Unsettled

I would love to write about something other than raising a baby - I have several items floating around my head - but the fact is that a newborn consumes every spare moment of your life.

Since last Saturday, evenings have proved to be a real struggle. Not unusually for a baby, evenings have been Alex's unsettled time. He refuses to go to sleep after his evening feed until (hopefully) his late night feed. That means that we can't rest from the time I get home from vwork until maybe 11pm.

On the upside he is often alert and can give you the most wonderful smiles when you play with him. However, too much play just exacerbates the wakefulness problem. My problem is that I end up absolutely exhausted myself, my whole body ready to collapse in a heap. Oh well, I still have some tricks to try.

Even after he is settled we still have to get up for his later feeds. The late-night television viewing continues. This week I discovered that while channels 7 and 10 both show the Home Shopping program at the same time, the remaining commercial station, channel 9 has Danoz-Direct which advertises the same products anyway. Collusion!

We have been mainly watching pre-recorded television anyway to get around the mundane nature of late night TV. The hilarious zombies of Shaun of the Dead. Kita ignored the melodrama of Rex in Rome until he heard the squeak of a dog toy. I prefer the Austrian version.

Yesterday we all attended Possum Cottage, where the nurses help you with feeding and settling problems for a day. They seemed pleased with us, but it was so nice to leave a sleeping Alex in their care for an hour while we had lunch in a cafe.

Possum Cottage is located at Sutherland Hospital. Their recent redevelopment has included some gorgeous courtyards, each different. My favourite was a bamboo forest with a pond of clear water bumbling over a mat of bamboo leaves, toy pandas positioned as if climbing the thick bamboo stems.

More late night TV

Late night television tends to be pretty dire, endless informercials masquerading as programming, ads for mobile phone sex videos and singles sites, evangelical preachers or stations closed for the night. I may be a creature of the night, but I certainly wouldn't stay up to watch any of those programs.

Last night, a Saturday night, was a little different, at least for a few hours. There were lots of movies on the TV, so much so that I stayed up to watch rather than trying to catch an hour's sleep in between feeds. Started off with Jurassic Park, then some Reign of Fire, which I have tried to watch a few times unsuccessfully (ended up recording it). On another channel, Men in Black, which is perfect for light, uninvolved viewing.

After all these big Hollywood motion pictures the commercial stations went into SBS mode. I mean, what's a movie about a East European transvestite doing on Channel 9? Channel 7 had the movie City of Ghosts on. It was about an American conman who had escaped to Cambodia. Actually, I didn't care about the plotline, but the photography of rural and city Cambodia was evocative.

It was a bit like sitting on an overnight long distance airline flight. With nothing better to do you end up half watching movies on the main screen that you ordinarily wouldn't bother viewing. And they always end up being more enjoyable that way.

In the wee hours of the morning when let the dog out to do his business the illusion of night flying was made more complete. The sky above me was clear and I could see the stars in sharp focus. The city around me was dark and silent as it so rarely is. I could have been up there in the sky, cruising awake over the sleeping lands with only the hum of the jet engine to be heard.

Bright Dragon

Two weeks after he was born we finally settled on Alex's middle name.

We had decided long ago that our children would have a Chinese middle name. Mother in law wanted a Mandarin (Putonghua) name, saying that it would replace the other Chinese dialects in future. Right though she may be, B doesn't speak Mandarin, only Cantonese, and the Mandarin names are not only difficult to correctly pronounce, but also the official Pinyin romanisation looks nothing like the sound.

At the last moment we changed to a Cantonese name. It doesn't matter if the language is "dying" because this a way of honouring it and anyway, the characters (not official, because you can only register English character names) are the same as in Mandarin.

After all that, what is his middle name? Ming-Lang 明龍.

It means "Bright Dragon". Actually, Lang is not the most correct romanisation of the character, which is also symbolic of the Chinese Emperor, but it's how B's surname was written so we kept it.

Hopefully our Bright Dragon won't be Ming the Merciless and be kind enough not to be so unsettled at night!

Chinese and kanji character tools

We decided that Alex should have a Chinese middle name to represent that side of his heritage, as suggested by B's mother. As neither of us can read most Chinese characters we have had to rely on translation and romanisation tools to assist us in determining the correct spelling for the name.

The following tools are pretty useful:

• Convert Chinese characters to pinyin with English meanings
• Mandarin and Cantonese translator (Learn Cantonese site)
• Cantonese dictionary
  
• Kanji (Japanese) to hiragana and romaji
  

Things I learned from late night TV

So we were up at around 2am feeding baby Alex when we decided to switch on the television. It was so terribly disappointing to see that the moronic mobile phone game shows were off the air, but there was still an education to be had. We learned:

• How to hide drug paraphenalia as sex toys (Life Support, SBS)
• That Australian satirical comedy is better than US satirical comedy (Life Support, SBS vs MadTV, 9)
• St Malo is cold this time of year (World weather, SBS)
• That channels 7 and 10 should be taken to the ACCC.

What are channel 7 and 10 doing showing exactly the same television program at the same time of night? Okay, I can almost forgive something like a speech from the PM or a royal wedding, but the Home Shopping Network? It's anti-competitive!

An ear for music

Thrice I have told an upset Alex to "listen to the music" playing from my MP3 collection and he has gone quiet and focussed on the sound. He tends to calm down when exposed to instrumental music, especially the more relaxed film soundtracks in my collection.

There was an exception last night. I left the radio in his room tuned to ABC Classic FM. In the wee hours of the morning I woke to find him whining. Upon entry into his room I heard what sounded like an energetic film piece playing. Obviously Alex was trying to bring it to my attention, the clever boy!

He, and consequently us, had a rough time last night. Our bub just wouldn't settle. Eventually I got him to sleep on my belly while I lay on the couch in the study listening to movie music.

Hopefully Alex's ear for music indicates some mathematical abilities as well. The two are supposedly linked. Wonder if he's left-handed as well. A disproportionate number of fellow students in my maths lectures were lefties, myself included. B's a natural lefty as well and maths was one of her best subjects.

I've introduced him to music. The cricket is on so I can share that with him as well. His curiosity should give him an interest in science and travel with any luck. Oooh, who's daddy's boy then?

The spacetime continuum

Spending weeks in a fugue state with only a few hours sleep at night in between programming or writing essays has not been an uncommon experience for me. I even enjoy it, truth be told. But it is nothing like the sleep deprived state I am experiencing right now with a newborn baby.

When working on a project it is work, sleep enough to continue working, eat so you can work and, just now and then relax to clear some space in your head. You fix yourself in a focussed state of mind, concentrating on the task, constantly processing information.

At this moment I can barely recall information, let alone store it. Instead of hours of time merging uncounted into one long stream of conciousness I find time being counted by smaller and smaller increments. The one that most matters is the time between the last feed and the next. Then the time of the feed, the time on each breast, the time to calm the baby, to change his nappy. And once night falls, the space between feeds broken up into increments of crying and calming.

And during the day in those hopefully empty spaces between the feeds when baby is asleep you try to fit in something of a life. The trip to the shop for supplies, to the hospital for weighing, read an email, walk the dog, wash yourself, wash the baby, make a meal, eat the meal. Today we didn't eat anything until after 4pm. Dinner is broken up into preparing, then pause, then cooking, then pause, and finally eating, sometime late in the night. But you don't find yourself hungry because that's too much effort. Instead you just get crankier.

Sleep is snatched whenever possible, but it frequently isn't. Increments of sleep are uncounted, it is too complex, too difficult for an addled mind. And just as you drift off, the crying starts again. You look at your wife. She is fast asleep, she has sat and fed him, will feed him again in a couple of hours, so you get up and try to calm him again, knowing that he will wake up again soon, or it will be feed time once more and your help is required.

You comfort him. You think you might be frustrated, even a little angry at him. But when you pick him up and hold him to you all you can feel is love and the need to nurture and protect this little life. Then he opens his eyes and looks at you. He does not understand, but you can see him trying to. And that's what being human is all about, trying to understand the universe.

P.S. We did get some relaxation last night by watching Mamma Mia on DVD, though I hope he won't grow up loving Dancing Queen.
P.P.S. The Raising Kids DVD and website are really useful resources.