Becoming my parents

I grew up to the sound of National Radio. All through my childhood, my dad woke at some predawn hour and switched on the radio in the kitchen while he made us porridge for breakfast and thick slab vogel sandwiches for lunch (oh my god I sound old) and the sounds carried through to my room. The four tones, three short and one long, that precede the news on the hour; the weather report spoken by the same voice with the same order of placenames each day (Northland, Auckland, Waikato and the Coromandel Peninsula, scattered showers clearing in the evening...); the radio plays and short stories read by enthusiastically dramatic voices.

Add to that Bob Dylan, Ella Fitzgerald, Van Morrison, Cat Stevens, Paul Simon, and a solid amount of classical music, and you have the sounds of my childhood.

Like most children, I grew up chortling at a good deal of what my parents did.  National Radio? It's just people talking. Classical music? Borrr-ing! But like most people in their late twenties and early thirties, my parents' habits have started to become my own.

I don't have much time for reading at the moment. I don't have much time for feeding my brain. I haven't read a newspaper in a long time, although I have read the odd BBC article on my fancy smartphone, a gift from a friend that has proved sanity-saving when breastfeeding takes up a good chunk of the day.

I tried TV. Have you watched daytime television lately? At first I found it amusingly terrible, but now it's just terrible. It's all hype (Tyra), dirtbags (Jeremy Kyle), weird kids shows (H2O Just Add Water) and awful makeover scenarios for the home and body (60 Minute Makeover and Queer Eye for the Straight Guy).

So I looked up the frequency for National Radio and found my housebound mind both nourished and calmed by the string of shows emanating from the stereo. There was no blast of advertising; short stories were read, giving me that old inspired feeling I had almost forgotten; and they even played some fairly modern music. What's more, the consistency of the voices seemed to make Zephyr sleep longer. His nap stretched for two hours and I was left feeling pleasantly surprised by the absence of distaste that becoming my parents left with me.

I thought I would take it one step further. I downloaded an album off Itunes: Mozart for Mother and Baby. I played it for Zephyr's next nap and found myself relaxing as I settled him to sleep, rather than fretting about how long it might take. He, consequently, fell asleep easily and slept blissfully to the sounds of Piano Concerto No. 20 in D. I was sold.

So I guess this is how it starts. Zephyr is going to grow up, like I did, despising the boring radio and the boring sleepy music I play for him, and then, in thirty years time, the cycle will begin again.

The never-ending education

Speaking with my best friend the other day, she remarked that when she read my blog about the birth, she was amazed at how much I knew. I told her that when you get pregnant, you naturally learn a lot about what's going on inside you, from being around midwives, executing paranoid google searches, and reading books given to you by well-meaning aunts.

Being in the presence of a growing baby pretty much 24 hours a day is a whole new education. This is immersion at its most intense. The most challenging thing about it so far is that it changes. You don't ever have it all figured out, because the baby is changing every day as he grows and develops. Just when I think I know his likes and dislikes, his sleeping patterns or his tendencies, he surprises me, sometimes for the better and sometimes for the worse.

I had come to the realisation that he wasn't ever going to like sitting in his bouncinette while I got little chores done around the house (in pregnancy I had this image of a happy baby chortling away while I baked a cake or did the dishes), because every time I tried to put him in there, he cried. Then the other day he sat in there for a good twenty minutes (this is a lifetime in baby hours), watching me quite happily while I put together my muesli.

At least I can never get bored!

Last week I wrote a note for a blog post idea: 'getting things done in tiny windows of time'. I was going to talk about how I had become quite adept at preparing for and executing small tasks in Zephyr's sleeping hours, however, since writing that note I have also changed. I have realised that trying to do too much while he sleeps has a negative effect on both of us. It means that while he's awake, I have an agenda. I'm thinking about how I will carry out the task, make the phone call, whatever it is, as soon as I can get him to sleep. I am picturing the laundry being hung out, the dishes being done, or the blog post being written, and I am not concentrating on the baby.

He knows, and he reacts accordingly. There are long periods of crying and I am at a loss as to what he wants. And I'm missing out. He's changing so fast (motherhood cliche, but it's true) and if I let all these little moments go by planning for stupid chores, I won't see how he's developing. I won't notice his changes and I won't see his cues. I won't notice that his feeds are getting shorter or longer, or that he needs naps sooner or later than he did before. So I have decided to slow right down. It seems to be working for both of us, but some days I find it difficult. There is some neat freak side of me that has trouble letting go.

Anyway, picture update...

And I better go rest before those chubby cheeks wake up.