At the ice cream shop, a scoop of the delicious stuff costs $4.50.
This time, at the counter I said, ‘I’ve only got $4.45 in coins. Can I have an ice cream?’
The shop person barely paused before saying, ‘Sure.’
A minute later I was licking a gloriously dark chocolate gelato shop in a waffle cone.
‘Hmm, this might be a bit hard to get home, Mia.’
I was at the post office with Mia strapped to my chest in her baby carrier. We considered the package that the post office had brought out. It was too large to fit into the shopping bag that I brought to carry it. It was covered in tape that said ‘FRAGILE’.
The person being me in the post office queue kindly handed me the box so that I could awkwardly hold in front of Mia.
Two minutes later I put the box down on a bench and repositioned it to rest on my head and right shoulder.
I had my first major wobble in front of the pub. By the time I got to the noodle takeaway shop, I was very nervous. The smart thing would have been to leave the package at the post office and come back later without Mia. Too late, though.
I slipped my hand under and around some of the packing tape and used it like a handle for the next 300 metres.
When I saw the tape stretching longer and thinner, I jammed my hand into the top flap to carry the box at my side. Five minutes later I changed tact again, digging both my hands into the taped up sides of the top flap to carry it in front of Mia.
I kept imagining the crash of glass if the flaps or stuck tape failed.
At the last big intersection from home, a lady looked at me sympathetically.
‘Do you want help carrying it across the road?’ she asked.
‘Would you?’ I replied immediately and gratefully. She took the box of me easily and we walked across toward her office.
On the other side, she asked, ‘Where are you headed?’
‘That building over there,’ I pointed about 300 metres away.
‘I’ll carry it there,’ she offered.
I was so happy as we passed another roundabout, crossed a street, unlocked and went through two doors and up a flight of stairs.
‘Thank you! I have no idea how I would have gotten through those doors. That’s your good deed for the day.’
‘You’re welcome,’ she said as she put the box down and left to go back to work.
I haven’t written much since my update on being pregnant. I’m glad to say that the birth went well and baby Mia will now feature on this blog.
It’s a steep learning curve, becoming a parent of a newborn. We’re fortunate that some of our friends have gone up this curve recently and their advice has helped pull us up with them. The first three weeks were like spinning plates. It wasn’t till week four that I felt like I could go outside with Mia without the plates coming crashing down.
Once we had mastered one thing, the next challenge came upon us. Here are the things that worried me in the order they came:
1. Breastfeeding
This was stressful and often painful. I got a lot of help from our Council’s breastfeeding clinic and the Australian Breastfeeding Association. I am now a member of the ABA. I highly recommend calling their hotline whenever you need help.
2. Reflux
Babies often sound like they are choking, gasping and burping. They cry. If things are particularly bad, it may be due to reflux (their food coming up from their stomach and hurting them). I worried that Mia had reflux and that she was in pain. Her wind stopped her from sleeping. We are lucky, though. Her digestive system seems to have matured quickly and she now has no problems with wind. Many three month old babies continue to suffer.
3. Using our pram
I was anxious about going outdoors by myself because I couldn’t attach our pram bassinet to the wheels, and I couldn’t get the pram up the steps of a tram. Now I know how to assemble the pram and I know which tram stops to use so that I can wheel the pram straight on. However, the real breakthrough has been ditching the pram for a baby carrier, which straps Mia to my chest. I use the Baby Bjorn for short trips and the Ergo Baby carrier for long walks.
4. Sleep and settling
I am obsessed with making sure Mia gets enough sleep. It used to take us up to 45 minutes to settle her to sleep. I felt like an incompetent parent, as I read about other babies that could be put in their cots and fell asleep without constant patting. Since week 12, we have made great progress and Mia can now put herself to sleep most of the time.
5. Loss of milk
I got a blocked duct and mastitis (an infection) in one of my breasts. Although the duct is now clear, my milk supply in that breast has plunged. For the past month, I’ve been trying to increase my milk. I’ve had an ultrasound to try to work out what’s wrong. But there is no explanation and no cure. It’s just one of the many mysteries of breastfeeding. I’ve now mostly made my peace with this. Mia is getting enough milk from my other breast and that’s the most important thing.
We’ve overcome the five challenges above. There’s nothing worrying me at the moment. It’s taken more than three months but I now feel like I know what’s going on.
To end on a positive, here is how Mia has evolved from newborn to what I now think of as a rather large baby.
We were coming back from a stroll around the Botanic Gardens when we saw a bright green rectangle on the ground.
‘Hey, a Myki!’ Damjan bent down. Baby Mia, strapped to Damjan’s chest in the baby carrier, might have squawked as she tipped over.
‘Damjan, of all of us here you’re probably the one least able to pick it up,’ said Sean.
Cobi, Sean and I peered at the Myki in Damjan’s hand. It was a Seniors Myki.
‘Oh dear,’ I said. ‘I wonder if they’ll be able to get home?’
‘If they’ve registered the Myki, maybe we can get it back to them,’ said Cobi.
‘Hello!’ called a man powering up the steps towards us. ‘Did you pick up a Myki? I saw you bend down around the spot where my wife pulled out her phone twenty minutes ago.’
‘You’re in luck, here it is,’ we said handing it over.
The man beamed as a dark haired woman caught up from behind him. ‘We got to Flinders Street Station before we realised it was lost.’
His wife added, ‘I told him not to bother coming back. Surely someone had already picked it up and pocketed it!’
‘We were wondering if you had registered it,’ Cobi said.
‘Oh no, that’s too complicated for us,’ they said cheerfully as they waved. ‘Thanks!’
I am in the late stage of pregnancy and am the biggest I’ll ever get.
Walking around town, I see perhaps one pregnant woman every day or two. In comparison, there are many people with babies and toddlers in prams.
Where are all the pregnant people? Surely there is one pregnant person for every baby?
My attempt to explain this observation is something like this:
This seems to be in the right ballpark. Perhaps the incidence of visibly pregnant people is higher in summer because lighter clothing might make it easier for me to notice pregnant bellies.
In the last two or three weeks, I’ve stayed mostly at home. If other pregnant women do the same, then this would reduce our visibility by 25%. Yesterday I went to the pregnancy day clinic at hospital. It was a very busy morning and it was the largest gathering of pregnant people I have ever seen in one place.
Damjan’s family celebrates St George as their Slava (Patron Saint Day) on November 16. This year, Mira taught us how to make Slavski kolaÄ, the special Slava bread with its own Facebook page.
The bread is highly decorated, and in our case, slightly sweet and lemony.
We were coming out of my aunt and uncle’s apartment in Taipei, when we heard Für Elise wafting out of a narrow alley.
Despite it being dark and 9pm, people streamed towards the source of the noise — a large green truck. The men hanging off the back of the truck cheerfully grabbed the bags off my aunt and uncle’s neighbours and tossed them into the back.
‘What’s that?’ we asked.
‘That’s how rubbish is collected,’ my cousin said. ‘When you hear the music, you bring your rubbish and recycling out.’
In the city of Tainan, we ran into a late night convoy of three trucks playing Greensleeves, with the words ‘Voted best garbage truck 2012’ emblazoned on the sides.
You can read about these trucks and see videos on the Mother Nature Network. The Taipei Times also reports:
‘When the first garbage trucks to be incorporated into the scheme took the streets of Tainan on Monday, the dulcet tones of “How are you?” and “I’m fine. Thank you” sounded the beginning of the nation’s — if not the world’s — first foreign language-teaching trash collection program…
“We plan to have at least 24 trucks running the English lessons in October,” Hsieh said. “And of course, if it continues to prove popular this number could increase and eventually include all the city’s garbage trucks.”
‘To prove how easy it is for residents with no previous knowledge of the English language to learn the simple phrases, Tainan’s mayor held an impromptu examination on Tuesday. The test was hailed a huge success, with six garbage truck workers being sent to the top of the class after replying to the mayor’s “How are you?” in heavily accented, but correct English.’
I’m sad that I wasn’t quick enough to take photos of any of the musical rubbish trucks. As consolation, here are some other odd things we saw in Taiwan.
Damjan and I are teaching Rachael and Julian a waltz for their first wedding dance.
‘Hmm,’ I said, pondering the step that Rachael and Julian had dutifully taken on my instructions.
‘I think it’ll be too slow to do it the way I said. Instead of doing a full L-shape, try sweeping your foot diagonally to land to the side.’
Here is the way I originally described the basic waltz step.
And this is what I showed Rachael and Julian to do instead.
Julian made the switch quickly and was soon keeping up in time with the music.
‘That’s great, Julian,’ I said. ‘Rachael, remember you don’t need to bring your foot right back, just go straight across.’
‘It’s like sweeping your foot over a soccer ball,’ Julian said helpfully. ‘That’s the way I think of it.’
We did something new on the weekend — rogaining. An hour north of Melbourne, our team of five friends competed with a hundred other teams to find as many checkpoints in the forest as we could within six hours. No smartphones or GPS allowed, just a compass and map.
It’s a good thing I’m on Week 6 of 9 the Couch to 5k running program. It means I can comfortably run for 20 minutes. My heart didn’t let me down as we tramped through prickly bush, climbed Steep Track and power walked towards our targets.
On the way to our third checkpoint, I tripped and crashed.
‘Are you okay?’ my team mates asked.
Surprised, I couldn’t answer.
It was exactly like the two seconds immediately after a toddler falls over, when you can see him working out if he is going to cry.
‘Joan, are you okay?’ they asked again
Mm. Still no pain.
‘Uh yes,’ I finally said. ‘Okay.’
As they helped me up, I said, ‘I haven’t fallen since I was a kid. It doesn’t hurt like I remember.’
My friends patched me up with antiseptic and giant bandages, then we were on our way.
Aaron and I were in Shanghai for a work project. One evening, we went in search of cheap electronic goods at a shopping centre that one of our colleagues recommended.
Sadly, pirated software and unbranded hardware seems to be a thing of the Shanghai past. Everything we saw was the real deal, as genuine as anything on Bourke Street Mall.
‘No discount.’ they said as we clumsily tried to haggle. ‘Real Apple. Same price everywhere.’
We quickly gave up our search for an Apple-compatible VGA cable. Instead, we found ourselves in a China-scale bookstore. It was as big as a small department store in Melbourne, and at 9pm was full of people reading.
‘Hello!’ someone said as I walked past a display of translated Barack Obama biographies.
‘Hello,’ I replied, keen to practice my Chinese.
‘Do you want to learn English?’
‘Um…’
‘Here! You can have English lessons,’ he said, trying to hand me a brochure. ‘Free lessons.’
‘Ah! I marshalled my thoughts to explain. ‘I grew up in Australia. My English is… much better than Chinese!’
The fellow looked confused and then left us alone. I think he got the message.
Later, I got two more chances to practice the same conversation with bookstore staff positioned deeper into the store.
