Progress

Progress on the nursery-to-be has been slower than I'd hoped. I've been doing most of the tidying, which has to be interrupted by long rest periods in which I wait for my lower back to recover. The boy spent a sweaty afternoon putting stuff into the attic - including a heavy, broken heater which I told him needed throwing out, not storing.

The chest of drawers is still unmade and in it's packaging, which is a little disappointing.

On the other hand, the boy brought home Buffy Season 5, part 2 and Angel Season 4, part 1. Apparently he did it so I won't be bored out of my mind when I stop working and start waiting for the big event. To misquote a well-known but oratorally-challenged All Black, all credit to my other half.

I managed to tick several things off my to-do list this morning:

- book an infant car seat from Plunket, for baby's trip home and first six months;

- get my mum showered and changed (she's steadily getting strength back in her arm, but isn't yet able to get into those tight thermal undershirts of hers);

- retrieved all my old bank statements from the rubbish bag out back, so I can manually shred them before putting them in the recycling bin (I'm paranoid about identity theft);

- return Foucault's Pendulum (I tried manfully to read it, but got bored - plus it's too big a book to hold in one hand and read in bed) and Oryx and Crake (a great little tale of genetic engineering extreme) to the library;

- find a new home for an unwanted, space-gobbling wardrobe.

my back, my back.

It's not just walking extremely slowly with my mother around the supermarket that makes my lower back feel like I've been trying too hard with the yoga back-bends; it's also when she takes off to the supermarket restroom, leaving me to stand around for twenty minutes minding her trolley.

I've found another way to get a really tired, sore lower back - too much tidying in the nursery-to-be. By tidying, I mean: going through my filing cabinet and chucking out old bank statements by the ton; shifting everything out of the glass cabinet and packing it all away into the kitchen cupboard, having first cleared out said cupboard (although finding a bottle of wine, a bottle of coffee liqueur and several beautiful mugs and glasses I forgot I had, was a definite plus); and sorting through boxes of old travel memorabilia to make sure nothing gets thrown away that I want to keep.

It's because all those boxes, cabinets and cupboards are low, which means I have to bend, bend, bend. It's one of the curses of being short, really; I can't put stuff in high places because I can't reach, but if everything is stored on the floor then I have to keep bending over to get at it.

So today has been a bit of a pain, literally. By mid-afternoon I was walking like an old lady with a groin injury.

It's been a couple of weeks since I last had time to get to the gym, but at this rate I'm not exactly going to be in any condition to do anything but sit on my bum and supervise the boy while he takes over the housework.

Big clean-up

Not content to wait for the boy to make space in his study, for all the stuff which is to be moved there from the nursery-to-be, I made a start cleaning out the latter this morning.

Apart from my own computer, the nursery-to-be is still home to all my art gear, including a large wooden easel, folders full of completed paintings and drawings, and bags full of paper and craft materials. It's also home to the vacuum cleaner, the ladder and just about everything else which doesn't have a cupboard to live in.

That's the trouble with old houses, the lack of storage. Stuff which would normally be put away in high cupboards is stacked in corners of our baby's nursery-to-be.

Well, after an hour and a half of taking down pictures and sifting through bits and pieces, throwing some things away and putting other things into boxes, the room doesn't actually look very different - no doubt because what's left has nowhere to go yet.

The good news is that the boy has promised to start tidying up his study tomorrow, so perhaps by the end of this long weekend we'll have a space big enough for the baby gear. And if I'm really, really lucky, he'll have put together the kit-set scotch chest too, so I'll have somewhere to put all the baby clothes.

We went to visit some friends today who have a six-week old son. He seems the model of babyhood - easy to put to sleep, easy to breastfeed (according to his mum, anyway) and not a crybaby. Maybe it's because both parents are so easy-going and non-stressy, but it's made me wonder whether I've been worrying too much about it all and perhaps have read too much about potential problems.

Another quiz

It's only because I'm having blogger's block, but at least I've gotten some interesting answers...


GREEN


??Which colour of Death is yours??
brought to you by Quizilla

Hecate


?? Which Of The Greek Gods Are You ??
brought to you by Quizilla

Chinese Superstitions about Pregnancy

A friend told me that traditionally, after childbirth a new Chinese mother must not get herself wet for six weeks. This includes bathing (although sponge baths are okay), hair washing and food preparation. My mum confirmed it, and my Chinese boss told me it's something to do with the need to rebuild one's Chi.

But wait - there's more...

According to ricebiz:

- use of glue during pregnancy will lead to a difficult birth;
- if you strike an animal during pregnancy your child will look and behave like that animal;
- praise of a newborn baby will attract the attention of evil spirits;
- a baby with wide, thick ears will grow up to be prosperous (lending new meaning to that parental exclamation, "I'll give you a thick ear!".

According to britishbornchinese:
- swearing during pregnancy can cause the baby to be cursed;
- a child's imperfections, deformities etc are blamed on the actions of the mother (yeah, imperfect as in the wrong sex too!);
- continuing to work during pregnancy will ensure an easier delivery (and I thought Chinese society was just treating women as slave labour);
- it is unlucky to name an unborn baby, because it means the parents want the baby to be a particular sex, and may be disappointed (so it must be okay to name the unborn child with a unisex name, right?);
- pregnant women are supposed to be taken care of by their mother-in-law, not husband.

Hmm...but I still don't know why pregnant women aren't supposed to eat lamb.

Preg-head

Today I accidentally left work half an hour early. Yes, really. Normally I work till 4.30 Wed-Thurs and until 4pm on Fridays. Today I just forgot and leaped out the door at 4pm. I didn’t even realize my mistake until I got home and wondered why it was only quarter to five.

My boss had left early to pick up her kids from their babysitter's, and I bet the other staff thought I was just taking advantage...

Whedon stuff

I haven't checked the Slayage site in a while, so I didn't know until now that volume 16 is out (only two months after the fact).

It includes an interesting article on the last season of Angel (including what season six would have been about) and another on the character of Spike.

There's also an episode guide to Firefly look for the link on the left hand side), as well as lots of quotes from the DVD commentaries of the show.

It's good to get my fix.

Natural Born Killers

This is a movie which never appealed to me when it first showed at the cinemas, and which we only have on DVD because the boy reckons its a great movie, a classic (actually, I bought it for him for Christmas). I only watched it for the first time last night, and I have to say it was one of the more unpleasant movies I've seen.

I get that Oliver Stone was trying to make a statement about the imbecilic glorification of serial and mass murderers. All the same, I didn't enjoy the relentless violence used to make his point.

The killers, Mallory and Mickey, are horrible to everyone else but totally loving to each other. It's this romanticism of theirs, and possibly also their youth and physical attractiveness, which allows them to pump bullets into innocent people (that is, when they aren't raping them, knifing them or beating them senseless) and yet become popular heroes. I get that.

But I would've felt better if they'd come to a sticky end. I always prefer to see a bit of justice being done.

Getting prepped

Thirty weeks and a bit, and it definitely feels closer to the big day. The belly seems to have undergone another growth spurth, resulting in my constant feeling of squashed-up-ness.

I knew from the diagrams that, as the uterus gets bigger to accomodate the growing baby, your lungs, intestines, stomach - just about everything else - is displaced into the ever-decreasing available body space. I just didn't realise quite how uncomfortable it was going to make me.

My mum's getting psyched too. She's been less and less demanding of me for weeks now; mum's advised me to get the boy to hang out the washing for me because our clothesline is up several steps, and even offered to stump up the cash for taxi fares so I can get to work in greater comfort (although I'll keep bussing and walking for as long as possible, just for the exercise).

We had another look at the baby gear shops and once again left without buying anything, only this time at least we have a list of the big-ticket items we'll get when the boy gets around to actually buying anything:

1) one of those vibrating baby chairs, as seen on Sex and the City (not one of Samamtha's sex toys, Miranda has one for her son)

2) a car seat of some sort for 6 months and over - we'll probably rent an infant-sized one from the Plunket Society

3) a portable cot which comes with 2 mattress layers (the higher one for newborn and the lower one for over 6 months) and a nappy change platform

4) several punk t-shirts, 'cos the boy just won't be able to resist

5) a buggy which can accomodate both infant-size and older

We went to a kiddie-gear fair today, a fundraiser for a local playcentre. I was disappointed that most of the stuff was clothing (although there were three buggies for sale), because I was hoping to find...you know, gear. Still, I managed to spend over one hundred bucks on used clothing and a couple of new fleece blankets. Everything was just so cute that it was hard not to buy stuff.

Misery, or The Perils of Enforced Starvation

I suppose there are several reasons why the act of fasting is so unattractive to me.

My upbringing, of course, has much to do with it. In my family, food is an opportunity to show love and an excuse to have friends and family around.

Food isn't just fuel, it's important enough to be particular about quality even if it means spending large amounts of time and money on obtaining and preparing it.

You all know about my sweet tooth. An anticipated trip to the bakery is sometimes all it takes to turn me from a grumpy-drawers into someone pleasant to be with. You also know about my inability to go more than about three hours without food, without getting Shaky, Grumpy and Weakly (the three hypoglycaemia dwarfs).

And this is why I felt so much suffering this morning, when I had to get some blood tests done for possible gestational diabetes.

It was one of those tests where you can't eat for about twelve hours prior. In the three and a half hours I was at the laboratory, I had blood drawn from my arm three times, one hour apart. Between 9.30 last night and 10.30 this morning, my food intake consisted solely of a glass of sickly sweet drink (part of the test) which made me feel nauseous. Nausea on top of severe hunger, on top of tiredness because I had to get out of bed half an hour early, is not a pleasant thing.

Between leaving the lab and getting to the bus stop, all of ten paces, I inhaled two small bananas, followed by a large cheese sandwich. I stopped shaking after I got to work and had a cup of tea and a meat pie.

I'm going to be so disappointed if the results come back positive.

unintellectual

I've been trying to read Foucault's Pendulum by Umberto Eco. Because I'm enough of a book snob to sneer at those lightweight romances, family sagas and run-of-the-mill thrillers, I thought I'd try something a little more literary.

There's really something quite off-putting about a novel in which every sentence requires me to pick up my dictionary. Especially when some of the words in those sentences aren't even in the dictionary.

I wonder, could I just toss the book aside as pretentious rubbish which only the most high-brow member of the literati would appreciate?

Margaret Atwood's Oryx and Crake is proving to be much more forgiving.

Dominatrix Bear

The raciest thing since Transvestite Barbie, here is Dominatrix Bear.

Not as furry as I've have expected

Too sweet

What a tragedy. I've been instructed to lay off the sweets, because the results of my Glucose Challenge Test (which sounds like a reality tv show, but isn't) indicate that my blood sugar levels are a teensy bit higher than they ought to be.

When I found out, I thought back guiltily to the pillow-sized French pastry I had for lunch. And the chocolate bar I snacked on last night, which was a preggy prezzie from a friend. And the giant blueberry muffin in the fridge. And the biscuits and gourmet ice cream.

For I have a sweet tooth matched only by the that of the boy, who is English and therefore has a very sweet tooth indeed.

To add further suffering to this Lent-like sacrifice, I have to go for more tests on Thursday - this time I have to fast. That means nothing except water may pass my lips between 9.30pm Wednesday and whenever the tests finish on Thursday (hopefully no later than 10am).

Fasting of any sort is a minor catastrophe for my metabolism, because I'm the sort of person who has to eat frequently in order to avoid feeling weak, lethargic and horribly grumpy.

Meanwhile I'll cross my fingers and hope I don't develop gestational diabetes.

The once-fashionable body pillow

It's been recommended to me by some of you commenters that I try sleeping with a body pillow at night, to help fix my frequent insomnia. I still haven't quite figured out how it's supposed to work, but I want one anyway (despite the boy's assertion that he is a perfectly adequate body pillow for me).

Well, the little buggers are proving hard to come by.

In the weekend we tried three different bedware shops in town - none sold them, although they all used to. Apparently they were all the rage just a year or two ago. By the time I'd been disappointed that many times, my bump had started to complain so we went home.

I rang a few places. Bedpost has two shops - the more distant one definitely has them, the nearer one possibly has them. I did a little dance of triumph and resolved to drive over to the nearer shop.

The man at Bedpost shook his head and told me they used to have them, but not any more. But he did promise to get one for me overnight.

The other positive thing to come out of my unsuccessful trip into town was that I didn't have to come home empty-handed. Just a couple of doors down is a French bakery, its display case crammed full of highly edible goodies with unpronouncable (unless you can speak French) names.

Far from having made a completely wasted journey, I returned with booty - a large, round, almond-topped, vanilla cream-stuffed eclair - almost the size of a pillow.

Ten things I've never done

Draic has invited me to take up the Ten things I've never done baton. Since I'm incapacitated with the snottiest cold I've had for quite a while, and I'm not likely to be doing anything exciting instead, I may as well run with it.

1. I've never watch a live rock concert from the shoulders of a boyfriend. This is kind of unfortunate, because I'm only five feet tall and fate always puts tall people with afros in front of me at concerts. That's why, when I went to see Prince in Edinburgh, I didn't actually get to see him.

2. I've never broken a bone, although I have suffered ankle sprains (from aerobics), severe bruising (from playing cricket) and knee problems (from playing Ultimate). If you've ever watched the tv show Kath and Kim, then you'll know what I mean when I say that this makes me sound worryingly like Sharon.

3. I've never been married. I do, very occassionally, give the boy a hard time about the fact that he still hasn't made any moves toward rectifying the situation; with a baby on the way though, it's hardly good timing for an ultimatum.

4. I've never been rollerblading. But I have been rollerskating, and managed not to sprain anything. I figure that I'm too old for learning skills which require balance, after unsuccessfully trying to learn to ride a pushbike at the age of twenty.

5. I've never bungy-jumped. Not that I'm scared of heights, but I am scared of my eyeballs popping out on the rebound.

6. I've never belly-danced in public. I was quite happy to dance at the classes (in my tracksuit pants), but when we had our end of year party at a local Turkish restaurant, I was one of the very few who didn't turn up with a spangly bra and shake my booty in front of strangers.

7. I've never seen myself on television. However, I have been caught onscreen during a news segment about student unemployment. I did wonder why there were so many bright lamps on in front of the job notices. Anyway, I do not have a television face, so I'm grateful I never saw myself - the pysychological damage would have required years of therapy.

8. I have never been mugged. When I was in Africa I kept meeting backpackers who'd been mugged in Johannesburg. By the time I got there myself, I was so paranoid I refused to leave the hostel after dark unless it was as part of a group. Well, that worked.

9. I have never given blood. The only time I tried to, I was refused because I was underweight (that was certainly a silver lining in the cloud!). Then I put on weight and couldn't give blood because I was always on medication for hayfever or something else. Now I can't give blood because I was in the UK during the Mad Cow years.

10. I have never been to a male strip revue. Somehow the hens nights I've been to weren't that kind of hens night. But I have had a male stripper at my birthday once. That was probably enough.

pirates

If you had a mate who was going to Asia and offered to bring back cheap, pirated copies of any DVDs you wanted, because it was only going to cost you a couple of bucks each, what DVDs would be on your list?

DVDs ain't cheap, which is why I tend to leave the DVD buying in this household, to the boy. That's why we have so many movies based on graphic novels, and huge gaping holes in our Buffy/Angel collections. So if money wasn't an issue (and in my mind, it usually is), what would I ask for?

Firstly, fill that damnned gaping hole - that means getting Buffy Seasons 5 and 7, and season 6 part two.

It also means getting Angel season 5.

Secondly, the entire Baby Genius collection, for the little one who is to come.

I wouldn't mind supplementing my favourite comedy, Zoolander, with some more of Ben Affleck's wonderful work - Meet the Parents and Dodgeball would be a good start.

I loved The Emperor and the Assassin, so I'd get that just to show the boy that Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon ain't all that.

As yet I can't decide whether to go for Star Trek season two, or the entire Seinfeld series. Sometimes nostalgia just isn't what it used to be.

Maybe another X-Files season, I'm not sure. We already have the seasons 1-4 and I know that by the time the whole alien conspiracy story arc was wrapped up it was only a matter of episodes before I stopped watching the show religiously.

Oh, and also Best in Show, The Mighty Wind, and that one about the two crooks who arrive in town masquerading as little-girl pageant coaches.

Obviously

I seem to have finally hit that stage when it's really really obvious to people that I'm pregnant. It's hard to look pregnant in the winter, because I've got my big bear-sized coat on when I go outside and I probably just look blubbery.

For the last couple of days now, when I get on a crowded bus I don't even have to say 'Excuse me, I'm pregnant - can I sit down?'. I might have to excuse myself, but that's it. And yesterday a young guy offered me his seat even without me looking in his direction. It really helps to unbutton my coat and let it all hang out (so to speak).

In the weekend, one of my neighbours whom I don't really know except by sight, walked past me as I retrieved my recycling bin from the footpath. We said 'hi', as neighbours do, but then he carried on and congratulated me on my mother-to-be-ness. This from a guy who usually doesn't say a word to me.

On the other hand, when I'm sitting on a park bench gorging myself on a giant-sized potato-top mince pie, I wonder if people walking past are thinking that I'm eating all the wrong food for a pregnant woman - maybe they're silently lambasting me for not eating home-made salad and hummous.

Today I bought a book called Bestfeeding, recommended to me by my GP. Amazing that something which is supposed to be such a natural thing i.e. breastfeeding, is so un-simple in practice that it takes a team of experts to write hundreds of pages on how to do it properly. How on earth do women in third-world countries manage?

Blah

Gawd, I've got months of getting bigger, heavier and clumsier to go and already I feel sick of being so big, heavy and clumsy all the time. Every time I get up to walk around I can feel a load of weight pressing on my bladder. Eating a sandwich and reading the newspaper at the same time is uncomfortable just because that particular activity requires me to lean forward.

The boy has been very understanding; he gives me hugs, encouragment and - today - pink roses.

I visited another child care centre today, after work. This time it's one that's just down the road from work. Like the previous one, it's noisy, separated into one space for babies and another for preschoolers, full of toys and craft materials and staffed by young women with qualifications in Early Childhood Learning. Unlike the last one, the toilets weren't seem to take up a large part of the space, so there wasn't that faint toilety smell around the place. That's got to be a plus.

I dunno. Thinking about putting my kid into a place like this makes me feel a little depressed, because it means thinking about getting my baby out into the big wide world already - before I've even given birth much less bonded with it, learned to live around it's sleep patterns and taught it to enjoy being with other people. I should really stop thinking so far ahead, and concentrate on looking for cute, yet practical, baby strollers, cots and nursery decor.

Think pink roses.

Starbuck's a girl

The boy bought three DVDs over the weekend - The Punisher, Battlestar Galactica (the pilot of the re-make of the 1970's series) and The Dark Crystal.

Thankfully I was spared The Punisher. Most films based on graphic novels I can do without. John Travolta was in this one, but that wasn't enough to entice me.

The Dark Crystal was okay. Probably the funniest thing in it was the girl-Muppet's pet, which looked like the head of a homeless man (just the head), encased in fur and yaps instead of talks.

Battlestar Galactica was actually more fun than I'd expected, although just a little too military. Apparently changing star fighter-pilot Starbuck into a butch girl (who is yet still Hollywood-pretty) and giving the other star fighter-pilot Apollo some father-son angst, were two major changes from the original.

Of the original, I only remember that I thought the title was ridiculously cheesy and that the commander was played by that old guy from Bonanza (Lorne Greene. Anyone get the Angel connection?).

The boy was indignant that the show's "villain", a computer genius whose lust for a blond in a painted-on red dress eventually leads to humanity's fall against the robot race, had an English accent. He thinks the Americans always make the villains English. Not true - they're usually Middle Eastern, German or Asian. English accents are more likely to be given to campy gays, snobs and, if Cockney, streetwise crooks-with-a-heart.

I'm not bad - I'm just drawn that way 

I thought it would be oh-so boring to simply take a photo of my big preggy self and post it to the blog. A drawing is so much more subtle (and, comfortingly, a lot less accurate). It took me six attempts to produce the version on the right - one in which my body parts aren't completely out of proportion. That's what happens when you stop drawing for more than a year, I guess.

So anyway, this is more or less what I look like at nearly 29 weeks. Actually, I'm a little bigger than I look in the drawing because I couldn't quite get the rotundity right.

The Hitichhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

I wasn't going to go see this at first, because I've always been a devotee of the BBC radio series (which I had recorded on cassette tape), the tv series and the books (including a book of the radio series scripts). I'm almost a Hitchhiker-nerd, except I don't tend to quote the funny bits (because I can't remember them word for word) and I've never felt the urge to attend a science fiction convention dressed as Arthur Dent (well, once...but I didn't go through with it).

I'd read bad reviews and good-ish reviews of the film. In the end the only reason we went to see it was because the boy wanted to watch it anyway, just to confirm the negative reviews.

It sure was important to have low expectations beforehand.

Lots of the funny bits from the books etc were in the film - unfortunately for me, they didn't make me laugh because they were so familiar and yet somehow not the same. I suppose it's like going to a pantomine and finding the performers have changed their lines just enough to jar you. And I was so used to hearing various characters speak in a certain way that it felt strange to hear it said differently, by different actors - wrong, somehow.

There were a couple of new funny bits - like when the white mice are about to feel Dent's wrath and exclaim "Bollocks!" (you'd have to be there). Also, the Vogons look really good as hunch-backed beauracrats - but Marvin looked a bit too cute. I was disappointed, too, that the Golgafrinchans didn't get a look in.

Probably the best part was the tour of Slartibartfast's work floor - really nicely done. Probably the worst parts were the lovey-dovey bits.

It wasn't a complete waste of time and money then, although it was just long enough for my infamous sore-bum afflication to return.

Third trimester opera

There's an opera coming up - Don Giovanni. I've never been to this particular opera, but it's the boy's favourite (he loves Mozart, which is surely a little unusual for a Metallica and Marilyn Manson fan). He's really keen for us to go, and I would be too, except there's one small thing which makes me hesitate before plonking down the credit card and committing us to a couple of not-too-cheap, non-refundable tickets.

By the date of the performance, I will be around 35 weeks pregnant; there's a good chance I'll have to pee during during acts (a big no-n0), and an even better chance that the kicking will distract me from the warbling. There's even a small chance that I'll go into labour in the middle of the show - wouldn't that be embarrassing. What if there's a fire? I'd have to get my hefty and not-too-agile self down all those stairs in the midst of a crowd of panicking non-pregnant people.

I asked the midwife whether she thought it would be a bad idea to plan to go to a three-hour show at that stage. She wasn't too helpful though; it depends on the individual and can't be predicted how comfortable, or not, something like this would be.

Then my boss told me that, at 35 weeks, she got on a long distance flight between Singapore to New Zealand. That's 10 hours in the air plus transit time in airports. Travelling in a plane doesn't quite compare, since once you're in the air you can get up and go to the toilet or whatever (though tight-fitting, apparently it is possible to manoeuvre a third-trimester tummy into and out of an airplane toilet). Still, I bet she spent a lot of time sitting in a cramped space though.

So I took the plunge. I was careful to choose aisle seats though, because even if the boy can stretch out his long legs in front of him, I'll be more secure knowing I can get to the ladies' without accidentally hitting someone with my bum or my tum.

a weighty matter

Apparently it's no longer routine to get weighed during midwife visits. After reading in this book and that, that I can expect to put on about 10 kgs more up to the moment of childbirth, I've been extremely curious as to how I compare.

I don't own any scales at home. I never saw any point in knowing my weight when I could tell very easily by the fit of my jeans whether I'd been overindulging from the bakery section at Pak'n'Save. Pregnancy's different though, because supposedly all the weight I put on is weight I'm meant to put on. During pregnancy, there is no such thing as overindulging. There is only the act of keeping up one's blood sugar levels.

So I asked the midwife today whether I could weigh myself on her scales. I've put on about 6kgs. Doesn't sound like a heck of a lot, does it? But then, I was no lightweight to start with; the books say that you put on more, the lighter you were to start with. The midwife assured me that regardless of how much I put on, it will all come off after the birth and a bit of breastfeeding. Right then, I could think of several women who, a year or more after giving birth, still had a pregnancy tummy. I'll believe her, but thousands wouldn't.

windfall

It's really strange. In my mail today I found a cheque for a nice amount of money, presumably from some transaction involving shares. I don't recognise the name of the firm, and don't as a rule go around buying shares all over the place. It's so bizarre. It's possible that it's a mistake of course, and the cheques was meant for someone else, but I think I'll bank that cheque before that's confirmed.

The great childcare hunt. Already.

I've been told that it pays to get in early when it comes to finding childcare, so I've started my search already. Despite the fact that I won't be needing it until next January at the earliest, I've already made up a tentative list of places near work or home, and I visited the first one this afternoon.

I really don't know what to expect from a childcare centre, or what kind of criteria to use when deciding on the merits of this place I visited, unannounced. It was smallish, but packed with toys, kiddie furniture and crafty stuff. All the staff had qualifications of one sort or another, in early childhood learning; the woman who gave me the tour said she had six grown-up offspring of her own, so she's obviously had a lot of practice.

Allergies and health-specific instructions are noted each time a child arrives, and I noticed on the whiteboard in the toilets that if a child needs all-over moisturising after each nappy change then it's all there for the staff to see. It's also five minutes walk from my house and, importantly, the daily fee is less than my daily earnings.

It's also kind of noisy - not the kind of place I myself would be happy to spend all day in - but then if I were a little child this might be exactly the kind of place I'd want to spend all day in. Kids seem to love expressing themselves at top volume, and the under 2s have a little noise-proof room to nap in.

One thing I really liked about the place was that each child has a scrapbook in which the staff record what the child's been up to - milestones are noted and photos and arwork are pasted in. I can imagine that would be bloody useful for parents who work full-time and would otherwise miss so much of their child's development.

I've already put my name on the waiting list (and yes, there already is one), but in the next few weeks I'll be visiting some more places just for comparison (in case there is such a thing as a childcare centre with sweet-smelling toilets, tons of room and low noise levels).

Anyone got pearls of wisdom to add?

mother-to-be's day

Until recently, Mother's Day was all about my mum; my mother, my brother and I always had a big dinner, for which she'd spent a couple of hours or more preparing. We would have bought expensive gifts, none of which she liked unless it was either something which massaged a body part, or cash.

In the last couple of years, the day has been celebrated separately by all of us; my brother and his family did Mother's Day in their home, my mother celebrated at her church, and all I had to do was buy a nice card and put some cash in it.

Now that I'm mere months away from being a mother myself, I found myself wistfully thinking that this time next year I'd be getting The Boy's equivalent of breakfast in bed (whatever that's going to be).

So I was a bit surprised when the boy jumped the gun somewhat, and asked me what I wanted for Mother's Day yesterday. We were strolling around the museum shop fingering the possum-mink jumpers and eyeing up the greenstone jewellery and fabulous art pottery at the time. I couldn't bring myself to point to any of those items because they were really really expensive (there's a greenstone thingamajig for over 16 grand in there). I told him to buy me a cake instead, but here's the thing - what the hell am I going to ask for next year?

Hmmm...probably a paid cleaner.

a labour story

The Editter put me onto this madlib - you enter an assortment of words and it constructs a wee story for you. And below is mine...

"Is that milk or did my water just break?" The boy wondered aloud.
"shit! Call the foot," shouted Mum, grabbing the town and running into the bathroom.
Holding her arms, The boy pissed like an huge shoe toward the bag.
"Remember what they said to do - to get through the contractions, you need to hit, hit, hit," Mum said painfully.
"Calm down! If this is labor, I'm Johnny Depp."
"But we have to be ready! Do you have a focal point?"
"Yes," The boy said. "The trolley."
"I'll go see if I can slowly fit it in the toyota camry. You stay here and dribble," yelled Mum, and ran out the door.
The boy shouted back into the bathroom and sniffed. Maybe it was milk, after all.

Go on, have a try for yourself and send me your stories.

unreality tv

We've been watching Lost religiously, and even though I wonder whether the series will ever resolve all those peculiar and unexplainable events which seem to happen on the island, I still find it compelling to watch.

Now, I know it's a fantasy - after all there're monsters in that show, as well as paraplegics who can suddenly get up and walk and drug addicts who can go cold turkey within the space of a couple of episodes - so I don't know quite why I was so surprised to see...

Claire, the heavily pregnant woman, sleeping on her back.

Oooh, that's such a no-no. Obviously the actress isn't really pregnant or else we'd be hearing her moan a lot more when she's moving around. She's also be trying to sleep on her side, and maybe not succeeding. Also - though maybe this is because she's quite a bit younger than myself - she walks and runs like a normal person i.e. without waddling or feeling the need to hold up her large belly away from her bladder.

That's tv for you.

Florence in '94 - them were the days

I don't have an awful lot to write about today (though some of you will wonder what's the difference between today and every other day that I blog), so I thought I'd rummage through my old travel diaries and pick out what happened on the 5th of May, 1994 (not quite the last time I did anything exciting).

On this day I arrived in Florence. I'd nearly missed the train getting there, because it'd arrived at a different platform than expected, and left earlier than expected. The youth hostel was really pretty, like the one in Verona - it had carrara ceilings and ceiling frescoes, and looked really grand.

My first touristy stop was the Ponte Vecchio, a bridge apparently once full of jewellers' shops; now it's full of souvenir stands. Then, while I was wandering about looking for the Thomas Cook office and a place to process my 14 rolls of film (I was about five months into my travels by then), I bumped into a guy whom I'd met on the bus to the hostel. Once a mid-Westerner and now a Seattlelite, Mike was in the midst of a Kurt Cobain makeover (without the Prozac, the rock chick girlfriend, and the record deal). He seemed really interesting because he played in a band back home, made his own movies and shared my love of Utimate (some call it frisbee football). We followed each other around the green-, pink- and white-striped Duomo, shared calzone and talked in the freezing cold hostel garden until curfew at 11pm.

It was in Florence that I was "caught short" and went into a cafe solely to use its customer toilet. Being an honest sort of person, I made the effort of buying and imbibing an expresso first so I'd qualify as a legitimate customer. Having added dangerously to my already full-capacity bladder levels, not to mention the diuretic effect of the caffeine, I was not at all pleased to discover that this cafe had no toilets.

It's the little things that make you want to go postal

I wish I was one of those can't-be-fazed people, but I'm not. And it's always those little irritations that make me mad.

Like the fact that, even though I have a fairly large mailbox designed to hold A4-size envelopes, the postie always manages to deposit my mail half-in, half-out. This wouldn't normally bother me, but it's been raining cats and dogs for the last couple of days and all my mail got soaked.

Or when I take my mother to the chemist to collect her repeat prescriptions. Being old and having the kind of fragile health which afflicts those who're old, she has a million types of medication. Sometimes the doctor omits something essential from his prescription, and other times the pharmacist misses something. So every time she collects her pills and what-not she has to pour all the boxes onto the floor before poring over them, just in to ensure everything is there. And I, the one who can no longer bend with ease, am the one who has to squat down and move those pill boxes around for her. If there's a discrepancy, I get to hear about it for the next hour.

Not to mention being really keen to get home and put my feet up, but being stalled at every controlled intersection. Some traffic lights are unbelievably quick to change, and sometimes it seems that I'm the one doomed to get every yellow light because the driver in front of me didn't know whether he wanted to turn left or go straight.


Whew - I feel a little better now. Thanks for listening.

The end of the second trimester

According to one of the pregnancy books I've been reading, the second trimester ends with the beginning of week 28. I'm almost 27 weeks, which means that I can now officially say hello to swollen body parts (apart from my tummy which, of course, has been swollen for a while now), breathlessness, lower back pain and the inability to walk quickly or without an accompanying pressure on my bladder.

I'm already on quite good terms with sleeplessness, nosebleeds and taking five minutes to change positions on the couch. Last week I was introduced to light-headedness and inconvenient fainting.

The latest bit of terrifying information I've read about it episiotomies. This is when the surgeon makes a cut down there to give the baby a bigger opening to come out of. Apparently if the cut isn't made, sometimes the woman can tear from clitorus to anus. Yikes. It made me think of that bit in Up the Duff where, after reading about caesareans and vaginal births, our pregnant heroine decides she doesn't want either.

I've also started reading books on what to do with the little blighter after the big day. One, What to expect in the first year, is a great big telephone directory-sized book. No doubt everything in there is both useful and accurate, but it makes me wonder why there aren't diplomas in parenthood on offer. After all, looking after a baby is supposed to be very important, and it sounds really hard; yet woman are generally expected to just pick it up somehow, eh?

Swoon II - the Internet lookup

Following my mysterious blackout on Wednesday, I decided to look up fainting and pregnancy on the Internet.

Babycentre says that it's not uncommon because the heart rate goes up, more blood is being pumped and the amount of blood in the system expands (by 40-45%). Apparently, now is about the time my blood pressure is at its lowest.

Then I found a discussion group, in which one woman says she's been pregnant fifteen times! When I saw that number, I stopped looking for stuff about fainting.

So I looked up parenthood records...

- Most number of children - 69, over a period of 40 years. 67 of them survived past infancy
- Youngest mother - 5 years, 7 months
- Youngest father - 12 years
- Oldest mother - 63 years, 9 months
- Oldest father - 93 years, 10 months

And a couple of rather interesting FAQs here:

- Highest number of children given birth to at one time - 9 (none survived past a week)
- It takes longer to give birth to boys than to girls

The short and sweet Horlicks clinical trial

Okay, more like anectocal trials than clinical trials but - the stuff sure works!

I had to experiment with the dosage though, due to my lactose intolerance (if you didn't know, Horlicks contains both skim milk powder and a separate amount of lactose, plus you have to make it up with fresh milk). The first evening, I made myself a full cup of the stuff and my anticipated sweet dreams were replaced by a disappointing case of "the trots".

The following evenings, I reduced my dosage to half a cup of the drink (minus the small amount which boiled over the edge of the cup in the microwave oven). This resulted in either a full night's sleep, or only minor awakenings (as opposed to being wide awake, getting out of bed, going to the toilet, watching Animal Planet on the telly and eating toast whilst waiting to feel sleepy again).

On Wednesday evening though, I missed my dose because of my cold. I was so full of mucous already, and decided I didn't want any more. And on that night I had a lousy night's sleep.

Last night I was back on the Horlicks, and sleep was fine and full of pleasantly interesting dreams.

So there you have it - Horlicks puts you to sleep. I'd be happy to recommend it, especially if the makers put money in my hands to say so on TV.

Swoon

This morning, in the middle of our monthly staff meeting, I did something that I haven't done for years; something I've almost only ever done as a result of either too much alcohol or eating seafood and drinking alcohol at the same time - I fainted.

I could feel it coming, that extreme light-headedness followed by the urgent desire to close my eyes and put my head down on something soft, so I did what I usually do when this happens - I left the meeting room, went to the women's toilet and sat there until the feeling went away.

Trouble was, fairly soon after I sat down again at the meeting, that horrible feeling came back - only this time stronger and quicker; I didn't have time to get to the ladies' without risking falling flat on my face along the way. So I desperately tried to keep my eyes open, while the cold sweat gathered on my forehead, and propped my head up in my hands.

Next thing I knew, everyone (including the new communications officer whom I'd just met half and hour before) was staring at me. My boss was wiping my brow with tissues which I'd brought with me to wipe my cold virus-laden nose with and the admin officer was supporting me on my other side. I must have gone as white as a redhead with an SPF 50 habit, because after a while I heard someone say that my colour had come back. I joked that this hadn't happened since the last time I got really really drunk. My boss murmured that this apparently sometimes happens to pregnant women. I wondered if the yoghurt I'd had with my cereal this morning was past it's use-by date after all.

I made some noises about excusing myself to go sit on the toilet for a while, and then I'd be okay, but one of my workmates had already gone to her desk to ring up the boy. Shortly afterwards the boy came by in his shining armour (a Toyota Camry), brought me home and tucked me up on the sofa with the telly and the heater on.

I suppose it was a bit of excitement for the day, for the folks at work. Perhaps one of them will go home tonight and blog about it (or not). For me, it was a little scary because I'd thought I'd worked out how to avoid blacking out in public - don't drink lots of booze, don't mix booze with seafood and try not to eat my own cooking - but now I'd discovered another variable, one which I could't pin down.

Several hours later, I finally got hold of the mid-wife. Although my having a cold could have had something to do with it, normally this sort of thing would only happen if I'd been sitting or standing still for a long time (which I hadn't), leading to my diluted blood pooling a long way from my brain, or if I was anaemic (which I'm not). In other words, she didn't have an answer except that sometimes this happens when you're pregnant.

In the waiting (for hours) room

What a long afternoon it was. My mother had an appointment at the fracture clinic, to check on her upper arm; the notice told me it was scheduled for 2.45pm, and to allow at least one hour.

After I'd gone over to her house to help her shower, dress, make lunch and shop for groceries and Chinese medicine, we were still about twenty minutes early for the appointment. At bang on 2.45pm, we were called up by Radiology to get some new x-rays done. There was the usual I'm-pregnant-so-I-have-to-leave-the-room-as-soon-as-I've-translated-
all-your-instructions-into-poor-Cantonese hassle, but it was over pretty quickly.


Then there was the hour and a half wait to see the doctor. In that time, we guzzled water (from my bottle, because there was no water cooler in the room) and chatted, I read from The Poisonwood Bible (for the second time), and we wondered why the examination room opposite seemed to have the higher turnover.

The doctor's consultation itself, took all of ten minutes.

Lazy Sundee afternoon-ah *

What a weird thing to have so little to do on a Sunday. Normally my Sundays are taken over by daughterly duties, but today my mother has been put off going out, by the icy wind which feels as though it has blown straight from the shores of Antarctica. Welcome to autumn in NZ.

I'm not normally put off by a bit of brisk weather, but today I'm as much of a wuss as an eighty-year-old with an arm fracture and a fear of being in cemetaries on cold, windy afternoons. No walks into the hills for me.

Today we'll partake of our latest DVD purchases - part 2 of Season 5 of Angel, Shaun of the Dead and Bad Santa. We already saw Bad Santa at the cinema, but apparently the DVD version is an uncut version. I wonder which scenes will be extended - perhaps that infamous one of Billy Bob Thornton's character having anal sex with a fat lady in in the women's changing room?

Shaun of the Dead we watched last night - it was quite amusing, but I couldn't help comparing it with Peter Jackson's much earlier film, Braindead. And from memory, the latter was much funnier.

And Angel was fab of course; there was even an episode which neither of us had seen before - a real bonus. Well, Fred annoys me. It's partly because she's supposed to be geeky but always dresses like her looks must be so important. The other thing that annoys me about Fred is that, while she's supposed to be a physics genius, now all of a sudden she's a total science polymath whose ability ranges from forensics to weapons design and beyond. Yeah I know it's a fantasy show, but still...

* that's a reference to the song by The Small Faces

Depressing stories

I had a late lunch date with a friend who's in town for a couple of weeks; I assumed she'd be late ('cos she usually is), so I dived into the library on the way and pulled a book off the Readers' Picks shelf. Just in case she was half an hour late or something.

The book was The Good Earth, by Pearl S. Buck. The title sounded familiar, like maybe it was prize-winningly famous or something. And I am often drawn to stories set in Chinese environments. (I can never quite relate to domestic tales about middle-class white people).

But I just had a look at a couple of Amazon reviews, and I realise now that I've probably chosen a typically depressing Chinese story. Let me give you an idea of how depressing it's gonna be: the hero is a poor farmer who wants to marry and produce an heir. The only way he can afford to marry a virgin is by purchasing a very ugly slave girl from a wealthy landowner, because all the pretty ones have already been "had" by men in the landowner's family. So he does. And apparently somewhere along the line this wife ends up killing her newborn daughter in order for her other children to live.

Is it really that hard to write a story set in China which has a happy ending?

horizontal-ness

The midwife had a good feel of my tummy today and announced that the baby is lying sideways, as opposed to vertically in a sitting-up kind of position. At least one of us seems to be getting enough sleep.

Desperate for a remedy for my insomnia, I've gone to the supermarket and bought a large jar of Horlicks. You're supposed to make it up with milk, but I'm hoping I can put in a smallish amount in the drink and still get the sleep-inducing affect mentioned on the back of the label.

Last night I kept waking up with a really dry mouth (due to my nose being blocked, and the fact I have to mouth-breathe). The boy kept telling me I was snoring loudly - which was really strange because I could swear that I wasn't even asleep at the time!

It might be why I'm a little grumpy that my bank has charged me five bucks for an unwanted overdraft facility on my cheque account for the second month in a row. Heck, I rang and told them to remove it when I got my previous bank statement last month; the last thing I expected was that it'd still be there one whole bank statement later.

Five bucks per month isn't a killer, but that amount is actually more than my total monthly bank fees were last year when I was pretending to be a full-time student (it wasn't an active lie as such, I just didn't bother telling the bank when I stopped being full-time, about three years ago).

It's all money, and we're gonna have to tighten our belts a little if we're to buy that plasma TV screen.

The belly

Those forty-five minute walks home from walk are taking almost an hour now, with every slow step being that much harder. I can see now why a woman might want to try a belly bra, because it feels like my belly is trying really hard to give me stretch marks - as though gravity itself is not doing a good enough job of it. I thought I would have to start taking the bus home when I could no longer go forty five minutes without a pee, but I might be wrong on that one.

Up until now, I've been guessing at whether I'm feeling the baby kicking. I think most of the time what I've actually been experiencing is gas, indigestion, cramp or the ligaments around my uterus stretching to make way for greater baby heft. But now I think I have it. The kicks are those little flutterings which feel as though I'm being tickled from the inside. It must be those, because they don't feel like anything else I've felt before, and because I've felt them mostly at night or when I'm sitting still.

Well, I'm off now to be my mother's nurse for an hour or two. The boy has promised to make me something especially nice for tea when I get home, because he feels guilty about staying out till 3am this morning. It's not that I don't like him having his boys' nights out; it's just that when I wake up at 2am and can't get back to sleep again, I want him to be around to feel my tossing and turning, and to hear me sighing with frustration. It's nice to have someone to complain to.

music for the inner child

There's a little kid inside me who isn't trying to get out yet, but give it about four months and there'll (hopefully) be no stopping it. Apparently now is the time to be playing music to the baby and finding out what makes it dance around in the womb.

So far I've played it Prince, Madonna, Bach and various acid jazz collections. As far as I can tell, these don't compel the baby to get down. What else have I got - Nick Cave's Murder Ballads (perhaps not a good idea right now), Chris Isaak and the entire soundtrack of Carmen. If they don't doing anything, then I may have to resort to the boy's collection of Metallica.

Remember Nanking

I honestly can't blame the Chinese for getting upset over the Japanese history textbook thing. Although it might have been more appropriate to throw things at the Japanese embassy rather through the windows of Japanese businesses who, after all, probably weren't around at the time of the brutal Nanking massacre.

As they say, history is written by the victors, and in this particular war the Japs won. On the other hand, if one wants to apologise for torturing, raping and murdering citizens of one's neighbour and trading partner then actually owning up to it is a damn good start (and paying compensation would also go a helluva long way too). I don't have anything against Japanese as individuals, but what they did as a country all those years ago affects me more than what I know of the Holocaust - because the victims were my parent's countrymen.

The boy is baaaad

Just because the boy is worried that I say too many nice things about him, he wants you all to know that he's not lovely and he's not nice. He's a bad dude, oh yes. People who work for him respect him, and not just because he's a good manager. It's because he's well practised with the hard looks and only-partially-jokey threats. Ask him about his scars, and he'll tell you about his dark past. There's a reason one of his nick-names is Dark Evil Lad.

(But sometimes he is just lovely).

The Chinese patient - episode two

My mother has stopped resisting offers of help - this is good, because she needs help with stuff like getting cleaned, getting dressed, food preparation and cooking, hanging out washing, getting around and buying groceries. On the other hand, I'm very very glad she isn't doing the equivalent of ringing a little bell whenever she wants something.

She's too hot, and needs help removing her cardigan; now she's too cold, and wants help putting it back on again; she tells me to chop up the veges; peel some oranges; cut her up an apple; get some fish balls out of the freezer; put her socks on. Instructions are issued rapid-fire as though they must be done as soon as she thinks of them.

But then, I look at her hurt arm and it's about 50% bigger than the other one; it's a scary dark red tinged with blue, purple and yellow. She had to stop using the Voltarin because they were giving her stomach cramps, and the codeine is apparently having some other nasty side effects, so she's having to rely on regular doses of Panadol.

So I just take a deep breath and get it done.

The Chinese patient

My mum has managed to avoid using the shower for two whole days now, probably because she knew she couldn't do it properly without help. I decided I'd rather learn to soap her down than put up with accumulated unwashed-ness every time I visit though.

There won't be any details, despite Jon's explicit request for a Showering with Mum blog post. Let's just say that it wasn't something I'd do if someone didn't have to do it.

She's holding up pretty well, though she did freak out a bit when she saw the extent of the bruising on her upper arm. If I'd had a big enough Cantonese vocabulary, I would've told her that the people who feature on Extreme Makeover look a helluva lot worse than that after their visit to the cosmetic surgeon.

Thankfully my brother has been visiting her mornings and evenings, so if she changes her mind about getting oranges pre-peeled for her, someone is bound to be along to oblige.

And I'm also thankful that after all that, I didn't have to cook tea when I got home, because that's the boy's job.

Breakable

Late yesterday afternoon, my mum was getting on the bus to go home after having a wander around the shops, and her legs suddenly just gave way. Over the phone, it sounded like she just keeled over on the steps. She wanted to get x-rayed, though she didn't seemed to be hurting enough to have broken anything.

A visit to the after-hours doctor and a few x-rays later (I had to translate for her and then swiftly remove myself from the room before my womb got zapped by the rays), it turned out that she'd managed to fracture and impact her upper arm. After the first hour or two of being shocked and stunned, I think she took it pretty well. I was told to take her to the hospital, just down the road, to see the orthopaedic registrar for an expert opinion. Apparently, there was a chance she'd go "into theatre". My mum isn't the singing and dancing type, so I took it to mean that there was an alternative to throwing her arm in a sling and letting the bones heal themselves.

My infamous navigation skills (i.e. none), the vague directions given by the doctor and the worst fog I've seen since Guy Fawkes' Night in a Edinburgh on a very foggy night, meant that the five minute drive to the Fracture Clinic took about half an hour. Out of four possible hospital entranceways, I managed to find the three wrong ones.

Anyway, by 9pm we'd seen the orthopaedic registrar's assistant and there wasn't going to be any "theatre". A nurse put a little foam sling on mum's arm and made it clear she was going to need a helping hand with showering and stuff, for the next few weeks. Oh, and some very strong painkillers.

I got mum back to her house, with a diversion to the after-hours pharmacy for Voltarin on the way, fed her the tablet, was refused help with getting her ready for bed, and left without remembering to tell her that sleep may be less painful if she sits upright in bed instead of lying down.

It was well past my bedtime by the time I got home, and I'd been on the go for about six hours with only a nasty muesli bar to keep me going. So I was hideously disappointed to find that I just could not fall asleep.

Isn't if funny (well, funny as in peculiar) that when you get insomnia, you tend to finally drop off to sleep only about an hour before the alarm goes off?

I don't do well without enough sleep (yes I know, I'm going to be in trouble in a few months' time), so I let myself sleep in and went in to work mid-morning.

I was still worried that mum might not have had much sleep herself though, so I called her to check in. Apparently that Voltarin is pretty hot stuff. She'd slept like the proverbial baby.

Posh dinner

Last night the boy took me out to what is probably the poshest restaurant in town, and for no particular reason (although my grumble that we don't celebrate our anniversary because we don't have one, may have had a tiny bit to do with it).

It wasn't just posh because it was humungously expensive. It was also posh because the menu is exotic (pheasant, venison, quail and salmon for instance); the waiter puts the napkin on your lap for you; he actually waits for a pause in your conversation before asking what you want to eat (and if you're not ready yet, he will come back); and because there were expensive-looking jackets and stoles in the cloakroom.

I'd been told to dress up, so with my designer pregnancy jeans I wore the only posh top that I could still get into (and only just - my boobs threatened to spill out at one point and the boy was compelled to "adjust" the garment for me). Even the lipstick, sitting ever-ready in the drawer for the last two years, got a look in. (The boy wore a long striped shirt that makes him look like Brad Pitt in Ocean's Eleven).

Our waiter was a young Jude Law with nice manners and a polite smile. He smiled a whole lot more when the boy gave him a tip that would have made me choke on my spinach and oyster soup, if I was still eating it by then.

Any hopes that the boy may have had for after-dinner naughties would've been dashed though. After a big, late meal like that, I was home and snoring in minutes.

Yeah Right

Someone, somewhere, must have sold off a distribution list with my name and address on it. Twice in the last month I've received scam mail in my (physical) mailbox.

The first was a chain letter sort of thing. Several pages long, and topped up with references from happy customers, it was basically one of those pyramid schemes i.e. if you send ten bucks to the guy on the top of the list of names and addresses, then add your own details to the bottom and send multiple copies to your unsuspecting friends, then you'll be rich. Hah - friendless, more like.

On the weekend I received mail from Spain. I don't know anyone in Spain, so it could have been only one thing. And I was right. Apparently I've won hundreds of thousands of US dollars in some kind of promotional lottery, and all I have to do is fill in the form with my personal details (including bank account number) and return it.

Well, all I can say is - what a waste of paper.

scary in the States

I'm currently reading a books kindly lent to me by Make Tea Not War - Misconceptions by Naomi Wolf.

Misconceptions is like an antidote to all the many, many preganancy books which aim to reassure. In fact, in the two and a half chapters I've read so far, the stuff Wolf describes is pretty alarming. She talks about how pregnant women in the States are subjected to medical practices which are geared toward (i) increasing billable costs and (ii) covering the practitioner's arses as much as possible, by pushing expensive tests and witholding information.

It doesn't sound anything like the treatment I've gotten so far. If this book is to be believed, then I'm glad that our taxpayer-subsidised healthcare is ridiculously cost-conscious (not to mention the fact that it's really hard to sue anyone in NZ). I don't think there's much chance of unnecessary procedures being performed on me if no-one stands to make any money out of it.

The working mum thing

We've been having a hard think about how much maternity leave to ask for. I've already decided to stop work in early July, so that I get four weeks of baby-less leave before my life changes completely, but what wasn't so certain was when to return to work. My imagination tells me that I would love being a stay-at-home mum who gets to do coffee mornings with other mums and learn to bake great scones and run up cushion covers on the sewing machine. The boy, however, is pretty sure that so much at-home time would bore me senseless.

I've had stay-at-home time before, when I was still in the throes of my art passion. For eight months I didn't work; I spent my days painting, thinking about painting and looking at other people's paintings. It wouldn't be like that this time around though; firstly because my painting passion has gone the way of all my other past passions; also because I'll have a baby to think of.

At the very least I'd like to take six months off, even if it's just to avoid the awkwardness of trying to breastfeed (or breastpump) in the workplace. After that, I can decide whether I want to continue being at home fulltime or go back to work part-time. See, if I do go back to work most of my salary would be going towards childcare anyway, so there's no point in working unless it's to keep a foot in the working world.

All the same, six months is surely a bit young to be a latch-key kid, eh?

A pain in the bum...and the knees and the hips and the back

Robbed of those endorphins which would have been really helpful about now, my body has started hurting for no good reason.

For instance, yesterday I had the day off work so I went for a walk up to the lookout behind my house. It's normally a 1 & 1/4 hour walk and it's usually a piece of cake - yesterday it was not so much a piece of cake as a truckload of cold porridge dumped on my poor joints. After my walk I had a sit-down; when I tried to get up and move around my whole body creaked and I felt like an arthritic old woman.

And today, I walked home from work like I always do when it isn't pissing down with rain with gale-force winds. Up until today, it was a 45 minute stroll which didn't feel like exercise unless it was accompanied by a daypack filled with a dozen large library books. Until today. First it was that ligament around about where my thigh meets my pelvis that felt out of whack. Then it was the knee on the same side. Then my lower back started protesting, followed by flutterings in my stomach. Now that I'm sitting down at my computer, it's only a matter of minutes before the old sore-bum complaint joins in.

The bump seems to have undergone a growth spurt, which is sort of a relief because I was worried that I was gestating a hobbit instead of a normal-sized baby. When I visited a branch office today, people seemed to know already that I was "in the family way" - they kept telling me to have a seat and looked quite uncomfortable until I quit protesting and got a myself chair.

Tomorrow, I'll be on the alert for similar signs of recognition on the bus. If nobody bothers to give up their seat for me then either my pregnancy is not as obvious as I thought it was, or else those people on the bus are a bunch of inconsiderate bastards.

Crybaby (or - Happy Hormones, where art thou?)

I'm pretty sure that around about now I should be benefiting from "happy hormones", and that this affect should last until soon after childbirth. But I haven't noticed any increase in cheeriness or laid-backness, which is unfortunate because I've never been that laid-back to start with and sure could do with some. My moods are, on the whole, about the same as always; I'm impatient, easily annoyed but can't hold a grudge, and am most grouchy when I'm stuck in a hot car or cruising the supermarkets with my mother.

On the other hand, I have noticed an increase in weepiness. Only yesterday I was watching Bargaining I and II from Season Six of Buffy - they're the episodes where Buffy's friends bring her back to life, not realising that they've taken her from Heaven. I wept like there was going to be a tear shortage or something.

It was worst in that scene where Dawn finds her newly-revived sister (who has just clawed her way out of her own grave) on top of the tower thing which evil shoe-loving goddess, Glory, built in the previous series - the place where Buffy sacrificed herself to save the world. Dawn's fear of losing her sister again and Buffy's returning memory of her last moments on Earth - ah, it was Tear City, Arizona.

If you know the episodes I'm talking about, then you might agree that they are pretty emotionally heavy scenes, which could make you cry even without a dose of pregnancy hormones. Okay - I also cried during Once More with Feeling, the musical episode.

Book Meme

Thank goodness - just when I know I've run out of anything to blog about, Make Tea Not War invites me to complete this book meme.

1) You're stuck inside Fahrenheit 451 which book do you want to be?

It doesn't matter which book it is, as long as it's not one of the books which goes on the bonfire. And from the movie, I'm pretty sure most books went on the bonfire except maybe The Bible.

2) Have you ever had a crush on a fictional character?

I really can't think of a fictional character I've had a crush on, and I'm really really sad about it.

3) The last book you bought is?

Q and A by Vikas Swarup. It was great; my comments are posted here.

4) The last book you finished?

Do Androids dream of electric sheep? by Philip K. Dick, on which of course the film Blade Runner is based. It’s a little more cerebral than the film, and doesn't have any of the right-wing, anti-feminist feeling I've detected in his other stories.

5) What are you currently reading?

(i)The Gameplayers of Titan by Philip K. Dick, which is interesting but probably the last Dick novel I will get from the library

(ii)The New Golden Bough by Sir James George Frazer, a classic history of magic and superstition from the early twentieth century; initial comments posted here.

(iii)Up the Duff by Kaz Cooke, loaned to me by my sister-out-law. It’s a hilarious, yet helpful, week-by-week account of what to expect now that I’m expecting. Needless to say I'm skipping over the bits about actually giving birth.

6) Five books you would take to a deserted island?

(i) and (ii)A couple of Buffy books – Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Philosophy, 'cos it combines two favourite topics and Fighting the Forces: What’s at stake in Buffy the Vampire Slayer, a collection of media studies-type analyses of the themes in this divinely wonderful series.

(iii)A survival guide of some sort, but probably not The Zombie Survival Guide

(iv) The madness of a seduced woman by Susan Fromberg Schaeffer, because it's a good read. Also, it's the kind of book which makes me angry at men; when I'm in that kind of mood, a deserted island might be the best place for me.

(v) One of Bill Bryson's books on origins of words, either Made in America or Mother tongue. He's a funny writer, and the subject is one I'm really interested in.

7) Who are you going to pass this stick to? 3 persons and why?
Anyone who wants to do this meme, can.

The day after the big spend

Yesterday, after I got back from the gym, we went into town for lunch and I wore my new boots. We didn't do all that much walking, but all the same I was glad that my feet didn't show any signs of new-shoe blisters. (I also wore them this morning when I took my mum out to the Sunday market, and still no sign of blisters). So, tentatively, I'm going to announce that the boots are such good quality that they do not cause blisters when worn new, thus vindicating the enormous sum I spent on them.

Blisters are a terrible thing. I once went for on a tramping weekend in un-broken-in boots, and got enormous blisters spanning the length of each foot - and that was just in the ten minute hike from the car park to the beginning of the track. Nothing stuffs up a walk in the hills more than feet that hurt.

I wasn't game to wear them walking up and down the zoo though. We were taking my nephew there, as a late birthday outing. Curiously, amongst the lion cubs, the otter, the giraffes and the baby guinea pigs, it was the peccarys (wild pigs) which he remembered and told his mum and dad about later.

Covering the whole zoo is quite a walk, and the little fella was plain tuckered out after an hour (though not too tired to finish an entire Fruju ice block). Once we got him home he fell asleep watching The Wiggles.

Actually, I was a bit tired too. Instead of going out for dinner as we'd planned, we got oysters 'n' chips from the local fish 'n' chip shop for an early dinner at home and watched four episodes of our new Angel DVDs.

In between episodes, the boy gave me little mini backrubs, because all of a sudden my back is always sore and moving around while sitting or lying down has become such an effort.

At the mall

Today I did something which is ubiquitous to American culture, but which I don't do very often - a friend and I hung out at "the mall" all afternoon.

My friend, who lives in Hong Kong, is back in New Zealand for a couple of weeks' holiday. At first we wanted to go out for a long walk outdoors somewhere, but due to the early arrival of Winter we had our walk in a shopping mall instead.

I was doing a very good job of getting her to buy stuff. I helped her choose some greeting cards, a sketch book (she's started learning to draw), a notebook, a book on drawing, two pairs of sandals on sale and some Body Shop skincare. It was almost more fun than spending money myself.

Then there was a hiccup - we went into a shoe shop and I found a pair of really nice cherry-red, flat-soled ankle boots which would make perfect mid- to late-pregnancy footwear. I tried them on, liked them, and attempted to avoid actually purchasing them by saying I'd think about it. This would have worked, too, except my friend then pointed out another pair of flat-soled ankle boots, in a soft, aged golden brown leather. This time my resolve failed me. I bought them.

I have spent so much money this week: first there was the fridge/freezer; then the boy and I decided we needed to get another bookcase - they were sold out and I had to put an order in, but I did find Angel Season 5 part 1 on DVD though; then the $200 boots.

I need those boots though, and they're surely going to last me several winters at least - if my pregnant feet don't swell up until they are permanently one size too big.

Wet wet wet

It's also been really cold cold cold. And it would happen the day after I obtain a lovely new summery top to wear, too. It looks like I'll be getting those elastic-waisted flannel trousers after all...

Last night was a double-duvet night. Sleeping under two duvets is normally reserved for mid-Winter, so I'm thinking it's only a matter of days or weeks before I retrieve the electric blanket from storage as well.

This morning the rain was so hard that, in the ten minutes it took to get to the bus stop, I was completely soaked from the hem of my rain jacket downwards. My boots kept my lower legs dry, but my white'n'wobbly thighs were only covered by the inadequate skirt I was wearing. It's made of that material which doesn't take long to dry, but feels really cold and clammy in the meantime. When I got to work, I had to be careful where I sat because I kept leaving damp patches.

I had a major preggy moment last night - I forgot to go and have dinner at my mum's. It's a big deal because dinner with my mum has been a standing date for the last, oh, twelve years. Not an engagement I should easily forget, yet I did forget, and only remembered when the boy mentioned it to me half an hour after I should've left.

Exhausting

I had a blog post all ready to go this morning, about my wait for the refrigerater delivery. But then Blogger lost it, so I gave up for most of the day.

And it's been quite a busy one, too.

First up, the delivery guys actually turned up nice and early with my lovely new fridge/freezer. They managed to not put any dents into my door frames or furniture, and even gave the fridge a good wipe before leaving with the old one.

Then, I walked into town to have lunch with my mate Desiree. She took me clothes shopping and insisted on paying for a really nice top which I liked (thanks :-)). It's a wrap top of black silky fabric, very similar to the dressing gown I bought in San Francisco's Chinatown a few years ago except it's shorter and doesn't have the ubiquitous embroidered dragon on the back. So now I have two new things to wear in my larger form.

By the time I got home, it was time to take my mum out shopping (to make up for Pak'n'Save being closed on Easter Sunday). I was on my best behaviour and didn't get grumpy even when she bought two large cartons of rice noodles weighing about 15kgs each. (I got my own back though, because she couldn't make me, a pregnant woman, lift them out of the boot and into her house. She had a go at doing this herself, but when she started to complain of chest pains I thought I'd better give her a hand.)

And then, it was time to go to the supermarket to buy stuff to put into my new fridge/freezer: ice cream, fish fillets, beef fillets, cream doughnuts and scones. Plus home-made wontons from Mum's kitchen. Mmmm....

I'm kinda tuckered out now.

The ole' body just keeps on expanding

I believe that my bra-less days are well and truly over.

Dogville

I've always liked Lars von Trier's films. They tend to be pretty dark, and maybe depressing, but he always tells a really interesting story. I must confess that I never finished watching Dancer in the Dark though, because it seemed to just get sadder and sadder, and in the end I decided I didn't want my mood to plunge.

It took a while for me to get around to seeing Dogville, but after reading what Hazel had to say about it, I knew I had to.

At one point in the film it got so bleak that I was regretting ever getting it off the shelf at the video shop. Without wanting to giving away any of the plot, I'd have to say it was gruelling. Not boring or too-slow, but hard to watch. It was certainly a bit of a change from our last night's choice, Resident Evil - Armageddon.

I'd sum up Dogville's plot as - Woman cursed with excessive idealism seeks refuge in a backwater town and is cured.

The townsfolk who initially seem harmless and friendly turn out to be pretty nasty, and even the guy who supposedly falls in love with Grace, the beautiful fugitive, turns traitor through his passivity. On the other hand, Grace is a frustrating character because she just accepts all the crap that the Dogville folk dish out to her.

I was almost praying for a happy ending. If I didn't get it I would have had to follow it up with Zoolander, just to stop me from being suicidal. The ending was bleak too, but in a way that was highly satisfying for me.

But then, I'm all for revenge. Some great discussion about Dogville can be read here. And yes, I thought it was anti-American, though only because of the stills at the end of the movie to the tunr of Bowie's Young Americans.

"Where are all the good men?" Nobody knows, but they aren't in NZ

According to a NZ social scientist, there really is a shortage of men. Not only is the number of "Kiwi men in their relationship-forming years" much lower than their female equivalent - remember that the number includes men whom right-thinking women shouldn't touch with a barge pole (really ugly, unpleasant and/or stupid men), so the true number of possible mates for women in the 20-49 age group would be even more depressingly small. The idea is supported by the fact that I had to import my own mate from England.

The same article says that the situation is reversed in Denmark and Germany (and I would think China also falls into this category). The answer for women who don't want to stay single, and are reluctant to date men who are either very young or very much older, is clear - emigration.

the weather gods are out to get me

In spite of weather forecasts earlier this week which predicted rain all through the Easter break, the sun shone both yesterday morning and this morning. Both times, I was optimistic enough to hang the washing on the line. Both times I was forced to take it all off the line again because by the time the clothes were nearly dry, the rain had arrived after all.

It was looking really promising today. The sun stayed out till just before we got home from lunching and refrigerator shopping. During lunch I managed to get greasy food stains on my new top, the one which I had created less than 24 hours previously. I should've predicted that would happen - not only was the garment new, but it was also light-coloured.

As for our new refrigerator, the possibility of getting one of those sexy curvy retro models was pretty much nil. We settled for getting a "normal" one. Neither of us bothered to check whether it is self-defrosting, super-energy efficient or beeps at you when the door's left open too long. Our main concern was that it didn't cost too much, yet big enough in both fridge and freezer compartments i.e. about the same size as our currently dying one. Unfortunately, they can't deliver it until Tuesday because we're right in the middle of Easter.

This is the culmination of a whole day's work i.e. including the "practice" garment which took four hours to do. It's a tent, alright. 

The computer back-up debacle

I went in work today for one purpose only, and that was to burn the office's weekly computer back-ups onto two DVDs (a weekly task which is done every Thursday). I arrived at 9.40am, and hoped to be in and out in a little over an hour.

At 2.30pm, I was had only just finishing burning the second DVD.

I've been told before that it's naive to think that any process involving computers can actually be done quickly, so I shouldn't have been surprised. Out of the eight computers whose backups I had to burn, only one had successfully produced a backup in the first place - mine. I had to rerun the backup jobs for the other seven, which took about three hours. While I waited, I fixed a botch-up on the intranet, answered phone calls and filed things into pigeonholes.

When it was all over, it was time for some minor retail therapy (nothing big, since the refrigerator purchase is looming over the coming weekend), so I went looking for some extra long, stretchy t-shirts to buy. Some maternity clothes only look good on when you're about ten weeks from giving birth. Instead, I've bought some fabric and a sewing pattern so I can at least play around with the fit.

On my walk home, I came across a very noisy band playing in the street. They appeared to be called Voice of Youth. Gosh, youth sure have a loud voice.

My feet are all sore now from carrying me around the shops and home over two and a half hours. I think I'll put them up now and read my Philip K. Dick novels.

My refrigerator's death throes

The first thing I noticed this morning, was that the fridge/freezer was even more noisy than usual. Like the dehumidifier, it has gotten increasingly loud with age. I've had it for maybe ten years, and in that time it's progressed from a quiet wee thing (like a large, white church mouse) to occasionally producing loud cracking and creaking sounds, sudden enough to induce heart attacks in the elderly; now it's developed a high-volume hum which sounds to me very much like a cry for appliance euthanasia.

What added to our problem this morning was that the freezer door had somehow been left ajar overnight.

Initially, I didn't do anything about this other than to rectify the door position and then tell the boy about it when he got out of bed. The boy was not such a bimbo about it however. He rightly set about going through the freezer contents, tossing out anything that felt thawed. Ten minutes and a shopping bag full of potentially bacterial produce later, our freezer is less than a third full and I've got doubts about the stuff we left in there.

It was a sign I think, to finally do something about replacing the fridge/freezer. I know the boy would much rather we spent our money on something more fun, like another boxed set of Angel DVDs or another X-Box game, or even some flash baby-care equipment. But I'm going to have to put my foot down. I'd love one of these curvy retro designs, preferably in red - but most likely it'll be a boring boxy white thing, perhaps one that beeps at you when you leave the door open for too long.

Melted ice cream and feline anatomy

It was a long work today - 9am till 6.15pm, with only half an hour for lunch plus morning and afternoon tea breaks. I couldn't even tune out during the day-long meeting, because I'm the minute-taker and had to pay attention.

The big plus was that our snacks and lunch were provided, and very nice food it was too. Because I've been brought up not to waste a single grain of rice in my bowl, it was impossible not to eat too much. Even with careful pickiness though, I still didn't have room for more than a smidgeon of dessert. Without meaning to be melodramatic, it was almost emotionally painful to see that huge block of melting strawberry and chocolate coated ice cream (and accompanying fresh fruit salad) left on the table as we left the dining room at the end of the lunch break, knowing it was probably going to be thrown out with the other leftovers. What a waste of creamy dairy goodness...

There. Now that I've got that off my chest, I feel so much better now.

The boy and I have discovered a new phrase to use on each other. I think it's Australian - it's definitely been used on Kath and Kim, and it's a synonym for to pout. It's To have a mouth like a pussy bum, or to have a mouth like a cat's bottom.

Fogged in, fogged out

This week my job is to take the minutes for a three day long meeting. But the start of the meeting has been pushed back a few hours because the airport is closed and no-one can get into town. If only I'd known before I dragged myself out of bed early this morning, after another night of broken sleep.

I had a bit of a grumble to my boss last week. My work days are Wednesday to Friday, and I kind of regret this because it means that I miss out on all those public holidays which fall on a Monday. I'd been philosophical about it though, because I knew that at least I would get Good Friday as a paid day off - until I realised that on the week of Good Friday I'd be asked to work Monday to Wednesday. Darned if I was going to miss out on my only paid day off! Anyway, the grumbling worked, because now I get a day off in lieu (that's not the same as a day off in the loo).

The boy has started calling me preg-head whenever I start to vague out. I would normally give him one of my "evil" looks, but they aren't working any more.

I decided its time to start wearing the maternity clothes which my sister-out-law lent me months ago. She's a little larger than I, so I'd have to pull the elastic in really tight so that the pants don't fall down. Even so, I keep having to hitch them up. When I do this at work, I get the feeling it doesn't look all that professional.

Looking at pictures of women at different stages of pregnancy in my Cosmopolitan Pregnancy magazine, I realise that my bump may well extend humungously over the next few weeks. The difference between the size of my bump at nearly 21 weeks, and that of Kylie of Melbourne at 23 weeks, looks like about twenty pizza's worth. Am I really going to distend that much over the next couple of weeks? Now I understand why I might get stretchmarks.

The Village

The reviews I'd seen for The Village weren't all that encouraging, but it was the likeliest looking candidate at the video shop so we gave it a try. It's probably just as well that I wasn't expecting much, because in the end I quite enjoyed it. It's not at all scary - well, mildly so at the beginning - and from the middle of the film onwards it's not so much scary as interesting.

If you haven't seen it yet and don't want to find out what happens, don't read on.

I couldn't believe it when, just as Ivy is about to enter the woods and risk a mauling from Those of which we do not speak, it turns out that the creatures are made up to prevent villagers from leaving. I didn't get the twist until, after her long ordeal in the woods (including being chased by one of those of which we do not speak), she came up against what looked like a boundary fence. "Hah!" I thought. No doubt we'll find out that the villagers are in fact in an insane asylum - a very spacious one.

Despite the non-scariness and the slow pace, the story certainly got me thinking (enough to invade my sleep, even). It made me think about the possibility that being a victim of crime (or just related to one) might be enough to make you want to withdraw from society completely, to the point where you deny the existence of the outside world; about how the offspring, who have known no other life, would feel if they found out they were in fact being cushioned from a high-tech, high-stress society where people actually use swear words and don't always behave like gentlemen;that whereever there are human beings there is the potential for crime.

I also wondered whether these families wouldn't have been better off going to live with the Amish, thus regaining their idealised innocence without having to pretend the rest of the world doesn't exist.

Interesting tidbits about NZ writing

It's not often that I find something quotable in the NZ Automobile Association magazine, although if I were in the market for a brand new car then this would be the first place I'd look. It's really a good thing that you get the option of receiving their magazine online instead of on hardcopy, because it means having less paper to chuck in the recycling bin.

I found an interesting little article about New Zealand writers in the latest issue. It's a joint effort by John McCrystal, Paul Little and John Cranna, called Getting It In Writing, and I've pasted in a couple of quotes which I found amusing (and you don't have to be interested in NZ writing to get it).

About early feminist writings in NZ:
“1920. Jean Devanny won considerable notoriety for her turgid 1926 novel, The Butcher Shop. This was banned in Germany, Britain and New Zealand. Curiously, while everyone else in the world was scandalised by its vicious attack on the institution of marriage, it was banned in New Zealand for making our farmers look bad.”

About Denis Glover's sudden lack of desire to gas himself:
“Plagued by depression, Glover once set out to kill himself by sealing the doors, turning on his gas oven and lying on the kitchen floor. After a while, he became bored, so dragged a mattress into the room to make himself comfortable and opened a Dickens novel to occupy himself. After another little while, enjoying the book immensely, he pulled out his tobacco and matches and was about to light up when he realised, with a start, what that would have meant. “I could have bloody killed myself,” he said, and permanently abandoned his suicide attempt.”

If only all NZ writing was as entertaining.