Disco Knitter

I got a little lie in this morning. Eventually, I thought I’d better get up and start the day - feed the baby, etc. He usually wakes up between 6.30am and 7.30am. Once he slept through until 9am and worried his mother quite a bit.

As I got up, I checked the clock, and thought it must have been out of battery. It said 9:55am.

I went to the bathroom and checked the clock in there. 9.55am.

I freaked! I was actually scared to open the door to Inigo’s room. I eventually summoned my nerve, and opened the door.

Which woke him up.

The kid slept from early evening until ten o’clock in the morning!

I feel a little queasy saying this, but the architecture of the new Olympic buildings in Beijing is pretty damn amazing.

I’ve been following a blog called “The Big Picture“, and this latest set of images are truly awe inspiring.

Amethysts are a quite attractive colour. Pines are not grey. Scarlet is bright and vivid red. Electricity has no colour, but the name usually describes colours of a startling and clear intensity.

Crystal also has no colour. And if it did, it wouldn’t look like cat vomit.

Sugar Plums don’t look like diseased apricots.

You might just be on the money with “Blue Haze”. But I don’t really know, it’s been a long time since I’ve been in one…

Now that things with the child are somewhat more “normal”, you’d think I would have a bit more me time. But he has started solids, I seem to be spending a huge amount of time preparing food for the gaping hole that is his stomach. I would call it a black hole, except that output still equals input…

Stuff like this -

goes in, and I won’t talk about what comes out.

Frozen steamed pear, kiwi fruit and rockmelon. It looked so pretty, I just had to take a picture.

He’s been showing great enthusiasm for new foods.

This was an empty box - he’s not allowed fruit juice yet!

Last night he had cauliflower for the first time, and ate quite a bit of it, as well as brown lentils mixed with pumpkin, and zucchini and broccoli. So far, he’ll eat anything I give him, and he shows more enthusiasm for new things after he has had them a few times. Unless they are sweet, in which case he will eat until he explodes. The new nickname is Mr Creosote.

And yesterday, we found a tooth!

Before Mark and I got married, I had a kitchen tea. But since we’d already been cohabiting for a while (and I’d had my own kitchen for years), we had no need for “stuff”. Instead, I asked friends to cook their favourite vegetarian dish, and bring me the recipe. We ate the yummy food, and Miriam put the recipes into a big folder for me to keep.

It was a gorgeous day, and I wish I had photos to show you now.

What I do have for you now is a superb recipe. I didn’t get around to cooking this until a few weeks ago, and I went through a period of mourning the years that I lived without this soup.

Jane learned the recipe from the monks at a Buddhist retreat that she went to when she was living in Brazil. Just what you need after a hard days meditation.

It’s easy (super, amazingly easy) to cook, and has such a wallop of deliciously distinctive flavour that you won’t be able to stop at one bowl.

500gm Red Lentils
3.5 Litres Water (I use a little less)
1 Onion, roughly chopped
2 cloves of Garlic, roughly chopped

7 Tblspns Sesame Seeds
1 Tblspn Salt

Chuck first 4 ingredients in a pot. Simmer till lentils turn to mush. Blend with a bamix to make a smooth consistency.

Dry fry sesame seeds over a medium heat, stirring constantly to avoid burning. You want the seeds to change colour, but it doesn’t have to be a big colour change.

Grind sesame seeds and salt - to be proper authentic you’d do this in a big stone mortar and pestle, but my shoulder gave in and I did it in a food processor. It still tasted good.

Stir sesame mix into lentil goop.

Serve with a garnish of fresh chopped continental parsley if desired.

This recipe freezes well, and is thick and hearty enough for a meal on its own.

A knitted lampshade.

Scroll down past the reasonable use for an appalling craft for the knitting.

Cardi by Donna

Last week, I went to a picnic with some other cloth nappy mums. They were all discussing sleep problems, and how each kid is worse than the last. I felt pretty left out - my child sleeps!

He’s been so amazingly, marvellously, wondrously calm, and happy to sleep (in his cot) when he gets tired. He sleeps in the car, he even sleeps in my arms when there isn’t a cot available. It’s been great for both of us (and Mark too!), and I feel like I deserve it. We’ve had enough grief.

I explained to the other mums about his new sleep habits, and about my magic solution. Antibiotics! It won’t work for everyone, but after all we’ve been through, I feel like having a baby without sleep issues is perfectly just and fair.

Then on Friday last week he stopped. We left him with mum and dad while we went out for dinner. I wanted to get him to sleep before we left, but after two hours of full body thrashing, screaming, fighting and kicking, I was at a loss. At first I thought it was just because he was in unfamiliar territory, but when he was still out of sorts the next day, I began to suspect that something else was going on.

He refused to sleep in his cot all weekend, and on Sunday he screamed all day. I was so wound up, when Daisy crapped in my bathroom, I lost it, and smacked him. I can’t really explain how bad this makes me feel, poor old Daisy is a bit senile, and I understand that he doesn’t know what he’s doing. And hitting an animal is never defensible. So you can tell that I was at a pretty low ebb when I hit out like that. Sleep deprivation destroys rational thought, and I think that having slept well for two months (since the antibiotics), going back to the bad old days was a bit of a shock to the system.

By monday, he was not sleeping until he screamed himself to exhaustion. I started to think we might be dealing with another infection. On sunday I refilled his antibiotic script. The last lot of antibiotics didn’t have a “Discard on” date sticker on them, and I just forgot. We got almost to the end of the bottle before Mark pointed out that they were probably out of date. So now he’s had the new lot of drugs for a few days, and last night he slept in his cot for the first time in almost a week. And all of us slept well. In fact, some of us slept so well, we were late for work
And now a little something for the afro fans out there…

Thanks to Chris for the great pic!

I saw a pilgrim in lederhosen today. And the baby was cross, so I couldn’t stop the car to photograph this guy with his peeps outside the local mosque.

I tried to register as a pilgrim on the weekend. Apparently you need to not only be catholic, but you also need to be “known” to one of the recognised organisations. And Acceptance is not recognised. I am not actually a member of Acceptance either, but if I was going to claim kinship with any mob of catholics, these ones sound like my kind of catholics.

Yes, I am planning to hand out condoms on saturday, and I feel quite strongly about the evil of the pope’s stance on their use in Africa, despite the spread of HIV/AIDS. I believe in women’s reproductive rights, and I am a big fan of homosexuality.

So why would I try to sign up to World Youth Day? I gotta get me one of those stylin’ backpacks!

God I am shallow.

Shamelessly lifted from Jussi.

I feel for those of you that didn’t get to attend a birthday party with false moustaches…

On friday night, we went to a party to farewell Kerry. Inigo was a trouper, and hardly whinged all night, despite the loud band and people everywhere. He even had a little nap, in his pram which was parked right beside the band.

I got to meet Bob Brown, and asked him for a picture with Inigo. There was no baby kissing - but I think this will make a great picture for Inigo’s baby book!

The t-shirt reads “I have issues”

Inigo sits on the table and devours a flyer advertising a rally outside Peter Garrett’s office

There has been rather a lot on in the last few weeks, and I have a cold, so it’s been hard to keep up the blog. I hope to add another post soon with pictures of Owen Edward, who arrived on Sunday. Hopefully his mum is starting to feel better after his birth - he was more than 10 pounds!

…hard work, passion, enthusiasm, intelligence, optimism, inspiration - and results!

Kerry had her last days in the Senate last week, and we went to Canberra to see her last speech.

Inigo chews a toy as the wheels of government turn

I had never been to new Parliament House before, and I had never been to a Senators office before either. We got “unaccompanied visitor” passes, which meant we could wander the halls without an escort. One security guard asked if he could feel inside the pram (since it was too big to go through the metal detectors on the way in), and I asked him to let me know if it was wet. I wish I had a photo of the face he made!

Inigo and his Cousin Ella play on the floor in Kerry’s office

The gorgeous Ella

One of her youngest fans?

The view from a staff lunch room, where we had a we drop to celebrate after Kerry’s (not valedictory) speech

Watching Natasha Stott-Despoja’s Valedictory speech on the tele in Kerry’s office. Don’t worry about the spots on the back of his head - he is either part vidiian, or they are stork marks (a non permanent type of birth mark) and will disappear in a year or so.


Mark and Ted walk past a painting by Sid Ball - George also had one of his works, which I think is better than the one in Parliament House.

The kid looks happy in the big chair

I’ve been designing (in my head) a follow up to the Myrtle Scarf - but not doing much knitting. Knitting has consisted of more booties, one pair from the gorgeous watermelon yarn that Bex dyed for me ages ago, and an orange pair now on the needles to “match” his purple corduroy pants that I made.

Here are a few pics I took of Myrtle before she went to her forever home, hopefully illustrating the beautiful sheen and stitch definition of the yarn, and the lovely drape of the finished scarf. Unfortunately the photography is nothing special - I was literally running out the door as soon as I took the blocking pins out.

And here is a picture of the sprog in his February Baby Sweater by Bex.

We had the MCU on the 16th, and saw the Dr to get the results. Apparently he has grade one reflux on the right, and grade two on the left. Grade one is no big deal, and probably not worth medicating on it’s own - but grade two is not good.

We did another urine test on the 16th, but so far we haven’t found the results. I have made numerous phone calls, but since my paed has two offices and two receptionists, and she has been away at a conference for a week, it’s been hard to pin anyone down. I will go to the Westmead office tomorrow, and if the results can’t be found then we’ll re-test.

Last Tuesday night Mark noticed that the tip of his foreskin was looking a little manky, so off we trooped to the medical centre (the skanky one I hate, but is open late). He weighed in at 7.9kg, and we got oral and topical antibiotics for the infection. Apparently it was probably caused by the MCU, not poor parental hygiene. So if he did have another urine infection on the 16th, this latest round of drugs would have killed it by now - but it would be helpful to know if he did get another infection while he was on the prophylactic dose of the antibiotics.

He continues to go from strength to strength, he started sitting up unsupported over a week ago, and has begun to “crawl”. Backwards.

We’re very proud.

Many months ago, Blueberry and Monkey went to live with our friend Dionne, and her bunny Jasper came to live with us. Jasper is a lovely girl who had lost her bonded partner, Harrison. Jasper and Harrison were deeply in love, and when he died, she was all at sea. Dionne and I thought that she might be a good match with Custard, who was also alone after the untimely demise of Grasshopper. Since Grasshopper died after Custard attacked him, I was understandably reticent about leaving these two alone together prematurely, and all of our early bonding attempts ended in growling, lunging, and eventually biting. We took things very slowly - perhaps too slowly.

But for a few weeks now, they have been living in domestic bliss. Jasper adores her new man, and sometimes he even deigns to groom her for a second or two.

Rabbits are social creatures, and really thrive in the company of their own species. A human companion is well and good, but there is nothing like bunny love.

Urinary reflux, not the other kind…

He was very good during the test. It was horrible having to put him through that, but at least now we have an answer. We know WHY he got the infection, and we know what we can do to prevent it from happening again. He’ll have to be on antibiotics for about a year, and that should keep the infections away. If it doesn’t, then we’ll deal with that later.

He’s now asleep, after a huge feed. He had a breastfeed, then he ate all the pear and rice cereal I gave him some sweet potato for dessert. I feel like I could sleep for a month.

On a desperate mission to get a scarf finished by thursday, so any spare moment I have while the child is asleep has been spent knitting.

Lynne, our community health nurse is retiring this week. She has been an amazing support, and will be sorely missed. She was instrumental in getting us to see Dr McVeagh, and ultimately getting answers. I had always intended to knit her something special, but I never expected to have such a short deadline. I am on the last of three balls, but I am seriously worried about my chances of getting the knitting finished, and getting it blocked and dried by thursday morning. Project details here for those of you on ravelry.

Last thursday Inigo was 7.13kg - above the 3rd percentile for weight - finally! He’s hovering around the 50th percentile for length, but his head circumference is above the 97th percentile. He is on track to follow his father into the special hat shop for cranial gigantism.

On friday night he tried “solids” for the first time. There are funnier photos, but the kid will have friends that know how to use the internet one day, so I’d better keep them private for now.

Yesterday was just another day. Sort of.

We walked up to Granville to get weighed, Inigo slept in the pram. Woke up for his weigh in, was charm itself to Lynne (who we haven’t seen since before the anti-biotics), and was the very picture of a gorgeous, happy, self settling, healthy, perfect little guy.

Everywhere we went, people commented on how gorgeous he was, how beautiful, how perfect. Just like it used to be. Just like the last three months never happened.

Like I’ve stepped into an alternate reality. $16 worth of anti-biotics, and our lives have turned around.

So I’m hoping that the next six months bring more of the same. I’m daring to hope. For the first time since he was born, I think he’s OK. I think he’s healthy, and I know he’s happy.

And I know, that if I can get through times like we’ve had so far, that I can get through just about anything.