Below are the 20 most recent journal entries recorded in tikiwanderer's LiveJournal:

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Monday, July 20th, 2009
7:44 am	Two more speech moments... I spend a lot of time with the Spud singing, talking, listening to voices on the radio, making silly sounds. She loves it, loves listening to stuff. Consequently her speech and communication skills are developing just fine, and she's starting to attempt to "talk" back to us now. This is leading to a few cool things. For instance, this weekend we started getting yells instead of cries. Instead of crying because she wanted something, she started yelling at us, with quite clear intonations and variation of pitch. We still didn't know what she wanted, which made her a little grumpy, but it was a definite change of emotion and action to normal. And a good one, because it means crying will continue to be for problems/discomfort/upset rather than just general communication. Two particularly cool things from yesterday: I told her we were going out to the Organ Pipes National Park, because there was lots of cool geology out there, and said "Can you say 'anticline'?". She gave me one of her happy smiles and said "Aaaaaa". James cracked up and said "Well, that's the first syllable". I started laughing too, and said "Close, little spud, close. Now, can you say 'polysyllabic'?" Then, last night, James and Sparrow started having one of the becoming-more-frequent conversations. She'll say things in murmurs and coos and it's usually just reactive, but *this* was an attempt to actually say something more abstract and not just an emotional communication. So after they'd cooed and murmured at each other for a while, James said to me "You know what's weird? We just had a conversation and I think we understood each other for all of it. And the weird thing is that we were both talking in Baby." (1 Comment |Comment on this)
Sunday, July 19th, 2009
7:48 pm	Visiting Brian Sparrow and I visited ozraptor4 on Friday, to say a last hello before he heads to Perth and then to a job in China. It was great. James and I already make a game of saying to Sparrow "Can you say XXX?", where XXX is any word that is unreasonably long with a complicated meaning that has to do with what we're talking about at that moment. Like "secondary industry", or "statistical deviation", or "recalcitrant" (that was a description of me :-). Mostly they're terms from maths, physics or psychology. With Brian suddenly the biology and nature sciences got a huge look in. Sparrow was a little wriggly when we arrived, so he started picking up random things to distract her. I think it was a model Diplomystus she was introduced to first, before we got into lunch - but that was after meeting Drake the Morelia, or carpet python - and gosh, did that generate smiles. On Sparrow's part, that is - Drake seemed a little puzzled by the tiny funny-smelling human. But Sparrow loved him. Can you say "herpetologist"? Brian and I had our lunch, as usual two very different kinds of sandwiches... can you say "ecological niche partitioning"? Then she needed a change and a feed. I couldn't help but laugh. Next to where I was sitting feeding her Brian had a pile of fossils on the floor that he was packing up, and he started picking them up and showing them to her and explaining what they were, how and when they lived and all about them. She was so fascinated she kept forgetting she was in the middle of feeding. They were just the coolest thing EVER. I was amused by this, but what got me laughing was when he ran out of fossils and picked up the next thing immediately to hand - a can of Brut deodorant - explained it with the same kind of style and scientific detail, and she gave it exactly the same fascinated this-is-better-than-a-nipple look that she'd given the fossils... (4 Comments |Comment on this)
Saturday, July 18th, 2009
2:20 pm	For the grammarians... I saw this bumper sticker the other day: I'd Rather Be Fishi'n Not Working and I thought, well, *I'd* rather be driving a car with rocket grenade launchers behind the headlights so I could erase that sticker from the face of the planet. But hey, we all make sacrifices. (7 Comments |Comment on this)
10:26 am	And another story... Here is Samoyekhre. Like the others, I wrote this pretty much in one hit, then sat back, looked at it, said "I can't believe I had this in my head" and refused to have anything more to do with it. No submissions, no looking for publication, just filed it as "writing practice". I don't like this story. Well, that's not quite true: I love the setting, the character interaction, a lot of the little details. It's a very vivid place and time. I just don't like the story's premise. I prefer things that are a little more lighthearted or joyous, and this one's blacker than I like by a long way, and not in one of the "nice" black ways either. If you're like me in that regard by all means read this story, but stop when he leaves the restaurant and don't bother with what happens next. For me that was the ruin of the story, even if I was the one who wrote it down. (3 Comments |Comment on this)
Friday, July 17th, 2009
8:11 am	Here's one of those unpublished stories if you want to read it Doing the first lines meme reminded me that I had this story to do something with. I finished it over two years ago, but never submitted it anywhere. Firstly, I wasn't sure it was good enough - it's sort of a curious style and I'm not sure it hefts enough mass somehow, though maybe that's me being culturally sexist and not sufficiently valuing a feminine manner of story construction. Not sure. The other big reason for never submitting it was that shortly after I wrote it, a very well marketed and prominent piece of pop culture media was released that had a sufficiently similar premise to the twist in this story to make the story suddenly entirely predictable to a reader instead of potentially surprising and interesting. It's now been long enough that it might possibly be less predictable enough to be worth reading. Maybe. I'm putting it up online anyway, for those of you who feel like reading something short and fluffy instead of working today :-) Enjoy (or not -grin-)! (5 Comments |Comment on this)
Thursday, July 16th, 2009
6:19 pm	First lines meme As on angriest and dalekboy: first lines of published works and works in progress (note that "works" is fiction, not including my science writing): (published) Birder When I first saw the yellow flash out of the corner of my eye, I thought it was a bird. (finished but not published, or not submitted anywhere) The Interview The sign wedged into the door said "Kronos Trucking – We Run On Time". Samoyekhre The street was the usual mix of lights and grime, people coming off duty and going on duty, staggering home to bed or heading out for a party of a night. You Can Take It They were wrong. Red Jacket Man The two boys crawled up the bank, pushing through the prickly bush. The Song of the Dark and Cold Darkness. (in progress far enough to have a first line) The mysterious art of Genka-fui When my new neighbour moved in, I said hello over the fence. (Huh. Seems that the key stories I have in my head, like the Scrambles kids or Kingston SE, are still only in scrap form, without a real beginning yet. Not surprising, though - I tend to write short stories in very intense bursts that leave me with something very close to a complete first draft in one hit.) (2 Comments |Comment on this)
Monday, July 13th, 2009
12:03 pm	The future ruler of the world begins her training... New photos here, of us wandering around with Grandma, visiting Parliament House and preparing to take over the world... (Comment on this)
Saturday, July 11th, 2009
7:37 am	Sand (in the movies) We watched Spaceballs the other night, for the first time in a long time. Certainly the first time since I started learning to track. You know how they've parodied a dune sequence, with the characters stumbling through the masses of empty baking desert until they find the secret hideout of Yoghurt? I laughed most of the way through it. Once you start paying attention to things like tracking, these scenes look so different. Tom Brown Jr mentions this in his Case Studies of the Tracker book, about how after working as technical adviser on the movie Hunted many of the movie crew who'd been paying attention to what he did with tracks, tracking and cleaning up had picked up enough understanding to be able to count takes in some movie scenes. And this scene was the first time I really got to do that myself. If you watch the shots carefully, you'll see that they've tried to hide anywhere where they've done multiple takes. They've tried not to be obvious. But in one shot when the light on the sand is glaring white so that no outlines show, watch the edges of their shadows as they ripple behind the characters. There's tracks aplenty in that. In another shot you can see where they've smoothed out the sand to hide evidence of a previous take - probably by running a sheet of cardboard over it or similar, and not very evenly. I spent most of the dune sequence laughing, and for a completely different reason than James (who turned around afterwards and said "Tracking geek!"...). So yeah, if you want to practice spotting tracks in a movie, that sequence isn't a bad one to start with. (Comment on this)
Friday, July 10th, 2009
12:34 pm	To drug or not to drug... I've always been of the rough opinion that giving infants painkiller drugs like Panadol was overkill and more often about fussy parents than an actual problem of the infant's. And then yesterday I for some incredibly stupid reason in hindsight decided to book Mum and myself in for High Tea at Parliament House, having been invited by the Sarjeant-at-Arms no less, on the afternoon of the day that Sparrow had her first vaccinations. Sparrow followed a fairly typical pattern for babies who've just been vaccinated - cried when it happened, settled down with a feed, went to sleep, was drowsy for a few hours and stayed fairly settled - and then about five hours later woke up with a grizzling, inconsolably howling vengeance. This awakening coincided pretty much perfectly with our arrival in the hushed, ornate, 23-carat-gold-leafed and Edwardian-painted beautiful halls of Parliament House and our settling down into the leather benches, red velvet chairs, dark wood panelling and white starched napkins of Strangers' Corridor. After much walking up and down with her, changing her nappy, attempting a few times to feed or provide something to suck, it became obvious that she was tired and hungry, but too achy, hot and uncomfortable to either sleep or feed. Twenty minutes and one bare-minimum-dose of baby Panadol later, she'd settled down to the point where she could smile, and then fell asleep and stayed that way for the rest of the High Tea, our following walking-tour of Parliament House, our walk through the city afterwards and most of the train journey home. It would have been the entire train journey, but we got Connexed so there was an extra half-hour transit time in there. So, as described by the nurse and other mums, baby Panadol is certainly a magical thing in that regard. I had it with me at the nurse's recommendation, as it's what they suggest if she starts to run a fever, just to bring her temperature back down to a safe level. The nurse also said that while you don't give it as a matter of course, if she gets to a point where she can't feed it's worth it to settle her down so that she doesn't dehydrate. She wasn't in danger of dehydrating yet, but it did bring her back to a point where all the vaccination reactions were manageable for her. So I think giving her the dose was definitely the right thing to do. She only had the one, and has stayed mostly OK if a little more unsettled than usual since. But I still have questions of myself. And the answers aren't necessarily internally consistent, having disliked painkillers generally but having never had to face this situation before. For instance: if we had been in a university cafeteria instead of Parliament House, would I have gone ahead and drugged her to sleep? I'm not sure. There was a certain degree of social pressure, not applied by others but perceived by us, that in such a formal setting howling was inappropriate. So perhaps I moved to give her the painkillers sooner than I would have in someplace less formal and more noisy like a cafeteria. Would I have dosed her if I was at home? Maybe not - I would have accepted the howling for a much longer period, and perhaps she would have cried herself to sleep given another half hour. Another half-hour wouldn't have bothered my nerves at all at home, but it did given where we were. If it was an animal and not my daughter, would I have dosed her? Instantly. I don't believe in giving animals unnecessary pain, especially when it's not got an obvious cause - it had been five hours since the actual vaccination, and how would you explain to an unhappy dog that something five hours ago was causing the uncomfortable hot achiness they felt now? Why do I feel differently about animals and infants? I don't know. I just know that I have more of a tendency to say "Toughen up, Princess" to humans, even ones that can't talk yet. Would I drug her for something else if she was in pain? Not necessarily - most ordinarily-encountered pain is probably something she can and should learn to weather through. But a vaccination has that problem, as above, of not easily linking cause and effect so there's an obvious-to-parent cause of the pain (and a reason which is probably worth treating), but it's not obvious to her. She's just unhappy and uncomfortable. Am I happy with having given her Panadol? In this case, yes, though it does give me reason to ask these questions. (9 Comments |Comment on this)
Monday, July 6th, 2009
12:41 pm	Two other things I've found hard I didn't have the right words for these in the other post about hard things, but now I think I do. The next thing I've found hard is, as I'd expected, the relentlessness of it. I've never been great at long-term commitments, be it research projects, permanent employment, or relationships. Y'know, play, work or love. Doesn't matter, they're all things I've had trouble dealing with if they come with the "until forever" clause, or even just a "do this and nothing else for at least two years" clause. I have a compulsive need to do as many things as possible, variety and diversity, all at once, high energy, broad focus. My marriage to James survives largely because I had to admit to myself that if I still liked him this much after twelve years we might as well make a habit of it and I shouldn't be afraid to sign up for lots of adventures with him just in case I got stuck with him. Cos, you know, I'll probably like all the adventures I have with him so more is OK, really. The other reason our marriage survives easily is because he's very patient, and understands that I'm not really containable, I just don't want to go anywhere else. He's very good at encouraging this attitude too. (Was I supposed to admit that I know he does that? Oops... never mind.) Thing with Sparrow though is it's really All The Time. 24 hours, 7 days. I knew this, I knew it would be hard, but the reality of it is just occasionally a bit challenging. As long as I'm her sole provider of food I need to be around, or carefully arrange the times that I'm not so that she's covered. I'm also, because this is what "food" means, the primary provider of warmth, cuddles, attention and security, though James does as much of that as he can as well. The last bit is the hardest - I am not really security-oriented, and looking to me to provide that is an exercise in silliness. But she doesn't have a choice in needing it from me, and so help me I don't have a choice in providing it either. Even if what I really want to do is sleep, read, work, exorcise the stories from my head, or go worship quietly in the forest. So much for solitude, and for getting the noise of people out of my head. She will always be there now. I find this a bit stressful, not least because it has no end. The other thing that's been hard is that I have trouble finding myself sexy. Classic post-natal issue, I know. But so much of my life's been built around a very confident and sexy self-image, and now the sexy half of that really isn't there. I can't really remind myself that I'm sexy either, at least not in the normal ways. For instance, I have to work fairly hard to strike a pose in front of a mirror that I think shows my current curves in any kind of glamourous light. I can't wear any of my lingerie because none of it fits. (To be fair, a lot of it didn't fit already seeing as it was bought when I was 18 and a size 8, but there was still plenty of more recent stuff that did. Now it's all too small, tops and bottoms.) My stomach muscles are still pretty shot, and my fitness low and my back sore, so my movement's pretty ordinary and highly restricted - none of the half-dancing walking or hugging that a lot of you would associate with me. I just can't do it. Instead I walk around the house trying desperately to uncrunch myself enough to stand up straight and not wince with each step. So the strategies I use to tease and flirt aren't really there. I went out for a walk the other day and realised that I was wearing black stretch pants stretched a little too far, a skivvy, and a big bloppy blouse open at the front that hid the lines of belly and thighs, and thought "Hey, this is exactly the classic overweight-middle-aged-woman's outfit stereotype". That led to a certain amount of misery, because at the moment between my excess weight and the frequent need to breastfeed it's all I can wear comfortably. And I don't think it looks good, it just solves the problem of what to wear at this time and season without me having to go buy a whole bunch of new clothes. So, meh. I will be going shopping at the ABA's shop in Malvern next week, I think, and possibly studying the offerings online at Hot Milk, because I know it's possible to dress a lot more nicely than I am and I'd really like to do that again. (5 Comments |Comment on this)
8:40 am	Old photos I pulled out the photo album from my first six years, looking for a comment my mother had made about wearing stretch shirts to include in a different post. I haven't found that yet, but I did find some interesting things. First, Sparrow definitely looks a lot more like James than me at this age. Her cheeks are much rounder and chubbier. Interestingly, I also look like I had longer legs at eight weeks, but that may be more of a difference in the nappies - while we're both photographed wearing cloth, I'm in the old folded flannel style, folded in a form which looks like it's about to fall off and which my mother comments is a way of folding she's stopped using because it wasn't working so well but that's how the hospital had done it. Regardless, I've got my legs out straight. Sparrow tends to be a bit bandy-legged in the nappies we have her in, and that hides her actual leg length. I also noted that as an infant I looked very much like my father. I grew to a face shape that is distinctly that of our female line, mother to daughter for at least four generations, but the influence of my father's appearance is quite strong. The last thing I noticed was a comment from a photo at my first or second Christmas, probably second. There's a big blue inflatable plastic elephant next to me, and Mum comments that it was my present, but I haven't really played with it because I prefer real things to toys. I still have this preference to give children real things to play with rather than faked-up or artificial toys, and I thought it was an adult opinion that came from my experience with education and early childhood and science and stuff. You know, a rational thing based on providing rich and complex stimuli with subtleties that relate directly to experiences rather than strong-but-over-simplified stimuli that don't relate to the world around you. But no, apparently I've believed this since I was only a few months old. Heh. (Comment on this)
Sunday, July 5th, 2009
10:23 am	Because I'm still thinking about it angriest asked if we'd won the 90 million in last week's lotto, what would we honestly do with it? It's something I've thought about on a number of occasions, though not usually with as high an amount. Now, I didn't win anything - I paid the tax on people who don't understand statistics like most people. But because I've spent plenty of time thinking about it, a lot of the details are starting to form. So I thought I'd put my answer here, or at least where it's up to. There's three stages. The first, like most people, is to stabilise the housing arrangements of ourselves and senior relatives, though with the added thing of setting them up sustainably water- and energy-wise. So, buy a house and redo/renovate it for sustainable living someplace where we'd actually want to live, cover outstanding mortgage debts or set aside money to do so when my mother hits retirement age in a few years, install water tanks and solar panels or wind turbines, rebuild for passive solar, etc etc as needed. Second stage is to gift in the direction of certain non-profits that I support. Focused gifts, to help them try and achieve certain of their aims. CERES, to employ an appropriate green technology person and keep going on some good projects as well as renovate / maintain some existing ones. The Alternative Technology Association, for some of their high-urban-penetration projects like the distributed wind power research they've been doing (and again, include salary). And lastly the Tracker School, in particular to support them running a standard course in Australia (if that's what they honestly want to do) - which involves a bunch of capital for the local research, shipping and instructor flights, and to set up the basic infrastructure to host a full class of 100+ students for a week's intensive without damaging whatever bush area they're in. Each of these three non-profits does good work at getting large numbers of people to improve their life quality, increase their sustainability and reduce their impact on the Earth. The third stage is the big one, and where most of the cash would end up going. The overall aim is to support the small communities of Western Australia to increase their sustainability and reduce their reliance on the greater infrastructure. There's several things I could do, depending on how much money I actually had, and what projects local councils were willing to get involved in - I'm not one to force new development on people because then it doesn't get used. The projects would also include funding for training locals to maintain utilities and provide services, if locals willing to undertake the training were present - the aim being to make whatever goes in something that can continue to be used for twenty years. Some of the possibilities that I've thought through for this third stage: * Set up a research project, fund and company to design, engineer and build appropriate and sustainable power sources for interested towns in the WA wheatbelt, to create distributed power sources and make shires as self-sufficient energy-wise as possible. (I'm thinking solar thermal ponds using salt water from the groundtable, biomass using oil mallee plantation leavings, wind power, or whatever seems appropriate for each area.) * Convert Narrogin into a Solar City with solar panels on most houses and businesses. (I worked out once it would be possible to do this with I think it was about one million dollars, if the townspeople were willing to be part of such an initiative. I know the council would support it - they said so when I asked them for details for doing the math.) * Develop a series of electric car charging points at suitable distances down the Albany Highway, Brand Highway and SouthWestern Highway in WA, that were solar powered but grid-connected. The project would involve local councils and also include training people in local towns for electric car repair/support. * Build self-powered / self-watered nursing stations in the smaller places, that can be used either by permanent nursing staff or by a district nurse on a regular circuit as the council thinks appropriate. (I can't provide the nurses or fix the shortage, but I can make sure the infrastructure is in place to provide an outlet for basic health needs). * Invest in communications infrastructure in country areas, so that there's less cherry-picking in who gets the better services. What I mean is, you don't just get the good quality services in the places where there's a high density of people to pay/compete for them. This could also include support for 24 hour health-related phone support lines, in a combination with the above point. Sure, I can't do all of this with 90 million. But I figure I could get a few five-million 1 MW power stations around the place, and some new nurse stations to boot. (6 Comments |Comment on this)
Saturday, July 4th, 2009
2:27 pm	Milestones Some folk record baby's first this, or baby's first that, be it shoes, babycino or (shudder) drink of Coke. Fair enough, we are too. So what are we recording for Sparrow? Uhh... well... today for the first time she attempted to sing along to Daddy doing Swedish Chef noises, and for the first time heard the phrase "quantum tunnelling" used correctly in a sentence. Today our daughter is eight weeks old. -grin- On another note, this morning a group of roadworkers were installing speed humps in front of the new crosswalk out front of us. So I took Sparrow out in the grey light of a Melbourne winter dawn to watch the cars, buses and trucks maneouvering around all the bright fluorescent orange markers and people. This led to me giving Sparrow a discourse on the atomic physics underlying fluorescence (which is where the quantum tunnelling mentioned above came in). Eventually she started getting restless - fair enough, it was cold. I said to her "Shall we keep watching the men in funny orange shirts while Mummy discourses on atomic physics?" and she said "Wak!", which is Sparrow for "Stop getting distracted and pay attention, Mummy". She says that to me a lot -sigh-. So we went inside to the warm for another course of breakfast. (Comment on this)
Friday, July 3rd, 2009
11:32 am	Sparrow helps with the housework Sparrow helps with the housework - photo and story page (3 Comments |Comment on this)
Wednesday, July 1st, 2009
10:08 am	What I've found hard There are a lot of things new parents are supposed to find hard, and I get asked about these a bit in casual conversation. Easy topic of conversation, you see, especially from people who haven't had kids themselves. Understandable, I used to do it too. They aren't the things I've found hard though. Sleeping? I get plenty of sleep. The first two weeks were rough, but after that it's been fine - I usually get between six and seven hours of sleep, and after the first month that was only broken up into two blocks most nights, so that's been plenty. Nappies? No issue. I keep cycling the laundry through in the same way I used to of a morning, just on a lot more mornings. The poop doesn't really cause any grief, it's just there. And only there, it doesn't tend to spread to everywhere. Time management and doing stuff? Easy-peasy after the kind of jobs I've held. I'm quite used to holding ten projects in my head, breaking them down into tiny steps, and doing each step at any opportunity that presents itself. Give me thirty seconds to three minutes, and I'll have done one or two more things that needed picking up, moving around, sorting out, fixing, preparing. So the house stays mostly tidy and organised, the garden's in good shape, I generally get exercise time and all my meals made and eaten roughly on time give or take an hour, she stays entertained, and I get one or two major tasks done each day on top of the daily stuff. You just have to be willing to take each thirty seconds as they come, and I've been doing that for a long long time before she came along. Even that old saw of "you can say goodbye to frequent sex" hasn't really been true, though it's taken a little more preparation and a willingness to put aside plans to spontaneously take advantage of free moments. So all of that's really been fine. I don't feel rushed, stressed, unclean or tired, and I'm getting laid. What I *am* struggling with is quite different, and predictable if I'd thought about it beforehand. The first thing is attention. I suddenly have all this performance and extrovert energy that's not going anywhere. I'm not on a stage in front of people, I'm not leading guided walks and answering public enquiries, I don't have people chasing me up to find out about things, I'm not making speeches or writing words that will be seen by thousands of people on TV or in newspapers. Being mostly housebound for a few weeks (and usually quite tired in the evenings) meant that for that time I also didn't go to any big social things where I could socialise with lots of people at once. If I go out for a walk, I get plenty of attention but it's secondhand - people stop to talk to the baby. I'm good with that, but overall I have this surfeit of energy that just doesn't have a channel. About the only channel I have is making and reading comments on LJ posts -grin-. I am thinking that when she's a little older I will try and join the local theatre group, or maybe one of the local choirs, so that I can spend some of that performance energy usefully. I should also try and find out about mothers' groups so that I have another potential social outlet. Melbourne's always been bad for me in the social regard - I have very few local connections, the workplace connections are a little random and loose because of all the partime and short-term contract work, and the other friends I have I don't tend to see a lot of. No particular reason or problem, it's just that Melbourne is a big place with a lot on. If you want a good party culture, you need a smaller city where people live closer together and there's less competition for social time. So now I need to work more on the local connections, I guess. The other thing I've found hard to get is creative focus. I occasionally get bits of story in my head, but that's where they stay. Same with paintings and drawings. I don't tend to get an hour of uninterrupted time ever, and an hour is about what I need to drop into fugue, create madly and intently, then slowly pull out of it. This is awkward because again it's a type of energy that gets blocked up, but also because the fugue is a form of rest for the rest of my brain. It keeps me more alive, aware, active; lets me see the continent of forest with all its great interconnecting systems instead of running around under the tree branches sorting the fallen leaves. Without it, I find myself a much less interesting person. And I miss it. (2 Comments |Comment on this)
Monday, June 29th, 2009
8:04 pm	A butterfly whispers its secrets ( A butterfly whispers its secrets: photo under cut ) (7 Comments |Comment on this)
Saturday, June 27th, 2009
7:37 pm	Weird cordial The bottle is labelled Sharbat Rooh Afza, Summer Drink of the East. It's the first cordial I've seen that is made in a laboratory, lists the ingredients by their scientific names as well as common, and gives the quantities of each in mL per 50 mL. Adding to the curiosity is that I only recognise around half of the plant extracts they've put in it (outside of the sugar syrup and pineapple juice base), and those that I do recognise are, um, not exactly common cordial flavourings. In order: coriander, carrot, large-leaf portulaca, Citrullus vulgarus, spinach, mint, loofah (!), Cichorium inkybus, Vitus vinifera, white sandalwood, Indian vetiver, Parmelia perlata, Nymphaea alba, Onosma brachteatum, distillate of Keoria, orange juice, distillate of Citrus medica, distillate of rose damask. The ones still in italics I don't know, though some I think I should and just can't remember - for instance I think the Onosma is a daisy or lettuce relative, not sure. Vetiver I don't know the flavour of. I've never heard of Keoria, and I have no idea which of the weird and wonderfully convoluted citrus family medica is. Then there's the things I *do* know. Coriander and sandalwood are more commonly found in perfume than cordial, as is the damask (though that's more believable in food if you like turkish delight). Carrot cordial is only slightly more believable than spinach cordial. Portulaca is a succulent, but even the large-leaf type would take a lot of squeezing to get much extract. And finally, loofah? That's the bitter melon they dry out and throw all the flesh away to get the inside for sponges. Sponge cordial, mmm mmm. I haven't tried the cordial yet. I opened the bottle, James and I each sniffed it, and he said "Take it far far away from me", and I agreed. I will still try some at some point, very carefully. But for once, given the things I normally eat without blinking, I'm extremely cautious. -wanders off muttering "loofah..." under her breath- (Edit to add: I've gone looking up the ones I didn't know. They include watermelon, citron (of one sort or another, there are lots of kinds), white lotus, chicory and the common wild grape. Still an odd mix of flavours and contents.) (4 Comments |Comment on this)
9:14 am	More useful baby stuff (Because I wasn't going to remember it all let alone write it all in one hit!) ( More stuff we've found useful with the baby ) (5 Comments |Comment on this)
Friday, June 26th, 2009
9:08 pm	Watching her develop emotionally It's curious to see how things start to fall into place for Sparrow, emotionally at least. Take fear, for instance. She's been having bad dreams since early on, where she wakes up crying, and it's an upset kind of cry. The other cues she gives show that the emotion occuring is along the lines of grief and sadness, the very personal kind that accompanies hunger. Specifically, food being taken away or not being available. So those have been her bad dreams - until a few days ago, when for the first time I saw a fear dream. She was dreaming, then went into a whole-body startle, pulled a fearful face, and burst into howling tears. As it happens I can make a pretty good guess what that dream was about, because the day before I'd accidentally lost my support on her head when she mega-wiggled in the bath, and suddenly her face got dunked in the water. With her mouth open. This was not a happy experience, and as far as I know it's the only adrenalin-type-fear-thingy she's experienced so far in life. So now she knows fear, and specifically the sudden-panic kind of fear as opposed to slower, more chronic fears like fear of loss, or fear of eventually dying in a car crash without clean underwear on. (Not that she's anywhere near comprehending the latter one yet; just giving an example.) Another emotion I've seen signs of in the last couple of weeks is boredom. A definite sense of "OK, I've exhausted the stimulation potential of everything I can see from here now". Some of this comes from the fact that she's now awake enough in the daytime to have time for other things beside feeding and being changed. She's not up to playing with toys - can't grasp them, can't reach for them - but is willing to look at them when proffered. They give her maybe thirty seconds of distraction. As does anything I show her or talk to her about as we wander around the house together doing housework. She is definitely starting to find our living room boring, I think, because she's spent so much time there, mostly on her back staring at the ceiling - she has only just started to turn her head herself to find other things to look at. So I am starting to work with that, to take the desire for interest and stimulation and start directing it or playing to it. The most fascinating one though is a kind of fear of being left alone, or of loss - and what's fascinating about this is how it relates to vision. At first, when she couldn't see, she didn't really show too many signs of panic about you being there or not being there. If you were touching her that was good, and sometimes if you weren't touching her she wouldn't realise you were there, but whether or not you were in visual range was irrelevant. Now, she can see, and pick things out from across the room (especially nipples). But like I said she's only just starting to deliberately turn her head, which means you can quite easily not be in sight. And what's developing is the whole idea that if you can't see it, it doesn't exist. I find it fascinating that a child has to learn that things you can't see are still there, when they started out knowing that because they didn't have operative vision. It took me a few goes to realise that some of the time she was howling now was because she didn't realise I was still next to her, because she'd turned her head away and couldn't see me anymore. I can stop some howls mid-squawk by simply turning her mat so that where I am working is within her immediate field of view. Then she sees me, and everything is OK. It's a bizarre misconception. (5 Comments |Comment on this)
Wednesday, June 24th, 2009
9:04 pm	More photos including total cute and awesome New photos on the Sparrow page - Sparrow meets Oma and Grandad. There are some nice shots of all the family. The last one catches James in the tender way that I often see him :-) The very first photo is possibly my favourite. It's texture and meaning all in a very simple composition, and I will probably take a high-quality version of it, print it and title it with Grandad's firm, heartfelt and repeated statement to Sparrow, "You can count on me". (5 Comments |Comment on this)