A Free Man

“I said, ‘I like Fidel Castro,
I think you heard me right,’
And ducked as he swung
At me with all his might.”

Z, at just shy of a year old, got in his first fight at day care yesterday. Unfortunately, it wasn’t because he was espousing his Dad’s (and Bob Dylan’s) socialist  notions. Nor was it because he’s taken to wearing girls’ sunglasses (thanks Arizaphale). Nope, he tried to steal some kid’s dummy (pacifier) and the kid responded, impressively, by going for Z’s eyes with his/her claws. I haven’t seen the other kid, but based on the scratch marks, I’m guessing Z came out second best. I’ve got no idea what’s going on in that day care, seems to be filled with battling feral children.

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Z’s birthday is in just over a week, and we’re planning the party. First birthday parties are, in my limited experience, only tangentially about the birthday boys or girls. For me, it’s a celebration of my success in avoiding major catastrophe whilst in charge of another human being for 365 days. That, my friends, is something to celebrate.

You’re all invited, by the way. Nichole looked online and found that she and the family could get down to Adelaide on short notice for $34,000 (U.S.). So, I’m looking forward to seeing her and Alex again. Don’t worry about a present, Nichole. Can’t think of a reason that the rest of you won’t be there as well.

Speaking of presents, Z’s gotten his first birthday gifts from his Grandparents in Florida and as with kids of his age, enjoyed the box as much or more than the contents. Among the contents, though was a great little piece of childhood memorabilia, a Tonka ambulance that has been playing the role of madeline for me since last night. It’s amazing how much you forget about childhood and how much can be brought back with a little bit of metal and plastic. You know what else is amazing - those old Tonka toys. Just indestructible, and Z’s giving it a good go.

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I took today off to spend with my son and I find that when I do that my brain goes a bit abstract and I start invoking Proust and shit. But among the partying that Z and I did today, we had to go and get another in the endless string of childhood vaccines. All the researching and posting and comment fielding that I’ve done about vaccinations and autism really got to me. Not because I had a slew of Luddites chiming nonsense and even some nut job compare me to Hitler. Nope, it was the thoughtful and valid points that people like April, NATUI and Joe and others made about the number of vaccines that kids are sometimes given at once. Since then, Dr. O’C and decided that Z would be fully vaccinated but that he would receive one jab at a time with a few weeks between jabs to let his immune system recover. Before you point it out, I recognize that we’ve made this decision in a very unscientific manner. But I’ve been parenting largely on instinct so far and, as I mentioned above, the boy’s still around. (One year, woo hoo!)

At any rate, the slightly thuggish nurse tasked with jabbing Boy Z tried to bully me into having the MMR and two other vax today as well. I told her no and explained my reasoning. I anticipated, and would have respected, an argument from Nurse Ratched based on the extra monetary burden on the health care system. One of the things about a socialized health care system is that you sometimes have to try to minimize costs and high maintenance parents demanding deviations from standard operating procedures cost money. That makes sense and if she had made this argument, I would have offered to pay the excess. But her case was that the kids get more upset with the more shots that they have to go through so its better to do them all at once. Bogus. Z barely whimpered with this one, which is about his 14th, and I doubt that he’ll be fazed by a few more. I’m always willing to stand on principle and Z will get his shots one at a time.

“As his fist hit the icebox,
He said he’s going to kill me
If I don’t get out the door
In two seconds flat,
You unpatriotic, rotten doctor commie rat…”

 

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There are still no sign of teeth, but just shy of a year old the boy’s taking to his feet. The days of lackadaisical parenting are near an end.

 

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“Lighted in a room, lanky room
Lighted, lighted, laughing in tune
Lighted, lighted, laughing…”

What better way to start of a Friday than this. Nothing warms my heart more than hearing and seeing Z laugh. Here’s hoping it’s always this easy…

R.E.M.’s essential “Murmur” is available from .

 

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As a first-time parent there is a whole series of “firsts” - first time the babe rolls over, his first bottle, first time he crawls, first haircut, first steps, first words, an on and on. And then there’s the first visit to the emergency room, maybe not one of the best ones, maybe not one that you capture on video, but certainly one that will stick in your head.

After recovering from his couple of sick days last week, Z seemed fine and dandy over the weekend and was unceremoniously chucked back into kiddie jail on Monday. Not for long, however as Dr. O’C got the call yesterday from day care that Z was running a fever of 40°C (104ºF) and raced from work to day care to the nearest emergency room. I raced, by bus, from work to the hospital. Nothing moves slower than a city bus when you’re on it and in a hurry to get somewhere.

Everything’s fine. Z has a case of tonsillitis and is on new antibiotics and ibuprofen and paracetamol for the fever. But that visceral sense of panic and powerlessness when you fear that your child is in danger is not a pleasant one. I fear that it is something that, with a young boy in the house, I’ll be dealing with on more than one occasion. First trip to the E.R. - probably not the last.

My first impression of the Australian health care system is that it pales in comparison to Britain’s NHS, but I’m not completely objective. Our wait was longer than I thought it should have been, but once we were seen by a doc, everything was fine. But it is better than the American system - when we walked out a few hours later we didn’t owe a cent for the treatment, medicine or even the cup of tea they brought for me.

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The White Stripes’ self-titled album is available from .

 

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One of the stated purposes of making this site ‘anonymous’ was so that I could air thoughts, feelings and neuroses that I may not want Google to permanently attach to my name.  I’ve always found writing to be great therapy and blogging extends the therapeutic possibilities by giving the potential for feedback in the form of comments. Problem is that I’m still reluctant to get to far outside of my everything is sunshine/check out this band/Go Dawgs! comfort zone. I’ve written more than one post that never saw the light of day because despite being ‘anonymous’, I’m not really anonymous.

All this is just a long winded preface to say that some of you aren’t going to like this post.

With the arrival of Baby Z, I’ve had a whole new set of neuroses to deal with - what’s my son going to grow into? What will he be like when he’s a teenager, a young adult? What can I do to insure that he has a chance of being a happy, healthy and well adjusted boy, teenager and man? Mostly I’m able to stifle these fears and just get on with the business of being a father - enjoying each day for what it is - but sometimes I find myself completely tangled in knots of confusion regarding some aspect of the boy’s rearing. These little bundles of obsession can keep me up nights, can be sources of heated arguments with Dr. O’C and can result in epic inconsistencies in parenting style on my part.

One of these little tenacious balls of anxiety is childhood obesity. It’s a problem that is reaching epidemic proportions in a lot of the wealthy Western societies. One of the side effects of a half century or so of unabated economic success is an excess of pretty much everything and one of the side effects of that excess is that our children are getting fatter and fatter.  According to the Centers for Disease Control, over 16% of American children were overweight or obese in 2007, triple the rate in 1980. In Australia, which recently surpassed the USA as the world’s fattest nation (Aussie! Aussie! Aussie! Oi! Oi! Oi!), over 20% of children are overweight or obese. Some experts have predicted that the obesity rate in children could skyrocket to 60% within 30 years.  There’s a lot of hand wringing about the causes, but for most people they’re blindingly obvious - our kids eat too much crappy “convenience” food and spend far too much time in front of the television.

I am desperately worried that Z is going to be one of that growing minority - that he’ll be a fat kid.  Now, I know that this sounds flippant and not that important in the grand scheme of things. There are far worse things that he could suffer from and, if I’m being honest, a bit of my concern is aesthetic. But, the majority of my worry not around some Hollywood/Madison Avenue dictated body image but health.  According to the Mayo Clinic, overweight children are at a significantly higher risk of Type 2 (’Adult’ onset) diabetes, high blood pressure, asthma and other respiratory problems, sleep disorders, liver disease, early puberty or menarche, eating disorders, skin infections and many more health problems in childhood. In my experience, they’re also at a much higher risk of being bullied as children. At a certain age, kids stop being cute and start being scary little fascists who pick out the weakest member of a group for vicious teasing and bullying. Any deviation from the “norm” can be used as a target - glasses, red hair, funny clothes, being fat.

Now, I’ve read a fair bit about childhood obesity and I know at an academic level that Zach is an unlikely candidate. Genetics and socioeconomic class are a significant factors in whether a child is obese and Z has no family history and comes from an over-educated middle class family. The major issues, however are diet and exercise, and here’s where things get confusing for your underwhelming narrator.  I really don’t know how much the boy is meant to eat. I’m averse to reading parenting books because I think that each one will give you a different opinion leading you to confusion, frustration and a tendency to buy more parenting books to clarify things. But, I did break down and consult the one book that we have in the household. It says that a boy of Z’s age should eat three healthy meals a day topped up with formula or breast milk with a minimum of snacking throughout the day.

I don’t want to be one of those Nazi parents that doesn’t let their child touch sugar or other junk food. I’m a pragmatist, I know that the boy’s probably going to have a Happy Meal now and again. Already, things are creeping into his diet that aren’t great - sugary soda, pancakes, french fries, tea and coffee - some of which I’ve given him myself. He gets good meals and hell, a little won’t hurt him, right?

But that snacking thing, that’s a horse of a different color.  Sometimes I think that Z looks to the dog for behavioral cues as much (or more than) he looks to people. Our dog can hear food being prepared from miles away and as soon as he gets the scent of people food, he’s under foot just praying for a bit of food to fall on the floor.  Since Z’s started crawling, as soon as someone in the house gets something to eat, there’s a race between dog and boy to see who can get the prime begging position. This was cute for a while and it’s hard to deny the boy a bit of whatever it is you’re eating. A little bit won’t hurt him, right?  As with the inappropriate foods, I’m guilty here too - sometimes it’s easier to give both kid and dog a bit of what your eating.  Sometimes it’s too cute - when Z gets his little fingers working - to resist.

However, with three adults in the same house working different hours and keeping different schedules, meal times can get muddied. Z has his dinner between 5 and 5:30. Myself, his Mum and his Nana eat at varying times between 6 and 7. Z goes to bed, with a bottle around 7 or 7:30. What this means is that between his dinner and bedtime he could be snacking pretty much constantly. I really fear that we’re setting up a bad precedent and one that is going to be increasingly difficult to break. Is this how these things get started? Are there habits that get established now that are impossible to break later in life? I don’t know.

Whenever I give voice to my concerns, particularly around Z’s female relatives, I get barracked with derisive statements like, “Jesus Christ, the child’s only X months old!” But at some point, the child’s going to be 5 years old or 10 years old or 15 years old or 35 years old, at what point do you have to start thinking about these things. At what age is it no longer cute? At what age does it start becoming dangerous? If not now, when? I’ve tried to establish a regular dinner time, where everyone sits at the table at once, an idea which has been met with a notable lack of enthusiasm.

So now, I stay quiet and stew and fret. And now, blog. I don’t know if I’m being neurotic and obsessive. I don’t know if I’m being silly. But I see these kids every day, these kids that are far too young to be as fat as they are. I see their parents and I wonder, did they know what they were doing or did they say, “Oh, a little bit won’t hurt, he’s only X years old.” And did they keep saying that and keep saying that and one day Augustus Gloop came home from school in place of their little baby? I don’t know. Do you?

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Jarvis Cocker’s self-titled solo debut is available from .

 

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You’ve got to love happy endings. In what could be Dr. O’C’s final post here on A Free Man, we get just that…

At some point my attitude to motherhood started to improve.  I don’t know when that happened, but it did.  I am a better mum than I thought I would be.  For the first few months, I would tell Z that I loved him, over and over but I don’t really think I meant it.  I said it more to convince myself of that fact.  I know that I was meant to feel this unconditional love for him.  Instead I didn’t really feel anything for him.  Sure he was a cute baby and it was nice when he smiled, but it could have been any baby.

Initially we had planned that I would take 4-5 months off work, but when February loomed I couldn’t go back.  I couldn’t put this helpless individual into day care 10 hours a day.  I didn’t know how it would work.  How would I get up, walk the dog, get Z and myself dressed and out the door.  Plenty of people do it.  I just didn’t know how it would work for me.  It comes back to my fear of new things or a new way of doing things.  A fear I never knew I had before Z was born.  I walk the dog the same route every morning.  I get up, walk dog, shower, get dressed, eat breakfast, brush teeth, dry hair and leave for work. In that order, every morning.  I don’t think I ever changed it.  It was the most efficient way of starting my day.  But looking back, was I inflexible and stuck in my ways?  With Z, although it took a long time to establish, I was used to doing things a certain way and couldn’t imagine fitting work into it.  I also couldn’t imagine that I would be comfortable leaving him with anyone else.

The irony of the situation is that before I got pregnant and even during my pregnancy I worried if I was capable of taking a whole 4 months off work.  I thought that would be pushing the limits of my sanity.  I am a social person, I love to talk, interact with people and find out about them. But mostly I knew that I would go insane if I stayed at home with a baby (and I kind of did).  If Chris could have taken paternity leave, I think that we would have both jumped at the chance.   And now here I was, not wanting to go back to work because I was both afraid of the logistics of doing what millions of people do every day, getting themselves and a baby ready and out the door in the morning and I was getting attached to this little person, whom I had had very little emotional connection with so far.

Chris and I had been discussing a move to Australia for a while.  Well to be honest, Chris was ready to go, but I loved my job and had negotiated a promotion for when I returned from maternity leave.   Problem was this promotion almost certainly required me to travel internationally every month.  Not something that was going to work with a small baby.  I know my company would have worked with me and changed the job, but to be honest I was probably looking for an excuse not to go back.  An excuse to not change my finely tuned routine and put Zach in the care of strangers.  Pathetic I know.  Instead of getting into a new routine of going back to work, I embark on a trans-continental move, involving two adults, a baby and a dog.  What the hell was I thinking?

I was thinking that it would be nice to be home after 8 years spent overseas.  It would be nice that Z has family around. A Nana whom he adores and who gives him sups of tea and biscuits, who he goes crawling half way across the house to when he hears her saying ‘Nana Nana Nana’. (She is determined that they be his first words).  It would be nice to have someone to tell me how to do things.  Simple things like when it is safe to give Z a piece of bread and not choke, when he is sick enough that he needs to see a doctor.  Someone to baby sit so Chris and I could have a night out, go see a movie, have a meal.  Someone who cares and loves him as much as we do.  It would be nice to be around friends who are having babies who Zach will grow up alongside.

Don’t get me wrong, the move was incredibly stressful.  I was moving home, but Chris was moving to a place he had never visited, a place where I grew up, knew people, had extended family.  I didn’t really know what the job market was like for either of us.  I didn’t know if Chris would like it.  I felt like if it didn’t work out for us that it would be my fault, that we would have wasted the better part of $15K moving our life here and worse still, we wouldn’t be in the financial position to do anything about it.  Dealing with importation of a dog into Australia is not an easy thing, not to mention importing Chris!  It might actually have been easier in hindsight to stay in Oxford.

But things have worked out so far.  Chris has got two jobs, both in areas he wanted to explore and on Monday I started a new job, a good job doing exactly what I had hoped I could do when I came back to Adelaide.  The next few months aren’t going to be easy, getting up, walking the dog, getting myself and Z fed and dressed, and out the door.  Not to mention establishing myself in a job that is challenging and WAY out of my comfort zone.  But I have more confidence that it will be ok.  That I can do it.  That Z will adapt.

I really didn’t think that having a baby would teach me anything about myself, that it would reveal numerous faults.   And in those early few months, I didn’t ever think I would get to the stage where I would look at my baby, my son and say I love you and actually mean it.

Now, about that final post thing. I can’t convince Dr. O’C of anything, not for lack of trying. But maybe you all can. I’ll leave it in your hands to persuade her to keep writing.

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Phantom Planet’s “The Guest” is available from and Amazon.

 

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We’ve been slowly introducing Z to day care over the last couple of months in anticipation of Dr. O’C returning to work. It’s been a pretty traumatic experience for both of them from what I hear, an experience probably best left to the protagonists to tell. Suffice it to say that Z is not yet a fan of day care. With Dr. O’C starting work this week it was to be his first full week at kiddie jail, as it’s known around the A Free Man household.

But Z got a temporary reprieve in the form of a winter bug and doctor’s orders not to send him to day care for the first few days of the week. Because Dr. O’C had just started her new job and thought her employer might be underwhelmed with her taking time off already, sick kid duty fell to me.  My own work situation is pretty precarious, I’m really just barely staying ahead of things, for example I finished my Monday lecture on the bus coming into the city that morning. Regardless, I was looking forward to a rare weekday in sole custody of my son.

Things got off to a bit of a snotty start, as Z’s mood and health was pretty well illustrated by the photo above. He was whiney and clingy and unhappy - the very model of a sick child. In order to save my sanity, I bundled the boy up and hit the road. I am not a shopping mall sort of guy, but on another rainy Australian winter day, it’s the best I could come up with.

It was at the mall that I realized something wasn’t quite right. While Zach was roaring around the play area, an acorn of suspicion started to germinate in my brain. When we left the mall, the weather had cleared up and man and boy headed to the beach. As we were walking along the jetty at Brighton, with Zach chatting, singing and laughing, I knew I’d been had. It seemed, in fact, that his symptoms had vanished completely. As someone who’s phoned in with the blue flu once or twice in his time, I know a con job when I see it. I mean, look at that smile - does that look like someone who is too ill for day care to you?

Baby Z, you can’t bull shit a bullshitter.

I enjoyed our day together so much, however, that I kept quiet  and didn’t grass him up when he started coughing, sniffling and moaning when his Mum got home. In fact, Z may have an accomplice in his anti-incarceration plan tomorrow.

Z and I thought we’d share a bit of our playlist from the day. Enjoy:

MP3: Ryan Adams - “Nuclear”
MP3: Count Basie - “The Kid from Red Bank”
MP3: Radiohead - “I Might Be Wrong”
MP3: Wolf Parade - “Modern World”
MP3: Morcheeba - “The Sea”

The albums from which these songs come are all available at .

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Things didn’t get any immediately easier for Dr. O’C after Baby Z was born. On this weeks episode, bringing home baby…

So, I am a parent - a mum.  I spend the first couple days at home wondering when I will be relieved of my babysitting duties.  But apart from that it is happy family.  Timmins, our Siberian Husky is behaving himself.  Z sleeps 4-5 hours at a time and I start to think that the next 4 months of maternity leave are going to be a piece of cake.  I am already planning my days of leisure.

Apart from the pain I am in, which the drugs are keeping under control, life is good.  Then the jaundice that has been causing Z to sleep so much wears off and the 2 hourly feeds 24/7 start and pretty rapidly sleep deprivation hits.  Now I know why it is such an effective form of torture.  I have always loved to sleep.  I love being in bed.  I get panicky if I know I am going to get less than 8 hours sleep.  Unfortunately it will be another 9 months before Z graces me with a full nights sleep.  That, my friends, is a very long time.

Apart from the sleep deprivation, which leaves me exhausted, I am in a lot of pain and can barely move. A simple shopping expedition to the local Mothercare makes me realize that my body is going to take more than a couple of days to recover.  Getting into and out of a car takes my breath away. I walk like I have just spent a year on a horse.  I wasn’t prepared for the pain.  I mean I knew that I wasn’t about to hop straight back on a bike after giving birth, but I never thought that a simple thing like getting your baby out of a cot would inflict pain.   The combination of constant pain and sleep deprivation make me realize that the whole motherhood thing isn’t that much fun. I feel no real attachment to Z.  I feed him, dress him, change his nappies, hold him, but he doesn’t feel like mine.  All I keep thinking is “What the hell have I done?  What was I thinking? I am not cut out for this motherhood thing.”  Now don’t get me wrong, I love kids.  I have two nephews, whom I adore. I just don’t know if I want to be a mum.  I haven’t felt this gushing ‘oh I love my baby soooo much’ rush of emotions that I think I should be feeling.Because I have chosen to breastfeed, the exhaustion is never relieved.  Z takes close to an hour to get back to sleep when I feed him in the middle of the night.  Chris offers to get up with him, but he has gone back to work and is teaching to earn extra money. Honestly I feel trapped in my situation and I know I am.  When Z wakes up 3-4 times a night for a feed, I find myself crying.  I remember one night crying so violently that I wake Chris up.  I just keep saying to him ‘I can’t do this’.  He tries to comfort me, but I think that he is disappointed in me.  What I am too afraid to vocalize is that I don’t want to do this.  I want my old life back.  What new mum thinks and says this stuff?

Looking back now, I don’t think it was as straight-forward as post-natal depression.  I wasn’t ready to be a mum.  I didn’t want to give up the life I had which was easy and uncomplicated.  Where I didn’t have to think of anyone but myself.  I also realize now (although it has always been glaringly obvious to most people around me) that I am a control freak.  I like to do things well.  I thought I was adaptable and easy going.  Z quickly taught me that I was not adaptable and although I have spent my life as a scientist performing new experiments, I actually would rather do experiments that I know will work, that I have done before.  A health visitor points out that some people like to learn through trying and others like to be shown what to do and then do it.  I disappointingly fell solidly into the last category.   Z doesn’t do the same thing day after day.  I think he is in a routine, only for it to the next day.  I feel a bit paralysed, unable to make plans for fear that Z won’t fit into them.  I am only capable of focusing on what is going wrong, of what I am doing wrong.  Z isn’t an easy baby.  He has a severe case of colic.  He cries for hours every night and some mornings.  Piercing, loud, hysterical crying.  The doctors and health visitors reassure me that nothing is wrong and that hours upon hours of crying can’t physically hurt him.  Mentally though, they take their toll on me.  Chris tries to relieve some of my exhaustion by feeding Z formula from a bottle.  A bottle he promptly rejects and continues to reject for months. We have no family in Oxford, no reprieve.  I become afraid to leave the house to meet up with people for fear that he will be a screaming nightmare.  It takes a while to work out, but when I eliminate dairy from my diet things start to improve.   

Chris, fearful that I am at serious risk of sliding into a depression, goes to great lengths to force me out of the house.  He emails my antenatal group on my behalf arranging meet ups.  He insists I visit him at work during the week.  He searches the internet for things for me to do.  I resisted initially.  I didn’t want to meet up with a bunch of people and just talk about sore tits, baby shit and vomiting.  I have a PhD dammit, I am a career women.  I have nothing else in common with them apart from having the same hippy lady tell us all about birthing.  In the end though, they were saviours.  Sure we talked about tits, shit and vomit, but so what, for the next couple of months (I thought at the time) that would be my life.  I slowly, very slowly, learn that Z is adaptable. 

I take him grocery shopping, and instead of him screaming his way around the supermarket he is fascinated until the rows and rows of tinned goods sent him to sleep.  We take him to our favorite Asian restaurant and he falls asleep in his pram staring out the window.  I think I had become afraid of Z.  Afraid of his tolerance for sitting in a pram, afraid to test him out, to see if he would actually be happy sitting and staring out a window.  I became afraid to let him whinge or cry.  When tested he passes with flying colours.      

What Dr. O’C is too humble to say is that she does as well.

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This week’s accompanying track is the Mates of State’s cover of Phantom Planet’s ”O.C.” theme. I first heard this on “This American Life” and found this version over at Agnes‘ site. I’ve no idea where she found it, but The Mates of State’s new record “Re-arrange Us” is available from .

 

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Gregor Mendel, the father of modern genetics, started to study the mechanisms of heredity after observing variations in flower color in his garden pea plants. He began to notice patterns from season to season and ultimately was able to predict the frequency of one flower color occuring in subsequent generations versus another. What started with attention to detail ended up as a set of natural laws that still stand unchanged 150 years later.

It’s serendipitous discoveries, like Mendel’s peas,  that have driven most of the great scientific discoveries over time. Something can start off as a curiosity and evolve into a groundbreaking revelation. So, one, especially if that one is a geneticist, can’t help but swell with a bit of pride when sent a photo like this. My young son is clearly demonstrating a scientific curiosity and spectacular powers of observation. Maybe he’ll get that Nobel prize that his Papa fell (well) short of…

….or maybe not.

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Ego bubble unceremoniously popped, I thought I would turn my narcissism outward and point you all at the folks that are doing this blogging thing better than I. I was talking to a friend about my apparent good karma today (let’s talk about that later) and I figure I better spread it around a bit to keep it coming. Here are some of my recent favorites:

Politics: If you’re not supplementing your election coverage with the Wonkette, then you’re taking this whole 2008 election far too seriously. While I occassionally disagree with their politics, the Wonkette folks are treating the race with just the right amount of gravitas.

Science: I tend to recoil from “old media” blogs, but Nature’s online commentary is excellent. The Great Beyond covers ‘hot’ science with just enough sarcasm and humour to keep it accessible and interesting. Nice work from the scientific “Grey Lady”.

Music: One of my favorite music bloggers these days is a 24 year old primary school teacher from Down Under. It’s a great statement about the democratization of media and I guess I’m just surprised that a school teacher has her fingers so perfectly on the pulse of new music. Impeccable taste and a way with words - check out Agnes at It All Started With Carbon Monoxide.

Personal: One blog that I’ve recently stumbled upon is really tickling my fancy lately. Formerly Fun is authored by a Southern California bikini waxer. If that doesn’t encourage you to give her a click then your priorities are all sorts of misplaced. She’s dead funny, prolific and spends just the right amount of time talking about mons pubis (or is that mons pubii?).

Wild Card: Finally, Garfield Minus Garfield. Ryan pointed me in the direction of this site which, as you may have guessed, is based on the hackneyed cat comic strip. Turns out that if you remove the title character, you go from having a fairly unfunny comic strip to a horse of an entirely different color. Garfield Minus Garfield is a portrait of the inner workings of one lonely, slightly disturbed, feline-less man. Even if you don’t like Garfield, especially if you don’t like Garfield - this one’s for you.

Wishing you a great weekend from Happy Valley.

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Update

While I’m spreading the love, I just have to point you to this post from one of my long-time favorites. Schadenfreude.

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I know that I’m about as far from objective as I am from my homeland, but this week’s installment of Dr. O’C’s recounting of pregnancy and childbirth struck me to the quick. I’m not one to be quoting poetry, but her post this week made me think of a Robert Frost poem that I must have read in college:

I craved strong sweets, but those
Seemed strong when I was young;
The petal of the rose
It was that stung.Now no joy but lacks salt,
That is not dashed with pain…

The green light to push. SHIT! Now comes the hard and painful part right?  Not so much.  I can’t feel anything with the epidural and am completely reliant on the midwife to tell me when I am in the middle of a contraction and when to push.  So I push for a bit, rest, push etc. I remember doing the breathing thing like they teach you in antenatal class and Chris doing it in my ear with me.  So far so good.  All very calm.  But then in come the doctors, they chat with the midwife over in the corner.  I (naively) assume that they are talking about someone else.  A doctor had been in previously to examine me.  But then they explain that because I had been in labour so long the baby’s heart rate wasn’t recovering at the end of every contraction.  They said it very calmly.  Explained that they were just going to help out a bit with a plunger! (Proper term is a Ventouse).  Turn the babies head or something and hopefully that would do it.  Chris started to get a bit panicky and so did I when I saw the size of the toilet plunger that was about to enter me.  Chris assured me later it wasn’t really THAT big, but at the time it looked bloody enormous.  Then things got a bit scary.  It is all a bit of a blur now, but I remember the panic in Chris’s face when a pediatrician came in pushing an elaborate life support cart.  I tried to reassure him, but was a bit frightened myself.  We later found out this was completely normal procedure.  A few more pushes and out came the baby, it was a boy - Z.  He was whipped onto my stomach for some skin-to-skin contact and then whisked away to the cart for some tests.  He was fine, but I wasn’t.

The long labour took its toll and I was (to put it bluntly) torn to bits.  I lost a litre of blood and knew that things weren’t great when several doctors spent time arguing about whether or not we could get access to an operating theatre.  All that kept going through my head was ‘But the baby is born, why would I need to be in an operating theatre?’  The lovely Irish obstetrician spent the next 55 minutes stitching me up.  I knew how long it took because I could see the clock ticking by.  I remember talking about Ireland, about my Nana who played camogie for Ireland (the OB played as well) and about other mundane things.  I remember Chris asking if I wanted to hold Z.  I mentally couldn’t.  This wasn’t the happy but exhausted holding the baby scenario I had imagined it would be after he was born.  Mostly I remember the OB telling me that it would only take 20 or so minutes and getting scared when it went much longer.  I remember all the bloody gauze that she seemed to be going through.  I tried to stay calm but 45 minutes into this ordeal I couldn’t.  I started to cry. She finished up, I begged Chris to get me a private room (which you could pay for if available).  Finally I was able to hold Z, but to be honest I don’t even remember it now.  I don’t remember the first time I held my baby.

A lovely midwifery assistant brought me toast and yoghurt and washed me down and got me into some PJs.  She helped me feed Z, which was a very strange sensation.  I was wheeled upstairs to a private room thankfully and we just sat and stared at Z.  I could barely move, Chris had to go home and here I was left with a baby who was big and swollen and surprisingly clean.

Chris came in the next morning with bundles of blue clothes.  Clearly excited and besotted and a little better rested than I.  Nurses, Doctors and Physiotherapists came by and checked up on us both.  They garbled a bunch of instructions at me but I was too exhausted to take much in.  We went off to the pediatrician to have him checked over and he peed on the intern.  We registered his birth and I begged to be let go home.  I didn’t want to stay in the hospital any longer than I needed.  In retrospect I probably should have.  I was weak, battered and probably in a bit of shock from the trauma of the birth.  I thought if I went home everything would be normal.  I finally convinced them and left with a bag of drugs to take over the coming weeks, and a kid!  I also left with explicit instructions not to lift anything heavier than the baby for 6 weeks.  I think in retrospect they should have told me to consider my wound as serious as a c-section because then maybe I wouldn’t have been so blasé about the whole thing and maybe it wouldn’t have gotten worse.

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