My god though, it’s SO much easier. Ok, so these days, nursing is pretty easy. Ender and I both more or less have the routine down, and if I wanted to, wearing “normal” clothing would absolutely be doable. But in the early days weeks months of nursing, it was just one more thing to deal with, and I fell in love with the easy openings of nursing tops. I got in the habit. Plus, if I need to nurse Ender while I’m out and about, it’s way easier with a nursing top to not flash every passerby a glimpse of my crepe paper belly, never mind my boobs.

Unfortunately, (affordable) nursing tops are pretty slim pickings. I have exactly four long sleeved tops I’m comfortable wearing. And as of this morning, one of them looked terrible on me.

I like brown, and some browns like me, but this pilgrim turkey brown was not one of them (I meant to take a photo of myself wearing it, but didn’t remember until it was too late). So I thought I didn’t have anything to lose by trying my first experiment with RIT dye. Well, first since a tie-dye activity in the 2nd grade.

I didn’t bother trying to get the original color out, mainly because I didn’t realize it was possible until recently. Plus adding one more step to a project just makes it a little less likely that I’ll get it finished. I thought a bright red would combine nicely with the original brown, and even if it stayed more brown than red, it would be warmer color, and hopefully look nicer with my skin.

Stirring, for over an HOUR was a pain, and it looked like evil Jello. It turned out beautifully though. The color was even nicer than I’d hoped for, I can’t think of the name of the red, but it’s a color that makes me feel nostalgic, it’s the color I imagine Little Red’s riding hood should be.

To be totally honest, my craft whims don’t usually turn out this well, so I’m pretty psyched to not just have one more shirt I can wear without feeling ugly, but to have completed a project in less than a day. I have plans to buy and dye two more shirts, and next time, I think I may play with masking using some wax resist. I can’t wait to see how they turn out.

While I was pregnant I came up with the idea of doing a girl’s craft night. I thought it would be a nice way to get me some grown up company and keep me sane.

Then of course Ender came and planning ANYTHING seemed pretty unlikely. As he’s gotten older though, he’s getting a bit easier, and more importantly, more predictable, so I started to think about it again a few months ago. I thought January, the new year, seemed like a good time to start up fresh.

I told everyone to come on the first Wednesday of every month. We planned on Matt being home and pretty much taking over baby-duty for the evening.

We did NOT really think about the fact that the first Wednesday in January was right in the middle of way too much travel. Planning an event, even a low key one, is sort of intimidating when you can’t think past planning out when you get to wash laundry between packing and unpacking the suitcase.

Craft night MEAGAN style is beyond low key though. I told everyone from the start, we will not be doing Martha Stewart type projects. Or at least, anyone is welcome to do Martha Stewart projects, but I will not be organizing them. I invited everyone to bring whatever they were working on, or if they weren’t working on anything, to have some tea or coffee.

I expected 5, but 2 canceled at the last minute and for 1, I think, I had the wrong email. Kim brought a whole craft store worth of craft supplies, and started a shell-chain necklace. Pam, a knitter, didn’t bring her knitting, but started a cute leather-bead bracelet that reminded me of a beading class I took half a lifetime ago.

I just worked on getting the last of the gunk off the glitter bottles, so now Ender can finally play with them.

It was a quiet evening of relaxed socializing, which is exactly what I wanted and needed, and I think the others had fun as well. And since Kim brought all the crafty stuff, there was zero clean-up beyond banishing the pizza box to the fridge- which is about all I’m up for in my current sleep deprived state. I’m looking forward to doing it next month, and maybe then I’ll even get to make something.

Unfortunately, water sealed they wouldn’t stay upright. I tried a variety of things to keep them balanced, weighting the bottoms with pins and beads, cutting down the sails, but eventually I had to just give up on the sail boats. Shame. I think they’d still be a fun (and easy) craft to do with kids though, as long as you didn’t mind them not lasting.

Ender really enjoyed watching me put the bottle together. Since he’s a little too young to understand presents, I didn’t feel like I was wrecking the surprise.

He REALLY liked the bubbles caused by the oil. I think once we get around to sealing the lid (haven’t had a chance yet) the finished wave bottle will be a hit.

When the boats were in play, I’d planned to fill the whole bottle with water and oil, so it would look as much like ocean and sky as possible. Once I gave up on the boats I realized there was no reason not to leave a top layer of air, allowing another section of floats.

I have no idea why the sequins didn’t sink to the bottom of the water layer. Not a one. In the glitter bottle, they fell down along with the glitter, but having a layer of oil on top seemed to make everything sit a bit lighter in the water (the balls floated significantly higher). I have no idea why this is. I assume there is some physics-y explanation, but maybe it’s just a fluke.

The bottle didn’t turn out at all like I’d envisioned it, but I’m still pretty happy with the final product. Whenever I (or Matt) get around to sealing it, I’ll be sure to post photos of Ender so you can see what he thinks.

So I ended up going with Fuji water… figuring the thicker plastic balanced the fact that they were square rather than round, so wouldn’t roll.

I had to restock on glitter, so I figured I may as well do two different bottles. I did one bottle all in white glitter, with white sequins and white glass beads, and some silver snowflakes- a snow bottle. The other bottle I was hoping to make more colorful than I did before – some of the leftover red, plus green and gold and a bunch of the white. I used about three parts white per one part of the other colors, so I thought it would be bits of color amid white, but I miscalculated, and looking at the bottle, you can’t even tell there’s white in there. I also put little gold bells in and multicolored sequins, but I can’t see a single bell floating in there, so I’m not sure what happened. Inter-dimensional portal maybe, or I suppose it could be that there just weren’t enough bells. I’m not thrilled with the result, but my friend Kim oohed over it and called it festive (while she was not especially impressed over the white bottle, which I think turned out better) so maybe it looks all right even though it didn’t match my expectations.

One plus, I did my trick with the glue inside the cap, and with such a small hole (and no leaks this time) it actually worked. I’m sure an air bubble will develop eventually, because the glitter and sequins seem to trap some air no matter how much you stir, but for now I can’t see any.

So Ender gets two glitter bottles, and even though he can’t roll them, I think he’ll probably find them interesting to watch for small bits of time. Of the two red jars, one has a leak and the other seems to be pretty much sealed, but since I’m not sure about letting Ender mouth the dried glue, I’ll probably just keep that one on my desk.

It’s nice to have one project finished, but I’m having mini panic attacks whenever I think of how much I need to finish before the weekend. I think I’m actually on schedule, but that assumes I’ve accurately estimated how much time the rest will take, and of course, that I don’t run into any more speed bumps, leaks or air bubbles.

Which is assuming quite a lot.

The plan was to make three “discovery” bottles. The first, as I mentioned earlier, is a wave bottle with little sailboats inside. The second is a glitter bottle and the third is a roller/rattle made of sticks and nuts (hard to explain without photos).

I started with the glitter bottle, because theoretically it should be the easiest and I managed to collect the last of the necessary materials this weekend. I used red glitter, a bit of food dye, some sequins and plastic stars, and water with a few squirts of glycerine inside a plastic peanut butter jar. I thought I was being clever, and put the plastic stars in the inside of the cap, so when I screwed it on, it would push into the liquid and theoretically make for a smaller air bubble.

It doesn’t matter though, because apparently the peanut butter jars aren’t watertight. I followed the glue instructions, putting some glue on both surfaces, let sit for 5 minutes, then screwed the top on as tight as I could. And I will say that the bottle LOOKED fantastic, the glitter behaves in really interesting and surprising ways. And the air bubble was smaller than a pea. Unfortunately, after a few minutes I noticed that there was a small puddle of water under the jar. I squeezed the sides, and little streams of orange water shot out from a few spots under the lid.

Not awesome.

So I tried again with another peanut butter jar. This time I tested with clear water before screwing it shut, thinking maybe the glue on the inside of the lid had kept me from closing it tight, but when I squeezed the jar, water came out of the clean jar as well. So this time when I went to seal it up, I just closed the lid as tight as it would go without glue, then tipped it gently upside down and filled the rim with glue all the way round.

This worked better, one tiny spot let little droplets of water out and I could probably seal it up. But it occurred to me after that the glue isn’t exactly non-toxic, so having it in a spot that will be mouthed by my baby seems like a monumentally bad idea. Shame.

I think I’ll end up resorting to water bottles; at least I know they’re watertight. That’s on hold though until I get a chance to pick up a bottle of water… plus more glitter and sequins etc. At least I still have plenty of glycerine.

As for the sail boats, I’d finally settled on using bouncy balls as my floating center, figuring they’d be cute and easy to find. Only it turns out that bouncy balls are one of those things that are everywhere when you don’t want them, and no where when you do. I found bouncy balls that were too big, too small, or too hard, but not a single pack of the stereotypical bouncy balls you think of in quarter machines (and the quarter machines just had candy and other cheap toys). I finally tracked down some cute striped balls from Target, only to get them home and find they sank right to the bottom of the water. No help.

I eventually settled on some translucent (I wanted opaque) balls that were about half as big as I would have liked. Fortunately they, like the test ball, floated on water and sank in oil, so I was set there. I was able to cut them in half with only a little bit of trial and error, so I’m ready now to put the sails on, and weight the bottoms so they won’t tip. I’m worried that because they’re so small they won’t stay afloat with the sails and anchors, but we’ll have to see.

The bottle of sticks is the only one that does not require a watertight container and I do have all the materials (though the jar is full of pretzels at the moment) but it will also be the most difficult to put together, so I’d prefer to have at least one victory under my belt before starting.

Christmas is frighteningly close however, so I might just have to jump right in and make sure he has at least one of the discovery bottles I wanted to make for him. I do like making things unnecessarily difficult for myself.

It’s easy enough to make one with an empty soda bottle. I think think this is a pretty typical kindergarten through 3rd grade craft project slash science experiment. I wanted something a little nicer and more permanent than that, and most importantly, bigger, so I could do a couple other things on the inside.

You’d think it would be fairly easy to find a large empty plastic container, but everything shaped the way I wanted either has a lid too large, or is made of glass. Finally I decided a big plastic food container would work since I couldn’t find anything more sturdy, but I couldn’t find any with a mouth large enough. So far I am still without a container, but I think we’ll go to Costco this weekend and I think I’ll be able to find something there.

Inside the bottle, aside from the blue water and clear “air” (oil) I wanted to have a layer of pebbles on the bottom, easy enough, and a boat floating on the water. The boat is where I’m running into trouble.

I KNOW there are things that float on water and sink in oil. I remember it at least vaguely from 10th grade chemistry. What I don’t remember is what those objects are. I must admit that while I generally did well in science, density bottles were not my strong suit. In my density bottle, I added a layer of soap so even my oil and water mixed together.

My first thought was to make the boat out of a walnut shell, because everyone knows walnut shells float, right?

Walnut boats do float on the surface of water, but they float the same way a metal boat floats… based on shape. And like a metal boat, they will not rise to the surface once sunk. This is important obviously, since I can’t guarantee the boat in my wave bottle will stay upright on the surface, and once it’s sealed up, I won’t have anyway to rescue the wreckage.

That pretty much used up my imagination. I expected this to be pretty easy to find out online, but it’s remained surprisingly mysterious. I found a yahoo answers post that gave the relative densities of water and oil, which makes it completely easy because it’s so easy to find out the density of any particular object. Not that I really trust yahoo answers anyway. I also found sites suggesting that “some” plastics would float in water and sink in oil or “some” woods. So nothing simple and obvious.

I found a post somewhere that said wax would work, which seemed plausible. I didn’t think wax would make a very convincing boat though, and I was sort of stuck on the walnut shell, so I came up with the idea of filling the walnut shell with wax.

Then I came up with a brilliant alternative: crayon catamarans.

I bought two packs of crayons (so both sides of the catamaran would be the same color) jewelry wire and a whole bunch of other bits that I thought might work together with the boats, but when I sat down with oil and water and a broken black crayon… it sunk to the bottom of the water glass.

Terribly disappointing. No catamarans. Unless it was just that I used a black crayon… maybe a lighter color wouldn’t weigh as much (yes I’m joking. No need to correct my science please).

I did another google search and someone mentioned a rubber band. Obviously a rubber band won’t make a great boat but it DID give me the idea to try a bouncy ball.

And finally… a possibility.

So I have something that I know floats at the right level, now I just need to play with it some to see how I can make it look like a cute boat.

The current plan is to find a few bright colored bouncy balls, cut them in half, drill a hole through the middle and attach a sail using jewelry wire. I thought I’d use a glass bead to weigh down the bottom and make sure the sail stays pointing upwards, but I may be over-thinking this thing. For the sail I’m using a bit of fabric, and I’ll polyurethane the whole thing to keep it somewhat water safe.

I’ll post an update as soon as I figure it out.

Meanwhile, enjoy my rubber Saturn.

*First image from Flickr user Sean Rogers1. All following from me.

What babe? The babe with the power.

What power?

The power of voodoo!

Who do? You do.
Do what? Remind me of the babe.

I saw my baby, crying hard as babe could cry.

What could I do?

My baby’s love had gone
And left my baby blue!

Nobody knew:

What kind of magic spell to use? Slime or snails?
Or puppy dogs’ tails?
Thunder or lightning?

Then baby said: (?)

Dance magic, dance! Dance magic, dance!
Put that baby spell on me.

Jump magic, jump! Jump magic, jump!
Put that magic jump on me. Slap that baby, make him free?
I saw my baby, trying hard as babe could try.
What could I do? My baby’s fun had gone and left my baby blue.
Nobody knew:

What kind of magic spell to use? Slime or snails? Or puppy dog’s tails?
Thunder or lightning?
Then baby said: (?)

Dance magic, dance? Dance magic, dance? Put that baby spell on me.

Jump magic, jump! Jump magic, jump! Put that magic jump on me.
Slap that baby, make him free. (Don’t slap my baby!)
Dance magic, dance! Dance magic, dance! Dance magic, dance! Dance magic, dance!
Jump magic, jump! (Don’t jump, Ender!) Jump magic, jump! Put that baby spell on me.
You remind me of the babe.
What babe? The babe with the power.
What power? The power of voodoo!
Who do? You do!
Do what? Remind me of the babe.

*(Best photos from this labyrinth costume break down.)

Warning: many bodily fluids described ahead. If you aren’t interested in reading about the birth, skip the bulk of the text here for photos below.

My water broke at 4:30 am on Tuesday. I had been feeling little trickles for about half an hour, but kept saying, no, it’s NOT my water, until finally I decided to get up and use the restroom and WHOOSH, just like in the movies. Ender wasn’t due until June 11, and with a half constructed changing table, giant boxes waiting to be broken down and removed, and all sorts of pre-baby chaos in the house, Matt and I were hoping for just a LITTLE more time, but just as everyone who took a look at my giant belly predicted, Ender came a little early.

If you want to see a sleeping man leap straight to a standing position, “damnit, my water broke” are apparently magic words. Actually, a week later, Matt is still a little jumpy whenever I say the word “water” in the bedroom.

Though we’d been warned in our childbirth class that when the water breaks it doesn’t just stop… I wasn’t fully prepared for the fact that it just. kept. coming. I called my midwife Colleen from the bathroom and left a message with her answering service, then texted my doula Kim, and our friend Willow who is thinking of becoming a midwife or doula and who we had invited to attend the birth. Irregular contractions started shortly after my water broke, but they were so mild I wasn’t sure that’s what they were. I called the midwife again a couple hours later when I didn’t hear anything (she was sort of busy in another labor).

We put a towel down on the bed and Matt and I took a nap, figuring the easy part of labor would take a while, and we ought to get some rest while we could. Shockingly, we both managed to get a couple hours of sleep in.

When I woke up contractions had stopped entirely. We heard back from Colleen’s office around 10 or 11 I think. I was told that normally they’d recommend I stay at home and labor there as long as possible to avoid ending up with Pitocin, but because I was group B Strep positive and had ruptured membranes (water broken)  they wanted to get me in to be checked and figure out what to do from there.

On the car ride over to Colleen’s office, contractions had restarted, were consistently 5 minutes apart and irritating but still not especially painful. I had a couple more painful contractions walking to the office, and then once I was set up on the table to be checked, they stopped entirely again. I found this confusing, but I guess that’s all pretty normal. I was at 3 cm, so Colleen recommended Matt and I go to the nearby mall (air conditioning) and walk around for an hour or so, to try and get things going. I think this was around noon, but I’m not entirely sure. She asked us to call and check in at 4 (pm) and I assume at the point we would have needed to start talking induction.

As soon as we started walking, contractions started again, and they became more painful, though still tolerable. I was a little worried about how bad they’d get though, because they seemed to be almost entirely in my back, and I’ve not heard warm fuzzy things about back labor.

By about 2, contractions were getting to be less what I would call tolerable. We wanted to get a meal in me before starting what we figured would be a loooong day(s), so we drove to Liquid Planet for a smoothie and a pita. I didn’t manage to eat much. We left after fifteen minutes or so to go to the hospital, where I was pre-registered.

I should probably explain here, that I was trying to go for an unmediated birth. This is not for any philosophical reasons, it’s for phobia reasons: I hate needles. Pregnancy HAS actually reduced this fear considerably, along with years of annual flu shots and now, weekly to twice monthly allergy injections (2 in each arm), but the idea of a GIANT NEEDLE in my spine freaked me out, and I was way more afraid of that than the pain, so epidural was the course of last resort. I’d requested the holistic birthing suite. It’s a recently added labor room with a large jacuzzi bath for laboring and is generally set up for natural birth. That room was already occupied however, so we were put in a different room with a big baby pool instead. All the birthing rooms at St. Johns are private, so I didn’t really mind.

Colleen was still in another birth (I think a different one, apparently May has been insane for births) so the nurse set me up on a fluid IV until she could get a script for the antibiotics (for the GBS). They wanted to get me two doses before the birth. I think I threw a wrench in the works here… I’d forgotten to mention an amoxacillin resistance. They always ask about allergies… but resistance just means it stops working, and so I never thought to mention it. It was lucky I was reading about GBS treatment a few days earlier and saw that the normal treatment is penicillin. So I think it took longer than expected to get me sorted with antibiotics, and as a result I was laying in bed for a couple hours with a fluid IV and increasingly bad back labor. The nurse who set me up was very sweet and, reading my needle phobia, got my blood draw done at the same time as the IV poke (not exactly sure how that works).

At this point no one really knew how far along I was, because the plan had been to wait for Colleen to check me to avoid extra risk of infection from lots of checks, and Colleen was still caught up in labor. I hadn’t called Kim (doula) or Willow (trainee doula) yet, because the idea is to wait until active labor, and everyone figured I should wait to hear how far along I was. I knew I was in pain, but since I had no idea how BAD the pain would get, I wasn’t sure. When Colleen arrived, she took one look at me and said we should get me up and moving. She was a little surprised that I was still on an IV instead of just the heplock, and got the antibiotics truck rolling so I could be a little more mobil. Colleen suggested I move to the toilet in the meantime, which I found pretty gross, but the change in position did seem to help for a while. She also said yes, for the love of all that is holy or unholy, call the doulas (she may not have put it like that, I think my pain was starting to translate language in interesting ways). I was only at 4cm, which probably should have been discouraging, but Colleen made it sound like good progress.

Both Doulas were on the way, but I think I was still on the toilet when I said, get me some drugs, PLEASE. I had been mildly freaked at having a heplock, though mostly distracted by contractions, but at this point I was wholly thankful to have it, as it made the nubain that much easier to get into my blood.

Can I just say, nubain is awesome? I moved from the toilet to the rocker and the contractions still hurt, but I didn’t care that it hurt. I LOVED the nubain. The nurse said, “Oh yeah, you’re high,” and I said, “YES I am.” Anyway.

Kim and Willow showed up at around the same time, with me still flying but the pain sharpening through the drugs. When I started to have a hard time again, Kim got me up from the rocker, and had me kneel, leaning on a birthing ball. This helped some, but not enough. What DID help was the pressure Kim applied to my lower back. I think she showed Matt and Willow how to do this as well, but I was starting to lose track of who was doing what at this point.

For some reason they want you at 5 cm before you can use the birthing tub, but my pain levels were rising rapidly, and the second dose of nubain didn’t help for nearly as long as the first. I started to talk about an epidural, but Kim suggested I get checked to see if I was far enough along to use the tub. So we did that.

I don’t think anyone expected me to be further along than 5 cm, but I was at 7. They started filling the tub, and I tried to figure out what I wanted to do. I had a pretty good idea about how the rest of the night was going to go.

I think I was progressing faster than people thought I was. Colleen had predicted (out of my earshot) a baby sometime after breakfast. First time labors aren’t supposed to move all that fast, but the pain seemed to be escalating fast… I had a feeling if I got in the tub I’d lose my window for an epidural by the time I needed one. In the end I figured I’d give it a try, and if it didn’t help enough, I’d get the epidural.

It did help, a lot, especially with water on my back and Matt stroking my hair. It ended up working out really well for me that the birthing suite was occupied: the baby pool used as a replacement was padded everywhere so I could move around without fighting hard surfaces. The walls were like vinyl couches.

Everything still hurt more than I felt I could cope with. At this point everything goes from kind of blurry to almost blank in my memory. I think I went into transition almost as soon as I got into the tub. It was horrific. It’s as close as I’ve come to crying from pain in my adult life. Friends had told us that the screaming you see on TV is unrealistic, but let me tell you, I am a screamer. Also a curser, though I’d like to point out that  my swearing wasn’t directed at anyone, and I don’t believe I ever resorted to screaming, “you did this to me,” at Matt.

I think the only reason I didn’t say, “that’s it, get me the epidural,” is that I sort of zonked out in the short peace between contractions and couldn’t focus long enough to say anything.

I have no idea how long transition lasted. At some point I started feeling “pushy” and when I mentioned it Kim and the nurse said to go ahead and push. Colleen wasn’t around at that point, I think she was nap-recovering in another room from her back to back deliveries, so I started pushing halfheartedly, not really sure.

I think at this point I managed to vocalize that I wanted an epidural if it wasn’t too late. I was pretty sure it was too late, so I wasn’t too crushed when they got me out of the tub to check me and announced I was fully dilated, and someone ran to get Colleen.

Kim kept saying, “push through the pain,” and eventually I realized that pushing actually made the pain of the contraction LESS and I started pushing with a lot more enthusiasm. They asked me if wanted to get back in the tub, but I was pretty sure I didn’t have the energy/coordination/balance to get back in, much less back OUT again, and I did not want to deliver in the water, so we continued in bed. I don’t remember when Colleen got there, or when they added the birthing bar, and when I look at the nurse in the photos, I don’t even recognize her (there were a couple shift changes while I was in labor).

The pushing actually hurt much less than transition. It was incredibly HARD, but such a relief to be in less pain that I was able to joke around a bit with everyone in between contractions. There was still considerable pain, I was still yelling and cursing, but it was more about the exertion than the agony. Colleen was awesome about explaining that the almost unbearable pressure/pain/stretching at the end of each contraction let me stretch more slowly. Kim managed to get me to relax between and prepare for the next. For the most part, I think pushing was within my coping range, but it was probably the most physically taxing thing I’ve ever had to do.

At first pushing was fairly productive, according to Matt, Kim and Willow you could physically SEE the difference as Ender moved down. One of the few times I opened my eyes, I glanced down and was startled at how flat my belly was. Progress seemed to stall right at the end though, and everyone kept telling me I needed to push harder/more.   I didn’t exactly have more to put into it. Eventually Colleen said if we didn’t get him out soon she’d need to do an episiotomy or get the vacuum. She was actually numbing me up for the an episiotomy which got me a bit panicky (the needles, not the thought of cutting which I wasn’t thrilled about either) but I finally managed to get him out in the next push.

Before, they kept talking about how he would “pop” out once he got over that edge, and that’s really what it felt like.

I actually thought Colleen had bopped him on the head to somehow get him to jump out (it didn’t make any more sense in my head to be honest) and then there was this wiggly mass of baby on the bed. Matt was supposed to get to hold him first, but the umbilical cord wasn’t quite long enough for that, so they put him on my chest. He was sort of greyish blue, which really worried me while they were suctioning out his lungs. The first of many freakouts in parenting, I realize. I’m pretty sure it was only a matter of seconds before they cleared his lungs and he started screaming in earnest, but it felt like quite a lot longer. He pinked up pretty soon once they got him crying, though his feet and hands stayed purplish for a bit.

I literally do not remember ever seeing that nurse. I was pretty content to just stare at Ender, though I think it took about a day for the real awe to set in.

The name Olivander doesn’t have any special significance for our family, we found it in a baby name book, and both quite liked it. We figured it’s nice and unique without being so weird sounding that he’ll get teased or be embarrassed. I have no idea what the “right” way to pronounce it is, but we’re saying it like a mash-up of Oliver and Alexander.

Olivander means “protector of the olive tree”  which we thought was kind of cool. As a side note, Oliver means “olive tree” but it can also mean “elf army,” which is sort of awesome. We did NOT get the name Olivander from Harry Potter, though one of the characters is named Mr. Ollivander, and I’m sure people will assume that no matter what we say. Ah well.

Ender is a character from a favorite sci-fi book, Ender’s Game by Orson Scott Card. We figure if he doesn’t like that nickname when get gets older, he can always go by Ollie or Van or even Oliver. Olivander is the name I used while he was in the womb, and Ender seems like a different creature than the imaginary baby I carried around for nine months. To us he looks like an Ender.

Willow was our wedding photographer, and she took most of the photos during the birth, as well as keeping me stocked in ice chips (love ice chips) and probably helping out in lots of other ways that I was too busy to notice. She also took a flipbook worth of photos of Ender crowning, which I will not be sharing, and which make me wince. Lots. I have a second degree tear, which I’d hoped to avoid, but I realize in terms of tearing it could be much worse.

Of course, every minute of the pain was worth it, but I wouldn’t say it was necessary. I wasn’t sure where my needle fear would balance with pain tolerance, and now I know: next time I’m getting the epidural.

It’s interesting to me that some of the people who set out to have a natural birth say they’re doing it that way because they want to be “present” for the birth, to be aware of the whole experience. For myself, I think I would have been much more aware and present had I had less pain. I think I would have been mentally defeated pretty early on without the nubain and the support of both my husband and doula(s). Transition was impossible, and I kept repeating, “I don’t want to,” because I realized, “I can’t,” was pretty much unhelpful and, frankly, untrue as evidenced by human history. The only real upside I can about the pain is that it made the pushing phase seem tolerable by comparison, but even with that, I think I may have had more energy for it if I hadn’t been so spent by transition.

I am glad it went the way it went. I am also glad it’s over.

The next morning:

Look at me, wearing clothes. That didn’t happen much while at the hospital, they aren’t kidding when they say modesty flies out the door.

Holding him is incredible. I can’t believe how soft he is.

With our insurance we get two days at the hospital from time of birth, and since Ender was kind enough to be born just after midnight, it was closer to three days, which made me feel much more secure about the whole healthy newborn thing, especially since my labor was fairly short- they only had time to give me one dose of antibiotics for the GBS.

I kept asking people if his nose looked yellow, but they periodically tested his bilirubin levels (the way they measure jaundice) and they were fine… right up until the point that they jumped up to not fine. I think that was sometime late Thursday, and unfortunately they weren’t able to get a blood test on him until Friday, when we were supposed to be discharged.

The levels were high enough that they told us he needed to stay another night… and under the UV lamps the whole time.

That was tough news… one of the things we loved about the hospital was that we had the option of keeping him with us the whole time we were there, and the UV lamps meant our time with him was limited to half hour feedings every three hours.

There were a few upsides to this though. The first one was that they wanted to supplement my milk with a little formula after each feeding to make sure he was getting enough (and flushing out his system). This gave Matt and opportunity to feed Ender, which he wouldn’t have had otherwise since everyone says don’t introduce a bottle until 4 weeks etc, etc.

Probably the biggest upside of being separated from him is that, as much as it sucked, it gave us a chance to sleep in solid 3 hour blocks. The last two nights had been disrupted by every little sound he made, every big sound he made, as we struggled to figure out how to get him to sleep, and the frequent checks by nurses on both his and my health. The third day, where I was technically discharged from the hospital (we stayed on as “boarders” at no cost) there were no checkups, and no fussing, but we still had access to lactation consultants and knew our baby was being taken care of. So even though it was emotionally rough, we both felt much better for the extra rest and support the next day, and I think we went home from the hospital much more recovered than most people do. We had to continue to monitor Ender’s bilirubin levels, and today they finally went down on their own. He’s still a tiny bit fake-tan looking, but he’s beautiful anyway and with any luck his color will return completely to normal over the next day or so.

Of course the final benefit was that being away from him made us appreciate being with him, and gave us an extra drop of patience for the next week of sleep deprivation. It’s anyone’s guess how long that will last, but for now, we’re all three feeling pretty good.

I’ll try to post more photos later this week.

The girls, aged 7 and 5 (8 and 6 by the time I finished, I was not over stating how insane long it took me to finish) liked the ducks, but we wanted to give them a fresh room and they were excited to have a room painted to their specs. (Somewhat. Even without previous experience, I know better than to take my design instruction 100% from kids, otherwise the room would have ended up half neon orange and half neon pink. Just saying.)

The older niece (we’ll call her N1) wanted a jungle/forest room, and the younger (N2) wanted a princess room, because when kids are sharing, nothing is simple. So I decided to do a sort of enchanted forest thing, with animals climbing the walls for N1 and a floating castle peeking through the trees for N2.

Most childrens’ rooms can end up looking awfully cartoon-y. We seem to have the notion that all childrens’ decor must be primary colors, or at least painfully bright, and if it works for a 6 year old they’d better outgrow it by the time they’re 7. My goal was to design a room that would work for both N1 and N2, and preferably continue to work for them as they grew into preteens.

The first thing we did was hang up the curtains from their old room, then started stripping wallpaper. This was gunky messy work, and the girls were able to help which I think they both enjoyed.

The texture left on the stripped wall was cool, almost intentional looking. It reminded me of a map, and made a nice backdrop to the globe. It almost seemed a shame to paint over it, but of course, we painted over it. In picking paint we (J and I) stuck to two main background colors. As I said, I wanted something that could grow with the girls, so we went with fairly muted colors: a yellowish bamboo green and a greyed out purple. The green went up first. J did most of the painting.

It’s always hard for me to tell how a color is going to look once you get it on the wall, but I LOVED the green.

Next I put up masking tape, in a non-pattern pattern to represent “trees.” I used two different widths of tape to keep it from looking overly ordered. Since the final intended effect would be flat, I hoped it would also create a sense of depth that unified width “trees” would not.

The effect of the tape on the green walls was striking. I think the girls would have been happy if we’d just left it like that.

For the next step we (and again, in this case we means J) painted over everything in our purple color. This didn’t look nearly as cool as the tape on green, and it stayed this way for several months which I felt a little bit bad about. N1 and N2 were remarkably patient, though I think every time I saw them N2 would ask me when I was going to paint her side pink. Eventually, I got around to the next step, painting clouds on top of the purple. This is a terribly stereotypical little-kid room motif, but I like to think I put a different spin on it. Once again, J did most of the actual painting after I outlined the cloud shapes on the wall.

With all the clouds up, I was able to start detailing the clouds. From here on, I think I can honestly say I did all the painting, rather than just stealing credit from J.

I outlined the clouds in a metalic paint that was supposed to be silver, but looked more gold or bronze depending on the light. It was a much darker color than I expected, which I think worked out quite well. One of these days I’ll learn to make art that looks cool according to plan instead of accident, but for now, I’ll take what I can get.

Once I finished all the outlines, I started sketching in the little details, a castle for N2 and some jungle animals for N1. N2 only got the one fantasy element because the castle took so much more work than the animals. I googled Disney castles and pulled a bunch of images that I thought N2 would like, then freehanded it with pencil on the wall. I don’t quite have the painting confidence to just paint without pre-sketching, and chalk didn’t work, but fortunately the pencil came off in the end.

The details went pretty quickly, but I still had to leave long gaps between steps because I don’t live super close.

Once the pencil was up I was able to start painting. This took far longer than I expected, because the undercolor, white, required several coats to look convincing. Once I got the white up however, the color went on more rapidly. Of course N2 got a PINK castle. I tried to match the color to the comforters and curtains, but I think I ended up going a little overboard and used a color that looked more like a highlighter exploded on the wall. N2 LOVES it though, so I guess that’s all that matters.

N1 got three animals. She specifically requested a monkey and a cat, but I decided she also needed a koala. I think the cat is her favorite, and the spots were quite fun to paint.

I intentionally kept the wall facing their beds a little calmer than the wall behind their pillows, with the notion that you don’t want anything TOO exciting to look at while you’re trying to sleep.

I have insomnia, so probably I’m a little oversensitive about that. We didn’t really have any plans for the door or the closet door, so I was pleasantly surprised that the cream color looked nice against the mural, and we didn’t have to do anything at all. The blue carpet does not match quite so nicely unfortunately, but it’s not a big deal. I think the eventual plan is to pull it out and restore the wood floors underneath, which should look incredible. All in all I think the room turned out well.

N1′s animals are mostly orange with a bit of the pink, and N2′s pink castle has touches of orange to tie them together.

The girls added the butterfly stickers.

Ultimately I’m not sure I succeeded in giving them a room that will stay timely into their teens. N2′s castle especially is pretty age specific, very little girl. Despite my attempt to broaden the visual style with black outlines and stark, limited color, I can’t quite see N2 wanting the hot pink princess castle next to her bed when she’s ten. At least it gave them a dramatically different space and they had a lot of imput in the creation. Possibly they would have been happier with something cartoon-y-er, I’m not sure. I honestly don’t know that I could have done a good job on a typical cartoon style childrens’ mural anyway. This simplified flat color with line detail is much more suitable to my artistic style.

Now of course, I’m planning my second mural/room design, for our baby‘s bedroom. I have the same goal of longevity (so I don’t have to paint over it in 4 years) that I had for my nieces’ room. My friend Kim is going to help me with the painting since I’m getting less mobile by the day, and also because she loves painting murals and is awesome at it. Hope to have something to post photos of soon.

Part of the reason for this is that it gave me a great excuse to dye my hair blue. For as long as I can remember, Halloween has been my favorite holiday, and that’s half because I love the spooky and half because I just love costumes. I take my costumes very seriously. When I ordered my yellow rain boots online, Amazon gave me this screen:

So it’s clear I’m not the only one who had the idea to dress as Coraline. But wigs are for the weak!

Anyway, I’ve dyed my hair blue before, and it did not go well. I followed online instructions rather than what was on the bottle, and ended up with crappy looking blue hair for about a day and a half… and seaweed green hair for another 6 months. In spite of past experience I ended up choosing the same dye (Raw Colors’ True Blue from Hot Topic) and this time I followed the instructions on the bottle.

It seems to have worked much better, but the dye gets everywhere.

I have a blue tub and a blue pillow case (inside out fortunately) and the only reason my face is no longer blue is because I scrubbed it off with Gojo. Note: when dying your hair, don’t bother using Vaseline on the outside of your ear, because they’re going to get dyed no matter how much you use. Put the Vaseline INSIDE your ears. This color seems to be fading to a dark teal color, and though I’m sure it will eventually get to that unlovely seaweed hue, I’m a bit more optimistic about the fading. We’ll see.*

Costumes are all about details, so I replayed the movie over and over to figure out what I needed. I was surprised at the lack of dragonfly barrettes (I found only a really crappy one, for $10 and decided it wasn’t worth it), so I thought I’d use the costume as an excuse to try my hand at some wire jewelry. Then I ran out of time.

Instead I dug through some of my old jewelry and found a dragonfly necklace from who knows when, and pinned it over a plain white barrette and called it close enough. I did manage to find a small purple messenger bag like the one Coraline carries when she’s outside. It’s not exactly the same color, and it’s got more to it then the one from the movie, but I liked it, and it looked like something Coraline would pick out if she had the option.

Of course the ultimate Coraline detail would be the spy-doll.

I don’t really sew, but this seemed like a good chance to try. I don’t think the doll appears at all in the book Coraline, but I’m all about costume details, and I thought the Coraline doll would add just the right bit of creepy.

I started off well enough, but once I stuffed it, the whole thing fell apart (not literally). The shape was completely wrong, and when I added in fabric paint it looked creepy… but in entirely the wrong ways. I also just didn’t leave enough time, so finally the night before Halloween I had to call the doll a fail. I left it on the table to dry, where it completely freaked out Matt when he got home from work, so, you know, I got SOME Halloween satisfaction from it.

This year was the first time I’ve been in town to celebrate Halloween with my friends in about five years. While I worked for the Vindicator, I ended up going to a student media conference every year and then last year, I was of course on our honeymoon. I wore my ceramic horns and Matt and I went reverse trick-or-treating on the train (we gave out candy) so that was lots of fun, but it’s not the full-costume Halloween I’ve missed. Overall I think Coraline was probably one of my more successful costumes, probably because it was extremely simple. It was also one of my more economical costumes since most of the elements were either something I could reuse, or things I already owned.

Plus, I still have blue hair, so OBVIOUSLY it’s a costume winner.

*The background in this photo comes from one of the tunnel scenes in Coraline. It is owned by whoever owns it (Henry Selick? Neil Gaiman? Not sure, but certainly not ME) and I have no idea whether it’s legal to use it in this context. If someone from Coraline land (no I don’t mean the OTHER world, I mean author, director, frothing lawyers etc.) wishes me to take it down, I will do so.