i’ve been spending a lot of time at hmc’s behest to come up with playlists for the birth.
this is much harder than you (and certainly i) would have thought. you need one with hours and hours of appropriately relaxing birthing music. follow up with another playlist with hours of slightly more active pushing/breathing down music.
the issue is coming up with like ten hours of music that’s a lot less active than you think. anything with words or understandable lyrics is right out, as you don’t want anything that’s going to take her out of a relaxed state. and then a lot of the things you’d think would work (the orb, lemon jelly, etc.) don’t work either, as they’re actually too uptempo(!).
but what’s left? how do you fill up the rest of the time without resorting to hours upon hours of that new age meditation buddha bar softcore porn sounding crap? this would have obviously been easier to address at home, where i could call upon our some 90GB of music, but once again it’s something i ran out of time on. i suppose i could resort to a buddha machine, if nothing else.
i suddenly feel like neal pollack’s alternadad, determined not to have snapper be born into the world listening to mushy new age buddha bar pap!
of course, i’m fine with snapper coming out listening to glitchcore, but somehow i don’t think hmc’s going to go for that.
so now it’s just about the waiting.
i find myself in lost angels, sitting around, ostensibly doing work: reading and composing emails, dialing in on con-calls, and doing other little projects. but really, mostly it’s about making sure that hmc is ok, ferrying her around to different locations, and then the waiting.
everything is now short-term baby-related action items: go to doctor’s appointments. fill out paperwork. attend hospital maternity ward tours. buy diapers and baby wipes. run around and find things like belly lotion and nipple cream.
by the way, it’s probably worth noting that if you want up to the minute updates when shit starts going down, you should probably start following me on twitter. i probably won’t have time to call people or even txt them, but one txt to twitter is easier than trying to remember who to contact once babies start shooting out of orifices.
check the twitterfeed on the right if you’re too lazy, i guess.
or if you don’t care that much, you can just wait till i get a moment and get back online. which should be in about 19 years.
just flew down on virgin america. which was lovely, as short little one hour flights go. i don’t know what to say that hasn’t already been said, but i pretty much agree with it all.
a live journal crossposting plugin that works! yetra will be so pleased. see? mt4 was good for something. ah, but i now see that the syndication of my site has been working again, so…?
obviously this is me just wasting time when i should be doing the last bits of my packing.
in summary, i fly out tomorrow to lost angels. on virgin america on those fancy new mood-lit jets. just because.
i’ve spent the last week furiously running around, doing all the last minute errands i can, tying up loose ends, and trying to unpack more and more of the house. the last couple of days i’ve been eating(!!) all the leftover food so nothing is spoilt.
and of course there’s all the work crap i’ve been plowing through and trying to smooth all out so i can be gone for a month without much todo. which ended up in me driving down to sunnyvale every day for the past two weeks, but seeing as i’m not going to be there again for over a month, i can’t really complain, can i?
maybe i can. but i won’t.
i notice that everyone i know is leaving for burning man. me, i’m leaving for birthing girl.
go figure.
of course, there are about a billion fantastic shows coming up in september:
alas, we’ll be in lost angels. and, uh, new parents.
drove hmc down to lost angels last night, and then flew back up first thing this morning to go back to work for one more week. i’ve got a million things to do before i go down, but the only thing i hope doesn’t happen is for snapper to try and come out before i get there.
sit tight!
by the way, the set i played at camp willits this year is available here, at least for a few days. as many genres i could seamlessly fit into 90 minutes. sorry it doesn’t fit onto a cd. it does share a couple of song with ebb13. maybe you should think of it as ebb13-1. or ebb13a. or for you comic book fans, alternate-earth ebb13!
oh crap. i look at the calendar and realize that sunday we’re scheduled to drive hmc down to lost angels. and then i go for good the week after. but if she’s going down on sunday, we need to pack and bring everything we’ll need to take care of snapper jones while we’re down there: infant seat, portable crib, bottles, baby clothes, blankets, swaddles, burp cloths, teeny mittens, sleepers, duct tape, etc.
AND IT’S ALREADY THURSDAY.
oh, and don’t forget that all-day baby-care class at alta bates on saturday.
crap.
hmc gave me the talk this evening as i was assembling our new stokke crib.
she reminded me that despite what we’ve seen from relatively serene babies like maya and river, some babies just cry and cry and cry and cry and cry. and that should snapper do that, we shouldn’t feel like we’re bad parents or doing anything wrong, because some babies just are like that for a while. like cait. or ro.
moral of the story: “hope for the maya, fear the rozilla.”
ok, just to make it official or if you haven’t been paying attention: we’re having snapper jones in lost angels.
now is not the time to ask, “why are you going so far away?” or “wouldn’t it be easier just to have it in the bay area?” we’re past that already. besides, anyone can have a baby in the same city that they live in. that’s not complicated at all. what’s the challenge in that? where’s the fun?
fine, just to sum up, here are the reasons:
when does hmc go down there? when do i? labor takes a while, but you can’t really wait for the water to break and then try and hop a southwest flight. yet i don’t want to come too early lest i waste too much of my paternity leave waiting around in lost angels for nothing.
where do we stay? hmc’s parents are renovating their place (finally!), and hmc says my parents’ house is too far away. thankfully, erin says we might be able to stay at a place across the street from her house, but it’s unfurnished.
and then the big question: how do we get back? sure it’s only a 6 hour drive, but since you technically can’t drive unless the baby is in a car seat and babies feed every two hours for 40 minutes or so, suddenly that 6 hour drive is now a very loooong drive. i suppose we could fly. or take a bus. or a train. but then how do we get home from there? if we don’t drive back, our only 4-seater is now left in lost angels.
see? i told you this was fun!
this just in from the latimes:
August 7, 2007
Parents hoping to raise baby Einsteins by using infant educational videos are actually creating baby Homer Simpsons, according to a new study released today.
For every hour a day that babies 8 to 16 months old were shown such popular series as “Brainy Baby” or “Baby Einstein,” they knew six to eight fewer words than other children, the study found.
Parents aiming to put their babies on the fast track, even if they are still working on walking, each year buy hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of the videos.
Unfortunately it’s all money down the tubes, according to Dr. Dimitri Christakis, a professor of pediatrics at the University of Washington in Seattle.
Christakis and his colleagues surveyed 1,000 parents in Washington and Minnesota and determined their babies’ vocabularies using a set of 90 common baby words, including mommy, nose and choo-choo.
The researchers found that 32% of the babies were shown the videos, and 17% of those were shown them for more than an hour a day, according to the study in the Journal of Pediatrics.
…
The American Academy of Pediatrics recommends no television for children under 24 months.
…
Christakis said children whose parents read to them or told them stories had larger vocabularies.
suddenly, i’m caught in my own version of a consumerist soap opera.
i called pottery barn a few weeks ago to order a mirror for our bathroom, because the one that came with our house is bufugly. if i have any rules for my new house, #3 is NO WICKER. even seemingly-innocuous wicker painted white to match all the other moldings. alas, the one in the catalogue seemed pretty nice, plus it has a shelf which is good for hmc to plop things on.
i call back last week to check on the order and see when it was shipping, only to be told that they can’t find the order. uh, what? “oh, it happens all the time.” so, willing to give them the benefit of the doubt, i order it again with the person on the phone, and i figure that i’ll check in later to make sure that nothing went awry this time.
yesterday i call back. here’s my conversation:
me: “hi, i’m calling to check the status of my order # xxxxxxxx”
her: “hm. i’m not finding it. what’s your name and your zip code?”
me: “me, blah blah blah”
her: “huh. i can’t find it in our system.”
me: “are you kidding?”
there was some bullshit runaround where they claimed my credit card had denied the transactions, which i verified with the credit card to be absolutely untrue.
finally, i got another supervisor on the phone who gave me the actual problem. it turns out that the old owner of our house had pissed off pottery barn so much that they BLACKLISTED THEM. FOREVER. meaning that pottery barn would NEVER SHIP ANYTHING TO OUR ADDRESS EVER AGAIN. what the hell do you need to do to get blacklisted by pottery barn? order stuff, decide that you don’t like it, and then shit on it before you send it back? claim that the sectional couch is facing the other way than in the picture? argue that the dresser you ordered is not colored espresso but mahogany?
but seriously, what the fuck does that have to do with me? they don’t live here anymore. i live here now. if they need evidence, they can look at the crap that i ordered from them from my old house. that i kept. and did not shit on. and if you didn’t want me to order, why did you send me two catalogs with “welcome to your new house and here’s 10% off so buy some stuff from us” coupons in them?
she said she was going to see if she could do something about it, but she didn’t sound hopeful. as it is right now, if i want anything from pottery barn, i need to have it shipped somewhere else. riiiiight, like i’m going to go out of my way to buy from them if they don’t want my business. it’s not like they’re the only ones out there selling overpriced crap.
after the second all-day hypnobirthing intensive class on saturday and then the all-day birth prep class at alta bates today, our heads are bulging and filled with everything you need to know to birth a baby.
now the next time someone asks me, “so, are you ready?” i’m going to look them squarely in the eye and scream “YESSSSS! WOOO WOOO WOOO!”
i think the comforting things were:
as for the hypnobirthing classes, aside from the new-age leap of faith aspect, it did help in terms of giving us something concrete to say and visualizations to rely on when i’m trying to help hmc relax and do deep relaxing breathing during the contractions. we’re hopeful that it will be sufficient to avoid drugs, but of course even if she needs them, it should help her focus and it helps us go into it more prepared and aware of the possibilities.