six impossible things

getting dressed

jac — Tue, 14 Feb 2012 13:33:59 +0000

Oh man. Now that I’ve learned how to do this, nothing will be safe. Animate ALL THE THINGS!

Status Update: Hair: 100% remaining Tights: Stripy with flowers High Kicking . . . → Read More: getting dressed

cute overload

jac — Wed, 18 Jan 2012 01:16:16 +0000

Hi again! I am still here. In fact I am almost always here; here, being the couch. Here, being the internet – not quite so much. I am having to learn to do a lot of things via the iPhone. Yesterday I downloaded a feed reader thing and I can read blogs! At 3.45am! That’s what I want to be doing at that time of the night, for sure! Well, that and playing Words with Friends. Turns out everyone knows the tricksy Q and X words but me. Still! I am nourishing a human and increasing my vocabulary, all at the same time!

I am sorry but I have nothing but photos. And none even of the Frog; he has sadly taken a back seat in the photo department. Actually this is mainly because he has developed the same allergy type thing he had last summer, and is currently in the process of scratching himself bald, so he is rather less photogenic. Admittedly I took photos of him with a giant wound on his head, so maybe photogenicity is not my aim here (is that a word? spellcheck says that isn’t a word. It seems like a word to me) but never mind.

I stick my tongue out at you.

HAAAA I totally stuck my tongue out at you! Did you see?

Three! Ah ah ah! Three different spotty items! I love! To count! And buy dotted things!

every day i’m swaddling

jac — Wed, 04 Jan 2012 04:49:15 +0000

Hi! I am still here. Mostly I am here one-handedly, as my lap area and one hand is often out of commission these days. Last night I messaged with my mum using the On Screen Keyboard, as I couldn’t reach the actual keyboard and only had use of the mouse. Did you know there was such a thing as an On Screen Keyboard? Neither did I, until necessity forced it upon me.

Anyway, how are you? We are fine. Thanks for all your lovely messages about AJ; she is great (especially at the moment, as she is sleeping and also wearing very cute clothes) and we will be keeping her. She arrived one day early which shocked the life out of me as I myself have never been early for anything. I often MEAN to be early, but it very rarely happens. Anyway, all went well, considering my birthplan was the very vague, “I want the baby to be healthy and I don’t want to die myself”; as far as I was concerned, all else could be negotiated. In the end I was extremely lucky (and have to thank my mother for very good genetics) as I had a 5-hour natural labour with no issues. I will politely avert my eyes as you gnash your teeth with disbelief; alternately I am more than happy to listen to your horror stories of 40-hour labours and emergency C-sections and hideous after-effects, all of which happened to friends of mine and all of which I was fully expecting to happen to me. So I am certainly not complaining, and nor am I claiming some sort of uber-birth powers as quite frankly the whole thing was totally out of my conscious control. And so here we are, with a three-week old currently napping on my chest. And already I feel guilty as I should Move The Child Off Me and have her sleep on her own; but eh. She’s three weeks old and I like having her here. Also did I mention the cute outfit?

As for her name, AJ is her first and middle initials. I am more than happy to let you know her name if you want to know it; I just won’t write it here for privacy reasons. Who knows what sort of sentient powers the internet (or, probably, The Internet) will have by the time she is computer literate (ie. probably in about 4 years). In fact The Internet could be reading this… er, reading itself… RIGHT NOW. (…and I, for one, welcome our new insect overlords.) Regardless of her actual name, she mostly gets called The Squirrel around here anyway at the moment. Why? I don’t know. She just is. Same reason the dog is the Frog, I guess. And he has been fine with her, of course; he does try to lick her, and drink her bath water, but apart from that he mostly ignores her. I’m sure this will continue right up until the point where she starts eating proper food and learns to drop it for him, at which point he will follow her around as a devoted servant.

Some photos below, mostly of the non-humiliating kind. I am saving the humiliating kind for when she screams for three hours straight (again) and I crave revenge.

In her carseat/capsule thing after coming home from the hospital. It was crazy cold that day; and yet now a few weeks later we have just had a mini-heatwave. Melbourne: unpredictable weather doesn’t even BEGIN to cover it.

ALL THE HAIR. She has the hair of five babies. Seriously, it is still growing and it is now almost in her eyes. It doesn’t seem to be falling out yet, either. It makes it very hard to pick who she looks like, too; our current consensus is that she doesn’t look like either of us. Elfin changeling baby!

Strike a pose, there’s nothing to it.

i made you something

jac — Thu, 15 Dec 2011 05:32:43 +0000

This is AJ.

She has a lot of hair.

Do you think this should perhaps be filed under ‘crafty’?

every day i’m shuffling

jac — Mon, 05 Dec 2011 07:37:37 +0000

Baby Update: No baby! Well, you knew that. I will tell you when there is one. Well, there IS one, it’s just freeloading off me and my delicious iron. Stop eating all the iron, baby. And the calcium. It’s not manners.

Apart from that, things are fine. I was about to roll into a rant but really, it’s been going pretty good. I no longer run anywhere, or pick up things other than with my toes, and I can only wear about three items of clothing (how can I pack a hospital bag when I am currently using/wearing the things that should be packed?) but Melbourne’s weather has not been overly hot, my feet and ankles have not swollen to prodigious proportions, I can still sleep and I take it on faith that I still have a lower body, even though I can’t really see it. Maternity leave is an odd thing and I have baked many a slice and cleaned out cupboards and sewed stuff and put up the Christmas tree and all manner of things that I had not gotten around to before. I am trying to stop Pulling Stuff Out To Organise, and instead concentrate on Putting Stuff Back So The House Looks Presentable; harder than you might think, considering the tiny house and the sheer amount of stuff I have pulled out. I have a LOT of stuff. A LOT. And that was before the Baby Paraphernalia began marching into the house; a march which I’m sure will only continue at ever greater rates once there is, you know, an actual Baby to be using the Paraphernalia.

Anyway, just thought I’d check in. Hi!

nesting

jac — Wed, 16 Nov 2011 10:59:32 +0000

Thanks for all your lovely comments! I have been meaning to sort the website out and post this for ages, but the closer it got the more tempted I was just to wait a bit longer and then chuck up a dog photo with a random baby in the corner and see if anyone noticed.

I forgot to say that we don’t know the flavour, so that will be a surprise. One of many, I’m sure. Nobody will commit to their predictions on the sex (my mum: “I think it’s a girl from the back but a boy from the front,” well IT CAN BE ONLY ONE, also PICK A SIDE) and I myself have no idea. I thought it was a girl for a long time and now I think it’s a boy. Mostly because Mr. T vetoed my top choice girl name and therefore by Sod’s Law the time I am currently spending on picking another one is bound to be wasted. Other than STOMPING ON MY DREAMS, Mr T has been busy continuing to renovate the house. I have finally given him the ultimate definite deadline date, and one of my major requirements was, “Don’t leave me trapped inside this house all summer with a baby.” Therefore building the deck jumped up the list and is currently underway.

AWWW YEAH CHECK OUT MY NEW DECK. ALSO MY FLAT HEAD.

Yes the little frog still looks a bit like the victim of an inept brain surgeon, but the hair on his head is growing back. Slowly. I have no explanation for that giant paw sticking out the front of him; he grew that himself. Also you can see the bobcat in the background, which (due to the deck) can no longer get into the back yard and is about to be banished to the front. The frog is terrible with the bobcat, in that he has no sense of personal safety and just walks in front of it and lies down while it’s working. (I’m hoping bobcat translates into other locales… like a little mini digger?) Anyway, as for the deck, that bit under the frog is only the start of it… below is the same subject matter (frog on the deck) but with me standing further back.

THAT’S MORE LIKE IT

So yes, the deck will be large. The roof/pergola thing over the top will also be replaced at some point, but my main concern now is to have the deck itself done. By the end of the week! It’s only taken, like, TWO YEARS! In renovation terms, a mere blip. And I only had to GENERATE LIFE to get it to happen.

this is the news

jac — Tue, 15 Nov 2011 08:11:43 +0000

God, why I choose to do these things sometimes I have no idea. I have changed hosting and of course nothing moves over as it should, and I just could not be bothered sitting down and fixing it properly. I think I have fixed it properly now… although I wouldn’t put money on it. Well, not my OWN money.

Anyway, now that I’m relatively sure I have this thing back on the rails, hello! Here I am! And as I mentioned earlier at some point, it has been rather low on photos round here because I dropped my camera into wet sand and DID NOT LIKE. So I got another camera and frankly, it was a bad choice. I ended up returning it and getting a better version of what I had originally. I just could not seem to figure out the settings on the first one. Like below, here I am trying to take a self portrait:

I GOT SKILLZ, THEY’RE MULTIPLYING

Right, so clearly I am not the best at exposure here. But dammit, my other camera didn’t have this problem! The error surely cannot be mine! And then I tried to take another photo, only to have the cat knock over the camera as it was taking the photo. THIS WAS NOT MY FAULT. Also, YOU CAN PROBABLY SEE WHY I AM TAKING SELF PORTRAITS. I don’t know why CAPS LOCK but it JUST SEEMED APPROPRIATE.

I ATE THOSE PIES. YES, ALL OF THEM.

So there you go… some actual news around here. Hence I have been incredibly tired all winter, and I am totally using that as an excuse as to my blogging absence. Although really I can’t complain – no morning sickness, all currently proceeding as it should. In these photos, which were taken on the weekend (along with some better ones, though frankly not MUCH better) I am 36 weeks pregnant, which means 4 weeks to go, which means this thing is primed to go off on 11 December.

Hey, when I give you news, I TOTALLY bring out the big guns.

hostering

jac — Tue, 08 Nov 2011 11:46:10 +0000

Sorry guys I am changing hosts and things are all buggered up to hell in here. Try to ignore me until I get this sorted. I mean, not that that’s HARD. Hey, at least you can see this. (It’s a . . . → Read More: hostering

cakeless

jac — Sat, 05 Nov 2011 13:02:28 +0000

OK, so I did not get around to making the cake. What, nobody is going to even pretend to be surprised? Mr T expressed a desire to make an orange poppyseed cake, and that also did not eventuate. Woe. No cake. Regardless, it was a beautiful warm day, the sort that Melbourne just throws at you all casual-like to keep you hanging on through the blustery scattered showers of spring. We went down to pick up some dinner earlier and the beach/pier/foreshore/reserve area of our little suburb was heaving. I personally counted three lobster red arms + white singlet outline casualties in the first ten metres alone. Mostly, I was glad it wasn’t me.

Still too cold for swimming. Then again, I am a wimp.

finicky

jac — Fri, 04 Nov 2011 12:44:15 +0000

I went to Ikea today. I got none of the things I particularly went to get (linen curtains, a particular type of storage box) and instead ended up with Christmas decorations and a silicone cake tin. Although it’s silicon, so it’s not really a tin, is it? Cake pan. Cake holder. Whatever, you know what I mean. I’ve just looked it up on their website (it’s the SOCKERKAKA which clearly needs to be in caps, and also said aloud with JAZZ HANDS) and apparently it’s a cake mould. And because there are two of them I’m supposed to make TWO cakes and put one on top of the other. I did not realise this. This sounds good. I will do that tomorrow. It is supposed to be 30 degrees tomorrow, to which I say: OUR TURN FOR SUMMER, NORTHERN HEMISPHERE. It has been cold and dark and dark and cold here and I have been doing a LOT of sleeping. Not your ideal cake baking weather, true, but if I do it I will have a lovely sunny day and also cake. This is win-win.

I went to find another photo to add to this post and could only find the one below, which is the first photo I took with this new camera. Oh, I dropped my old camera in wet sand at the dog beach. Don’t do that, by the way; your camera won’t like it. I did try to get all the sand out with a little paintbrush but it ground its little gears at me and still refuses to turn on. I live in hope. Anyway, I got a new one (thank god little cameras are cheap these days), charged the battery, sat on the floor, turned around and took a photo of the nearest thing to me, which was my ginger cat in the dog’s bed. Apparently the flash was on. He wasn’t impressed.

I AM NOT IMPRESSED

ALSO THIS DOG BED IS COVERED IN DOG HAIR, THIS IS GOING ON MY ONLINE REVIEW