A Million Words

I haven't gotten around to doing anything in the past few weeks. Ever since Thanksgiving, it's been one unfocused, vaguely hectic day after another. Nova has been struggling along with her teeth. She has horrible decay in her front top teeth because of my tooth-cleaning negligence combined with night nursing, and her bottom back molars were coming in. Nova had her 2nd birthday, and I made two cakes for two separate celebrations of the occasion. The first, a Chocolate Brownie Torte with White Chocolate Mousse and Caramelized Bananas was a bit of a flop, but tasted good. Nova enjoyed blowing out the candles and eating it. The second cake was equally mediocre, but held together better. It was a basic chocolate cake with orange frosting and chocolate-frosting decorations. I tried to decorate it with the traditional pastry bag and tips. Nova ate the bits of chocolate off the top. Obviously her diet is not as tooth-friendly as a dentist would wish for, either. We have been doing ...

A few days ago, Nova started saying "Shut up!" loudly, emphatically, and frequently. We were puzzled and troubled by this development. We don't say that around here, at least I don't think we do. Where had she picked it up? Who was she telling to "shut up"? Well, along came this morning's batch of pancakes, and Nova started the shouting again. "Shut up! Shut up!" And then we took it out of the fridge: Syrup!

We arrived in the US two weeks ago today, after several exhausting weeks. During our final two and a half weeks in Ireland, we visited London, packed up the apartment, and tried to keep up with the normal round of daily activities. Meanwhile, I wrapped up the rough draft of the Regency romance I'm working on and battled one of the most exhausting head colds I've ever had.  Nova sprouted her final eye tooth during a whirlwind trip to Edinburgh to visit a friend, and started putting words together.  Mike sorted through his entire collection of games and books, and shuffled everything over to his father's new attic.  Our final day in Ireland was spent cleaning the apartment and dealing with our landlord. He had seemed like a decent enough landlord up until that point, but he walked in that afternoon affecting a "very angry" mood and roaring that the place was "very dirty" (it was a hell of a lot cleaner than it had been when we moved in), and making up spur...

May has been a good month for reading. I read Mort , by Terry Pratchett, , which was good fun, and I finally knocked another item off of my to-do list: Read Strunk & White. Many years ago, I read that every writer should read The Elements of Style , by Wm. Strunk and E. B. White , study it, and re-read it every year. This struck me as such fine advice that I went out, bought the book, and read the first ten pages. With less then 90 pages to go, it shouldn't have taken me another six years to get to the end, but somehow it did. I got caught up on the mysteries of colons and semicolons, two punctuation marks that I have never fully understood. The book slipped back onto my bookshelf and has stayed there ever since, near the front of the pile but rarely opened. I am now happy to report that I have finally read the whole thing. I felt its influence on my writing immediately, as if I could tighten sentences better than ever before. I felt my critical eye sharpen as I read. I did...

I realized the other day that Nova has looked uncharacteristically sad in all my recently-posted photos of her. Here's one where she looks more like her usual self:

Late Thursday night I came down with a bout of mastitis, aches and pains all over, chills and general malliase.  I had a pretty good idea what was happening, so I went in to see the doctor right away. That kept me from writing on Friday, I was still pretty tired on Saturday, and by the time Sunday rolled around Nova had a fever, too.  We took her to the doctor yesterday afternoon. Now she and I are both on antibiotics and I haven't done any actual writing in days.   According to the doctor, Nova has an ear and throat infection resulting from her recent runny nose and cough. Also, her two top eye teeth are on the verge of breaking through the gum.  The result of all this is that she's nursing almost non-stop, more than she has since she was a newborn, I think.   Now, this is the first time in Nova's 17 months that she's had to take antibiotics, and it isn't pretty.  Toddler antibiotics come in a sticky yellow liquid form, and are supposed to be dosed out by the teasp...

A few months ago I reported on Nova's early words in the post Nova is Walking! For months after I wrote that post, her vocabulary remained stagnant, and even shrunk a bit.  I don't think she used the word "baba" once between September and March, then all of a sudden, about three weeks ago, it was back.  More words followed.  Last night I attempted to compile a list of Nova's current words, including those that I'm not 100% sure of (followed by a ? in the list bellow) Baba (baby) Ball ballaballap (balloon) bubum (butter) bye-bye (also used to mean, "let's go already!" when I'm taking too long to get out of the house) book? blue? buttbutt (button, including especially bellybutton)  dada down dat (that)  dog (Nova's favorite word) dark (not very precisely pronounced) duck (a very popular word these days, second only to "dog."  It includes all birds.) eye hat/head/hair (not sure if she's distinguishing between these yet) hi/hiy...

Nova's birthday was this Saturday, and despite the chaos of roommates moving out and in, and the kitchen being in complete disarray, I was determined to make Nova a cake.   It is an orange chiffon (sponge) cake with chocolate ganache between the layers and huge amounts of ridiculously sweet white chocolate buttercream icing all over.  We took it to Mike's mother's house for a small birthday party that night, and a good time was had by all.   At one year old, Nova is never still except when she's asleep.  She walks at breakneck speed, honing in on anything sharp, dangerous, or electronic.  Her favorite teethers are mobile phones.  She enjoys exploring the far reaches of her range.  In the library, she will stay and play in the children's section for a while, but then she'll get restless and wander over to the computers in the reference room.  She can make my computer do things I didn't know it was capable of.  She's a very sociable baby, but with all the ...

Mike has been after me for months to make Nova a Cthulu costume, and last night it finally came together.  Mike made the wings, and I frankensteined the rest together from a cheap pair of boy's pajamas.  Here she is:  

Nova pulled herself to stand at 6 months and 3 weeks, and cruised almost immediately thereafter, but she didn't crawl at top speeds until a month after that, shuffling the normal order of infant skill acquisition. Now, at long last, after months of warm-ups she's finally walking on her own.   She took her first independent steps almost a month ago, and by this time last week she was stringing four or five steps together at a stretch.  Then, in the last few days, she's finally started to use this new "walking" skill to get from point A to point B.   Meanwhile, she's had a runny nose and possibly an invisible tooth coming in and has completely gone off solid food, so she's nursing like a newborn, but it's all really very exciting.   My mother says that at this age I had about a dozen words. I'm not sure how many words Nova has, or what counts. She hasn't said "baba" (arguably her first word) in months, so I don't know if she still h...

Just now, Nova took two steps in a row, totally on her own.  Last weekend she took a step on her own, then sat down, and all week she's been crouching and standing and crouching back down to crawl.   This step towards walking comes about a month after she first stood up on her own from the ground, without using anything for balance or support or to pull on.  Now I really do think she'll be walking soon.

Nova is nine months old tomorrow and she's working on walking.  When she was younger, people often commented on how alert she seemed compared to other babies her age, and even in the womb, in the long weeks of gearing up for labor, her activity level drew comment whenever I had monitors strapped to me.   I attribute her frequent kicking and subsequent explorations in part to the constant stream of caffeine I send her, first through the umbilical cord and now through breastmilk, but I think it's also just her personality.  Still, it didn't seem important until recently, when she's gotten much more mobile.   We've met up with several babies her age lately, and she enjoys their company but she's crawling circles around them, poking at their eyes, grabbing their noses, and sometimes even stepping on them.  Many other babies her age, especially boys, are still inching around on thier bellies.  The differences are getting a lot more noticeable.  She's generally ha...

At 8 months old, Nova is crawling, climbing stairs, standing with support, and pulling things of shelves.  She's speeding ahead as usual, but the last week has been tough, with a head cold, two new teeth cutting in, and immunizations to top it all off.  She's getting sticky and dirty and occasionally a bit bruised and scraped from her crawling and climbing adventures, but she's still having a good time.   She's also enjoying "eating"and I think some of the food has started to go in.  So far, I'm having mixed success keeping her off salt, sugar, wheat and dairy, since that's all most people eat around here.  She's still enjoying her carrots, apples, bananas, pears, porridge, avocado, rice cakes, etc.  It's nice being able to set her up with her own tray of food when we're all eating dinner, so we don't have to take turns holding her while we eat.   She's also getting a lot better at keeping herself entertained, especially when she ha...

Earlier this week, I was leafing through the internet or a book, and came across the advice that one should read to babies starting from the very beginning.   Now, I would love to read to Nova, but she sees books first and foremost as a thing to chew on.   Goodnight Gorilla   already sports quite an array of toothmarks.  I went onto one of the parenting chat sites I waste so much time on and asked for advice.  People had all sorts of opinions, as you might imagine, but all in all I was encouraged to give it another go.  The night before last, we turned all the pages of Goodnight Gorilla .   One piece of advice I found interesting was that you can read a baby your  books, by which the poster obviously meant whatever books you are reading, but that wasn't how I read it at first glance. I thought, "Aha!  I can read Nova Scrapplings  and all the other books in the Anamat series that I've been trying to write since 2002."  So last night, as I lay there just this side of sl...

A few weeks ago, I resolved to write during Nova's naptimes.  She often naps for an hour or two in the morning, and sometimes for an hour or two in the afternoon, as well.  If she did nap for three hours, that would theoretically be three working hours in a day -- a perfect amount of time. But today is like many other days.  I start off the day with my cup of tea and Nova amuses herself and practices standing and crawling for an hour or so while I make myself breakfast and perhaps check in with the world of the internet.  While she's nursing, I play scrabulous and surf around innumerable time-wasting sites devoted to the hippy fringe of parenting, or go off on a tangent and look at fabrics on-line. Sooner or later she nods off.  Some mornings it only takes 10 minutes of nursing until she nods off, this morning it was well over an hour (with a short interruption, when I thought she was asleep). The real problem, though, is me.  Once she's safely settled in her slumbers, I ge...

Last night, I finally finished reading  What's Going on in There ,  which I started in December or thereabouts.  Since then, long weeks have passed in which I did not read at all, or picked it up only to read one or two pages. Between January and mid-May, I don't think I read more than ten pages on any one day, and usually much less than that. When Nova went to sleep earlier than usual three nights ago I set out to read 15 pages and wound up reading nearly 40.  It felt so good to really get into a book and feel my brain stir to life again.  I nodded off with only one chapter left to read (the second-to-last, because I'd skipped around).  The following night I was too tired to pick it up at all, but last night I read those last 15 pages.  I have now read a full-length book with Nova at my side. What's Going on in There was pretty good, but like many books, it dragged in the middle. I found myself more interested again towards the end when it started talking about languag...

To work or not to work, that is the question that plagues me now as I watch Nova sleeping in her car seat, which rocks her back to sleep when she startles.  I feel lucky even to have the choice. As Nova crests the 6-month mark, I am considering whether to get a regular, paid day-job. I would like to get out a little more, have a little more grown-up time, and make some money, but when I run the numbers it just doesn't add up.   It seems like most of my peers in America are compelled to go back to full time work six weeks after their babies are born, or three months later if they're lucky.  Here in Ireland, most wait until six or seven months, about Nova's age now.  The little ones go into daycare at rates that cancel out ordinary wages, but if you're a well-paid professional you come out a little bit ahead financially and, more importantly, stay up to date in your career of choice.  The babies are generally fine, but a whole load of natural parenting options go out the...

For the past month and a half, I have been obsessed with cloth diapers.  It started with what I thought was a simple idea:  I would make Nova some training pants, trim cloth diapers which could be pulled down or snapped closed.  I didn't even think about buying them, really, because the ones that were available ran about $15/pair, which seemed like too much.  Besides, I like researching random obscure information. And so it came to pass that I fell through the rabbit hole into the strange and puzzling world of cloth diaper makers, as found on Mothering.com and in the Diaper Sewing Divas group.  Meanwhile, a woman I know here brought it to my attention that some people collect  diapers, and will pay hundreds of dollars  for a single diaper.  The current "hot diapers" are by a group called Good Mamas.  I've seen some, and frankly I don't understand what all the excitement is about.  Sure, they're nice, but not that  nice.   Meanwhile, I was making my own.  I loo...

This week has been a total loss in terms of writing.  Not only were we moving, but we didn't have an internet connection until yesterday afternoon, and we've been dealing with the byzantine Irish bureaucracy so we can get married.  There has also been a stream of tradesmen coming and going from the apartment, fixing the hot water and the showers, the heaters and fans, etc.  I think I've spent half the week waiting to let them in and texting the landlord about what has or hasn't been done.   And then, there is the laundry.  It's not so bad, just a load or two every morning, but I think I had become accustomed to the help of Nova's grandmothers in that area, not to mention the convenience of having a dryer.  Here, we have lots of light and air and I've bought an enormous clothes drying rack which would hold probably three days worth of diapers at a stretch, but because there's always something else to wash and they do get stinky lying around, I've been...