little feet, big sky

One of my twitter moms, techmama, was asking about favorite iPhone apps – the perfect question for a Monday morning blog post. :-) Since I feel that an app really has to be stellar for to me to pay money for it, most of the apps listed below are free unless otherwise noted. Enjoy!

• Stitchminder – For any craft in which you need to count stitches. Customizable column names, like “increase row” or “pattern row”.
• Sunrise – $.99. Spice starts knocking off to sleep right after sunset, so it’s handy to know exactly what time that is, so I can start her evening feed/bath/sleep routine.
• Wordpress – Blog from your iPhone. Pretty slick overall, but obviously not perfect if I’m still not blogging from it frequently.
• Things – $9.99. The ultimate to-do list. Really, I love this one, as it has a Mac desktop app that will soon sync with the iPhone version. Right now, it’s easier to just use the iPhone version for everything.
• eReader – Awesome e-book reader. One click download from books purchased on ereader.com or fictionwise.com. No sync needed! Setting white text on a black background is perfect for nighttime reading in bed. (Tip: Try it with one of their free books, like The Age of Innocence.)
• NYTimes – Full NY Times articles. What’s neat is that you can organize your preferred sections, like “Politics” or “Photos” in the bottom bar.
• Twitterific – Twitter client. Not as full-featured or fast as Hahlo, but Hahlo can’t do pics. :-(
• Weatherbug – Extreme weather details. Insanely better than the useless default Weather app. Like radar/satellite views and weathercams.
• Evernote – Note-taking program that syncs with website and desktop app. Can be a bit clunky. Neatest trick is being able to take pics that sync to both places automagically, which is useful for blogging later.
• NetNewsWire – News reader that syncs with NetNewsWire (OS X) and FeedDemon (Windows) through Newsgator Online so you never read the same thing twice.
• eBay Mobile – Track your auctions, whether you’re buying or selling.
• Pandora Radio – Incredibly sharp choose-your-own Internet radio.

I have an appointment with the shrink again today. *sigh* I’ve been vacillating between wanting to go and wanting to cancel. I know I should go because I know I need help and that’s what you’re supposed to do. I want to cancel because it doesn’t seem to help. I come home and everything just seems just as bleak as before.

I feel so useless lately. I know the whole “taking care of a whole person” bit, but I can’t help but feel that I’m just not accomplishing enough. And frustrated because I don’t have the time or energy to get more done. Work is pretty much shot. I might spend an hour with my hand in actual code, but that included hours spent in my head working out the problems first – and my head is nowhere near clear enough to do that. I have an attention span “the length of a flea’s nose”, as an old friend used to say. I consider the spouse lucky if I follow him talking for more than five minutes. All my mind can think of is baby, and other than that, my demeanor is pretty vapid most of the time. How on earth is this a biological survival skill??

At this point I’m capable of the following: eating, sleeping, showering, feeding baby, changing diapers, bathing baby, playing “wiggle out the farts” with baby, doing laundry and limited driving. Okay, so some days I only eat about 600 calories and I’m often so spaced while driving that I make myself say the color of the stoplight out loud before the intersection. Still, right now, that’s about all I can manage.

I’ve recently added knitting back to this list. Knitting usually takes more brain cells for me than crochet, but lately I’ve been on auto-pilot with it. The whole “sleep when the baby sleeps” thing doesn’t work for me because I don’t easily sleep with daylight and she rarely sleeps long enough for me to get in a nap, too. So I’ve found that twitter and knitting are both things I can do in 20 – 30 minutes chunks, between her and some laundry and maybe a cup of tea. I’ve finished a baby vest, and am almost done with some gorgeous wristwarmers that I’ll probably sell on Etsy. Next up are some scarves, a wool diaper wrap and perhaps a pair of socks. The other morning, I photographed many (but not all) pieces of my copious yarn stash to list on Ravelry. This made me realize just how much good yarn I have that needs to be knitted into something useful… hence, the knitting spell.

If you knit or crochet and you’re on Ravelry, check out my notebook and send me a hello! I’m also on twitter and always looking for new friends to follow.

Haven’t been posting much lately, due to something wrong with Blogo. When I try to post, it crashes and it only happens about 50% of the time, but that’s enough to make me not want to use it. :-( Posting from the web for now, until I get this thing hosted myself, and Blogo sorted out..

If I were a dog, I’d be embarrassed to wear something like this. My mother loves these silly “thong” sweaters on her dog, though. Poor chihuahua doesn’t even have the smarts to be a little abashed. I had made my mother a scarf last winter, a gorgeous thing in black Blue Sky Alpacas Bulky, with a single strand of black and silver Rowan Kidsilk haze. I found some leftovers from it and whipped up a matching thong sweater. *sigh*

It’s grey in L.A. today and hot cocoa stuffed with BonBonBar vanilla marshmallows is delish. Too bad I can’t figure out how to lick the inside of the mug…

The spouse is recovering nicely, thanks to lots and lots of vicodin. :-) My mother drove down for a surprise visit on last Monday, which was an unexpected godsend. She’s a nurse, so it was doubly good to have someone handy to keep an eye on the sleeping-all-day spouse as well as be able to hand the baby over once in a while. We lounged around for the most part, drinking tea and coffee and hanging out in the kitchen. The kitchen part is fun, because we both love cooking and it’s hard not to look at a jar of pecans and start imagining warm pecan pie. She woke up early one morning and cleared out and rearranged all my kitchen cupboards! Yea, Mom!

Now she’s spending the weekend with my sister, and the house is quiet. I’ve resurrected some old knitting/crochet projects and have filled up the recent downtime from Spice with laundry, the kitchen, crochet, tea and books. I whipped up some booties for her to wear under her baby legwarmers in some buttery soft , and frogged the newborn baby bolero I was making to make a sleep soaker instead. I also just finished Stardust last night and it was fantastic. (I’ve been a fan of Neil Gaiman since Preludes and Nocturnes, and aside from the Sandman books, my favorite book is still Neverwhere.) Now that I’ve read the book, I can add the DVD to my Netflix queue in good conscience.

My mother and sister are going for dim sum this morning and invited me. Given the recent drama, I’ll probably bow out, but dim sum! The spouse, being vegetarian, has a tough time finding something edible there, so I usually only go with my mother and sister. *sigh* I’ll just have to content myself with being curled up here with my tea, a blanket, cleaning out my rss feed reader and try desperately not to think of hot, steaming nor my gai.

I’ve been reading a book called Buddhism for Mothers. It’s like a cup of tea for my soul lately and is inspiring me to write the following…

I an tired. I would normally hate to admit this, but I’m trying to be compassionate with myself. The idea is that I would never treat anyone else as badly as I treat myself.

So, I am tired. My back aches, my knees hurt and I am mentally and emotionally drained. I feel guilty admitting this, as I’m sitting next to the recovering spouse, slumped sleeping in a chair because it’s too painful for him to move to the bed two feet away and there’s still ten minutes to go until his next dose of pain meds. Guilty, because I am a guilt-monger. Guilt is the whip that drives me onwards to some imagined perfection every day.

But where was I? Oh, right, I’m tired. I’ve barely caught a few hours of sleep since Thursday, and have been juggling baby, house and sick spouse since then. Maybe tired is an understatement, but I’m running on that extra adrenaline that comes with the fear of letting just one ball drop.

Oh, that’s what I was thinking. I was sitting here by the spouse, tearing up a little, and was wondering why I wanted to cry so badly. It’s just an appendectomy, right? Kids get them all the time. It was part exhaustion, I’m sure. But mostly, it was this overwhelming frustration at having to choose between the spouse and Spice. Three hours here. Four hours there. Both need me right now and I spend time with each guilty that I’m not spending time with the other. How messed up is that.

Of course, the logical side of me says that I can’t be two places at once, so there’s no point in crying over it. And the aiming-for-compassion part of me tries to pipe up that I really am trying to do the best I can, that I’ve done so much the past few days, and I just need to get a few hours of sleep. And that’s nothing to feel guilty about.

The spouse is in the hospital ER waiting for someone to cut out his appendix and I’m here at home.

We agreed that it would be better not to have Spice sitting around all night in a germy hospital, but being here alone while he’s there in pain is soooo hard. I just got off the phone with him and at least the pain is wearing off under the morphine.

I lay here in bed, next to a sleeping Spice, wondering who I could call to watch her overnight so I could go to the hospital. My sister and I are no longer talking. My mother lives 300 miles away. There’s a close family friend I trust, but she’s retired and about 30 miles away; I wouldn’t want to wake her up in the middle of the night to make her drive so far. And I can’t think of anyone else. All our other friends ate either too far away, ones we really aren’t “close” to, or not the baby-watching type.

As always, I wonder what people did in the past for this sort of thing, and I’m reminded that we only stopped living in villages a couple of hundred years ago. Never before have parents been expected to raise a child alone, just two adults. Children have been raised by villages, passed along to grandparents, aunts and uncles, even older children for babysitting. Even my mother was raised by her grandmother and aunt, alongside her parents, and in turn she raised her younger brothers and sisters as well as her cousins. This whole nuclear family thing was a bad, bad idea.

I should really try and sleep since Spice and I will be headed down there in a few hours. I just wanted to say that it really does take a village to raise a child. From PPD to ADHD, it’s becoming clear what happens when the village no longer exists.