Lao music, launch parties, and other elegant celebrations
What a whirlwind! Love At The Speed Of Email had a great launch day yesterday. Scores of people visited the launch announcement and a bunch of you clicked on over to buy a copy (thank you!!). I spent some thrilled moments watching you all help me share the news on facebook and twitter (again, thank you!!) and feeling overwhelmed by that happy sort of embarrassment that comes when you’re a bit the center of attention and you realize how many people care about you. And then there was the rest of the day. Because, you see, launching a book from Laos over the internet is a very abstract sort of...
Read MoreShowers, champagne, and flame trees: Celebrating and commemorating birth
It is 7:45 on Monday morning. I have been up for two hours already. Dominic’s “secondhand milk” score this morning is my hair, two of my tee shirts, two of his outfits, his play mat, and our bedspread. When he’s not fussing at the moment, he is lying around looking like a tiny, grumpy, Dr. Evil (Austin Powers, for those of you not familiar with that reference). Given what I wrote last week about how actions determine attitude, this seems like the perfect morning for me to write about celebrating Dominic’s birth. So, celebrations. The first thing I did to celebrate Dominic’s...
Read MoreLove the feeling, love the action
This post is part of a series on the fruits of the spirit. The current theme is love. Three weeks after Dominic was born and two days before Mike left for Laos again, Mike and I went out to dinner at the Bangalow pub. I can tell I am not one of these women who is going to struggle to tear myself away from her baby to go on date nights – I finished the feed, tossed him into my Mum’s arms, wriggled into jeans for the first time in nine months, set my watch for two and a half hours and trotted happily out the door. Over a delicious dinner Mike and I talked about what the month apart would...
Read MoreSupply equals demand: Our first argument as parents
I am typing this one handed while Dominic sleeps on my left shoulder. About every twenty seconds he pops his head up and makes angry-koala-bear noises. I suspect that this is because he has so far stubbornly refused to burp after spending most of the last hour guzzling milk. I don’t understand. He burps quite nicely for Mike (who has been primary burper and diaper-changer during the daytime for the last ten days). Then Mike goes into town for an hour and a quarter (and counting) and what do I get? No burps, but a big baby vomit into my hair (the hair that I washed just this morning) and two...
Read MoreLessons learned during labour and delivery
I don’t really know where to start when writing about labour and delivery. For starters, it was such an intense experience that even now, almost two weeks later, I’m struggling to find the right words (any words) to tell the story well. And secondly, while I was pregnant I was incredibly curious about other women’s experiences of the whole process. Yet I’m not sure that hearing all those stories actually served me well. Almost no one I talked to spoke positively about labour and delivery, and it seemed that for every woman who had experienced a relatively trouble-free birth there were...
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