gaspode, doin it right.

it's all in the timing

We're sitting in a bar when Crowded House comes on the stereo.

 

Me: "Maddie listen: this is your musical heritage."

Maddie: "Mama", (gestures appropriately) "this is my bum!"

Baby talk

So sure, the kid says plenty of cute things. (Her latest thing is to start chanting "Let's Go Mets!" every time she sees t-ball being played in the playground across the street. Little does she know that those kids could probably sub in fine. Poor Mets.) But it's not the cute things that I really like. It's the baby neologisms and mispronounciations. At the same time that we are trying to correct them, I'm secretly mourning everyone that gets lost.

 

One of the earliest was last Christmas. Maddie was quite an early talker, and had a bunch of words by then, when she was about 15 months old. She was fascinated with the snowmen ornaments on her grandparents' tree. The word for snowman for the next six or eight months was "nee-noo". Yep, nee-noo. Before that even, when she was just starting to vocalize with meaning was "Bigh" (to rhyme with high). It took us a while to work that out. It meant "help!" She'd be trying to pull herself up, and going "bigh, bigh!" until we came over to her. Or when we were trying to get a tight sweater over her head she'd sob "bigh! bigh!" until she peekabooed out the top. The other one that persisted for a long time was the renaming of Beaker the muppet (who she loves) "mee-mee" after way too many viewings of the Ode to Joy vid on youtube.

 

Now, as she moves into complete sentences, she's losing all of that. It's great to be able to communicate more effectively, but it's sad to be losing something so very singular to her.

It only comes around once a year.

Last year and this year I recieved a brilliant birthday gift from Steve: a complete Saturday to myself. No kid, no husband. A whole day to do whatever the hell I want.

 

It's an interesting, and I guess slightly depressing thing I suppose, that a mother who does not stay at home with her kid - hell, I only see her for about 4 hours a day during the week - would need a day completely to herself, but there you go. It's less the physical proximity and more the mental release. Because even when I'm at working and she's at daycare, I'm still thinking about her. I think about Maddie all the damn time. It's exhausting. One of the nice things about this Saturday off is that for some reason I was able to completely switch off in a way that I don't normally do, even when I'm working, even when she's asleep in her crib.

 

Last year a good portion of my day was spent just sitting in a cafe with a book. Because I could. And if I'd wanted to, I could have sat there all day. It rocked.

 

This year I had a few plans. I had a gift card for a spa, so I planned on getting a massage. And because the spa was around the corner from MoMA, I planned to go there afterwards, and eat lunch at The Modern, the associated restaurant. So I structured my day around that. Being a parent now, I was out of the house by 8.30, refreshed at my sleep-in and late start to the day (!) Started off with porridge for breakfast, from Sarabeth's. They do good porridge. Nom.

 

I had an hour or so to spare so I walked the couple of miles down to the spa, where I got pummelled for an hour or so, until all the knots in my shoulders and legs were gone. Lovely. Decided against going to MoMA (screw culture!) so I just went to The Modern for lunch and had delicious mahi-mahi and Marlborough savignon blanc. I was meeting my friend Helen for afternoon cocktails, so had a few hours to kill and just wandered around downtown, browsing in stores as the mood took me. I can never do that! So exciting.

 

Afternoon and evening were just chilling with Helen, chatting for a few hours about lots of stuff. I drank too much alcohol, of course, but did get to introduce Helen to Pimms and ginger ale, a great mixed drink if you don't want to faff around making  a Pimms cup.

 

Happy, relaxing times all around. Everyone needs a day off life now and then.

"Mama's bread, Daddy's bread, MY bread!"

We had our first family dinner last night.

So, the one thing that gets mentioned over and over when talking about family dynamics is the importance of eating together as a family unit. Well, I don't know anyone with toddlers that eats together. I pick Maddie up from daycare between 5 and 5.15. She goes into the bath at 7, and to bed at 7.30. Steve gets home from work between 6 and 6.30. When was I supposed to cook dinner, and when were we supposed to eat it? So typically, I would prepare Maddie dinner, she'd eat around 5.30 or 6, depending on whether we would go to the playground, and then we'd play until bathtime. After Maddie went to bed, I'd start cooking for Steve and I at around 8pm and we'd eat anywhere between 8 and 9.

 

But the other day, she insisted that I sit with her and eat. And the next day she did the same as well. So Steve and I decided to overhaul our evenings such that we now have a family dinner. The deal is that I'll prepare dinner during the afternoon, so it will be all done when I pick Maddie up. We'll aim to be eating around 6.15, as Steve walks in the door. Just call me June Cleaver (RIP). (Heh, maybe better off calling me Betty (Draper) Francis. Hand me the wine.) It means that I will have to work in the evenings for an hour or so to make up the time, but that's just time that I would have spent on our dinner anyway. It worked out well yesterday. I made a chickpea and chicken stew that I knew Maddie would like (chunks of carrot and macaroni in it equals big fun) and she sat in her new booster seat (farewell, high chair) and pointed out everything that she ate with a big grin on her face.

 

Here's hoping it continues.

Weirdly enough, this was something that I was discussing not two days ago with some friends.

OK. I realised that despite the fact that I have not updated my vox blog since Maddie was born, that the thought of the blog going *poof* into the ether made me sad. So I moved it, and am thinking about starting to update again.

yay?

Miss Madeleine

Has already demonstrated a decided joy at screaming at 4am, a love for her car seat, and ten tons of cuteness.

Due date going, going...

September 7th has nearly left us, so our daughter is officially "late". Of course, late is a complete misnomer, given that the whole 40 weeks thing is just an estimate (arbitrarily decided in the early part of the 20th century), but there is still something about having a concrete date, and not hitting it.

We are being assiduous with our application of completely unvalidated home remedies to induce labor. Nicely summed up with "hot sex, hot food, hot bath". Somehow my taste buds have adapted because on Friday I wolfed down a vindaloo that my husband couldn't eat more than a bite from.

At least she didn't come yesterday on my birthday.

Palin has raised $8m... for Obama

Obama's coffers have been filling since Sarah Palin attacked him repeatedly in St. Paul last night.

An Obama aide confirms Drudge's report that Obama has raised about $8 million from more than 130,000 donors and is on pace to raise $10 million by the time McCain reaches the stage tonight.

UPDATE: Obama spokesman Bill Burton says, "Sarah Palin's attacks have rallied our supporters in ways we never expected. And we fully expect John McCain's attacks tonight to help us make our grassroots organization even stronger."

via

Rudy Giuliani's speech at the RNC

You know, I rarely actually write anything about politics, never here, and rarely on the community blogs I frequent. It's primarily because I'm not the best writer in the world, and usually because someone has said what I want to say better than I could anyway. But all morning I've been dying to write something about Giuliani's speech last night. I haven't been able to formulate a good way to write it without sounding like it's straight out of the metafilter echo chamber. so I'm not going to write one here. But this comment from Douglas Rushkoff's blog, quoted in the thread, sums up what I want to say.

I felt a bit nauseous watching the Republican convention last night. I’m very much a give-the-benefit-of-the-doubt kind of guy, so I try to listen to the arguments people make even when they’re made in over-the-top or patronizing ways. Sometimes it’s good to distinguish between the rhetorical devices and the underlying substance. Even people who use manipulative language sometimes have an important point beneath their persuasion techniques (ads against smoking, for example).

I usually don’t feel uneasy when I put those filters on, but last night - during the Guiliani speech - I realized I was no longer filtering a speechwriter’s intentional manipulation; I was trying to look beyond real hate. These folks were gritting their teeth, shaking their fists, and smiling the way gladiators do when going into combat against barbarians. And this is the incumbent party. The ones currently in power.

What is it they hate? Guiliani and Palin both made it pretty clear: community organizing. Community organizing is energized from below. From the periphery. It is the direction and facilitation of mass energy towards productive and cooperative ends. It is about replacing conflict with collaboration. It is the opposite of war; it is peace.