is that I AM THE SERENEST.]

Have you ever tried to graft 2x2 moss stitch? I didn't think so; there seems to exist almost nothing online about how to do it. And all the stuff I could find in knitting books was about 2x2 rib, which didn't help much. Laura says she has tried it and found it so fierce that she recommends just grafting it in stocking stitch and then duplicate-stitching on the purl bumps later. But by this point I am far too obsessive about this fershluginer sweater to use a kludge.

It took me the better part of three days to figure out how to do it. I made a small swatch out of different yarn, and knitted (and purled) a white row in the middle as a guide for the grafted row. I tried six or seven times on the actual sweater. And suddenly, yesterday, the clouds parted, and light shone down, and a choir of angels sang, and I was using a darning needle to connect two pieces of knitting with something that looked very much like moss stitch.

The back is now done, and I'm picking out a row on the front. I'll work in the dreaded moss stitch for 3" or so, praying that I don't run out of yarn, and then graft some more. And then I will resew the bottoms of the side seams, and I will present the sweater to Dave, and he will put it on, and he will exclaim happily about the fit, and then he will wear it every day for a month if he knows what's good for him.

And then I'll sew the hem on that goddamn ski sweater.

The unbearable cuteness of Clara

2007-10-31T22:51:00.001-04:00

High cuteness
Originally uploaded by Spamily.

Clara was a pumpkin for Hallowe'en. We went to Lettuce Knit and she flung candy around. So. Much. Cuteness.

Lots more pictures on my Flickr stream.

Hoops of wood

2007-10-29T11:56:00.001-04:00

Our little family, Clapp Library, Wellesley College
Originally uploaded by Spamily.

I took this while sitting in the armchair next to my thesis carrel in Clapp Library at Wellesley while I was nursing Clara. The sun was setting and everything felt exactly right.

Home is where I want to be, but I guess I'm already there

2007-10-28T16:46:00.000-04:00

There's been a lot going on in the past month and a half. At the end of September we spent a week out west with my mother's extended family, attending my cousin's wedding. (I was the flowergirl at her parents' wedding many years ago.) I gained some new perspectives and was glad to have some time to spend with my sister and her girlfriend, who is good people. My parents are working on selling their house so that they can move to a town just outside Buffalo in order to be closer to Clara, so things are awfully chaotic for them.

The wedding was beautiful, and it was nice and a little sobering to see people I hadn't seen in a couple of decades. Oddly enough, we're all older.

We were back for two weeks (including Clara's birthday, celebrated at Lettuce Knit) before we left again, this time on our first long roadtrip since Miz Thang was born. We went to my twenty-year high school reunion, visited the old neighbours for the first time in fifteen years, had an all-too-brief visit with friends in western MA, spent five days with one of my best friends and her husband and three kids, had dinner on the Wellesley campus, and then went to the Rhinebeck Sheep and Wool Festival. If it all sounds like a bit much, that's because it was. I couldn't have asked for a sweeter, more satisfying homecoming, but the ten days were starting to make me think that some guy was about to step out from behind a tree, film crew behind him shining lights in my face, and bellow, "Emily Krapsnart, THIS IS YOUR LIFE!" It was 1974 to 1992 packed into just over a week, except that this time my husband and baby daughter were along for the ride. And wow, what a ride.

The reunion was fun, I guess; I got a very welcome chance to see two of my closest high school friends, but wished that more were there (Italophile, I'm talking to you). My old neighbourhood has changed a lot; my childhood home is unrecognizable. The wonderful people next door had us over for dinner, a marvellous spread that fed my soul. (Margaret takes care of her daughter's kids, so there's kid paraphernalia all over. I had not been at all prepared to see my tricycle in front of their house; the sight of it made me burst into tears.) Two of my high school teachers who were major figures in my adolescence are now divorced; I talked to him and saw her. Life goes on.

Five days in a house with four kids six and under: exhausting. But it's always great to see AM. I sent Dave out geocaching a lot so he could get some Dave Time in before the yarnulence of the weekend. We also managed to see some more old neighbours who have moved to eastern Massachusetts, and they suggested that Pina drop in for dinner while we were visiting them, so we got a bit of time with her. Somewhere in the five days there was dinner with Steve and Peter and David B.; it was really good to see them, too.

Wellesley is more beautiful than ever; every time I'm on campus I shake my head in disbelief that I spent four years there. We walked around the misty, luminous campus and took pictures, and then ate in the new student centre, surrounded by students who, when I was in school, were not much older than Clara is now. The intellect and potential and youth of all those women in that magical place made me hopeful and happy.

And then, Rhinebeck. My God, Rhinebeck. I'd spent fifteen years convinced that I wasn't homesick for Dutchess County, but oh, I am. I am. It is unspeakably beautiful in the fall, and the nostalgia that the fairgrounds evoked after everything that had come in the few days before -- well, it was more than a little overwhelming to be back there.

I bought yarn, a lot of yarn. As I knit it, it will continue to remind me of home.

One year

2007-10-03T12:50:00.001-04:00

Dear Clara,

Today is your first birthday. You're pretty cranky today because you haven't had enough sleep: you're still a little jetlagged from our trip west to your cousin Amanda's wedding, and your Grandma and Grandpa wanted to see you first thing this morning before they left to go camping. Grandma baked you an angel-food cake, and was so happy to watch you dig into it with your little hands while the "1" candle dripped wax all over the frosting.

I've been writing this letter in my head for at least a month now. Every time I think about your being a whole year old, I want to touch your cheek and nibble your toes and hug you close to me as I feel my heart expanding yet more in my chest. You are already such a remarkable little person, with an irresistibly cheerful disposition and an infectious giggle that we hear so very often.

You meet new situations with curiosity and aplomb. Yesterday was your first Kindersports class, and your first swimming lesson, and in between them a very persistent five-year-old named Grace made sure that we went to the drop-in centre nearby. The Kindersports class was far, far above your age level -- you were the only one there not walking yet, and you didn't seem that interested in passing balls around or rolling down an incline -- but you still giggled and waved all your arms in happiness. At the drop-in centre you worked for a very long time on the new toys, turning them over in your hands and inspecting them and trying them in your little mouth. Su, who runs the place, introduced herself to you, and you laughed, and charmed her. You charm just about everyone.

You love water. You like to crawl into the hall bathroom and dip your hands into the cats' water bowls, and you sit on the bathmat and gesture at the tub and urgently move your fists up and down in front of your chest to make the sign for "bath". At your swimming lesson I dunked you a few times and you barely flinched. You splashed and giggled and thoroughly enjoyed yourself, and when I brought you home you passed out within the hour. Sweet baby.

You and I walk around the city a lot, you tied close to me in your beautiful mei tai. You point at things and flirt with strangers and sometimes tweak my nipples, hard, and laugh. People smile broadly at us and ask how old you are and gush about your cuteness. When you've been carried for too long you get restless, and you want to get down and crawl. You love being outside; one of your favourite places is on the grass, grabbing sticks and leaves and waving them around while you sing happily.

Your dad is completely smitten with you. He sits on the floor with you and plays little games like "where's the block?" and sings little songs that he makes up on the spot. He takes you out geocaching at least once a week, taking you places where you can get plenty of Grass Baby Time. Every night he straps you onto his belly in the blue carrier, and walks you up and down the hallway outside our door until you fall asleep. I watch him with you and love him more than ever.

Your favourite food is probably ice cream; smoked salmon and garlicky garlicky hummus are pretty high on the list too. Your favourite song is Ladytron's "Destroy Everything You Touch" (seriously) and you get a huge kick out of stroking the soft soft bunting that Kerry and Mary and Toby sent last year when you were born.

Tonight we're taking you out to see the knitters, who are fans of yours. Megan at the yarn shop said we could celebrate your birthday there, so we're about to head out.

I love you very, very much, and I feel so honoured and privileged to be one of the people responsible for helping you find your way in this world. I'm proud of the job we've done so far and I know there will be many challenges in the years ahead. I hope we can continue to do right by you.

Happy birthday, my beloved little daughter.

Bup!

2007-07-13T10:22:00.000-04:00

Clara is talking a lot now, but we don't know what she means. Favourite syllables include "bup," "epf," "upf," and "huh-bapf." The other morning she and I awoke at the same time; she yaaaaawned and streeeeetched and rubbed her eyes and then very solemnly intoned, "Bup." I nearly fell off the bed.

We're just getting through to the other side of a particularly difficult phase, the dreaded Nine Month Freakout. This is when object permanence develops -- she's working hard on the concept that things still exist even when she can't see them. She'll hold a cloth in front of her face and then lower it to see us, and then laugh and laugh as she does it again. (I knew babies liked peek-a-boo, but hadn't realized it was so important developmentally.) She's also working on the idea that a picture of a cat represents an actual cat, like the ones she lives with, and that a black or orange cat is the same kind of animal as her beloved Martha. Plus, she's getting more mobile (but not crawling yet; she can scoot along backwards and get stuck under things), and the separation anxiety has kicked in. (Separation anxiety is evolution's way of keeping us from getting killed as we become more able to move away from those looking after us.) Clara's has been mercifully mild, I think because the babywearing and co-sleeping and unified approach from both parents have made her feel very secure with either of us, and so the other one can get a break now and then without Clara wigging.

And then there's the teething. Oh man, the teething. Poor baby has six of the little choppers now. She got the middle lower ones first, and then the lateral incisors on top, more than a month before the central ones, which have just come in in the past week. She's been looking a bit like a little baby vampire.

So there's been a lot happening in babyland, and baby has not been very happy about most of it. Sweet little thing.

Here she is, as of yesterday:

Love. Her.

In knitting news: the Diamond Fantasy shawl is done and waiting patiently to be blocked. I did seven pattern repeats instead of six. The applied I-cord castoff looks fabulous. The Sea Silk looks like spun gold. Pictures forthcoming.

Shawls on the needles: Kate's modified Lace Wings, in purple Sea Silk, and a Shetland Triangle in Mini Maiden, which I like even better than the Sea Silk. As Homer Simpson would say, glaaaaagh.

Knit night this week was all kinds of fun; Glenna and Maryann have posts up about it (and Glenna's even has video, and more pictures of Clara!). Fun conversation, good beer, people losing their minds over the SEVENTY-FIVE POUNDS of newly arrived Socks That Rock yarn (nine ounces of it came home with me), a delicious yam burrito (mmmm, Big Fat Burrito), happy Clara being held by at least a dozen people, and knitting, at least after Clara's dad took her away to go geocaching. And singing! We were serenaded! Perfect.

Even better: tonight's Drunken Knitting is at Betty's, my favourite pub ever (and my local).

Life is good.

Denny's seven-shawl challenge

2007-06-22T17:03:00.000-04:00

Drat you, Denny.

I am too chicken to commit to seven shawls at once, but I think the knitting muse is saying "DO SHAWLS NOW." Last time I tried to ignore her I ended up not knitting at all for several years, so She Must Be Obeyed. Here are possibilities:

1. Lace Wings. Done in a gorgeous cream-coloured Sea Silk with subtle hints of a rosy bronze through it, and blocking on the spare bed next to me. Okay, I'll commit to that one. Soon it will be off to a friend who has no idea it's coming.

2. Clapotis. Already got the five hanks of Koigu Kersti for it. I am one of the three knitters in the world who haven't made one yet.

3. Shetland Triangle. Got a hank of Hand Maiden's Mini Maiden for it. Looking forward to this one.

4. Diamond Fantasy. There's a hank of gold Sea Silk (seriously, it looks like spun gold -- Rumplestiltskin yarn) in the closet with this shawl's name on it. This one or the Shetland Triangle will go over my long strappy black velvet dress when I go to my HS reunion in the fall.

5. Another Lace Wings, in a purple Sea Silk, but with a slightly different lace pattern. This one is for a friend.

6. Maybe a Flower Basket (PDF) in a yarn I haven't picked yet.

7. Perhaps something rectangular, in the pearl grey Euroflax linen I've had in my stash for more than a decade. Suggestions welcome. I've got two hanks.

I finished the first Monkey sock last night in the Farmhouse colourway of Socks That Rock yarn. It looks great. I'm working on Square #12 (13, if I use the very muted one) of the Lizard Ridge afghan, and I have yarn picked out for a Rogue cardigan. I have a Chad's Pullover in orange Peace Fleece about 65% done for Mr. K, and I think I'm starting to make headway in the boxes of UFOs in the linen closet. The Morning Glory vest has been sitting there for years, just needing some seams and a decision about what to do with the cut steeks (answer, sanctioned by the Yarn Harlot at the S&B the other night: cut them down two stitches and leave them), and I've made so much headway on it in the past few days that I might actually finish it today. ! These days I don't go anywhere without at least three projects along. Motherhood inspires multitasking, I guess.

Then there's the Dalegarn ski sweater, which just needs a hem and a collar, and a yoked cotton pullover that needs a collar and a lot of ends darned in, and a burgundy Cotton Fleece cardigan whose edging is much too tight and that I don't actually like very much. I might rip that whole thing out and use the yarn for something for Clara. All these projects are finally turning from albatrosses to things I can actually imagine having finished. Hooray.

Clara is marvellous as always. She is in the middle of another very fussy period -- this is the dreaded runup to nine months that tends to kick babies' and parents' asses -- but her underlying nature is so sunny and cheerful, and the developmental leaps she's making are so exciting to her and to us, that we can put up with a lot. She waves hello and bye-bye now, and last night she was giggling at pictures of herself. Her hands have a great deal of fine motor control, and she's happy to use them to grab unfamiliar foods and pop them in her mouth. Yesterday she discovered she really likes roasted garlic hummus on whole wheat pita. She makes friends everywhere she goes. Her smile lights up the room and brings tears to my eyes. Our sweet, sweet baby.

Forest baby

2007-05-25T12:47:00.001-04:00

Forest baby
Originally uploaded by Spamily.

And just because the last entry didn't mention Clara at all, here she is.

We never did hear anything about the lost bouncy chair or mei tai or toys, but we've replaced just about all of them. The bouncy chair has been discontinued, so we got the floor model at a nice discount, and Grace at MangoBaby was very nice about the mei tai, too. So the Stupid Person Tax wasn't as high as it could've been.

She understands certain words now, and she has one more tooth. We are still completely, completely smitten.

Knitterati

2007-05-25T12:07:00.000-04:00

Can't talk. Knitting.

I don't usually knit to deadlines but the Yarn Harlot is doing her (shhh) book launch in Toronto tonight, and is collecting hats for the homeless. I am blasting away at this hat in Noro Kureyon #55 (picture forthcoming, when it's done) and need it (and possibly a second one) done by 7pm. I have also been digging through my stash looking for an Elizabeth Zimmermann hat made of Lopi that has been very close to done for... what, five years now? Whenever it was that the knitting muse left me. Must find it and finish it, too.

Very happy to report that I seem to have found My People among the knitters of Toronto. Most of them have been hanging out together for a while now, and have that easy rapport that comes of longer friendship and shared experience; it's a little hard being on the outside of that, but that's life. And anyway, 80% of life is showing up. If I keep showing up on Wednesday nights, and keep going out with the Drunken Knitters once a month, and take part in the TTC Knit-a-long on June 9, I think I might start feeling a little less awkward. They're a very welcoming bunch.

It was nice to meet Swatchy and Noricum on Wednesday, too.

Anyway, back to the hat. And I have a student showing up in 45 minutes, eep.

Mindless knitting and a very high Stupid Person Tax

2007-05-03T11:09:00.000-04:00

Last night I got so discouraged about a project I'm working on (it's a complicated little thing that may well be entirely the wrong size for its intended recipient) that I went ahead and started the Jane pullover, which is lots and lots and lots of stockinette stitch. Yay. Boring knitting.

Good thing I did, too, because at the S&B last night Jen was working on it too (in exactly the same colourway!), and was a few rows in when I asked her whether she'd used a provisional cast-on.

What? she said.

So I pointed out the bit a few paragraphs on in the directions that say to pick out the cast-on row. Oh. All righty then.

So she pulled out what she'd knitted, and Joyce showed us both how to do the cast-on, and now we're off. Hooray. Mindless knitting in gorgeous yarn. I tried on Laura's shop sample: this sweater sure is going to emphasize my rent-a-tits. Whee!

Last night was fun and I'm glad I went, even with the headache that has moved in and hung up pictures and put down area rugs. (It's still here today, five days after it started. Sigh.) There were three (count 'em) birthday cakes because there were three people who had recently had birthdays. One woman, not knowing about the weekly gathering, came in to buy yarn because she knew the shop was open late, and was quite apologetic about interrupting a party. No no no, everyone said, come on in and join us. When she mentioned that her father had died very recently she was sat down and comforted and handed a glass of wine. The knitters: they are good people.

In other news, the beautiful new mei tai is gone because of a moment's stupidity on Sunday. Dave was picking me and Clara up at Jacquie's house after an afternoon of knitting in the sunshine, and somehow the bouncy chair (with mei tai, peacock toy, stuffed giraffe, and Whoozit toy inside) made it out to the sidewalk but not into the car. I'm sure someone walking by after we'd left was thrilled to find Free! Great! Baby Stuff!

We'd had the mei tai for two days. I'm still feeling sick about losing it. Dave went back to put up signs, and I posted on Craigslist, but I'm not hopeful. The total value of what we lost works out to be just about the same as what I made doing some private tutoring last month: not very much in the grand scheme of things, but also, a lot.

At least it wasn't my knitting bag.

Knitterly thoughts

2007-04-30T12:30:00.000-04:00

Took Clara to the Knitters' Frolic on Saturday, where she was a big hit in her new MangoBaby mei tai. (Note: "MAY tie." Not "my tie." Do not correct me when I say "MAY tie"; I am right. A Chinese person told me so. And I don't wrap my baby up in a fruity umbrella drink.) She will be seven months old on Thursday and is heading into several new phases at once: the "AAAAA! I wasn't finished playing with that plastic bag when you took it away from me!" one, the "AAAAA! My new mobility scares the hell out of me!" one, and the "AAAAA! WHO THE HELL IS HOLDING ME? I DON'T RECOGNIZE THIS PERSON!" one.

Phases one and three came together to make her freak out when she was handed to the very sweet and grandmotherly Ann Bourgeois of the Philosopher's Wool Company. I was mortified. I want to go visit their farm in Inverhuron and say "See? She's really a nice baby," and maybe buy yarn for another sweater or two. But right now I need more yarn like I need a third shoulder.

Right now I'm finishing one project and about 40% through another one for the kids of a friend. Will post more about those once the kids are wearing them. I made a hat out of Blue Sky Cotton for Clara, but it's much too big, so I'm going to make another one in the next size down. It's the bucket hat from Little Turtle Knits (scroll down to near the bottom). I did the first one with a cream-coloured brim and crown, and a dusty rose band. I think I'll do the smaller one with a rose brim and crown and a cream band. It's a very fast project, takes less than a day, and entitles me to do another Lizard Ridge square. I'm just finishing #7. My sister-in-law's loud socks are done too, hooray.

I have yarn for the Jane Origami Sweater. I had originally wanted the Blackberry colourway but it wasn't as intense in person as I'd thought it would be, so I went with Midnight, a mix of rich purples and browns. I've decided I'm not going to start it until the kids' projects are in the mail. Twitch twitch. At the Frolic I picked up five hanks of Koigu Kersti in a rich yellow with a lot of dark flecks -- it's going to be my clapotis (only two years after everyone else's).

Clara

2007-04-28T20:29:00.001-04:00

Clara
Originally uploaded by Spamily.

We have a daughter.

Lying fallow

2007-04-20T14:34:00.000-04:00

The blog has been lying fallow while I've been trying to get past the giant writer's block I've had for the past month. I'm knitting a lot, Clara was baptised last Sunday (and yeah, I had a very hard time with the idea, but it was important to her dad), she has been packing on weight like crazy since starting the solid food, my mother was here for ten days (and my dad the staunch agnostic made a Special Guest Appearance for the baptism last weekend), I'm teaching one student once a week, and good things are happening for me in the gym. Oh, and Charlotte Kitty has been unwell but should be fine now after some surgery to remove a bladder stone (or "urolith," as I learned yesterday). Only $1,000 to get her out of the shop. Sigh.

I am very tired. I'm still joining the Drunken Knitters tonight, though.

I am the boss of my knitting

2007-03-11T13:44:00.000-04:00

The Lizard Ridge afghan is underway, and I've decided that I am not going to make it in squares. I am going to make it in rectangles. This way, I finish each ball of Kureyon, and my afghan is that much different from everyone else's. I'm going to put it together so that the rectangles are staggered, like bricks; this will mean that there'll be some planning involved, but that's fine. I'm also going to do a garter stitch edging instead of the wavy crocheted one. So there.

Now I'm itching to go back to Lettuce Knit. I'd go right now, but Clara's napping and Mr. K is out geocaching. He loves his geocaching, he does. Maybe I can get there tomorrow. Twitch twitch.

First meal

2007-03-09T10:45:00.001-05:00

First meal
Originally uploaded by Spamily.

First "solid" meal, anyway. We started her on rice cereal yesterday at the recommendation of her doctor, who is still a bit concerned about Clara's slow weight gain. At about 25" long and 10lbs, 13oz, Clara is in the 75th percentile for height and well below the third for weight.

She is developing beautifully, becoming stronger and increasingly grabby. One of her favourite games is "Attack of the Forty-Foot Baby," in which she stands on top of her dad's chest while he lies on the floor and makes monster noises. RAAARRR! RAARRRRR!

She did pretty well with the cereal -- as instructed, I mixed it with a lot of breastmilk, so it was soupy. Lots of it ended up on her hand and her chin and her bib, but a fair bit went down. She figured it out remarkably quickly. She figures out a lot of stuff remarkably quickly. We've got a smart one on our hands.

She's been vocalizing a lot: she's discovered she can make long, high-pitched noises that her father points out sound eerily like a howler monkey's calls. She has two teeth already -- first one on February 19, second on February 22 -- and is experimenting with biting my nipples. This is not a fun game.

She caught me off guard yesterday when we were at the Movies for Mommies seeing Pan's Labyrinth (which I hated for its bloody brutality; the retreats into fantasy were not nearly enough to redeem it for me) and bit Leftie hard, hard enough to bring tears to my eyes. Instinctively I swatted her, and immediately felt like the biggest shitheel ever. I guess this is a bit of excitement that nearly all breastfeeding mothers have to deal with. I've been experimenting with different anti-biting and anti-pinching strategies: ending the feeding, pressing her nose into the breast (as Dr. Sears recommends), admonishing her sharply. I hope one of them gets through soon.

Every now and then I look at her and start to cry with joy just because she exists. Beloved, beloved baby.

On the knitting front: the baby kimono is done (I'll try to photograph it today; the light is nice), as is the first Lizard Ridge square. The last bit of the kimono was very tedious. I used Japanese short rows for the neck and shoulder shaping, and managed to get one of them wrong as I was picking stitches for the neck edging. Conspicuously wrong, in fact. It took a long time to fix with a crochet hook (I did not want to take out and reknit more than 1100 stitches). My reward for doing that right was knitting the sashes: two 18" pieces of six-stitch rows on 2.75mm needles. Knit 6, turn. K6, turn. K6, turn. K6, turn. K6, turn. K6, turn. K6, turn. K6, turn. K6, turn. K6, turn. K6, turn. K6, turn. K6, turn. Etc. EIGHTEEN INCHES. TWICE. Bleah. But the good news is: DONE. And the matching trousers are underway.

It took several experiments to get the short rows right for the afghan square. I finally settled on yarn-over short rows. The wrapped-stitch ones didn't look right to me, and the Japanese ones, while the most attractive, are far too fussy for a short-row project of this scale. Once I figured out what I was doing, the first square went quickly. It's beautiful. It is taking all my self-restraint not to throw my little "one square per finished object" resolution out the window and just get down to business on the whole afghan.

I was sorry to miss the Knit Night on Wednesday this week. When I went last week it felt like I was coming home. Knitters are my peeps. This week, Clara's nap schedule was so b0rked that I couldn't get there, plus my sister-in-law came by to say hello. I'm hoping to get there next Wednesday, though, and maybe even pick up the yarn for this, which is supposed to be a great sweater for breastfeeding.

In other news, the cats are still dorks. But I love them.

Today was awesome.

2007-02-21T19:44:00.000-05:00

Woke up at about 9; Clara was still sleeping. Got her up at 10:15 so we could get to the 11:00 exercise class. She beamed at me when I woke her, and giggled while I was changing her. Is she really my daughter? I'm usually grumpy as hell when someone wakes me.

Had a rush of endorphins about two-thirds of the way through the class and felt like I could go for at least another hour. Discovered after the class that in a roomful of babies, people gravitate toward Clara. Maybe it's the beaming.

Went to the Turkish deli owned by one of my former students, a wonderful, wonderful woman who radiates kindness and generosity. I hadn't seen Esme since before I was pregnant. Clara slept in her carrier on my chest for most our visit, but then woke up to beam at Esme as well. Esme nearly turned inside out.

Had lunch with K. at Il Fornello -- buffets are perfect when one is in FOOD NOW mode, as I am after exercising, and Il Fornello's food is yummy. Clara charmed the server and the entire next table, who already had a baby with them. (That baby was pretty darned cute, too.)

Got on the subway and went to Lettuce Knit, which I had not been to before. I love Kensington Market. I don't go there nearly enough. Lettuce Knit was full of people; Clara charmed several of them even while passed out cold. (When she woke up, of course she beamed.)

A few weeks ago I made her a raglan pullover (again from Debbie Bliss's The Baby Knits Book); I used Tahki Donegal Tweed in a discontinued colour, a lovely teal-turquoise that I got at the Wool Room in Kingston. (Hi Mabel!) I think the pattern was designed for a yarn with a very different hand, though, because the neckline is HUGE and looks unfinished. Yes I know babies have big heads, but this neck is about twice as big as Clara's little head. So today I was looking for a finer, softer yarn to use for a collar.

Had a very nice, long chat with another customer who was infinitely knowledgeable about the store's stock; we talked about babies (she wants one) and birth. Turns out she's a doctor who delivers babies sometimes, and yet she wants to give birth at home. I joked (as I often do) that Clara's being born at home means that she couldn't have gotten swapped at the hospital. This woman told me that she was switched at the hospital -- the nurses gave her mother the wrong baby. Fortunately her mother was with it enough to realize that this scrawny little thing she'd been given was not at all the nine-pound bruiser she'd squeezed out. Oops.

She helped me find a hank of Alchemy Yarn's Haiku, a gorgeous silk-mohair blend with a lovely halo, in a beautiful orange that picks up on the flecks of orange in the tweedy raglan. I held it out for Clara to touch. She stroked it a bit and her whole body vibrated with excitement. All righty then: I guess that's the one she wants. Kid's got good taste. There's enough yardage that there should be enough left over for a scarf after the collar is done. (Good, because it wasn't cheap.)

I also bought my first ball of Noro's Kureyon for a Lizard Ridge afghan. Dammit, I'm getting sucked in. (Has everyone made one of these already?) I have this cute little plan that I'm going to buy one ball and make one square each time I finish a project. Other knitters titter at this idea. Yes yes dear, that's nice. We all had plans like that once. Now we have afghans.

Then we came home on the streetcar and the bus, Clara cooing happily as we rode. The weather was gorgeous and the city's mood buoyant. When we got in, Clara had a satisfying diaper and a good meal, and then she went down for a very late nap. I picked up the needles again and plan to finish the right front of the baby kimono by the time I go to bed.

What a terrific day.

Knitting again

2007-02-18T15:08:00.001-05:00

New sweater
Originally uploaded by Spamily.

After her longest absence ever, the knitting muse seems to have returned to me with a vengeance. My sister says she knew I'd start knitting again when a baby arrived.

This little sweater is from Debbie Bliss's Nursery Knits; I made it out of Garnstudio's Silke Tweed. The sweater knitted up smaller than it would have in the yarn that the pattern called for, but hey, she has a sweater that fits her now.

I am now working on another Debbie Bliss pattern, this one from The Baby Knits Book; it's her kimono and trousers, in her official wool/cotton yarn, which I am sad to find has been discontinued. Romni Wools had a fair bit of it in their sale room, marked down to $6 a ball; with their 20% off sale, it was down to $4.80. So not only will Clara be getting the kimono and trousers and a matching pair of booties in fuchsia with a pale grey trim, she'll also be getting a Bliss-designed tank top (which actually looks more like a vest to me) in a dusty rose.

I am really liking this yarn. It tended to split a lot on the cast-on row, but once past that it's been knitting up beautifully. The 50% merino-50% cotton blend means that the fabric has a bit of stretch and a nice sheen.

Bliss's pattern calls for stair-step shoulders, but I am being rebellious and using a short-row shaping method that I found on the Intartubes. It'll make for a much more even shoulder seam. I'm even pushing myself to try a new (to me) way of doing the short rows, the Japanese style. What sold me on this style was Nona's mention that Lucy Neatby invented the pin trick -- I've been a Lucy Neatby fan since Mr. K and I met her long ago when we were in Nova Scotia. On hearing that a fellow knitter was having car trouble in her neck of the woods, she invited us to her house and fed us lunch while Rolf the Golf was being fixed.

Nona suggests that one advantage of short-row shoulders is that the stitches remain "live" and the shoulder can therefore be finished by way of the three-needle bind-off. This is true, but once again I am going to be rebellious and cast them off anyway once the short-rowing is done, because I like sewing shoulder seams. (There, I said it.)

I used to think I was hot stuff in the Internet knitting world because I had a great big site about knitting. The Internet did not wait for me while the knitting muse was away, though. I cannot believe how many knitting blogs there are now. I've spent the past few weeks trying to breathe life back into my own site (what I've done so far is still behind the scenes; I'm hoping to unveil it all early next month) and I'm just astonished by how the online knitting world has exploded since I put up my pages in 1994 (1994!).

Evidently knitting is hot. Who knew?

Weigh-in

2007-02-08T11:20:00.000-05:00

Yesterday's weigh-in: nine pounds, fifteen and a half ounces.

Clara is still the smallest mammal in the house. (Most other babies are at least twelve pounds by now.)

At the recommendation of her (mercifully non-interventionist) paediatrician, we'll be starting her on rice cereal at five months, not six. One more month until the really nasty baby shit starts.

She's been having a rough few weeks because her brain is wiring itself up for the nineteen-week developmental leap, and she's perceiving lots of stuff differently and is very confused. She spends a lot of time stroking textured surfaces and putting things (especially our fingers) into her mouth. I'm finding that life is a lot more manageable when I think about the baby not as an impediment to what I want to be doing (futzing with my website, knitting, going out to the gym, writing blog entries, etc.) but instead as What I Do, with the other stuff on the side. She's much happier that way, and therefore so am I.

My brain hurts

2007-02-04T14:01:00.000-05:00

I've decided it's far past time for a major overhaul of one of the websites I've owned since 1994. I bounced a new design idea off Fedward, who shrieked "TABLES?!?"

Evidently web design standards have changed since 2000. Who knew?

So I'm trying to teach myself CSS, and my brain (which still has not recovered from the pregnancy) is leaking out my ears. As my friend Jenya wrote when we were in high school, "It's all going by in pretty colours and shapes."

Thank heaven we have finally figured out the finer points of Midday Naptime. Oy.

The awesomeness increases by the day

2007-01-25T16:51:00.000-05:00

Yesterday: first swim, in a wading pool at a community recreation centre in the west end. No crying, but no smiling either, just much seriousness. "Well, Mama's here, so I guess this is all right." I even dunked her twice, with no complaints. Wow.

Also yesterday: she rolled over by herself again, from front to back, and promptly had a fit. "What was that?!? I didn't authorize that!" Poor baby. I think a lot of being a parent is figuring out how to stifle one's giggles while making the appropriate soothing noises.

Today: she laughed. She laughed. I was changing her diaper and singing the "Baby balm on the baby bum!" song, and I tickled her belly, and she laughed. So I called her dad, and she laughed for him, too. Good thing, because I could barely speak.

Also today: I decided it was her naptime, so I took her in to the bedroom, fed her for a while lying down, tucked a soother into her mouth, and then left the room while she was still awake. I expected to have to go back in a few minutes later to calm the fussing. But: ten minutes later there was silence, so I took a look: she fell asleep on her own.

So much excellence I can hardly stand it.

Head

2007-01-21T17:15:00.000-05:00

Mine is full and sore.

We went to a birthday party for a friends' one-year-old yesterday. There were a lot of older kids there who were nice enough but made me feel like the Grinch anyway, at least when they started with the maracas and the tambourine and the triangle and the noise noise NOISE NOISE NOISE!!! The last twenty minutes or so that we were there were incredibly stressful for me, as I stood there, shoes on, holding Clara's bunting bag and waiting for the kids to stop climbing all over Mr. K so we could leave. Extra-strength Tylenol hasn't touched the headache.

For now I am content to be the parent of a single child. I am writing this to remind myself later, in case someday I get the crazy idea that I want another one.

I finally went back to the gym. Oddly enough, I have lost a tremendous amount of ground from where I was just before getting pregnant. I can't do 410 pounds on the leg press anymore, and I can't finish a second set of ten reps of 50-pound bench presses. If I tried the 200-pound deadlift again I'd probably rip my arms out of their sockets. I think the best attitude to take here is that I suck, n'est-ce pas?

(Not really. It felt wonderful to be back. I'm going to shoot for lifting twice weekly and FitMomming once a week until I run out of FitMom classes, and then go back to three times a week at the gym. Should be able to get back to where I was pretty quickly. God, I've missed it.)

I owe a lot of people e-mail. I usually remember who they are at about midnight when Clara is finally drifting off to sleep. If you're one of them, I'm sorry. My inbox is a mess right now; I still read everything in Pine on a Unix shell, in plain text, and once something has scrolled off the top of the screen I tend to forget it was ever there. Bleah.

Speaking of sleep, we haven't figured out the best way to approach it yet. Clara's been sleeping in my arms every night, but when she writhes and twitches she wakes me up and I'm grumpy all day afterwards. So Thursday night we tried putting her in a sleep sack back in the co-sleeper. She didn't sleep well, and screamed and screamed and screamed and screamed all day Friday. (Perhaps that is what poured the foundation for this headache; the noisy party framed it, and the hideous nightmare this morning finished off the roof.)

However: I am very close to finishing a sweater. I sewed the last seam today, and am going to try to get all the ends darned in and the buttons sewn on tonight. Clara will probably have outgrown it by next Wednesday.

But what will the neighbours think?

2007-01-10T22:00:00.000-05:00

My mother has complained bitterly all my life about her own mother's obsession with what the neighbours would think of any given situation. (The answer is usually "They don't. They have their own lives to worry about.") Instead of enabling me to become a devil-may-care type, however, her complaints seem to have installed this same attitude in me. I am my own worst critic. (But we've known this for a long time.)

Clara is still tiny for her age. As of last Friday (at 13 and a half weeks) she was nine pounds, 1.5 ounces. This is off the bottom of the growth curve that the paediatrician uses (and I'm pretty sure she's using the new one that's calibrated for breastfed babies, who tend to be much leaner than formula-fed ones). Even so, Dr. D is very happy with Clara's development, which is right on schedule: she's grabbing at things, she smiles and coos at people, she controls her head better every day, she rolls from her back to her side at will, and so on.

Yesterday I went back to FitMom after the holiday break (which I had confused with the Movies for Mommies holiday break, and assumed was one week longer than it actually was). Two things depressed me a lot.

(a) I've lost a huge amount of ground with my fitness again -- it's like being back in high school gym class and being the biggest sluggard there. I know from so much past experience that it's just a matter of buckling down and exercising three times a week and eating more protein before I'm getting stronger and feeling better again, but sleep deprivation plus shorter days plus having nine pounds of raw need right. there. all. the time. are making it harder for me to convince myself that this really is something I have to do. And all the pep talks in the world from other people don't help.

(b) I'm to the point where I'm embarrassed to tell people how old Clara is, because she's so small and mothering seems to be such a competitive sport. I talked to one woman yesterday whose ten-week-old's slow weight gain had prompted her paediatrician to recommend supplementing with formula. The mother did, and the baby gained more than a pound in a week. Clara gained 13.5oz in the past month.

There are lots of reasons I really don't want to supplement: reduction of my milk supply, changes to Clara's intestines (PDF), messing with the incredibly fine-tuned system that is a nursing mother and child. Plus, she's obviously healthy and developing appropriately; Dr. D. even said that if she stays on the curve she's on now, even if it's below the "official" one, there's no need to worry. (I like Dr. D.)

But good ol' Lizard Brain is shouting at me that People are going to think that I'm a bad mother because my baby is so tiny. I know this is stupid, but I feel this way anyway. Telling myself not to doesn't shut it up.

I've read that parenthood is a whole lot of being faced with things you can't fix and learning how to deal with them anyway. I've spent most of my life fighting my weight and feeling rotten about the bigness of my body; who'd have thought that my first big challenge would be trying to accept my daughter's smallness?

Dr Tongue's 3-D House of Claras

2007-01-05T21:24:00.001-05:00

Dr Tongue's 3-D House of Claras
Originally uploaded by dabhid07.

Clara's father is a very silly man.

Referrers

2006-12-27T12:16:00.000-05:00

This blog is the #1 result on Google for the search string "how did leslie harpold die?"

Every time I see that I want to throw up. But if I take the relevant post(s) down I'll break the Internet. Sigh.

Lots of people get here by searching for Vicki McCarty Iovine, whose asinine Girlfriends' Guide to Pregnancy I ranted about here. (Do not buy this book. Do not give it to your friends. Track down a copy of Spiritual Midwifery instead, and while you're at it, throw in Nine Months Strong and The Thinking Woman's Guide to a Better Birth as well. Harrumph.)

Others get here by following links to Titland. Still others stumble here by looking up home birth or breastfeeding. One person wondered whether Toronto's Mt. Sinai Hospital was a good place to give birth. (I'd say only if your pregnancy is very high-risk. If it's low-risk, as the vast majority are, I've heard good things about Toronto East General; I can also strongly recommend home birth with midwives. This from someone who used to be terrified of the idea of not going to the hospital.)

Some searches just break my heart. A few months ago there was one about no fetal movement at 37 weeks. (I hope, hope, hope everything turned out okay. No way to know, I guess.) There was one earlier today that brought me to tears: "I just feel so sad my baby has died."

I am so, so sorry. What a difficult thing to be poking around on the web for over Christmas. Whoever and wherever you are, you have my empathy.

Clara's first Christmas was full and busy, with stockings, breakfast, presents, lunch at the Holiday Inn in downtown Kingston overlooking Lake Ontario, more presents, a visit from Edna's brother and one of his daughters, snacking, and finally more presents. She got toys, books, and clothes, and a 2006 set of Canadian coins, which she deemed appropriately shiny. She has learned how to use her hand to pull a soother out of her mouth, but not how to put it back in. This leads to crankiness. Next up on the development chart: learning about cause and effect.

Hope everyone has had a peaceful few days so far, and that 2007 will bring happiness. I hardly dared dream a year ago that by now there would be a baby here, but here she is, dozing on my lap. Sweet, sweet girl.

All the best for the new year.

Christmas notes

2006-12-21T10:43:00.000-05:00

1) I'd been feeling fairly benevolent toward Paul McCartney lately; he's always struck me as a decent guy, and it's sad to watch a decent guy go through such an ugly divorce from a psycho. But then the other day when I was wrangling Clara through the Eaton Centre, I heard his song "Wonderful Christmastime."

I try not to be a violent person, so I don't wish him harm, exactly... oh, what the hell. Yes I do. Augh. Nothing life-threatening or permanently disfiguring, just enough to convince him to pull all copies everywhere of that song and destroy them. He's a rich man, isn't he? He can do that, right?

(And if I've earwormed you, sorry. No, wait. No I'm not. Misery loves company.)

2) I still hate shopping malls, and evidently Clara does too. There was a huge (HUGE) screaming meltdown in the washroom of the Indigo Books and Music because she was simultaneously hungry and dirty-diapered. One thing about parenthood is that it often leaves you doing things you've sworn not to do, like feeding your child in a bathroom. There I was standing there with my tit in my daughter's mouth, shopping bags all over the floor, diaper bag open and spilling its contents everywhere, while the cleaning lady worked around us.

I'm learning to tell who has kids and who doesn't: the parents look upon screaming infants kindly and sympathetically. The non-parents give dirty looks. I was a non-parent for so long that I often find their reactions in me as well. Shut up shut up shut UP you're bothering everyone everyone is going to think I'm a bad mother. But then the experienced parents say soothing things, and I think, Oh. Oh yeah. She's a baby. Babies cry. She'll stop soon. And sure enough, she does.

So, thank you nice cleaning lady in the Indigo washroom, and nice security guard gentleman at the Sunrise Records at Yonge and Dundas. You helped a lot. I bet you have good kids.

3) I've seen more movies in the theatre since October than I think I had in the previous five years combined. Thank you, thank you Movies for Mommies. I've seen Hollywoodland, The Queen, Casino Royale, Borat, Little Miss Sunshine, and The Prestige, and today K. and I are off to see The Pursuit of Happyness. I've liked all of them, especially Little Miss Sunshine, which had me laughing so loudly I was a little embarrassed.

The theatre where we're going today is walking distance from here. I love living in the city.

3) The yap dog across the hall is still going. You'd think he'd get tired. Sigh. Perhaps the Christmas gift to the neighbours can be a giant Milk Bone soaked in Valium.

4) We're going to Mr. K's parents' house for the holiday. His sister will be there too -- she came home from Japan last summer after living there for ten years -- and this is Clara's first Christmas, so Mr. K's mother should by all rights be happy as a clam to have her clan around her. I love the in-laws dearly and they're very, very good to us; I'm afraid the differences in childrearing philosophies will continue to make for some tension. (Yes, I am going to feed her now, even though she just finished eating half an hour ago. Last time we checked, she was in the 95th percentile for height and the 3rd for weight. She's a skinny little thing. Damn straight she eats whenever she wants. And no, we never just let her cry. Sigh.)

5) Huge congrats to Esquiver, who's coming home. E: what are you doing for St. Patrick's Day?

My heart grows three sizes every day

2006-12-17T11:09:00.001-05:00

"Is that so?"
Originally uploaded by Spamily.

Clara seems to like her dad an awful lot.

I do too.

How I knew her

2006-12-14T11:03:00.000-05:00

Leslie Harpold was part of a great big community of people ten or twelve years ago who all met on the Usenet newsgroup alt.society.generation-x. (Remember Usenet? Back before the Web? When all we had was plain text and 14.4k dialup, and we liked it?) Other old asg-xers who have posted remembrances: John Scalzi, Amber, David B., Mig, Joe, Nicole, Robert, Kerry, B, Twonk, Steve. (If I've missed you, kick my ass in comments.)

I met her in person three times, all in the mid-nineties: once in New York, once in DC, once in Boston. I didn't get to see her as much in NY as I'd have liked: after dinner, we gathered at the townhouse of one friend to hang out for an evening, and she got there much, much later than the rest of us. Later we got a terse explanation that on the way over she'd run into some people who had known her fiancé. All anyone seemed to know was that he'd died -- how recently wasn't clear, but now that I look back, it couldn't have been more than a few months. I don't think any of us knew then about her incredible grief. All we saw was the brash, brassy, hilarious, warm, loving yet catty woman so thoroughly eulogized all over the 'net in the past few days. By the time she arrived we were all pretty well toasted; she and Kerry were upstairs watching Godzilla vs. Mothra long after the rest of us were near catatonic on the downstairs floor.

In DC... well, there's Miguelito's story about the hotel rooms. And I remember her at Sunday brunch, on the back patio of a nice restaurant, coming completely unglued at Mr. K's deadpan remark about one of the other people who had come for the gathering. (It was just like any other group of people anywhere: not everyone got along with everyone else. But those of us who did have cleaved to each other for more than a decade now.) She had the most contagious laugh.

In Boston (to be accurate, its suburbs), she, as Jason Kottke put it so well, "did me a favor I didn't know I needed precisely when I needed it." She and some of our other best friends from the Internets were going to be in town for the Columbus Day-slash-Remembrance Day weekend, and Dave and I, having been together for five and a half years already, had suddenly decided to get married there. We were engaged for a month; the City Hall wedding was one step up from an elopement.

She offered to be the official photographer, and the night before the wedding she and Kathleen took me out to a dive of a bar. We drank Bud out of bottles and smoked cigarettes and joyously belted along with the Journey tunes on the jukebox. As the night wore on, Leslie started talking more and more openly, finally telling us the story of how her fiancé had died and how she'd found out. They had bought a house in the south, and the move was imminent. She waited for him to pick her up one night, and he never came.

The details aren't really mine to share -- not in public, anyway -- but they were so heartbreaking. She never got over his loss. Hearing that story in that place, at that time, added so many layers of meaning to David's and my union the next day. She was there to document it, and her presence, her story, and her love were visceral reminders of how fleeting everything is and how critical it is to grapple our tried friends to our souls with hoops of steel.

This from the woman whose favourite phrase in the English language was "Look, bitch."

Last night I said to Dave, "God damn it, why did Leslie have to go and die?"

He replied, "I know. It was so selfish of her. She's totally off our Christmas list."

She'd have thought that was hilarious.

More about Leslie

2006-12-12T12:17:00.000-05:00

I spent a lot of last night wide awake, clutching Clara to me and thinking about Leslie, or dreaming about her when I finally did fall asleep.

She was fiercely private, and had one of the most difficult lives of anyone I've ever known. Deaths of people close to her (including her fiancé, who was ~~buried~~ cremated before she knew he was dead), a fire in her apartment in which she lost nearly everything (including her novel), a routine surgery whose post-op care was botched so badly it sent her to a rehab facility for five months and left her partially disabled and in searing pain for the rest of her life (for her account of what happened, start here and read the next few entries), a burglary that robbed her of the diamond earrings that her fiancé had bought for her in Paris, the premature deaths of both of her beloved cats, the loss of an unexpected pregnancy. I never knew how one person stood it all.

In the face of it she showed astonishing self-awareness, optimism, generosity, righteousness, grace, wisdom, and yes, fierceness. Even after all this, she was the one that others went to for advice and comfort. She was fearsome and beloved. She was so beloved that when her apartment burned, a large online community came together for her and did everything they could to get her back on her feet.When she was burgled, she found the guy in her apartment and scared him out of taking some of what he'd planned to steal. She dealt with her chronic pain by focusing on small moments with people she loved, and being grateful for them. Recently she had moved back to Michigan, buying a house there to be near her mother, whom she loved so very much.

On Thursday, the date of her last post to this year's always remarkable Advent calendar, she IM'd a friend that she was dealing with her annual bout of bronchitis by sleeping sitting up. On Friday she was supposed to contact her mother and didn't. On Sunday her mother, concerned, went to her house and found her.

Leslie didn't want a memorial service. On one of her sites she endorsed the charity Modest Needs; I think donations to them would be a fitting way to remember her.

Bless your soul, Leslie Harpold. Life is too damned short. I miss you.

Update: read this.

Update redux: and this, which has links to some of her writing at the bottom. Thanks to prairie for pointing it out.

Update #3, December 13: this is a roundup of links, assembled by Kevin Fanning, to tributes to Leslie. Miguelito's has a great story about her.

Traffic to this blog is up nearly 1,700% in the last two days. I hope she understood the scale of the love for her. She moved so quickly through so many people's lives, and left just about all of them better for having known her. What an incredible life.

Update #4, December 15: Shauna's post about Leslie is beautiful, hilarious, and heartbreaking.

Leslie

2006-12-11T23:11:00.000-05:00

The richly talented writer, designer, and photographer Leslie Harpold took this picture of us on our wedding day, November 10, 1997. I've always loved it. It's the first thing you see when you walk into our home.

Leslie died alone at home sometime late last week; her mother found her on Sunday. She would have turned 41 on January 8.

Bless you, Leslie, and thank you. Next time I see Kathleen, she and I will go to a biker bar and hoist longnecked Budweisers, as we did the night before my wedding, that night when you told us so many of your stories of heartbreak and showed us your still endless capacity for optimism and love. The next day was the last day I saw you, and now it'll be the last time ever. Godspeed. You are already terribly missed.

Tribes

2006-12-09T11:41:00.000-05:00

I keep coming up with ideas for entries but am still too sleep-deprived and small of brain to remember what they were.

The most notable news is that Clara now fits into sleepers that were too big TWO DAYS AGO. She ate like crazy on Thursday and had three (count 'em) thermonuclear meltdowns; yesterday she passed out on the way home from fitness class and slept like a log all afternoon. When she woke up, she was bigger. This infant development is pretty wild stuff.

Moxie says that it's important to find one's tribe when one is a new mother. Other than in the immediate small circle of friends from before the pregnancy, I have not managed to do so yet. I seem to have very little in common with the moms at the midtown fitness class, who pull up in their Volvos and pull their carseats out of the cars and snap them into strollers, and then spend the whole class chatting about cribs and Diaper Genies and afternoons in shopping malls, as the impossibly perky drill sergeant of an instructor demands 25 more leg lifts to the tune of "Itsy Bitsy Spider" and I fantasize about doing unspeakable things with a 45-pound Olympic bar.

Our carseat stays in the car (we had to pay someone to install it), we don't have a stroller or a crib, Clara has never worn a single disposable diaper, I hate shopping malls, I go almost everywhere on public transit with Clara strapped to my belly, and I fucking loathe leg lifts. Loathe them. I am craving the gym, with the squats and the deadlifts and the bench pressing and the weights that aren't covered with coloured vinyl, and even the reminders of how much ground I've lost since I was able to hoist 225 pounds as high as my knees. I've told myself I'll go back in the New Year, when Clara's a bit older and I can leave her with her dad for a couple of hours as he works from home on Mondays and putters around the house or goes geocaching on Saturdays. Twitch. Twitch.

I'm going out this afternoon to the apartment of some friends so a bunch of us chyx can knit and kvetch about the upcoming holidays. The host is childless (so far) but more than child-friendly; she and her husband looked after Clara last weekend for a few hours while Mr. K and I went to a wedding. I need to spend time with the friends that we do have, and not take them for granted.

Clara's day

2006-12-05T18:27:00.001-05:00

Another milestone
Originally uploaded by Spamily.

She bounced back very quickly from getting her first round of vaccinations yesterday, and today she and I have spent a quiet day at home hanging out with each other. This morning she spent some time having breakfast, and then lay on her play mat for a while reaching for and eventually grabbing one of the toys dangling above her. She held it for quite a while, pulling it toward her mouth. She's figuring things out, yup.

Later she grabbed her pacifier by the handle and pulled it out of her mouth. Then she promptly shat herself. It's hard work being a baby.

She is cuter and more interactive every day. Lots more pictures on the Flickr stream. I love this baby so much.

Our lives are so sedate now

2006-12-01T11:03:00.000-05:00

Joe.My.God asked for bad neighbour stories, so I told ours. It's a doozy. He said I won the thread. Made my day. Yay! Thanks, Joe!

These days our neighbours are retired couples and the family across the hall with the new yap dog. Other than the dog, we hear nothing because the walls are solid concrete. We're such grownups now.

There is still a baby here. She is cuter every day, but still not gaining weight as quickly as the new pediatrician would like. But hey, someone has to be at the bottom of the growth curve. She's otherwise healthy as anything: bright-eyed, alert, attentive, able to fill diapers in a single blam. She spent yesterday sleeping and eating her way through the new Bond movie (which I liked) and then through about two thirds of the One of a Kind Craft Show and Sale. We're going back this afternoon, after fitness class, to see the rest of it. Who knew it took hours and hours to see 800 artisans?

Pink does not suit her

2006-11-20T23:28:00.001-05:00

Pink does not suit her
Originally uploaded by Spamily.

The little skull-and-crossbones T-shirt does, though.

I try to preserve my professional self

2006-11-20T15:45:00.000-05:00

Last Tuesday was bad, and Wednesday was worse. On Tuesday, the laptop that is my lifeline stopped connecting to the Internet, and the water to our apartment was shut off for no apparent reason. Hours after it came back on, the faucets were spewing orange gunk. In the afternoon I started back to exercise class (first time in six weeks, and I've been craving getting back in shape); I left in plenty of time, but the streetcars were agin' me, so I was ten minutes late. Clara had huge screaming meltdowns both at the beginning and end of the class. When we were all to introduce ourselves and say something pithy about motherhood and how it's changed our lives, I found myself blurting to a roomful of women that I'd been sleeping in baby shit because we hadn't remembered to change the sheets. Oddly enough, I was not invited along to the weekly kaffeeklatch after class. The cherry on the sundae had to be the new puppy across the hall, who yaps all the time. Yap yap yap yap yap yap yap yap yap yap yap yap yap yap yap yap yap. You know those battery-operated dogs in shopping malls that go "Yap yap yap yap yap" and then pause to flip over? This one sounds exactly like that, but without the pauses. Yap yap yap yap yap yap yap SHUT UP SHUT UP SHUT UP OH GOD PLEASE JUST SHUT UP.

(And the owner's on the condo board, and the dog [who is admittedly very cute] is a birthday gift for her painfully adolescent son. Sigh.)

On Wednesday, I stupidly agreed to teach an SAT class on Thursday night. Some other instructor couldn't make it, and I want to keep my hand in so that I'll still have at least one of my jobs when I'm ready to go back to work. I envisioned going to the exercise class in the afternoon, and then teaching in the evening. Later that night I remembered that Thursday was the beginning of the TESL Ontario conference, and that the plenary speaker was Jeremy Harmer, one of the most well-known and respected names in the field. He wrote the book used in my TESL training course, and I'd been planning to go to the conference since... well, since last year's conference. (I have to go to these to maintain my professional certification, and anyway, it's nice to find out about what's going on in ESL-land.)

The realization that I'd overscheduled myself was enough to turn me into a sobbing wreck. It's too early. I can't have both a profession and a child. I'm a bad mother because I'm selfish enough to want stuff outside the realm of the baby when she's only six weeks old. Lizard Brain went into overdrive and I cried for more than an hour. Mr. K loved on me and told me to go to the conference and skip the class, but I couldn't back out: I'd committed, and like I said, I want to keep this job. Finally I worked out a plan: I'd go to the plenary speech on Thursday, register for the sessions on Saturday when Mr. K could look after the baby, and go ahead and teach Thursday night's class. Six teenage boys, a soccer team from north of the city. Bozhe moi.

On Thursday morning, though, the tide changed. At 9:30 the courier arrived with the package of materials that I was to teach from. Shortly thereafter, I got onto the streetcar with Clara and rode over to the hotel where the conference was taking place, arriving ten minutes before the speech began. I ran into some of my former colleagues, who were thrilled to meet the baby (and happy to see me, too). Clara was quiet as a mouse for the whole speech, which was more than worthwhile. I then had lunch with two of my friends, and went home for a few hours to prepare for the class.

Soon Clara and I were on the streetcar again and then the subway, heading up to the end of the line, where Mr. K met us and drove us up to York University (site of the class), stopping for subs on the way. (I had forgotten to factor my dinner into the day's plans.) The boys were 15 minutes late, so I had a chance to eat and feed the baby before they arrived.

I was on. I got through the assigned material at a good pace, adding stuff I think important at the appropriate places, and managed to keep them as focussed as anyone can when high school boys are punchy, pubescent, and tired. Even as recently as last year the prospect of teaching a class like this would have alarmed me, but you know what? After an unmedicated labour and childbirth, dealing with a few adolescent boys for three hours is nothing.

Mr. K brought the baby back at break time so that I could feed her, and then after the class was over he drove me home. Bless him. I married the right guy. Having to have a support staff in order to teach means that it's too tough for me to go back to it regularly at this point, but I am so glad I got the chance to do it for an evening. I remembered that I really am good at what I do, and realized that the confidence that's come to me from giving birth the way I did is going to affect the rest of my life. Can't ask for more than that.

Farewell to the midwives

2006-11-13T22:49:00.001-05:00

Melida, Clara, and Cynthia
Originally uploaded by Spamily.

Today Clara was 59cm (23.2") long, had a head circumference of 38cm (about 15"), and weighed exactly eight pounds.

Today we said our goodbyes to the wonderful midwives -- their scope of practice is only to the sixth week of the baby's life. You can see that Clara likes staring at Cynthia, whose face is the first one she ever saw.

I cried on the way out of the clinic, from sadness that they won't be looking after us anymore, and from relief that we've gotten this far and have a healthy, happy baby.

I guess the changes aren't going to get any slower.

Every day a developmental milestone

2006-11-13T22:41:00.001-05:00

The aforementioned play mat
Originally uploaded by Spamily.

See? She's smiling. At five weeks.

Today I put her on this mat on her belly, and she promptly rolled over onto her back. The intarweb sites about baby development say that this doesn't happen until the third month for advanced babies, or the end of the fourth month for average babies. She's at least a month and a half ahead of schedule. We're doomed.

Anniversary

2006-11-13T22:36:00.001-05:00

Clara and her grandpa
Originally uploaded by Spamily.

Friday was the night that Mr. K's parents came to visit; if I'd remembered it was our NINTH WEDDING ANNIVERSARY I might have asked them to come on Saturday instead. But it ended up being good that they were here: Mr. K's mother looked after Clara for an hour so that Mr. K and I could go out to our new local brewpub. Clara was sleeping like an angel when we got home, but, of course, was in full meltdown mode for most of the time that we were gone. Poor Edna (not her real name, but it really is what we call her).

Pictured is Ralph (also not his real name); he is, as you can probably tell, not so comfortable with tiny babies.

Clara is eating well and filling diapers like there's no tomorrow. Her weight gain is still slow but she's growing like a weed: she's almost three inches taller than she was when she was born six weeks ago. (Six weeks ago!)

Postings are infrequent because it's hard to type with one hand. (The other hand is usually holding Clara to my breast.) But things are good. The blessed thistle and fenugreek are keeping my milk supply up, and the occasional glass of stout helps. I don't have body odor anymore; instead I smell of fenugreek. It's weird.

More pictures soon.

Welcome to Titland

2006-10-31T13:51:00.000-05:00

Clara is the star of the show these days, and my breasts are the all-important supporting players. They are still tired and sore, and Clara wants nothing more than to gum them all day every day. Often she's not even eating; she just wants to suck on them for comfort. Although she is healthy, she is not gaining weight quickly enough to suit the midwives, and so they've got me back on four doses a day of fenugreek and blessed thistle. On Monday she was 7 pounds, 11 ounces; they were hoping for 7lbs 15oz. (7lbs 11oz is still much better than 6lbs 4oz, which was her lowest weight [and still an ounce and a half heavier than I was at birth].) Breastfed babies often take longer to gain weight, but are far less likely to become obese later in their lives.

She is a great baby, minimally fussy. When she does fuss, she wants to be fed or changed or picked up and held, or she wants a finger in her mouth. (We tried a pacifier. "PIH!" said Clara as she spat it out. Oh well.) She has been to two Movies for Mommies so far: last week's The Prestige and this week's Little Miss Sunshine. It has been many, many years since I saw two movies in movie theatres in such quick succession. Clara was wonderful: fed or slept straight through, both times. Bless her. Today I was practically giddy at having gotten out of the house with her all on my own. I'm mobile again! Hooray! Calloo callay!

Martha likes to sit on my lap pressed up against Clara as I feed her. Charlotte has finally, four weeks later, started to sleep on our bed again. She still doesn't like the baby, but she's seeming a little less freaked by the idea.

Mr. K has Clara in the sling right now, and she is sucking his finger for dear life. So I need to get some dinner together for him. Two nights ago I made a massive pad Thai (I make fabulous pad Thai, if I do say so myself), and last night we collaborated on a baked pasta dish with cheeses and tomato sauce and ricotta and the rest of the tofu left over from my mother's tofu cheese pie from the weekend. (My mother is a good cook. I wish she'd felt more like cooking while she was here. My dad, bless him, did the dishes several times and cleaned the bathrooms. Hooray for Dad.)

This time is hard, but also very rewarding. My love for Clara is sneaking up on me. I think that if it had hit all at once, my heart might have exploded. Sweet, sweet baby.

Life with baby

2006-10-20T10:04:00.000-04:00

Something I didn't know before Clara was born: the active ingredients in Preparation H are yeast and shark liver oil. Who thought of this? "Ow, my anus hurts! I know, I'll squeeze the oil out of this here shark's liver and put it where the sun don't shine!"

I wonder about such things.

Clara is a great baby. She gets fussy sometimes, as babies do, but she doesn't cry much at all. One or the other of us is holding her just about all the time, except at night, when she sleeps in her co-sleeper. Mr. K has been reading about all the great benefits of having the baby sleep in the parents' bed, but when she does, I don't sleep. If I don't sleep, I don't make milk, and baby doesn't get enough to eat. (Plus I get incredibly cranky during the day.) So into the co-sleeper she goes.

We went to the Canadian Car Seat Installation Centre yesterday and let them do their thing. Clara is still very small and looks pretty ridiculous in the seat, but it's nice to know that she's protected when we're riding around. I sit in the back with her and Mr. K chauffeurs us as we go out to buy things such as nursing clothes for me, baby clothes for her, and small pieces of furniture from IKEA, such as a little table and chairs for the nursery (the chairs to be assembled later, when she is old enough to sit in them) and a pair of lamps for the living room. I'm finding it pretty necessary to get out of the house every day. Yesterday we discovered the baby care room at IKEA: wow. Nice armchairs, changing tables, free diapers (which we didn't need, but still), a nursing pillow, stuffed animals lurking here and there, dim lighting, and a lock on the door. We took Clara in there to change and feed her both before and after we went shopping; this meant that we could spend more time out of the house without worrying that she wasn't eating enough. (I'm still working on mastering the art of breastfeeding in public.) Why can't more places have rooms like that?

Clara wanted to eat ALL DAY yesterday. Every time I took her off the breast she wanted back on. While I was getting ready for bed, Mr. K gave her an ounce of expressed breast milk through the feeding tube off his finger, and she finished the whole ounce in four minutes. (She's been known to take as long as 25 to polish off the same amount.) There must be a growth spurt coming.

My parents arrive tomorrow, and Mr. K goes back to work on Tuesday. Life goes on whether you want it to or not.

Update: I see I'm getting a few hits from an amusingly satirical blog. The more I learn about breastfeeding, the better an idea it seems: savings of thousands of dollars, no supporting incredibly irresponsible and soulless corporations, non-stinky diapers, reduced chance of ovarian and breast cancer and osteoporosis for me, a better immune system for Clara, less stuff to haul around, no worries about formula recalls, and lots of quality time bonding with my baby. Yeah, it's being tough to get it started, but I know it's worth it.

Progress

2006-10-17T21:00:00.000-04:00

Clara is feeding much better and is back up to her birth weight as of yesterday. Hooray. We went to the breastfeeding clinic again a couple of days ago to try to get her latch fixed, because my nipples were on fire. There was another couple there describing their experience having a baby at Mount Sinai Hospital. The doctors refused to give the baby to the mother for the first hour (critical bonding time) because they said her (the mother's) blood pressure was too low. Then the night nurse, when the baby wouldn't feed, laid a huge guilt trip on them about how the baby was STARVING and was going to get JAUNDICE and needed formula RIGHT THEN. What a great idea: actively discourage a new mother from trying to breastfeed. Grr. Hearing this made me nearly incandescent with anger. (Everything is very, very close to the surface right now.) If I hadn't thought before that we'd made the right decision to have midwives... This poor couple. We talked to them and tried to reassure them that yes, it's hard in the first week(s), but if they really want to do it they'll be able to feed their baby the way they want to. It was weird feeling like the grizzled veterans already.
The family politics, never enjoyable even at the best of times, are taking their toll and, I suspect, are only going to get worse. Hint to everyone: now is not the time for deep discussions with me and it is not the time to grouse to anyone about my requests for only positive energy in the house. Sigh.
I need more sleep.
I don't want Mr. K to go back to work next week, even if my parents are going to be here. He's my rock.
For a while this afternoon, both Clara and Martha were asleep on my lap, baby's back smooshed up against the cat's. Hooray redux. (Now if only Charlotte would start sleeping at the foot of the bed again instead of spending all her time downstairs.)
Right now my life doesn't seem to have changed all that much from the way it was in the last month of my pregnancy: I'm home most of the time, I screw around on the Internet too much, I watch some TV, and it's hard to move around. The biggest difference is that I'm a lot more sleep-deprived, and there's someone small around who likes to munch on my tits all the time. She's not very interactive yet and even though I love her, I don't feel as engaged with her as part of me thinks I should be by now. But evidently this is normal too: falling completely in love with the baby takes time. Hard to believe she's two weeks old already.
I think part of me is still grieving the loss of the first baby two years ago. When I lost the pregnancy, we wrapped the pee test stick up with an amethyst (would've been a February baby) and a cotton cloth I'd knitted, inside a piece of paper that Mr. K had made. Something from his hands and something from mine. We buried the little package on A. Island, where his parents have a bit of property. (Our beloved James is buried there too.) Last night it occurred to me to put Clara's footprints on another piece of Mr. K's handmade paper; I mentioned the idea to him this morning. He said that he'd thrown the paper out during the Great Cleaning before the baby came. I went to pieces and cried for much of the day. Tonight, thank heaven, he found five pieces of it. Oddly enough, I don't feel that much better yet. Tomorrow we're going to hunt down some water-soluble ink.
Clara is stirring. Titmunching time again, I guess.

Martha seems to have come to terms with the recent addition

2006-10-14T21:50:00.000-04:00

Charlotte... not so much. She spent the first three days downstairs. She's reclaimed her place at the foot of the bed, but the second that Clara starts fussing, Charlotte is gone like a shot. Pics here.

Clara had a big day: her grandparents, Aunt Sheila, and great-aunt Mary came to visit. Grandma made lunch (her famous mac and cheese). The visit was nice and it was good to see everyone, but it seemed more exhausting for me and Mr. K than it did for Clara: it's still hard having extra people around, even if they're helping.

Clara has had lots of visitors so far, and more are on the way. Aunt Dori and her sweetie Melody blew through town on Monday night, leaving Dori's and my parents to be the last close family to meet her. They're arriving on the 21st and staying until the 31st. I'm a bit worried about this. It will of course be great to see them, but as I said, even the mere presence of extra people in the house right now is draining, and we're going to have to be crystal clear that there is to be no negative energy brought in. Certain topics (like family politics) stay outside, for example. If it gets to be too much, I think we'll gently suggest that my parents visit Mr. K's for a day or three.

In other news, Clara is feeding much, much better. She's not getting all her nutrition on the breast, but she's figured out how to nurse and will do it much of the time. (If only my nipples weren't so damn sore.) She had her first bath last night, going into the tub with me, and got through it by breastfeeding for dear life. Sweet little girl.

Feeding Clara; how to visit new parents; where we've found help so far

2006-10-11T18:00:00.000-04:00

On feeding Clara. She had her first away mission yesterday, to the breastfeeding clinic at the Toronto East General Hospital. A very, very nice public health nurse watched Clara at the nipple, and then made some suggestions and adjusted how I was holding her. Clara then fed like a champ for more than 20 minutes. As we were leaving the clinic I was teary-eyed with relief: she can do it, she can do it, we're over the next hurdle.

After we got home, Clara decided once again: screw you, nipple; I want the finger with the tube. So back she went to the clinic today.

Today's nurse watched what I was doing and said yes, you're doing everything exactly right; it's just going to take time for her to figure it out. This evening, Clara will go to the nipple without screaming, she'll get a great latch, and then she'll just hang out without sucking. This is a step forward, so we're happy about it. Each small step brings us closer to an easily fed baby. So many parents have told us that the first few weeks of breastfeeding their kids were sheer hell, but that they got through the rough patch, and the patience required to get things started is more than worthwhile.

How to visit new parents. Mr. K's sister Sheila is the queen of visiting new parents. She's in the first days of her student teaching, so she has plenty to keep her busy in her own life. But on Monday she brought us a full homecooked Thanksgiving dinner, spent some time visiting with the baby, and then washed all of our dishes. Washing the dishes seems like a trivial thing, but for new parents who are overwhelmed by everything, it's a wonderful gift. Every time she comes by she brings food and support and a sensitive ear, helping so much to keep a positive energy in the house even when she herself is exhausted. She puts her own stuff aside and just pitches in to help. Yay Sheila.

Moxie describes the first days at home with baby beautifully:

[You] soon realize that you'll be attempting to nurse, changing diapers, attempting to nurse, changing diapers, attempting to nurse, changing diapers on a nonstop loop, spelled only by going to the bathroom to change your pad and looking at your partner saying "We have a baby!" with a mixture of wonder and fear.

When you're doing nothing but lactating and changing diapers, your partner has to pick up the slack by doing everything else involved in not only running a household, but changing your entire way of life. Plus fielding phone calls and dealing with a crying baby and crying mom (the hormones!). It's really hard.

You'll need help.

It's easy to think about how romantic the first few weeks after the baby's birth will be, when your cozy little family will be working things out. And it's true that it might be like that. Some people have a pretty smooth postpartum period. But it's also a possibility that you'll be either a little or a lot overwhelmed, the three of you, with odd sleeping schedules and engorgement and sore nipples and poop all over and dirty laundry and crying (all three of you) and friends demanding pictures and thank-you notes and it's-8-o'clock-what-are-we-having-for-dinner? and you're all just so tired. And it would be really helpful to have someone there who could fix you some food or take out the trash or even just smooth your hair and tell you you're doing a good job.

You need someone who will actually help you, not make you cook or make tea or have certain things on hand while s/he holds your baby and gets all the sighs and coos you should be getting. The only people who are allowed to come for more than an hour are people who understand they're there to help you, not just fawn over the baby.

Amen, sister.

Places where we have found help so far. So many people have been unbelievably kind to us. Andrea Page of FitMom kept me in shape through the pregnancy, gave freely of her endless knowledge and encouragement, and even lent us her handheld electric breast pump. Cristi and Ian got me through the pregnancy by giving me a huge stash of maternity clothes. My dear friend AM, who just had a baby herself four weeks ago, has sent us a shiny new double pump that her insurance covered but that she doesn't need; she's been checking in almost every day to see how everyone is doing. Cynthia, Melida, and Tia, the midwives: I can't say enough about them, especially Cynthia. Stephanie, our doula, coached us through an intense labour and helped make sure that the birth was exactly what we'd wanted. She's even going to give us boxes of baby clothes as she cleans out her basement. Moxie and her commenters have been lifesavers. The nurses at the TEGH breastfeeding clinic have given us reassurance and calmness. Mr. K's colleagues sent a huge, gorgeous bouquet that has been brightening the bedroom for a week now. Vik, those two blankets you guys gave us are in heavy, heavy rotation; Clara sleeps swaddled in one or the other every night. Everyone who chats with me on AIM (Krapsnart) or Yahoo (Knitchyk) is helping keep me sane as I try to adjust to this fundamental shift in my identity. (This will become even more important when Mr. K goes back to work and the midwives aren't dropping in every few days. I have a history of clinical depression and am doing my damnedest to ward off the PPD.) And so many our friends and family have offered congratulations and support: this is a wondrous time, but it's also very hard and we are vulnerable. We really, really appreciate your kindness.

Evidently breastfeeding has a learning curve.

2006-10-09T17:47:00.000-04:00

Holy fez, have we been having a rough few days. My milk did indeed come in, but not enough of it, because Clara hasn't been nursing enough to get it going well yet. A typical feeding: I pump my breasts for 15 minutes and get less than an ounce of milk. We tape a tube to my nipple and put a bright-eyed little Clara to the breast. She finds the tube and gets a bad latch on my breast as she drinks greedily from the easy supply. We pull her away to try to get a good latch. She gets angry and starts to scream, then refuses to go back on the nipple. We end up finger-feeding her what's left for the tube. She finishes it in less than a minute, then screams and screams because she's still hungry.

Alternatively, we try to wake her up for a middle-of-the-night feeding (which she needs; she's lost more than a pound since she was born) and nothing will rouse her. Not tickling her feet, not swabbing her with a cold wet cloth, not speaking to her loudly, not changing her diaper, nothing. Except maybe another finger feeding, which means another missed opportunity to get her established on the breast.

Or: I let her suck my finger for a while, then try to move her mouth to my breast. She starts to scream. She seems to want to suck anything (finger, wet washcloth, her own hand) except what makes the food.

This morning she was busily refusing my nipple while Mr. K was downstairs getting me some breakfast, and the dam finally broke and I started to sob. When he came back up to report that the breastfeeding clinic at the Toronto East General Hospital was closed today (Canadian Thanksgiving), he started to sob too.

You know what? Sometimes the occasional sob really helps.

So we called Cynthia. She has been so great through this: she came over at quarter to ten on Saturday night to see what she could do to help, and she came again today with some herbs (fenugreek and blessed thistle) to get my milk supply going. She stayed for the better part of three hours and saw a whole attempted feeding, from the pumping, to the WAKEY WAKEY bit, to the tightly pursed little lips at the nipple, to the screaming, and eventually to the finger and tube put in frustration into Clara's tiny mouth just to get something into her.

Cynthia, in consultation with Melida, finally recommended that we do this:

Boost my milk supply with pumping and herbs.
Put Clara to the breast as much as possible, supplementing what she can get out of there with whatever breast milk I can produce plus whatever formula (sigh) is needed to bring the supplement to two ounces.
Go to the TEGH clinic tomorrow.

So that's the current plan.

Just sitting and talking to Cynthia for more than an hour, about babies, career choices, life histories, travel, etc., made me feel so much better. When she finally left, able to report that even with Clara's grumpiness she'd still gained two ounces since Saturday, I felt calm again. Mr. K and I have been trying so hard to stay calm and positive to keep a good vibe going in the house, but there's only so much we can do by sheer force of will. I know this will all work out and that I'll be able to breastfeed this baby, but oy, I can sure see how tempting it would be to throw up one's hands and just quit trying. And there are all those formula companies lurking and waiting to prey on exhausted parents who just want to make sure their babies are getting enough to eat, waiting to profit from people's misery. I feel very lucky to have so much support available to get us through this fiercely difficult stretch.

I find myself thinking a lot about whether these first few days reflect Clara's character: will she always be so impatient? What can we do to teach her patience, now and later?

I look at this tiny person on my chest and think: I cannot believe how much I love you.

There really is a baby here

2006-10-06T22:18:00.000-04:00

Clara, Mr. K, and I have spent the past few days learning about each other. She likes instant gratification. My milk is not in yet. Yesterday was rough. She screamed for the entire day and well into the night because even though she could get a good latch on my breasts, the good stuff didn't arrive quickly enough to suit her. By 2am she was dehydrated and we were beside ourselves. Mr. K took her into the nursery to rock her for a while so I could try to sleep, but when the shrieks of desperation started again, they hit me like jolts of electricity.

I checked Dr. Jack Newman's Guide to Breastfeeding, which mentions that the second best choice for a newborn after pure colostrum is colostrum mixed with a bit of sugar water. So I hauled my sore self downstairs and made up a little shot glass for her.

Mr. K held her as I cup-fed her. We both got teary-eyed hearing her swallow. She calmed down immediately, and even fed from the breast for a while afterwards. Words cannot convey the relief we felt.

The midwives visited this morning, and Melida, the primary one, confirmed our decision, saying, "You have to go with whatever works." She and Cynthia, the student midwife who was mostly in charge during the labour and birth, gave us a piece of long, 1/16" surgical tubing. One end goes in the sugar water, and the other end goes right next to my nipple. This way, Clara gets her instant gratification, and once she's sucking, away goes the tube. This is a fabulous way to jump-start a feeding: she gets fussy, she gets a few drops of sweetness, she's on the nipple and happy. She's been drinking colostrum on and off all day, and the more she works, the sooner the milk comes. Melida says it will probably arrive by tonight. Yay!

Adam asks (hi Adam!) who does suturing at a home birth. If the home birth is attended by midwives, as this one was, they do. In Ontario, registered midwives go to school for five years and do at least a year of supervised clinical practice, as Cynthia is doing now. They bring a great deal of equipment to a birth: oxygen, a neonatal resuscitation unit, IV supplies, and so forth: at least 80% of what would be available in a hospital. They have to be recertified annually to do certain procedures, and often what they do is based more on evidence and research than what many OBs do. Plus, they don't limit themselves to what would be available in a hospital pharmacy: they use a lot of traditional herbal remedies such as black cohosh and blue cohosh (which brought on my labour like gangbusters after the water broke) and the aforementioned shepherd's purse, which is very effective at stopping bleeding. I suspect midwives have been using such remedies for hundreds of years.

Mr. K and I have both been so impressed by them and by the quality of care that Clara and I have received. They are far less interested in numbers than they are in holistic assessment, and this laid-back approach suits us all just fine. For example, they never asked once about my weight, because they don't consider it as relevant as the size of the uterus. They put Clara onto my chest as soon as she was born, and gave us well over an hour together before they even mentioned weighing or measuring her. Today they didn't weigh her or check her bilirubin levels (she's a bit jaundiced, as is common in breastfed newborns); Melida told us just to put her in sunlight, which has worked wonders already. Melida's quiet wisdom seemed a bit brusque at first, but as we've gotten to know her it's come to seem exactly the right approach. Cynthia's enthusiasm and love for her new work make her a wonderful complement to Melida. Cynthia's eyes were so bright as she talked about how exciting it was for her to watch the development of this baby in utero and then finally meet her on the outside.

They've shown great respect for the emotional and spiritual aspects of pregnancy and birth, as well as great medical knowledge and competence. I feel that they've cared for us as whole people, and that has been such a gift.

And now Clara Elizabeth sleeps on my chest, and all is right with the world.

P. S. It has taken all day to write this. The milk truck has arrived. My breasts are now bigger than Clara's head. Yow.

Meet Clara

2006-10-04T10:56:00.000-04:00

Born at home with wonderful midwives and a doula yesterday at 6:41am. Seven pounds, six ounces; 20.5 inches long. My water broke with a huge gush at 2:30 Monday morning, and by midnight I'd started seven hours of intense, intense unmedicated active labour, most of it standing up and hanging on for dear life to Mr. K. Eventually they got me to sit down on a birthing stool, and she crowned fairly quickly after that. At the end of it her whole little body came out with one giant push.

She is alert and mostly very calm. She and I are learning how to keep her fed. I am sore -- I tore in a bunch of rather odd places and needed stitches, and oh my god the hemorrhoids -- and had a bad time yesterday a couple of hours after the birth when I got up to use the washroom. I ended up leaving a trail of bloody footprints from the bed to the toilet, and nearly passed out while I was sitting there. A big bottle of Gatorade, a shot of Oxytocin, and some shepherd's purse helped a lot; within hours I was feeling worlds better.

The home birth was exactly the right option for us. Surrounded by familiar things, able to move around as we wanted, into our own bed shortly after her arrival. I haven't been out of bed much since; she's been getting plenty of skin-to-skin contact. So far she's met Mr. K's parents and sister, who are somewhat pleased to have her around. Mr. K has handled all the diaper duty so far, which is more than fine with me.

She is here and I feel like a lioness.

Waiting

2006-09-29T11:16:00.000-04:00

Waiting
Originally uploaded by Spamily

I think I give this baby at least another week in utero, maybe more. The prenatal instructor said that first babies come an average of eight days after the "due date," and I don't feel like this one is in a hurry, even if the head is down.

Sleepers and onesies and socks and diapers and receiving blankets are slowly accumulating in the nursery. We're going out tomorrow for a changing pad to go on top of the dresser that used to be full of yarn.

J., the aforementioned prenatal instructor, has picked up on the grief and fear that are still lingering from the miscarriage two years ago, and suggested an extra hypnotherapy session to help me let them go. I find myself awfully skeptical, and yet willing to grasp at anything that will make it hurt less. This baby doesn't deserve to have birth slowed or made more difficult by anguish about what might have been. So I think I'll take J. up on her offer, and see what happens.

In cat news, Martha has been unbelievably clingy the past couple of nights. bringing her snake directly onto the bed next to me, and spending most of each night curled up half on top of my belly and half on top of the body pillow. Yesterday when I was puttering around in the nursery, she and Charlotte both came tearing up the stairs and then spent a while running around the room, wild-eyed. There's a disturbance in their Force. Poor kitties. They don't know the half of it yet.

Thirty-nine weeks

2006-09-26T10:10:00.000-04:00

It is getting harder and harder to haul myself off the couch. When I sit on the exercise ball, my belly touches it. This baby is riding low.

I am still making it to my FitMom classes -- last night was yoga -- and this afternoon I'll be out of the house for quite a while, first for a massage appointment, then for some shopping, then for a haircut. (If I want a nap today, I'd better have one now.)

The painter finished last Thursday. The nursery is a nice cheerful yellow with red and green here and there. The master bedroom is a dark indigo-purple, slightly darker than before. It looks fabulous. The piles of crap are diminishing slowly; yesterday we got rid of the big pine table that had been my desk for years. I posted it on Freecycle.org, a network intended to keep stuff out of landfills by making it easy to give things away. Within a few hours I had a response; a single mother of three is moving out of her basement apartment and needed a new dining table. We probably could've gotten $40 out of it if I'd tried to sell the thing, but giving it away to someone who really needs it was much better karma. Now to move along the old CD cabinet, my old nightstand, and a box of tumbled marble tiles.

Mr. K is under the gun for a big deadline at work; he pledged that he'd be able to finish this piece of work before the baby showed up, and so he's really feeling a lot of pressure. I find myself getting nervous that the baby will come before he's had the chance to learn enough about labour and birth. I'm glad we've hired a doula.

Man. I am exhausted. I think that nap is a good idea. (Hello, baby. You sure are active today.)

(By the way, I did vanquish the bootie pattern. The results are ridiculously cute. Pictures forthcoming.)

There oughta be a disclaimer

2006-09-19T12:25:00.000-04:00

This pattern for knitted booties ought to have a warning on it:

Warning: not suitable for pregnant women

It is way too fecking complicated for my poor shriveled brain.

I will vanquish it. I will.

The nursery

2006-09-18T23:12:00.000-04:00

The nursery
Originally uploaded by Spamily.

The baby could show up any minute now and still be considered full term. The picture shows what the baby's room looked like as of yesterday. You might notice the dearth of baby-related stuff and the surplus of random crap.

We spent yesterday evening mucking the room out (into the study, which was previously pretty much done and is now unusable), and also doing lots to move stuff away from the walls in the master bedroom. When my midwife told me to stay away from paint fumes, I decided I didn't want to leave all the painting responsibilities on Dave's shoulders. I also decided that it would be a very good idea to cover the flat indigo paint in the big bedroom with an eggshell paint, so that when the kid gets mobile and starts leaving marks everywhere we'll be able to scrub them off. And I didn't want the painting going on with a baby in the house, so I broke down and hired a painter. He will take three days to do the whole job, and it will look great, and it will be done.

He started today. The room in the picture is now almost empty, and it's a nice yellow with a red bulkhead and green closet doors. Tomorrow he'll do the windowsill, the door, and the baseboards, and then he'll get started on the bedroom. Nice guy, highly recommended by others in the building. So: yay.

My feet and ankles are sausages. I'm finally getting stretch marks across my belly. I grunt a lot when I move around. I'm glad I'm not working anymore, because it's so much effort to get anywhere, and I get exhausted very easily. But even with all the discomfort and unpleasantness, I've really loved being pregnant. It's amazing to know that my body can do this, can build a tiny person by combining two cells. I'm a little sad that this part of the process is almost over.

Thirty-seven weeks

2006-09-14T16:04:00.000-04:00

Yesterday the primary midwife (M.) and the student midwife (C.) made their home visit. The cats were friendly; Martha certainly did turn on the charm. M. and C. had a look around the place, deemed the master bedroom an appropriate place in which to give birth, and then examined me. Blood pressure 110/80, fundal height 36cm, baby's heart rate 144bpm, head engaged in the pelvis, body starting to turn so that the back is toward my front. This last in particular is very good news, because I'm told it's extremely painful to give birth to a baby whose skull is pressed up against one's tailbone. (This is what's known as the dreaded back labour.)

Plus, we've made it to 37 weeks. The baby could come today and be considered full term. People keep telling me that first babies are usually late, though; we could be waiting for another five weeks. I hope that labour waits for at least three more, because the prenatal classes that we're taking end on October 4.

I'm not sure what to think about these classes. I've been very glad to be able to approach this birth with so much attention to its emotional and spiritual aspects as well as to its physical ones; the traditional medical model of care tends to ignore all the touchy-feely stuff (literally, with babies often being whisked away to warming units when they'd do far better to be lying skin-to-skin on the mother's chest). And even though I'm more than a bit of a hippie, I find myself oddly resistant to the idea of self-hypnosis, and I'm having a hard time achieving the deep relaxation that we're being taught. The classes are paid for, though, and I'm sure it'll be good for me to hold a lot of my fears about labour, birth, and being a parent up to the light so that I can try to let them go. It is nice to be in a class in which everyone has a midwife, not an OB.

Plans for the next week: exercise class tonight at 7:30. Lunch with the old boss and his wife tomorrow at 1:00. (I have to figure out a nice gift to give them. Suggestions welcome. They've been very good to me.) Trip to the west end tomorrow evening to look at the contact sheet for the pictures we had taken last Saturday, and to pick up another dozen and a half cloth diapers. (Doug: we're planning to wash them ourselves.) Then back out east to greet Teezonk and two other friends who are coming for the weekend.

Saturday is the neighbourhood garage sale; if I weren't so lazy I'd have spent part of today making price tags for all the stuff we need to get rid of. Saturday night we're having dinner at the Thai restaurant owned by one of my former students. (I hope she's there; I'd dearly love to see her.) Sunday we see our friends off and then get to work moving furniture and boxes of crap so that the painter can show up on Monday morning to work on the nursery and the master bedroom for three days.

Monday is lunch with my awesome trainer, with whom I hope to start working again a couple of months after the baby comes, and then yoga class in the evening. Wednesday is lunch with my friend Mika, and then another prenatal class in the evening.

I write all this here mostly to keep myself from forgetting something. I'm looking forward to getting my brain back someday. It's not a bad brain, when it has enough serotonin floating around.

I'm going to go downstairs and get some more food and water, and put my feet up, and finish this second baby hat. I like knitting for babies: yesterday's hat took, yup, one day.

Baby-related consumer-based activities

2006-09-10T11:30:00.000-04:00

Yesterday we dropped a lot of money on cloth diapers (yes we are planning to use cloth diapers), a diaper pail, diaper covers, and a baby carrier. On Thursday, after we dropped my parents off at the Buffalo airport, we went to a Babies-wah-Us* and bought a co-sleeper bassinet that attaches to the side of the bed. It's exactly what we wanted, but we couldn't find the Arms' Reach brand in Canada. We also bought a couple of onesies and a couple of sleep suits with feet. One of them has little trains on it because Mr. Krapsnart is such a railfan. High cuteness.

*Our friend Steve K., lexicographer extraordinaire, calls it this because the backwards "R" is pronounced "wah" in the Cyrillic alphabet. I love hanging out with language geeks.

The other thing we did yesterday was go to a professional photographer who shot pictures of me and the belly (clothed and not), and pictures of me, the belly, and Mr. K. We've been together for more than 14 years and had never had a professional portrait taken before. We'll have a contact sheet (she uses film!) next week, and some prints sometime after that. I am very excited about this, and very happy to have found a good photographer on short notice. (Had tried Heather Rivlin a while ago, but she's booked at least eight months in advance.)

I feel like every step we take toward getting ready to have a real baby around will delay the imminent arrival that little bit more.

People have been asking where we're registered. This is a very good question. The answer right now is that we aren't. This morning I tried registering at the Sears Canada website. Feh, I say. Feh. The "Register online" page was nearly impossible to find, and once I'd filled out our information (which I hate sending over the Internet) I discovered that there seemed to be no way to add items from the website to the registry. So I called the 800 number and, after being talked at for ten minutes by a particularly loquacious CSR, confirmed that no, there is no way to do everything online; to add items you either have to go to the store and fire a scanner gun at the things you want, or sit at home typing in numbers from the (paper) catalog.

Grr. So much for Sears.ca, then.

(Martha is washing Charlotte's head as I type this. They usually have quite an adversarial relationship, so this is nice to watch.)

Even though we've bought some stuff there, I don't think I want to register with Babies-wah-Us because they seem to have been pretty crappy corporate citizens over the past few years. Amazon.ca doesn't have all the baby stuff that amazon.com has, and most things coming in from amazon.com would be subject to Canadian taxes and import duties on arrival. So I'm at a bit of a loss about a registry. It would be nice to have one so we could specify "no pink or blue pastel" (one of the biggest reasons we haven't been forthcoming about whether this baby is a boy or girl, even though we've been 95% sure for months*) and "no branding, especially no Disney." Much of what we're buying is in bright colours (babies see them better!), and, well, don't get me started about Disney. (They bought Pooh Bear, dammit. And never mind their stranglehold on the American media, and the sexism and racism in so many of their products, and and and... Like I said, don't get me started. I'll know I've lived a bad life if I die and find myself eternally trapped in Disneyland.)

*Recently I was talking to a friend about boy and girl babies, and mentioned that one of my cousins and his wife had been expecting one and been surprised by the arrival of the other. My friend's response: "That would have been such a disaster! We'd have had to redo the whole nursery!" I don't get it; I really don't. Everything we have so far is unisex.

And yes, I freely admit that my stances on corporate and personal social responsibility are inconsistent and even at times hypocritical. I could be far more diligent than I am about refusing to buy anything made in China; I could spend a lot more time researching the provenance of what I buy; I could get off my ass and actually move the money in my RRSP out of the big corporate funds where it lives now and into more socially responsible funds at the credit union. [FWIW, the bulk of my investments, made back when I was living la corporate vida loca ten years ago or so, are in ConglomMutualFundsCo's ostensibly "socially responsible" fund, which has done much better than many of their other ones.)

But: I live in a big city and almost never drive; I haven't eaten meat in 15 years; lots of my non-pregnancy clothing is made from organic cotton; and I do my damnedest to avoid buying anything made by Nestlé. I'm going to have to think about all this stuff a lot more so that I can explain it to our child over the next few years and provide enough education and facts to enable the kid to make her or his own decisions.

This is the long-winded way of saying that no, we are not registered anywhere, and probably won't be. We really appreciate the inquiries, though. You guys are awesome. If you really want to send us something, drop me a comment or an e-mail and I'll send you our address.

Almost 36 weeks

2006-09-04T18:49:00.000-04:00

Almost 36 weeks
Originally uploaded by Spamily.

The scary thing is that this is the biggest my tits have ever been.

Life is a series of hellos and goodbyes

2006-09-01T16:37:00.000-04:00

This morning started at 7:00 when the alarm went off. We lay there dozing through the national news on CBC, me with my head on Mr. K's chest and my leg across his legs, Martha curled up in the small of my back. Charlotte, as always, was at the foot of the bed.

I got up at about 7:40 and got into the shower. After I was clean and dressed, I came downstairs and had some breakfast: a scrambled egg, slices of cheese, and a pile of alfalfa sprouts on a wholegrain English muffin. Mr. K has become very efficient at making my little breakfast sandwiches. I put on a bit of makeup (concealer under my eyes, some definition for my eyebrows), poked around on the Web for a bit, and finally got out of the house just after 8:45.

The Pigeon Man was out this morning, lying on a small mound of grass in the little parkette he frequents, shaking out a bag of bread to feed the masses of pigeons and sparrows that were clustered around and on top of him. He always looks terribly unhealthy, just inches from death with his sunken cheeks and hollow eyes, but he's there almost every day, pulling on his giant foul-smelling stogie and letting the birds surround him.

As I walked north I didn't see the tall, nervous, thin woman who always seems to be in a rush to get to work. Nor did I see the squarish red-haired guy with the chinstrap beard.

The streetcar was relatively empty and I got a seat with no trouble. I'd forgotten the new September Metropass, but the very kind driver let me on anyway and even gave me a transfer so I could get on the subway. The chimes of the cathedral announced nine o'clock as we went past, letting me know I was on time.

I got onto the subway and rode to work. Took the stairs out of the subway station, and the two flights after I got into the building. Went into the tiny little teachers' room, chatted a bit with another teacher, gathered the books I needed, and went off to class, where I had one (1) student.

This routine, with minor variations (usually more students), has been my weekday morning for months now. Today was its last hoorah. I taught for a couple of hours, and then cleaned my stuff out of the fridge, said my farewells to my boss and his wife (they're taking me out for lunch next week), and left.

This is the seventh job I've left since I finished university. It doesn't get easier to walk away. This is the first time, though, that I've had someone kicking me from the inside to remind me why I'm going.

I've been thinking a lot about the work I do and about how it's compensated: even though there are more letters after my name than after Mr. K's, I make a fraction of what he does, and my jobs are far less stable. I discovered a week or two ago that I am most likely not eligible for any sort of maternity leave because I've been officially self-employed for the last eight months (read: working for a place that's too small to afford a payroll system).

The work I'm drawn to -- teaching English as a second language within the realm of social service -- is traditionally underpaid. There seems to be an assumption that because it's good, meaningful work, often in the nonprofit sector, those who do it shouldn't expect more pay. Aren't you committed to the cause? How dare you want more money? Shouldn't you be willing to make sacrifices for the greater good? (This hasn't been the case at all at the job I just finished, but then that job wasn't at a nonprofit.)

I find myself wondering about the degree to which the inequity of compensation between jobs I can get and the job that Mr. K has is linked with gender: when I go to professional conferences, I can't help but notice that 90% of my colleagues are female. Even the ESL jobs that aren't connected to social service are usually underpaid and unstable. (At one conference, the [male] keynote speaker noted that ESL teaching is "the armpit of academia." ESL programs in schools are often the first ones to be cut when budgets get tight.)

And the instability of my pink-collar job means that I don't get benefits when I have to take time off to do the unpaid work that women have been doing for millennia. This isn't what I had in mind when I finished my degree at a feminist women's college.

I'm feeling deeply dissatisfied by the lack of structural support available for women who find themselves in what are traditionally "women's jobs" and need to leave for a while to bring new people into the world. People keep telling me I'm lucky to be able make choices, but even if I had a job that guaranteed me a maternity leave, it just wouldn't make any financial sense at all for me to keep working and Mr. K to drop to only 55% of his salary so that he could take time off. For economic reasons, I have to make exactly the same decision that a working woman did 40 years ago.

So that's what's been kicking around in my head for the past couple of weeks. Kicking around in my belly is a baby, whose imminent arrival is freaking me out no end. Baby baby baby.

My parents are here, and they and Mr. K and I spent the afternoon poking around baby shops. We have bought almost nothing even though I'm due in less than five weeks. Right now the baby's possessions add up to this:

a dark blue Wellesley onesie
twelve small washcloths
three receiving blankets (two of which were gifts from friends)
a pair of soft-soled shoes (also a gift from friends)
one pair of socks (gift from my parents)
one bib (gift from my parents)
a travel playpen (a gift from Pina and Ian, given when they visited and their then-13-month-old needed a place to sleep)
a sling (also from Pina and Ian)

So far no diapers (we're planning to use cloth), no co-sleeper or crib, no big pile of onesies, no diaper cream, no nipple cream, no "so you've gone and had a baby" books, no changing table, no bedding, no curtains, no car seat, no stroller. The nursery looks like a storage room: it is currently full of crap purged from my study (soon to be our study, but currently in use as a guest room for my parents) and stuff that Mr. K needs to deal with. We haven't even bought paint yet.

I am simultaneously equanimous and overwhelmed.

I guess we're keeping each other

2006-08-13T12:18:00.000-04:00

After eleven years of living together and almost nine of marriage, it's finally happened: we've merged our book collections. I am thrilled about this. We merged the CDs long ago, but now I finally feel completely married. Phew.

The merger is a result of having to consolidate Mr. K's study into mine so that his can become the baby's room. Even though we've been working like dogs for a couple of weeks now, remarkably little has happened in what will be the nursery; it's all been going on in my room and the master bedroom.

Mr. K has complained for years that he's tired of having IVAR shelves. I've lost count of how many times I'd suggested Billy, only to have him veto those as well. So we've lived with IVAR for more than a decade, and it has served us well. Last weekend, however, I suggested getting an IVAR desk, and that seemed to push him over the edge. On Sunday he phoned from IKEA and said, "How about some Billy shelves?"

I am proud to report that I didn't climb through the telephone wire and hit him.

So now we have Billy shelving in the study we will share. Installing it involved taking all the books off the old shelves, disassembling the old shelves, assembling the new shelves, and putting most of the books back onto them. They have somewhat less capacity than the old ones, so there've been piles of books sitting on the floor quietly awaiting new homes.

Some of the IVAR has gone into our bedroom closet, which is (thank you, idiot architects and idiot builder) too shallow to hang clothes in. (We had to spend a large chunk of money six years ago to get a wardrobe and drawers installed along one wall of the bedroom.) All the trade paperbacks went in there, as did my collection of film books.* That closet is now done, yay.

* A great interest in silent film a few years ago resulted in the accumulation of a decent little library about it. My changing interests are reflected in my books: I have collections about not only silent film but representations of the female body, knitting, writing, teaching ESL, weightlifting and triathlon training, and Shakespeare. And that doesn't touch the novels.

Because Mr. K was out of town for the weekend helping his parents get their place ready for their 50th anniversary festivities in a couple of weeks, K. and J. came over today to help me move the five-foot solid pine table out of the study and assemble the new computer desk, which is considerably more complicated to put together than the Billy shelves were. Despite some very frustrating moments resulting from our not having read the directions carefully enough, we all managed to maintain remarkable equanimity and good humour. Hooray for us. I now have a new, fully assembled desk.

Left to do: take down the other wall shelf so that the printer can go on top of the desk. Plaster over the holes in the wall, and sand, prime, and paint them. Empty the contents of the large pine dresser (a ridiculous quantity of yarn and an embarrassing number of unfinished knitting projects) into big plastic tubs (yet to be bought) that will go into the linen closet. Move the dresser out of the study. Put my computer desk into place and reassemble the computer. Move Mr. K's computer desk into the study. Buy a four-drawer filing cabinet and fill it with the contents of both two-drawer filing cabinets. Dispose of the two-drawer filing cabinets. Sell the large pine table. Sell the big queen-sized futon that used to be our couch. (Snif. So many guest-based adventures happened on that futon. I'll be sorry to see it go.) Get a smaller pullout sofa to go into the study so that we still have room to put up guests. Paint the baby's room. Move the dresser into the baby's room. Get a changing table and a crib, preferably one that can be converted into a bed.

I get slightly dizzy thinking about all of it. And I don't stop working until the middle of September, and my parents arrive on August 23 to stay for two weeks. I still don't know where we're going to put them.

Best student error I think I've ever received, in a short essay about earthworms: "For instance, earthworms destroy the soil cover by taking neutrinos from pants."

Memo to my students: do NOT trust the spell checker. Just don't.

(Beware the pants neutrinos!)

Seven months

2006-07-31T21:36:00.000-04:00

Duck suit
Originally uploaded by Spamily.

The nesting instinct has kicked in and we are trying to (a) excavate space in my study and (b) consolidate the contents of Mr. K's so that we can turn his into the nursery and move his stuff in with mine. There is a large, slowly disintegrating pine dresser (from IKEA, hence the disintegration) in my study that is full of yarn and unfinished knitting projects. There are also a half dozen large shopping bags around the house full of same. The knitting muse, once so much with me that I could hardly put my needles down, has been mostly absent for the past few years. She'd gone on holiday before, but never for this long.

I had at least half a dozen projects so close to completion that all they needed were a few hours' work. To wit: this duck suit needed some ends darned in, and the eyes and buttons sewn on. The nesting instinct is so powerful that it yanked the knitting muse back from vacation and forced her to sit with me as I went ahead and finished this damn thing. Hooray! One project out of a shopping bag and into... um... I guess, another shopping bag that will eventually fill up with things for the baby. We'll keep that new bag in the bedroom so I can at least feel like I've accomplished something in the study.

I also finished a child's sweater (but can't yet figure out how to blog more than one picture at a time, so you'll have to check my Flickr stream to see it). That one is going into the mail, so at least that's something out of the house.

Then there was the sock that just needed the toe stitches grafted together. I'm working on the mate for that one right now. Should have it done in a couple of days, and then I can make a baby blanket. I'm thinking a much shorter version of Alice Starmore's "Little Rivers" wrap, in bright red superwash sock yarn.

Knitting in sock weight yarn is not going to make much of a dent in the stash. Sigh. But at least the return of the muse seems to mean that I can stop with the compulsive Sudoku-ing.

The pregnancy continues and the baby is moving a lot. I am still coughing (after twelve weeks), with no sign of infection; the new theory is that the cough is somehow connected with the unbelievable heartburn. Thursday night and again last night, the cough woke me up in the wee hours and got so bad that it sent me flying to the washroom to puke. I guess the baby doesn't like Betty's black bean burritos. Alas.

At least coughing this much is making my abdominal muscles stronger for the birth. I really am feeling mostly positive about all this, even if my navel is disappearing.

Backup midwife

2006-07-24T21:01:00.000-04:00

Met the backup midwife today, and really liked her. She said that my glucose tolerance test came back fine (yay!) and that the baby's head is already down. She also pointed out that the baby had a foot up under my ribcage on the right. Yes, thank you (oof), I had figured out that (oof) a pretty powerful limb was there (oof). So far, all seems to continue to go well. Thursday is the 29-week mark.

We will meet the spare emergency auxiliary backup midwife in two weeks.

Still having trouble grokking the idea that there's going to be an actual baby. People keep asking whether we've bought anything or registered anywhere. We have bought one thing: a dark blue onesie with the name of my alma mater on it. My fitness instructor says you really need only two things when the baby arrives: diapers and nipple cream. I'm down with that. (Although a good friend also recommends lots of soft washcloths plus ass cream. Makes sense.)

The post about home birth may have to wait for a couple of weeks. I accidentally left the sheaf of photocopies from the student midwife at the in-laws' house, and today I finally returned the copy of Ina May Gaskin's Spiritual Midwifery to the midwives' library. I'm waiting for my own copy to arrive from Amazon (haven't been able to find one in a bookstore). It's worth quoting. So far it's my favourite book about pregnancy and childbirth by a long shot. It was published in 1977, so all the pictures are of hardcore hippies and lots of the birth stories are full of words like "psychedelic" and "tantric" and "heavy." The mellow vibe is bringing me great joy. Ina May and her colleagues at the Farm Midwifery Center attended 186 births before anyone had to have a Caesarean; between 1970 and 2000, the Farm's Caesarean rate was 1.4%. (The US average in 2001 was 24.4%.) These women know what they're doing.

Outside babyland: Spent the weekend with the in-laws. Slept in their RV, and took the cat in with us. He spent most of the night on my pillow, crammed up next to my face. He is large and orange. I approve of him.

Also, a new student started in my TOEFL class this morning. He's from Russia, and he looks about 15. His mother brought him in this morning and warned the staff that he was shy. Well, yeah, I'd be shy too if my mother were shepherding me everywhere. Poor kid.

Time for the bed. I love the bed.

Filler

2006-07-23T11:24:00.000-04:00

I'm working on a post about the safety of home birth as compared with hospital birth for low-risk pregnancies, but my attention span is so short this morning that I'm going to have to come back to it later. In the meantime, I thought I'd post a little bit of filler. Here are some links to my favourite websites these days.

Cute Overload, which manages to be insanely cute and yet not cutesy. I know everyone already knows about it, but I link it anyway because it makes me so happy.
Waiter Rant, written by a forty-something former seminarian who manages to be both deeply compassionate and bone-wearily cynical. Compelling snapshots of everyday drama plus trenchant little character studies: it's a great read.
Working America's Bad Boss contest, with thousands of entries submitted by people who have had to endure incompetent, criminal, and even psychotic managers. (Why, yes. I do still have some unresolved anger toward my old boss, who made it impossible for me to continue in the best job I've ever had. Somehow it's comforting to read about people who are even worse.)
Mimi Smartypants. I still love Mimi Smartypants.
Ask Moxie, sensible and sensitive advice about raising kids.

There. That oughta hold the little bastards.

Insert amusing title here

2006-07-17T22:12:00.000-04:00

My belly continues to get bigger. The placenta's in the front, so most of the sensations from the baby are somewhat dulled, but Mr. K finally did feel the kicking for the first time two weeks ago today, a few hours after it had awakened me at 3am. So far that's the only time that the baby's movement has interfered with my sleep.

Oh: sing ho for the comically large body pillow. I'm sleeping so much better with it between my knees and under my belly.

Today I put my hand on my belly at lunchtime, and felt something that resembled kicking, except that it came at very regular intervals. Hiccups!

In (somewhat) non-pregnancy-related news, last week I had (halal) pizza with two former students, one from Sudan and one from Iraq. F., the former, is a force of nature, big and beautiful and outspoken and funny. "How is your baby girl?" she asked. I asked her what made her think it's a girl. She said, "I already told you this one would be a girl." Oh. Heh. Okay, then.

S., a very smart woman of humour, dignity, and good will, was telling me about her brother's being kidnapped in Iraq and brutally beaten for four days. Amazingly, when the four kidnappers -- who took him at gunpoint in broad daylight as he went to buy stock for his grocery store -- realized that his family couldn't afford ransom, they let him go, just dropped him off on the side of a highway in the middle of nowhere. He was so badly hurt he could barely walk, but somehow got himself to a police station. After his family came to get him and bring him back to their town, word went out on a PA system that he was home safely. Fifteen hundred people showed up to the impromptu lunchtime celebration. S. said that out of forty-one people kidnapped that day, he was the only one to come home. For a few months afterwards he tried to readjust, but finally realized that he couldn't stay there and get over the trauma. Late last week he left Iraq for good, to move to Syria.

Ayup, destroying the country's infrastructure and leaving it open for mercenaries to abduct and beat civilians at will sure was the morally correct thing to do.

Can't think about it too much. It makes me too angry. Saddam Hussein was a despicable tyrant, but what's happening in his country in the name of the United States of America is far, far worse. Americans were supposed to be the good guys.

I hope we're doing the right thing by bringing a child into this fucked-up world.

An era ends

2006-06-30T18:56:00.000-04:00

Dammit.

The third trimester looms

2006-06-27T20:53:00.000-04:00

Lots happening but I'm too tired to write much. My feet and ankles have started swelling and it's getting harder to sleep. Mr. K bought me a body pillow. Hooray for the body pillow.

Evidently post-nasal drip happens to some women during pregnancy because the body is making so much extra mucus. I'm one of those women, and I've been coughing for seven weeks now. Sick. Of. Coughing.

I don't have anything serious to complain about, though. The baby is active and everything seems to be going well. I've found a great chiropractor who specializes in treating pregnant women, and I've hired a doula who comes very, very highly recommended. Tried prenatal yoga yesterday: didn't love it, but should probably stick with it. My balance for the tree pose is somewhat lacking.

I've discovered a marvellous Thai restaurant half a block from work. Gotten lunch from there three times in the past week. Today's lunch (with one of my colleagues, who is leaving in a week or two because he's about to burn out, alas): fish cakes, mango salad, and coconut rice. Yum, yum.

Some guy tried to pick me up as I was walking down Eglinton yesterday. I'm not used to having people try to pick me up, so the whole experience was strange and slightly unsettling. He stopped me to comment on my dangly moonstone necklace, asked several questions I didn't readily understand ("Are they your moonstones?" and "What are you doing?" at the top of the list) (and no, Mr. Friendly, my necklace did not come from the moon), and then said he hoped I'd join him for a beer. Guess he must've missed the wedding ring and the six-months-pregnant belly. Flattering but weird.

C., another colleague who is leaving soon (she's going back to school, and I'm taking over her job for a week starting next Monday until the new guy can get trained), told me today that her sister-in-law just lost her baby at eleven weeks. It's hard to talk about miscarriage: hearing about other people's experiences just dredges up so much pain and sadness. People mean well when they say things like "At least you know you can get pregnant" and "It's for the best," but dammit, all the hopes and dreams that were starting to take root are suddenly devastated, and for a long time every passing pregnant woman or tiny baby is like a knife to the heart. C. and I talked for quite a while; I think she's going to go visit her sister-in-law this weekend to help her grieve.

The Esquivalient One (to whom I wish peace and happiness as she tries to sort out her career and her relationship with her sweetie -- been through the rough patches myself, and yea, verily do they suck) mentions that she is careful about her blogging in order to maintain a narrative flow. A noble, considerate goal, that: makes reading her stuff more than worthwhile. All I have energy for right now, though, is brief little snapsnots such as this one.

I can stop whenever I want to

2006-06-18T18:56:00.000-04:00

We were on our way out of the building earlier to do a bit of shopping, and a guy in the elevator noticed me staring at a Sudoku puzzle. "Now when you have to do one of those in the elevator, that's addiction."

So I hit him.

(Not really.)

Pet peeve: the word "soduku," both written and spoken. "Su" means digit in Japanese, and "doku" means "single." I was reading somewhere that people are stupid.

Reunion was marvellous. Started it by working out at the Sports Center (whose selection of free weights sucks, alas: there's not even a squat cage or a proper bench press setup). Watched myself doing sets of 95-pound deadlifts in the mirror, looked at the pregnant belly and the muscular shoulders, and thought, "Yes. Perhaps it is possible that I don't suck as much as I once thought I did."

That moment alone was worth the trip.

Update

2006-06-07T22:28:00.000-04:00

1. My grandmother died at about five after one Denver time this afternoon, when all the family members were out of the room and the nurses were getting ready to give her a bath. I knew this was how it was going to happen, that she wasn't going to die with family near her. She held on for more than 72 hours after they stopped giving her fluids. Stubborn as anything, right to the end.

2. Mr. Krapsnart is officially a citizen of Ireland: the certificate arrived this morning. The application process was long and expensive and worrisome, because we were afraid the papers wouldn't come through until after the baby came. But because they did, the baby is now eligible for Irish citizenship as well, and therefore for an EU passport. Mr. K was so happy this morning that there were tears in his eyes. Kiss him: he's Irish.

I might just have a half pint of Guinness this weekend to celebrate. So there.

Absolution

2006-06-05T21:33:00.000-04:00

Mimi has not died yet. She is septic and has had a heart attack, and the doctors have given her nothing except morphine for 36 hours, and yet she continues to hang on by her fingernails. Nobody is surprised.

My mother (who has not slept in those same 36 hours) told me in no uncertain terms not even to think about going to Denver. She told me to go to Reunion and take care of this baby. So that's exactly what I'm going to do. Bless my mother.

Saw the midwives today and heard the baby's heartbeat again. I don't get tired of that sound.

I am nearly out of grandparents

2006-06-04T18:08:00.000-04:00

1. My classmate's baby did not survive.

2. My 92-year-old grandmother, whom I as a child adored beyond words, will probably not make it through the night.

The years have mitigated my adoration. Oh, the stories that abound about her manipulative nature, her narcissism, even her cruelty toward the people she was supposed to love. Her expectations that unfathomably rude behaviour was, from her, completely acceptable, because she was a Lovely Lady, wasn't she?

Neither my mother nor her sister knows where the will is. Word came out recently that one does exist, and that it disinherits all five of us grandchildren by name. Why is it, then, that she asked one of these grandchildren (the only male) to hold her medical power of attorney? To prompt one last pointless, malignant rift in the family? To show one last time that dammit, she still has control?

I have so many fond memories of being a small child and visiting my grandmother's house. My mother's doll Gary still rests in his pram in the basement, exactly where I'd leave him 30 years ago. I remember how special I felt when I was in that house, how loved I was, how much I enjoyed the little rituals -- the big red chair coming upstairs so that I could be tall enough at the dinner table, the old bellows organ in her living room moaning below the pumping of my feet as I picked out a melody on the keyboard, the giant music box in the room where I'd sleep being cranked into life so that it could play its big steel discs of old, old songs.

The visits became infrequent after we moved east, two thousand miles away, when I was four. My parents tell me I lamented moving so far away because it meant that I couldn't live in the house next door to Mimi and take care of her when she got old. For years the letters and presents came, and Mimi's telephone number and the melody it made when I called it are still burned into my brain.

It wasn't until years later that I understood why we'd moved.

The tales of the machinations, the snubs, the cutting remarks, the moments of high and manufactured drama: these aren't really mine to tell, as she was only ever sweet and gentle to me. But the effects of her carefully concealed, vicious nature poisoned my upbringing something fierce. My grandmother, Iago.

Next weekend is my fifteen-year university reunion. I've registered and paid, and we cashed in a pile of frequent flier miles in order to go. I was already girding for an emotionally draining experience -- being back in the area where I went to university always makes me sob unpredictably and uncontrollably, for reasons I don't yet completely understand -- but I need to go. I need to see the campus that I still dream about, I need to see my dear friend AM (she is a couple of weeks more pregnant than I am, and she did so much to help me get through my time there), and I need to show the place to my baby, even if my baby is still in utero.

I am terribly conflicted, though, about not going to Mimi's funeral. The major reason I'd want to go is to support my mother, who was and is so damaged by her own mother. But I know that the politicking (now there's a charitable word) among the extended family is going to be nearly unbearable. The financial reasons not to go are not inconsiderable, either. Everyone I've talked to tells me to skip the funeral, go to Reunion, and get my mother up here in a month or two, when the initial shock has worn off and the real, far more solitary mourning has begun.

But the little, innocent, loving four-year-old Emily would never understand in a million years.

I don't know what to do.

Wow.

2006-06-03T11:19:00.000-04:00

Last week David Bowie showed up for the encore of a David Gilmour show at the Royal Albert Hall, and helped out with the vocals on "Comfortably Numb."

The thought of hearing Bowie's voice singing "Hello... is there anybody in there? Just nod if you can hear me..." makes me weak. I think if I'd been there I might have passed out.

Update: yes. Oh, yes, oh, yes.

P. S. I am very amused to note that mentioning my nipples on Fark resulted in a whole bunch of hits on this site yesterday and today.

Twenty-two weeks

2006-06-01T22:51:00.000-04:00

Today brought an e-mail from the instructor of the fitness class, reporting that one of the classmates gave birth last Saturday. At twenty-three weeks. The baby weighs about a pound and has a brain hemhorrage from which he may or may not recover.

Various people are organizing to drop off food at the parents' house. I'm hoping to make a quiche or lasagna or something tomorrow evening after I get home from work so that we can drop it off on Saturday morning. I don't even remember which woman this is and I still spent a bit of the afternoon alone in the teachers' room sobbing. (Evidently pregnant women are sensitive. 'Cause, you know, I wasn't nearly sensitive enough before.) Jefus Chrift.

Dear our baby: please stay in the oven a while longer. You're not ready to come out yet.

Today's breakfast

2006-05-30T11:14:00.000-04:00

Two eggs scrambled with a bit of milk, one thick slice of marble cheese chopped into small squares, and some sauteed mushrooms, topped with some homemade chipotle sauce and wrapped in a whole wheat tortilla.

Yum. I had a bit of a craving.

The chipotle sauce is from Deborah Madison's The Savory Way, which is about my favourite cookbook ever. It includes a can of chipotle peppers in adobo sauce, blended with boiling water, brown sugar, tomato paste, and balsamic vinegar. It's yummy. Our friend Steve eats it as soup.

Making lemonade from the TTC strike

2006-05-29T20:30:00.000-04:00

The Toronto Transit Commission was on strike for part of the day, and nearly 800,000 people (including me) had to make alternative arrangements to get to work. This on the first smog day of the year, and the first day it's been above 30˚C.

You can imagine that there were a lot of cranky people on the streets today. Fortunately, Mr. K was able to drive me and the beloved bike to my day job. Two of my co-workers couldn't make it in, but there were so few students there that the boss and I were able to handle the tiny little classes by ourselves.

One of my GRE students called in the morning to remind me that I'd scheduled a makeup class this afternoon for the one she missed last Thursday. (Bless her for calling. I always tell them to, because my pregnancy-addled brain is more than likely to forget, as it had this time.) So I hopped on the bike and rode to midtown, threading my way along signed bicycle routes through Forest Hill. It was a beautiful ride. There certainly are a lot of gorgeous, ludicrously expensive houses in this city. I arrived without incident and even managed to find an unoccupied post-and-ring stand to which to lock the bike. Taught the makeup class and then biked home along Rosedale Valley Road, averaging 30kph on that stretch. I love the Rosedale Valley Road: a surprisingly long stretch of beautiful greenery in the middle of the city, with a bike path well away from traffic. Mmm.

Unfortunately the southernmost part of the bike path along the Don River itself is closed for the next three years while they do minor work such as rerouting the river, cleaning up all the contaminated soil, and building an entire new neighbourhood. So I had to get most of the rest of the way home along Bayview Avenue, where people drive scarily fast and carry passengers who wave the finger out the window as they whip past bicyclists who are minding their own business. On the first day of Bike Week, and on a day when there's a smog alert and a transit strike. At a pregnant woman. Classy. If the car hadn't been going so fast I'd have blown a kiss.

So that was 15km today, a nice little jaunt that would have seemed gargantuan five years ago. Yay.

Strike's over now, but I have plans with Mr. K for a nice long ride up the Don Valley tomorrow.

I still like Toronto.

P. S. We did make it to some Doors Open places yesterday; pictures on my Flickr stream.

Still got it

2006-05-27T21:24:00.000-04:00

Went out biking today. Made it from the Distillery to past the Humber River (read: from one end of Toronto to the other). Total distance for the day: 35km (nearly 22 miles).

We'd wanted to go to some of the Doors Open buildings (hi Maria!), but a late start (as seems to happen every dratted year) plus an emergency trip to a maternity store to get me some shorts plus a flat tire meant that we arrived at the first place we'd wanted to visit at 4pm, just minutes after it had closed. Dammit.

It was six years ago this weekend that I wrecked my knee. The long white scar seems to have faded as much as it's going to. I kinda like it: it reminds me of learning to find joy in small things (like getting on a bus by myself with crutches for the first time), and of discovering that regular physical activity can actually make a very big difference for me. I remember the first time I tried to stand on my wasted leg, six weeks after the surgery that repaired it, and discovering that it wouldn't support me. Months of physio enabled it to work again without even a slight limp, and now when I'm at my best I can do sets of leg presses at 410 pounds.

Three years ago I did the 25km Ride for Heart and was thrilled to finish. Two years ago I did the 50km, and last year I finished the 75. I'll never set any speed records, and my cardiovascular endurance still isn't great, but I'm strong. Today's 35km made me think I can do the 50km ride again next weekend, even at five months pregnant.

I doubt I'll ride all the way up to the end of the pregnancy, but right now my centre of balance is still familiar to me and it's very enjoyable to be out on the bike. I love the bike.

Hoping we'll do some Doors Open stuff tomorrow.

Five years in a nutshell

2006-05-25T22:50:00.000-04:00

My fifteen-year university reunion is coming up soon, and we've all been asked to write up something for the record book. So I sent this:

I write from Toronto, the city where I've lived for the past fourteen years, in a country I've grown to love very much. I married [Mr. Krapsnart] in 1997, and became a permanent resident of Canada in 1998, and a citizen in 2003.

What kicked off the past five years for me was having to learn to walk again in 2001 after knee surgery, having torn the anterior cruciate ligament (ACL) in a stupid late-night accident the previous year. The months of physiotherapy after the surgery forced me to think about what I wanted to do with myself, and I finally decided to leave technical writing and the computer industry for good, and to become a teacher.

After I went back to school for the better part of 2002 and gained certification as a teacher of English as a second language, I spent two and a half years teaching English to immigrant and refugee women at a nonprofit agency in a program funded entirely by the Canadian government. Never have I loved a job so much. I taught women from 38 countries, and helped see them through culture shock, difficulties in settling in a new country, pregnancy, miscarriage, career woes, health issues, domestic violence, divorce, widowhood, and of course, the frustrations and joys of starting life in a new language. In return they gave me immeasurable amounts of love and support. They showed me their cultures and taught me about what is truly universal. There was so much warmth and respect and just plain fun at the school's occasional parties -- I knew I was in the right place when I was watching a Sri Lankan Hindu Tamil woman dance to salsa music at the party for Eid ul-Fitr, the holiday that ends the Muslim month of Ramadan.

Deciding to leave the agency was one of the hardest things I've ever done, especially when I was faced with the outpouring of emotion from the students when I made it clear I had to go. But it was the agency's management that in the end left me no choice. The agency has a staff of a little more than a dozen, and in three years more than twice that many people have left.

I still miss the place a lot, though, and hope to return to education in the social service sector someday, I hope in a place that values emotional connection as much as it does numbers on spreadsheets.

I am now working at a small company (five people) that teaches international students how to take standardized tests of English proficiency. I teach the Test of English as a Foreign Language (TOEFL) and the Test of English for International Communication (TOEIC). My coworkers are interesting and funny, and the boss is compassionate and humane. It's a good place with high standards. I'm also still working part-time teaching the SAT and GRE at [a test prep company], as I have been for more than five years now.

I never considered teaching when I was at [East Coast private college], but am now relieved to have found at least part of what I'm supposed to be doing. My [part-time] boss told me, "Emily, you ARE a teacher." Yes, I guess I am.

I have another fundamental shift in identity on the way: if all goes well, I'll finally be a mother by early October. I've been spending a lot of time educating myself about midwifery (we're hoping to deliver at home with midwives in attendance) and fitness during pregnancy. I'm very much enjoying learning about the capabilities of women's bodies, and especially about how midwifery honours them by encouraging us to trust our ability to handle childbirth without potentially dangerous medical intervention, at least when the pregnancy is low-risk (as most are). It also encourages parents to take responsibility for and make informed choices about their children well before they are born. In the province of Ontario, midwives are trained and certified, and home birth attended by them is fully funded. I feel very lucky to live here. Regardless of how the baby arrives, though, [Mr. K] and I are endlessly excited about becoming parents.

The interest in fitness has been a couple of years in the making. After a miscarriage in July of 2004, I decided to become physically stronger to prepare my body for future childbearing. Oddly enough, I fell in love with weightlifting, and ended up training with a wonderful powerlifter named Samantha who cheered me on to attempting a 225-pound deadlift last year. I got the weight off the ground, but not all the way up to mid-thigh; I'm sure I'd have lifted that and more by now if I hadn't gotten pregnant first. But now I have something to shoot for after the baby comes.

The other occupants of our household are still of the feline variety. A few of you will remember James and Percy, who came with me to Canada in 1992. We were heartbroken to lose both of them to cancer in 2004, Percy in January and James in October. (2004 was just a bad, bad year. I'll never trust the Year of the Monkey again. Monkeys mess with things.) These days we're living with two more beautiful brown tabbies, Martha and Charlotte. They have their own distinct personalities -- Martha is sweet as anything, and Charlotte is prickly yet loving -- and once again we find ourselves unreasonably fond of our animals.

I'm looking forward to seeing everyone at Reunion. Here's to another five years.

I think they're going to come by to revoke my "girl" card soon

2006-05-21T15:40:00.000-04:00

I bought a pair of shoes this week. I think I buy shoes about twice a year, if that often. For the past few years I've been living in black Saucony walking shoes because of a persistent case of plantar fasciitis. They're not attractive, and they mean I don't often wear skirts or dresses, but they mean I can walk around in comfort and do my job.

So: new shoes. They're Merrells, and they're comfy and somewhat more attractive than black sneakers.

For me a shoe purchase is blogworthy because I buy shoes about once or twice a year, and am just baffled by the people -- usually women -- who spend a significant part of their disposable incomes on footwear. I don't get a lot of the stuff that women are supposed to be into. I'd rather have a canoe from the Mountain Equipment Co-Op than, say, a diamond ring.

I do wear makeup sometimes, but I don't feel like I can't leave the house without any. I shave my pits right now because I'm trying to stay active and my sense of smell is so heightened by the pregnancy that I was grossing myself out by the end of the day. But I still feel, often, that I'm, well, a bit of a freak.

At the fitness class last Wednesday, I found myself yet again the resident alien. Many of the women (there are about 20) were comparing notes about what products are best for numbing the skin before waxing. It didn't seem to occur to anyone that it was even possible to just go ahead and let the hair grow. It was just accepted that it's a woman's lot to submit herself to pain to meet a standard of beauty.

But when it comes to actually giving birth to all these babies, I seem to be the only one even considering a home birth with midwives. Midwifery is traditional women's wisdom, handed down over hundreds of years. It expresses faith in women's ability to handle a normal, low-risk birth without medical intervention instead of treating it as a terribly risky event that requires hospitalization and often surgery. It shows a respect for women, our ability to handle pain, and our ability to make informed choices that the obstetrical model of birth often just doesn't. It requires women to take a great deal of responsibility for their children well before they are born. And it's a way for women to connect with each other on the deepest of levels.

And yet those of us who want a natural birth in a familiar place are often considered almost criminally irresponsible. We are consciously rejecting the deepseated belief that the most advanced technology must be the best option available. Many people who hold this belief find challenges to it to be misguided and even threatening. (My aunt, married to a formerly practicing obstetrician and herself certified as a childbirth educator 20 years ago, has already started warning my mother about what an ill-informed, dangerous decision Mr. Krapsnart and I are making.) We're also considered a little crazy for being willing to open ourselves to pain in order to bring a baby into the world.

The conversation among the educated, motivated pregnant women at the fitness class invariably turns to doctors and hospitals and epidurals and episiotomies and caesarians (with, of course, the occasional foray toward Brazilian waxes. Pain for beauty's sake is, apparently, perfectly acceptable, but pain in childbirth is to be scrupulously avoided, even when the verdict is that 24 hours of labour are far, far preferable to 24 hours of waxing). Midwives and home birth are rarely mentioned, and when they are, they're afterthoughts.

If I speak up, I get Looks, and the occasional "Wow, you're brave." If I'm silent, I seethe.

I know I'm painting in very broad strokes here, and I know that I don't know the instructor (who, again, is fabulously well informed) or the women in my class well enough to do so yet. But so far (after three classes) I haven't found anyone else who's working with midwives, so I think I'm not completely wrong to consider myself an exception to the norm, both in the class and in the society at large.

My body and my baby are no different from those of most of my classmates; why are these women -- and so many others -- so convinced that birth isn't something they can do without needles and knives? And why do I feel so alienated for having faith in us?

Random, loosely-linked neuron firings

2006-05-14T20:13:00.000-04:00

Lots has happened in the past few weeks that I could be blogging about, but by the time I sit down on the couch and pull up the laptop I can barely remember what sites I want to read, let alone what I want to write about. And the old episodes of Doctor Who are piling up on the PVR too quickly for me to burn them to DVD. It's hard out here for a geek.

Three of my best friends from high school have been in touch recently; one of them, J., even came to visit (albeit far too briefly). You never make friends again like the ones you have when you're 14, and it's really quite marvellous to fall back into a conversation as comfortable as ones had more than 20 years ago. R. commented on one of my Flickr pictures today; that's how I got back in touch with her. She's a diplomat in India these days. She's always been a richly talented writer, and her blog (Esquivalience, linked on the right) is some wonderful reading.

I dropped by the old job on Friday (not, of course, going inside) and saw several of my former students and co-workers. S., a tall, gorgeous French speaker from Cameroon, and I congratulated each other on our bellies. She's at seven months now, and has an older daughter who has the best case of Skeptical Small Child Face that I think I've ever seen. Everyone seems to be doing well; I still miss them all a lot.

In other news, the anatomical ultrasound went well. We got to watch the whole thing on a monitor on the wall in front of us. Evidently there really is a baby in there. We saw a head, a heart, a healthy spine, kidneys, arms, legs, hands, and as the technician put it, "two tiny feets." The femur was 2.4cm long (about 1"). The still pictures they give out afterwards don't come anywhere close to conveying the visceral thrill that comes from seeing a tiny little hand open and close inside your belly. This baby is very active and seems to enjoy the energy that comes after I exercise.

On the other side of the circle of life, though, we got word this week that Stephen, my first officemate at IBM when I came here in 1992, died a couple of months ago. Stephen was a true Renaissance man, with collections of books and LPs that could probably have put some universities to shame. He was kind and funny, goofy and generous to a fault. He loved opera, cooking, doggerel, bad jokes, and his partner, Edward, who predeceased him by at least a decade. I'd been meaning to get back in touch with him for years. Dammit. Peace be with you, Stephen. Your presence is much missed.

What a day

2006-05-03T21:03:00.000-04:00

This morning on the streetcar I ran into Amalia again.

"Guess what," I said as I tapped on my belly.

"Me too," she said, and beamed, and hugged me.

She's about a month behind me. I am thrilled for her.

~*~*~*~*~

Today I went to my first FitMom class. I knew my endurance sucked, but boy howdy, it sucks bad. The class is circuit training, with lots of lifting of girly-girl vinyl-covered dumbbells, and doing of lunges (which I loathe), and chatting about pregnancy and labour. My trainer would probably have a fit at the amount of overhead pressing, given that she says it's hard on the shoulder joint, but my shoulders didn't seem to complain about it today.

The instructor is impossibly perky and for a few minutes at the beginning I was having serious "what have I done by signing up for fifteen weeks of this?" doubts (especially when the girly weights came out). Perkiness and I don't get along so well. But said instructor is also immensely knowledgeable. I'd read in a couple of places that it's important not to get one's heart rate over 140bpm during pregnancy, but she stated (without even being asked) that that information is outdated. The real test of whether you're working too hard is trying to talk: if you end up gasping for air and unable to choke out words, ease up. Otherwise, you're fine.

I found this very reassuring, given that my heart rate monitor-slash-wristwatch spiked to 160bpm briefly when I was at the gym yesterday, and was reading about 150 today. It is okay to get my heart rate up, and I need to do it. My cardiovascular health is currently shot to hell and I need to improve it dramatically if I'm going to have a chance at the labour and delivery that I want.

She talked a lot about the amount of misinformation that is floating around out there, and about how some people are so committed to it that they're willing to verbally abuse perfect strangers who aren't behaving in a way they deem appropriate. She mentioned running a 10k when she was seven months pregnant, and said that as she'd trained for it, people driving by had rolled down their windows to yell at her. She also said that people she didn't know would fuss at her at the gym. "Are you sure it's okay to be doing that?" Her response? "Well, I'm a nationally recognized pre- and post-natal fitness expert. What do you think?" Um...

It was also nice to meet the other moms, most of whom are first-timers as well, and some of whom are already past thirty weeks. It seems to be common among this crowd to keep working out right up until bitter end. (Overheard conversation: "What happened to so-and-so?" "Oh, weren't you here when her water broke?")

We worked hard and I'm sure I'll be sore tomorrow. I'm glad I signed up.

Tomorrow is the big eighteen-week ultrasound. Please hold a good thought for us.

Warping young minds since 2006

2006-04-29T00:14:00.000-04:00

"I now only took 1000 drops of laudanum per day..."
Originally uploaded by Spamily.

I thought about posting this on the Books and Babies group on Flickr, and then imagined the sort of feedback that might come from those whom Mimi Smartypants calls "Cat-Sweatshirt People, and reconsidered.

But man, it's too hilarious not to share.

It is immensely draining to have a mobile one-year-old bouncing around an incompletely childproofed house. I keep asking Mr. Krapsnart: "What have we gotten ourselves into?"

On the good side, Pina brought a large stash of maternity clothes for me, and is leaving as a shower present the travel crib that she bought for Ewan to sleep in this weekend. Thanks, Pina and Ian!

The cats are terrified of the baby. At first they were very curious and eager to investigate him, but then he grabbed Charlotte's head. She wasn't so hot on that idea. Now, when he's awake, they spend a lot of time under the bed. Martha ventures out now and then only to panic when he notices her and enthusiastically waves his arms up and down. Poor kitties. They have such a big adjustment coming.

Pregnancy news: the nausea seems to be down to once a week, but now the nosebleeds have started. Yay! Nosebleeds!

One more picture from last weekend

2006-04-27T10:58:00.000-04:00

O RLY?
Originally uploaded by Spamily.

People seem to like this picture a lot. I know I do.

Pina and Ian and their small are coming this weekend. We've never had a one-year-old in the house before. I should get back to battening down the hatches.

Smiling Llarry

2006-04-23T17:21:00.000-04:00

Smiling Llarry
Originally uploaded by Spamily.

I love llamas.

We spent the weekend at a bed and breakfast up northeast of Orillia, an hour and a bit north of Toronto. It was marvellous. The hosts were friendly and kind, the house was beautifully appointed, the spring peepers were peeping, the old cat was a great big suck, the reindeer were full of personality, and the llama was highly photogenic. Sunshine would have been nice, and a lack of head cold would have been nicer, but all in all it was a most enjoyable couple of days.

Sixteen weeks

2006-04-20T22:05:00.000-04:00

Since the awesome day on Tuesday, I have been miserable with a head cold. No good day goes unpunished, I guess.

But the misery of the head cold disappeared into the aether late this afternoon while I was tutoring one of my SAT students, a really good kid who wants to get into Princeton. We were at the office, and suddenly I had to stop talking about logarithms because I had tears welling up.

"I just felt my baby move for the first time," I told him.

It was a quick little fluttering low in my belly. Pina (who had her baby last year) told me a few days ago what to expect, so I knew exactly what the feeling meant.

J. is about seventeen, less than half my age, but he still got it. He was of course a little shocked to see his teacher being so unexpectedly emotional, but he collected himself quickly and immediately congratulated me a few times, then, and again when we were finished for the day. I too collected myself as quickly as I could, and soon we were back to the logarithms, but my mind kept drifting back to my belly. "Hello!" I kept thinking. "Hello! You're really there! Hello! How are you doing? Are you getting everything you need? Hello! Are you healthy? Will I ever get tired of your kicking? Hello!"

I knew the quickening happened at about sixteen to eighteen weeks, and had been envisioning where I'd be when it did. But I hadn't imagined it would be at the sixteen-week mark on the nose.

There really is somebody in there. Wow, sez I.

A good day

2006-04-18T21:49:00.000-04:00

Today did not suck. It was Mr. Krapsnart's 40th, and in the morning I gave him two small presents: a rubber chicken and a cow in a can. (I was so excited to find the cow in a can at a toy store the other day. I'd been looking for one for years.)

I then took my bike to the shop where I bought it last year so that I could get it tuned up a bit and get the flat handlebars swapped out for ones with a bit more sweep, so that my wrists quit freaking out when I ride. (Yet another thing one is not told before pregnancy: carpal tunnel is very common in the second and third trimesters.) I also asked the guy (who built the bike, which I adore) to put on a new mirror, because the bracket for the old one was cracked.

Then I went to the Mountain Equipment Co-Op to see about getting a GPS unit as Mr. K's real birthday present. He's been wanting one for years.

The guy at the Co-Op could not have been more helpful. He spent at least 15 minutes talking to me, describing the pros and cons of the models I was interested in, and showing me how to use the one that I eventually bought. The computer said there were two in stock, but he couldn't find the other one, so he offered me the demo model complete with batteries. Sold, I said, and thanked him, and then went upstairs to get some shoe insoles. Suddenly there he was, saying that he'd found the new, unopened one. So we traded, and I thanked him again. He didn't have to do that.

Work went pretty well; the students in the TOEIC class seem to be warming up to me more, and I'm getting to know the test better. Then I had a nice conversation with the new volunteer, who has 60 hours of TESL training under her belt but no actual teaching experience. It was odd to feel like a grizzled veteran. I also got to listen to the boss talk to her and describe his teaching philosophy, which he's been carefully honing for more than a decade. He said something I hadn't heard him say before: he believes there are four stages of teaching. One: you know what the answer is. Two: you know why it's the answer. Three: you can explain why it's the answer. Four: you can do all of the above and add something extra. He tries, and encourages us to try, to reach the fourth stage as often as possible.

It's so nice to work for an experienced teacher who prompts me to think hard about my profession and how to improve in it. It might be easy to stagnate, working in test prep, but I have a feeling that this job will continue to challenge me.

After work, I went home to drop off my knapsack, and then made my way back to the bicycle shop. I'd expected to pay somewhere in the neighbourhood of $90, all told, for the tuneup and the new handlebars and the new mirror. The mechanic asked me how much I'd paid for the old mirror (which I hadn't even bought there), and I told him. He knocked that much off the price of the new mirror. (!) When I took the bike to the front and handed my card to the cashier, she rang it up as $9.20. I tried to protest, saying I was sure I owed them a lot more than that. But she looked at my bike and said, "We won't charge you for the handlebars because it's one of our bikes, and it's your first tuneup, so we won't charge you for that either." So $9.20 it was. Wow, sez I.

I am now a very big fan of the Urbane Cyclist shop.

And the bike rides so, so much better now. I love my bike.

Then it was off to dinner with Mr. K at the Archeo Trattoria (formerly the Distillery Canteen [formerly the 1832 Restaurant]) around the corner. The service was impeccable and the food was great. And Adrienne Clarkson and her husband John Ralston Saul were having dinner there too. We were quietly thrilled.

As we were walking home at around 9:30 we noticed that the doors of the Brick Street Bakery were wide open, so we went inside to see what we could get for dessert. There were a lot of beautiful lemon curd tarts just sitting there waiting to be eaten. We asked the guy behind the counter, "Are you open?"

"No," he said cheerfully. "What can I get you?"

Any evidence of the lemon curd tart that made it home has since vanished.

Happy birthday, love of my life.

Nearly fifteen weeks

2006-04-10T19:37:00.000-04:00

Saw the midwife today. I was impressed by how thorough a physical she gave me: checked my heart and lungs, thyroid, reflexes, blood pressure (105/64), pulse, and the baby's heart rate (148bpm). Mr. Krapsnart got to hear it for the first time. It's not a sound I get tired of. Just over three weeks until the big anatomical ultrasound.

Nigella's Asian-spiced kedgeree was dinner tonight. Yum, yum, yum. I'd never cooked with lime leaves before. We have a big bag of them now, so I'll have to find some other recipes that use them.

I've been reading a lot lately. Curtis Sittenfeld's Prep, a novel about a bright middle-class girl who goes off to a hoity-toity boarding school in Massachusetts, hit a lot of nerves. Her descriptions of the campus, the alienation that the main character felt there, the intense and sometimes spectacularly failed friendships, the racial and especially class tensions: it all reminded me far too much of my own college experience. Sittenfeld is a very good writer with a knack for capturing the angst of a smart teenager who's a fish out of water no matter where she goes. I liked Prep a lot, even if it was awfully wrenching at times.

Another book I just finished was Haruki Murakami's Kafka on the Shore. I've read all of Murakami's translated fiction and generally liked it a lot, but with this one (another tale of adolescent alienation, with a heavy dose of Japanese surrealism and general weirdness) I found myself rather baffled at the end. I know that the last scene with Hoshino was supposed to be the climax of the book, but I couldn't figure out what it represented. The weird, while satisfyingly meaningful and symbolic most of the time, too often seemed to me to be there for the sake of the weird. (I wonder whether a toke or two would help with this book. Can't test that theory right now, alas.)

Kate Taylor's Mme Proust and the Kosher Kitchen was marvellous. Historical fiction (in the form of Marcel Proust's mother's diaries) blended seamlessly with the stories of the diaries' translator and a French Holocaust escapee who grew up in Toronto. The book evokes very strong senses of place (especially this city, rewarding since I've been here for so long), and it is a bittersweet, poignant work about love and family and food and history and memory. Highly recommended.

I've just started Edward P. Jones's The Known World, more historical fiction set in nineteenth century Virginia. I can't read very much of it at a time, because I just get to shaking with anger about the whole idea of slavery. Reading about people working for years to put money away to buy their own children brings the true depravity of such a system home on a gut level. I keep thinking about my ancestor who fought for the Confederate Army, and I'm sure that many of my numerous North Carolina relatives must have kept slaves. So there's familial shame and good old lib'rull white guilt burbling up as well, for all the good they do. It would be easy to put this book down and just tuck all that rage and shame away again. But I'll keep reading, because I should know more about this stuff. Everyone should.

Finally, I picked up a copy of Ami McKay's new book The Birth House today -- the midwives were selling autographed copies. It's about a woman in rural nineteenth century Nova Scotia who is apprenticed to a midwife who dies just as a male obstetrician is moving into town and holding afternoon teas to explain why it's no longer necessary to endanger Our Children by letting unqualified women look after mothers during pregnancy and delivery. I suspect this one will have me foaming at the mouth as well. The more I read about the medicalization of birth for women with normal, low-risk pregnancies, the angrier I get about that, too.

Women are built to make babies and give birth to them. Most mothers don't need medical intervention. There are reams and reams of information passed down through generations of women about how our bodies work and how we can treat them well in order to bring about healthy outcomes (and babies).

I'm looking forward to learning more about midwifery so that I can learn more about social history as well. The Birth House should be a fascinating start.

In other news, Martha the cat is still impossibly cute.

We'll definitely be going back to this place

2006-04-07T18:55:00.000-04:00

We'll definitely be going back to this place
Originally uploaded by Spamily.

One of my colleagues and I went out for lunch at a nice Indian restaurant on Eglinton today. His comment, on seeing this sign: "I'd like three grams, please."

I think I am giving off vibes

2006-03-30T21:17:00.000-05:00

First: the TOEIC class (full of cute young Japanese women) seems to have warmed to me dramatically since finding out I'm pregnant. Today they were friendly and giggly, and a lot of fun.

Second: G. (one of the other instructors) and I left at the same time this afternoon and walked to the subway together. He wanted to stand in the sun for a while (it was so warm today that neither of us had worn a jacket) and finish his cigarette; I was happy to wait with him. Suddenly some guy (whom I couldn't see because the sun was right behind him) started going on at length about what an attractive woman I am. Evidently people just don't appreciate women, especially women who are a 9.5 out of 10, and who were picked on as kids (you were, weren't you?).

It was high weirdness (and the weirdness wasn't the only thing that was high, IYKWIM). But it was oddly nice, too.

Third: the King streetcar was crammed full (it was 5:30, after all), so I had to stand for the ten-minute ride. No big deal. But suddenly a seated woman looked up at me, noticed my loose clothes, and offered me a seat. Surprised, I thanked her and declined.

I'm showing a bit if you know what I looked like before, but I certainly don't look very pregnant yet. My aura must have changed or something. I don't know how much I go for all that psychic stuff, but today was just a bit freaky.

For dinner I suggested we go to Betty's. We've been semi-regulars there for more than six years, and hadn't been there in a few months. A year and a half ago I had a weepy night on Sinéad, one of their servers, very shortly after the miscarriage. She has three kids of her own, and she couldn't have been more kind or supportive. Tonight she was there, and came over to say hello to us even though we weren't at one of her tables. She sat down next to me in the booth and gave me a big hug. Her first words were, "You're drinking juice!" as she beamed at me. It felt so great to be able to say "Yes! Thirteen weeks!"

Mike waited on us and was full of congratulations. Kim came over to say hello, and she was too. Mr. Krapsnart and I giggled with each other and just had a nice evening out. I felt so comfortable and welcome. Hooray for having such an excellent local.

Welcome to the second trimester, I guess. Not sorry to see the back of the first one.

P. S. Many thanks to Bitch Ph.D. for the link to one of my posts.

Thirteen weeks

2006-03-28T18:06:00.000-05:00

It was a very mixed day. The gym this morning was good: Mr. K was with me, and I managed to increase either weight or reps on every exercise I did. I'm even doing more weight on the bicep curls and the seated calf raises than I was doing last October. So, yay!

This afternoon, though, I wasn't so on with my teaching, and the vibe in my TOEFL class was a fairly resounding "meh." Then my boss told me, ten minutes before a writing class I've never taught before, that he was coming in to observe. Oh goody. I always get so wound up and nervous when I'm being observed, and today was no exception.

I do appreciate feedback from someone in my own profession -- it was one of the things sorely lacking in my previous job. But my boss is such a perfectionist that even though all the comments he offers are valid and constructive, they're so numerous that I always feel grumpy and slightly incompetent afterwards.

Then a student from my night class needed a makeup this evening because she missed last week. She was tired, and she's been sick, so her brain was working slowly (boy can I empathize) and I ended up spending about two and a half hours with her instead of the one and a half that a makeup usually takes. I didn't get home until just before 9pm. And I'm still not finished with my prep work for my eight-and-a-half-hour day tomorrow.

But then on the commute home, I saw a Mennonite choir assembled in the Bloor-Yonge subway station. They were singing in beautiful four-part harmony, and suddenly I felt peace and sweetness and a twinge of longing for their deliberately simple lives.

"Wham!" say the cultures as they collide

2006-03-25T11:06:00.000-05:00

Yesterday morning, I was starting to think I'd have been better off to stay in bed. I woke up with a head cold (on top of the nausea, which persists), and did not feel like dragging myself into work. But I'd seen the boss dragging his bad self in all week, and he was worlds sicker than I was. Our little school is so small that if a teacher is out, some students don't have class that day. So in I went.

I was to teach a listening and speaking lesson for three hours yesterday, and all the material I needed was on some CDs that I couldn't find. Turned out they'd gone home with the administrator so that she could make backup copies of them. Oh dear. (She was thoroughly apologetic, as was the boss. Some days I am very glad I am not a new teacher.)

So I had to do next week's lesson (which I hadn't prepared) on reading and writing. The reading part went well, but the writing after the break went completely to pieces. The prompt was "'I think that there is too much violence in movies.' State whether you agree or disagree, and give specific reasons and examples for your opinion." Standard TOEFL-type boilerplate 30-minute essay with the introduction and the body paragraphs and the conclusion and the hey hey hey. Two of the (five) class members had spent four hours with me earlier in the week discussing what makes for good reasons and examples in such an essay, so I figured that for them, at least, the exercise would just be a review and a chance for some extra practice.

Silly me. After they'd written for 30 minutes, I started a table on the board of the "for" and "against" reasons that they'd come up with. Suddenly two things became clear. First, all of them had misunderstood the assignment. Several had simply described the plots of violent movies that they'd seen, without offering any supporting reasons or evidence as to why that violence was "too much". Others had disagreed with the prompt without offering any compelling reasons why. They were a bit baffled when I told them that the TOEFL graders would not give their essays good marks. Sigh.

Second, and what set me back on my heels a lot more, was discovering that what constitutes "violence" in some cultures is very, very different from "violence" in North America. Some of them seemed genuinely surprised that the definition assumed by the essay prompt was limited to the realm of the physical. A Turkish guy mentioned "bad language" as an example of violence, and pointed out that in his country, prison sentences for murder are reduced if the person you've killed insulted you. He was surprised that the law is so different in Canada. One student, an utterly charming young woman from South Korea, had given "same-sex marriage" as an example of "too much violence in movies".

Um.

The topic of homosexuality and same-sex marriage has come up in my classrooms before. The first time that it did, the ensuing discussion left me a blubbering mess, what with students I respected deeply saying things like "finding out my daughter was gay would be like finding out she was a cocaine addict" and "I'd rather my son were dead than gay" (this one from a wonderful older woman whose first son had died in the Iran-Iraq war, so she knew what a child's death really meant). The next couple of times, I was better prepared, and I like to think I handled it better. (The third time I even told them that although I'm married to a man, I'm attracted to women. They were wonderful about it.)

The class I'm teaching now is much more focussed on preparing people for tests, so I couldn't let the discussion stray very far. But I did say that in North America, violence involves efforts to hurt other people, usually physically, and I couldn't see how two people standing up in front of a wedding officiant to say "we love each other and want to keep each other" could hurt anyone. I mentioned the three weddings we attended in 2004: one straight, one lesbian, and one gay. I said that my sister is making noise about maybe marrying her girlfriend. And I did acknowledge that hearing about these kinds of relationships discussed openly can be a very big shock for people who come from other cultures that anathematize them, but that in Canada, equal marriage is the law of the land.

I'm polite about it (hell, I'm Canadian), but I don't brook homophobia in my classroom.

Eventually the Korean woman acknowledged that she shouldn't use same-sex marriage as a negative example in future essays. It's a start, I guess. Damn shame it was her last day in the class; I'd like to work with her more on writing good, solid, well-reasoned essays. I hope I at least planted some seeds.

Twelve weeks

2006-03-21T10:23:00.001-05:00

The nausea seems to be easing, at least a bit. Yesterday I went into the washroom at work twice without retching from the stink of the McDonald's that's downstairs. (I have been polishing my hatred of McDonald's to a fine sheen over the past six weeks. Every day I loathe the place just a little bit more.)

We took Martha and Charlotte to the vet this morning for their annual oil change and tire rotation. The (extremely nice) vet, who sent flowers when James died, was quite taken with our accounts of Martha's obsession with the rainbow snake. Both kitties are very healthy and well-adjusted. Hooray.

The office cat is an enormous, infinitely mellow tabby named Pushkin. He let me hold him on my lap for a little while. When I hefted him up, I got unexpectedly teary-eyed because his shape and weight and brown tabby goodness reminded me so much of the greatness that was James. I've been missing him a lot lately. He was so very excellent.

I loves me my cats. My parents tell me that my first word was "kitty."

I am currently trying to achieve escape velocity from the apartment so that I can get to the gym, and then have time for a shower and lunch after my workout before I have to be at work at 1:30. I guess I should put the computer down and back away.

By the way, all, comments are welcome. I hope to get a blogroll going soon, so I can feel a bit more like I'm actually participating in something, and less like I'm just sending stuff off into the nothingness.

Off to lift heavy things.

A hope, not a promise

2006-03-18T10:55:00.000-05:00

Mr K just left to go see his parents and get his dad to sign an application for an official death certificate for his (Mr K's) grandmother. Mr K had already dropped off said application in person a couple of weeks ago, but the government of Ontario lost it somehow. Yee ha.

The certificate is necessary because Mr K is applying for Irish citizenship, to which he is entitled because his grandmother came from Ireland. If he gets the Irish passport before our little sprog comes, the sprog gets Irish citizenship as well. So time is of the essence. You wouldn't believe how much paperwork is involved in this process: the Irish embassy wants official copies of just about every document you can think of.

So I'm alone for the weekend.

I've made tentative plans with K. to do some shopping this afternoon, after I get to the gym. I talked to her more than an hour ago and said I'd see her in two hours, after I'd finished working out. Here I still am in the house. Sigh. I'm going for dinner tonight with K., her husband M., other K., her husband J., and I don't know who else. So at least I've made arrangements not to sit around sulking by myself for two days.

I've been reading a lot about abortion lately, and I've just been seething about the arrogance and misogyny that is gaining control in the country of my birth. I'm so horrified by what's happened in South Dakota: of course the abortion ban is a challenge to the Supreme Court, but how many women (and children!) are going to suffer while this piece of trash legislation wends its way through the judicial system?

Bitch PhD writes so well on this topic; every time I read something she has to say about it, I find myself nodding in agreement. But the piece of writing I found yesterday is particularly resonant for me right now. I've been feeling oddly disconnected from my emotions about this being growing inside me. Gretchen Voss's story of having to make the agonizing decision to end her pregnancy at 18 weeks after discovering her baby had hideous genetic defects struck such a chord. Near the end of the article, as she describes her second pregnancy, she writes this:

Way too nervous to sleep on that frigid morning this past November, I snuggled my bloated belly up to my husband and curled into a little question mark. Sixteen weeks pregnant, today we would finally have our full-fetal ultrasound, finding out whether our baby was developing normally. Given what happened the last time, I had every reason to be nervous.
The last four months had been a sort of emotional no man's land where the baby was concerned. While we were elated to be pregnant again, we were also terrified. It was hard to become fully attached to this pregnancy, knowing that it could be taken away from us. Instead of shopping for layettes, we were consulting genetic counselors. We now knew all too well that pregnancy was a hope, not a promise.

"Emotional no-man's land." "Hard to become fully attached." Yes. Yes, yes, yes. Exactly. I wept as I read this. I weep now as I type this.

My gut knows just how devastating it is to lose a pregnancy, and even at the time of my little miscarriage at seven weeks I knew that it would be so much worse if I'd had to make the decision to end it myself. When I see all these efforts to take away the right to make that decision, to force women to bear children they don't want or can't support, children who might be horribly damaged or even already dead, I am enraged.

I once saw someone argue that the biggest advance in medicine for women was pain relief in childbirth. No. No, no, no. The biggest advance is the right to control when or even whether we bear children at all. Pregnancy is exhausting, disfiguring, sometimes disabling, even life-threatening. It is dangerous. No one who does not want to endure it should have to.

When a pregnancy is not a hope but a sentence, something has gone terribly wrong.

Eleven weeks

2006-03-14T10:59:00.000-05:00

We went for our second visit to the midwives this morning. Just being in the clinic still made me a bit weepy, but not in a bad way. I'm far enough along now that they're actually starting to do medical things, such as taking blood, testing my urine, checking my blood pressure (100/66), and feeling my abdomen (the uterus is just starting to peek up over the pubic bone).

The midwives are nice people.

Yesterday the geneticist called and left a message. My blood is normal except for one thing: I did test positive for the prothrombin gene mutation. Dammit. (Fortunately, Mr K is negative.) However, I found this on the March of Dimes site, confirming what the hematologist told us:

Generally, treatment is not recommended for most pregnant women with one of the less severe thrombophilias (such as factor V Leiden or prothrombin mutation) and no history of blood clots or pregnancy complications. The risk of blood clots or pregnancy complications due to thrombophilia appears to be less than 1 percent in these women. However, some doctors may recommend about six weeks of treatment after birth (when risk of blood clots may be highest) if the woman has a strong family history of blood clots or if she has a cesarean delivery.

Other than that first miscarriage, which seems to have been of the garden variety, I have neither a history of blood clots nor of pregnancy complications. So basically, the message seems to be: don't worry about it until after the baby's here.

Looks like I'm going to have to find other stuff to fret about. Knowing me, I'm sure that won't be a problem.

Word seems to be getting out to my old students that I'm pregnant. In a week or two when I'm feeling better, I think I'll collect all the e-mail addresses that I have for them, and send something out. I miss them a lot. The new job is good, but there's nowhere near as much of an emotional connection with the students as there was at my old one (the director's open contempt for such connections notwithstanding). The focus now is on getting them good marks on their tests, not on giving them the language they need to get on with their lives in Canada. Also, the new students are mostly a whole lot younger than I am; so far only one is a mother (her baby is two months old), and she's leaving the school next week.

For the past several months I've more or less pulled my head into my shell and been out of touch with friends. Time to change that, I think.

Life on Mars?

2006-03-10T17:28:00.000-05:00

From the news coverage you would think it's a godawful small affair, or not even an affair at all. We have fifteen news channels and not a single one is showing anything about the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, the most technologically advanced spacecraft ever sent to our neighbouring planet. It's designed to study the history of water on Mars.

I guess I watched too much Star Trek when I was young and impressionable, but this news gives me a thrill. It represents a tremendous achievement for the engineers and scientists involved, and an important moment for humankind. But if I didn't have Web access I'd have no idea that NASA was just able to reestablish contact with the orbiter after it had gone out of range. I can only imagine the party that's going on in California right now: sure as hell can't see any of it. Stupid "news" networks.

Exhausted.

2006-03-05T16:59:00.000-05:00

I bought a three-month membership at the new gym today, having let the membership at the old gym expire at the end of February. The old gym was well equipped, and it hooked me up with my fabulous trainer, but the hard sell I got when I joined was enough to sour me on it. Plus, it seemed to focus mostly on machines, and it had only one squat rack. Often I was the only woman lifting the free weights; all the other chyx were doing cardio. Harrumph. And being on the gym floor while the hip-hop dance class was going on, with its same little hip-hop riff being played over and over and over and over and OVER again at earsplitting volume, was just a little slice of hell. Plus, since I quit the old job I had no regular reason to be in that neighbourhood anymore anyway.

So: the new gym. Smaller, less crowded, worlds more mellow. No upselling, no high-pressure "Let Us Tell You about Our Personal Training Packages." A carefully chosen set of equipment, decent music, published rates, and towel service included. It feels like a community gym rather than a corporate one. So, yay. New bullshit-free place to work out. And I actually got there today, and Mr. Krapsnart came with me. I like working out with him.

I've had to scale back so much on my workouts since I got pregnant. The biggest change is that I've been doing them only about once a week for the past month or two, as I've eased into the new job and tried to find a rhythm with my new schedule. Another big change is that I've had to decrease the weight I'd been lifting. A few months ago I was able to do three sets of eight squats at 95 pounds each; now I'm just about wiped out by three sets of eight at 45 pounds. And I've stopped deadlifting; late last year I managed to get 225 pounds off the ground (if not all the way up to the top of a deadlift). Wonder how long it'll be before I see that again.

Last Monday I put in my first full day of work, teaching for five and a half hours. I'm still not used to how much English these students know; they're at a much higher level than the ones I used to teach, and the adjustment is challenging for me. Plus, good teaching is draining even when one isn't nine weeks into her first trimester. When I got home, nearly dragging myself in on my lips, I checked my e-mail to find a note reminding me that I'm to teach a night course at my other job for the next eight Wednesdays, from 6:30 until 9:30.

If I'd been sitting at a desk I'd probably have banged my head on it. APRIL first, I'd kept telling myself. The other class doesn't start until APRIL first. But noooo, it started on March first. And one of the students works all the other nights of the week, so we can't move it. Monday and Wednesday are my five-and-a-half hour days; now Wednesdays are going to involve eight and a half hours of teaching. I asked Mr. K. to take me out back and shoot me, but he reminded me that we live in a condo and that there is no "out back". Drat his oily hide.

Good thing I don't have to be at work until 1:30pm on Thursdays.

Almost nine weeks

2006-02-28T19:25:00.000-05:00

Why I haven't been taking pictures lately
Originally uploaded by Spamily.

I heard and saw the heartbeat today, and burst into tears right there on the ultrasound table.

There really is a little person growing inside me.

Procrastination

2006-02-26T21:15:00.000-05:00

Thursday was a bad, bad nausea day. The past couple of days I've felt kinda queasy, but not like on Thursday. I wonder how much of it is the McDonald's stink in the washroom at work. It just gets up my snout and stays there. Ugh.

I taught a bit on Wednesday and Thursday. Wednesday's lesson felt like a bit of a train wreck. It was on conditionals (which I'd never taught before) and I spent far too long on the grammar and not enough time on how what I was teaching connected with what the students need to do, namely, get good marks on their exams. Thursday's lesson was better, I'm glad to say.

Tomorrow I'm teaching for five and a half hours, all material I've never taught before. It's taken me most of the day to get the preparation done for the first three hours of it, because my powers of concentration are pretty much shot to hell. Now I'm writing a blog entry. Someone please kick my ass.

The Olympics are over and Canada got 24 medals, coming in third in the medal totals for its best result ever. Yay Canada. It's been interesting watching the Americans implode: Picabo Street has some interesting commentary up on the NBC site about the poor conduct of so many members of the US ski team. I mean, really, wearing a tiara to your medal ceremony, or going out drinking every night before your events: do you have any idea what the Olympics even mean? Have you given any thought at all to how you're representing your country to the rest of the world?

Watching Sam Sullivan waving the flag at the closing ceremonies was pretty damned cool. The CBC noted that he'd been practicing in parking lots in Vancouver before going to Torino, and that he'd gotten some police attention at least once. Heh. Nothing to see here; move along. No, really, I'm the mayor.

Tuesday is the appointment with the hematologist (the blood test results may or may not be in), and possibly an ultrasound. Please let there be a fetus there, and please let it be moving.

Back to the books. Don't know how I'll get through tomorrow.

Amalia

2006-02-21T17:34:00.000-05:00

Amalia was one of my students at my previous job, when I taught English to women from other countries. She was my first Romanian, a quick learner who wore her heart on her sleeve like few people I've known. She and her husband worked at a gas station, often on the night shift before she came to class. She had plenty of stories about the customers, some of whom were very sweet to her, and others who were right assholes. (Just like people.) She got so worked up once about someone who'd been awful to her the night before that she started to cry, right there in the classroom. She let her emotions come right to the surface, and she dealt with them, and very soon let the negative ones go. Soon after she cried, she was laughing about what a jerk the guy had been.

Last time I saw Amalia was a year and a half ago, some time after she'd finished English school. She'd dropped by to say hello and to share her happiness in just having found a job at one of the big banks. Her pleasure was contagious. She hugged me at least twice, and then asked shyly, "Baby?"

It was at the end of the week after I'd told my class I was pregnant. I nodded. She touched my cheek with one hand and my belly with the other, with such tenderness I thought I might cry, and she beamed and then hugged me again.

I've thought about Amalia a lot since I lost that baby a couple of weeks later, and taken some consolation in the idea that in her world, I have a one-year-old by now. I know it's silly, but when I'm low I can't shake the feeling that I let people so many people down. It was oddly comforting to know that there was someone out there who still believed.

I'm writing about her now because we ran into her on the streetcar this morning. Hugs galore. She looks great. She still has the job with the bank, and her husband is working in his field (programming) as well. She apologized for not visiting the school recently, and was surprised to learn I don't work there anymore. I told her I was happy at my new job. We asked about each other's husbands, and she finally asked gently about babies. I had to say no, no babies yet. She said the same for herself, but that they're trying. I couldn't bring myself to tell her I was pregnant again.

I told her it was great to see her, and I meant it.

Yesterday we went to the first appointment with the midwife, who works in a private practice with six other midwives in a creaky old Victorian house in which you have to walk through the kitchen to get to the reception desk. It's a warm, welcoming place with dozens of photographs of infants on the walls. It was the first time I'd been there since before the miscarriage. As soon as I sat down in the living room (waiting room), I was blinking back tears.

There was another couple who looked to be from Central Asia. She was wearing a headscarf, and he was in one of those classic Russian fur hats complete with earflaps. Their small son's play with the clinic's toys began with dumping all of them out on the floor, because that's what you have to do when there's a bin of toys to be played with.

The person who talked to us the most was not the midwife herself, but her student, who will finish her two and a half years of clinical training at the end of next month. She (the student) told us that if I do have one of these clotting disorders, they are pretty much required to turn my care over to an obstetrician. Joy.

We go back there in three weeks.

Today we went to the pregnancy unit at Mount Sinai Hospital. It's all reception desks and fluorescent lights and vinyl chairs and magazines featuring people who wear $1100 gloves and have different bedrooms for different seasons. No lending library, no comfy couches, no peeling paint, no bins of toys. I've never seen so many pregnant women in one place in my life. We saw a genetics fellow and his supervisor the geneticist. The fellow was quite baffled by my mother's blood results (and relieved to hear that her hematologist was too). The geneticist was glad to hear that I already have a referral to a hematologist in the Special Pregnancy Program next week, and she decided to take blood from both of us to get the testing started. She said that if I have a clotting disorder, small clots could hit the placenta in the third trimester and cause a stillbirth. She also said that most people don't get tested for these blood abnormalities until after a pregnancy ends, and that there are treatments available (such as injections of blood thinners) that would prevent such clots. So, yay.

Best case scenario is that I'll test negative for everything, stay with my midwife, have an uneventful pregnancy, and deliver at home. Next best is that I test positive for one or more of the disorders, have an obstetrician who specializes in placental abnormalities keep a close eye on my pregnancy, keep the midwife, and deliver in the hospital. There are dozens of other possibilities after that, but the worst is that Dave and I both test positive for the same disorder, and the baby doesn't live for very long after delivery. That one's highly unlikely, and not worth thinking about right now.

One advantage of getting the medical side involved, though, is that they're willing to schedule an early ultrasound. So we might be able to find out whether the heart is beating as early as next week. Once I hear a heartbeat, I might actually start to let myself think there might be a baby at the end of this.

Tomorrow I have to teach about conditionals (which I've never taught) and participial adjectives ("I am interested" vs. "I am interesting"). Eep.

Sometimes I wish I lived in the UK

2006-02-20T19:10:00.000-05:00

British Telecom recently started a new service whereby one can send text messages to landlines, and the recipient will hear them read in Tom Baker's voice. So of course someone started compiling examples for a website.

My favourite is the version of "Video Killed the Radio Star". Brilliant.

Because the world needs more ukuleles

2006-02-19T10:36:00.000-05:00

Via Ghost of a Flea: the Ukulele Orchestra of Great Britain performs "Smells Like Teen Spirit".

Today's update: still pregnant. "Morning" sickness is misnamed. I'm usually fine in the mornings, and quite ill by late afternoon or early evening. Fatty food doesn't sit well. The washroom at work stinks of the grease from the McDonald's downstairs; by the end of the day it's nearly unbearable. If that's the only thing I have to complain about in re the new job, though, I guess I should be grateful.

I did go ahead and tell my boss. He was awesome. Two adjectives that describe him beautifully are "professional" and "humane". His first question was "What do you need from us?" This after he'd spent at least four months looking for someone to fill the job I've just taken. Wow.

Tomorrow I go see the midwife; on Tuesday I see a genetics fellow at Mt. Sinai Hospital. The genetics guy phoned me on Thursday to ask for faxes of all my mother's test results. He said he'd never, ever seen a patient test positive for more than one of the blood abnormalities on the list I gave to my doctor. (My mother has tested positive for seven.) High weirdness. My mum had two healthy pregnancies and no trouble with blood clots until she was past sixty. Who knows what the hematologist will find by testing me the week after next?

In other news, Martha is still awesome. Two nights this week, I've woken up and found her snake on my pillow. This morning when she brought it downstairs, she dropped it right at my feet. Is it possible to have a crush on one's cat?

Score!

2006-02-14T19:45:00.000-05:00

I think I just got the last copy in Toronto of the new Doctor Who series. Thank you people in the Outpost Gallifrey forums!

Started the new job today. I think it's going to be good. I observed one of the other teachers for the morning. Tomorrow I'll observe my boss teaching all day, and probably do some lesson planning as well. It's nice to have a chance to watch other teachers at work. I didn't get a chance to do enough of that while I was training, and my last boss had no qualifications or experience whatsoever as an educator, so her grasp on what constituted professional development for us was tenuous at best. ("I know -- I'll force the three teachers to swap classes without asking them or offering any rational explanations. That'll develop 'em!" Never mind that we never got annual performance evaluations, to which we were contractually entitled. I suppose that that was a blessing, though, as getting one was invariably code for "You're about to be fired." Ahem.)

The new boss pays us for staff meetings (the old one didn't) and apologized that he can't pay us for the lunch hour yet. (!) He has very carefully designed the schedule so that I'll be able to ease into the job and still get Tuesday and Thursday mornings off. All this makes me feel guilty that I have to tell him I will most likely be leaving in late September, at least for a while. I'm doing a lot of debating about when to break the news that I'm pregnant. I hate keeping secrets, and I feel like he deserves to know why I'm going to be flaky and exhausted for the next while. But it would kind of suck to conduct the sort of search he just did and have the new person say "Whoops, sorry! Knocked up! Seeya!"

At least I'll be around during the summer, which is high season for private ESL schools in Toronto. And ESL teaching lends itself well to part-time work, which is good for new mothers.

Decisions, decisions.

I think I'll watch some Who.

Bootzilla

2006-02-09T20:14:00.000-05:00

It's Winterlicious time in Toronto, so we decided to go out for a really nice dinner at a posh restaurant of the sort where we'd eat regularly if we were filthy stinking rich. I pored over menus for a while, and we finally settled on EPIC, at the Royal York hotel. The food was fabulous. Mr. K and I agreed that our waiter looked like Dan Castellaneta.

What I had for dinner:

Nova Scotia Lobster Bisque with Enoki Mushroom
Blood Orange Brushed Atlantic Salmon with Ginger and Lemongrass Scented Belgium Endive, Cardamon Infused Roasted Carrot, Lemon Thyme Essence
Praline Crème Brulée with a Cumin Scented Biscotti

How long it stayed down after we got home: about three minutes.

Me, leaning over the toilet: Yay! Still pregnant!

I saw my doctor today. She's referring me to a hematologist and to the genetics clinic at Mount Sinai Hospital. Don't know when they'll see me, but at least the wheels are moving.

Everything louder than everything else

2006-02-08T19:23:00.000-05:00

One. Trust me to write a rant about how I'm going to keep working out while I'm pregnant, and then fail to summon up the motivation to get out of the house for days at a time. (Why, no. Being knocked up hasn't helped with the clinical depression, thanks for asking.) The only way I could get to my workout today was to ask Mr. Krapsnart to drive me there on his way to work. It's out of his way (the new gym won't be, much, but I won't start going there until after I've started working again, and it'll be easier to get there on my own because I'll already have achieved escape velocity from this black hole of a condo). I'm tired of inconveniencing him just because I'm such a slug. Yet more proof that I suck. Oh yes, the depression is still here in spades.

Anyway. The point is that yay! I got to the gym today! and who should be working out there but the Canadian Tire Guy. Oddly enough, he wasn't trying to sell an all-in-one Workoutenator to everyone who walked by.

Even so, it was weird.

Two. I got a phone call from my mother today. She's had some pretty hideous health problems over the past couple of years, including intestinal blockages, diverticulitis, major abdominal surgery to remove more than two feet of her colon, and serious problems with blood clotting. We're lucky she's still with us.

She just saw one of her many MDs -- I think it was the hematologist this time -- and he told her that it's critical that I be tested for all of the seven different blood disorders that she's recently been diagnosed with. Dad sent me a Word document (thanks, Dad; I still read all my e-mail in Pine on a Unix shell, so attachments are a pain in the ass, but how could he know that?) with the list of them. I've been plugging stuff like "antiphospholipid syndrome" and "prothrombin gene mutation" into Google and getting pages that contain the words "second trimester" and "fetal loss."

Of course Depression Voice starts up with the "you are destined never to have a baby" shit again. (And that makes my brain go "Look Betty, don't start up with your white zone shit again! There is just no stopping in a white zone!") It doesn't matter that K., who was here this afternoon to watch some Doctor Who, and who has depression so crippling that she hasn't worked in four years, is able to point out that my mother had two kids even with all that wrong. My onboard saboteur bursts its pimples at me and sends me careening down the "everything is going to hell" fork of the road instead.

You're going to lose your baby again. Or if you don't, you're going to have to disappoint your new boss and tell him that you're pregnant and will have to spend a lot of time in doctors' offices over the next eight months. And you're going to have a highly medicalized, depersonalized birth with all the invasive equipment and machines that go PING! and everything you didn't want when you told the midwife that you wanted to give birth at home. You'll have to give up the midwife.

Sometimes I really hate my brain.

I guess I should call my doctor tomorrow.

Party animals

2006-02-07T13:12:00.000-05:00

A while ago I got a call from the brother of a very good friend from college. He was having his second 21st birthday party (having not been able to celebrate the first 21st birthday properly, as he was in the Army), and could we come?

We said sure. Never mind that the party was at least 9 hours away by car. We went anyway, I suspect largely because we want to do roadtrips while we still can.

It was a fun party, with lots of comestibles and games of Cosmic Wimpout (which I played) and Mao (which I did not). Not being able to partake of some of the refreshments, I wasn't as outgoing as I often am at parties; I even fell asleep on the couch in the middle of everything for a while. By the end, my pregnancy was not very secret. Lots of people wished us well.

My college friend, C., and her husband I. have a ten-month-old who is too cute for words. They went through several different kinds of hell for him to be here. The first time C. got pregnant, the fetus died, but nothing much happened after that. She's a doctor, and had to go to a colleague to see about a D&C. He kept putting her off, telling her to wait for it to pass naturally. It didn't. She carried a dead fetus for a month until she finally went to someone else.

It became clear that she had fibroid tumours in her uterus, so she had to have surgery to remove them. The surgery rendered her unable to conceive by traditional means, so she and I. had to go through all the awfulness of infertility treatments: hormone injections, egg extraction, and finally the IVF procedure (which has only about a 20% chance of working). Miracle of miracles, it did, and little Ewan the Butterball joined us last March. I. jokes that when Ewan starts to ask the inevitable "Where did I come from?" questions, they'll tell him, "Well, first Mommy and Daddy went to see the reproductive endocrinologist..."

I told her how scared I was that I'd miscarry again. She said she understood. I'm sure she understands better than most people do. In the grand scheme of things, one little missed abortion is not that big a deal; it just shows that the body knows what to do when things go wrong in the development of the fetus. But it happened just when I was starting to let my guard down and think maybe, maybe a real baby is coming to us, just when we were starting to talk about concrete plans for a nursery and work schedules that would enable us to look after a child, just when my body was changing enough that I was starting to buy new clothes. I have an expensive pair of black wool maternity pants that I've never worn. They hang there in the closet reminding me of what could have been. (What kind of cruel maternity shop doesn't take returns?)

I'm terrified to let my guard down again and let myself enjoy the knowledge that there is a baby growing in me. Maybe I'll feel better when we hear the heartbeat in mid-March.

On the way home from the party, I drove for the first three hours. I took us as close to the house where I grew up as I've been for nearly fourteen years. I drove along the stretch of two-lane highway that I've been up and down at least 3,000 times. The area had changed far less than I'd expected, except for my high school, which is now more than twice as big as it was when I graduated half a lifetime ago. I pulled into the parking lot and started to sob.

Damned if I can tell you why.

Martha and her awesomeness

2006-02-01T17:06:00.000-05:00

Martha and her snake

This is Martha. She and her prickly yet loving sister Charlotte turned two in October. They are the second generation of cats in our household, coming after James and Percy, who were known far and wide for their awesomeness. (We lost both of them to cancer in 2004. 2004 was just a bad, bad year.)

Martha is pictured here with her rainbow snake. She has a very complicated relationship with it. I would dearly love to know what goes on in her little walnut-sized brain concerning the snake. Every night, shortly after we've gone to bed, she processes it upstairs in her mouth, squeaking in major sixths all the way. She then drops it off next to the bed.

Every morning, when we're downstairs, she processes it downstairs and into the living room, again with squeaks. She then spends a good part of the day guarding it, as you see here.

I was just upstairs trying to nap to take my mind off how queasy I felt (I guess I needn't have worried yesterday), and pretty soon Martha squeaked in, bearing the snake. Martha then jumped onto the bed and lay down in the meatloaf position clear on the other side from me: close enough to let me know she was there, but too far away for me to scratch her.

I am so very, very fond of Martha.

Upgeknocked, and a book review

2006-01-31T16:26:00.000-05:00

Pregnant again. Had a short little pregnancy in mid-2004 that didn't end well. Conceived on January 12, so am now at day 20. The Pregnancy Journal: A Day-to-Day Guide to a Healthy and Happy Pregnancy says that a lot is happening today "in the development of [the] baby's muscles, bones, spinal cord, and heart." I am of course fretting because I don't feel sick. The phrase "The sicker the mother, the better the outcome" keeps rattling around in my brain. I did feel pretty awful yesterday, even puking once or twice, but today: almost nothing. It was just after this point last time that I started feeling really good, and two weeks later I was fishing something that looked and felt suspiciously like a sea sponge out of the john, and asking S&P to take me to the emergency room.

Last time I bought three books: Sheila Kitzinger's The Complete Book of Pregnancy and Childbirth (recommended by my then-midwife and her intern), Ann Douglas's The Mother of All Pregnancy Books (I hate the title, but it's one of the few Canadian resources out there, and it's actually quite good), and the Sears' The Pregnancy Book. I also bought What to Expect When You're Expecting, but promptly took it back when I realized how paranoid and scoldy it is. How can that book have become so popular? Do pregnant women really have such a low opinion of themselves and their instincts that they need to have virtual fingers waggled in their faces?

This time I've bought two more. AM (one of my best friends from college) recommended the Journal mentioned above, and on a whim I bought The Girlfriends' Guide to Pregnancy. This was not such a good idea. At first I liked its humourous, "tell it like it is" approach, but when I got to the chapter about exercise, I started getting pissed.

Before I rant, a bit of background about the author, Vicki McCarty Iovine. She had four kids in six years, so she's got to have some insight about pregnancy and childbirth. And she's a bright one, having graduated summa cum laude from UC Berkeley, and then picking up a law degree from Cambridge. She's on the board of directors for the Special Olympics. She was also Miss September 1979 in Playboy. My sex-positive feminist streak has complicated feelings about this. I'd love to talk to her about what led her to pose, what the experience was like, whether she ever felt exploited, and what kind of control she had while posing for that most famous bastion of suave male horniness.

I mention this all this because in her Guide, Iovine reveals a number of neuroses about body image, and disturbing assumptions about how her readers' experiences and attitudes will naturally reflect her own. These neuroses are nowhere more clear than in the chapter about exercise, which she says flatly that pregnant women should not do. Her stated reasons are ludicrous: "You Will Be Too Tired." "You Will Not Look Good in Your Leotard." "You Will Get Fatter Anyway." "Exercise Will Not Help You in Labor or Delivery in Any Way." "You Might Endanger the Pregnancy." "Even If You Don't Endanger the Pregnancy, If Something (God Forbid) Goes Wrong, You Will Forever Wonder If Your Exercising Caused It." "It's 'Nine Months Up and Nine Months Down' in the Weight Gaining Department No Matter What You Do." "Our Compulsion to Exercise When We Are Pregnant Is a Reflection of Our Inability to Surrender and Let Nature Run Its Course. SURRENDER DOROTHY!"

Let's take these one at a time. First, the tiredness. It's well known that exercise can boost energy and relieve stress, and some suggest that it even lessens morning sickness and prevents or manages gestational diabetes. Me, I think it's worth it to fight through tiredness three times a week for all that.

Now, looking good in your leotard. (I won't rag on her (much) about the leotard business because she was writing in 1995, but c'mon, nobody wears leotards anymore.) Here's an excerpt: "I don't mean to be nasty, but the women in these [pregnancy exercise] videos look swollen and uncomfortable. And those are the women who looked good enough to volunteer to be on TV in their little striped leotards in the first place! Those of us who would get dressed in absolute darkness to avoid having to inspect ourselves if we could would rather have natural childbirth than have anyone see us in spandex at this point. I have seen some die-hard pregnant women in the gym with their husband's T-shirts over their exercise clothes to camouflage things, but I am one of those who would rather just sulk and stop exercising."

Because, of course, looking good is the most important thing. Wonder whether she knows that exercise during pregnancy can help prevent varicose veins. Ahem.

(I'm not even going to pay much attention to her dismissal of natural childbirth and her blithe assumption that the medical model of birth so prevalent in North America is the best one. Henci Goer and others have been demolishing that myth for years. Goer's meticulously researched survey Obstetric Myths Versus Research Realities even came out the same year Iovine's book did. But hey, if Iovine even knew about it, she may have decided it lacked truthiness.)

"You Will Get Fatter Anyway"? Well, duh. As if one exercises only to avoid being fat. The "Nine Months Up, Nine Months Down" justification for quitting exercise also reveals a remarkable ignorance of the benefits of staying active during and after pregnancy. As for exercise not helping with labour or delivery, that just isn't true, regardless of the anecdotal evidence she offers about her Girlfriends (capitalized throughout, in a grating bit of preciousness).

Endangering the pregnancy? Earlier in the book she mentions that she was worried her husband would leave her if she'd stopped dyeing her hair. There's long been controversy over whether the chemicals in hair dye are harmful to the developing fetus. If endangering a pregnancy were her biggest concern, wouldn't she have been willing to put up with grey roots for at least the first trimester?

Finally, the bit about surrendering and letting Nature run its course. Um, what? Surrendering to what? The desire to sit around on one's increasingly fat ass all day? Hasn't Nature designed pregnant women to be able to carry water and work in fields? What a breathtakingly classist, ethnocentric, willfully ignorant point of view. (And "SURRENDER DOROTHY"? I don't have any Dorothies, and I wouldn't give her one if I did.)

Iovine seems to regard exercise not as something enjoyable (as I do), but as unpleasant drudgery to be done only so that she can fit into her size four clothes. She concludes that since size fours are right out during pregnancy, all women should give up on exercise entirely for those nine months. Worse, she presents her conclusion as somehow empowering, when it actually smacks of Victorian paternalism. Feh, says I.

So I won't be buying any more of Iovine's books. But I will be going back to the gym. So there.

An upcoming entry will be about how hard it is to find reliable information about weight training during pregnancy. There's some out there, but so much material for women who want to keep fit assumes that we do only cardio, and that the heavy lifting is for the boys. Horsefeathers.

Told the students today

2005-09-20T00:50:00.000-04:00

It sucked. They're really upset, and it hurt a whole lot to know that I made so many of them cry. Bed now.