A new venture

Long time no chat! So much for back in the game, eh?

Just after I said the baby was sleeping beautifully, everything went down the toilet on that front, and it's never recovered. She's now 11 months old, lovely in every way, except attached to me 24/7. I have no. Time. To. Myself.

It's crazy. Buuuut we're working on it. Always working on it. In the meantime I'm aiming to get two or three hours of writing time every Sunday while Sophie's dad looks after her.

And to ensure that I keep myself thinking about writing, I've agreed to go in with three very good friends and start a new, joint writing blog- All The World's Our Page. Please stop in and check it out, and even better, put a link up on your blog or at least add it to your favourites. We promise to live up to the hype, we really do :)

I'm the Monday girl over there, and I'm going to double post there and also here. In between posts there, I hope to continue my solo musings on writing at this site.

So, go check it out, and leave a comment- that will make you eligible for the weekly prize draw we'll be holding for the first five weeks. This week's prize is FIRE IN FICTION, by Don Maass. After that, we'll be taking turns to give away a favourite book.

I'm back in the game!

I keep hearing that by four months of age a lot of babies are sleeping through the night (at least five hours, anyway). Well, we're a long way from that, but at least Sophie is now in a solid bedtime routine which sees her settling down at about 7pm every night and staying sound asleep until at least midnight before she next wants food.

So, that means I finally have some me time, which means a consistent time I can use for writing.

In celebration I finally bit the bullet and bought my long-awaited MacBook. Now instead of having to borrow my husband's PC laptop to write I have my own space, my Scrivener and all the other things I've missed so much over the last five months of being Mac-less.

I've set myself a concrete goal: to write, plot or otherwise progress Between the Lines for one hour every single night, between 9:30 and 10:30pm. Sophie has not been awake at this time on any night of the last fortnight (having said that she'll probably change her routine tomorrow and make it her du jour time to fuss :))

I sat down tonight not sure of what I'd manage, and an hour and ten minutes later I'm very pleased to report that I've been able to reconnect a little with the story by re-reading previously written scenes and working through some plotting and some notes. I actually think the extended break has been good to give me some much-needed perspective. I'm looking forward to my hour tomorrow night- and let me tell you, that's the biggest progress of all considering I've been almost dreading the idea of forcing myself to get back to writing over the last few months (too few hours in the day! Too much to do! Argh!).

So, it's all good. Hopefully before long I'll be right back in the swing of things.

Fly Away

My Life in Itunes

RULES:

1. Put your iTunes, Windows Media Player, etc. on shuffle.

2. For each question, press the next button to get your answer.

3. YOU MUST WRITE THAT SONG NAME DOWN NO MATTER HOW SILLY IT SOUNDS.

4. Tag 5 friends

5. Everyone tagged has to do the same thing.

6. Have Fun!

IF SOMEONE SAYS 'ARE YOU OKAY' YOU SAY? [It Will]Pass in Time (Beth Orton)
Not such a good day then, evidently!

HOW WOULD YOU DESCRIBE YOURSELF? Don't Know Why (Norah Jones)
Clearly I'm unreliable and commitment-phobic

WHAT DO YOU LIKE IN A GUY/GIRL? Stacked Actors (Foo Fighters)
I didn't think I was that shallow, but apparently I am

HOW DO YOU FEEL TODAY? Through With You (Maroon 5)
Somewhat teed off and potentially violent, I guess

WHAT IS YOUR LIFE'S PURPOSE? Locked Out (Crowded House)
Cryptic indeed. I'll take it to mean my life's purpose is yet to be revealed

WHAT'S YOUR MOTTO? Sparks (Coldplay)
Er... I have no idea what that means

WHAT DO YOUR FRIENDS THINK OF YOU? Stan (Eminem)
Great, just great. My eclectic taste in music comes back to bite me in the ass. Apparently I'm a homicidal loner who *has* no friends- sure, a pregnant girlfriend, but it's about time I locked her in the trunk of my car and... Well, thanks, guys.

WHAT DO YOUR PARENTS THINK OF YOU? Why Don't You Love Me? (Rosemary Clooney)
Waaaah! Who doesn't love who? Do I not love them? Or do they not love me? Whyyyyy?

WHAT DO YOU THINK ABOUT VERY OFTEN? Charlie (Sophie Koh)
I don't actually know a Charlie, but alrighty. There *is* a Charlie in Between the Lines- maybe I'm supposed to be thinking about him.

WHAT DO YOU THINK OF YOUR BEST FRIEND? Drive Slow (Kanye West)
She's actually a pretty good driver. I suppose this one must be metaphorical in some way.

WHAT IS YOUR LIFE STORY? William, It Was Really Nothing (The Smiths)
Now I'm really feeling cursed. Check out the lyrics to this slightly obscure British song to discover why my life has apparently been worth nothing. Nothing at all.

WHAT DO YOU WANT TO BE WHEN YOU GROW UP? Teotihuacan (Noel Gallagher)
Yes. Yes, I want to be an enormous, ancient pre-Columbian city. Perhaps this is a reference to my archaeology background.

WHAT WILL THEY PLAY AT YOUR FUNERAL? Queer (Garbage)
I'm telling you, iPod Shuffle hates me today.

WHAT IS YOUR HOBBY/INTEREST? Tell Her Tonight (Franz Ferdinand)
I've never quite understood what this song was about and I still don't.

WHAT IS YOUR BIGGEST FEAR? Been a Son (Nirvana)
Clearly this goes back to the way my parents rejected me in that earlier question. Sob. Lyrics here.

WHAT IS YOUR BIGGEST SECRET? Illegal Smile (Serena Ryder)
Ha ha. I like that one.

WHAT DO YOU WANT RIGHT NOW? Miniature Disasters (KT Tunstall)
Awesome- just like Sim City, little tornadoes, little earthquakes- just leave out the little bushfires.

WHAT DO YOU THINK OF YOUR FRIENDS? Love and Marriage (Frank Sinatra)
So suddenly I'm a potential bigamist on top of it all. I'll just call myself a philanthropist in the literal sense, shall I?

WHAT WILL YOU POST THIS AS? Fly Away (Black Eyed Peas)
Which I would like to do now I know I'm a loner with no friends whose family hates her. This was a great game, sure it was. Grumble.

I tag: Deniz, Rachel, Kristen, Tara and Helen.

Birth Story

Here's the good news- we have a beautiful 6-week old baby daughter we named Sophie Rose. This is her looking cheeky, which is a favourite pastime and something she's rather good at.

On the bad news side, the birth did not go well, and the long-term outcomes are not clear at the moment. It's funny to read that last blog post with all the assumptions I was making- particularly that the baby hadn't arrived because she was happy in there. Turns out she was anything but happy. This is a cautionary tale about listening to your body and your baby during pregnancy, and about trusting your instincts when you feel like something might be wrong.

Basically, two days after I wrote that blog post I was still sitting around waiting for something to happen. The Braxton Hicks contractions were getting uncomfortably strong, but beyond that there was no progress. I spent the day emailing my mother, chatting to friends, and otherwise relaxing. Later in the evening I put together the new stroller- and it was right about then that I noticed the baby hadn't been moving for a while.

There were certain things she always moved for- if I drank a cup of tea, if I ate pasta, if I bent over to pick something up- and I'd done all that in the preceding couple of hours. No movement. I noticed it when I bent over to put something together on the stroller- normally when I did that she'd brace both feet against my stomach like she was about to fall out. Didn't happen. Initially I wasn't too worried, but then I tried a few other things to get her moving- drank a glass of cold water, ate a banana, lay on my right side- and when none of those worked either I started to get a little freaked out.

My husband and I debated whether it was just because she was squeezed in there (they're supposed to slow down as you get towards labour) or something more serious. In the end we decided to call the hospital and ask- and they told us to come straight in. All the way there we were still joking about making this a practice run for the real labour. We were so preoccupied we didn't even notice that the weather was more than a little stormy.

As soon as we got there they put a monitor on my stomach, and to our huge relief the heartbeat was there and solid at 140 beats per minute. But there was definitely no movement, and as we watched the heartbeat was dropping to 80 beats per minute. Within 15 minutes they had the doctor there, and she took one look at the trace and decided we needed to do a caesarian right then. Within an hour I was in the operating theatre. It all went so fast we didn't have a chance to panic. I was totally calm- a little relieved, even, since the wait was finally over. The whole thing seemed unreal.

They tried to do an epidural but couldn't get it to work, so the worst case scenarios continued- first a caesarian, then a general anaesthetic.

When I woke up a couple of hours later I was in a quiet room with my husband sitting by the bed- and no baby. Turns out she wasn't doing too well. Her umbilical cord had been wrapped six times around her legs and by the time she was born her heart had stopped beating. It started again spontaneously, but by then she'd inhaled a bucketload of meconium and had to be intubated and breathed for. She had to be flown up to the city on the Royal Flying Doctors Service- but it also turns out that the storm had been one of those once-in-a-century affairs, and in fact the plane couldn't get down because the weather was so bad. So, 12 hours after she was born they finally came to get her, and they wheeled my bed out into the hallway as they wheeled her incubator past so I could see her for the first time.

My husband drove up to the city straight away (a five hour drive on one hour's sleep) while I was left behind on my own in the hospital. Thank goodness for my wonderful friends who rallied into shifts to make sure I wasn't left alone, because I would have been a complete wreck if it wasn't for them (them, and the morphine-on-tap). The next day in world record time I was out of bed and on a plane myself to follow Sophie to the city. I had to stay in a different hospital for three days, but after that my husband and I were able to move into parents' accommodation at the neonatal intensive care unit.

For the first few days she was on a ventilator, sedated, and had tubes in every available vein to feed her and keep her blood pressure and numerous other functions working. It was horrible to see. The first time I got to hold her, they transferred the whole bundle of Sophie and her wires onto a pillow on my lap- as someone said, it was like cuddling a VCR instead of a baby. The oxygen deprivation had caused a condition called hypoxic ischaemic encephalopathy (HIE), in which there is bleeding and swelling on the brain. Her level of injury is classed as the highest- grade 3- because she also suffered seizures. The MRI scan looked pretty bad.

But against all odds (apparently some 75% of babies with her level of injury die) she began to get better within a few days, and she was soon sucking, swallowing, moving, listening and watching, doing everything a normal baby should. In the long term she could have cerebral palsy or almost any kind of disability, but for now she's showing signs of an absolutely remarkable recovery. The hardest part is not knowing what comes next- we now face years of developmental testing, knowing that bad news could be around any corner. For now, though, we'll just count our blessings. According to the midwives, if we'd left it even a couple of hours longer she'd be dead.

So here's what I want to tell people who might find this by Googling various terms:

1. Be aware of your baby's movements and learn what feels normal. When something doesn't feel normal, don't be afraid to check it out. My doctor told me not to bother keeping a fetal kick count, but now I wish I had- that would have told me faster that something was wrong.

2. Baby hiccups- we've now read that increased hiccups from 36 weeks (4 or more bouts a day lasting ten minutes or more) can be an indicator of fetal distress. I asked doctors and midwives repeatedly if her hiccup bouts were okay, and they all said yes. She was hiccuping five times a day for 20 minutes each time. Insist on more investigation. It's written in What to Expect When You're Expecting under fetal distress if you need to back yourself up.

3. Hypoxic Ischemic Encephalopathy- I still don't know the long term outcome for Sophie, but I'll tell you this- according to the literature a baby with grade 3 HIE should be on a feeding tube for months because they can't suck (amongst trhe numerous other things they can't do). Well, she can suck- she can do everything. So don't lose hope. We had 19 days in intensive care and another 7 in hospital, and now we're home and everything is looking good.

4. Even in a totally healthy pregnancy, even when you're overdue, things can still go wrong. So don't drop your guard.

Overdue

I don't think overdue ever has a good connotation. If your library books are overdue, you get a fine. If governmental change is overdue, it means things went past the point of being okay a while back, and have, as a result, not been okay (see: recent US election).

So, here I am- officially overdue. 40 weeks and one day pregnant. I have to say, although I've taken a very open-minded approach to this whole pregnancy, not locking myself into any set ideas about anything, this has thrown me completely.

DH and I were both early babies- I arrived at 36 weeks, 2 days, and he arrived at 37 weeks. Of seven kids born to our collective families, only one has arrived after their due date. You could safely say there's a pattern there. Right from the start, we saw the due date as a sort of upper limit of possibility- the date by which we knew with absolute certainty that we'd have the baby.

But no. Clearly, as many have pointed out to me, this is the wee girl making her first stand at stubbornness. She's obviously pretty happy in there, and not too fussed that I can't sleep at night and have to spend all day trying to find comfortable positions to sit. She hasn't dropped at all, and beyond the ubiquitous Braxton Hicks contractions, there's no sign she'll be arriving anytime soon. I'm going to the doctor this afternoon, and she'll book me into the hospital to be induced next week (this must be the ultimate hurry-up for the kid- she then has a race to get here *before* I reach that day).

It's driving me bananas. I know I'm only one day over, but like I say, we were so sure she'd be here early that I feel about two weeks overdue already. And I've heard it all- be patient, she'll come in her own time, etc etc; I've done all the old wives' tales, too. It's not going to take away the frustration. I think that's partly because I have no real idea how much my life is going to change once she arrives- at the moment I'm just waiting, happily floating along in life-as-I-know-it. I bet that once she's here I'll wish this time had stretched out longer (and plenty of people have told me that, too, but how do you think they all figured that out? That's right, by doing it themselves) but for now- crazy.

Anyway. In the meantime, I'm finding it so hard to concentrate on writing that I'm not achieving anything. Though I did manage to write one little scene of the gothic WIP as part of my punishment (cough) on Mission: Accountability for overestimating how much writing I'd get done a couple of weeks back. And it really did feel great to write something again- to put the words on the page without worrying about them, then to go back through and make a tweak here or there until it read the way I wanted it to... Yes, the spark is definitely still there. I'm going to try to see this delay as an opportunity to get myself a little on track- every day I'm overdue is another day I can try to get back in the writing groove before the world changes. That's one way to turn it into a positive, right?

My copies of The Eye in the Door and The Ghost Road arrived yesterday- books two and three in Pat Barker's WWI Regeneration trilogy. I read the first, Regeneration, a few weeks back and was absolutely blown away by her magnificent writing and sparsely drawn but incredibly effective characters. Along with the numerous other blog posts I'm thinking of writing (hmm!), I'm going to do a couple soon on the various fiction and non-fiction books I've used for information and to get into the groove of my novel's time and place over the last few years.

I figure the more things I plan to do, the more likely it is I'll go into labour when I least expect it (g). Oh, and I've also found a few different blog sites where people have complained about being overdue, and have promptly gone into labour a day or two after posting. If it works, I can chalk it up as a new one for the list of old wives' tales! Wish me luck.

Updates

I've almost finished my first week of maternity leave. It was exceptionally hard to get used to on the first day- so, seeking things to do, I naturally decided it would be a good idea to go into work and finish up the last bits of filing. After about three hours and couple of cups of tea, I realised I had to ban myself from doing that again, or else I'll just be loitering around work non-stop.

After that it only took me a couple of hours to watch every interesting cooking or baby show on Foxtel, and then I began to sink into a cold panic at the thought of six weeks of this... Oh dear...

I'm happy to say that five days later I've adjusted to the heavy stresses of doing nothing much at all, and I'm feeling quite relaxed. The current tally of activities undertaken to amuse myself:

Books read: Five.

In five days. An unsustainable rate, I'm sure you'll agree. All I can say is damn you, Jen, for hooking me on two different series (Janet Evanovich's Stephanie Plum novels, and *much* more insidiously compulsive, Stephenie Meyer's Twilight and sequels). I think I'm going to have to moderate my reading rate a tad.

Baked goods produced: Two.

This is less than expected. However the consumption rate is right on target- it only took us three or four days to eat the entire lemon yoghurt cake (yum!), and I predict that today's apple date muffins will be gone by tomorrow, since we have a five-hour car trip to undertake.

Chocolate consumed (to the nearest kilogram): Er... I can't tell you that.

Let's just say there isn't any chocolate left in the house. Not even emergency chocolate. And the hot chocolate is almost all gone too. Even (sob) the cooking chocolate. I made the unfortunate discovery of a technique for making the easiest chocolate fudge sauce ever- a handful of dark cooking chocolate buttons, a tablespoon of butter, and a slurp of evaporated milk (in place of cream), all in the microwave for twenty or so seconds, and that's it. A whole tub of Connossieur vanilla ice-cream lasted about three days once the fudge was discovered. But hey, I was having it with sliced strawberries. That has to count for something. And I'm sitting right on 11kg gained in 35 weeks of pregnancy, so I'm doing perfectly at that. Clearly the ice-cream and fudge is necessary.

Rooms tidied: Hmm... Well, I've tidied bits of the worst-offending rooms. And moved things around quite a lot.

Hospital bags packed: All three (labour, hospital and baby)!

This seems horrendously organised, but we're a little spooked by the fact that we'll be driving off five hours away from home (and hospital) tomorrow, and it's only 11 days before the point at which I was born in my mother's pregnancy. So, we feel it's sensible to take all the hospital bags and the car seat- in fact, being *that* organised about it probably guarantees that nothing will happen. Fingers crossed.

I'm feeling much better this week, mental-health-wise- thanks for all your support out there, by the way :) I haven't started taking any medication- it's a long story, but illustrates why I do need to start taking it- I've actually lost the prescription somewhere in my house. Yes, it's that much of a disaster zone...

What I *haven't* done yet is start looking at writing, in any capacity. I wanted a whole week to relax, zone out and do nothing much at all before diving in there, so next week I anticipate getting right back into it. I'll even set myself some kind of schedule- one that will include the promised blog posts on the character/ dialogue course I took.

So, that's about all I've got at the moment. Right now the baby is having her first hiccup session for the day- she's been up to four or five sessions lately. It was kind of cute at first, seeing my belly do the little jumps, but it's just not that cute anymore. She has her head jammed right down there and every hiccup is a nice little headbutt (repeated once every two seconds for fifteen minutes- arrgh!). There's also some serious foot action happening across the top of my stomach lately- I guess it's getting squishy as heck in there, but boy, you can physically see how much she's grown in the last month or two.

I'll admit I'm starting to have moments of blind panic about the whole process of giving birth, but they're only moments, and for 99% of the time I absolutely believe in my ability to do this. I kind of see it as a team effort between me and the wee girl- we each have our part to play, and our bodies are both designed to do this. It's just incredible to think that in five weeks or less she'll actually be here.

Tomorrow we're taking Daisy the mad beagle-maltese dog to the big city to get her head sorted by the Bark Busters behavioural people. Or as I understand it, they train us in how to be less crappy pack leaders, and she is magically cured. I guess we'll see how it goes...