Section 118 Entry 0001. Date: 2004 July 15 Thursday.
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Baby Cornucopia is now over six kilos in weight and it won't be all that long before she's three months of age.
Compared to what she was earlier, she's enormously mature, and does amazing things like almost rolling right over. But she's still very definitely a baby.
"I keep wanting to say to her, 'Oh, don't be such a baby!'" says my wife. "Then I realize she is a baby."
The most annoyingly babyish thing that Cornucopia does is to scream herself to sleep. This happens routinely.
First she gets tired. And, when she gets tired, she gets bad tempered. Then fretful. Nappy dry? Yes. Been fed recently? Yes. Too hot? No. Time for her to sleep? Definitely. Okay, so let's dim the lights and put on the happy sleeping music.
Sometimes that works, sort of, as long as a compliant adult carries Cornucopia around for half an hour or so while she drifts off to sleep. But, equally often, she will start to scream, regardless of whether she is or is not being carried around, patted soothingly or sung to.
And she will scream. And scream. And scream. And scream. Working herself up into a positively hysterical pitch of tortured fury. Sometimes the screaming will die down to zero, and the relieved parent will think, "Oh, so she's going to sleep, then." But, after a brief interlude, the screaming will start up again.
And then, finally, she will shudder into sleep. It happens quite suddenly. One moment she's screaming. Then next moment, she seems to come to a decision: "Oh, I've screamed enough." Then she will close her eyes and slump into sleep.
The task of phasing Cornucopia into sleep usually falls to me, as Cornucopia's going-to-sleep time is also my wife's shower time. I try to get some sleep on the train going home in order to be prepared. I find if I can sleep for twenty minutes or so on the train, then I can be tolerant (even amused) in the face of the determined bawling. But, if not, then the thought "I don't really need this" tends to go through my head.
In the "Baby Talk" book by Dr Sally Ward it's suggested that you talk to your baby for half an hour a day. When I first read this my thought was, "How am I possibly going to find half an hour in my busy day to be with my baby?"
But, in fact, it can easily take half an hour just to get Cornucopia off to sleep.
That's not an ideal time for a talk session, of course, but I have further opportunities on the weekend, when I often look after my daughter for hours at a stretch. Talking and singing to her. Singing pretty much anything. La Marsellaise, for example. I don't know many of the words, but it's a great song to sing to your baby.
Actually, I'm just looking at La Marsellaise now, on the Internet. I thought it started "A la defense de la patrie." But actually the words are (excusing accentual marks):
Allons enfants de la Patrie,
Le jour de gloire est arrive!
Contre nous de la tyrannie,
L'etendard sanglant est leve,
Entendez-vous dans nos compagnes
Mugir ces feroces soldats?
Ils viennent jusque dans vos bras.
Engorger vos fils, vos compagnes!
Aux armes citoyens
Formez vos bataillons
Marchons, marchons
Qu'un sang impur
Abreuve nos sillons.
And so forth.
Initially, I just sang it without worrying about whether I was correct or not. (And, in fact, I still like my ""A la defense de la patrie" opening better than the authentic opening.) But, after singing a mutilated version an unknown number of times, I finally started thinking, "Hey, if I'm doomed to sing this sucker another ten thousand times, I might as well learn the words."
My daughter, then, has begun to influence my education.
She now talks, sort of, and at times talks enthusiastically, saying stuff like "Woo, woh, woo, woh!" None of which makes any sense.
When she was a month old, both I and her mother thought that at one point she started to say, distinctly, the word "Hello!" But, in retrospect, I think we were deluded.
Section 118 Entry 0002. Date: 2004 July 16 Friday.
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A couple of days ago I read an article in a newspaper about Japanese women (allegedly this is a trend) drying their hands on their hair rather than using a handkerchief. (Toilets in Japan often have neither paper towels nor hot air dryers.)
As it happened, on the day in question I'd ventured out without my handkerchief, so I decided to give this a shot, even though I'm not a woman, and even though my hair (since the thousand yen haircut) is pretty short.
However, it doesn't work. The result is that you end up with damp hair and damp hands.
On the baby front, a good news / bad news situation. My wife found one thing that succeeded in stopping baby Cornucopia's tears, at least temporarily. What? Sumo! Confronted with the spectacle of sumo on TV, Cornucopia "became very serious" and stopped crying.
The bad news component on this is that the latest sumo tournament, the Nagoya Basho, is almost over. I'm pretty sure it ends this weekend, either Saturday or Sunday.
(Once I would have known for certain. But I've become so busy that I've ceased to pay attention to sumo, and I only see it by accident when the occasional thirty-second segment shows up on the evening news. And I don't have time for regular evening TV news watching, either, so my encounters with the TV news have also become accidental.)
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