clearbluecup

a few more vancouver photos are up now...

click on the photo below to get to the album.

a few updates:

bea has totally figured out how to smile. I've been trying to get a picture, but catching just the right expression on a baby's face is really difficult. most of the pictures turn out blurry, off-centre or just that moment too late to get the true smile. but this one gives a pretty good idea of the level of cuteness we are dealing with here - -

we have settled into our month-long accomodation and are getting into the house-hunting mode. since I'm not totally debilitated by depression I've been taking on more of the searching than I'd expected to, but it's working out just fine. we viewed our first apartment last night, which happened to be just across the street from our current apartment. it was ok, pretty bog-standard, but a good idea of what the baseline is, I think. it's a difficult task though. when I call to respond to ads half the time there is no answer and no reply to the message I leave, and the other half of the time the apartment or house has already been rented. and this is out of the 5% of rentals out there that actually accept cats. So, a tricky job.

also, our stroller/buggy/pushchair/whatever you want to call it is a major attraction here. In a sea of butt-ugly north american style gracos our buzz stands out in a big way, especially because we're using a carseat with it. I went to sears to buy a pack n play yesterday, and the lady in the shop was all excited about the carseat and wanted to know where we bought it and even brought her co-worker from another department over to see it! Literally every time I go out on the street somebody stops me and comments on my stroller.

we have settled into something of a routine, and life is getting easier. I can predict when bea will want to eat and sleep, and now that we've got the pack n play she can sleep in that safely, which frees me up to do other things, like write blog posts and call rental offices. I'm actually feeling like I'm getting a handle on things, which is a wonderful feeling. but lest I get arrogant and cocky, we still do have those days where something throws us for a loop. like yesterday. I decided that I would walk down to the starbucks and treat myself to a latte, then walk down to the harbour and look at the rentals in the newspaper while drinking my coffee in the sunshine. lovely! but not so lovely several hours later when bea is totally wired and tired and can't sleep because the caffeine has come through in my milk. duh. should have expected that one. but lesson learned - no more lattes until weaning. oh well. today's been much better.

does anyone know where I can buy cotton wool? like cotton balls, or even a big roll of soft, absorbent fluff made out of real cotton instead of icky rayon "absorbent puffs"? I don't remember ever having this problem in canada before, but it seems that all the cotton balls have disappeared out of the shops and have been replaced by nasty synthetic puffs. at our local grocery in ireland you could buy real cotton in about a dozen different forms - pleats, puffs, pads, rolls and on sticks (as in q-tips).

also, I can't find any omega-3 eggs here. I only started eating them recently because I didn't trust them until I read that they increase the omega-3 levels by feeding the chickens really healthy food that is high in omega-3 oils. good for the chickens, good for me - yes please, I'll have some of those eggs. but not even the fancy organic foods supermarket here carries them. I'm confused. maybe they only treat chickens well in europe.

house hunting is turning out to be a pain, as always. it would be easier with a car, as one of the hardest parts is getting around the city trying to find the houses, and finding the time to do so. how do you decide which places to go view? based on how you feel that day, whether they satisfy a certain number of criteria or just a few high priority criteria, whether they are nearby, cheap, have attractively written ads or charming agents managing them? In an ideal world, I would go to see as many as I possibly could, thereby increasing my chances of finding something good. if there is one great place in every 10 dank holes then I don't mind seeing many more dank holes to find that perfect place.

but alas, I live in a world of finite energy. by 8pm every night I am pretty much reduced to a child myself, cranky and needing a nice bath and my blankie. there was a "garden level" suite being shown tonight that I thought looked promising - good neighbourhood, garden, cats welcome and three bedrooms. however, the open house was at 9pm. by 9pm I hope to be in my pyjamas drinking camomile tea, not dragging beatrice out onto the bus to look at some "garden level" suite that might be really nice but also might be a dank, lightless basement. but maybe we've just given up that perfect house that would be a nice short commute for tom, near to amenities for myself and bea, and a with a back garden for louis to hunt birds. how do you know until you've seen it?

If anyone else out there has a system for house hunting I'd love to hear it. we're going on the luck, sweat and tears approach at the moment and it's a bit exhausting.

thanks for everyone who replied to my plea for cotton wool and omega eggs! turns out neither are unavailable here, they just aren't sold at our local safeway or shoppers drug mart. Tom found real cotton wool at london drugs, and I found omega eggs at the corner store across the street from our apartment. go figure that the fancy organic shop doesn't carry them but the ethnic corner store does.

the house hunt is going well. we decided to rent a car yesterday and drove around for the afternoon looking at neighbourhoods and scoping out rentals. saw a gorgeous place that we're going to look at properly today, and from the outside it looks absolutely perfect. I'm hesitant to get my hopes up too much in case something falls through but it fits so many of our criteria - close enough to downtown for tom to commute by bike, close to amenities like shops, yoga studios and a community centre for me, and a garden and big patio for louis (and the rest of us, I suppose).

also, if you're checking in here and wondering why I haven't written you an email directly, I'm sorry. I haven't actually emailed anyone since I've gotten here although I've thought about all the emails I wanted to write. Writing a blog post gets in contact with more people in the same amount of time, but I will start working through my list of individual emails to be written very soon. I haven't forgotten about you!

so we went to look at the inside of the lovely house today, and it is lovely lovely lovely. beautiful wood floors, gas fireplace, big windows with city and mountain views, skylights, clawfoot bathtub and a wonderful set of carved wooden drawers in the bathroom. we put in an application and have crossed all our fingers and toes.

we also went to the capilano suspension bridge yesterday and the cleveland dam this afternoon. it amazes me that a ten to fifteen drive from our apartment downtown takes us to a forest that feels like the middle of nowhere. tom really enjoyed the suspension bridge, especially the way it wobbles as you walk along. that makes his vertigo really go nuts.

and just because we haven't had many photos of louis recently, here is a picture of his mind control stare. "you will let me go outside. open the door. yes, just open the door. I want to go outside."

Thou Shalt Not...

Wake a sleeping baby. Never ever, under any circumstances other than life and death. You would think this is a self-evident rule, but no. We learned this the hard way.

Leave a diaper on for longer than two hours. Want to know why? No? I'll tell you anyway. Well, apart from general hygiene and grossness factors, it gets soaked with pee and then a ginormous poo comes along and there is no absorbency left. I will leave the rest to your imagination. This lesson was learned in Shannon airport, where we were delayed at the check-in desk for longer than we really thought possible.

Ignore the urge to breastfeed. It's easier on everyone involved to stop whatever you are doing and whip out the boob than it is to convince a hungry baby and a mother with leaking milk to just wait another 5 minutes. The consequences of breaking this rule involve a lot of shouting and are really not pretty.

Drink caffeinated lattes. As previously discussed. Our friend Rosalind suggested ordering a decaf, which is a brilliant compromise. I plan to test this tomorrow morning.

Change baby's clothes in the middle of the night if they're not really dirty. This is another one that seems self-evident in retrospect, but last night at 3am my logic brain said, "Beatrice wears pyjamas when she sleeps at night. It is nighttime and she is not wearing pyjamas, therefore, I should put her pyjamas on." WRONG. The only things that should be done at 3am are feeding and doing whatever needs to be done for everyone to get back to sleep in as short a time as possible. Not fiddling around trying to pull t-shirts over heads and arms through sleeves. I realised I'd made a mistake on this one as Bea was half-undressed, and it was too late to undo what I'd already done. oops.

In case you were one of the (probably many) readers who could't access my photo albums since I switched over to movable type in august, you'll be glad to hear that I've updated my templates and added a link to my photos. you can find it over there on the right, just beneath the search box. it wasn't actually as hard as I imagined it would be (there is a theme here), and I am working on a fancy xml feed to show tiny versions of the newest photos on the sidebar as they are uploaded. I've registered to take another course in my master's program starting in january, so it's good practice to try and do things that take a certain amount of brainpower during beatrice's downtime.

the past week was a busy one with a visit from my parents during the week and a trip out to kelowna on the weekend. I'll have some more photos up soon.

I would have some way to remember the fleeting moments,
some words capable of capturing the scent of a scene,
the glint and flash of a single maple leaf floating down towards the ground in the autumn sun,
a flock of leaves in formation between branch and ground.
the smiles and coos of my baby,
the size of her hands and the curve of her pouty lip.
the dizzy sensation of flying in time as we drive through the mountains,
sitting in the backseat and looking out the window.
the trees flicker past.
the shape of each mountain known
by some deep, old part of my younger self.

memories of memories and children of children;
we are immersed in a recursive world.

I added lots of photos into bea's album, click here to get to the album, or try out the link on the right.

edited to add a video... bea is starting to coo and have little chats with us, which you just can't capture in a photo but the video does a pretty good job. :)

yesterday I finished reading The Time Traveler's Wife by Audrey Niffenegger, and I have to say that it was the first time in a really long time that I was absolutely compelled to keep reading once I hit the final third of a book. Bea was having a particularly cuddly day in which she really didn't want to be put down by herself in her bed, so we sat together in the armchair and I sucked up some tasty fiction while she alternately slept and nursed. I didn't get a lot else done, but they're only little once, right??

this book is expertly constructed, given the challenges of narrating a story in which the main character jumps around the timeline of his own life. there were all kinds of things I love to see in fiction - dream sequences, snappy dialogue, philosophical questions and characters that are so alive they show up in my dreams. Kiki from Zadie Smith's On Beauty is that kind of character too, just so round and full that you feel like you've known her all your life.

reading books like this makes me feel all fired up to write something great myself, although it could be the time of year as well. there is something about autumn that brings up all kinds of creative urges in me - wanting to write, sew, make papier mache, anything. i miss baking bread too. not long now, i tell myself. not long now.