It’s been a month already since Elliott was born, and time has been plodding along as each day we encounter new baby challenges and hurdles. We do seem to be getting used to it in a way, if that is even possible, and I feel confidant of how we’re going with it all. Heathers parents will be coming here from Canada in a few weeks time which will be nice to have a hand around the place. I feel like I almost getting on top of the whole sleep deprivation issue and haven’t had much insomnia at all. Went to see the new physiotherapist yesterday for the second time. He was surprised that I hadn’t dramatically improved but I assured him I did feel like we were on the right track with it all. He thought that as this problem had been occurring for over 5 months, it will probably take more time and some extra work to recover. He also felt the condition was definitely treatable and I would improve fairly soon. I can’t even imagine what it would be like to feel somewhat normal again with my wrist a

Just added another print to my etsy.com store which you can view here . I'm hoping to add at least one new print per month.

Saw a cool documentary by Alan Berliner, called ‘Wide Awake’ on the TV the other night about insomnia. I suffer from it occasionally and have had it once or twice since the baby has been born. I thought these were some helpful tips for correcting your sleeping pattern: -Think how comfortable the bed is how much you appreciate being in bed -Get up at the same time every day, no matter how much time you’ve slept -Get sunlight straight after waking and eating breakfast etc (Edit: I also saw another thing on TV the other day that said that looking at the blue sky in the morning helps with your circadian rhythms as well) This from good ol' wikipedia on circadian rythmns, The ability of light to reset the biological clock depends on the phase response curve (to light). Depending on the phase of sleep, the light can advance or delay the circadian rhythm. The required illuminance varies from species to species, much lower light levels being required to reset the clocks in nocturnal ro

Yesterday I went to the new physiotherapist as recommended by my previous one. When I left the house Heather has reminded me to be positive about the visit and hope that this new guy had some answers. My appointment was at 3.50 and I got there on time, and checked in at the desk. After a few minutes I was directed into a curtained off room by the receptionist. I’d gone into this appointment with a fairly negative outlook after suffering from this problem for 5 months, I had not seemed to get any where with it, I was still as clueless as when it started. But here I was at the appointment, sitting in a weird little curtained of room listening to other patients answer questions about how much football they play a week and feeling awkward about explaining my vague but serious symptoms to yet another specialist. As each minute went past I was getting more agitated, I looked at my watch and it was twenty minutes past my appointment time, I wondered if I should just leave. A few minutes late

I went to see my physiotherapist for the fourth time last Friday. Once again she was surprised that the treatments hadn’t been helping me improve much at and suggested that the problem could be stemming from a shoulder problem. She then referred me to a colleague who specialises in this area. I could have become frustrated with this situation, where there never seems to be any real answers to the problem. I’m getting through by telling myself that I have a unusual and more complex problem, that I’ll eventually get to the bottom of. For now, I’ve stopped doing all the treatments until I see this new guy tomorrow afternoon. I actually stopped wearing the brace to bed the other night anyway as I’ve been finding it hard to get to sleep; yeah that’s right our baby started sleeping better in the night, then I start having insomnia, it’s a cruel joke! In regards to drawing and my wrist problems, I seem to have calmed down about giving drawing a rest. I still miss it but I’ve been able to adj

I ran into that friend who works at Target the other day. Heather and I were out on a stroll with little Elliot in the pusher. The girl was also with her partner who I had met in passing before. We got to show off Elliott and she also introduced us to her partner properly. At this stage I was excited to ask her about her fellow Target employee who was talking about me, the mystery dude, it took a few seconds to jog her memory. She then laughed and told me that she said to him I work in town, so that’s why he must see me a lot. It was a little anti climatic as I was expecting some further details of what he had said. We finished up talking and parted ways. As we were walking off the thought struck me, ‘had Heather met these two before’? I really thought she had as we often go to the same Indian restaurant, and I’ve seen them there whilst I was out to dinner with Heather. I turned to look at Heather’s face which had that ‘you didn’t introduce me’ fuming mad look on her face. Sure enough

I read yesterday that sleep is the new sex and I couldn’t agree more right now. In our pre natal classes they discussed babies sleep and feeding patterns and suggested that feeding every few hours is not strange for them and if you think about it we also often snack and or have a drink every few hours. It was a sobering thought at the time of things to come, but we managed to get our heads around it. They also tell you all about this concept of demand feeding, that is you feed the baby every time they demand it and not on some abstract time schedule, once again sounds pretty logical to us. Fast forward two weeks after the birth to two parents who have endured said amount of time on 2-5 hours of broken sleep each night and you realise that there is no logic to this sleeping and feeding business when it comes to babies. Demand feeding really means that the boob will constantly be out and that by the time you’ve finished feeding them and they have a short break they’ll hungry again. Feed

I was over at John Porcelino’s site King Cat when I came across this link to this book ‘Watcha mean, what’s a zine?’ I think I’d seen it before whilst doing the early stages of research for my honours. Now having faced teaching that class on zines this would be great to have as a reference. You can get it here from Amazon. Anyone else know of some good reference books or zine making? Speaking of which I have been putting together a simple one of my own for workshop purposes. I’ve been tweaking the text for a while now; you might remember I put an early first draft of it in one of these blogs. It’s almost finished it just really needs some more illustrations that I need to do soon.

I had a funny thing happen to me the other day. I quickly drove into town to do a few errands, one of them to look for a new chair that would be suitable for Heather to breastfeed in. Being the school holidays the traffic was busy, which meant I had to use the massive car park next to Target. Once I drove in I got an impatient driver right up behind me and when I tried to park in a spot I could see her getting agitated with me. Add to this a foggy passenger side window so I just pulled out and kept moving. She kept following without taking the park, then same thing happened with the next park I found, I quickly zoomed off and luckily got into a park smoothly before she came whizzing around the corner and drove past. I sat in the car for a minute trying not to get annoyed at her, I mean who gets mad because they go into a car park and someone in front of them gets a park, isn’t that what a car park is? I got out of the car feeling a bit frazzled and started walking slowly to the entranc

This last week has been fairly crazy with the arrival of our son and the resulting change in lifestyle. But it’s all worth it to have him here finally safe and sound. It was also such a big relief to get back from the hospital and be in our own space with no interference. We’ve both been surviving on such little sleep, as new parents do, we’ve been like zombies and even the most simple everyday task can take on monumental proportions! But each day it has settled a little and we feel little bit of normal creeping in. Thus far we’ve only ventured around the block as a team, but we’ve both had some small individual ventures outside to run errands. I just found out that a workshop on Zines I was meant to be running tomorrow has been postponed for now which is a huge relief for me. I was madly trying to find some headspace to do all the last minute prep for it. It may still be going ahead on the Tuesday but there’s a high likelihood it will be cancelled as well. Here’s hoping! Although