Baby Sign

Yeah, we sign with our baby. We started when she was 8 months old, with very few signs (more, done, down) and were rubbish at being consistent with the signs. Somehow, I found it hard to do the sign when it was better to get that spoon in her mouth quickly before she lost interest while Mummy was signing "more".

Despite our best efforts, the Toddler has actually picked up on signing! She now uses 'more', 'down', 'help', 'water', 'please', 'eat', and a few that we've made up together like 'where' and 'Wiggles'. You'll recall I posted about the Wiggles -- they're the Toddler's favorite TV programme. She loves books, so I should teach her 'book', and i've just decided tonight to teach her 'music' and 'reach' or 'get'. She uses nodding head and shaking head for 'yes' and 'no', and waving for 'hi' and 'bye' since I didn't see the need to try and teach those signs.

It's really cute. She uses 'more' the most, asking to continue a game (ie: "again!") or for more food, or to watch the Wiggles for the gazillionth time. Her 'Wiggles' sign is guaranteed to make you smile -- pointed forefingers and thumbs waved in the air, and body wiggling like you are doing the twist, accompanied by the biggest grin ever.

Now if someone could just teach W. sign language. I know what I'd teach him -- 'idiot', 'stop', 'no', 'quiet', 'sit'.

How About Renaming it MMS?

PMS is such a misnomer. Like Morning Sickness, which is not limited to the morning but rather is all-day-nausea, PMS for some is all-month-evil. To carry the analogy a little further, with Morning Sickness, upon puking (which normally one would assume would make one feel better) one still feels just as nauseated *and* has vomit-breath. With PMS, at the start of bleeding when one would expect relief from the symptoms, the opposite is often the case. Now not only is one moody, miserable and depressed, but bleeding.

Did you ever see those commercials where the slightly disheveled, clearly put-upon woman is trying to get a shopping cart out of the cart line to do her grocery shopping? She wrestles a little with the thing, then bangs her hands on the handle and slams the cart into the others to a voiceover saying "Why does this always happen to me?" I used to slightly grin at that commercial thinking "We all have those days. No need for Prozac."

Heh. Hand over the drugs. I've dissolved into tears recently over something as little as a packet of laundry tablets refusing to open cleanly. I've yelled at The Toddler for -- well, being a toddler. And poor Mr LSG gets his head taken off routinely. He deserves it, you know. He puts his knife in the sink instead of the dishwasher.

Did I Say San Francisco?

I think I married my father.

When I was young(er), my father would torture me with this really cool mind-game of his. He'd have a decision to make: red tie or blue? Volvo or Sunfire? He'd get us kids involved in the debate, get us to come out in favour of one thing or the other, and he'd agree that we were right, the red tie or the Sunfire was the decision.
Then WHAM! He'd flip. "No, it's the blue tie." "Actually, the Volvo is better" (okay, so he was right there).

Sometimes, if he was really feeling mischevious, he'd get us to agree with the flip -- only to flip back. "You know, I think you were right before. The red tie it is!"

Now that I'm older, married (happily, thank you!), have a child of my own, I think I understand that he was trying to get us to think for our own and stand by our decisions in the face of pressure. But holy shit, was it frustrating.

Mr LSG and I are doing a similar dance lately with the "where do we live" question -- as soon as we say "Right, we're blowing this clambake" we start to feel as if we might actually like to stay in London for a while. Damnit.

The Caffeine Monologues

Let's talk about children. Most of us have this -- let's face it, narcissistic -- need to procreate. And when we do, our lives go all topsy-turvy on us. We now understand sacrifice, tough love, and discipline in ways that were completely incomprehensible before baby. We have experienced how sleep-deprivation is a form of torture and how we never ever ever could have prepared ourselves for it before baby. And we still love these instruments of our undoing in a fundamental "of course" way.

Now let's talk about caffeine. If you are like me, you gave up caffeine for the length of time it took to fall pregnant (1.5yrs), be pregnant (37 weeks) and breastfeed (4.5 months and don't get down on me for this, I wanted to go longer). Previously, I had one to two cups of coffee in the morning only, and reveled in the clarity it brought me for my morning commute and early work day. When I gave it up, it wasn't too difficult (blinding headaches nonetheless) and I went on happily drinking decaffeinated teas, patting myself on the back and being grateful I didn't have to hunt down a cup o' joe on holidays and at other people's houses.

Unfortunately, after I stopped breastfeeding, that devil in me that says "go ahead, indulge, you are no longer directly feeding another being" perked up when I stopped breastfeeding. She was in a stupor from the sleepless nights and days and needed CAFFEINE and CHOCOLATE. I was helpless to resist. Especially when I discovered the Mocha Latte.

So once again I find myself a slave to caffeine. It's a love-hate relationship. Love the buzz. Hate the dependancy. Unless The Toddler learns to sleep through the night, I absolutely cannot contemplate life without caffeine. So can someone tell me: just how am I going to kick it the next time we want to conceive?

BrainTunes

"Toot-toot chugga-chugga, Big Red Car; We'll travel near and we'll travel far!" The Wiggles, "Big Red Car"

I remember pre-Toddler when I would get a song or jingle stuck in my head and it would be annoying. It was always a fragment of the tune. Never the entire song. My, how times change. Hours after having dropped the Toddler off at nursery I will still be humming some child's song that we sang together in the morning. The entire song. With hand motions.

I wonder if that's the reason for the odd looks? Or maybe it's this morning's rejected yoghurt in a lovely Rorschach blot on my shirt.

21st Century Kitchen

The plumbers came today and installed our new dishwasher. We had to sacrifice a cupboard (cabinet to the rest of you) but both Mr LSG and I agree that it's a small, worthwhile sacrifice.

Did you know that dishwashers now have all these nifty devices inside? There's the stemware rack, for starters. The top rack shifts up and down for taller items. And there's a cool new "cutlery insert" for keeping your flatware separated ("You gotta keep 'em separated") for optimal washing.

I wanted to run a load immediately, but a quick perusal of the instruction manual told me I have some shopping to do first. Apparently I need dishwasher salts and rinse aid or I can't run the machine. The salts get poured in the "pan" in a reservoir and I MUST NOT use regular salt as it will damage the dishwasher. I also must run a full wash programme after putting the salts in to avoid any corrosion. No problem! I was planning to wash my breakfast cereal bowl, spoon and glass -- oh and my coffee mug and french press -- all by themselves as a first load, so clearly I have no issue running a full wash programme and wasting resources. Ahhh, the luxury.

I also have to call the local water authority to find out the water hardness level in my area so I can dial some gizmo to the proper setting for our water. "This shouldn't take long," she said, gritting her teeth as the local wather authority's phone rang and rang and rang and rang.

I wonder if I'll be able to use the dishwasher this month?

I Thought I Would Have Nothing to Say

I started this blog two days ago, thinking "I'll never keep it up. I don't have anything to say on a monthly basis, let alone weekly or daily."

Open scene:

Bedroom, last night. Lights are out, two bodies asleep on the bed. As we close in on the woman, we realize she is not asleep. Her eyes are closed in a desperate attempt to fall asleep because she knows she'll be woken in a few hours by The Toddler and doesn't want to be even more sleep deprived than she has to be. Regardless, she's awake.

Cue voiceover:

"I'm addicted to commas. Jeez, rereading that last post made me realize it. Gah! I'm a comma abuser. Well, I guess I come by it honestly. Mom was an ellipsis abuser. I remember getting email from her that was 250 words and not a period, comma, colon, semicolon or exclamation point in sight. All ellipsis. Ellipses? Anyway. At least I'm not an exclamation point abuser. Hey, this is a post topic!"

Fade to Black.

I guess it's better than mentally gnawing at the other topics that have been keeping me awake. At least this one felt fresh and productive. There's only so many times you can think "SF? Boston? London? Austin?" before you want to lobotomize that section of brain.

Oh Give Me a Home

And San Francisco becomes a possibility again. No, really.

Such angst, trying to figure out where to live. There's Boston, where Mr LSG (my husband; name clouded to protect the innocent) family and our friends are. We lived there for 10 years, got married there, bought our first house there. There's San Francisco, where my brother and sister-in-law are and the biotech and computer industries are. Then there's Austin, where our best-man, his wife and 2 sons live. Oh yeah, and London, where we are now. "That's quite a list," you say. "They're all great cities," you add.

Well -- Boston is a no-brainer, easy to move to, easy to settle in, built-in friends and support network and family close by.
Austin is HOT. I hate heat. London is, for all it's greatness (diversity, foreign culture, hipness), isolated from the family and friends by the mere fact that it is a foreign country and is on the other side of the Atlantic. I am not sure why, but that is a big psychological barrier to our family and friends, forgetting the exchange rate for the moment. When we moved here, I immediately fell pregnant and so decided that getting a job I would have to quit in 6 months was a no-no, the unforseen consequence of which is that I have no non-mummy friends. We also did not forsee that it would take 2 years to build up a group of friends, and that since we found most of those friends in the Expat community (foreign nationals, most of them here on short tours of duty like us) that they would leave us sooner rather than later. Upshot? As a stay-at-home-mom, I'm lonely, isolated and discouraged.

Which leaves San Francisco. Ah, San Francisco. I've always wanted to live there, since graduating from university and thinking I might try for my Masters or Doctorate. Mr LSG has the same desire. We've visited quite a few times, drinking in the west coast attitude and the wonderful weather. So now that Mr LSG has an opportunity popping up in San Francisco with his company, and we've decided that we need to leave London, it seems perfect. But. Is it a good idea to move to San Francisco, where my brother and his wife live, or should we focus on Boston where our entire post-college life was?

This is hard.

Pillows

Who knew? Pillows belong in a pile in front of the couch. Not on it to provide back support, but on the floor in front of it. Better yet, one should carry said pillows between the couch in the first reception room and the couch in the second reception room, stopping only to suck one's thumb and watch Balamory.

Maybe I should have called this blog "Observations of a Toddler's Life" or "How Many Times Can You Sing Incy-Wincy Spider?"