baybeasts

We’ve been tagged. Thanks Az. We’ve negotiated with Az to just do four each (given that our brains are only operating at half-capacity). I’ve managed to scrape together my four - not sure how bean will go, given her general lack of blogging mojo at the moment (because she actually tries to sleep at night when she’s looking after the baby, unlike me). If they seem rather baby-centric I am sure you will all forgive me…

1. When I was a teenager I used to write long, passionate, detailed letters to random people that I had enormous crushes on (music camp tutor, Bono, etc). I would package them up in little boxes or brightly coloured envelopes, sometimes with lovingly made drawings or origami things. I never got any replies. Years later, I was the token native English speaker at an English school camp in Japan, and a girl there (maybe 13?) wrote me this series of letters, in Japanese - it felt very weird. I suddenly had some idea of why no-one answered me all those years ago.

2. I have found that the very best way of getting my three week old son to fall asleep in the wee hours of the morning is to sit on a fit ball in front of the computer with him strapped to my chest in a sling, google the lyrics to songs I know (the seventies are proving to be particularly fruitful - The Logical Song, Hotel California, Stairway to Heaven, The Boxer etc) and bounce up and down while singing them badly. It never fails - he’s asleep within two songs every time.

3. In my twenties I said very emphatically, over and over, that I would never have children. My mother used to either get upset, or laugh and say that I would end up married with six! I wish she was still alive to see that her prediction came true (well, I’m not married but I’m in a happy, stable relationship, and I have one child and one on the way, but would love to have four in total - near enough).

4. I am a true child of the seventies - conceived around the time of the Aquarius Festival in Nimbin in 1973 as the result of a one night stand, born at home on a Japanese style dining room table in Coolangatta, and given a name out of a poem written by my mother’s guru. While this makes a rather lovely story, one rather sad consequence is that I don’t have any baby photos - the youngest I have is me at about one sitting on my mother’s lap (who had long hair parted in the middle and wore a sack-like dress) under a Moreton Bay Fig, and it’s blurry and we’re too far away from the camera to see our faces clearly. This may explain why we already have over 300 photos of our little fellow (though I also blame digital cameras and the pernicious influence of bean’s family who are the most prolific photo takers I have ever met outside Japan).