crooked house

The Dunkley Motorized Pram From 1923

This is the Dunkley Pramotor -- a motorized pram sold in 1923. "We should get that. That's what I'm thinking," says Sylvie as she looks over my shoulder.

Whenever I had to lug around one of those incrediblyawkward and heavy removable car seats with one of my babies in it -- say into the grocery store -- I liked to imagine that in the future, a podlike car seat would hover in the air beside the mother, trailing her wherever she went. Recently I tossed around the idea of a kind of remote control stroller that would follow a parent, so he or she could be hands free for shopping or holding the hands of bigger toddlers or whatever. Are these ideas as crazy as this stroller looks? Via I Cannot Go to Bed -- There is Epic Shit Happening on the Internet, which I found through Lizzie Skurnick.

Beckett's Fail Better

Although this is the finished print, if I were still teaching the first grade, I think I'd make up similar work sheets for my class to complete. They'd make a fun display. (See also Beckett for Babies, one of my own failure, of which there are many.)

Boobie Beanie

You can purchase these boobie beanie baby hats -- or the pattern to make one yourself -- on etsy. You know, so you can protect the delicate sensibilities of those who are offended by public breastfeeding. God forbid anyone should happen to glimpse a bit of breast as it nourishes an infant.

Arthur Recreates Scenes from Classic Movies

Arthur recreates 12 Angry Men.

Arthur recreates American Beauty.

Arthur recreates Close Encounters of the Third Kind. There are more at Studio Arthur. Thanks @sue_oz!

Seven Billion Babies

This is baby Danica Camacho, born yesterday, upon whom has been bestowed the symbolic title of the World's 7 Billionth Baby by the UN. She was born in the Philippines, a country that has a high fertility rate and poor access to contraception.  To mark this momentous occasion, she was given a cake and a certificate for free shoes. Shoes? Surely they could have mustered up a scholarship or a reality show or at least something a little more dramatic. Unless they are magic shoes.

I wonder what her life will be like?

There are differing opinions about whether our rapid population growth is not that big a deal or a total nightmare.

Here's the latest estimate on how many people have ever lived.

And here you can calculate your numbers: When I was born I was supposedly the 3,590,447,718th person alive on earth at the time and I am the 77,663,903,455th person to have lived since history began.

Rocking the Cradle

Gorgeous rocker cradle by fine woodworker Scott Morrison.

The copy I borrowed of  Babies: An Unsentimental Anthology, edited by Iona and Peter Opie, is long overdue at the library. A computer somewhere is totting up my fine as I type. And that is a shame, as I've been meaning to post number of excerpts from this delicious collection of amusing, unflattering, and often realistic snippets from literature about babies. Here is one of my favourites:

If you rock an empty cradle, you will rock a new baby into it. This is a superstition in viridi observantia, and it is quite curious to see the face of alarm with which a poor woman, with her tenth baby in her arms, will dash across the room to prevent the 'baby-but-one' from engaging in such a dangerous amusement as rocking the empty cradle.

                      The Book of Days, Robert Chambers, 1864, II, 9 July

I've been collecting lots of  photos of beautiful rocker cradles and rocking chairs on pinterest.

Sleep or Lack Thereof: Patricia Morrisroe's Wide Awake

This beautiful photo (published here under the creative commons) was posted by bitzcelt on flickr. I concur with his comment.

I realize I've been relying heavily on photos instead of words here on the blog lately -- that's because I've been having a lot of trouble stringing them together when speaking, let alone writing. I am just. so. tired. At about four or five months of age Sylvie started to pretty much sleep through the night. Regular readers of this blog could probably go back and check for the exact date -- I'm too tired to bother. Because ever since Sylvie started to crawl, about two months or so ago, she's been waking up pretty much every two or three hours at night. At first I thought she was excited by her new ability and simply wanted to get moving; then I chalked it up to teething. She had an ear infection in B.C., which certainly didn't help, and now, as a result of the antibiotics, she has thrush. So it's probably been all of those things, in sequence or in combination. I don't consider it sleep deprivation on par with that caused by a newborn -- those wakenings, at least for me and my babies, always lasted an hour or more at a time. These wakenings are usually mercifully brief, except for an early morning one that generally lasts forty-five minutes to an hour, around  four a.m.

I'm a big sleeper -- love to sleep! Loved it before I had children. Love it even more now. And I need a lot of it. I've always needed more than the average eight hours a night. I need about nine to feel normal. And I'll happily steal ten if I can. I also like to read in bed, so those ten hours are, ideally, book-ended by a couple of hours lying there reading. Of course, this does not happen nearly often enough for my liking, not with two small children, and probably too often for David's. (The man is a saint. And he doesn't need very much sleep. And I haven't said a word about all the hockey lately. Isn't there some kind of playoff thingy going on?)

One of the subjects I like to read about in bed is, drum roll please: sleep. So this week, I absolutely devoured Patricia Morrisroe's new memoir of insomnia, Wide Awake. A magazine writer, Morrisroe, who is best known for her biography of Robert Mapplethorpe, has been an insomniac since childhood. She has no trouble falling asleep -- it takes her an enviable five minutes. It's staying asleep that's the problem. She generally wakes up for at least a couple of hours in the dead middle of the night. At least, she used to. Because during the writing of this book, which she decided to write in order to find a cure, she did indeed solve the problem of her insomnia.  This is actually quite surprising, given how unyielding the problem tends to be. The book belongs as much in the popular science genre as it does in the memoir category-- it is science made light, personal and, whenever possible, amusing. In fact, even though I'm utterly sleep-deprived at the moment, it actually kept me up, reading into the night for way too long.

For a little taste of Morrisroe on sleep, check out this article about how her mother-in-law, who is 87, takes advantage of her insomnia to work her way through the classics.

I like sleep so much, I've often thought of writing a novel about it. (I wrote "dreamed" instead of "thought" first and then changed it. That was too much of a groaner, even for me.) A novel about sleep would be exciting, huh? Here's a tiny flash I once wrote on the subject.

Also, if you like the subject of sleep and you haven't read Steven Millhauser's novella Enchanted Night, you really should. There's a lot more activity in it than just sleeping but it's very ... sleepy. And it beautifully evokes a small-town summer night.

If you know of any more really good books on the subject of sleep -- or somehow related to it -- please do drop me a line or leave a comment.

Babies After Bath

I like the hair.

A Day in the Life of Miss Sylvie

Check Out the Bedhead