Easily Distracted by Shiny Things

Progress notes for August 8, 2014 (and some bits in the days between this and the last report, but not as many as should be)

Total words new or revised : +616. I have ONE more scene to add before I start delving into the places others can get taken out.
Reason for stopping: Need sleeeep. Chapter end. Also still debating structure and exact placement of scenes.
Tea: Reduced-Sugar chocolate milk.
Music: The usual playlist, just went through "Let it Go" and Stan Rogers' Turnaround. Hit the slow version of Thunder Road at almost dead on the right spot, though. That was sweet.
There's Always one more Quirk in the character: Heather did want magic before she got into this mess.
Mean Things: Serious puncture bite to the jaw.
Research: The date by which a certain cliche had become cliched, the geographical source for another turn of phrase. The timeline regarding basic knowledge of DNA.
Books I'm Reading: Elizabeth Bear - Shoggoths in Bloom, Terry Pratchett and Jacqueline Simpson - The Folklore of Discworld, Drew Hayden Taylor - Motorcycles and Sweetgrass, Terry Pratchett - Wintersmith


Inevitable Asides:

The last couple of days of Joseph have been ... extra super interesting. I think they warrant their own post, though. Because it was alternating things to laugh at and things to make me despair.

Just one example to reward those who read to the end: Joseph has been "Helping" with unloading the dishwasher for a few months now - he did it before his grandparents came, but with them, it became a big Thing for him. (More people = more dishes = more dishwasher loads). he's very meticulous, sorting by colour and size as he goes. But he's not always clear on the difference between clean and dirty (IE, he has regularly caused trouble by tryign to unload dirty dishes *while* his grandfather was loading the dishwasher).

So yesterday while I was upstairs doing a quick scrub-and-dress, he pushed a chair up to the counter below the dish cupboard, took out all the clean purple plates (both sizes) and very neatly lined them up in two rows in the dishwasher.

I'm not pregnant, again.

No miscarriage, unless it's the kind you can't tell from a regular period. Just not pregnant. But I'm more depressed about it than usual.

And yet, it, and some coincidental reading, and some stuff about Joseph, all have me thinking again about the hard world of child raising, and trying to have kids, and choosing not to try to have kids. Then I ran into these (Because I've been reading her Narnia Deconstructions, but a few months behind, and slipped into the Storify one, and linked back to the older one from there...)

And in some ways, even though our situations as regards EVERYTHING (fertility, cause of failed pregnancies, efforts to get pregnant, even feelings about wanting children ahead of time) are different - I felt like I had seen a strong mirror of my own feelings. (Also, some serious WTF??? about the Grown Babies in Heaven from every lost zygote. Like, nuclear explosion degrees of WTF???)

The miscarriages were alive enough to me to have possible names, if only after the fact (Names I would never have applied to an extant child and names that are no-one's business but mine and Colin's), but they were mourned as she says; as potential, not actual children. It was losing a whole attachment of dreams (Dreams that didn't cover half the reality I already face, but she talks about that, too) -- but it was not half of what losing Joseph on the day of his birth, when he was a real and whole and solid BABY, would have been. And it is NOTHING, and I repeat that with huge emphasis, to what losing him now would do.

Potential, not Person

Storify: Infertility and Abortion

I wonder what it is about having faced the consequences of our own reproductive efforts (None of which actually WERE abortion in either my case or Mardoll's) that makes it so very clear why reproductive choice, including abortion, is so very important? Maybe it's because it's us, not some abstract woman, and our zygotes and fetuses and babies, not some abstract "Fetuses are babies" platonic ideal. (I held and touched one of those fetuses, an inch or so long at the time, and I knew exactly hat I was holding, and it was devastating -- but it was not a baby.)

Just posted on FB, but relevant here.

In spite of his newfound ability to get out of the crib, Joseph has actually stayed in it every night at bedtime (It's middle of the night wake-ups that have differed.)

Until tonight.

When he will not stay.

He went to bed at 8:00.

He was last seen at the baby gate on the door at 10:45.

I am (at midnight) about to check on him so I can put him in his crib instead of the high non-toddler-railed bed where he was lying the one time around 10:00 that he looked like he was trying to sleep. (I put him in the crib. he lay there until the music ran out on the bassinet. then got out to turn it back on.)

Long night already...

Exhibit A

In the last couple of days, when I have had my back turned, I have variously returned to find Joseph:

- Playing quietly
- Flipping through books.
- Spinning whatever item he can find will spin (Pot lids, toplike toys, flat discs, etc.)
- Has dunked a book in the toilet (we usually keep the bathroom doors shut. Book is destroyed, not due to anything extra in the toilet, but just from general water exposure.)
- Is standing on a stepladder, watching the fascinating waterfall effect of tipping the Brita jug onto the counter (And the water's subsequent pour to the floor)
- Is standing on the kitchen windowsill looking out.(Sill is roughly 6 inches wide) (Moved the stool he used.)
- is sitting calmly on the kitchen windowsill kicking his feet. (Got there from the back of the high chair. Which I know because I caught him straddling the distance another time.)
- is sitting in his high chair. (This involved the stool again, not going over the back of the high chair. I hope. NB. these events were hours or days apart.)
- Has cleaned my desk by dropping almost every object from my trackball on smaller to the floor of my study.
- Has emptied a fabric bin (he used to completely not notice) as far as his arms could possibly reach.
- Is dropping any number of experimental objects down the stairs.
- Is lying perfectly safe on the couch but giggling crazily like he's done something awesome.
- Has once again taken apart all the play mats in the living room and scattered them.
- Is dropping either his toys or the dry cat food in the cats' water dish. (This has been one of his standard things for a while.)
- Is carrying his 3' inflatable pool into the kitchen like he hopes I'll set it up indoors for once.

In other words, he's a normal healthy toddler.

____________________

Exhibit B

So we still buy JoJo a number of toddler packaged foods or other easy foods for those times we're eating something he can't/won't or just don't have time. (though some days finding the acceptable from the suck is hard...there's one readily available brand where a lot of their stuff is either lacking in nutrition or full of stupid levels of salt.)

So I found a rather nice series to try. One of them being pumpkin and squash with quinoa. Opened it. Offered JoJo a spoonful. He ate it but made a face. I tried a bite. Said, "I see the problem." Went to the cupboard. Added small doses of cinnamon, ginger and nutmeg. Stirred. Gave him another spoonful.

He ate every bit of it.

Good god, people. You do not have to avoid reasonable seasoning in Baby food, and especially toddler-level food. Kinda the opposite...

He had some issues with actually spicy thai food, but I mean "feel the heat on your tongue for a while after you ate it" food. (And even that, he had several bites before he was all about "Give me the cup of milk to kill this!")

_______________
Exhibit C

At the age of 21 months:
My boy climbs EVERYTHING.

He's been doing this for a few weeks.

It looks like the embed doesn't work, so here's a link.

The stairs he's been doing a while, but the posts are new.

It looks like the embed doesn't work, so here's a link.
_________________

Only Semi related

The picture is fuzzy but here's the progress on the mural. I need to redo the horses size-wise (That's what I get for, like, measuring them the first time.)
( Cut )

Last Wednesday, serendipitously, the healthy baby topic was "introducing your baby to solid foods." (it had been requested by several of the other moms, even though it was covered relatively recently, as in about three months ago). Serendipitous because I'd been sort of hoping to ask about just that. In any case, it did help decide me to do just that, though the first stage is hardly solid. Nonetheless, as of last Wednesday, Joseph's been eating a bit of rice cereal once or twice a day. So far, he seems to rather like it, and he certainly gets the idea of a spoon, even if he needs to work on some refinements. (Ie, he still ends up with food all over). I let him try to handle the spoon a bit; really glad it's a soft tipped, as I wouldn't be willing to do that with a metal.

Plus, as a bonus, I'm offering him sips of water from a cup. It will be a while before he gets to hold *that*, I can say. I have no sippy cups for him yet; they're not strictly a necessary thing, as I understand it, though convenient as anything, it seems to me.

He made the most interesting faces when I tried him with egg yolk, though. I was thinking for a second try I should mix it with milk, not water. but first I'd need some means to Get milk that doesn't involve hand expressing, because that hurts. I'm not practiced at it, and I have no desire to be if I can avoid it.

Anyhow. Yay for strange food exploration.
______________

Sigh.... a friend of mine started calling Joseph "JoJo", and while we were in Spain, I realised it stuck in my head, too. Iulianna, I have a bone to pick with you.

Better than Joey, I guess.
______________

I started going through the pictures from Spain. May post some soonish, along with a bit of babble about what we did. As much for my own record as for anyone else's curiosity.
______________

Sigh. I should make a new icon for myself. I haven't been to archery in a while. Ineed to get to dance practice, if only to prove I have no intention of dropping the SCA.
_______________

Apparently, I'm considering revising The Serpent Prince again. Actually, I started.

Here's what happened. In that writing meme I still haven't finished, one of the unfinished questions questions is "the ten worst things about your novel." It's unfinished because I didn't get to ten. But two of the things I did get down are the general fight with doing things in a patriarchal setting, and the difficulties that causes, and an issue specific to Serpent, which is that in the course of the novel, a woman gets Refrigerated*.

I could have lived with one or the other, but the combination was nagging at me. Because of the nature of the patriarchy they're in, I already felt I was stretching the bounds with the number of active female characters I had. And there wasn't a lot of room to make more of them active; Ketan is focused on the events that lead to the big ending. As to the Refrigeration, her death starts the whole climax and collapse, and has effects that carry over into at least the second book. She had to die. It's unfortunately very in character for the one who did it to slaughter innocents, knowing it hurts the people he's punishing worse than killing them would. But I still found it rankled. I don't tend to like Refrigeration in other peoples' stories. There are a few cases where it worked; in all of them, the woman had agency and personality before it happened, and was About more than her death. This female character has some personality, but the constraints of novel length and the main plot don't give her as much on-the-page time as would be needed to really make her shine.

So I started worrying again at ways to make this better. Give her more screen time. Leave her as is but get even more female characters up and active. Again and again I bounced off the fact that there just seemed no more room for a change. Count on the rest of the books in the series, or the rest of the books I write, to make up for it? Didn't seem like enough.

And of course, I'd already turned yet one more character female in the second book. I really couldn't do that again...

Two days after we got back from Spain, and suddenly, I found myself thinking there WAS one character I could feasibly turn female. A major player in the story. Someone whose gender would alter the whole dynamic of the story and happily spit in the face of the whole damned patriarchal setting. Mostly because it would highlight a whole lot of hypocrisy. Theo.

Instantly, I started going through his scenes and revisioning them with a "her", and trying to see if they would fit. Some of the scenes and plot points made even More sense than they had; she or her antagonists had stronger motivations. Some didn't -- until I started debating definitions of legal versus actual gender and how that might work in this particular culture. (In this case, it's More transgressive for her to be a cis female than it would be if she were transgender -- because if she wanted to be male, the Gods would just grant her wish, and the whole gender flip would pretty much end on the first page. And if she was born male, it also wouldn't work as well, for reasons that would involve getting too far into plot and culture for an already overlong ramble.)

And the name was easy. At VP, I had a lot of people who didn't much like Theokoi anyhow; one person said they stalled on the "koi" because they saw Fish, and therefore associated it with Japanese, when most of the stuff around it was obviously Europeanish (French for the Serathi and Cerissan, Scandinavian for the Germainesh). But as soon as I wondered what feminine thing I could use instead, I immediately remembered Jo Walton's Tiffany Problem, and she was renamed Theophanie. And thinking how to shorten it, my brain instantly went "Teo", pronounced, well exactly like Taeyo. (The "th" in French is usually a t with a bit of aspirated sound after it, not a th as it tends to be in English. Most of the 'e's in all the other names are already pronounced as if they had an acute accent over them.)

And yeah, I started right in; saved a new copy of the last draft and started poking away. I really think it could work.

(A friend of mine said that when she has thoughts about changes that big, she just writes another novel. I considered that, and my brain immediately rebelled, because adding another unfinished novel would be far far worse than doing even a major rewrite.)

Of course, I'm already trying to sell the story. So the real question is, do I keep sending samples and queries to agents, or do I stop again so I can finish yet another draft? The draft I have is finished and polished enough that I don't think they have anything to worry about re: newbies trying to sell unfinished works. Without Joseph, I think this might be the work of a month, maybe two. But I *am* slowed down by the baby...

Well, I'll see if it stalls partway through. I do still have the whole and complete novel with the guy Theo to fall back on.

______________

I can't help think I make a very poor feminist. EVERY time I've changed a character's gender, it's been male to female (In one case, one female character replaced not one but TWO male characters from the prior drafts). Because, Labyrinth aside, I keep shortchanging the women and focusing on the men. :P I suppose it's a kind of consolation that other than this series, most of the men are gay or bi. But really, too many ingrained assumptions.

And yet, obviously these things do matter to me or I wouldn't keep worrying at them.
______________

* For the few of you who don't know the term, this means: a female character is killed JUST so a male character can have massive Angst and Manpain. She's not killed for anything she is or does, but entirely because of her relationship to the man. It got its name from a comic book wherein a woman is literally killed and stuffed in a refrigerator.

Colin moved some of the pics. Reposting with correct urls.

Lessee. First there's the fuzzy Tardis:

( With cat for sizing )

( Door off but better angle )

Then there's this baby (for both grandmas: more at Colin's photobucket, all from the last 2 weeks):

( April 28th, showing off his latest fashion accessory )

( He inherited his talent for putting his foot in his mouth from his mother )

And a video:
( My son the skirt chaser )

If you've been on Facebook, You've seen these. IF not:

( Hidden for Size )

Wow, that was a day.

First, there's a phenomenon they call "nesting" that tends to happen in late pregnancy. IT involves
- a brief burst of inexplicable energy
- a strong desire to help get things ready for baby.T his tends to mean that the energy gets focused on nursery prep or housecleaning (Things one otherwise has been struggling with energy-wise).

All good, right?

Well, I had my first direct experience of the phenomenon last night -- when I got out of bed at 1:00 or 1:30 to deal with a combination of restless leg and mild acid reflux. So instead of doing a few leg exercises and crashing again, I ended up sweeping out a couple of the places downstairs where the plaster had made a mess (Again), moving a few itemks around in the kitchen part of the new extension so as to make more room, and roaming between that and the middle bedroom making plans -- because even I could tell that running the shop-vac in the kitchen extension at 2:00 Am was not a good idea. So instead I quieted it by laying in plans for today.

Anyhow, I slept poorly after that, too (After I fed the cats at 7:00, I lay awake for at least an hour and a half). SO not only was I the usual backachy, I was also short of sleep and disinclined to do much but nap.

Hah.
________

In spite of what I said a handful of time ago about how long things might take, this is how it went:

- While I got up and went to my latest doctor's appointment, Colin and his friend Chris Q worked on laying down double-sided tape for the flooring upstairs.
- While I came back and ate lunch, they laid down the flooring itself.
- Also, I hashed out with Colin where we'd started thinking at cross-purposes about certain things regarding what would go where for storage. And how much of a priority baseboards are. (This sort of planning and communicating happened in tandem with some of the other stuff, but takes its own time, and really is essential...)

- In spite of having no energy, I decided to start the first steps of what I'd been planning to do the night before; while they guys ate lunch, I moved some *more* things around in the kitchen extension to provide even more useful space (And a bit more room to get the dryer through to the basement), and applied the shop-vac to it so that one could get to the back door without walking on splinters of lathe, broken tile, and plaster chunks.

- Swept the upstairs hall, bringing up the pieces of the crib, and giving them all a thorough wipe-down (especially the mattress) due to plaster dust, general dust, and just being cautious. While I was doing this, the guys were cleaning out the construction related stuff in my study - then consulting me on what could be moved where to get it out of the way.

- Chris Q. vaccuumed out my study, while I washed/dusted a number of other things in urgent need of attention, in and out of study and nursery. (Like the stair rail that had gone from creamy to grey with ingrained dirt during all this summer). Including the bookshelves we were about to move.

- We all moved most things out of the nursery and either into the storage side of the new upstairs extension or back into my study (they did the bookshelves and chests, I just hauled armloads of books or small boxes). (Books are not in order; this was somehow not a priority yet. Lord knows, there will be a day or two or three coming when I obsess over it...)

- I swept out the nursery -- and stripped and moved the bed around, and actually put baby things in the dresser drawers now I could reach them -- while Colin and Chris Q cleared out the passage into the basement and hauled up most of my wheel, some shelves, most of the boxed-up pottery, and most of my working supplies. I also helped arrange/rearrange these once they were upstairs; Chris just left the boxes to me once they were in the room.

- After dinner (Which Chris made), I also mopped the nursery.

- In short, we went from three rooms which couldn't be used for their intended purposes and didn't even contain the right furniture, to three rooms that are all back to fully useable for their intended purposes, *even* conceding that none of them is completely *finished*.

Beforehand, I'd have said that this was at least two days of full-time work. More once they started digging into the basement for boxes and stuff. But most of this was done by 5:00 - actually the biggest bout was done by 4:00, after that we were slowing down. We also fit in a viewing of Kung Fu Panda 2. If we'd also got the dryer into the basement, I'd call it a full out miracle.

And thanks to my lovely timing, I did most of what I did without the benefit of nesting energy. OR any decent sleep.

My back hurts. But as I noted to Colin, it hurt when I sat still too long, too. Right now I don't think I overdid it, just that I should go to bed NOW.