Tag: baby jail

Monday Roundup

On By BekkiIn The Weekly ReviewLeave a comment

1. I’m back on the East Coast next week. I didn’t realize until a few days ago that I’m going to be gone during the week of Hannukah. A and I normally don’t make it much past the first night of menorah lighting, as evidenced by the nearly full box of candles I got him eight years ago when we first started dating. This year, though, I’d been looking forward to lighting candles with Z.

2. Cooking with a toddler is a whole different ball game. Z has gotten to the age where she very much wants to help with everything, and her enthusiasm is far greater than her skill. And I’ve been trying to cook a bit more, especially when A goes into work earlier, to make his life a bit easier. This means that I’m often trying to keep her out of the raw meat with one hand, off the knife with the other, and away from the eggs with the third. At which point I realize I don’t have a third hand and catch her just before she stuffs a piece of raw chicken in her mouth. It’s all worth it when she eats everything on her plate and asks for more. (Days she doesn’t eat anything, I just want to scream.)

3. The closest I ever came to seeing a STP concert was watching Scott Weiland’s ass disappear into the back of a tour bus.. They played a free concert at USF my freshman year of college. I didn’t have a car at that point, so I spent a good chunk of time trying to find someone who did. By the time we got over the bridge and through traffic, it was over.

** Edit:  My brother has reminded me that this isn’t true, and we saw STP together back in 2000 at the WBCN River Rave, and that it was a pretty incredible show.  He’s right, on both counts.**

4. We had our first adult dinner party since Z was born this weekend. A set of matching dinnerware is still very much on our to get list, DSC_0574so I rolled with it, using vintage Coca-Cola glasses instead of pints to keep the “rustic” feel going. Z didn’t want to get out of her PJ’s, so I rolled with that too. It was good to have company that’s not family (although I love having family too!), and proof that there is life beyond the black hole of poop and temper tantrums.

5. I am most definitely stressed out this month. Part of it is the fact that my big report for work, which was supposed to be done before Thanksgiving, has been pushed back again. This means that instead of having the holidays and our vacation in January clear, there’s a chance I might have to work through some or all of it. Then there’s the holiday season itself, and all of that craziness (including the fact that I’m rapidly running out of time to get any kind of holiday cards out the door). Add in a two year old, the daily battles around bedtime, and the complete inability to get anything done with any sort of efficiency while she’s around, and the result is that I’m needing about 5 more hours in each day than I’ve got right now.

Closing Tabs

Z and I made the gingerbread cake from All Cakes Considered this week, and it was fantastic. I’m pretty sure I ate most of it. In my defense, I was following the recipe.

My mom has always said people are inherently good…
The Worldbuilders Stardust ARC is one of those things that restores my faith in humanity. Every year, Pat Rothfuss puts a signed ARC of Stardust into the lottery or auction for his yearly charity. Every year, without fail, the winner donates it back.

…and inherently dumb.
Red mercury is the holy grail of terrorist bomb plots, strong enough to flatten a city the way a nuclear blast would. It is also scientifically impossible. The result? Cons, conspiracies, and long read piece in the Times Sunday magazine.

This guy spent 4,200 of his 10,000 hours working on capturing a single photograph of a diving kingfisher. Anyone can buy a digital camera and Photoshop and pass themselves off as a photographer, but this kind of patience and dedication is what makes you a pro.

Serialbox is attempting to bring back serial novels, doing it TV-style: each “episode” is written by a team and takes about forty minutes to read. I was initially excited about this, then downloaded the sample chapter for Bookburners and decided the writing was crap about two pages in. And that would have been that, except that I’m seeing all kinds of excitement for Tremontaine, a prequel to Ellen Kushner’s Swordspoint. (If you’re into fantasy and you haven’t read Swordspoint, you should). So I’m giving Serialbox another try.

How do you handle the holidays and the end of year craziness?  Comment here, because I’m still banning myself from Facebook!

Things That Happen When You Become A Parent

On By BekkiIn Musings & RamblingsLeave a comment

1.  You find yourself rocking back and forth, even when you’re not holding the baby.

2.  Going to bed at 8 pm is the best thing ever.

3.  You sing, everywhere, all the time. On the street, in the subway, in stores.  Carrying the tune and knowing the lyrics are optional.

4.  You realize around dinner time that you haven’t showered or brushed your teeth all day.

5.  Everything gets a cute name.  Her toys.  Her outfits.  The dishes.

6.  Random things like shower drains and lawnmowers sound like a crying baby.

7.  You turn into a human jungle gym.  Hair, glasses, ears all become handles.

8.  Going to the bathroom becomes a family activity.

9.  Posting to your blog becomes one of those things you did before you had children.

10.  The best part of your day is coming home and seeing her smile.

Baby o’Clock

On By BekkiIn Musings & RamblingsLeave a comment

We got back from California almost two weeks ago now. Every time we go, it feels more and more like going home. Something about the hills rising up out of the earth, crumpled and creased and golden. The highways, wide and flat and sinuous. The ocean, beating against the sand.

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Going away was good for us. For me. I feel like I’m finally starting to settle into life with the baby. Sure, everybody said that life would change, but I didn’t think it would be that different. Call me naïve, but I thought I would finally have time to get things done. As anyone reading this who has had a kid knows, that didn’t happen.

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The reality is that her favorite place to nap is on me, or her dad. That even though she can’t speak, she has plenty of ways of getting across what she wants. And what she wants is to be right where I am.

So I blog with my phone while she’s nursing. I read books with one hand while walking around holding her with the other.  But mostly, I accept that the to do list is limited to one item per day.

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And some days, I’m even okay with that.

Orange Tangerine Pearl*

On By BekkiIn This is FeminismLeave a comment

I’m writing this with a baby on my lap. My baby. She is a week old, and she’s perfect.**

I’m not going to go into all the labor details here, but there were a couple of things that happened during the birth that really interested me from an information processing point of view.

The first is that, according to my husband and our doula, I didn’t start talking about an epidural until after the anesthesiologist came in. My recollection is that I started talking epidural when the contractions became unbearable – query whether there’s any link between what I was experiencing before and after the hospital reminded me the epidural was available.

The second is that I wanted to do a natural childbirth because I thought it would lead to the best outcome for me and Zed. Everything I was reading and hearing pretty much said the less interventions you do, the better – less chance of a C-section, better breastfeeding, etc.

Suffice it to say, I ended up having two interventions – I got an epidural, and the OB broke my water. Both were exactly the right moves at the time, and both made the labor much shorter than it would have been otherwise.

The thing is, I was so focused on the potentially negative effects of interventions, that I hadn’t bothered to consider the positive. Although the teacher in my birthing class discussed pros and cons for everything, I didn’t really pay attention to the pros because my mind was already made up.

I didn’t do this consciously. In fact, I’ve always thought of myself as very open-minded. But when I was thinking about the way labor had gone post-birth, I realized that I hadn’t really factored in the potential benefits of interventions.

It made me wonder what other things I might have missed because I only paid attention to the information that supported my point of view. And I’m hoping, as A and I confront the myriad of choices and decisions that is child-rearing, I’ll remember to pay afternoon to all the information out there.

*The color of our new car. Also our code word for “I actually mean that I want the epidural now”.

**In case you’re wondering, you didn’t miss the pregnancy announcement. A and I decided that we’d like to keep little Zed off the internet for the most part. So I probably won’t be talking about her here very much.   Incidentally, Zed is also the reason I haven’t posted much – for some reason, pregnancy has been my main focus for the past nine months.

Also, if you’re doing the math, by the time this goes up Zed will be about 2 weeks old. We call this the newborn effect – everything takes twice as long as it does in normal time.