Baby Passports

 General  2 Responses »
Sep 272006
 

I had to take the kids in to get pass­port pho­tos done today, since we’ll be trav­el­ling with them out­side of Canada. I found a loc­al place with exper­i­ence in tak­ing pho­tos for dif­fer­ent coun­tries (Canada and New Zea­l­and); the require­ments are dif­fer­ent. For example, Canada wants a white back­ground for the pho­tos, while New Zea­l­and wants a light but not white back­ground. Both coun­tries expect pho­tos with eyes open and mouth closed and no vis­ible hands, so the pho­to­graph­er put a cloth over the hand hold­ing the front of the baby. She kept turn­ing to look at me, or smil­ing at the pho­to­graph­er, but even­tu­ally we were done. For­tu­nately there is an inter­sec­tion set of who’s allowed to sign the back of the pho­tos to say this is really the child in the photo (our fam­ily doc­tor); New Zea­l­and will allow any New Zeal­ander or one of a num­ber of pro­fes­sions to be a wit­ness (guar­ant­or of iden­tity), while Canada insists on the pro­fes­sions (doc­tor, account­ant, etc). One could won­der why people who engage in oth­er pro­fes­sions aren’t con­sidered good enough to veri­fy your iden­tity in Canada. Why not your employ­er, for example? And why is geoscient­ist on the list, but not phys­i­cist or com­puter scientist?

Autumn

 General  No Responses »
Sep 162006
 

The weath­er has changed here at 49 ° lat­it­ude north, the days still warm and sunny, but the nights are cool. The memor­ies of nights when we slept with the fan run­ning and the win­dows open are reced­ing fast, soon to be filed with memor­ies of pre­vi­ous sum­mers. The win­dows in the house that were open until last week are shut now in response to the cool, moist air, and I think of the vari­ous winter-proof­ing tasks that will soon be due. The cats are happy to come in in the even­ings now, no longer eager to stay out­side, wan­der­ing the neigh­bour­hood until all hours. Now they want to sleep on the bed, snug­gling in close to the warmth. Our son does­n’t want a cat sleep­ing on his bed, and they’re not allowed in the baby’s crib, so we are their remain­ing option. The garden is still act­ive, the roses bloom­ing and the phlox and hydrangeas tower­ing over the calen­du­las. The signs of autumn are here as well though, the plums and blue­ber­ries all gone, the pears mostly so. Only the toma­toes are still ripen­ing on their vines. The sum­mer seemed so short this year, I hope the autumn stays longer, gives us more sun before we are sub­ject to the grey and gloom of winter. 

Northern Voice Questions

 Conference  No Responses »
Sep 062006
 

North­ern Voice is a small Van­couver con­fer­ence on blog­ging, and I’m on the organ­iz­ing com­mit­tee. We’re gear­ing up for the 2007 con­fer­ence, which we were plan­ning on hold­ing in Feb­ru­ary, but we’ve run into some issues with the ven­ue. So we’ve come up with a sur­vey to ask people who were think­ing of attend­ing NV 2007 for opin­ions on the vari­ous options we have — it’s at NV 2007 Dates and Ven­ue Sur­vey. Clos­ing date is a week from today, that’s Septem­ber 13th. The sur­vey is short and should­n’t take more than a couple of minutes to fill in. Thanks!

Coping with Pregnancy

 Family  9 Responses »
Sep 062006
 

I found a couple of things very use­ful for my second preg­nancy that I did­n’t dis­cov­er for my first — and thought I should blog them in case they’re use­ful to any­body else. I’m sure any read­ers with oth­er ideas will add them — I’ll do anoth­er post in a bit about some early baby­hood stuff that I found useful.

The biggest prob­lems I had with the second preg­nancy were simply due to the size of the belly. I can highly recom­mend doing Pil­ates, or yoga, or find­ing some oth­er way of get­ting some­body to help you fig­ure out how to sit, stand, and walk as the belly grows. I stuck out in front which made the poten­tial for lower back pain (which I had for my first, when I did­n’t do Pil­ates) worse than for those women for whom the weight is more evenly dis­trib­uted. I was in a cof­fee shop in the last couple of weeks and chat­ted to the barista about this; she thought stick­ing out in front and not being notice­ably preg­nant from behind was good until I poin­ted out it makes doing up your shoes dif­fi­cult. You do get some­what adept at twist­ing your legs around so you can get at your feet side­ways — I found a long shoe­horn was very use­ful at this stage. 

A body pil­low was use­ful for sleep­ing as you are meant to sleep only on your side, and the lig­a­ments in your hips start to stretch and hurt, so you need all the sup­port you can get. You can get by with lots of pil­lows, but a body pil­low is easi­er to deal with. I did­n’t both­er with one of those fancy shaped body pil­lows, the basic straight ver­sion did just fine and was a lot less expens­ive. I also found reg­u­lar mas­sages from a registered mas­sage ther­ap­ist (make sure they have preg­nancy pil­lows for sup­port and have exper­i­ence in pren­at­al mas­sage) to be well worth the money — all those muscles that are being stretched and over­loaded in unfa­mil­i­ar ways really enjoyed being put back into place.

And of course you want to get as much done as pos­sible before the baby arrives, while get­ting as much sleep as pos­sible. No mat­ter how tired you are before the baby arrives, and how little energy you have, you will be more tired and have less energy after­wards! Mind you, if you live any­where like Van­couver and need any renov­a­tions done, you won’t have much choice in when things get done. They will get done when the con­tract­or can fit them in, if you can find a con­tract­or to do any­thing. And the rest will get done when you have some energy. Hav­ing a baby is a good les­son in what does­n’t need to be done.

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