baybeasts

In the interests of truthful reporting, I feel I must record that the night following our perfect day was a crazy three ring circus. Oh well. Swings and roundabouts and a bunch of similar platitudes.

Mostly, our days are a mixed bag, with laughs and shiny moments all smushed up against laundry and angst. But today was just one long lovely shiny jewel of a day.

It began for me with that sweetest of things, a sleep in. It was my Huey night (we take turns) and he’d been up in the night, manic and flapping with glee to be awake with us at 11pm, zooming around the carpet with the wooden trolley we got from the toy library. So when 6.30am rolled around and Arlo started clambering over us and chatting in his newly invented language, rather than joining in with a cheery ‘hey dah!’ as usual, Huey kept his head down and had a little cry. ‘I think you better get Arlo up’ I told bean, and rolled over, plugged Huey in and went back to sleep. Imagine my surprise when I rolled back and looked at the clock - nearly two hours had slipped by. Bliss.

Once Huey and I were up too, we headed out for a special treaty breakfast at a cafe we love. Breakfast out with the boys is so wonderful. There’s coffee, and good food, and no dishes to wash at the end of it. Heaven.

Huey’s sleep in plus the drive home then gave us another unexpected gift - the rare and elusive double sleep (we’re hanging out for when Huey is old enough for a one sleep day). Huey’s morning nap was late, and Arlo’s midday sleep early because he fell asleep in the car (and transferred to the bed!), and so we had a whole hour and a half of baby-free time. Usually we would use that time to frantically run around and do chores, but today we gave ourselves another treat - a bath. Just the two of us, lounging in the warm water, no slippery babies to manage. Nirvana.

After they woke up and we gave them lunch, we got back in the car and headed to the women’s hospital to visit the enough grows girls and admire adorable little Turkey. Charming!

The day was topped off by a delicious meal of lamb tagine made by bean and her gorgeous friend J who stayed with us on the weekend (so no cooking needed to be done). We drank red wine and watched Dr Who, and now I am writing this as bean writes in our book where we record stuff the kids are doing. Soon we will go to bed and snuggle in the middle and listen to the kids breathing peacefully on either side of us. Perfect.

Sometimes, when we are at the end of our tether, when we are exhausted from the unrelenting imperative to look after the every need of two small beings and feeling rather sorry for ourselves and wishing we had grandparents who could pop over and help out now and then - such as this week where we’ve caught a bog load of illness (first S with gastro, then me with gastro and a woozy cold, then arlo with the gastro and then tonsillitis - yes, it’s been a bloody awful week) - huey, who has miraculously remained unscathed thus far, bestows upon us a goofy grin of such delight, whilst surrounded by his halo of happy hair, that it doth break through our miserable fug and restoreth us to greener pastures and whatnot.

Hooray for the safe arrival of wee Judith. Her mums sure did get a cute one!

Eek! We’ve been tagged by Erin and Maria to do a meme.
We have been dreadful at doing memes when tagged (sorry and sorry! and any others we have missed) so we will try to do this one right away rather than wait for something interesting to say…

1) What were you doing 10 years ago:
bean
I was 24 and it was a big year. I moved from Brisbane to Sydney (I never bonded with Sydney), started my first hospital job as a registered midwife, became uncomfortably familiar with the low after the high of party drugs, and started my first long-term relationship with a woman.
sorenson
Oh, 1998, how I loved you - you were indeed a Very Big Year. I spent 1998 in Japan, ostensibly on exchange at Ritsumeikan University in Kyoto, but actually spending most of my time hanging out and partying with a wildly fascinating group of queer artist types (and I learnt a lot more Japanese from them than I did from my classes!). It was one of the best years ever.

2)What are the five things at the top of your “to do” list:
bean
a) decide if I am going back to my old job or if I am going to do something completely different
b) weed the garden
c) work on ‘regaining my figure’ (as my grandmother’s bridge friends would say)
d) decide if we are ever going to (try to) have more kids
e) learn to cut hair to save money
sorenson
a) finish at least some of my endless unfinished craft projects
b) empty the worm farm
c) clean out the chook coop
d) prune the climbing roses
e) write more blog posts

3) What are five snacks you enjoy:
bean
a) a banana with a cup of tea
b) fruitcake with a cup of tea
c) an apple (Fuji) with a cup of tea
d) a bikkie and a cup of tea
e) baked-at-home wheat based treats with a cup of tea
sorenson
a) home baked goodies
b) any piece of fruit that I have grown myself (except the tamarillos)
c) toast with butter and honey
d) cracker with peanut butter and honey
e) cheese

4) Name some things you would do if you were a millionaire:
bean
Buy a home in the country and one by the sea and one in the heart of the city with housekeepers and groundskeepers and maybe a chauffer while I’m at it. Hmmm… maybe a million doesn’t go that far any more.
sorenson
Oh, exactly the same as bean!

5) Name some places you have lived:
bean
Germany, Chile, Japan, Brisbane, Sydney, Melbourne.
sorenson
Apart from a slow migration south from Queensland to Melbourne (Coolangatta, Sydney, Albury, Melbourne), only Japan.

6) Name some bad habits you have:
bean
Not putting the top back on the toothpaste properly, not separating colours, eating when I’m not hungry and being easily defeated (especially by craft projects).
sorenson
Not putting the lids back on jars properly, making a huge mess in the kitchen when I cook, picking at the food as I cook, not finishing craft projects.

7) Name some jobs you’ve had:
bean
audio-visual assistant at the state library, fast food job in high school, nursing home assistant, registered nurse, registered midwife and lactation consultant.
sorenson
mucking out horse stables, corner store assistant, selling books, teaching English in Japan, waitress, cultural studies tutor, public servant.

We all went to visit my grandmother in Brisbane for over a week, and we used disposable nappies while we were there. We learnt a few things that surprised us.
• Disposables nappies smell worse than cloth nappies. It was weird. We kept checking for poo only to find them clean.
• The boys both got a bit of thrushy nappy rash. We change our cloth nappies fairly often, but got a bit lazy with the disposables.
• Having two in cloth nappies is a lot of washing! We are lucky to have a nifty front loader which gets them clean without using heaps of water, but maaaan… you gotta be committed.
• It seems we are indeed committed. Despite the week-long flirt with an easier method, we couldn’t wait to get them back into cloth. We are also trying to catch the odd wee in the potty!

we cannot tell you how excited this news makes us.

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!

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.

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).