Category Archives: The Girl

The Boy’s New Cello

This past Monday we took a day trip to Ottawa to visit the Canadian Museum of Nature (or “the dinosaur museum,” as the boy calls it, but he also calls the ROM the same thing so it’s city-dependent) and we’re very impressed with the renovations. The new Queen’s Lantern in the front is surprisingly beautiful for a modernist structure of metal and glass, housing what they call a butterfly staircase (which is essentially a divided staircase that goes up two different ways from floating mini landings) and the whole thing is actually suspended, not built on the lower part of the tower so as to avoid placing weight on it (the reason that the plans for the original tower had to be abandoned). It was a beautiful day for a drive, too.

The other reason we were in Ottawa was to see the 1/8 cello I’d seen listed on Kijiji a month ago. I told the gentleman who listed it that if he sold it in the meantime I would completely understand, but he kept it for me against several other inquiries. He was so kind that I’m very grateful the cello was in great condition and we could buy it. It’s thirty years old; he bought it long ago for his daughter who played it for a year before switching to piano, and he’s kept it all this time, hoping that he’d eventually have grandkids who would play it. He and his wife are selling their house (which was a lovely older semi-detached cottage-style house dating from the 1940s, I think, and if we were in the Ottawa area it’s just the kind of place we’d love to move into) and it was finally time for them to let the cello go.

It’s in very good condition for something that’s been stored for thirty years. There are a couple of cosmetic scratches, but other than that it’s very sound. The strings are dead, dead, dead, but I tuned them as best I could and the boy had a go at it to see how it felt, and the tone wasn’t bad. It will need new strings and bow, as I expected, and the tuning pegs may need to be reshaped (although I got them to stop slipping with a couple of dabs of peg dope — yay, I finally got to use the stick of it that Emily sent me!). I don’t doubt my luthier will want to reshape the bridge, too, because it seems very thick and heavy. The endpin is clunky and dates back from before the fashion was to be as light as possible, so it may be replaced at some point too. It desperately needs a new case, as the bag it’s got is vinyl backed with some sort of mohair-like man-made material that shreds onto the bridge and doesn’t open very well. But the instrument itself is in great shape, and all these other little things can be done one by one, starting with the strings and case, since we’re still using our teacher’s tiny Twinkle bow. And seriously, when one was renting at $170 for two months at a time, this will still come out cheaper only four months down the line. (I’m not kidding: this cello cost $150; updating the accessories will cost about $300. The only local 1/8 listed is $850. New, we’d be paying $1400.)

Most importantly, I asked him if he liked it, and he thought about it seriously before saying that he did, and that it felt comfortable. Did he want to buy it, I asked? Yes, he said firmly, he rather thought he did, which charmed the seller and his wife. So his decision was final, and we paid the gentleman, and the boy now owns his own cello.

(Oh, the forehead in the photo? He walked up to me this morning and said, “Mama, I want you to draw a maple leaf with a lightning bolt on it on my forehead.” “We have no face paint,” I told him. “We can use marker,” he replied cheerfully. Oh, no, we can’t, I thought darkly, because his so-called washable markers have proved decidedly non-washable lately. “Let me Google facepaint recipes,” I sad, and found one that I kitbashed (cornstarch, flour, honey instead of corn syrup, hot water, food colouring), outlined a maple leaf in eyeliner, and painted it in. In related news, we were awoken early this morning by the boy burrowing into our bed, where he proceeded to sing the national anthem to us.)

More recent good news:

– My largest freelance cheque arrived the day after the mail started moving after the government’s heavy-handed back-to-work legislation, so we have money again. For a limited time, of course, because now I get to throw money at utility bills that have been piling up, car insurance and registration, and reno materials, and cloth diapers, and obviously 1/8 size cello accessories that cost the same as full-size ones, a fact that I find extremely unfair… but this is what it was earmarked for, so I’m just thankful I’ve got it. (Which reminds me; I need to call QPIP and struggle through the red tape of initializing maternity benefits for a self-employed entrepreneur. Pray for me.)

– HRH and his dad finished laying the floor in the attic yesterday. This is huge, because it means all the other steps can happen.

– Tonight is the annual Canada Day concert given by the Lakeshore Chamber Orchestra, and although I’m still not feeling fully prepared (the inability to remember if I’m supposed to be playing A flats or sharps is one issue that comes to mind, and no, looking at a key signature doesn’t help much on the fly). Also, we suddenly have a full brass section, part of the magic of hey-it’s-the-week-before-the-concert. I’m looking forward to it. It’s a gorgeous day for Canada Day festivities, too.

– I hit 35 weeks yesterday, and am still very proud of the Owlet for hanging in there. One more week and my hospital will deliver her without stopping labour or transferring me to Ste-Justine for imprisonment. (Just kidding, Ste-Justine; you are a remarkable hospital, and I love you and your staff and everything you have done for us in the past, but I really, really want to work with my own hospital of choice for this delivery.) She is getting really cramped for space and I am near the okay-enough-of-this point, so any time as of 7 July is a go. We are not committing to a date, but we suspect the third week of July.

– My cousin and his family stopped by for the afternoon on Tuesday on their way to Nova Scotia and we had a wonderful time with them. I hope they stop by on their way back in two weeks, but I think they plan to drive straight through.

Right; time to give my music one last once-over in the hopes that anything that hasn’t yet stuck manages to make its way into my brain, then pack a sandwich and snacks and stuff to eat after warmup and before the concert, otherwise I will fall over dead around eight-forty-five.

Potpourri

1. I had another prenatal appointment yesterday. Everything is spot-on. My doctor was so excited about me going past the 31-week mark that I had to laugh at her.

2. HRH has finished the stairs to the attic, and they are beautiful. He has also temporarily cleared out all the insulation so we can lay the floor. We have been able to revise the flooring plan because we discovered when he cut through the ceiling that the existing attic floor/first floor ceiling was made with tongue-and-groove strips, solid enough to be walked on. Seriously, this gets better and better; first, actual windows existed up there under the siding, and now a floor? The attic was genuinely designed to be another room that the original owners just didn’t tell the builders to complete.

3. After today, there are only two days of kindergarten left for the boy. He has a kindergarten celebration tomorrow afternoon, where the parents will go in and watch them sing songs and that sort of thing, then they will get certificates, and then there will be cake and juice for everyone. Where did this academic year go? Didn’t he just take the school bus for the first time?

4. As the end of the school year approaches the boy has been bringing home workbooks and folders and artwork. I had no idea they wrote and drew journals as part of their curriculum, but he sat down with me yesterday and read me all his journal entries, about one a week since they began in January, and I was stunned. They don’t teach formal reading or writing in kindergarten, or so they say; they encourage sounding things out and phonetic spelling as steps toward it. This means that yes, there are letters missing and incorrect letters, but the sounds are mostly there. I now have a six-year-old who sounds out every written word he sees with ease, reads above his theoretic grade level, and who does a pretty impressive job of writing words down just from listening to them or saying them. I can read his journal entries without referring to his teacher’s interpretation below. I find this kind of evolution of how to read and write absolutely fascinating. Here, here’s an example from two months ago; I’m giving you this one because I recognised it right away. This is a pretty precise depiction of Ceri and Scott’s basement from where you’d be standing if you paused in the archway into the TV room and saw Scott and Liam playing video games together. I even love that he drew Scott’s computer desk off to the right.

I also love that he wrote and drew about something important to him each time: spending the day with a special friend, building in his Lego City that lives on a board under his bed and is pulled out to play with, visiting grandparents, the best part of a field trip, and that sort of thing. We’re going to keep up the journal exercise weekly over the summer. He seems excited about it, it’s a great way to keep working on practising his letters, and I love the idea of tucking it away in a memento box for him to look at years from now.

(Have I mentioned that I find how kids learn fascinating? I do. I find the stuff they don’t learn just as fascinating. Like how the boy still can’t grasp riding a two-wheeler bike.)

5. I am currently struggling with internal tension about the postal strike. I fully support the CUPW’s right to demonstrate, call for collective bargaining, their requests for proper contracts and the pay scale and benefits they’re fighting to keep, including maintaining pension details for existing and new workers that got hit when the economy tanked. (It drives me up the wall that CP keeps saying mail volume is down and that’s why they’re not agreeing to the union’s requests to maintain what was in their last contract because they’re “unrealistic,” but they’re neglecting to acknowledge that to make up for it they’ve been accepting more paid admail to be delivered over the past few years, which has made up the shortfall in lettermail in both volume and profit. Admail; you know, the unaddressed stuff that the postperson sorts, carries, and puts in everybody’s mailbox that you take out and put right into the recycling box.) The one-day rotating strikes slowed things down a bit, but that was fine. When Canada Post cut operations to three days from five, effectively going to part-time for everyone, it slowed things down more and I chafed a bit, but at least things were still moving. But when Canada Post locked their workers out completely to create a national situation, things went badly for me. I have three (no, four by now) rather important freelance cheques coming to me from the US that are now stuck in the system. They were due to arrive the second week of June at the earliest, and we budgeted accordingly. Now that budget is screwed and have been scrambling to rebalance things; money originally scheduled to go one place is being diverted to go others and things are being left for a later date that ought to be paid now, and buying the last few baby things we need keeps getting shuffled later and later. The attic has taken a hit, too, because we were going to use part of my biggest cheque to buy the initial round of supplies, timed to happen with the beginning of the month-long vacation HRH had booked. (Although things look brighter in that department due to parental generosity, so at least HRH won’t be sitting here off work, twiddling his thumbs and wasting time, waiting for the cheques to arrive in the mail so we can get building.) So yes, things have been rather stressful and unhappy around here money-wise for the past two weeks. And just as bad, important outgoing mail got stuck in the strike as well, like our taxes and my application for cord blood donation, which needs to be received by Hema-Quebec before I get to 36 weeks. The life of a postal service-dependent freelancer is not a happy one. And it really annoys me to read comments like “We don’t need the post office, everyone should go to e-mail billing and direct deposit!” on news articles, because that demonstrates a really poor understanding of how businesses function (and also assumes everyone has internet access, which is also erroneous).

6. The boy went to La Ronde, our local Six Flags amusement park, for the first time this past Sunday, on a free pass with his best friend, her mum, and HRH. They had a fabulous time. I am shocked at the expense of these sorts of things, so a free pass is pretty much the only way it could happen. (Although HRH told me that season passes for a family are less expensive than a single admission for said family, if purchased before a certain date, so we may look into that as a gift to him next year since the boy had The Best Time Ever.) They spent the day mostly in the family ride area, the majority of which seems to have been installed in 2005. I am jealous, because he got to go on the Belgian carousel built in 1885 and bought for Expo 67, which runs on electricity right now but is being restored to run on steam power again, complete with its steam organ:

7. Tomorrow is the boy’s last day with his rental cello, then I take it back to the luthier. We couldn’t renew the rental even if we wanted to, with this stupid cheques-stuck-in-the-mail issue. But hopefully practice will be back to normal as of Tuesday morning, because on Monday we are taking that day trip to Ottawa to see secondhand 1/8 cello at a steal of a price, see the newly redone Nature Museum (which we last saw a couple of years ago in the midst of renovation) and also walk past the Parliament Buildings.

8. There’s a post with knitting and spinning and stuff to come, I promise.

I think that’s it for now.

Away Time

I am swamped with work and countdown to this weekend’s recital, so I haven’t been here and won’t really be for the next week, either. I’m late on my Books Read in May roundup, and that has to wait, too. Short form:

– Lovely weather, but as is expected the humidity rising, so there are good days and bad days.

– The boy turns six on Saturday, and has a school field trip to a local national park for frog and butterfly exploration on Friday. They had caterpillars in class to observe in the latter half of May, and the kids saw them make chrysalises and hatch into beautiful Painted Lady butterflies, which the class released last week. Very exciting.

– The boy finally realised what playing in a recital meant at his lesson last Saturday, and there were some tears because it would be different from his usual environments of lessons and home practice. His teacher worked with him sensitively and they changed his piece to a duet with her; we also scheduled him to be second, so he isn’t playing first and alone.

– Owlet is doing fine, and passed her brother’s gestational record of 31w2d this past weekend. Go Owlet! I am exhausted and in pain a lot of the time, which isn’t a surprise considering the stupid amount of growth that was accomplished in a very short time on top of my pre-existing fibro and scoliosis issues.

– Also this weekend, there were suddenly a half-flight of stairs, a landing, and a big hole in the ceiling to the attic. Next up: Plywood floor, framing walls, vapour barrier and ventilation layer, lifting insulation, plasterboard. Windows have to be installed in there somewhere, and wiring run to be certified by an electrician.

– Did I mention I am swamped with work? I handed in the copyediting gig, but now it is all bird book rewrites all the time, and I am having panic attacks at the amount of work that needs to be done by Friday night. Technically I have to hand it in on Monday morning at 8 or 9 AM, but I won’t be able to work on it all weekend because of dress rehearsal, guests, birthday party, and recital, so Friday’s the deadline.

– We have a lead on a secondhand 1/8 cello for the boy at an insanely low price. It’s in Ottawa, so we’ll trundle down there for a day trip the last week of June and check it out, as well as visiting the redone Museum of Nature and walking through the Parliament buildings. Even if it needs new strings and a bow rehair (both of which I fully expect) it will still be less expensive than the other secondhand one listed here in Montreal.

Right; back into the fray. Wish me sanity and an even head.

Owlet Update

I booked all of yesterday off, because the past few appointments I’ve had have taken more than all morning, and trying to squeeze scheduled work in after that and before the boy got home was just stressing me out. It was a gorgeous day, sunny and hot but with a decent breeze to offset the growing humidity. I dare say I’d have been less happy about it if the maternity wing of my hospital wasn’t air conditioned, but it is, so I spent the morning in relative comfort.

This time my wait was only an hour and a half long, and my appointment was very positive. Owlet has done some serious work, growing five weeks’ worth in two weeks (hello, 30-week growth spurt). She went from being three weeks behind to bang on target, all of her measurements coming in at an average of 30w5d (which was a day shy of where we were). She has shifted from a transverse position to head-down, and the placenta is in awesome shape and position. She weighs about 1658 grams, which is almost exactly what the boy weighed when he was born. My body is still showing zero signs of potential labour. “Congratulations,” my doctor said as she started to put the monitors away. “You are officially no longer considered a high-risk pregnancy. Keep doing what you’re doing, because it’s obviously working.”

I am no longer considered high-risk! WOO-HOO!

All the good vibes (thanks, everyone!), bed rest, progesterone treatment, and extra ice cream have obviously worked. This is wonderful news for me, because as of today I’m at 31 weeks, the precise point where things went wrong last time with the boy. The “keep doing what you’re doing” instruction is rather key, though, so I’m keeping to the reduced activity. She didn’t tell me light bed rest was off the schedule, so I’m not throwing myself back into running around with the boy and doing grocery shopping or extended errands again.

While I was there, I made an appointment for a hospital tour in three weeks. I’m excited about it, because this is one of those lacunae in my experience. I mean, I’m very familiar with the high-risk clinic, and the ultrasound rooms, the first contact emergency area, and their nursery where the boy was transferred after his stay in NICU, but nothing else. They gave me a choice of June 26 or July 24, and maybe it’s just me, but July 24 felt like cutting it a wee bit close for comfort. So I’ll finally get to see my hospital’s labour and delivery rooms.

I got home around noon and managed to get an hour and a half of work done before I had to stop. See? Scheduling the day off and getting work done anyway feels like a major bonus or score somehow, like finding billable hours where you didn’t think there were any. I also made myself sit down and do an hour of heavy work on all my cello recital pieces, since work and bed rest had my practice record rather, erm, spotty in the two previous weeks and my performance at the group class last Sunday showed it. And once the boy got home, I finished spinning the first half of the BFL/silk for the lace cap, too, and started the second half. So it was a remarkably productive day.

I also went to orchestra last night for the first time after missing two weeks, and it was a wonderful evening. We were in a different rehearsal location, and it was very pleasant. We could never afford it on a regular basis, but it would be nice if we could. It’s where the youth orchestra practices, and when our conductor called break he encouraged us to engage in one of their rituals, heading to the local parlour on the corner to indulge in homemade ice cream. It would have been lovely, but rushed, and my wallet was also empty. And besides, the celli were all comforting one of our section, who slipped on the stairs on the way up the stars to the rehearsal room and smashed his cello.

I’m achy this morning, which is totally understandable, since I did more yesterday than I have done in ages. I also didn’t sleep very well, because the windstorm that blew down trees and power lines yesterday (and our metal gazebo in the backyard, which I am fervently hoping is salvageable) rattled our bedroom window all night and there was a cat bent on waking us up at all hours with aggressive purring in the face. I think I can just about finish the copyediting assignment I have today, though, since I hit roughly the halfway point yesterday. I can certainly get close enough to the end that I can wrap it up and probably send it back tomorrow (yay, more invoicing), leaving me all of next week for the bird book rewrites. I may leave myself open for one more copyediting assignment, but then I’ll book off for a couple of months and initialize my QPIP maternity benefits (which became available to self-employed workers the year after I had the boy, thank you, Quebec… although they don’t make it easy to figure it all out if you don’t get tax receipts, which I don’t, as I’m paid freelance from the US; I’ll be using the last two years of net income as reported on my taxes as source numbers).

Today: Thirty-one weeks of pregnancy. Between five and nine to go.

Busy (Or Apparently Bed Rest Only Covers Physical Activity)

1. I have a new copyediting assignment due 9 June. It’s the companion book to the one I edited two weeks ago, which drove me moderately mad because there was no bibliography or sources listed and I had to track copyright info down. Why do people think it’s okay to not cite sources, even if what they’re using is public domain? It still came from somewhere.

2. The edits for the bird book I wrote came back, due 10 June. And they’re extensive. I expected this — told them, in fact, to expect it themselves what with all the major changes in direction on their end throughout the project — but apparently the timeline is tight (when is it ever not tight?) and I have to turn it around in two weeks. I have the official cover as well, and I’ll get around to sharing it at one point, when I’m not handling six trillion other work things.

3. I spent last Friday in the hospital because of unidentified bleeding on Thursday night. To make a long story short, I was admitted to the hospital for five hours of observation and examination to be told that my baby is wow super healthy with a strong heartbeat whoa who is very energetic (I could have told them that), I have zero contractions (I did tell them that), and my body was nowhere physically near demonstrating that premature labour was imminent (that’s what I couldn’t know and was worried about, because this is how it started last time: blood, then two days later wham, sudden labour). The doctor I saw theorizes that a blood vessel in or near the cervix was weakened and finally burst after the physical strain of violent vomiting during the gastro I had last Tuesday/Wednesday. She stressed that I did the absolutely right thing in going in, considering what happened last time. I would say that I at least got a free lunch out of it, but it was awful and I didn’t eat most of it. (Note to self: Pack a box of Twinings’ Lady Grey in the hospital bag, because ugh, their orange pekoe tastes like coffee grounds. Not that I am a fan of orange pekoe to begin with.) The Owlet had great fun kicking the fetal monitor for the hour and a half they had it on. They finally took it off. They told me that if anything untoward happened again to call them, but that otherwise, they’d see me in six to ten weeks.

4. I have been swatching for a lace cap for the Owlet to wear. (No, I have no idea what has happened to me.) The lace pattern was totally defying me until Ceri and I figured out that my understanding of the PSSO abbreviation and its explanations was not the same as what experienced knitters understand it to mean. Also, the pattern had different abbreviations in the intro material than were actually used in the body of the pattern, a copyediting thing that drove me mad. Anyway, I finally mastered the lace pattern with Ceri’s e-mail support, and I am now spinning some dreamy BFL/silk blend in off-white for the light fingering weight two-ply yarn I want to use for it. And because I love the yarn so much, I am further considering a longish coat in a simple lace pattern done on biggish needles out of the same weight of yarn, for a larger lace effect. Obviously, pregnancy has done something very odd to my brain.

5. I finished shoe #2 of the adorable origami garter stitch shoe set, and when I put them side by side I saw that because my tension was so very different between shoe #1 and shoe #2, the first would fit a 3-6 month old and the second would fit a newborn. Obviously the answer is to knit another set of squares to fold, because it will most likely match one or the other.

6. Instead, though, I found a new pattern, and knit this:

It’s another knit-a-shape-and-fold-it shoelet. My cast on, and therefore the upper edge of the shoe, seems a bit loose (I used the two-strand thumb cast on for its tidy edge), so I’ll probably need to tack the upper vamp together about 3/4 of an inch up from the toe. Blocking may help, though. Now I need to knit another one, which shouldn’t take me more than an hour like this one did, but apparently you can suffer from Second Shoe Syndrome the way people suffer from Second Sock Syndrome.

7. I have come to the very sad conclusion that I am not going to be able to weave the Manos Clasica blanket. It’s too much physical activity and standing up and bending over for someone on bed rest. I swatched a double moss stitch/seed stitch on size 15 needles though, to see if I could knit it instead, and while I could, I’m not sold on it. I think I’ll return to the idea of weaving it, but do it after the baby is born. She isn’t going to need a Manos Clasica wool blanket in July and August, after all. And she has handknit blankets coming her way from her Auntie Cate and her Nana anyhow.

8. Speaking of the baby being born, I looked at HRH the other night and said, “We have to start thinking of this baby arriving in about a month instead of two. That way we’ll be mentally prepared whenever it happens.” “Sure,” he said, “but not till it’s a month away from 36 weeks.” “That would be on this coming Thursday,” I said.

9. The boy turns six years old in two weeks. Be very afraid. I somehow have to plan a family birthday for him as well as a friend birthday two weekends after that, as well as prepping two cellists for a recital on his actual birthday weekend. I am kind of tearing my hair out, as bed rest is supposed to be low-stress, and having to juggle all this stuff like two work things in the space of one plus all the planning and prepping isn’t physically taxing, but is still energy-consuming.

10. More stress: If Canada Post goes on strike, then my freelance cheques that are due to arrive in mid to late June will probably be held up. That is bad, so very, very bad, because that money is desperately needed, or the renovations don’t go forward. I am crossing my fingers that the impasse between the (very reasonable plea for better work conditions/against slashing benefits and wages, read up on it) demands of the postal workers union and the corp itself is solved ASAP.

For The Record…

… having gastro while 29 weeks pregnant really, really sucks. You know that whole pulling-of-the-abdominal-muscles-front-and-back thing you get? Ten times worse when your abdominals are already under stress.

Because yes, of course I caught it, too. HRH and I were tag-teaming on taking care of the boy: whoever wasn’t being sick or unable to struggle up from a horizontal position handled whatever needed handling. The boy was very understanding, however, bless him.

The Owlet was fine on day one, but very, very quiet on day two, which worried me. Dehydration is a Really Bad Thing in general, but Super-Extra-Bad when pregnant. On top of that, I wasn’t feeding myself because nothing was staying down, which meant she was dealing with whatever stores were available. Today, however, she seems perky and bumptious and more like herself, rattling around and exercising as usual, for which I am very, very thankful.

I am also very thankful that I handed in my last copyediting assignment on Monday and didn’t get a new one till last night, because I was pretty out of it in general and finishing up a project would have been impossible. I felt mostly myself again around bedtime last night, and really good this morning, until I did the fifteen-minute round trip to get the boy to his bus stop and wiped myself out. In fact, I wiped myself out so badly that even though I tried to stay quiet and first work at my desk, then lie on the chesterfield, I ended up having to go back to bed for an hour.

So now I’m struggling with the eating thing, which is one of my usual problems at the best of times, but it’s always worse after I’ve been sick. I’m just not hungry. This is kind of a problem when we’re trying to fatten up the Owlet. I’ve choked down a milkshake and some grapes, but even that has me kind of queasy. I guess it’s back to crackers for a bit, and maybe a carrot stick or two. My life; it is so thrilling.

In related news, today marks thirty weeks of pregnancy.

Light Bed Rest: First Impressions

1. Everyone panics. It is amusing, then not so amusing to explain the “no, neither I nor the baby are currently in medical danger, this is a preventative thing” over and over.

2. Everyone offers to come by to entertain me or somehow make things easier, because I must be bored or unable to handle household stuff. I am someone who suffers from social stress, so again, this is amusing on one level, not so amusing on another because I have to keep turning people down. This social stress is partly an introvert thing, partly a fibro thing: dealing with people takes energy, something I have in short supply on a normal basis. (Jan calls this kind of social energy “teaspoons,” a variant on the spoon theory allegory of spoons representing the finite amount of available energy to someone with FM/CFS. I love the term; it combines the idea of social interaction with the basic allegory.) Also, I’ve got lots to keep me busy, namely work, which for various reasons like finances and deadlines can’t be dropped. And household stuff is already minimised.

3. Lying in bed/on the chesterfield is dull. Luckily, as Paze pointed out, most of my hobbies are rest-compatible: reading, spinning, knitting, and eventually weaving (although that last one is actually the most intensive of them all, and I will have to break it down to very basic, brief units). And there’s always work, which has never been an issue, because I don’t commute and make my own hours.

4. I am actually capable of getting myself drinks, snacks, making meals, doing light laundry, walking to the corner to meet the boy’s bus, brief cello sessions, and so forth. It’s not like when they chained me to an IV stand at the hospital last time and told me I couldn’t get out of bed for two months after stopping labour halfway through the process. By prescribing light bed rest, my doctor is looking to further reduce the amount of energy I’m expending in order to shunt as much as possible to the Owlet. What I am not allowed to do is go out and do, well, most stuff. Orchestra will be on a week-to-week basis, and I will be taking Wednesdays extra easy to save up energy for it. HRH will be driving the boy and I to cello lessons, which is ideal, because driving is one of the things that totally drains my energy and stresses me when I have two cello lessons back to back at which to pay attention.

5. After bbqing and watching kids run about yesterday with friends, which was very pleasant, I put myself on 24 hours of full bed rest to recover, because things were getting twingy at the end of the day. In bed at six o’clock! Awake at three o’clock, because my body said, “Well, we’ve been in bed for nine hours, that’s normal, so it must be time to get up!” Just for the record, body, that is not on. The 24 hours of full bed rest today was, alas, down(up?)graded to light rest again, though, because poor HRH got violently ill in the wee smas, with what I suspect is an HRH-sized version of the 24-hour tummy bug the poor boy had on Saturday. So I was up with the boy this morning after all and handling all of the morning stuff instead of the half I usually do.

All in all I’m doing very well so far. The clinic called me to go in to pick up two prescriptions and a requisition form for follow-up tests in two weeks the day after my last hospital appointment, which was ironic seeing as how it’s a 45-minute trip both ways and they obviously hadn’t yet gotten the news that I was on light bed rest. It can take a few days for info to trickle between the hospital and the clinic, I have discovered. This should no longer be a problem as I’m being followed at the hospital from hereon, though. Which means, alas, no more free clinic wi-fi while I wait hours past my appointment time. Sigh.