Tough times

Katie is expecting her fourth child at St Mary’s in Knoxville. She’s having a rough time. It sounds rather unpleasantly like my own experience. She’s resigned herself to a c-section after many days of labor.

People ask me how I managed with three days of labor – how could they have let me go that long. Well, probably like Katie, I never thought it would go that long. You don’t think after the exhausting first day – oh I’ve got two more days of this. You think – hey, if I’m lucky I’ll have a baby in a few hours – 8 hours away tops – not 48 more hours. You never think that. I didn’t want a c-section so I tried everything not to have one. It didn’t work.

Good baby milestones

I took Baby Cletus out to the shops today and for the first time he didn’t scream his head off for a healthy portion of the trip. He either slept or gurgled cherubically in his stroller, while occasionally batting the jingling cow baby toy that I’ve named Shambo – after the recently slaughtered holy bullock resident at a Welsh Hindu monastery.

He was so good that I wished I could reward him with some teeth rotting candy or an age inappropriate DVD.

Before and after

An expectant blogger mom has pretty much finished her nursery – all bar the finishing touches and, well – the baby. And it’s all pretty darn impressive.

I have to say it makes me feel a little like an underachiever. It pretty much looks like it’s out of a book and their before was a gutted attic, so many would be hard pressed to do that much. But we’re a long, long way off that.

Ol’ Cletus hit the 8 week mark on Sunday and our “nursery” looks a lot more like a before than an after. I’m not a home decorating guru, so I set the bar reasonably and realistically low on our nursery standards and we haven’t even met that. For example I was asked:

What color are you going to paint the nursery?

I was just thinking of leaving the walls the original off-white. I like off white – it’s the best pallet for the imagination. But I will get some spray cleaner and wipe off those random marks on the wall and I might clean the kitty nose prints off the window.

Progress update: strange black marks and kitty nose prints still intact. On the other hand, we did manage to clear a shelf for all of Cletus’s new clothes. And now instead of a random pile of law books and novels on top of the dresser there’s a random pile of baby stuff. And for us, that’s a big, big deal.

We don’t even have a crib set up. It’s still propped in pieces behind a chair in our living room. Thank goodness we planned on co-sleeping.

Spiky things

Echinacea at Wisley

A few words on the astronaut scandal

You know how NASA has had to admit that sometimes the astronauts are flying high? And they just let them go ahead because it would cost ka-jillions to scrub a flight.

But the thing is, they have B-team astronauts, or at least they used to. One of my college professors was an astronaut also-ran. He was selected and trained and all and they probably fitted him for a suit with a bubble head helmet – but he never went up.

If I were the a B-team astronaut, ready and waiting for my chance, the day the A-team astronaut got gastric flu or something and I found out that they were letting A-listers fly drunk, well I would be really pissed.

They shouldn’t throw stones

The Vol-in-Law and I took Baby Cletus down to Wisley today – a Royal Horticultural Society botanical gardens. It’s hard to tell what an 8 week old baby likes (besides milk), but Cletus really seems to like seeing trees against the sky – and Wisley has plenty of those.

The place was absolutely packed and it seems like many people had come to see the new glass houses.

This is a long awaited development and they are pretty fancy and shiny and new. But we didn’t stay long in them because

1. It was the first nice day in a while
2. It was forecasted to be the last nice day in a while (and it’s raining heavily again as I type)
3. There weren’t enough trees against the sky for Cletus’s taste and he let us know.

We decided to come down and get a closer look in the winter time when it will be nice to be inside and warm.

We also had a look at the urban display gardens – including two that use artificial turf.
They also had a look at the model urban gardens that included artificial turf

I asked readers some time ago what they thought about artificial turf and the response was unanimous – a big old resounding, that’s tacky. But it actually looked pretty good in these gardens and it might be softer on a little old toddler head next summer.

The hand that rocks the cradle…

…rules the world. At least that what they say. I hope that’s true, ’cause I’ve been playing Medieval Total War II while nursing the baby. That’s why blogging has been light. I’ve been simultaneously trying to conquer the New World and fend off a Mongol invasion and breast feed.

Baby tending and world domination leaves little time for blogging, my friends.

When I die…

Since one of our most frequent recreational past times is taking a walk in the nearby cemetery, we play the “when I die” game a lot.

When I die:

• Don’t bury me in this crappy cemetery.
• I want a kick ass floral memorial – like maybe this one – only in single malt/ sipping whiskey flavor.
• I want to enter the fossil record, so you have to bury me in a zone of accretion rather than erosion (I majored in Geology in college)

But never once has either of us said:

When I die, please steal a street sign, turn it around and write my whole life story in both Arabic and English and cover my grave with a random assortment of fake flowers which you may or may not have collected from other parts of the cemetery.

What does your garden grow?

I like to have a container grown tomato crop. I always forget how big they get, though. But you know what they say…there’s just two things in life that money can’t buy…and that’s love and home grown tomatoes.

I can usually do OK with tomatoes, but my garden is tiny and sometimes our summers here are a little too damp and cool and we’re absolutely overrun with snails and slugs. Sure, there are crops that I could grow – like rhubarb which need more cool and which wouldn’t do so well in Tennessee. But isn’t rhubarb Yankee food? It’s a weed. And while I’m all over eating weeds and garbage fish (e.g. catfish) and other peasant grub – I really only ever crave my own soul food. I guess that’s the point of soul food.

Sometimes I fantasize about the veggies that I would grow if I had more space, more heat and more blazing sun – i.e. if I were gardening in the South. I would grow tomatoes (lots of them), yellow crook-neck squash, cucumbers, zuchinni, okra and peppers. I might grow asparagus, too – the foliage is so pretty. Maybe I’d grow onions and tomatillos, too.

12 US Senators harbor a dark secret

It’s true. Twelve US Senators harbor a dark secret. I know that it’s true because I saw it in black and white. Some canny reporters blew that story wide open. Phil Gramm, sneaky bastard that he is, couldn’t even muster a denial in the face of the stone cold facts.

“It’s all true,” it quotes Sen. Phil Gramm, R-Texas, as saying. “I’m amazed
that it’s taken you so long to find out.”

Only one paper was brave enough to tell all.

WASHINGTON (AP) -- Going where no congressional critics have gone before, a
supermarket tabloid contends that 12 U.S. senators are space aliens. And many
of them are "admitting" their otherworldly origins.

The Weekly World News.

And now they’re closing down. And why? Why is obvious.

The Bush Administration knew they were getting too close.

We can’t handle the truth.

——
Hat Tip to Joe Powell. And I still have my WWN t-shirt which proves that 12 US Senators were space aliens.

UPDATE: Someone might be willing to take on the gaping void that the Weekly World News will leave.