t-11: mistaken identity

People will say a lot of things to you when you’re pregnant. There are the comments about your weight. Or you’re impending due date “Are you about to pop?” -mmmm, you mean like a zit??? I hope not. Then there are the comments about what you’re going to name the baby. (And no it’s not Cletus – I promise – it’s the same name that my grandfather had and my brother has, also uncles, great uncles, cousins and even my mom’s husband). Or what your childbirth intentions are (most people are supportive of our decision to go for a home birth…some not so) or just how disgusting and horrible childbirth is – mostly I have to say from women who’ve never actually had any children. Thanks for sharing your body fears and anxieties with me!

But the one that really gets me is about the gender. I’d reckon that a majority of people in England choose to find out the gender if the option is open to them. (Some NHS trusts refuse to reveal gender to “avoid disappointment” in case of mistaken diagnosis, but everyone suspects it’s to avoid the incidence of gender-based abortion in certain sub-populations). Some people would like to know and their trusts would tell them but the little one won’t cooperate, essentially hiding the goodies.

Now, I’m sure all of you have seen a blurry ultrasound picture, perhaps in an email titled “It’s a boy!” – and if you haven’t you can see ours here. If you get a good one, there’s a nice fetal profile or perhaps a foot. But you can’t really make out much. And if it’s not a very good shot, it’s more like “Are you sure that’s not your appendix?” And this is, of course, all about the “old style” ultrasound – not the new 3D/4D kind in which you can see baby’s feature’s with amazing accuracy. But these aren’t offered on the NHS (currently) and we were too cheap to shell out the £100 to £300 to go private just to see what the baby would look like.

The little snapshots are terrible, but when you’re having the scan done – you can actually make out quite a bit more. Bones have particular clarity. But as to soft tissue – I could never see much. The tech might say “There’s the stomach.” Oh, ok whatever you say. I’d only ever manage to make out the heart – and that’s because it moves in heartbeat like way.

Before our scan started the tech asked us “Do you want to know the sex?”. I tried to manage my expectations – because I know they can’t always see – but I said yes, if she could tell. At the end of the diagnostic session (they were looking for fetal anomalies) she asked me again and I said again – “Yes, if you can see.” And the tech replied, quite positively, “Oh, I’ve already seen.” I knew enough about ultrasounds at that point to figure it had to be a boy. And sure enough, she showed us a picture of his “willy” (NOTE TO TECHS – please, please don’t use nursery language for body parts! And besides, that’s dangerously close to what we’ve decided to actually call Cletus). Now, because I wanted a girl I kind of refused to make out the penis and testicles, but it was obvious enough, really. And there was the Vol-in-Law (trying to conceal his glee) and the Tech outlining his parts on the screen – and me just going “Well, if you say so.” Only when I got onto the pregnancy discussion forums and people displayed their “classic” shot – that I understood that’s exactly what I’d seen.

But just before I left work, several people asked me if I was sure that it was really a boy. And they told me about mistakes that had been made with people they knew. And I say “Well, yes, sometimes with girls, it’s hard to tell – and they’ll give you a percentage like 85%. It’s harder to prove that a penis isn’t there and the limited tell-tale signs can be easy to conceal.” I’m asked what percentage we were given, and I say we didn’t get any – because the tech was very, very sure.

But still…these people have somehow managed to insert some doubt in my mind. And even though I wanted a girl before, I now don’t want this baby to be a girl. He’s already in my mind as a boy.

But the suggestions that the tech might have somehow been wrong are plaguing me. Maybe I’m fixing on that rather than worrying about real potential problems. Maybe it’s a distraction technique.

Even VolMom asked me what the chances were. I said they were slim. But if it were a girl, she’d be wearing a lot of blue (and little old man sweaters).

VolMom, who’s a more inveterate shopper than I, said “No, we’d have to start from scratch. But some little boy in London will have an amazing wardrobe.”
Publish

11 days til baby Cletus,

random images

Random images that I’ve been scanning in today…

I put this together on the beach. I think I was trying to be artistic. I don’t remember where or when this was. Probably somehwere in Ireland.

We took a road trip through Ireland. On a tiny country lane in the border country of Northern Ireland, these lambs approached our car. Somebody had clearly been hand feeding them. As soon as they realised I didn’t have any treats, they began to move off and by the time I managed to get my camera out they were nearly away.

This was Otis. Our first kitten together and the Vol-in-Law’s first mammal pet(he’d had some goldfish). They were very close. He was more of a man’s cat. He got run over when he was just around 2 years old. It was devastating.

This was an advertisement for some kind of Sheffield specialty. It’s kinda like Worcestershire sauce, but a bit nastier. When I lived in Sheffield, I wanted to like it.

scattered pictures and double-eared corn

I’ve been going through some old photographs – don’t know why really – as I have many other things I should be doing. I’ve noticed there are lots of pictures from the beginning of our marriage – then hardly any. This is partly because my camera broke and I couldn’t afford to replace it with a camera I liked.

In the past couple of years I’ve been taking loads of pictures, but they’re all digital. I’ve been trying to make sure I put stuff from trips into photo books (I did our trip to France and Christmas visit to Tennessee) and annual retrospectives – like A Year in the Garden 2006 rather than just leave them in digital files. And I should probably get my blog printed up and bound into a book – just for posterity.

Anyway, it’s interesting looking back on our lives. And I’ve separated the photos into

• Please scan and make into a photo book
• Not very good, but can’t bear to throw away (the biggest pile)
• Throw away (this is the smallest pile)

I’ve noticed that we were a lot younger and thinner when we first got together. Some of us had more hair. We look quite happy.

I found some old letters, too and managed to avoid the temptation of actually reading them. Many of them are from my grandfather who died almost four years ago and who were planning to name the soon-to-arrive baby after. My grandfather used to send me pictures regularly, too. And clippings from The Tennessean or the Lawrence County Advocate or wherever that he thought might interest me.

For example, I found this snippet of Wilson County News –

The Neal family farm near Tuckers Crossroads is one of just three farms in the state chosen for an important experiment in improving forage for cattle and cutting the farm’s dependence on hay for feed, Agriculutral Extension Services Agent Jon Baker said. Baker added that if the proer kinds of grasses are developed for pastures, it will mean less work for the farmers and reduced costs for consumers. As Baker said “Cows are designed to eat forage, not grain.” – WARREN DUZAK.

taped to this picture:

On the back of the picture, it’s written in my grandfather’s scrawl

This is a picture of the water damage in our shop recently. Insurance has pd all damage but $500 which we are asking the roofers to pay.

I do not know if this in Lawrenceburg – where my grandfather rented antique selling space on the square or if it was in Nashville or Franklin – where over time he had also rented space.

I do not know why the story about experimental forage on the Neal family farm was attached to it. That may be an accident of proximity and tape and time.

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I do know why he sent me the snippet on agriculture. We are kin to the Neals. My great grandfather’s mother’s maiden name was Neal, his given name was Neal and he and his brother Ben were raised in the home of William Haskell Neal, his maternal uncle, after their father died.

Haskell Neal, as he was known, developed Neal’s Paymaster Corn (read more if you’re interested about his induction to the Wilson County Agricultural Hall of Fame). This was the first reliably double-eared open pollinated corn. Haskell developed it through selective breeding. My grandfather told me that his daddy remembered harvesting corn with his Uncle Haskell and that Haskell kept a special sack for double eared corn – which he would use for seed corn the following year.

Here’s what a Works Progress Administration 1939 survey of the State of Tennessee said about it:

Corn always has been the leading crop in value and volume. For more than 50 years the State has had a yearly average of three million acres in corn. In 1935 the crop amounted to more than 60 million bushels. One third of the corn grown is the high-yield variety known as Neal’s Paymaster. It is interesting to note that until 1904, when W. H. Neal of Lebanon developed this variety, most Tennessee farmers had been growing the same type of corn planted centuries before by the mound builders. The major part of the Tennessee crop is consumed in the region of its production.

I recently told somone about this, just kind of casually mentioned it – I’m not sure why but it was vaguely relevant. This person seemed distinctly unimpressed. But it was a really big deal. This effectively doubled yields in a time when many people went hungry.

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Events have conspired lately to make me think of Haskell Neal and his Paymaster Corn. I was listening to a radio show about pacifist farming communes in England during World War II and one of the former residents was talking about how they strove to improve yields – and how if they could only produce twice as much corn (this actually probably means wheat) from the same acreage what a difference that would make to the world. I thought of Haskell Neal. He did that.

And last night, I was watching a show about genetic modification and some foodie journalist was absolutely appalled by the selective breeding efforts of livestock farmers to produce some really big beef cattle – Belgian Blues. He seemed to think selective breeding was some kind of new fangled invention, somewhere along the lines of Frankenstein food. How freaking ignorant. How could someone who is supposed to write about food know so little about how food is produced? A biologist on the show pointed out that so long as we have had agriculture we’ve had selective breeding. I thought about my great-grandfather and Haskell Neal’s sack of double-eared seed corn.

Toddler watch

The British news is dominated now with stories of a three-year old Madeleine McCann who was taken from her parents’ hotel room at a resort in Portugal.

Her parents were eating in a restaurant 150 yards away or a few hundred yards away, depending on sources. According to the parents, they checked on her and her sleeping siblings (twins, aged 2) every half hour.

These parents are middle class, Dad’s a cardiologist, Mum’s a GP. And there has been a complete absence of criticism of their decision to leave their children unattended – despite the fact that evening childcare was apparently on offer – a free evening nursery or baby-sitting for an additional fee.

Now, everyone makes mistakes and I don’t think that anyone could have anticipated that a child would be stolen. Despite kidnapping being the stuff on nightmares, your child is much more likely to choke or fall or wander off or simply wake up in a strange place and be terrified than be taken. And that’s why you don’t leave them alone. Sure, everyone turns their back “only for a moment” and kids do abscond themselves in that moment only to be found playing (as I was once) in a median strip. Kids will zero in on danger in a way that makes you marvel at the survival of the human race. They have NO sense of self preservation. And that’s why you don’t leave the very young children alone for an evening.

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My in-laws took a trip to Amsterdam once when my husband and his sister were very small. Pretty much the ages of the McCann children. My father-in-law told me (in a tone that implied they deserved extra credit) that they had booked a hotel specifically for its child-minding services, but when they arrived they found that the services were temporarily unavailable. Disappointing, I’m sure. But the ViL’s dad said that this did not stop them from taking that “much deserved” evening out alone. Apparently the hotel would offer a “baby listening” service – where parents leave their phone off the hook and reception staff “listen in”. To me, this doesn’t sound adequate, but I suppose it would be ok if your kid is a good sleeper and you just want to have a beer on the hotel terrace where reception staff can find you.

But no, my in-laws took the phone off the hook and then went out to dinner in Amsterdam and then took a walking tour of Amsterdam’s red light district before one of them (and there is some disagreement about which one) decided that maybe they’d better head back to check on the kids.

The kids were, apparently, screaming their heads off. And the hotel reception staff hadn’t noticed. But a German hotel guest had noticed- and had checked on them. And as my father-in-law recounted “that German woman looked at me with eyes like daggers at breakfast the next morning,” implying that he was somehow the injured party. Bloody Germans, they just have no human sympathy.

My father-in-law told me this as an amusing story of childhood foibles of the young Vol-in-Law. I wasn’t laughing. You see, I’d already heard this story. From my husband. He didn’t recount it as a gentle anecdote, but as a real horror story. An indelible early memory of abandonment and terror.

As he remembers it, the room got very hot and he and his toddler sister woke up uncomfortable and very, very thirsty. They wanted some water and so toddled into the bathroom to help themselves. But the taps were too tight and they couldn’t turn them and their thirst became overwhelming and their parents weren’t there and they were scared and they cried and cried and no one came, which only made their terror and thirst that much the worse. And what if they had managed to turn the taps and instead of cold water it was hot, and they’d scalded themselves? What if they’d managed much worse?

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I do think there are times depending on age and individual personality and circumstance when you might leave a kid alone. By the time I was 9 or 10 I was one of those latch-key kids, and I cherished my time alone in the house. On the other hand, when VolBro was once left alone around this age – my grandfather’s house caught on fire (he still denies involvement) resulting in expensive cosmetic damage.

I can remember a couple of stories of British parents being arrested in Florida for leaving their children alone in their hotel rooms while they ate in the hotel restaurant or took in a fireworks show on the resort premises. So maybe there’s some kind of cross-cultural difference. But I just find it a little bit odd that folks here seem to think it’s ok to leave very small children on their own in strange places.