Finn:
You start the day with a rumble, then a growl followed by a yowl. The red light on the baby monitor flashes its alert “Get up!”
I go to you and open the venetions singing an aubade from the ‘Hair’ soundtrack as I unpack you. ‘Good morning starshine, the earth says hello, you twinkle above us, we twinkle below.’
Dad has already fed you some hour or two earlier so you’re content to start the day with our little song. Giggle, rub eyes, the swag gets unzipped and you stretch out for bear. Tickles, kisses then up for bed-cuddles where you grasp at our hair and poke twiddly little fingers into our mouths (such interesting caves of treasures: tongue and teeth!).
Uppity up, rolls on the floor, weeties and banana or pear in your highchair then kiss Dad bye-bye, pull on his hat and tie and we begin our long and languorous day.
Little bug, one day you may learn all about science and maybe even quantum physics, but for now just now this. We trick time every day by keeping our world very small in space and distance covered. Before your morning nap it’s off in the stroller up and down and round and round the local streets, stopping in the village for my coffee and your flirty little smiles at strangers and local folks alike. Michael the Lebanese pizza man pulls faces and says he’ll steal you. The ladies in the newsagent grin and coo and sometimes can’t resist tugging one of your perfect little fingers. On our way home I give you a flower or leaf and point out the cats. I sing as I walk, completely unabashed in my wailing of blues or showtunes, and people behind fences are benign when they hear us pass with our song.
In the lounge again you roll or commando crawl, and Whiskey-cat eggs you on with her teasy little half-skips away: ‘come and catch me, yes you can’.
Back to bed for you Mr Finn, Finn-bo, Finn-de-do. Sometimes you resist and I have to sing “All aboard the sleepy-train, all aboard the sleepy train, all aboard the sleepy train, we’re going to Sleepy Ville’. While you snooze I potter about doing housework, perhaps whipping up your favourite mashed peas or fish stew meals to freeze. Its only 10.30 and we’ve already tricked time, so much day still ahead. There is your ‘wake-up poo’ that I sing to: ‘Let’s have a look at your bum chum, let’s have a look t your nappy, Pappy, cause your bum might glum chum, and we want it to be happy, happy happy, happy-happy!’
After your lunch we often take train trips: To Yarraville for faces and shops, or to Altona Beach for vast sea views and the smell of the pines. You love being out on the pier, the rumble of planks under the stroller wheels massages you into doziness and your eyelids soften against the glare of silver water and sky.
We spend a lot of time on th floor together as you learn to first grasp, then grab, then sit, roll, spin and finally do a high speed tummy crawl around the place. Cuddles and tickles and books are had. You love ‘Maisy’ and ‘Does a cat wear glasses’ but you hate ‘the Very Hungry Caterpillar’ and cry when you see the butterfly. You cry from tooth-pain too, and some days we just get by together cause your mouth is sore and you feel miserable. That’s when you get rusks and cold watermelon and your gums rubbed with Bonjella. On those days I get tired and sad that I can’t help and I’m grateful when your Dad gets home.
There’s another nap or two (lucky you) and each time you wake up happy and I am happy with you as I breathe in the gorgeous sweet smell your baby-breath has filled the room with. So the days roll on, small in the physical world we traverse, enormous in the learning and feeling and wonder. Time stretches out like a seemingly endless ball of string.
But there is an end, and this particular ball is at its.
Tomorrow I return to work part-time and hand you over into the loving hands of your Dad each day. With him you’ll play in new ways and learn new things.
And though I’m sad as I say farewell to this beautiful time spent with you I know we’ll always have had it, I will always be here to touch and tangle limbs with.
I am your touchstone, the giver of leaves and flowers, the maker of songs of games.
You will grow away and be fierce in your independence, but I will always be your singer of morning starshine, your Mum.
Saturday, January 2, 2010
Tuesday, December 8, 2009
teething bub
A very quick post with plenty of tags! Hopefully some needy parents will find this and perhaps find it useful.
Our baby boy at eight months seems to have been about to cut a tooth forever.
His symptoms are:
flushed cheeks, a scaly rash under his chin from drooling, a lot of drooling, lethargy (some days) irritability (other days) occasional cold symptoms (without a temperature)chomping on everything and 'gluey' poos. Do always check your baby's temp is normal and there are no rashes, as teething symptoms can be unfortunately close to those of more serious illnesses.
Things we find that help are 'Bonjella' ointment rubbed on his gums, lots of extra sleeping opportunities, rusks to chew, a little liquid baby panadol at night and very cold food good for sucking. In Coles in Australia you can buy a little gadget that is a small mesh bag with plastic lid attached to a ring. They are in the baby-food section. Very cold soft fruit and veg shoved into this works really well- he can suck and chew on the treat in the bag, top up his hydration and the mesh fabric seems to rub his gums and alleviate the pain. We find cold watermelon to be a winner, but also cold soft-boiled veg or other fruit work too.
Good luck!
Our baby boy at eight months seems to have been about to cut a tooth forever.
His symptoms are:
flushed cheeks, a scaly rash under his chin from drooling, a lot of drooling, lethargy (some days) irritability (other days) occasional cold symptoms (without a temperature)chomping on everything and 'gluey' poos. Do always check your baby's temp is normal and there are no rashes, as teething symptoms can be unfortunately close to those of more serious illnesses.
Things we find that help are 'Bonjella' ointment rubbed on his gums, lots of extra sleeping opportunities, rusks to chew, a little liquid baby panadol at night and very cold food good for sucking. In Coles in Australia you can buy a little gadget that is a small mesh bag with plastic lid attached to a ring. They are in the baby-food section. Very cold soft fruit and veg shoved into this works really well- he can suck and chew on the treat in the bag, top up his hydration and the mesh fabric seems to rub his gums and alleviate the pain. We find cold watermelon to be a winner, but also cold soft-boiled veg or other fruit work too.
Good luck!
Tuesday, October 27, 2009
The ghosts I know
Walk with me. Take that warm coat off your hook, for it is chilly and dusk sets in. We are in Windsor, almost at the corner of Hotham and Dandenong roads. Opposite the beautiful old red-walled cemetery are two white art deco blocks of flats. I don’t want to frighten you, and you may hold my hand, just to keep warm mind, but the left of the pair has ghosts aplenty. It’s best if you go on alone now.
If you walk down its driveway you’ll see at the end a two story flat. It’s new but tries in vain to repeat the swollen ship-curves of the original block. Can you feel it? There is an overlay that sits above and within this new structure. An old two-car garage has entries so narrow only a mini could fit, but there is Lisa’s turquoise valiant with its whitewall tires. She is a drummer in surf-rock band and has painted her damp flat in deep burnt red. On her shelves sit Barbies without heads, sparrow skulls, lizard skins, buttons and cans and chip packets from the seventies. She is a curator of detritus, a collector of what gets left behind: the ghosts of products, creatures, stuff.
Walk past the garage to the right. Here are the stairs, and at their end a wooden door. Emerge into the barnlike washroom, where an old copper and wringer appear as strange to us as medieval torture devices. Women may yet live who remember their red and chapped hands wringing out the baby’s nappies. Did they sing as they worked, or purse their lips with the effort? Through the door onto the garage roof. Ancient concrete and a lone hills-hoist strike a sombre bass-note against the treble of rooftops, antennas, elms and ivy-strangled grey walls.
This place where I would leave the world behind with beanbag, book and glass no longer exists, it is a ghost place. But you see it too.
In the same block of damp old deco flats: my first home out of home. One enormous lounge with a semi-circular window wall, and a narrow kitchen that always made people feel they were in a train car: wire fronted cupboards, an ancient aga-style cooker with gas-marks and a built in breakfast nook. Off the bedroom the mildewed, frayed and falling down glamour of a bath the size of a lap-pool, a Chrysler-building pattern of red and black tiles and a showerhead the size of a dinner plate. One morning as I lay in bed she emerged from the bathroom, an image of neat skirt suit and dark hair in a bun, an expression tired and a bit baffled to see me. Then I blinked and she was gone. Poof.
The new buyers ripped apart the kitchen to modernize, and removed the bath to accommodate a laundry. I wonder if the rising damp took the hint and retreated too. And doth my lady still linger?
Stroll downhill, perhaps along Alexander Ave and alongside the cemetery. On Inkerman Street you will find the Kimberly Hotel and beside it a large Jewish convention centre. The red brick flats that still pulse within its walls were completed on V.E. day. All six of these mansion apartments of two, three and four bedrooms with separate dining were already promised to returned veterans and their wives.
When I lived there amidst falling tiles, rising damp and threadbare rose-print carpet, June still lived there. The husband had left, but left her with four rooms, rent-controlled ‘for life’, and furnished in the calmly sparse and elegant pieces of the late forties. Whilst her flat was an understatement of olive and walnut, June wore sarongs, red lipstick and dyed her hair black on her back-step once a month. She swore like a trooper when her guaranteed home was sold out from under us. She’d never been told that the promise given her as a war bride was only valid if the husband lived there. You’d think they’d mention that. But she was still glad she’d kicked him out and emptied the teak liquor cabinet.
So now the Jewish community sings there within new walls, and my old neighbour Kerstin, a witch if ever there was, flits be-cloaked amongst her herb garden, calling to the corners and bedazzling the Autumn moon with her purely female smile. And in a gloomy central room I lay more logs into the tiny corner fire and pull my old red-velvet wingback chair closer in. The lover and I will drink Morris Pressings, eat pot-chilli and read. The kitten ‘X’ will soon jump on my lap, unknowing that after another twelve years of terrorizing small creatures and my hair elastics he will die peacefully in his new home, west of the water.
Sometimes when I walk these old places in my mind it seems my existence is being torn away behind me as structures tumble and are churned into the new. Then ‘I have fears that I may cease to be’.
I will cease to be. I will go. The Skipping girl may go, the Rialto, the clown-face of Luna Park, all may go. The icons, buildings and pathways of a personal history that trail behind me like a lost narrative seeking its author, all of this could go. And should my mind go, as well it may, even these tattered skirts of story trailing behind me will go too.
So take it all away. Stand me on the brink of the Western water. I can see the Dandenong ranges. I will find the known view and start walking towards my childhood, passing ghosts with every step.
If you walk down its driveway you’ll see at the end a two story flat. It’s new but tries in vain to repeat the swollen ship-curves of the original block. Can you feel it? There is an overlay that sits above and within this new structure. An old two-car garage has entries so narrow only a mini could fit, but there is Lisa’s turquoise valiant with its whitewall tires. She is a drummer in surf-rock band and has painted her damp flat in deep burnt red. On her shelves sit Barbies without heads, sparrow skulls, lizard skins, buttons and cans and chip packets from the seventies. She is a curator of detritus, a collector of what gets left behind: the ghosts of products, creatures, stuff.
Walk past the garage to the right. Here are the stairs, and at their end a wooden door. Emerge into the barnlike washroom, where an old copper and wringer appear as strange to us as medieval torture devices. Women may yet live who remember their red and chapped hands wringing out the baby’s nappies. Did they sing as they worked, or purse their lips with the effort? Through the door onto the garage roof. Ancient concrete and a lone hills-hoist strike a sombre bass-note against the treble of rooftops, antennas, elms and ivy-strangled grey walls.
This place where I would leave the world behind with beanbag, book and glass no longer exists, it is a ghost place. But you see it too.
In the same block of damp old deco flats: my first home out of home. One enormous lounge with a semi-circular window wall, and a narrow kitchen that always made people feel they were in a train car: wire fronted cupboards, an ancient aga-style cooker with gas-marks and a built in breakfast nook. Off the bedroom the mildewed, frayed and falling down glamour of a bath the size of a lap-pool, a Chrysler-building pattern of red and black tiles and a showerhead the size of a dinner plate. One morning as I lay in bed she emerged from the bathroom, an image of neat skirt suit and dark hair in a bun, an expression tired and a bit baffled to see me. Then I blinked and she was gone. Poof.
The new buyers ripped apart the kitchen to modernize, and removed the bath to accommodate a laundry. I wonder if the rising damp took the hint and retreated too. And doth my lady still linger?
Stroll downhill, perhaps along Alexander Ave and alongside the cemetery. On Inkerman Street you will find the Kimberly Hotel and beside it a large Jewish convention centre. The red brick flats that still pulse within its walls were completed on V.E. day. All six of these mansion apartments of two, three and four bedrooms with separate dining were already promised to returned veterans and their wives.
When I lived there amidst falling tiles, rising damp and threadbare rose-print carpet, June still lived there. The husband had left, but left her with four rooms, rent-controlled ‘for life’, and furnished in the calmly sparse and elegant pieces of the late forties. Whilst her flat was an understatement of olive and walnut, June wore sarongs, red lipstick and dyed her hair black on her back-step once a month. She swore like a trooper when her guaranteed home was sold out from under us. She’d never been told that the promise given her as a war bride was only valid if the husband lived there. You’d think they’d mention that. But she was still glad she’d kicked him out and emptied the teak liquor cabinet.
So now the Jewish community sings there within new walls, and my old neighbour Kerstin, a witch if ever there was, flits be-cloaked amongst her herb garden, calling to the corners and bedazzling the Autumn moon with her purely female smile. And in a gloomy central room I lay more logs into the tiny corner fire and pull my old red-velvet wingback chair closer in. The lover and I will drink Morris Pressings, eat pot-chilli and read. The kitten ‘X’ will soon jump on my lap, unknowing that after another twelve years of terrorizing small creatures and my hair elastics he will die peacefully in his new home, west of the water.
Sometimes when I walk these old places in my mind it seems my existence is being torn away behind me as structures tumble and are churned into the new. Then ‘I have fears that I may cease to be’.
I will cease to be. I will go. The Skipping girl may go, the Rialto, the clown-face of Luna Park, all may go. The icons, buildings and pathways of a personal history that trail behind me like a lost narrative seeking its author, all of this could go. And should my mind go, as well it may, even these tattered skirts of story trailing behind me will go too.
So take it all away. Stand me on the brink of the Western water. I can see the Dandenong ranges. I will find the known view and start walking towards my childhood, passing ghosts with every step.
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