crooked house

Edmund Dulac's The Real Princess

Edmund Dulac's The Real Princess (or the Princes and the Pea).

Sylvie's nickname is "Button." I think I should change it to "Pea."

I would like a copy of this illustration, I think, to hang on my bedroom wall. Artsy Craftsy has one for sale.

This particular illustration is mentioned in Patricia Morrisroe's Wide Awake, which I prattled on about in the previous post. Morrisroe and her husband spent a Christmas at the Ice Hotel in Swedish Lapland, where he presented her with a copy of Stories from Hans Christian Andersen. (I'm not sure if he presented her with the reproduction I linked to -- what a beautiful book at a good price -- or a first edition.)

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.

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.

Luke's Baby Records, Otherwise Known As The Books of Revelation

This morning Luke was tearing his bedroom apart, searching desperately for his Shrek gingerbread man toy from McDonald's, a toy he has not seen nor expressed an interest in for at least six months, and David and I were "helping" him, mostly by sitting around aimlessly, and feigning weak searching expressions whenever the child happened to glance at our faces. (This is a bit of a role reversal. When Luke recently lost something else, I told him to go look for it in the living room. Following him, I watched in disbelief as he literally whipped his head rapidly back and forth two or three times and then turned to shout to me, "No, Mama! I can't find it!" The difference is, I suppose, that he actually thought he was looking.)

Glancing desultorily in the closet, I happened upon those three binders pictured above and boy, did they take me back. Those three binders contain the record of Luke's first six to eight months or so. No, they're not full of pretty photographs and sweet anecdotes -- they're full of pages that look like this:

Those are daily time lines, in which we recorded what he ate and how long it took him, when he slept and for how long, when he fussed and for how long, episodes of gas and reflux, the contents of diaper changes, the time and duration of baths, and the many medications and doses he was given and anything else that seemed relevant at the time. A lot of sleep-deprived new mothers often keep a small notebook noting the last time the baby nursed, for instance, and on which breast he started, simply because it's hard to remember when you've not had more than two successive hours of uninterrupted sleep in weeks. There were three adults in our house not sleeping (me, David, and my mother) and we were often asked what felt like extremely complicated questions about Luke's schedule and habits when we made our frequent visits to the doctor or hospital. So my mom devised this system. The system was useful, too, for keeping everybody informed when we started having night nurses come in after six weeks. (The night nurses came in not because we are wealthy beyond belief or because, through the magic of the internet, I am writing to you from Victorian England. No, they came because Luke stopped breathing a few times at home, I started to go completely batty because I refused to sleep at all after that, and David has really great insurance at work.)

I was sifting through the pages and musing with no little trepidation on the new baby, when I happened upon this triumphant page:

On that page, dated October 13, 2005, is written "Yay! Yay! Yay! [Luke] slept NINE HOURS THRU NIGHT FIRST TIME EVER!! Gramma's visiting. She is MAGIC!" He was seven and a half months old. I'm sure I didn't manage to take advantage of those nine hours of peace and get a good night's sleep myself -- I would've been too busy checking every fifteen minutes to see if he was still breathing even though, of course, there was really no point in that. Because fifteen minutes would certainly allow for an unusually long pause between breaths. And the next night he reverted to his usual three or four hour night sleep. As I was reflecting on all this, I decided on the new baby's name: Apocalypse. Pretty, isn't it?

What With the Fatwa and All

Lilly McElroy is getting a lot of attention for the photographs in which she is throwing herself into the arms of strange men but I think I prefer the photos of her lying on the floor in her nightgown in "privately owned public spaces." I'm so tired I almost did that myself today during my pilgrimage to the Superstore. I couldn't sleep last night. I found myself lying in bed itchy and wide awake at 1 am. I drank a Pepsi at 6 pm. I can't have any caffeine after 4 or that's what happens. My mind was going like this, "Damn that Pepsi. I don't even like Pepsi. Pepsi. Lakshmi. Rushdie. That fool for women, Salman Rushdie, kissing Scarlett Johansson's neck in a video. He's old enough to be her grandfather. Why am I SO ITCHY! Goddamnit. Man, oh man, that Salman Rushdie IRRITATES me. What a tool. Scarlett Johansson is pretty."

For the record, I don't normally have particularly strong feelings about Salman Rushdie one way or the other. The poor man's had enough troubles, what with the fatwa and all. And: how could Scarlett Johansson doing Tom Waits covers turn out to be so boring? It just doesn't seem possible.