April 22, 2014
#MakeSomething: The Most Magnificent Book
It is always a good day when we get a package in the mail from Kids Can Press. In particular, when that package has to do with a book that we’ve loved as much as we continue to love Ashley Spires The Most Magnificent Thing.
Remember that book? The book of which I wrote, “ It’s got everything. It’s got a dog, a girl who builds things, appealing illustrations that stand out against simple line drawings of an urban street-scape. It will appeal to both sexes. It’s got words, so many words, terrific verbs employed in the act of construction. It’s about coming up short, making mistakes and getting angry–the acknowledgement of such experiences is incredibly profound and has echoes of Sendak.”
So it was so cool to get this kit in the mail full of stuff for making, including a modified version of the book for us to “hack” and include in our creation. Harriet quickly set to work making blueprints, and was determined that her magnificent thing would be a monster.
The project came together fast. Harriet’s dad worked alongside her.
She cut, she stuck, she modified, she erred and tried again, and came up with something even better than her blueprints.
Like her mother, Harriet is blessed with not being a perfectionist, and so her final vision seemed more than satisfying. We hooked our guy up with the book, because monsters like reading just as much as anybody does.
What fun fun fun, and just an example of the creativity this fantastic book will inspire. Thanks, Kids Can Press! So happy to spread the word about a book we love as much as this one.
February 25, 2014
On Living With Harriet the Spy #Harriet50th
(See Harriet the Spy Celebrates 50 Years of Sleuthing).
I never read Harriet the Spy when I was a child, and to be honest, I’m not sure I would have been sophisticated enough to appreciate it if I had. There are subtleties at work in the novel, a subversion I might not have been comfortable with. Instead, I loved The Long Secret, the lighter, sunnier Harriet novel. In The Long Secret, Harriet’s father is always home, and doesn’t say “rat fink” once. It’s Beth Ellen’s novel, the girl they call “Mouse”, and really, this novel is subversive too. I was just too stupid to know. Beth Ellen, like Harriet, can wield the power of the pen, but that’s the secret. I loved the map in the book, tracing my finger along its paths and roads. I never owned the book, but The Long Secret is one I borrowed from the school library over and over again. It acknowledged that people could be ugly, and I appreciated that. (Of course, I own a copy now.)
(See Lizzie Skurnick on The Long Secret)
I didn’t read Harriet the Spy until I was 28, and I couldn’t remember why I did, but a search through my blog archives reveals that it was the internet’s fault (and isn’t everything). In 2008, I found an article on Harriet the Spy (via Steph at Crooked House), and it was only then that I realized that Harriet had not been a girl-sleuth solving boring neighbourhood mysteries, but had in fact been a writer. So I finally met Harriet in her original form, and was besotted. The novel was a guide to life, a guide to how to write and be a writer, and guides to such things were important to me in 2008, when I was just a year out of grad school with my writing career going nowhere at all. And that character–she was everything I love about everyone that I love best. She was the best and worst parts of me as well, and I adored her unabashedness.
“When I have a daughter, I am going to call her Harriet.” I remember telling my husband this news in the waiting room at our dentist’s, and lucky for me, he likes most of my ideas, and this was no exception.
Harriet was born in May 2009, and right away, I saw where I’d gone a bit wrong. All these spirited heroines are very nice to dream of, but to have to live with them is a whole other matter. To have to be the person whose job it is to teach Harriets civility, or at least enough to get by–can you believe that I signed up for that? But we’re figuring it out, and so is she, and she really is everything I dreamed of her being when I first dreamed of my own Harriet seven years ago. She loves books, has a vivid imagination, swears too much and is often rude, has a jam-smeared face and messy hair, makes up great stories, is full of faults, is absolutely perfect, and fierce as all get-out. She’s the kind of girl I want to see in the world. She’s worthy of being a Harriet namesake. It might have been easier to name her Beth Ellen, but would probably have been less fun.
Last summer we read Harriet the Spy. Our Harriet had just turned 4 and was much too young, but she was eager to read the book she’d been named for, and I wanted her to hear it too. And I think most of the book went over her head, but she never complained of being bored (and believe me, she would have if she were). As I read aloud, I noted to myself that this was the first book I’d ever read her that contained the word gestapo, and fortunately, she didn’t ask for clarification. I would have told her, but it might have interrupted the flow of the book.
As we were reading the book, Harriet found a notebook of her own, and took to going around scribbling in it. That she didn’t know how to write as much as her name at the time to my Harriet was no deterrent.
It’s a complicated legacy, Harriet the Spy. To give it to a daughter is to open a can of worms, and yet it also contains almost everything a daughter will ever need to know. About character: the sense of self and strength of conviction I wish for her, for one. I want her to know the power of her own voice. Harriet is a good way to learn how to be a woman. And yes, I want her to learn the lessons that Harriet learns too–that indeed, people can be ugly. People can be horrible, but you don’t have to tell them. That we go wrong when we always privilege the truth–sometimes you have to lie. People are rotten and sometimes you have to lie, but also the world is fascinating, full of things to be seen, and you just have to pay attention. Stories are everywhere. Stories are also everything, and happiness and freedom can only come when yours belongs to you.
November 7, 2013
On the Unbearable Uselessness of Mother Wisdom
My daughter Harriet is four, and she is a lot like me, except that she’s grown up in the city instead of the suburbs and she goes to the museum once a week. For someone who is four, she has some excellent ideas about where to get the best pastries in our neighbourhood. One day she’ll use chopsticks, but for now, she eats her sushi with a fork.
Which is to say that I am enamoured of her worldliness, and I’d like to think that between the two of us, we have this life thing figured out.
My illusion slips though when I glimpse the parts of her that are just a little too familiar. I observe the awkward ritual of her eating a cupcake. I catch her being unkind to a younger classmate. I see her making all the missteps I’ve spent most of my life learning to avoid.
***
It took me 25 years to learn not to leave dirty dishes piled in the sink. Which sounds like a lesson that’s awfully mundane, but it isn’t. First of all, because it made me the kind of person who doesn’t leave dirty dishes piled in the sink, which is useful. And also because it taught me the pleasures of a chore all done, the loveliness of a small window in my life in which there are no dishes to do. When there’s a job, get it done, is what it took me a quarter of a century to figure out, and this is just one of the things that I know.
I know that cupcakes are most delicious when I don’t lick the cream off first. This is also true of Oreos. I know that making my bed in the morning will improve the experience of going to bed tenfold. I know that I have to be the change I wish to see in the world, and that kindness is a subtle force, but one that’s powerful. That if something’s difficult, it’s all the more reason to try it. That fear is not an exemption from bravery. I even know how to eat an ice cream cone without it dripping down my shirt. Most of the time.
I know that books are the key to the universe. That after every winter comes a spring. That if I try it, I just might like it. That being loud is not the same as being heard. That if I take care of things, they last longer, and if I put them away, I know where to find them. I know that cheap shoes will leave a legacy of ruined feet. And if I’m going to eat a cookie, I better make sure that it’s a good one.
***
Let us imagine a conversation with my daughter. The one where I tell her, “I learned all my lessons so you won’t have to.” And she says, “Thanks, Mom,” my ever-grateful beneficiary. She will always get her homework done before dinner. She takes care of her teeth. She will seek out vulnerable classmates and befriend them. She never ever asks, “Are we there yet?” because she knows that whining doesn’t make a journey go faster, and she was born knowing that boredom is a kind of personality defect.
I am not completely a fool. I know that parents more experienced than I are reading this now and thinking, “Just you wait, lady…” My little daughter is only four and the stakes are cupcakes and whining; this is just the beginning. And it’s what lies ahead that is totally terrifying.
I think of other things I’ve figured out by now. Important things like how not to get hit by busses when crossing the street. How not to get a stupid tattoo. I know how not to get pregnant. I know how not to get so drunk that I’m left unconscious and therefore, in the minds of some, a fair target for rape. I’ve gotten quite good at figuring out how not to get my heart broken. I learned how not to give myself away, how to keep friends, and how to appreciate my own company. I fell in love with a man who knows he is lucky to be loved by me. I can drive a car without crashing. I know how to be secure in myself without having to whittle away at the self-esteem of another. These are lessons, some of them, that have been a long time coming.
**
From exposure to a multitude of terrible cliches, I’ve known all along that part of being a parent is letting our children go, letting them fly, setting them free. It’s a lesson that’s easier to know in theory than in practice, but I still understand it as a necessary component of the mother trade.
And it’s a really romantic idea, at least when you choose not to think about Icarus. Instead, soaring eagles and everything. But what I never understood are the inherent risks of flying, that our children aren’t always going to soar. I didn’t realize that part of being a parent is also giving our children the freedom to plummet back to earth.
So far, being a mother has been one long continuing education, and the greatest revelation has been this: it is unfair to expect my daughter to immediately impart a lesson that I took 25 years to learn. From my daughter’s perspective, all my hard-won mother wisdom is utterly useless. No matter how many times I tell her all the things that I know, she’s still going to have to figure them out for herself.
***
I am watching Harriet in the playground, besotted with the big girls who have no time for her, following them around and seeming not to notice when they don’t respond to her bossy instructions for playing. The girls are playing with Barbies, and now she wants one too, never mind my lectures about their distorted bodies and deformed high-heel feet. Another group of kids is playing soccer, but Harriet doesn’t want to play with them, no matter my feminist imperative that girls can do anything. “I’m not good at running,” she says, which is actually true, because when has an apple ever fallen far from its tree? If Harriet had a sink, her dirty dishes might be piled to the ceiling.
But she is four. This is what I have to remember. What I keep telling myself. It would be a tragedy if she had it all figured out, and it would also make me quite redundant in the role of her mother.
As it is, however, she needs me. Not to have all the answers, but to stay close-by as she makes her own way. It’s my job to give her space, to let her fall, and to help pick up the pieces, if need be.
It’s my job to love her as she is, a work-in-progress just like the rest of us.
This essay was written in August. Mercifully, Harriet has not since mentioned wanting a Barbie.
October 21, 2013
Harriet and Sheree Fitch at Eden Mills
The most wonderful thing that ever happened was captured on video! Here is Harriet storming the stage to help the great Sheree Fitch read Mable Murple at the Eden Mills Writers’ Festival.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EaOX6dValjY&feature=youtu.be
September 24, 2013
The Hang of It
My new office.
Now that we’re nearly three weeks into our brand new life, I’m going to take the risk of saying out loud that we might be getting the hang of it. After a very bumpy first week, Harriet is very happy to be in Junior Kindergarten, and has already acquired some brand new skills, such as being able to sit down and focus on a project for more than two minutes, and also the ability to draw something that actually resembles a thing. She is also enjoying being back at her play school in the afternoons. Stuart is back to work, and quite happily now that we’ve learned he’s got a promotion and begins a new position next month. He’s also taking a college course he’s finding very inspiring, which means I am home alone on Wednesday nights.
The first Wednesday night was surprisingly good–I had two crabby kids and a heat wave, so we all jumped in the bath and had a pool party in the tub. Somehow, I managed to drown no one, we had dinner, *and* I mopped the floor, so I got to feel like Mommy Awesome. There was to be no repeat the following Wednesday, however, as the baby proceeded to cry unceasingly and the house looked like it had been hit by a hurricane. We’ll see how I do tomorrow.
Regarding Iris, who is 3.5 months old: we thought we’d been doing so well tolerating her poor sleeping habits, and then she went and showed us that we’d not seen nothing yet as poor sleeping goes, and so now I’m kind of the walking dead. This time, however, we know it’s a problem to be endured instead of something that we can fix, and so we just tolerate the tireds without feeling badly about the whole thing, and that makes a huge difference. She has a cold and has just got her second tooth in, which isn’t helping matters, plus she is a *baby* and we know what they’re like.
What they’re like though is pretty easy compared to 4 year-olds, which I didn’t appreciate at all the first time. I also think that when I was home with Baby Harriet, I was terrifically bored, but now I’ve got commitments and deadlines, and things to get done with Baby lying on my chest. There is no time for boredom, and so Iris rolls around on the floor while I do my work, and I really am accomplishing so much, though I am having to also train myself to type with one hand while the baby screams in my other arm. In the mornings, she falls asleep soon after I drop off Harriet at school, and so I can’t go home because our apartment is up a flight of stairs and I’ve got her in the stroller, so I go to RedFish BlueFish instead and work for the 30 minutes she manages to stay asleep for. (Iris has about six naps a day, 20-40 minutes. This would bother me, except I had another baby like that once before, and everything worked out fine.)
And the very best thing we’re up to these days is that we started reading Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone, which Harriet and I are both encountering for the very first time. And we love it. I’m reading it aloud and once in a while get a sense of where possible criticism comes from, but these criticisms would mainly be about there being too many adverbs, or that characters “hiss” sentences which are not sufficiently sibilant, which are the kind of criticisms you really have to go looking for and be an asshole to make.
August 28, 2013
True Confession
Last week on our biannual visit to the mall, I bought gendered Lego. But that’s not the whole story. Read my True Confession here.
August 13, 2013
Going Out With Harriet
During the last weeks of my pregnancy and in the six weeks after Iris’s birth, I wasn’t able to pick up Harriet, and when I was finally permitted to pluck her up again, there was no plucking about it–she’d become enormous. Part of this is actually true–I think a growth spurt took place somewhere around her fourth birthday. And the rest of it is that I spend my time carrying about someone who weighs just ten lbs, and so Harriet at four times the size really is quite large. Once in a while I become struck by her massive nostrils and monstrous thighs, a logical consequence of spending much of my time staring at parts that are baby-sized.
We have been lucky this summer that we’ve had as many parents as kids around all day so that Harriet has not had to suffer too much of a dearth of attention. Though her need for attention has certainly ramped up since her sister arrived, but I am getting the sense that things are settling down and in a few weeks, our whole lives are going to be constructed around Harriet’s school day as much as the presence Iris anyway.
But I have missed Harriet. This I wasn’t conscious of until our week at the cottage when Harriet was often at loose ends, and we ended up spending more time together than we had since the baby came. “Oh, this!” I thought as we worked on her sticker book, when we played “Motor Boat” in the water, had a rainy day picnic on our cottage floor. While I would never say that Harriet and I have a special bond that does not include her father, it is true that we spent most of her entire life together from 9-5, Monday to Friday. And it was very nice to spend that time together again. Nice for her, sure, but nice for me too. It had been awhile.
Yesterday, Iris was asleep in Stuart’s arms and I was suddenly compelled to visit the bookstore. “Come with me!” I asked, and she agreed once I’d promised to buy her a book to make the journey worthwhile. And so off we went, her hand in mine (which remains the greatest privilege of my life), her new purple boots on. We tramped up Brunswick to Bloor, and along the street to Book City, whose staff are some of the loveliest people around. Harriet walks around the store as if she owns it, marching right up to the carousel of paperback books she continually lusts after. The carousel of paperback books I usually never buy, because they’re not real books, I tell her. Not like the picture books proper on the shelf. Commercial tie-ins, I tell her. These books are only toys.
But while Harriet appreciates a good hardback as much as anybody, she is just as devoted to toys, so this argument doesn’t sway her. We buy books from the carousel from time to time, rooting past the Doras (which, thankfully, Harriet has never shown any interest in) and Thomas’s in search of something really good. But this time her attention was caught by a Superman I Can Read book–she is currently very much into Superheros, thanks to The Incredibles and her Daddy’s collection of Spiderman t-shirts. We looked through the Superhero books and I was ecstatic to find Wonder Woman. Harriet leafed through the book and was excited to see an illustration of her carrying a shield. “A shield!” she said. “They have those in How to Train Your Dragon.” There was even a dragon in it, plus the book was $5.
Wonder Woman is iconic in a way that Dora the Explorer will never quite manage to be, plus hers is the ultimate princess story: a princess who didn’t want to be a princess but chose to fight for justice instead. My distaste for commercial tie-ins is fickle. I was happy to buy Harriet that book, and picked up the book I had arrived for: How to Get Along with Women by Elisabeth De Mariaffi. I am also happy because Harriet is now obsessed with Wonder Woman–at 2:30am, Stuart went downstairs to her room and had to ask her to stop “reading” her new books, and go to sleep, please– which means that this morning’s outing will be to our local comic book store in search of a Wonder Woman comic. Two bookstore visits in two days! Harriet has also asked if she could please be Wonder Woman for Halloween, which is the best thing ever. And even better: Harriet asking if might it be more convenient if Wonder Woman fought the forces of evil whilst wearing pants. “Why does she have to wear her underwear?” she wonders, which is a very good question.
But the point of all this is not even books or bookstores, or Wonder Woman. It’s about the joy of walking down the street with my big girl, just the two of us. With all the changes in our lives, what stays constant is that she is excellent company.
June 13, 2013
Hobbling Out in the World
We made it to the Farmers Market yesterday, my first outing since coming home from the hospital. I had to hobble there while clutching my incision, and for the first time ever, we had to implore our slowpoke daughter not to walk so fast, but we made it and it was lovely to be in the world, even if the soundtrack was a bagpiper dueting with steel drummer on a version of Jamaica Farewell. We also came home with strawberries and raspberries, so it was definitely worth the trek. I’ve elected to spend today in bed though, partly because I don’t want to overdo it, and also because Iris was up most of the night, scarcely sleeping for more than an hour at a time.
It still remains true how much easier this experience of having a newborn baby has been. Part of this is because we skipped the stage where Baby loses 11% of her body weight and breastfeeding is as difficult as it is constant. Iris had surpassed her birth weight as of Monday and she’s doing very well, bouts of misery aside (which can be attributed to diagnosis:Baby). Partly because we knew what to expect in terms of the all-night fussiness and the problems which have no solutions. (This time I have not once paged the midwife because the baby refuses to go to sleep.) I am not resisting having Iris in bed with us when required, which was a huge hurdle before–everyone had warned that it was the slippery slope to the end of life as we know it, but now I know that it isn’t. I have not googled anything newborn-related to seek advice from uninformed, hysterical women who are as desperate as I am, and as I result, I do not feel so desperate. The holy trinity of a queen-sized bed, my smart-phone in the wee hours and the placenta pills continue to bolster us. My husband who is not going back to work anytime soon. All these things are making these days quite different than the last time we went through them. Also the knowledge that these are probably the last time we’ll go through them. It seems to me that having a second baby is like getting a tattoo after all.
When we went out into the world yesterday, I was not surprised to discover it was still there. It doesn’t seem surprising that life has gone on normally while our family has been changed forever. Iris’s arrival has not so shaken the foundation of our existence as Harriet’s did, mostly because we were parents already and have not had to weather the explosion of becoming so, and also because Harriet herself ties us to the world, to the pattern of ordinary days. Stuart gets up in the morning and takes her to school, and she comes home with dispatches from the world beyond the four walls of my room. She demands meals and bedtime, stories read, games played. “Pay the most attention to me,” she demands, ever comfortable with voicing her needs. And so we have not been able to be sucked into that funnel cloud of newborn mania, crazed internet searches, middle of the night despair, logs of inputs and outputs. Downstairs we have the Hospital for Sick Children Baby Care book, and if you open it you will find the marginalia of a madwoman. There is a chapter on sleep habits, and I went through it with a pen underlining every single bit of text. Obviously, the notes were unhelpful, and I’ve not opened that book in quite some time.
Which is not to say that I didn’t cry this morning after being up all night when the bad baby still wouldn’t settle. But I had a nap and then I felt better, and I’m looking forward to walking a little bit farther tomorrow.
June 8, 2013
How Iris arrived
It really was a very gentle time, the weeks we spent waiting for Iris to come. I spent last Friday evening bouncing on a ball to induce labour, made absolutely miserable, and then my husband discovered that if you bounced on a birthing ball to terrible hiphop ballads, the whole experience was made more fun. Though looking back, I realize it was probably for the best that my labour was not brought on by bouncing to Usher singing Love in this Club. And I absolutely adore the photo of me in my bathing suit from last week, the gloriousness of it all, though it’s all sort of bittersweet when I compare that image to my poor ravaged body today.
Here it is: I am so so happy. I know I am only four days postpartum, and probably hormones have something to do with the happiness as well, but they’re supposed to. “I never imagined it could be like this,” but this means something very different now. And I know the experience of my birth, although it was far from ideal, really has something to do with this. Oh, how much it matters how the baby arrives. I know this for sure now, but in a more nuanced way than when I was ranting a few weeks back.
My labour began on Sunday night after we’d eaten much of Barbara Pym’s Victoria Sponge, although it was not apparent to me that it was labour until Monday around noon. I spent Monday night awake every ten minutes with contractions, but then by morning they were gone. A visit to the midwives on Tuesday showed that things had been progressing, even without the contractions. They started again Tuesday night with a great deal of trouble on my behalf, and we were up all night again, sure that this was it. The midwives arrived with birthing supplies and found me dilated to 6 cm. But the contractions never got stronger and once again were gone in the morning. The midwives came later that morning with the intention of breaking my water, but then the baby’s heart-rate was troubling–she was not responsive enough. And while she was stable, it was scary, and there was no longer very much natural about my “natural” birth. I just wanted the baby out.
We took a cab to the hospital, both of us crying–partly because we knew our birth plans were out the window, because we were scared for the baby, and also because we knew we were leaving Harriet without having prepared her for this. (She was at school at the time, would be cared for by our wonderful friend Erin until my mom arrived to stay with her here.) It was cold and grey outside, and as we drove past a high school, a group of boys threw rocks at our car. The world seemed quite horrible and we kept crying–I have never seen a taxi driver more concerned about his fares (and so maybe the world was not so horrible after all).
En-route to the hospital, I started having contractions again, which continued as we waited in triage. The OB on-call found it odd that someone dilated 6cm was not progressing, and give me the option of induction, which I had no intention of taking. (“It’s going to need a lot of drugs to work,” she said, again, a far cry from natural.) But still, that she give me a choice made the decision to do a repeat c-section one that I could own, and I am grateful for that. Which is not to say that I wasn’t weeping in the OR, so much so that the staff was confused–never had a sadder woman been about to give birth. Situation compounded by an anaesthesiologist who I think forgot I was a human being as she handled my body pre-surgery. The student midwife came over to comfort me with casual conversation though–I think she said, “So what’s the first thing you’re going to eat when you can eat again?” And obviously, the answer was chocolate croissants, and seriously, that woman changed my world around. By the time Stuart was brought in in his scrubs, I was comforted and ready, and knew we had made the best and only choice.
Iris means rainbow, and Malala is a hero. The midwives knew how troubled I’d been having never seen Harriet until she was wrapped and hatted when she was born, and so when they pulled her out and brought her to the warming bed, I knew just where to look and Stuart snapped a photo. She was amazing, purple, and she was mine, ours. I knew it instantly. Because of Harriet, there is a part of my heart that is mother-love now, and Iris resided there immediately. I cried and cried, like I’ve cried just one time before, at the birth of Iris’s sister. Our girl was finally here. Our family was complete. It meant something that we’d been waiting so hard for her, that I had been supported so much in my intentions for VBAC, and that Iris herself had been trying as hard to come to us–they discovered the cord was wrapped around her neck four times and there was no way she would have made it out on her own, and an induction would have been a disaster.
They didn’t lie, all those people who told me it would be different the second time around. That first night as Iris fed all night long, Stuart having to deliver her from one side to another as I was unable to move, I didn’t sit there wishing we could leave her and run away. I knew already that the objective to such a night wasn’t getting the baby to sleep, that the baby was doing nothing but simply being a baby. The goal of the night, I knew, was to get through it as best we could, which we did, aided by the fact that Iris has breastfed like a champion since being 40 minutes old.
We left the hospital yesterday–turns out they can boot you out after 2 days now, which is kind of unbelievable, but we were good to go, and eager to get home to Harriet. The surgery has left me brutalized–I think my surgeon 4 years ago was a master of the art, because I was out for walks last time and today I can barely move. Midwives have assured me that my previous experience was the exception to the rule. And I hate that, feeling so badly, but it’s also not so bad being confined to my bed. I’m reading Where’d You Go, Bernadette, which I love. Stuart is bringing me snacks and meals. We prepared for all of this by buying a queen-sized bed last winter, which is so comfortable, and I also got a smart phone a few weeks ago, knowing it would make this kind of thing easier, still being connected to the world. The postpartum crazies also have yet to arrive–they were knocking at the door last night, but then were followed by the woman I’ve paid to make capsules of my placenta, which are meant to help balance hormones. She dropped off the pills, I started taking them, and I’ve been feeling cool ever since. No weeping even! Maybe it will all kick in tomorrow, but in the meantime, I’m happy to take good days where I find them.
Iris, as we know her so far, is marvellous. She arrived and looked like an elderly frog, the next day like a dinosaur, but now she just looks like Harriet did, but with fairer colouring. She practices smiling in her sleep, and midwives reported today that she’s doing great. Her mood could be assisted by the fact that her mother is not a lunatic. She’s just three ounces down from birth weight and we no longer need to wake to feed! Because of my previous experience, when Harriet lost so much weight, I’ve been breastfeeding with great persistence (which is not so heroic–Iris is content to let me read while doing this) and it seems to have paid off. It’s so good to be home and Stuart is taking such good care of me. Harriet is the big sister beyond my wildest dreams, her bond with Iris already making us swoon, and she is displaying such annoying and atrocious behaviour in addition to this that we know she is in fact fully processing the change in our family and we won’t have to wait for another shoe to drop.
So there it is. Everything is wonderful. Just four days in, and I know you have to take good times one day at a time just like the trying ones, but it really means something. Four days postpartum with Harriet I was in pieces already. I was so scared to go through all this over again, and I am so relieved and grateful that this is different. That the gentle times continue. Knock wood, of course, and there will be challenges ahead, but I’m pleased that there really is a chance that I’ll be strong enough to meet them.
And thank you to so many friends for support and best wishes. We are a very lucky family.
