Chez Moi

Today's thought experiment: if I ran a cafe, what would it be like?

• There would be high chairs, and a little nook with toys for the roaming variety of little bean
• Comfy couches, powerpoints,wifi
• Hot chocolates made from real melted chocolate
• Tea would be loose leaf
• Free refills
• Cakes would be small - no one need brick-sized wads of the stuff
• Food mainly vegetarian, with options available for the dairy/egg/gluten-free proportion of the population
• Magazines! Games! Pens and scribbling paper!
• Wheel chair accessible toilets and a separate baby change room

...if anyone happens to know of such a magical place, let me know.

Dream On, Baby

It's been a day of dreams! First I find out one of my ladee friends had an action- and anxiety-packed dream involving me and some apple pie, and then I came across this, the best maternity leave project, ever: Mila's Daydreams. Lovely, creative scenes built around a sleeping baby. This photo is one of my favourites:

 

Small Screen Families

I've yet again been struck by how good the British are at television comedy. Now, as much as part of me wants this post to descend into joke bingo (I ate all your bees! Hairy inquisitive sex octopus with concealement crevices! This is an ex-parrott!), more recently I've actually been thinking about the programs that are less jokey and more about relationships, in a more realistic and down-to-earth way than most comedies.

For she's a jolly good fellow...

Today was a somewhat sad day: my buddy Sandra is moving back to Germany, so we had a last quick catch-up at uni with lots of friends. Sandra and I met at a scholarships information session the year before we started our studies, we've been office neighbours all this time, lived along the same street for a while (okay, so it's a long street), did the teaching Internship and worked on Limina at the same time, and we both had Big things happen to us last year. I've met lots of charming, witty and sparkly people through her and my postgrad experience has been better for her presence.

Perth will be a gloomier place without Sandra.



(on an unrelated, but cheerier note: Sebastian curled up to sleep tonight cuddling... a spoon.)

Uncluttererising Part Two; or The One Where I Say Bad Things About Books

The uncluttering project is going slowly. It's hard to organise things when you're also trying to keep a crawler away from powercords or from eating all those important bits of paper and/or the dead bugs that accumulate behind piles of said important papers. Things are in that stage where, if you know what you're looking for, you can tell there is order among the chaos, but if you don't all you can see is chaos.

Sunday reading

I got Outi Heiskanen's Tehtävä Suomessa on interlibrary loan, although in that frustrating version that only allows access to the book inside the library. So I spent my Sunday afternoon  in the library, reading about Finland in films by non-Finns, such as Helsinki playing Moscow or St Petersburg during the Cold War.*

Uncluttererising

I'm taking some inspiration from Unclutterer and sorting through the study. It's a mess, with bits and bobs everywhere - even when I  have organised things in the past I tend to end up with a "misc." pile. One misc. pile on top of another, time passes... problems develop. Not all of the clutter is mine, of course (like the computer gadgetry and physics textbooks from the early 1990s...), so I can only really sort through my own stuff, but here's hoping that I can at least clear my workspace, sort out my side of the bookcases and be all super-productive and organised come next semester.

...When I venture back into teaching. Eeep!

Old Spice Magic

I hadn't seen the Old Spice The Man Your Man Could Smell Like ad until last week, when the Gruen Transfer featured it. But see it I did, and loved it. I want two tickets to that thing I love!

And yesterday the dashing Mr Internet, Tama Leaver, wrote about the Old Spice campaign getting cleverer than clever, with the Old Spice Man replying to people's comments on the ad here.

I could link to individual ones 'till the cows come home, but I won't. Except just a couple.

Try Gillette and poor taste, jhodsdon on the ladies, and - in reference to my previous, boob-themed post - RobbieBrewer and the old Spice man as a baby.

Great Boob's up!*

Over the past couple of days I've read Alison Bartlett's Breastwork and Fiona Giles' Fresh Milk, both fascinating studies of breastfeeding and its various social and cultural values. I loved getting different perspectives on the process, particularly when, for the large part, the main 'issues' around breastfeeding seem to be whether it's ok to do it in public or how to support women who want to breastfeed but have difficulties in getting started, without making women who can't or won't breastfeed feel inadequate.

...and "action"!

I'm sorting through references and notes, moving things around, changing the structure, looking at all the chapters at the same time and feeling a strange sort of buzz. This is going to get done, not now or next week, but it will be done. And it's exciting.

Even so, I'd much rather the whole writing process could just be replaced with a an action-packed writing montage. Set to It's a Kind of Magic.

***

One dream one soul one prize one goal
One golden glance of what should be
Its a kind of magic

 [...]

The rage that lasts a thousand years
Will soon be done

Woe is me!

Why is it that ideas come together at 1am, when I should be in bed, knowing that I won't be able to get down to kneading the bastard of a thesis tomorrow morning, either?


Curses to you, Muse.

A rhizome by any other name...

Danica reminded me today that I had promised to explain where the name "Siberian Ginseng" came from, but had not yet delivered. The shame!

Frostbyte

December 2008, Nurmo.

Do you hear the people sing, singing the song of...

...Eurovisions past? I have the scaffolding of a Eurovision Song Contest article tucked away in one of my folders, and it beckons me. What is a girl to do?

Not Guilty, Your Honour

Yesterday, somewhere in-between leaving the house and sitting in a cafe drinking a weak latte and aiming spoonfuls of yoghurt at the boy, I realised something: I don't feel guilty.

A message from our sponsors...

I've been amazed at how quickly the 'targeted adverts' in the sidebar change. Yesterday the ads were all about doing Master's degrees and "buy your assignment here" (sigh), now it's sleep solutions for baby. Technology, I am in awe of you.

Nap time

...the boy's, that is. I'm going to try and make the most of what have become more or less predictable sleeping routines over the past couple of weeks. He usually goes down for about half an hour around nine, having woken up between six and seven. The next nap is longer, about an hour and a half, after lunch.

So, the grand plan shall be to try to get up a blog post in the morning, and do something thesis-y during the afternoon nap. Here's hoping it turns out as achievable in reality as it sounds plausible in theory...*

While I'm here I might as well put down some thoughts on the whole sleep issue with babies. The holy grail of parenthood (in the first year at least) seems to be getting the baby to "sleep through", which basically means the baby goes to sleep at night and doesn't wake his parents up before morning. Everyone wakes up during the night to some degree and has periods of lighter sleep, but adults don't tend to remember waking up because they know how to resettle themselves back to sleep very easily. Babies can't automatically do that, and often need help getting back to sleep. Add to that the fact that small babies also need to be fed every couple of hours, particularly when breastfed, it means that parents do have to be resigned to some level of sleep deprivation.

The first month or so of new parenthood is pretty gruesome, but after a while you do get used to waking up frequently - to the point that one night when the baby slept for a magical four hours straight, my husband and I still woke up after three and waited around to be "needed". And for the most part waking up frequently to breastfeed a baby wasn't that bad, particularly when Ben would get up and bring the Wee One over and take him back again. (In case anyone ever tries to convince you breastfeeding is only something mothers do, that's only half the truth: dads can make a huge difference in how well the whole thing works)

After a while, though, it becomes clear that the baby doesn't 'need' you in any real way as often as he wakes up, but is simply used to waking up and being helped back to sleep. For us that point came when we realised that, given he's eating at least three solid meals a day, he couldn't possibly be as hungry during the night as he was as an exclusively breastfed baby.

We used a fairly flexible reading of Save Our Sleep and The New Contended Little Baby Book, and the 'tricks' that worked for us were

• bedtime routine (dinner, bath, breastfeed, cuddle) followed by putting the fully awake baby into his own bed (still in our room, though)
• ignore the protest and tired cries
• if he starts crawling around in bed or gets genuinely distressed, we help him settle down (without picking him up) and stay with him until he falls asleep
• regular nap times during the day, no sleeping after 4pm until bed time
• regular meals during the day
• 'dream feed' at around 10-11 pm, although we dropped that after a week or so

We had a couple of nights when he would clearly be offended at not being picked up and fed as he had been up until that point, but that was it: he was offended, angry even, but not hungry or distressed. Soon he started settling reasonably easily, and would, as a rule, sleep for about eleven hours without needing us in between. The last couple of nights have strayed from the pattern a bit given he's coughing a lot, but by and large I think we've 'succeeded'.

I'm aware that for some people the methods we used (and the bit about ignoring certain cries in particular) amount to letting him "cry it out", which - if you believe some of the horror stories - is evil and sadistic. Although I don't know whether any "sleep expert" actually advocates leaving distressed babies to scream themselves to sleep, which is what the perception seems to be. The argument goes that babies cry to communicate, not to manipulate, which is of course true. The thing is, though, that babies don't always communicate the same thing with every cry. They have cries that don't need to be attended immediately, or in the same ways, and as hard as it can be listening to any kind of cry, if the reward for treating different cries differently is everyone having a better sleep the benefits would seem to outweight the inconveniences.



*so far, not so good: I've been adding to and editing this post while rescuing Boy Wonder from the fireplace. Shorter posts must be in order!

Fifth Annual Limina Conference

Limina is a peer-reviewed online journal of historical and cultural studies run by postgraduate students at the University of Western Australia, and yesterday the collective hosted its fifth conference together with the Institute of Advanced Studies. I was a member of the collective for a couple of years, so I was duty-bound to attend. Also, I like Limina conferences.

An opening.

I'm still in the process of tweaking the layout and appearance here, and deciding on the right blogging "voice", so it will probably take some time for momentum to build, but one has to start somewhere.

The purpose of this blog is to bring together some of my thoughts on and approaches to scavenging around for a career, for want of a better word, that feels right and fits in with the rest of me. I dislike the term "work-life balance", mainly because it often seems to be only applied to women with children, but also because it implies that the two are discreet entities and the challenge is in juggling them. The real challenge is finding work that enhances life.

So, with that in mind, up and atom!