crooked house

Showing Off Sylvie

Luke has dubbed this her little piggy suit. Note the ears. And that is her doll, christened "Alien Rosie," also by Luke, who wanted to name Sylvie "Rosie" so badly he called her that for at least two or three days after we brought her home from the hospital.

And some more photos, especially for Gramma, to whom we all send big, sloppy, drooly kisses and extra-squeezy hugs today. Click on any of the photos to enlarge them. See if you can get a glimpse of the second-longest eyelashes in the world.

 

 

 

 

Shirley Jackson's Daughter Joanne, On Her Mother's Writing About Their Family

I've just finished a binge on Shirley Jackson's stuff. I love both her lighthearted family memoirs and her short stories and novels. She does creepy extraordinarily well -- I do most of my reading in bed, next to the sleeping Sylvie and Luke, and I finally had to restrict The Haunting of Hill House to daylight hours. I was starting to imagine that our house was haunted, especially the other night when I got up at 4am to feed Sylvie and heard disturbing crooning and radio-static noises coming from somewhere downstairs. I roused David and we both crept through the eerie dark looking for the source. It turned out to be a musical birthday candle we'd had on David's birthday cake earlier that day -- it was singing its death throes in the garbage can.

I gather from Jackson's biography that much of her supposed non-fiction writing about her real life was fictionalized. I suppose it's hard for a good storyteller not to embellish. But those who do likewise when they write about their kids should take note of this, from Private Demons: The Life of Shirley Jackson:

   Respect for privacy, in fact, was one of the basic tenets of the Hyman household. The angriest Sally and Joanne ever saw their father was the time they sneaked down during a party to tape-record him doing one of his wilder songs. "It was very dramatic," said Joanne. "He dragged us out, took the tape and flung it. It was a point of honor. The lesson wasn't 'Don't mess with your parents'; it was 'You invaded my civil freedom.'"
   Yet at the same time, Shirley was violating her family's privacy all along, in one way -- by writing about them. Perhaps because she sensed this, she often involved her daughters in the writing process, particularly when she was planning a family story. She would sit on her stool in the corner of the large kitchen, by the stove, her ashtray filled with Pall Mall butts, her giant coffee cup or her glass next to her on the counter, occasionally stirring a pot, and run ideas by them. She listened carefully to their suggestions, often incorporating them. As a result, they have a certain fondness for these stories that is not shared by their brothers. But even Joanne has some ambivalence:
   "Do you have any idea what it's like being nine years old and not knowing what you remember, what you were told, and what you read? I had no trouble disassociating myself from the stuff that wasn't about us. But the stuff about us -- I sort of knew it wasn't the official family version and sort of knew some of that wasn't what I actually remembered. It turned on an automatic narrative voice in my head that I haven't gotten rid of yet."

All The Money I Had Is Gone

Sylvie will be eleven weeks old on Monday and I have to admit that things are going well.  Due to his prematurity and his GERD, Luke's first six months or so were hellishly difficult -- after experiencing that,  I was extremely unwilling to go through it all again. Happily, we haven't had to. Now I know why the human race continues to reproduce. When Luke was Sylvie's age I couldn't understand why all newborns weren't simply left by the side of the road. Yes, a healthy, full-term newborn is difficult. But not impossibly so.

Sylvie's only quirk right now is that during the day she refuses to be put down to sleep. If Sylvie were a first baby, this one quirk wouldn't be a problem at all -- I'd be quite happy to spend hours rocking her and reading. But there's Luke, too, and he's got needs. He needs to be fed, for instance, and on a relatively regular schedule. Our amazing babysitter, Renee, who has been with us almost full-time since Sylvie was born, has been a big help with both kids. Unfortunately, she goes back to university next Wednesday. So, after a summer of her most excellent help, I recently blew what little money we had left on a good infant swing and another glider for downstairs. Now all the money I had is gone. Hence the song.

Eyelash Envy

David (holding the baby in his arms and crooning): Sylvie! Sylvie! You have the longest eyelashes in the world! Yes you do, baby girl. Yes, yes, you do...
Luke (sitting across the room on the sofa, looking disgruntled): No, I have the longest eyelashes in the world.
David (glances at Luke): Oh, sorry. (turns back to the baby, crooning again): Sylvie, Sylvie! You have the second longest eyelashes in the world! Yes you do, baby girl. Oh yes you do!
Luke looks mollified.

And so the sibling rivalry begins. Over the relative lengths of eyelashes.

Our Brush With Hurricane Bill

 Hurricane Bill brushed past us this morning, resulting in torrential rain and strong winds. After two or three weeks of almost unbearable heat and humidity, we were all pleased to see the rain. So pleased, in fact, that at the height of the downpour David and I took turns running down the porch steps hand-in-hand with Luke, racing around the yard, and scooping him up and twirling him around and around in the rain. We did this until we were well and truly soaked and then we came in. We might have been too blasé. Half an hour later, David looked out and noticed that a large dead branch had fallen out of the very tree we'd been running circles around. We were lucky it didn't fall while we were out there.

Luke strikes a sad pose as he considers what might have been our fate. "We could've been bonked on the head, Mama!"

Little People, The Smooth-Away, and Luke

Yesterday we accidentally bought Luke a Fisher-Price Little People set that contains a figure Luke already has.  (Michael, for those in the know.) When we got home and he realized this, he said, "I already have that one! Now I won't know which is itch!"

I could have corrected him but I didn't. Is that so very, very wrong?

On the way to the store, Luke regaled me with information he has recently gleaned from the television about Smooth Away, a sandpaper-like hair removal product. "You know Smoov-Away, Mama?" he announced out of nowhere. "It's a product for both men and women. Both of them can use it! You rub it on your arms and legs. There is a little pad for the skin around your eyes..." Here he delicately touched a fingertip to the area between his eyebrows while gazing thoughtfully off into the middle distance. "And there is a bigger pad for your arms and legs! You'll never have to shave again!"

"Oh," I said. After a pause, I asked him, "And what does it mean 'to shave'?"

Luke thought for a second. "I don't know," he said.

He also expresses great interest in the Shamwow.

Hermione Lee on Biography (And An Extremely Short Shirley Jackson Anecdote)

For the past five or six months I've been reading a lot of biographies, autobiographies, and memoirs. Every few years I tend to go through a stage when I binge on them. Just this past week, for instance, I finished Private Demons, Judy Oppenheimer's biography of Shirley Jackson. It left me telling everyone, only half tongue-in-cheek, that I wish I could take amphetamines like Jackson did in order to stave off exhaustion. If I could only get my hands on some speed, I aver, I could probably toss off a literary masterpiece in the intervals between Sylvie's night feedings. Jackson's family doctor prescribed them to her -- a lot of busy housewives in the 1950s took them as a matter of course and Jackson not only had four children, she also was one of the few mothers in her small town who worked at something else. Unfortunately, the amphetamines meant she had to take tranquilizers in order to sleep and the drugs are now thought to have contributed to her early death at age 48.

Anyway, my fascination with the genre means I am very much looking forward to reading Hermione Lee's Biography: A Very Short Introduction. Here she is discussing the book (via Maud):

Sylvie's Paris Outfit

This is the Paris t-shirt I bought for Sylvie for eight bucks at our local grocery store, which offers a line of nice, and nicely cheap, clothing called Joe.  I'm in love with the embroidery on this and will probably frame the entire thing after she outgrows it, which should happen in about two weeks. Click on the photo to see it enlarged.

I'm sure our heavenly vacation in Paris a couple of years ago has something to do with my affection for the shirt. (The vacation was heavenly for many, many reasons and foremost among them is the fact that it was the first time I got several good long sleeps in a row since Luke had been born two years earlier. He stayed home with Grandma. The other main reason is, of course, that Paris is an amazingly beautiful place. I half-expected it to be overrated but I was absolutely blown away by the sheer magnificence of the place.) I bought a tee for Luke there but it certainly wasn't as nice as this one. Maybe I could fund another vacation by buying out the grocery store's entire stock, flying to Paris, and selling the shirts for fifteen euros each to tourists on the street.

Here's the shirt paired with striped pants and her red shoes:

Ooh la la! I'll try to get a shot of Sylvie in it later if I can keep it on her long enough. She's asleep right now, having vomited up what appeared to be a litre of milk on her last ensemble.

Books About Babies

"R. D. Martin, a primate anatomist and paleontologist, claims that humans really have a twenty-one-month gestation -- nine months in utero followed by twelve months outside." From Meredith F. Small's Our Babies, Ourselves.

The Philosophical Baby: What Children's Minds Tell Us About Truth, Love, and the Meaning of Life and Our Babies, Ourselves: How Biology and Culture Shape the Way We Parent came in the mail over the past couple of days. I'm really looking forward to them both -- developmental psychologist Alison Gopnick really knows her stuff and she is an excellent writer to boot. And I'm hoping anthropologist Meredith Small's book will give me some perspective on the conflicting advice I've been getting from my stash of parenting books. Feed the baby whenever she seems to want it (i.e. constantly)! No, feed the baby on a strict four-hour schedule! Carry the baby at all times! No, put the baby down! Put her down! Pick her up! Put her down! Feed her! No, don't! Swaddle her! Whatever you do, don't constrict the baby's movements! And so on, ad nauseum. It's like having a good angel on one shoulder and a devil on the other except that you're never sure which is which. My natural inclination is to the attachment parenting side, all !Kung San all the !way -- or perhaps that's only my theoretically natural inclination because when I get tired and exasperated I'm also really drawn to those experts who advocate a strict, strict schedule and a fair degree of separation between infant and caregiver. Suzy Giordano, author of The Baby Sleep Solution: A Proven Program to Teach Your Baby to Sleep Twelve Hours a Night, I am looking at you. With lust in my eyes. I want you, I need you. Will you come here and train my baby for me please? Alas, I suspect, but am by no means sure, that Giordano's promise, to have the baby sleeping twelve hours a night by twelve weeks of age, is a bit of a pipedream. Unless you have a baby who is just naturally inclined to do that, in which case... wanna trade? Mine's really cute. And if yours sleeps all night, I don't care if it looks like an orangutan.

Just kidding.

Sorta.

Ways to Spend A Saturday Afternoon

On Saturday, while David stayed home with Sylvie, I took Luke to our annual local exhibition. He was big enough to go on almost all of the rides but not quite big enough to go by himself -- so I had to go on them with him. Carousel? Check. Dragon roller coaster? Check. Whirling strawberries? Check. Whirling bears? Check. (I'm not sure why it was necessary to offer two of those sickening rides that do nothing but spin in a circle until you're ready to throw up. One is more than enough.) Flying bumble bees? Check. Bumper cars? Check. House of mirrors? Check. Giant slide? Check. Giant jungle gym? Check. It was about 30°C with nearly 100% humidity and the rides were set up on a mostly dirt field. By the end of the afternoon we were both coated in filth, stuck on with sweat. Good times. And by "good" I mean "ugh."

Actually, it was much more pleasant than spending the afternoon with an increasingly cranky seven-week-old. Apparently fussiness and extended bouts of crying peak between six and eight weeks in newborns -- and Sylvie is right on schedule. I've been trying to research this phenomenon in the few spare moments I'm not swaddling and swinging and shushing her  -- some experts say it's due to a six-week growth spurt. Others imply it has something to do with brain development. At this point infants are awake more, and therefore they're stimulated more, but they're still not able to turn themselves off (ie tune out or go to sleep) when they've had enough. Whatever the reason, it's not fun. And it's very labour intensive. Plus she's still eating every three hours round the clock, so no one in the house is getting a lot of sleep. She sleeps best when someone is holding her and rocking, which is what Renee, our babysitter, is doing right now as I type.