Saturday, August 27, 2016

Games Day

Little to report, but it was a good day.

Helen is safely here. She enjoyed the vegetarian spread I had prepared. She is going to a mosaic workshop in Stockbridge today which is why she has preceded the rest of her family by two days. I can't imagine that Stockbridge has much to teach her, but it's always fun to be among fellow enthusiasts. And Stockbridge  is halfway to the Western General, so she will probably be able to visit her father at the end of the day.

I had a good talk with a dr yesterday. It is all much as I thought. They are aiming to get my husband home, with a “care package” involving two carers at a time, four times a day. They think a hospital bed might be a good idea. But he’s not ready for home yet. He thought, yesterday, that he might be coming home today. It’s all pretty grim.

As for knitting, I finished the ribbing of the Whiskey Barrel sock – that wasn’t so bad, after all – and began speeding down the leg. And I did a bit more on the Uncia, and am now halfway through the final session of repeat-last-two-rows-seven-more-times. There’s an awful lot of purling, and I think what is being produced, between the ribs as they radiate outwards, is garter stitch. But I also think the purling may be a necessity enforced upon the designer by the fact that the in-between bits originate as the purl stitch in a K1P1 rib down at the beginning.

Non-knit

A book review of “The Cyber Effect” in today’s Times says: “If mothers glued to their mobile phones no longer make eye contact with their babies while breastfeeding, how does this affect their child’s emotional attachment?”

Bugger eye contact. Breastfeeding was my one chance to read, back in those stressful days. (Rachel was not yet five when Helen was born – and the two boys were in between.) The thing I mostly regret is how fashion has changed: in those days, it was a competition to see whose baby would eat the most solid food the soonest. Nowadays, I think I could have had four or five months of blissful breastfeeding and reading before the pablum started.


The one thing I think to be deplored, is to leave a small baby with a bottle to manage for itself. 

5 comments:

  1. I found that if the baby could make eye-contact with me during breastfeeding, it was a sure sign that our positioning was all wrong and someone was going to hurt (ie me). And I have never read as much as in those milk-soaked years.

    I started them on solids when they started trying to steal my lunch from my plate. One health visitor approved of this strategy, the other did not. It was at somewhere between five and six months each time.

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    1. Anonymous4:09 PM

      My daughter "stole" her first solid (a spoon of non-sweetened applesauce from her Dad's lunch). We carried on with bedtime breastfeeding until just after her second birthday because her doctor felt it would help her get through eye surgery (and it did).

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  2. So hard to be caught between the doctors and the mister. Happy Helen is there to help.

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  3. Hospital discharge decisions can be enigmatic. It often seems to be driven by whether someone else needs the bed.
    My friend's mother lived with the double carer visits, five times a day for a longish while - she had added a dislocated hip to a polio leg. However, she was able to last through the night without assistance. Does your husband need to get up during the night, and how might this be managed without it all falling back on you again?

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  4. I would say, if you can bear the upheaval of installation, go for the hospital bed. It will make life easier in the long run. I hope you can find some quiet time to recharge your batteries as it will be all go on Tuesday!

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