baybeasts

It’s easier to post in memes. (Even easier to just play scrabble on Facebook).

This is actually a LiveJournal meme but I haven’t posted to my LJ for a long time, so I’d rather do it here.

Comment and (if you want) I’ll give you a letter. In your journal, list 10 of your favourite songs that begin with that letter.

Az gave me G. In no particular order, lifted pretty much straight from my itunes, we have:

1. God is a Bullet (Concrete Blonde) - memories of year 11 and Pambula Beach where a girl I knew through music camp gave me this song on a 7″ single (I still have it). I love Johnette Napolitano’s voice - so gutsy and passionate, and this song really grabbed me with its anger and sadness. I’ve always been a sucker for a song with big emotions and dominating basslines.

2. Gloria (Patti Smith, Van Morrison and U2) - I have to confess that I first loved this song via U2. But the cool thing is that it was U2 who got me onto Patti Smith (via their cover of this and also their cover of Dancing Barefoot, which I thought I loved until I heard the Patti Smith original and was totally blown away). So this one is really less about the song itself and more about the story. That said, I still have a soft spot in my heart for the young, scruffy, Dublin boys belting out Van Morrison’s classic with passion but not much style - they were always self important but when they were little it was kinda cute.

3. Golden Brown (the Stranglers) - this is actually one of bean’s favourite songs. I must have heard it before we got together - it was certainly familiar - but the passion with which she loves it made me hear it with totally new ears. I love the disconcerting way it is a sweet and loving ode - to heroin, not some random chick.

4. Goodnight Little Arlo (Woody Guthrie) - we knew when we named our son that there was a famous folk singer called Arlo, and that people would incessantly ask us if we had named him after that singer (we didn’t, we just liked the name). But we didn’t know that his dad had written him such a gorgeous song, until a friend emailed me after he was born and told us. Bean’s mum, the musician, listened to it once or twice and identified the chords so I can now play it (badly) on the guitar to little Loey. It’s a very cute song from a very cute album called Songs to Grow on for Mother and Child - much better kid’s music than much of the crap on offer these days.

5. Great Waves (Dirty Three and Cat Power) - I think this might just be my song of 2007. It came via a mixtape from Barbelith, the theme of which was “the end of the world”. This song moves me so deeply - the apocalyptic vivid imagery (”blue blood is floating, the city, its contents, have been ripped out”), expressed in Chan Marshalls’ voice which is somehow disconnected from itself yet hauntingly beautiful, all underpinned by the characteristic texture and wildness of the Dirty Three. I just love it.

6. Glass House (Ani di Franco) - I think we all went through an Ani phase (except bean who thinks she is whiny and annoying). I put this in more for the whole album (Little Plastic Castles) which was released the year I went to Japan (1998) and had one of the best years of my life - this album (and by corollary this song) was one of the soundtrack albums for that year.

7. Galactic - Battlestar Galactica theme 2004 - when we first started watching Battlestar Galactica (which ranks as one of my favourite TV shows ever), I loved the show, but I was unconvinced by the opening theme song. Over time though, I have grown to love it passionately, especially the thrilling drums at the end. And now the opening bars send a chill of excitement down my spine. God I love this show. (Come to think of it, I had a very similar experience with the theme song for Firefly.)

8. Gone Darker (Electrelane) - most of the cool music that I have loved over the last year or two has come via Az. Ages ago now he asked me if I wanted to come to this gig with him - I had no idea who Electrelane were but I was really keen to listen to some live music and to hang out with him so I pretended I did so that he wouldn’t think I was totally uncool or that the ticket would be wasted. They blew my socks off. I remember this track from the gig so well…the sample of the train and the moaning of her saxophone - I remember standing there just totally caught up in this soundscape that these four stunning women created from nothing. They are now one of my favourite bands.

9. Goodbye Stranger (Supertramp) - actually this, again, is a stand-in for Supertramp more generally (synecdoche!). When I was a kid, my mum married a man 9 years younger than her, and he brought with him a whole lot of 70s music - Pink Floyd, Fleetwood Mac, Donovan, Simon and Garfunkel, and Supertramp. This music became the soundtrack of my primary school years, mixed up with my own forays into pop music (see next song). Supertramp have a special place because listening to them was the first time I realised that music could make you feel something - the song Rudy moved my little ten year old heart to tears. I still love all this music, even though that man is long gone from my life, and it has resurfaced particularly as a fruitful source of songs to sing Loey as part of our ever-expanding repertoire of ways to help him fall asleep.

10. Girls Just Wanna Have Fun (Cyndi Lauper) - She’s So Unusual was the very first album I bought with my very own money. Actually it wasn’t with money, it was with a gift voucher that I got for Christmas from my friend-down-the-back, Alexis. Which little girl didn’t love Cyndi Lauper? She was so fun and exciting and crazy and squeaky. I still love this album, and this song is a total classic of the 80s for me.

Hey, that was fun!

(After a fair bit of deliberation about what to call our little fellow on this blog, we’ve decided to go with Loey.)

The only constant in life, they say, is change.

Last night Loey wouldn’t settle in the bassinet, and so spent his most productive sleeping hours (one lot of 1.5 hrs, one of 40 mins, you begin to see why we are so demented) in my arms.

Seems this is a baby who knows what he wants, and it ain’t always the same thing as whatever worked last time. This presents a small challenge to us, his predictability and routine loving parents, but whatever, we’ll do our best to adapt.

The other night, S changed the sheets on the bed. I went in to put the new doona cover on, and when I looked at the fresh thick flannie sheets, I felt you know - a stirring in the loins.

yes.

sleep is the new sex.

When bean and I are confused, worried, planning something new, or just feel like it, we do research.

So when we reached the end of our tether last week, we ordered a whole swag of books from the ABA’s mail order service:

The Fussy Baby Book
The Attachment Parenting Book
The No-Cry Sleep Solution

and an ABA booklet called ‘Understanding Wakeful Babies’.

It was such a relief to have everything we have been doing confirmed, after the patronising and dire warnings in the Baby Whisperer book (I would burn it only it’s not ours), which was all we’d had to go on up to this point. But also somewhat dispiriting because none of our enlightened parenting was making him any easier to settle.

Even so, I completely lost it at about 4am yesterday morning, but our midwife has this uncanny skill of showing up just when we are falling apart (without us contacting her at all - it’s seriously spooky) and dropped in last night and sorted us out, again. She reminded us that he is just a baby, a wakeful, intense, ‘high-need’ baby but ultimately just a baby doing his thing. And we need to chill out and work out how to keep ourselves sane, rather than keeping on thinking that we are doing something wrong or that there is a problem we need to fix.

We had a big breakthrough yesterday too, which is helping me feel more sane - he finally consented to sleep in his bassinet! It was very exciting to be able to put him down (up to now he’s been pretty clear about wanting to be held most of the time, and we’ve been happy to oblige him but it is exhausting, especially overnight). I think we’ll be sleeping in shifts for a while yet though - even in the bassinet he needs resettling every 30-40 minutes and will only sleep for two lots of 30-40 minutes (ie 1-1.5 hrs in total) before he wants to get up again for food and hanging out.

Sadly, I think he is just not that keen on the family bed idea - he doesn’t feed to sleep in the bed (or anywhere) and often wriggles and cries even when he is held in our arms or literally on one of our chests. On the few occasions he does go to sleep in our bed he wakes up at the slightest movement by either of us - the other night bean moved the doona by 2 mm and he lost it. He’s a sensitive little thing…

It’s so ironic that we consciously chose these ‘controversial’ ways of parenting (feeding to sleep, family bed) but he totally has other ideas - it’s a big parenting lesson already, and it’s only been five weeks.

I am learning how to type with him strapped to my chest while I am bouncing on the fit ball. I don’t feel more fit, sadly, but I do have a sore back! S really came to my rescue at 4am this morning. I was on the fold-out bed in the living room and after an hour and a half of being unable to get him to settle for more than a few minutes at a time, I felt pretty awful. I had run out of ideas, and for a few minutes, I just watched him cry. Then I heaved myself up and fed him (again!), at which point S stumbled out of our bedroom. She then settled him for the next 8 hours, only returning him for feeds. She is a seven-months-pregnant-superwoman. I would be non compos mentis without her.

Here is our gorgeous spotty beast this morning, being perfectly one month old.

Tis 4.40am and the little one has just finally fallen asleep after a session of bouncing and singing (PJ Harvey this time). He kept his bean awake from 2.30am. When I came out at 4am after my allotted 4 hrs sleep she was feeding him with a kind of demented look on her face. “I understand why people shake their babies” she said, and as she did, he gave her a smile of the most glorious, contented luminosity that we both immediately understood why we would never actually do it. She then handed him over to me whereupon he immediately started making the cutest faces and smiling wildly for at least 5 minutes, interspersed with tired frowns and grizzles.

I wonder if smiles starting at 4-6 weeks is an adaptive mechanism to counteract the other developmental trend of this period - increased hours of crying and unsettled behaviour…in other words, it’s much harder to send your unsettled baby to the glue factory when he looks into your eyes and smiles as if you are just the nicest thing he’s ever seen.

This is one tired baby. He doesn’t feed to sleep (we feel totally ripped off!), and he doesn’t yet know any other ways to get himself to sleep. So he needs us to actively settle him (involving upright movement) 24 hours a day which is fine in the daytime, but bloody hard at night time when all we want to do is lie down and close our eyes. Which, now that he is finally asleep against my chest, I am going to attempt to do.

As I lay in bed this morning in a stupor, S said sadly - you’ve gone all facebooky, and don’t blog any more… It’s true. It’s so much easier to log on to facebook and check out who has made a new friend, than it is to gather together words with any degree of cohesion after no more than 45 minutes of sleep in a row.

Our little hairy beast has been decidedly grumpy for the last few days, and it is very wearing. We think it is because he is working on the smile. There have been a couple of sneak previews of the real deal, and it is entirely heart melty. He has started to process more about his surroundings. Instead of bawling until the boob is in his mouth and milk is flowing, he is actually starting to settle when I talk to him and reach for the bra strap. It has also been a spotty week for our son. I’m hoping it is just the run of hormonal pimples from 3-6 weeks, but some patches look pretty angry. We don’t want him to feel self conscious, so we try not to make too many comments about it.

Here he is this morning, having a lovely chat with S who crocheted this christening gown.

It might not be so obvious from this photo, but I have finally, at nearly 7 months pregnant, officially ‘popped’. It’s so strange - because I am very short, with a very short torso (bane of my sartorial life), I was sure that I would stick out from way early on simply from lack of room. But even now that I have popped, I still think strangers would hesitate to ask when I was due, just in case I was merely fat. No neat pretty baby bump for me!

1) I played violin with Queensland Youth Orchestra 3 for one year.

2) I can put both feet behind my head - or used to be able to. Once I was showing off and accidentally rolled down a small incline with both feet stuck there…

3) I have had a catheter inserted twice. The first time, it was inserted by me - as a curious young nursing student, and the other time, in labour. My urethra doesn’t like it.

4) I have found getting pregnant, pregnancy, birth and parenting (thus far) much harder than I ever expected.

We tag the girls at Enough Grows to continue on this meme.