crooked house

The Prophetess Sleeps. But Her Mother Sure Doesn't.

The Prophetess sleeps.

Wow. Where did that week go? I've been in a haze, feeding Sylvie pretty much every two hours round the clock -- except for when David or Renee, our babysitter, spell me. And since a feeding generally takes half an hour to forty-five minutes and then we hold Sylvie in an upright position for fifteen minutes or so (a lesson learned from the experience of feeding Luke as a newborn with gastroesophageal reflux disease), that means by the time the feeding is over there's about an hour in which to sleep. And it generally takes me half of that to get back to sleep, no matter how tired I am. In fact, the more tired I am, the longer it seems to take. The severity of this situation is something that most childless people don't quite comprehend -- I know I certainly didn't. It's a form of torture, the sleep deprivation, and I personally believe it's evolution's way of ensuring the new mother's undying devotion to her little cult leader. "Maternal love"? Just another way of saying "completely brainwashed".

Last night, though, hurrah! Last night she went three hours and then four hours between feedings. This meant she fed at 10:30pm, again at 1:30am, and then not again until 5:30am -- and that meant I slept for perhaps two hours in a row before I had to be awake for an hour, followed by almost three consecutive hours of sleep. It was a miracle! I love sleep with a passion. If there were a way to marry sleep or vote it president, I'd do it in a heartbeat. That is, of course, if Her Holiness The Supreme Leader and Ultimate Prophetess, Sylvie, said it was so ordained.

(Worth noting: I just used Merriam Webster's thesaurus to try and find suitable titles for the leader of a cult and when I did a search on the word "pope" no matches came up. But a list of "similar words" did. It is topped by "babe" and "baby." Out of the mouths of thesauruses. Thesauri? Whatever. I'll be back when I get some more sleep.)

Sleep Deprivation, Genies, and Crooked Houses

So here it is, 3:50am and while Sylvie is sleeping like a dream, I'm wide awake. I fell asleep around 8:30pm and David snuck her out of the room so I wouldn't wake for her feeding in the middle of the night -- which of course meant he had to stay up long past his agreed-upon shift -- and I woke up, a bit confused and surprised, a little after 2:00am. I think that's the longest stretch of sleep I've had since she was born. He brought her back to bed around 2:40am, fast asleep, which meant I should have been able to sleep for another two, three, or even four hours. But I haven't been able to -- my mind's been racing.

My mind isn't the only busy one around here. Ever since Sylvie was born, Luke's been doing a lot of deep thinking. He came to me a couple of days ago with a perplexed look on his face.

"Mama?" he said. "Why doesn't Bella [our female cat] have a genie?"

I stared at him, in incomprehension.

"And why doesn't Theo [our male cat] have a penis?"

Suddenly understanding, I explained that they both have the appropriate boy and girl parts, it's just that they're rather hard  to make out under all that fur. And then I held a pillow over my face so he wouldn't see me laughing like a seventh grader over "genie." Although we always use the proper names for body parts whenever discussing them -- hence the child's familiarity with the p-word -- I must say that "genie" is the best diminutive for the female parts I've ever heard, including Oprah's infamous "vajayjay."

In other news, on Monday night this little-known blog got 10,000 hits in ten minutes, when the television show Jon and Kate Plus Eight featured Crooked Houses, a company in Maine that makes custom playhouses (and t-shirts that I covet). They happened to do it on the episode in which they announced their divorce -- if you're not up on this, I guess you don't read the covers of the tabloids while waiting at the checkout stand in the grocery store -- and the ratings must have been through the roof. So if you're here looking for them, well, you're welcome to hang around but you really should go there. And you Crooked House Playhouse people, please do feel free to come install a playhouse for Luke and Sylvie, too. There are only two of them -- but sometimes, like at 3:50am, they can feel like eight.

From Up Close, She Looked More Pregnant Than Most Pregnant Ladies. She Looked That Way From Far Away, Too.

Last weekend, the weekend before Sylvie was born, I devoured my first Raymond Chandler novel, The Big Sleep. The characters, with the exception of Philip Marlowe himself, are ridiculous* caricatures, especially the women, and the plot was ridiculously* convoluted -- I'm still not sure what happened  -- but the writing is stellar. There's something very Art Deco about it, very vivid and economical, all dramatic stylized swoops. Those zingy one-liners; those crazily apt similes and metaphors! Yum. There are too many great ones to list here, but the one that goes something like "He looked more like a dead man than most dead men" has stayed with me. The construction works to describe lots of things, like my current situation. Although I gave birth a week ago, I still look more pregnant than most pregnant ladies. (Try it! It's fun! Not the looking pregnant thing -- which is decidedly unfun -- but playing around with the "He looked more ___ than a ___ ___construction. If you come up with a good one, please do share by leaving it in the comments.) You can read some good Chandlerisms here but that list is by no means definitive. There were at least that many good lines in The Big Sleep alone.

Take this, from The High Window:

"From thirty feet away she looked like a lot of class.  From ten feet away she looked like something made up to be seen from thirty feet away."

It's very similar to a description that I've always liked, from the movie Clueless, written by Amy Heckerling:

Tai: Do you think she's pretty?

Cher: No, she's a full-on Monet.

Tai: What's a Monet?

Cher: It's like a painting, see? From far away, it's OK, but up close, it's a big old mess.

I wonder if Heckerling is a Chandler fan.

*Ridiculous is my new favourite word, ever since Luke has started using it a lot -- except he pronounces it "ree-dick-lee-us."

Weddings, Roses, and Dried Umbilical Stubs: A New Tradition?

It is the middle of the night. Newborn Sylvie has been fussing and mewling for a couple of hours. Stephany is changing her diaper for the seventh time. David is staggering around the room, scooping up burp cloths and knocking over the furniture. Sylvie's umbilical stub falls off.

Steph [picking it up, examining it]: Now what am I supposed to do with this?
David [staggering in aimless circles around the room]: Um. You're supposed to dry it? And save it for her wedding day?
Steph stares at him, then vaguely recalls endless conversation with overly talkative discharge nurse two days ago while still in hospital, who had advised us at great length to dry the roses we'd be sent, and save them for Sylvie's wedding day.
David: Yeah, it could be a neat part of the ceremony. You know, we'd present the groom with her umbilical stub, perhaps on a white velvet pillow, as a symbol that we were passing on our attachment to her... to...uh... him. Or something.
Steph: Honey, I think you should go lie down now.

Silly man. A white velvet pillow indeed. I'm thinking we could get a designer to incorporate it in a nice piece of jewelry, maybe. Or something.

Sylvie Says Hi. And Shows Off Her Shoes.

I am being unduly influenced by the drugs or the hormones or, most likely, a combination thereof, because I think this photo is cute. Well, I veer between thinking it's cute and wanting to make a Lady Macbeth joke. I have a feeling Sylvie Rosalind is not going to like being dirty. She looks like she's freaking out: "Ieeee, what's this stuff all over me?!"

Sylvie was supposed to arrive on Friday, June 19th, via c-section at an excellent maternity/children's hospital in Halifax, which is about an hour's drive from here. Instead, she decided to make her entrance here at our small local hospital on Monday, June 15th. I woke at 6:20am, feeling mildly crampy, and then lost my mucous plug, which is colloquially known as having "bloody show." (When you've got a choice between saying "I lost my mucous plug" and "I had bloody show" perhaps it's best not to say anything at all.) I'd heard that while this is a sign things are progressing, it doesn't necessarily mean that labour is imminent. Then a few minutes later, I thought my water broke. It turns out I was wrong -- for those interested in such things, it was more "show" only this time less "bloody" -- but I knew that when your water breaks you must go to the hospital at once and I thought mine had. So I calmly told David, who was already up and getting ready for work, that we should go have a quick check-up at the local hospital before driving into the city for a c-section, if that turned out to be necessary. We roused Luke, woke his grandfather and asked him to meet us there, and drove the five minutes to the local hospital. We were there by 7:30 and by the time they hooked me up to the fetal monitor a few minutes later, I was having intensely painful contractions about two and a half minutes apart. Since I was hardly dilated, they told me I was free to drive into the city. Problem was,  I couldn't move. "Would you like an ambulance?" they suggested. At first I thought yes and then I thought no. They started throwing around the idea of airlifting me to the city. Between moans that sounded like a herd of cows having choir practise -- but imagine cows that can actually sing* -- I said, "Could I just have the c-section here?" And they, the lovely people, said yes. Sylvie made her entrance at 9:17am. She weighed 7lb 10oz, a good three pounds more than Luke did at birth, and she's terrifically hearty and healthy. If I'd decided to go into the city, I would've still been on the road at that point, and experiencing relentless contractions without any pain relief. Here's to fast and close to home.

When they pulled Sylvie out and showed her to me, my main reaction was surprise. You'd think I'd have come to terms with this whole pregnancy thing by now but I was still terribly shocked to see that a small perfectly formed human being had just been pulled from my mid-section. And for the rest of the week, which I have spent in a drug-and-exhaustion-induced haze, things have continued to seem surreal. That first night, as a labouring women moaned up and down the hall outside my door like ghosts, I dreamed that every time a baby was born, the attending doctors and nurses and assorted onlookers rose in a standing ovation. The next day I realized that the wheels on the baby bassinets made a rattling sound like applause as they were transported up and down the halls. And I'm not too sure about the hordes of labouring women moaning outside my door, either -- a couple of days later I noticed that the elevator made a similar groaning sound.

Here is Sylvie looking slightly grumpy and hardly at all like a gerbil. Sorry for the blurry, poorly lit photo -- she only opens her eyes when the light is dim. I could only capture them at half-mast but I'll keep trying.

And here she is modelling her Zutano newborn kimono shirt and striped pants. I have found that since she doesn't cry all the time, unlike her brother at the same age, I am able to fuss with her wardrobe. She's only six days old and I've already started to play with her like a doll. She actually fell asleep while I was changing her into this. Shh, don't tell any of those overly maternal teenagers who want to have a baby so they will have "somebody to love." 

When I went to the grocery store today -- yes, I was able to go to the grocery store today! -- I couldn't resist these teensy tiny shoes.

Turns out they're not quite teensy tiny enough.

Okay, that's all for now. I've got oodles to tell you but I am still feeling fuzzy and fried. Like some kind of gourmet dessert made with peaches. Which is appropriate, because this time around, everything feels like that. Peachy. But still fuzzy and fried.

*Speaking of the choir of cows, I really did start to half-sing/half-moan along with the contractions when they started to come so close together. The room was full of people swarming around me, readying me for surgery, and I thought, "Hmm, this room is full of people, readying me for surgery. And I am sing-moaning at the top of my lungs. Or moan-singing. Hmm." And then I thought, "Oh well." And then I moan-sang a little more. David commented on it later. "You sounded like you were singing. I thought of taping it." And I have to admit, I almost wish he had. I suppose his sense of propriety stopped him. You'd never catch him moan-singing in public. Unless, you know, a small perfectly formed human being was attempting to emerge from his mid-section.

Appropriate Names for Half-Human/ Half-Vampire Babies

Half-human/ half-vampire baby Renesmee's photo taken from this fan site.

So I finished the last of the wretchedly addictive Twilight saga last night -- it was kind of like eating four giant chocolate cakes one after the other or maybe four pot roasts and now I am feeling more than a little sick. Also: I have been suffering through lots of vivid but not particularly frightening vampire dreams. My head cold has turned into a painful sinus infection and I had to finally give in and start taking tylenol and a decongestant, which apparently acts as a stimulant, so perhaps that helps explain all the dreaming. I'm thinking it's why the baby has been kicking so hard. My teeth are killing me, especially one of my eye teeth, which seems fitting. I'll start antibiotics on Monday if this isn't getting any better by then as I cannot imagine undergoing either a c-section or a normal delivery in this state.

Obviously, now that I've read the final book and (spoiler) discovered that Bella gives birth to a half-human/half-vampire child, I can no longer write the vampire/baby allegory I was hoping would make my fortune. Great minds think alike or dull ones seldom differ, whichever. I will say that it's probably not a good idea to read the baby's birth scene/Bella's death as a human scene when you are only weeks away from giving birth yourself. I'll post an excerpt for the Babies in Literature series when I can stomach reading that section again. But half-human/half-vampire babies apparently tear their way out of the womb with their teeth.

I was amused by how Bella came up with her baby's name, as it also echoes some of my own ideas about trying to honour grandparents. She combined her own mother's name, Renee, and Edward's adoptive vampire mother's name, Esme, and came up with Renesmee. (Maybe we should go with something like Ruthinda. Or Luntha.) Astonishingly, Bella managed to go even further than that, by combining her father's name, Charlie, with Edward's vampire dad's Carlisle, to make Carlie, which she used as a middle name. Impressive feat, wouldn't you say? (We'd have to go with Jurray or Mohn or some variation thereof.) I'm wondering if we're going to see some actual Renesmees when the final movie comes out -- I've heard tell of the odd Trinity since The Matrix came out ten years ago. As of yet, Nameberry has no entry for Renesmee. Must remember to give Pam the heads-up.

In Europe It's "Macdo"

More evidence that McDonald's restaurants can be very different depending on where in the world you are: Stephmodo posts some photos of a fancy-ish modern one in France, where she witnessed a worker making pretty floral designs in the foam of a customer's drink. (Via Ohdeedoh). A commenter notes "I am not surprised! My "Macdo" in Switzerland has crown molding, crystal chandeliers, and a lake-front view! Their coffee menu rivals that of my favorite US coffee shop." Très bizarre.

Shirley Jackson Might Have Been a Mommy-Blogger

Shirley Jackson might have been a part-time mommy-blogger, had she lived in the internet age. I think I was looking for We Have Always Lived in the Castle at the library and, as so often happens, they didn't have it, so I scooped up something else by the writer instead. In this case, it was Life Among the Savages, a memoir of her life raising three small children in Vermont. It is a direct ancestor of the current crop of mothering memoirs -- someone should put together a history of the genre -- and it shares their frequently jokey "if I didn't laugh, I'd cry" tone, a tone so different from that used in "The Lottery" that I had to check to make sure this was the same Shirley Jackson. The beginning sucked me in completely:

   Our house is old, and noisy, and full. When we moved into it we had two children and about five thousand books; I expect that when we finally overflow and move out again we will have perhaps twenty children and easily half a million books; we also own assorted beds and tables and chairs and rocking horses and lamps and doll dresses and ship models and paint brushes and literally thousands of socks. This is the way of life my husband and I have fallen into, inadvertently, as though we had fallen into a well and decided that since there was no way out we might as well stay there and set up a chair and a desk and a light of some kind; even though this is our way of life, and the only one we know, it is occasionally bewildering, and perhaps even inexplicable to the sort of person who does not have that swift, accurate conviction that he is going to step on a broken celluloid doll in the dark. I cannot think of a preferable way of life, except one without  children and without books, going on soundlessly in an apartment hotel where they do the cleaning for you and send up your meals and all you have to do is lie on a couch -- and as I say, I cannot think of a preferable life, but then I have had to make a good many compromises, all told.
   I look around sometimes at the paraphernalia of our living -- sandwich bags, typewriters, little wheels off things -- and marvel at the complexities of civilization with which we surround ourselves; would we be pleased, I wonder, at a wholesale elimination of these things, so that we were reduced only to necessities (coffeepot, typewriters, the essential little wheels off things) and then -- this happening usually in the springtime -- I begin throwing things away, and it turns out that although we can live agreeably without the little wheels off things, new little wheels turn up almost immediately. This is, I suspect, progress. They can make new little wheels, if not faster than they can fall off things, at least faster than I can throw them away.

Very modern, isn't it, in its arch breeziness about wanting simplicity -- and not having it? The book was published in 1953.

Twilight Delight

I've never been much interested in vampire genre fiction -- for instance, I've never read any of the Anne Rice books on the subject and I don't think I was able to sit through any of the movies (were there more than one?). But this past week, unable to pick my head up off my pillow for more than fifteen minutes and unable even to focus on the television, I developed a bizarre craving for the stuff. Chalk it up to pregnancy.

Spurred on by something I saw over at Light Reading, I picked up Living Dead in Dallas: A Sookie Stackhouse Novel at the library. I enjoyed it very much, the way I'd enjoy downing a giant bag of potato chips if, say, the potato chips came in a delicious and as-yet-uninvented Sex'n'Violence flavour. Unfortunately the rest of the Sookie Stackhouse books were out -- and since in my state, you don't really want your nether regions stimulated any more than they already are by the pressure of an enormous fetal cranium, varicose veins, an overactive bladder, and constipated bowels (is this too much information?) -- I decided to spring for the wildly popular Twilight book, which I'd read was a teenage abstinence allegory, typed out with one finger by a Mormon housewife while she cared for a baby and two other little boys under the age of five.

I have now made a private vow to write something similarly wildly successful and lucrative just as soon as I pop out this baby. Should be a piece of cake. And speaking of cake, although the abstinence allegory is certainly very obvious, the novel also works very nicely, perhaps even better, as an allegory of dieting. Edward feels about Bella the way I feel about certain kinds of chocolate and this thought kept me giggling through many of the otherwise romantic scenes. I was not the only one in my household to notice this, either. After I finished the first book and the second, New Moon, I sent David to the video store for the movie. Early on, he commented, "She's just like M&M Slow Cooked Pot Roast to him." This is a dish I've been serving my family ever since I was diagnosed with an iron deficiency -- quite a big deal around here since we normally don't eat much red meat at all. If I do manage to write my own wildly lucrative vampire allegory of something or other, perhaps I will invite M&M to invest in a product placement. Although I have a feeling my allegory might end up having something to do with babies being the vampires, and mothers being the bloody pot roast. Milk = blood, or something. That hasn't been done before, has it? I'm still working out the details.

As for Luke's impressions, well, he didn't take note of the dieting allegory as he was not watching the inappropriate movie but was instead playing an elaborate game with his collection of McDonald's toys on the floor. He did, however, stop for a minute to notice Edward's brightly lipsticked lips. "He's got a funny mouth," he said. He watched as Edward said a bunch of romantic things to Bella and was perplexed by her serious and quivering reaction. "His mouth is so funny! Why isn't she laughing?" Because your pot roast doesn't laugh at you while you're staring it down at the end of your fork, that's why. It just quivers and looks tempting.

Enormous and Boneless. With a Side of Head-Cold. In a Cup.

This morning we were watching the beginning of Wall-E -- although I think it's a terrific movie, for some reason Luke never makes it more than halfway -- and I realized that at this point in the pregnancy I feel exactly like one of the enormous boneless people who live on the shapeship. Early on, one called Josh falls out of his chair and squirms helplessly around on the floor until he can be rescued. That's me right about now. Also, everyone in the house has developed a head-cold. I'm hoping it's gone before my c-section, which is scheduled for three weeks from last Friday. And/or that I don't spontaneously go into labour before it's gone.

Speaking of c-sections, last night while reviewing The Nursing Mother's Companion (and trying not to hyperventilate as my first attempt at breastfeeding was a total nightmare), I laughed when I came across this brief note on the operation: "If you have had a cesarean birth, keep in mind you are recovering from major abdominal surgery. Most likely, you will have to take pain medication during the first week or so at home. You may perhaps be bothered by an uncomfortable feeling that your abdomen may fall out." I don't really remember being too bothered by the c-section the first time round -- I was much too busy trying to stay awake for the round-the-clock feedings. This time I've vowed to make myself take notes through everything, no matter how tired I get. I'll pay particular attention to any sensations that indicate my stomach is about to fall out and report back.