Category Archives: Diary

General Update

Last Saturday my husband made his stage debut as the bassist of the band known as Invisible, now in their seventh year, and the show was wonderful. I am terribly, terribly proud of him, and of all the guys. It was also really nice to get out and actually see people for the first time since early February.

Today I had my second let’s-keep-an-eye-on-your-body-for-signs-of-premature-labour ultrasound. It demonstrated that yay, my body is carrying on with the Stupendous Work it is doing in not showing signs of premature labour this time around: everything is perfectly normal. Go body! I have awesome BP, great results from my last blood test and the glucose challenge, and everything of that sort.

What is concerning my doctor is that the Owlet is very small. She’s about three weeks behind where they’d like her to be measurement-wise, and weighs about a kilo at 29 weeks, which means that out of 100 kids at this gestational age she’d only be 13th from the bottom. (If you’re wondering, the boy weighed 3lbs14oz at 31 weeks, which is also on the lower end for that point of gestational age, apparently, so I am not overly concerned about this.) My doctor is taking the facts that (a) it is a girl and (b) I am very petite into account, but even so, she’s not entirely sanguine. So my care has been transferred from the regular OB clinic to the high-risk clinic in the hospital, where they can evaluate me with machines and ultrasounds every two weeks to track the baby’s weight.

As a result of this weight issue, I have finally been officially put on what my doctor describes as Light Bed Rest. This is not the “eek things are scary” kind of bed rest, as nothing has changed from yesterday, or last week, or my last appointment two weeks ago. I am not in imminent danger of preterm labour. It’s just that if it should happen for some reason, a low birthweight baby has a worse chance of survival, and my doctor’s not taking any chances. She’d have put me on bed rest three months ago if I worked outside the home, but I don’t so she didn’t, and my work situation hasn’t altered. She has formally told me to avoid any activity that is stressful, or entails me travelling a lot in a day, or being on my feet for extended periods. I can continue to do quiet sedentary stuff like my freelance work; it’s just that instead of working at my desk in my home office I get to do it on a laptop from the couch, which is simply a step down from how we’ve been handling it all along because I already reduced physical activity three months ago at her recommendation. Now I have to avoid things like grocery shopping, and unfortunately it also means that presenting my keynote address at the Gaia conference this weekend is off the menu. You should have seen my doctor’s face when I ran that past her this morning. “Do you really think that’s a good idea?” she said dryly, which was essentially very polite shorthand for, “Am I going to have to call your husband and tell him to lock you up on Saturday?”

If there was such a term as Further Reduced Activity, that’s what I’ll be doing; it’s the next step down from the Reduced Activity in which I have already been engaged. Because hey, yay me, I’ve been keeping my body from slipping into preterm labour signs, did I mention that? Huge victory there, and my doctor is very, very pleased about how I’ve been handling that. And the Light Bed Rest thing is going to be reevaluated every two weeks, although in all likelihood this is the way it’s going to be till the Owlet is born.

So there you have it. Everything is going very well, and staying even more quiet than I have been will help keep it that way. We just need to fatten the Owlet up a bit. HRH is writing me a prescription for More Ice Cream, which I think is an excellent idea.

Mother’s Day Roundup And Other Mothery Stuff

This morning the boy picked up his bow and bowed his fingering exercise. He’d been playing it pizzicato till now, saying that no no no, the bow would be too hard. Today he decided to do it all on his own. I am learning so much about the way he learns by working through his practices with him. And we share experiences, too, like today when we were talking about pivots to cross strings, and he said, “I kept my right wrist really, really still Mama.” I agreed, and said, “You know how your teacher said grown-up cellists still have problems with not moving their bow hand wrists and letting their right elbows direct the movement instead? Mama still has lots and lots of trouble with that.” (Mama was also taught to use her wrist and keep it loose in order to economize energy, as was our current teacher, so we’re both working on remembering otherwise; you can see how teaching and playing styles change over the years.) “Really?” he said. “I won’t! When I grow up, I won’t move my wrist at all!”

I love that we share this together. I love that I can hear him humming bits of my recital pieces when I work on them, both during my lesson and when I practice at home, and even at random times when he’s building with Lego or playing with action figures. I love that he’ll play an exercise for me without announcing it and then ask me impishly if I can identify it, and he’s so chuffed when I do. He counts his practice stickers every morning before putting another one on, and it looks like we may hit 100 right around recital time (very exciting!).

He was so excited about Mother’s Day that I got my school artwork on Thursday when he brought it home, a construction paper daffodil and two heart-shaped cards. I was awoken on Saturday morning at 5:45 by a gentle pat and a whispered “Happy Mother’s Day, Mama,” because he couldn’t wait for that, either. On Sunday morning at 7:00 I got another drawing of a heart, and then a silver tray with a cup of tea and a small bouquet of tulips and daffodils from the garden. We’d invited HRH’s parents over for lunch, so I made that lovely cinnamon loaf and a quiche, and my mother-in-law contributed salad and crudités, and fruit to go with the cinnamon loaf for dessert. The food was all lovely, and we sat outside afterwards as the weather was spectacular. I managed to get sun, as the freckles testify. HRH and his dad (who is looking really, really fantastic and recovering well from his bout of very bad health) got to wander around upstairs and bounce ideas for finishing the attic off one another, and ended up on a recon mission to the Home Depot three blocks down that resulted in two perfect windows being brought home, much to everyone’s surprise.

Monday was a ped day. What? You say you thought the boy just had several? So did we. It was marked as conditional on the school calendar, which I didn’t check till this weekend, and I didn’t get an announcement or confirmation from the school beforehand so I went ahead and assumed it was happening. As I’d already put off my second round of blood tests and the glucose challenge test once from last week when I had the dizzy spells, instead of rescheduling it yet again the boy came with me to the hospital yesterday, and his mission was to take care of me. He was very interested in the cold orange drink I was given and asked what it tasted like. I said, “Like melted orange popsicles, with a bit of fizzy to it” and he made a face. We hung out in the snack bar for the hour it took for the glucose test, where he nibbled on the carrots and snow peas we’d brought, and we read a bunch of books. Then we went back to the lab and he held my hand very importantly while they took the blood so that I wouldn’t be afraid. The technicians thought he was adorable for patting my arm and telling me that it wouldn’t hurt and it would be over in just a moment. We came home and had a picnic lunch in the backyard.

I’m starting to feel a little weird. I’m at 27 weeks, and at the hospital they gave me a test to be done at home at 35 weeks. I had my first baby at 31 weeks, six years ago; I don’t know what happens normally after that, what tests are done, when appointments are scheduled. I missed two-thirds of my final trimester, so I have no idea what to expect from it. I’m in the weird position of having experienced labour and delivery, but not in the way I’d expected in the hospital I’d worked with up till that point; I never got to pack a bag or plan out what to do to keep my mind busy in labour, or anything like that. I’ve never even had a hospital tour. I’ve never had my brand new infant in my hospital room with me, or got to take it home with me when I left. It’s all new for me from hereon in till the baby arrives home, at which point I’m back in familiar territory. (I have plenty of experience in dealing with NICU, though, and pumping exclusively for a month to supply my baby with breastmilk, and in dealing with hospital staff and schedules of all kinds.) It’s just a really odd feeling to have this lacuna ahead of me between the two sections of pregnancy/new mum stuff that I know about. I sometimes feel like an imposter when first-time-pregnant women of my acquaintance ask me about the last trimester and new babies. My experience is so different from the norm.

Speaking of this baby, she is really working the kickboxing routine these days. I can’t find a comfortable position for my very adjustable desk chair and the yoga ball I got somehow manages to stress my lower back more rather than less, both of which make for a challenging work sessions. I may ask HRH to get the kneeling chair out of storage; that might work.

Picking Up

The first couple of days after driving toward a major book deadline are always odd. There’s a simultaneous sense of complete freedom after a number of months, but also of fatigue and the inability to focus on much at all. And then there’s the weirdness of trying to settle back into a regular life again after being deadline-focused and working overtime for a while.

Yesterday I handled e-mail and stuff, and let the copyediting team know I was available again after delivering the long-term project that had taken me off the roster. I cleaned up my desk and shelved the stack of bird books that I’d had next to me for reference throughout the writing of the book. I made bread. I read some more of the new Charles Todd book, A Lonely Death. I napped out of necessity. I spun some more of the Wensleydale I got in my three-month subscription to Northbound Knitting’s fibre club last fall. (I think I’m making a heavy laceweight single, because it’s very pretty as-is and I don’t want to halve its yardage by plying it with itself.) I’m glad I have a fibre stash, because I’m certainly not buying anything new for a long time what with finances being very, very tight for the next six to eight weeks as we are a single-income household now until I receive my cheque for delivering the book. (I am seriously glad the welcome tax finally landed, because the huge chunk of money I had set aside for it was starting to get impatient, but my presently-empty bank account is sad and lonely now.)

I was supposed to go in to the blood lab at the hospital today for my second round of blood tests and the oh-so-exciting-sounding-but-actually-boring glucose challenge test, but I came home early from orchestra last night after experiencing a couple of dizzy spells. I figure fasting and then driving through rush hour morning traffic for a blood draw after a set of dizzy spells might not be the best thing right now, so I’ve pushed that to Monday. (Huh. I just checked the website, and apparently the blood lab is open till 3:00 now instead of 11:00, and I could have sworn it was only open Monday through Thursday but the site says nothing about that.) It was also up in the air because the boy woke up with an asthma attack yesterday and a nasty cold announcing its presence, and by dinner last night he had no appetite and a fever of 100.5, so he might have been staying home today. He woke up with just the cold, though, and was bright-eyed and bushy-tailed so I sent him off to school after a dose of decongestant.

Today, gentle readers, is tax stuff. Yes, we are late, for only the second time ever (ironically, the last time was also when we were expecting a baby) because I had so much work to do in the past two months that I couldn’t spare any to sort out all my freelancer stuff and make lists. Today I pull out my folder of receipts etcetera and make piles of different categories to add up, check up on much we paid in utilities, and make that list of questions to ask our most excellent tax guy. There are a tonne of unknowns this year, you see. We bought a house, and I have no idea what that does to my freelancer claims (do I claim part of the mortgage payments the way I claimed part of our rent? what about city taxes?), or what proof we need to claim first-time homebuyer stuff, or even what we can write off or what tax rebates are available to new homeowners. This year is really complicated. And no, despite the Canada Action Plan ads, there’s not a hell of a lot of info available online either federally or provincially regarding it; this is why we have a Most Excellent Tax Guy who knows all this stuff and can tell us about it. To each his or her own area of expertise!

So there you have it. I have said it on the Internet, and so it must be true: Today is devoted to tax stuff. There’s other stuff I have to do, like update my pro site with info about the upcoming book and the Gaia Gathering conference I’m speaking at this month, but I’m going to let that slide till tomorrow because I’m really tired. If I can accomplish one major thing a day for the next few days, I think I’m good. In the last week before deadline I borrowed energy from future days, something fibro folk do out of necessity sometimes, but the penalty is always a long recovery.

I think I shall sort the receipts and bills, then nap, then add them up. Doing both in a row without a rest is just asking for horrendous errors. And I ought to eat lunch in there, too.

Bird Book Done: Check

The bird book has been handed in to my editor. I always forget how long checking bibliographies takes.

I wish I had more energy to be enthused. I feel rather run over, partly from contorting myself and the material to deal with the imposed changes and cuts in the last six weeks, partly from dealing with the election. I wish I had a better sense of what this book was like, because it feels very fragmented to me. Not a surprise, perhaps, since three-quarters of it consists of brief reference entries on birds, so my usual sense of flow and evolution doesn’t apply here.

I’m going to break for lunch and possibly a brief nap, then start typing out the introduction for the companion journal. Yesterday afternoon was technically the deadline for both the book and intro, but my editor gave me a couple of days’ leeway due to her workload, bless her.

ETA: And the intro for the companion journal and the edit of the sample record sheet is also done and handed in. Now I get to pass out for half an hour before I go meet the boy’s bus.

What I Read in April 2011

The King’s Speech by Mark Logue & Peter Conradi
The Rowan by Anne McCaffrey (reread)
All the Weyrs of Pern by Anne McCaffrey (reread)
Dragonsdawn by Anne McCaffrey (reread)
Charmed Life by Diana Wynne Jones (reread)
The Cater Street Hangman by Anne Perry (reread)

Lots of rereads this month, as I don’t have the money to buy new books and browsing my library catalogue didn’t turn up any of the new ones I wanted to read.

I was looking for series to reread, because they take up a decent amount of time, so I pulled the first Anne Perry Charlotte & Thomas Pitt book off the shelf. Oh, these haven’t aged well. They’re very flat, and I’ve stalled halfway through the second one.

Dragonsdawn was what I was looking for character and story-wise, but then I decided to read the Pern-rediscovers-that-2,500-original-settlement-and-tech book All the Weyrs of Pern, and that felt kind of flat and forced, too. In a while I may go back to the original Pern trilogy, but AtWoP kind of turned me off the series for a while. I pulled the space opera The Rowan off the shelf and that was better.

My reread of Charmed Life, one of my favourite Chrestomanci books, was done in response to Diana Wynne Jones’ death. I read it all in one evening, and I was about to go on to The Magicians of Caprona the same night but I lost steam.

The King’s Speech is a biography of Lionel Logue, the speech therapist who worked with King George VI, and I enjoyed it a lot. It’s written by Logue’s grandson (and a journalist, who I assume provided structure and support and editorial stuff) who did a lot of work with family records, letters, and diaries, and provided information and material to the filmmakers who created the 2010 movie. I have not yet seen the film (shocking if you know me; it was a bad six months for a lot of stuff I wanted to do) but the sense I got from what I know of history and the apparent timeline of the film was that things didn’t quite line up chronologically. The biography confirmed that my history was, in fact, not as shoddy as the film made me wonder if it was, and clarified a lot for me.

The State Of The Estate

This morning HRH went out to pick up the free tree we’d reserved through the city a week and a half ago. He says it was wonderful; there were tonnes of people out for the Journée verte, and everyone was happy. The sun is shining, it’s a gorgeous, warm day, and it may actually be safe to say that it’s finally spring. I wish we’d had the money to pick up one of the discounted rain barrels on sale, but it wasn’t in the budget.

We chose a Red Splendor crabapple. The material included on the reservation website told us it was a 5m wide by 5m high max growth. The handout HRH got along with the tree said 7m each way. It would have been nice if the info was consistent so we could have planned a bit better, but eh. Apple trees like pruning, and we’re going to keep this one tidy. Yes, crabapples are messy in the fall, but you know what? Their glory in spring and their summer foliage are more than worth it.

So the boy has finally gotten his tree. We wanted to plant one when he was born, but we were renting at that point, and while our landlord was totally cool with whatever landscaping improvements we made to the value of the property, we didn’t want to plant a tree and then leave it any time soon. (Also, there was really nowhere we could have put it; most trees would have taken up the entire backyard at maturity.) We consulted with the boy and he confirmed that the crabapple was what he wanted.

It’s about two years old, and the trees were being stored in straw in a cool place to keep them dormant. But there are lots of bumps where leaf buds should start growing any day now that it’s out in the warm sun and we’ve given it plenty of water. It’s a great weekend to plant a tree.

Speaking of trees, our lilacs have wild numbers of leaves budding on them. I can’t wait till they flower.

We’ve got other tiny plants making themselves known round and about. There will be tulips sometime this week in the front and side backyard beds, and a few days ago some lovely little hyacinths appeared in the backyard. We have mid-purple ones in a couple of places, but the stand of whites are the prettiest.

HRH plans to turn most of the rest of the front yard into garden, as there’s a couple of strips of grass that are more annoying than anything else. The baby’s tree will go in front of my office window. We’d planned to double the size of the garden on the north side of the backyard and make it the vegetable garden, but that won’t happen this year because our focus has to be on the attic renovation. Instead, we’ll use the smaller garden on the south side and plant our usual lots of tomatoes and peas, some cucumbers, carrots, and herbs in it. It already has everbearing strawberries, mmm.

Easter Weekend and Baby Stuff

We had a lovely weekend visiting my parents. The drive was a challenge for me, as I usually need a day to recover from a long drive, but this time I had the extra physical challenges of pregnancy on top of my regular fibro issues to deal with. (It is truly astonishing how sore one’s core muscles get when one is pregnant and stuck in a car for seven hours, even with a lumbar pillow.) The weather was fabulous; warm, sunny, windy. My mother took the boy out for a movie, gelato, and some shopping on Saturday so HRH and I got to have some time out by ourselves, which was nice, too. Easter dinner was the usual tour de force everyone has come to expect from my mother’s kitchen (slow-cooked lamb!), complete with the best red wine I have ever tasted. She also taught the boy how to make chocolate ganache, which I think is an excellent skill for any almost-six-year-old to have.

One of the things HRH and I did on our day off was visit a children’s clothing store, which happened to be conveniently located next to the store HRH had to visit to buy new jeans. We realised that we had no idea what little girls’ clothing looked like, so we wanted to do a quick recon in order to steel ourselves. Amusingly, when we stepped into the store, we both turned left toward the boys’ section; we have to retrain ourselves. The girls’ clothes were mostly not bad with a lot of it being very acceptable and some of it downright sweet, although there was a small selection of the expected sequins and sparkles and ruffles and gaggingly cutesy sayings (note to people thinking of gifting us with any of these: please don’t, even if you think it would be funny). The cloying saturated pink seems to have been replaced by a paler version, thank goodness, and there was plenty of pale green and lavender and a nice chocolate brown on the racks, too.

The Easter Bunny stopped by Nana and Grandad’s house, and the boy found all seventeen of his hidden Easter eggs (or so we were told when he woke us up; apparently he found one and decided there must be more, and undertook his own egg hunt before anyone else got up). There was a basket of presents at the breakfast table, too, and the boy cheerfully opened the Owlet’s gifts as well as his own, being absolutely delighted by the tiny girl onesies, sleepers, and dresses. The Owlet now has a decent selection of clothing, what with the new stuff in the Easter basket, the sleepers Ceri’s mom brought up (thank you, Carmel!), and the box of family stuff from my cousin’s two little girls.

This seems as good a time as any to say that while we appreciate the slew of offers of baby clothing and general baby stuff, we did have a baby ourselves six years ago, and so we’re pretty set. We know there will be token gifts of new things, and every baby should have something new, but as much as we appreciate everyone’s generosity we really don’t need boxes of baby clothes. We’re set for equipment as well (and this is where I give a wholly deserved shout-out to Leah, who passed along equipment to replace some of ours that we initially borrowed, that we lent and wore out after seven kids, or came back broken). Of course, if there are one or two special pieces of clothing you want to offer us because you think they’re adorable and deserve to be worn by someone else again, that’s fine and we would be touched, but general bags and boxes of stuff really aren’t necessary.

In other clothing news, I finished one of the knitted origami baby shoes, and am an inch away from finishing the squares for the second one:

We have hit the third trimester and the Owlet is doing just fine. My last ultrasound, scheduled specifically to investigate for high-risk issues, discovered that I am actually less close to preterm labour than I was a month ago, so my doctor is very pleased indeed with my treatment. People keep telling me somewhat dismissively that I’m not very big at all, which I’m sure is a compliment in their view, but I’m just about the size I was when the boy was born so I’m actually a month ahead of where I was last time. I’m so petite that the bump may not seem big to them in comparison to other women who are larger than I am to start with (which is, let’s be honest, 99% of the female population), but taken within context of my body size and shape it’s big. The baby is right on schedule for her gestational age, too. I’ve grown out of two or three pairs of my go-to maternity pants… no, not grown out of, actually; it’s more that my shape has shifted and so the cut no longer sits comfortably, so they have to be cycled to the bottom of the box of maternity clothes, woe! The weather is finally warming up, so I dipped into the box of summer stuff to get a break from the same old clothes I’d been wearing for the last four months. I’m glad it’s just about warm enough to leave jackets open, too, because my polar fleece is about ten days away from no longer zipping up at all.

It’s hard to believe that at this point last time, I was five weeks away from a baby. At least this time the book gets handed in three months ahead of our due date, instead of a month. (And yes, I am knocking away on my wooden desk as I type that.) Funny story: We got new music last week at orchestra, among it Die Fledermaus overture. We sightread it and I frowned, asking our principal if we’d played this before, and she confirmed that we had. The sheet music looked like it had a note or two on it in my handwriting, in fact, but while it was familiar, I couldn’t remember ever having performed it. Upon consultation with the rest of the section after the rehearsal, it turns out that this piece was part of the mostly-Tchaikovsky programme we presented six years ago for Canada Day, a programme that was personally awful for me because of key signatures and rhythms, and, coincidentally, I ended up missing because I delivered a premature baby two and a half weeks before the concert. We found this very amusing, since it’s been programmed again when I’m pregnant. If anything happens, I will personally blame Johann Strauss Jr.