Smokey the Magnificent

So, yesterday, someone dissed mah pig. I was at the supermarket with the snortlepig and the auxiliary pig, feeling vaguely skilly because I managed to wheel them around the supermarket with minimal tears and make my new credit card work on only the second try… actually the third, if you count having to push it in, not swipe it, but still… and as I loaded the goods into the boot, an old Chinese couple approached me with clipboards. At least, I assume they were Chinese - the clipboards were for a petition asking the Chinese government to stop persecuting Falun Gong practitioners, it being (according to the leaflet) a peaceful religion, with no post office and very few exports. This petition has been circulating around our fair city for approximately ten years - you can’t walk down to the Indian grocer in our suburb without being accosted by it, and again on the way back. I must have signed it about forty times. (And, side note, what’s with that anyway? Is an evil Communist regime really going to go “Oh, ten thousand people in New Zealand think we shouldn’t persecute a religious minority? Well, right-o then”? I mean, as I say, I sign the thing when asked; it seems like the pukkah thing to do; but it seems like there must be more effective methods of persuading governments. Nuclear methods, mebbe.)

Anyhoo, so I smiled benignly at the couple and said “I think I signed that one yesterday”, and the chap approached Miles in the trolley and began to make fond faces at him and chuck him under the chin, the way one does with pleasing infants. And then he said “How old?” and I said “He’s four weeks today”. Whereupon both petition-holders began laughing their heads off. There was a brief pause, and I said “Yes, he’s quite big” - because he is, and people do frequently make comments to that effect, which is fine. But they kept laughing and laughing. And after a moment it became Awkward, and eventually I gave them a smile of vague, frightened goodwill and hefted my laughably enormous baby into the car and drove off, thinking: they totally done just mocked my pig. And they were still laughing.

Suggestions? I mean, yes, he’s fairly sizeable, and possibly babies run smaller in China, but I wouldn’t have thought he was mirth-inducingly big. And is that really the way to raise support for Falun Gong?

Also, look at him. Who would mock such a pig? He’s squashy in the face and says “pla” when he sneezes.

In other news, the cat of Helpdesk Man’s dear friend just died. So, being a Woman and therefore full of Tact and Empathy, I made a commemorative mousse. It was less blurry in real life. Helpdesk Man’s dear friend didn’t have much to say about it, but he did eat the mousse.

RIP, Oogley.

Blow it all, I’m three and a half weeks postpartum and not up to my usual searing political commentary: so I shall amoose you all, Gentle Readers, with a series of quotations, melodies and other such media which I have recently found pleasing to the spirit.

DOMBEY sat in the corner of the darkened room in the great arm-chair by the bedside, and Son lay tucked up warm in a little basket bedstead, carefully disposed on a low settee immediately in front of the fire and close to it, as if his constitution were analogous to that of a muffin, and it was essential to toast him brown while he was very new.

That was Charles Dickens. This next one is Iron and Wine. It is a song I discovered from an online discussion about labour playlists, in which an individual - presumably one with a somewhat bleak outlook on parenthood - suggested it and everyone was all “Ooh, yus, that’s a nice song”. Which it is. Smashing, in fact. But would you really want to listen to it while giving birth? You decide.

Thirdly, I am very tempted to post some juicy quotes from Withnail and I, but some of the language is not quite the thing, and there are children present.

This one, for example. So I will instead merely link discreetly to IMDb’s Memorable Quotes, and those with unshockable dispositions can see for theyselfs. But don’t blame me.

[Some hours later]

Actually, I have some things to say after all.

1. The pig is learning tact. Her usual method, when faced with a nourishing dinner, is to eat three bites and then begin whining “I don’t want my dinner”; an attitude which wins her no friends. Last night, however, she switched tactics and said in a tone of polite regret, “Mummy, I love you and I’m very sorry, but I can’t finish my dinner”.

2. One hundred per cent of the friends I have thus far polled on the matter say that for $100,000, they would never eat peppermint or peppermint-flavoured foodstuffs again. I would scorn them for money-grubbing, but I’m sad to say I agree with them. I like peppermint, especially in the form of after-dinner mints and mint chocolate chip ice cream; but I could live without them. Chocolate-covered Turkish delights are a good substitute for after-dinner mints, anyway.

3. My knuckles grew during pregnancy. I tried to put my wedding rings back on the other day, and they wouldn’t go. And then I tried a week later, and they still wouldn’t go, and I made them, and it was a mistake. It’s mighty odd. My fingers don’t look swollen or indeed, in any way distinguishable from my pre-auxiliary-pig fingers; but there it is. The rings do not lie. Unless Helpdesk Man cunningly switched them during my pregnancy in order to mess with my postpartum head and cause me to off myself so he could collect the insurance and flee to Spain; which would be nasty, but I once knew a lady whose onetime husband would hide the rubbish bins just to mess with her head, so it just goes to show there are few depths to which humanity will not stoop. Flatmate Man consistently leaves numbers up on the microwave display so I can’t see the time without pressing “Stop/Reset”… for instance.

4. Still craving milk. I had two big glasses today and I yet I do not feel sated. Maybe that’s why my knuckles grew… calcium deposits. Anyway, it’s regrettably expensive, especially as Helpdesk Man has touchingly taken up the habit also. (Unless he’s just doing it to mock me, real subtle-like. See above. It’s not unpossible.)

5. I have to go now. I made Caesar salad and must eat it. This will be the second time today I have eaten poached eggs, although the first lot was in the context of toast. Did you know, you can poach two eggs at once? They separate beautifully after cooking, and it saves time. Once I get my Vitamin D levels back up and I’m brimming with confidence and self-esteem, I’ll try poaching three at a time. I should, like, televise it.

1. I am forty million years pregnant.

2. I want to drink ALL THE MILK IN THE WORLD.

3. I am paralysed by a mental inability to make baked custards, which I desire muchly, and to finish sewing a bunch of winter clothes for the snortlepig, which she sorely needs.

4. I watched LA Confidential the other night and was left with the impression that it was a Good Thing, but if held at gunpoint would not be able to tell you who most of the corpses were or exactly what was going on with the bad guy, who surely can’t have been all that bad anyway, because he was Zefram Cochrane and also the farmer in Babe.

5. Braxton-Hicks remind me of when the Enterprise on Enterprise does that weedy hull polarity thing instead of having proper shields. Kinda cool, texture-wise, but it won’t keep the Klingons out.

6. When was the Holocaust named the Holocaust? During? After? Was there a poll? Did some people have an alternative title?

7. The pig made up a song yesterday. It went like this. To get the full effect, you must understand that she has trouble pronouncing the word “fat”, so she says “flat”:

“Mummy’s so flat

She has flat cheeks

She’s so squishy

She’s got a baby in her tum

It’s very very very very very very very very squishy

It’s the squishiest baby I ever seened”.

8. Still haven’t settled on a name for the Auxiliary Pig. I’m thinking Gaviscon.

9. A small and unworthy part of me sort of wants to get into a minor fender bender of dubious faulthood with another car, so when the chap gets out to yell at me I can go into labour and disconcert him all to hell. Wouldn’t you?

10. Just finished reading Love in the Time of Cholera. Good book, but a surprising lack of cholera. I kept waiting for someone to die of it, and nope. It could just as well have been Love in the Time of Eggplant, eggplant featuring rather more promimently in the text and having less sphinctery connotations to boot.

11. I bet a good bout of cholera would get the Auxiliary Pig out.

For the past few weeks I have been craving custard like a fiend from hell. I made some delicious baked caramel custards the other day, and they didn’t last twenty-four hours between them. I figure there are less nutritious, more toxic things to crave during pregnancy, but the craving does serve to depressingly illustrate where my life is at. If I were to meet Joss Whedon in a lift, for instance, the conversation would go like this:

JOSS: I’m Joss Whedon. I make cult TV shows, write and direct movies and write comic books. At my Comic-con appearances I am hailed as a very god.

ME: I’m really into custard in a big way.

And there’s not a lot of places the conversation can go from there, is it? No commonality of minds. No equality. No “You seem a likely wench, come join the creative team on my new ill-fated scifi series”. I’d be better off as an actual sicko. For instance:

JOSS: I’m Joss Whedon. I make cult TV etc etc.

ME [with a curt tip of the head]: Smokering. Arson.

He’d probably respect that. He ought to.

In other news, my vile baby has gone transverse on me. Off to try a forward-leaning inversion.

Smokey and heartburn have been engaged in an escalating war for the past few weeks. First the raw almonds were enough to keep it at bay; then I progressed to papaya enzymes, which worked for a couple of nights; but last night I surrendered to the remarkably unpleasant-tasting Gaviscon. It seems to have temporarily foiled the heartburn, but it had better keep working - I’m not sure what the next stage would be. A bionic sphincter? Self-immolation? A made-for-TV movie dramatising my plight? If you’ve never experienced heartburn, just imagine your oesophagus corroding and causing you to spend your nights retching, gurgling and hoicking up things that have long been extinct in the wild. It’s demoralising, to say the least - and the first person who suggests I try a nice glass of milk before bed can undergo a heart bypass with a cup of chamomile tea in lieu of anaesthetic.

Also, there’s a slight possibility that I may be losing my mind. A cynic might observe that I’ve never been the poster child for mental health to begin with, but a string of recent events has left me looking sideways at my mind, going “Uh-huh?’. To wit:

1. Today Helpdesk Man breathed on me, in the faintly threatening way he has, and he distinctly smelled of lamb hot pot. We have not eaten such a dish for weeks.

2. Tonight being Saturday night, I invited two friends around for dinner and a movie, and made a batch of chocolate mousse, which I divided according to custom into four bowls. I did this yesterday, because I am Skilly and Organised. Then last night I thought “Well, there will be three of us”, so I ate the fourth bowl for dessert, and was happy. Then this morning, one of said friends emailed me and said she had invited another friend along too. And it was too late to retrieve the mousse. And I spent about five minutes in a blind panic, flapping my hands in terror, before it occurred to me I could, y’know, make more mousse. Which I have now done, and the world is safe and shiny again; but it was a near thing.

3. A couple of weeks ago, I was hallucinating. Srsly. I was home all alone at night, and rather overtired, sewing; and out of the corner of my eye I saw a corpse on the couch, and later a mannequin slumped on a chair. I considered mentioning this to my midwife, but I wasn’t sure I’d like her response. What is the appropriate midwiferly response to that, anyway? “Heh”? “Duuuude”? She’d probably have given me a brochure with the telephone number of my local antenatal hallucination support group, and I would have left it in my bag, and the snortlepig would have pulled it out during church and biffed it at a deacon, and it would have all been too too. And the hallucinations have not recurred. But still though.

Also, have you ever tried brushing your teeth with your non-dominant hand? Harder than it sounds. You could lose a uvula.

1. The snortlepig referred to me today as a “meat pompom”. I think it was intended as a compliment, but it is too apropos for comfort. Sucks to snortlepigs, I say.

2. Did you know you can assess dilation without internal exams? Someone posted this link on a pregnancy forum, and I found it fascinating.

3. In keeping with the grand Hypnobabies tradition of weedy birth euphemisms, Helpdesk Man and I have decided to post a note on the door of our room at the birth centre, requesting that all staff refer to contractions as “squeezles”. If anyone refuses, I shall look her darkly in the eye and start to seize. It will help to pass the time.

4. Raw almonds do actually kinda help with heartburn. The snortlepig is a great fan; she keeps finding the bag beside my bed and saying solemnly “I gotta baby in my tummy, I got heartburn, can I has a almond?”. As a result we are going through them at a great lick, which is a shame as they are rather costly; cheaper, however, than the papaya enzymes I bought from a troublingly dim-witted woman at the health food store. Helpdesk Man has developed a curious mental block about the word “papaya”, and refers to them as pimiento enzymes… which would not help heartburn… but assures me that they work. I have not tried them yet myself. I don’t trust furrin fruit.

5. Last night I ate practically an entire pizza and garlic bread. Living in an Atkins household must be getting to me. Today we are having guests for dinner, and I made the most enormous marbled chocolate-orange cheesecake you ever did see; and if they turn up late, I will eat it all. Fortunately Helpdesk Man, having been dropped on the head as a baby, does not like cheesecake; so he is not jealous. I think he’s been popping more papaya enzymes than his heartburn strictly requires, though.

1. A month or so ago I was downing my hideous fermented cod liver oil tablets, while my sister-in-law watched with great interest. Then she said “Man, those are big, no wonder you swallow them one at a time”. And my brain went “?!”, and I realised that in several years of swallowing supplements designed to make me clever and sleekit, swallowing more than one at a time had never occurred to me. Since then my life has changed dramatically.

2. As of Tuesday, the Auxiliary Pig is no longer tangled up in his umbilical cord. This is a Good Thing. Better yet was the ultrasound tech, who upon seeing “3x nuchal cord” as the reason for re-scanning snorted loudly and kept up a muttered commentary through the proceedings, along the lines of “Never in all my years working here have I seen such a frivolous reason for re-scanning; I don’t know what these people are thinking; too much information, I call it, just causes needless stress, she should have just kept her mouth shut; ridiculous!”, which endeared her to me greatly. Better yet, she had to take a bunch of photos of the Auxiliary Pig’s face and neck to prove that it was unobstructed, and she let us keep them. A bit chinless in a few pics, but promising; he looks a bit like the snortlepig, if she had a more transluscent skull.

3. I am being totally productive. Upon realising I could have fewer than ten weeks to go I flew into a panic and started actually sewing some of the fabric which has been sitting smugly in my sewing niche; which, as it turns out, is the way to get things done. I have currently completed a winter pinafore for the pig, a pair of rather dishy Ottobre rompers for the Auxiliary Pig, a knitted baby hat I made up myself, and a small, short-sleeved shirt. I am now in the process of sewing another pair of rompers from a pair of hand-me-down trou, some winter pyjamas for the pig, a knitted kimono top, and a mei tai. (Yes, all at once; apparently completing one project before starting another is beyond my level of cunning.) After that will come another winter dress for the pig, a ring sling, a sleep sack, a knitted aviator cap, a coat for the pig, and as many more baby clothes as I can churn out before the Auxiliary Pig arrives and demands to be dressed.

Unfortunately our camera is lost, so I cannot show you the gorgeousness of the things I have made. Here’s a water buffalo, though. Just imagine I have harvested its wool and made it into a cunning little vest.

4. Helpdesk Man has officially started the Atkins diet. We have now spent our life savings on slabs of meat and surprising quantities of produce, and he has taken to hoarding his Vitamin C tablet to eat after dinner as a truly pitiful substitute for dessert. Tonight he and Flatmate are out, so I am taking the opportunity to make a Lime Marshmallow Pie in their absence. Ha. (It’s classier than it sounds. Not only do you make the marshmallow topping yourself, from scratch, but you also make the graham crackers for the biscuit base. Also, it has limes in it.)

Helpdesk Man and Flatmate Man have been discussing little else but the carb content of mustard and Brussels sprouts for the last week, and yesterday Helpdesk Man announced he was going to spend his birthday voucher on a set of bathroom scales. I am clearly the manliest person currently living in our house…. not counting the pig, who it turns out can do the splits. How? She certainly didn’t get it from me. I could never do so much as a handstand or cartwheel, and my childhood suffered accordingly.

5. I have discovered the most awesome blog. I read it all. I Am Baker. Lookit that hydrangea cake.

6. It is surprisingly hard to find good, free knitting patterns for baby vests online. Anyone? I want one that buttons on at least one shoulder and down one side, so I do not have to pull it over the head of the pig and give it flashbacks to the childbirth experience and stunt its tiny psyche; also one that is appropriately manly, attractive, easy to knit, and did I mention free? No luck so far; very annoying. I’m tempted to wing it, but last time I did that I ended up with a hat I should probably donate to the preemie ward, if it has a box for spectacularly un-fussy preemies with no dress sense; and I knit so slowly that an unwearable item is no small matter.

7. This may reveal unfortunate things as regards my character, but I have come to the realisation that people who blog about loving their husbands freak me all the way out. Mother pointed me in the direction of a crafty person with a blog she thought I might like; said person lives in our town and Mother feels we might Get Along. I thought so too, until I read her blog, and what is it filled with? “I love my husband”. Like, every third post. And now I can never meet her, because she’s my age (and indeed, her husband used to be in my class at school), and all I’ll be able to think when I look at her is “Heh. You love your husband”.

I mean, naturally I am glad that she does; and had she stuck to discussions of weaving and sewing, I would have probably assumed that it was the case. But come on, people. A little reticence. A little dignity. A slight sneer when the love of your life enters the room, to prove to the world that you are still your own man and not some moonstruck dingbat. Perhaps an occasional well-deserved critique regarding his face. Is it so much to ask? Must you spew newlywed bliss all over the internet like so much rainbow upchuck? It’s unseemly.

Right. I am going to go sew some straps on that mei tai snugly enough that the Auxiliary Pig won’t be able to plummet to his doom, no matter how hard he tries. And he will, if he inherits a healthy sense of nihilism. And I’m pretty sure I’m on a supplement for that.

This is the pig, being three.

This is the birthday cake I made her.

This is what the pig would call a baby tortle.

The pig was about that size when she was born, although of course she looked more like this:

I, on the other hand, looked something like this.

Edward, not Bella. I may have had an even ghastlier pallor, but I cannot guarantee it. Anyway, that’s pretty much how I looked. I’d go into details, but my Hypnobabies protocol instructs me to let all such reminisces ping harmlessly off my Bubble of Peace and slink back into the void. Hypnobabies has no sense of fun sometimes.

You know how sometimes you do something faintly adult and magnificent and are like “Hah, universe, I’m on top of you”, and the universe steeples its fingers? That happened to me today. I woke up feeling comapratively unpregnant, made a to-do list as long as your face and spent a profitable morning defrosting the freezer, making pizza dough and custard from scratch, doing my Spanish practice and singing practice, and other marvellous things. To be sure, I then had to go have a lie down for three-some hours, but even those were not a total waste, as I read the last half of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows and did my Hypnobabies practice. A good day.

When I awoke at seven, I decided to be yet more magnificent and whip by the supermarket and the library, picking up ingredients for a wedding cake I have to make this week and dropping off overdue books, respectively. Helpdesk Man and the snortlepig were out for dinner, so I bade an airy farewell to Flatmate Man and roared off in a driver’s-licence-having, responsible-citizen way. I whipped through the supermarket shopping with aplomb and a list, stowed the goods in the boot, and had forty minutes to spare before the library shut at 8:30.

Unfortunately parking in town is something of a closed book to me. I circled around the library block looking hopefully for spaces, but despite it being after hours on a Monday night there were none. Then I caught sight of an underground parking garage, and in a burst of bravery thought “Yes; I will do this thing”. So I swung in, undeterred by the fact that I nearly had to dislocate my arm in order to reach the little ticket thingy, and was gratified to note that there were many free spaces indeed - nearly all of them, in fact. It was then I felt a nagging hunch that the sign outside had said “Closes at 8″; if true, this would mean I had spent a precious dollar on a mere flying tour of the facilities, and would still have to park elsewhere. So I hastily grabbed my library books, locked the car and headed up to the entrance to look at the sign. “Closes at 8″, it did indeed say. So I grumbled back with my load of books to the car, only to discover that I had locked my keys in it.

After several minutes of basically saying “Is it” at the world, I decided to dash to the library and ask if I could use their phone. The librarian found my predicament highly amusing, but the lady on the other end of the number kindly provided on the carpark sign had clearly been dead for a while, and only suggested I pop back and ask the advice of the security guard. This I did, and just in time too, as he was locking up. (I was delayed, incidentally, by trying to call home four times to see if Flatmate Man could drive Helpdesk Man and his spare key to meet me. He did not answer. It turned out he was watching a video game show with his headphones on. Some people’s children.) Said security guard proved to be kind-hearted, but - literally and figuratively - toothless. Even though we walked all around the car and looked solemnly at it and said “Yup” in a hopeful way to each other, there was nothing for it but to leave it there until morning. The security guard informed me that it would be as safe as houses and nobody could possibly make off with it, which would have been more convincing if he hadn’t just tried all his keys in the lock with the disappointed comment “That’s funny, usually you wiggle any key in there for a bit and it just pops right open”. He also kindly informed me that the buses were still running, wished me well, and we parted on cordial terms.

Unfortunately, after dragging my pregnant self across several city blocks and risking Crimes of Violence, it transpired that the buses were not in fact running at all. So I then had to walk back to the other end of town (pausing, I admit, for a Starbucks strawberries-and-cream frappuccino to soothe my ruffled feathers - six dollars eighty, if you don’t mind!) and loiter outside the taxi stand. This I did for ten minutes before venturing inside the Irish pub to ask the Irish barman if any taxis were planning to grace its presence that night; upon which he shouted something unintelligible and Irish at me and I slunk back outside again. After another fifteen minutes I tried the other pub across the road, which was not Irish and let me use its phone, only whenever I tried to call a taxi or indeed anyone else it beeped at me frantically; so, not wanting to out myself as the kind of barely hominid milk-fed gimp who not only locks her keys in her car but can’t operate a telephone, I abandoned it and slunk outside yet again; at which point, fortunately, a taxi showed up just as I was about to hurl myself underneath it. He took me home, where the household conspicuously failed to greet me with cries of “Yay!” and “We were so worried, have you fallen prey to Crimes of Violence?” and “The freezer looks so nice and clean”.

I have two things to say about all this.

Firstly, I once got a perfect score on my English SATs. I feel this needs to be said. Perfect, people. 800. You can’t get any higher.

Secondly, on a scale of one to cheem, in what condition do you think the milk in the boot will be when I collect it tomorrow morning?

Tonight, the snortlepig upended a piping hot bowl of Hungarian goulash over my bare feet. Judges of human nature might be interested to note that, while Flatmate Man leaped to get a cloth to wipe said goulash off my scalded feet, Helpdesk Man sat stolidly on the window seat, chewing goulash and staring into space in a thoughtful manner. So nice to have a spouse who is above the mundanities of everyday life.

Would you rather die at the age of forty-one, or 110? I asked this question tonight at singing group and got a range of answers (well, two, although one seditious individual did attempt to divert the conversation by asking if we would choose to live to 1000, if we stopped ageing at 50. A foolish, futile question). I am inclined towards forty-one, although that could be the crippling depression speaking. Alzberger’s, as my small sister calls it, is no matter for chortles.

There is a stink bug on the ceiling. Friend Stink Bug, I call it.