Light and Momentary

Serenades

One of the things I have enjoyed most about the past five weeks is watching Joe with his little sister. He was the most visibly excited about the pregnancy of all the boys. Every night when I tucked him in, he asked eagerly whether he would be able to feel her moving as I lay beside him. Every night he sang her the Indiana Jones theme song, and when she fusses in the car these days, that's his automatic response. (His older brother sings the Star Wars theme at the same time. Feel free to draw your own conclusions about whether dueling movie themes sung over the noise of a wailing baby can actually serve to bring down the unhappiness level in the van.) Today, though, we were driving home and baby was protesting. "Quick!" said Pete the 3yo. "Sing the Indiana Jones theme song for her!"

I often sing the muffin man song to her, altered to "Oh, do you know the muffin girl?" and "Oh, she's the sweetest muffin girl...who lives at [conveniently anapestic house number]." Recently Joe was playing a fierce air guitar and belting out a song in his best imitation of a rock star voice. His lyrics: "Oh, yes, I know the muffin girl."

Coming soon to a radio station near you, I'm sure.

Seven Quick Takes Friday

1. Baby is a month old today! She needs a blog name, but I can't use the same formula I used for her brothers. I have both a SIL and a friend with the name that the formula yields, and it just doesn't fit my baby. I'm a little stumped about this.
2. We're adjusting pretty well here. I am awfully tired by the end of the day, but I'm hanging in there. The laundry is clean (I am typing this with the steam from a load of drying diapers blowing outside) and even folded, and I'm good to go with dinner tonight. Last night I was settling Pete down for the night and thinking about dinner. "Something meatless," I thought, "since it will be Friday. Maybe I'll start some slow-rising bread tonight. And what can I do with a big package of shredded cheese? Hmm." I went downstairs and Elwood told me that the pal who was picking him up for poker was bringing us some cheese calzones for a future dinner -- a bready cheesy thing that required no effort whatsoever on my part. Much appreciated. 
3. Tomorrow I must deal with the paper. It breeds in the dark when I am not looking, I am persuaded. Perhaps if I leave the dining room light on at night I will not have quite so much of it to deal with? The thank-you notes are mostly written but they need addresses and stamps. The bills are mostly caught up for the moment but they will not stay that way. Blech, paper clutter. Makes me wish for a secretary.
4. My oldest is going on the Klondike campout this weekend. Unlike Tracy's son, Alex is looking at single-digit nighttime temps and a high of 11 tomorrow. Brrrr. I love camping, but camping in the snow makes me very grumpy.
5. I have finished morpheme analysis for 25 of the 301 transcripts. I am going to hit 10% tonight, by golly. (Summer's comment about morphemes made me laugh out loud.)
6. To earn my stipend this semester I am a long-distance TA for a class of first-year master's students. I am responsible for online discussions, and the first question went up on Wednesday. It was not a success. They thought it was too hard, with too many parts. The professor was unruffled by their complaints. We're supposed to challenge them, she says. But I was hoping they would find it both interesting and fun, so I'm a little bummed about their response.
7. Facebook could be totally addictive. I am deterred from spending time there in part by some drama between two friends from high school (I don't want him to see me logged in and bug me about her). Well, by that and my will of iron. (Do you see me rolling my eyes at myself there?)

P.S. I am reading this over and it sounds kind of gloomy. I am only the littlest bit gloomy. I should go to bed early tonight to stave off the gloomies, however, even if it means I don't hit the 10% mark until tomorrow.

A Whole Lot of a Good Thing

I have started the first of the four big analyses for my dissertation. In this one I'm looking at kids' use of derivational morphemes. A morpheme is the smallest unit of meaning in a language. In some cases, that's a whole word. In some cases, it's something smaller. When toddlers figure out that they can add -s to a word and it means "more than one," that's a grammatical morpheme. And it's a big step forward linguistically. (It gives me a geeky little rush, actually, to watch that skill unfurling. How do they know, at 18 months, how to do that? Why do some kids struggle so with it?)

We keep adding morphemes throughout childhood. They're a huge part of the vocabulary expansion that happens in the later grade school years. Quick becomes quickly. Attract can morph into unattractive. One of the questions I'm looking at is whether the control kids use more of those affixes than the kids with risk factors.

(Oops, diaper break. It's a good thing I don't count how many times I get interrupted writing a blog post or I might give it up in discouragement.)

For several of my analyses, I'm using a powerful but not very user-friendly program. The manual section that covers the morpheme analysis tool is pretty forbidding. This is for the serious user, it says, who's willing to put in a lot of time getting it right. Not quite "Abandon all hope ye who enter here," but still rather alarming given the learning curve for the other tools in this package.

But I've started, and I haven't thrown up my hands in frustration yet. It will require me to go through every line of my 301 transcripts and check whether the automated parser assigned the right function to each word -- and, in many cases, to parts of words. I have begun seeing morphology tags everywhere I look, involuntarily parsing the sentences in picture books.

The sentence that I'm typing now would look like this.
det|the n|sentence rel|that pro|I~aux|be&1S part|type-PROG adv|now aux|will&COND v|look prep|like pro:dem|this.

I find myself thinking of the parser as a living and not very bright entity. He reads "Bob and Mary" and calls Bob a verb (which, granted, is certainly possible) and Mary the adjective form of the verb "mar." I guess a mary table is one that's had too many glasses of cold water left sitting on it? Anyway, there are many errors to untangle. Many many.

I have moments of thinking,"I was born to do this," because I love grammar with a rather startling passion. In eighth grade I would take home my English book and diagram sentences for fun on the weekends. (Why, no, I wasn't very popular in junior high school -- why do you ask?) I also have moments of thinking, "This is a staggering amount of work." I have done 16 transcripts. Only 285 to go. If I'm scarce, blame it on the morphemes.

Chocolate!

I am finally following up on my offer of chocolate to the people whose guesses about the baby's arrival were closest. Julie got the weight right and guessed that she'd be born on the day I actually went into labor. Susan called the Dec. 23 arrival. Ariella also got the birthweight exactly right. Email me your address and I will send some chocolate your way. Let me know if you're a milk person or a dark person. :-)

Goal Post II: A Reckless Experiment

If you read Conversion Diary, you will know about her reckless experiment with prayer and its fruits. I am going to try a reckless experiment of my own.

For the ten years that we have had an internet connection in our home, I have struggled with my use of time. It's so easy to sit down and piddle away half an hour. Or more. I have tried to set limits for myself. It doesn't work very well. I give up reading blogs for Lent, say, but then I succumb to the lure of the Ravelry forums instead. I say I'll only spend x amount of time on the computer. It always expands. Always.

I am still thinking about New Year's resolutions here. (I know the new year started two weeks ago, but I am giving myself an extension since I had a baby on the 23rd of December. Oh! I keep meaning to follow through on my promise of chocolate to the person who guessed when the baby would arrive -- more on that very soon.) Over the weekend I was in the adoration chapel with the baby and felt a tug toward a deeper prayer life -- a call, specifically, to pray without ceasing.

I am going to work on that in two ways, both of which were prompted by another look at A Mother's Rule of Life. First, the easy part if I will only remember it, is to invite the presence of God regularly throughout the day. It's funny, but I started doing this when I was in a rough spot. I was feeling blue and easily angered, wondering if I was sliding toward some postpartum mood disorder, and so my prayers went like, "Lord, I invite you into this moment when I have just bellowed at my children." Or, "I invite you into the cleanup of this exploded light bulb which is SO not how I want to be spending my time." But maybe that was a good place to start, because I need to remember that the Lord is not a guest who only wants to visit when the kitchen is clean and the hand towels are freshly laundered.

The harder part, the part that feels a little crazy, is that I am going to try to cut down radically on computer drift by spending less time on purely recreational computer use (reading blogs, playing games, goofing around on Ravelry or Facebook or whatever comes along next) than I do in prayer. Gulp. That will be, let me make it clear, a significant shift.

I will need to do some fine-tuning of this idea. If I put writing blog posts or dealing with email into the "purely recreational" category, I will never post and will be perpetually behind on email. If I don't, it will be easy for me to let that time balloon. There is a part of me that really likes the anesthetic effect of sitting down in front of the screen and drifting for a while. But that phrase -- "the anesthetic effect" -- is key here: I don't want to be like the alcoholic who gives up drinking but starts smoking pot daily.

Maybe an important part of the balance is to invite God into my computer use as well. I don't know exactly what it will look like. I only know that I'm tired of the imbalance, and ready to make a change.

I wrote this post yesterday and got cold feet at the end. Did I want to hit publish on a post announcing that I'm going to attempt something I will be certain to struggle with? Struggle a lot, even? But I think I do. There are 350 days, 50 weeks, left in 2009. How much can I grow in prudence and detachment over those 50 weeks? No idea. But if I don't try, I'll never find out.

The Plan

All right, I have a dissertation to work on here. I was always vague about my early research project because I am the only person ever to look at that particular relationship, but my dissertation is less unique. (Which is good, because I don't have to argue so much about whether it's a reasonable research question.) I am analyzing three sets of language samples, collected a year apart, for two groups of kids -- one with a set of risk factors and one without. I am running nine computerized analyses on a total of about 160 transcripts. Four of the analyses are big and hard and will provide me with opportunities to grow in patience. (You know how I love opportunities to grow in patience.) The remaining five analyses are easier, but three of those require me to use results from one of the complicated measures.

So: last week when Pete went back to preschool, I pulled out the transcripts I'll be analyzing, converted them to the appropriate format, and fixed the errors that popped up in the conversion. Now I am going to knock off the two easy analyses before I roll up my sleeves to tackle one of the hard ones. My goal for the week is to get the two easy ones finished and get the program I need running on this computer by Friday. We'll see how it goes.

19

Nineteen days, nineteen pictures. I only put a few of them in as thumbnails, out of sympathy for people with slow connections and uncertainty about how many pictures anyone besides my mother would really want to see. My camera is making me a little crazy lately and so the picture quality is not outstanding. But the baby cuteness is, so I'm posting them anyway.

This one is from a few hours before my labor started. I am standing on the toilet, cleaning the blind slats with my trusty toothbrush. (I haven't touched that toothbrush since.)

The next morning I washed the meconium out of her soft, soft hair. I don't know if it will be red, but I think it will be curly.

Dad needed a little help with the Times crossword and she was happy to oblige. 

Before I crashed on Christmas afternoon, the grandparents took the first picture of all seven of us. (I do not really expect pictures of all seven of us to get much better from here.)

Here she is a week old, helping me bake a clementine cake for her oldest brother's birthday. The birthday boy pronounced it good.

The next day was New Year's Eve, and we celebrated with a batch of chocolate fondue.

She is so new-looking in this one on the right: you can still see the broken blood vessel in her left eye from the birth squeeze, and the peeling new baby skin on her neck.

In this one I am multitasking: nursing the baby, knitting her a hat, and reading St. George and the Dragon to the two younger boys (Pete is wearing part of Joe's old dragon costume).

Here I needed to see if the hat fit. (It didn't. Ripped it back to before the decreases and added more length.) This is not a good picture, but I get a cozy feeling from it even though the top of my head is missing -- the Gladly females in their handknit sweaters. It makes me feel all Proverbs-thirty-one-ly. (That is totally a word.)

The boys want to make sure she doesn't get lonely. Sometimes Pete leaves her a friend to keep her company. Joe thought maybe she'd like to try out his sword. Marty was busy reading, but he made sure she had a hand to hold. She doesn't have to worry much about being lonely, though.

Grandma came to visit for Epiphany and was treated to a big baby smile. It's very blurry, because those early smiles are hard to catch, but it warms my heart anyway.

One of my college roommates, who used to lend me her clothes back then, sent me a big fun box of baby things. I love the stripes.

And one more: here's my mom's eye view.

Goal Post I: From Felix to Felicity

I used to make New Year's resolutions by the dozen, but I don't seem to do that these days. Still, I've been thinking a lot about what I'd like to change this year, where I'd like to be at the end of it. I'm starting tonight with the physical: I have some baby weight to take off, and it is not going to go away if I continue raiding the bag of caramel kisses. I'm going to use a strategy that's worked for me before with excellent effects on my disposition and energy level: five servings of vegetables a day plus a gallon of water and NO SWEETS. I've had the vague idea of getting started every day this week, but now I am posting it on the web so I'll have to stick to it. Tomorrow is the feast of an obscure St. Felix, and my plan is to eat this way until the feast of St. Felicity (and St. Perpetua) on March 7. I'm also going to aim for some gentle exercise four days each week -- gentle as in walking briskly to pick the boys up from school. I'm still feeling a little too newly postpartum to try running just yet.

Overheard

From the 12yo boy too cool to kiss his mother, ever, to the sweet bundle on his shoulder: "Who's my favorite muffin girl, huh? Who's my favorite muffin girl? I'll give you three guesses and the first two don't count." (I keep calling her muffin, maybe because she is warm and sweet and everyone thinks she is delicious.)

Tandem Nursing: Notes from the Gladly House

In response to a couple of comments on that last post: I am tandem nursing for the fourth time. All of my sons, in other words, have nursed through and beyond a pregnancy. I am a quiet tandem nurser, because it is an odd choice in this culture. Some people assume you must be a freak doing it for nefarious reasons; others assume you must be a hardcore lactivist passing judgment on the non-tandem-nursing population.

Woe unto me if I ever walk around passing judgment on 99+% of the population. I harbor no illusions that tandem nursing will make for a more peaceable world -- or even a more peaceable household, though that's my hope. It works for us, so that's what we do. I asked Pete the 3yo for his point of view.

What do you think about sharing nonny?
It's good! And the new baby will say "Wummy wummy wummy." And it's good to share, right?

Do you ever wish you didn't have to share the milk, or is sharing no big deal?
It's no biggie, because there's lots and lots and lots and lots.  And it's for nobody else except the new baby and me.

I thought about posting the reasons why I've nursed my children past infancy given the widespread assumption that it must be for freaky kinds of personal gratification, but I'm not sure that assumption is actually very widespread among people who read this blog. Nursing is a happy but diminishing part of a happy and growing relationship with my 3yo: we read books, we do puzzles, we go to the kids' museum and drive the model tractor, and sometimes we nurse. I expect that during the next year, he'll wean peaceably. I also expect that, like his brothers, he'll dimly remember nursing as something that left him feeling safe and loved and content.

For the people who say darkly, "That woman must be getting something out of it for herself," about older nurslings, I will acknowledge that I do get something out of it for myself. I have a vicious oversupply problem, and an older nursling is a huge help in ramping down supply without drowning the new baby, or subjecting her to GI distress, or landing myself in bed with recurrent mastitis. I could pump, sure, but on Christmas Day when I was battling chills and misery it was so much nicer to lie down next to my Petely than it would have been to wash and assemble the parts for my little hand pump, hoping I remembered how they went together and mustering the muscle to move all that milk. (Many of the dark mutterings suggest that mothers of older nurslings get some kind of sexual charge out of the relationship, which is, not to put too fine a point on it, asinine.)

The first time I tandem-nursed, it was really hard. Really really really really hard. But then everything was hard about going from one to two -- not so much going from two to three, or three to four, or four to five. (So far.) As my pregnancy progressed I talked to Pete about what to expect when the baby came. He seems to have listened closely. (When he climbed into our bed in the morning of her birthday, he said, "Is the milk going to spray out now?" Probably tomorrow, I told him.) I don't pay much attention to how often Pete asks to nurse. I almost always say yes in the early days, when the youngest child has just become the big brother, but I don't worry about saying "Not now. Another time." And I'm not worried about weaning -- it will happen. It always does.

Carrying my children a lot didn't delay them when it was time for them to walk. Using words to interpret their early gestures and monosyllables didn't keep them from talking in sentences (and paragraphs and novellas) when the time was right. And being willing to nurse them for a period of years rather than weeks or months won't keep them from weaning in due time.

I was typing this with baby in the sling. She had just finished nursing, which prompted Pete to say, "More nonny?" We just had nonny, I reminded him. How about another muffin? He didn't want a muffin, but he didn't complain about waiting until later to nurse. Instead he leaned over and planted a spontaneous kiss on his sister's fuzzy head. It works for us. It works well.

Further Notes from Postpartumland

• I want to remember how smiley she is. I know week-old babies aren't supposed to smile, but that's when it started: occasionally she'll look right in my eyes and smile slow and big. We mostly see sleep grins, but I love those too.
• Last night I was holding her and watching her dream -- her little mouth moving through grins and frowns and big surprised O-shapes. How I wonder what her dreams are like.
• Also last night, she had her first bath in the big tub. Pete was splashing in there and I thought I'd just hop in with the baby, who needed a bath. I told Elwood to be ready to grab her in case she was miserable, but she loved it -- I want to remember her wide, wide eyes, taking it all in.
• One of the reasons I am a fan of homebirth is that I found the postpartum adjustment so much easier after my two homebirths than I did after my two hospital births -- less sibling stuff, less marriage stuff, less of my own stuff. I had always wondered, though, how much of it was that my two home-born babies were warm-weather babies. This one, I thought, would be the test, since I have always struggled with winter blues. Verdict: one of the reasons I am a fan of homebirth is that I find the postpartum adjustment so, SO much easier. (Is there an echo in here?)
• With that said, is there a little bit of crazy that just goes with the postpartum territory? I always find that I do have to push away anxious and irrational thoughts (to wit: I was just wondering what would happen if I had postpartum psychosis and didn't know it, and had to remind myself that postpartum psychosis has some important symptoms I am not displaying, like, say, psychosis).
• In another example, baby slept an eight-hour stretch one night and a seven-hour stretch the next. The first night I was really worried. I had this whole explanation worked out: I never got the results from my GBS screen, but in my small-hours tizzy I was sure they were supposed to tell me because it was positive, and the baby had developed late-onset GBS symptoms (did you know that sleeping soundly was a GBS symptom? me neither), and she needed to wake up rightnowrightnow for me to be sure she was all right. I was rubbing her feet and tickling her face and still she slept on. At some point I had to shake my head at myself and say, "Attachment parenting has turned you into a bit of a freak, honey. Most parents whose babies sleep eight hours at a stretch say, 'Thank heavens,' and not 'Late-onset GBS!!'" I was much happier when she was back to a normal newborn nursing groove last night.
• When I had one child and then two, I couldn't imagine how mothers of large families managed. What I didn't know was how much help a pair of willing hands could be. The boys are eager to hold her, though they are quick to hand her off when she tries to eat their shirts. She needs you, Mom, they say. I also didn't realize, with the older ones, how fast it goes. I will savor these little patches of hair at her temples, and the sweetness of her milky breath, because once they're gone they'll never come back.
• She is sleeping in my lap, a drop of milk at the corner of her mouth. She is smiling, once again. She likes it here, I think.

The Really Long Conclusion

The next stretch of labor was -- there's no other word for it -- fun.

In Which I'm Not (Do You Hear Me? I Mean It!) Going To Have A Baby Tonight

On Monday afternoon, the 22nd, I loaded the two younger boys into the van for what I hoped would be my last prenatal visit. I was anxious, yet again.

Snippets from Postpartumland

Joe: "Why is your belly so squishy?"

Marty, after a few days at Grandma's house: "Is it just me or did your breasts get a lot bigger?"

Pete, on the day my milk came in: "There is a lot of nonny." A minute later: "There is enough nonny for everybody."

Me, stirring the waffle batter this morning: "She must have an unbelievably huge diaper if I can smell it from another room." (Then it dawns on me that sometimes when you smell buttermilk, it's because you're actually smelling buttermilk.)