fine whine

Welcome, Carnival of Breastfeeding readers. My wife put me up to this, but as long as she does the majority of waking up late at night, and changes more diapers overall, I'm generally willing to go along with what she tells me to do.

So our daughter is breastfed, basically exclusively, other than the applesauce*. That said, she's eaten in a variety of places, public and otherwise, and every time I've been ready for somebody to be outraged. And waiting.

Except that nobody is bothered by it, to my befuddlement. I aggregate a few "new dad" blogs, and they rarely fail to point out a new media blitz when some celebrity in NYC or L.A. pulls up or down her shirt and gives her kid some milk. The blog and/or youtube comments following those articles are very, very informative as to the great gulf between the folks who find 'feeding fantastic, and the ones who are disgusted by the very notion of its mention, let alone seeing any portion of an exposed breast. Likewise the stories of women thrown off airplanes for offending more prudish passengers or flight attendants.

But out in the real world, I can't seem to find anybody willing to vocally object, or to even sneer, or look away in disgust. Either I'm ignoring such people, or they just aren't out there, around here. A couple weekends ago shoppers passing through the hoity-toity upscale mall portion of Columbus's Easton shopping mecca might have glanced, in the front window of Claire's (an earring and cheap jewelry boutique, for those of the non-female persuasion), a distraught baby with two new holes in her head, getting some comfort food from her mom.

For the record, I'm still not convinced getting Natalya's ears pierced before she's old enough to pay for it was a good idea. I have no such reservations about her being breastfed, and again, am almost sad nobody else seems to object either.

Not that I'd throw down my gloves and get into a good scrap with the offended party, anyway, but I'd point out that my wife would give them a good talking-to.

As for this Carnival, here are some more links:

• Jessica's post
• breastfeeding.blog.motherwear.com
• breastfeeding123.com
• mamaknowsbreast.com
• thelactivist.blogspot.com
• breastfeedingmums.typepad.com
• crunchydomesticgoddess.com
• nursingyourkids.com

* I don't really count shoving spoonfuls of peaches and sweet potatoes into her mouth "feeding" as I think of it as, more or less, an early, pediatrician-approved form of torture. The mashed-up bananas, well, once she's started eating more than she ends up wearing, then I'll figure out what I think of those.

... a baby rolling over! If you can't see the player below, click here to see the video.

The funny thing is, of course, that by the time I finally got around to uploading this, she's mastered the front-to-back roll as well, so she can now roll over and over and over*.

I've also uploaded a few more pictures to the photo album, which means I'm only about a hundred behind, or so.

* I guess I'll just have to build a tracking dolly so I can get a film of that.

... or rather, lack of content.

First, let me be the last to wish everybody a Happy New Year 2007*. I never intended to let the entirety of January pass without writing anything at all, but the fact that I'm actually writing this on February second would show that exactly that has happened.

I didn't have any drafts started for the month, at least not in my software.

This is not to say that nothing interesting has happened; only that writing about it isn't atop my to-do list anymore. Coincidentally, neither is beating up the denizens of Azeroth - I'm almost completely weaned from the World of Warcraft, too.

But enough about things virtual and insignificant.

It's been a big month for our daughter, too. Just last week Natalya started attending daily day care, and Jessica's gone back to work. Our day-to-day routines continue to evolve - I now wake up more than twenty minutes before I leave as it is my responsibility to feed (and sometimes re-clothe) Natalya. I think I'm going to assemble a DVD or two of TV episodes to watch in the morning as I feed her, since my initial experiments into holding a baby, a bottle, and a Playstation 2 controller have been less than successful.

I haven't added many new photos of her to my gallery recently, and in fact haven't taken as many either. But I do have a few to upload, and have no intentions of stopping taking pictures anytime soon.

So then you ask, other than not taking pictures of my daughter, what have I been doing these last several weeks?

At work I've been spending a considerable chunk of my time doing workshops that are not exactly in the scope of my day-to-day responsibilities. My day-to-day responsibilities have not exactly shrunken to accomodate these added demands, however, and as such have had some extra workload issues.

As such, I've been borrowing a laptop at night. A laptop which, I have discovered, gets better wireless reception than any of the ones I've tried before in my house. In fact I am able to piggyback onto the wireless network of one of my neighbors across the street, as long as I stick to the front rooms of our house, particularly near the windows. I've entertained the notion of trying to figure out exactly which house houses the router to which I connect, but haven't tried very hard so far. I have, however, finally seen the first season of Arrested development and the first two of NBC's The Office, and I must say, they're quite funny.

Of course both shows would be perfect feeding-time entertainment, but this idea has only occurred to me after I've already watched them, before I was consistently feeding Natalya every morning. I suppose I could always re-watch them, of course.

As ever, though, watching TV shows is the merest fraction of the time my TV is on; I'm watching movies at pretty much my usual pace. Unusual, however, are the movies themselves: I've begun watching Bollywood movies. Though I haven't made it through ten of them, I (arbitrarily) decided to watch 50 Hindi movies by 2008, though I may need to revise that goal to 'movies from India' to better cover the non-Bollywood films (i.e. ones not in Hindi). Even from the few I've seen I have much about them to write, and hope to get around to doing that soon, since I've been bouncing the ideas around in my head for quite some time.

At the risk of promising almost nothing and still failing, I'm not going to make any promises or resolutions about posting more.

And any rumors that this post is timed to match yet another threadless sale are, well, nonexistent until now, and entirely untrue. They are, in fact, doing another sale, however this time around to save $5 per shirt you need to buy two of the same, for you and ostensibly for your sweetheart. This is also your chance to stock up on duplicates, I suppose.

Whenever Jessica and I inadvertantly wear the same color shirt I'm tempted to change clothes - I'm not sure I'd be interested in wearing the same (trendy, hipster approved) shirt as her. So it goes.

* Or may I be one of the first to wish a Happy New Year of the Boar? Chinese New Year is rapidly approaching - it won't be 4704 much longer!

I can't resist it any longer. Threadless has been running a $10 sale for almost the entire last month, and it's over Thursday.

I'm considering buying only one this time around: The downside of genetic engineering.

Other notable designs:

• The Communist Party
• Funkalicious
• No Repeats!
• Mechanical Mayhem
• Calling Home
• Memories, Sweet Memories
• The War Against Work
• THIS Is How The World Ends

But enough about shirts*.

December is not the brightest month, generally. If I put any stock in all of the newly discovered 'disorders' (or owned stock in the companies that make drugs to treat them) I self-diagnose myself with a mild case of Seasonal Affective Disorder, whereby as the seasons get colder I'm less of my warm self.

Except that that's pretty much what happens to most people, to some degree. The days are shorter and darkness falls earlier and earlier; people don't leave their warm abodes as often, fostering cabin fever, and then there's always the incessant Christmas music that is inescapable from Halloween on.

Every year I've been posting to this site I've posted less and less during the month of December. This year I've got even more of an excuse: sleep deprivation.

Which brings me to the baby. She's been doing pretty well - we've got her on something of a normal schedule at night, at least, whereby she sleeps from about 11 until 5 in the morning. Unfortunately in order to get her to do this we need to keep her from getting too much sleep during the daytime - and by 'we' I mean Jessica during the day, and me after dark. Some nights she's okay with the plan, but other times she cries and cries, until I can find the one magic fix, which is never the same night to night. Sometimes she just wants to lay on the floor or the table, other nights she wants to be rocked in the rocker, some nights I walk with her on the treadmill for half an hour, and sometimes she calms down in the swing. It's never the same thing one night to the next, but I guess that's just how babies are.

I have set up a photo gallery of sorts, and you can look at it by clicking on the '/photos' link above. At some later date I'll post more information about where the pictures are and how you can get better copies of them, for printing and such, but at the rate I've been writing lately that won't happen until February.

Until then, well, happy holidays and stuff.

* The best way to shop is the stock chart. The usual disclaimers apply: All of the Threadless links, except the one in this sentence, contain affiliate information for me through which I get store credit if you buy a shirt. Or lots of shirts. They make great gifts, you know!

Natalya received two important cards this week, one from the federal government and one from the city library. Though she doesn't have a wallet at the moment, she's never supposed to carry the first card in it, and probably won't need to carry the latter one either, even though she'll probably be using it considerably more*.

I've already begun using her number to reserve more movies, as well as children's music, which I will duly file away to hopefully never need to use as a disciplinary measure.

* It is my hope that she picks up my propensity for memorizing several-digit numbers. I've got two of my credit card numbers, all three of our social security numbers and now all three of our credit cards, as well as a random smattering of phone numbers, available at a moment's thought. But ask me how old I am, and I'm stumped for several seconds.

Oy, missed another week and all I've got to post is more baby stuff. She does have a tendency to consume more of my time than many other things at the moment, so I suppose I shouldn't be surprised for such to spill over into something like this.

So. Yesterday was her first Thanksgiving. I'm pretty sure Thanksgiving's not too high on the list of the big "Baby's first..." holidays, but hey, that doesn't make it any less factual*.

For that matter, there were a couple more 'first's today of equal note:

• She spit up on me - it wasn't very much stuff, though.
• She grabbed and pulled off my glasses (without dropping them).

I'm not sure she meant to do either, but I'm pretty sure they both count as some sort of minor milestone in her development. It's not like she's talking ro walking yet, but hey, she's not even a month old.

* Immediately after typing that 'factual' I got Zippidy-doodah in my head. "It's the truth, it's actual, everything is satis-factual..." and whatnot. I know that my exposure to children's music is only beginning again, but that doesn't mean I'm not going to try and make it pleasant for the three of us.