little feet, big sky

The awful infant swing comes with a different “melodies”, though I wonder who might consider those sounds melodious. I tend to pick something on the nature channel, depicted by what I’m guessing is supposed to be a bird. The first three “tracks” sound vaguely like water running, terribly electronic in their tinkling. I have no idea what the fourth one is supposed to be, but it sounds a bit like an old dial-up modem, complete with handshake signal. The fifth is what I select, and assume to be white noise, which works perfectly for putting Spice into this happy, hypnotic state to doze off to.

The problem? The spouse hates it.

Turns out, what sleepologists everywhere suggest for getting babies and adults to sleep sends my spouse into painful, teeth-grinding nightmare… when he can get to sleep. This has led to several scenarios taking place in our house, all variations on the spouse turning down or off the noise and the baby waking up or not falling off to sleep as easily.

So, I’ve resorted to trying other things. Loud, repetitive sounds seem to be the key. I tried Ozzy in the car with limited success; seems I’m more soothed by it than her. My mother burned me a CD with classical Indian music which works well enough that I haven’t removed it from the car to copy to my computer for fear that I might forget to put it back in the car. Yesterday, she calmed to Morrissey, though that might just have been from horror at my chipper sing-a-long with The Last of the Famous International Playboys. Bob Marley’s Is This Love was only a minor success, so perhaps her tastes aren’t fully developed yet. We’ve also tried birdsongs, jungle river, tropical rain, thundering rainstorms, thunderbolts and lightning… mamma mia.

This morning I scoured Amazon’s MP3 Downloads looking for something like womb sounds. Most of what I found was cheesy crap, stuff a deaf baby would scream to turn off. Then I found it, the perfect baby-calming track, an hour-long continuous heartbeat to the sound of waves. Amazing. Spice calmed and gurgled to the preview, so I splurged on all $.99 of it.

While his father was recently here visiting the baby, the spouse and him set up the downstairs guest bedroom as the movie-watching room. (Futon = bed OR couch.) They set the new projector up, and hardwired surround-sound speakers to the wall. Now, thanks to the Blu-Ray feature on the PS3, we have an amazing setup for watching movies at home, which is great since we probably won’t make it to the theater for, oh, about a decade.

With Spice’s swing in there, she now gets the full surround-sound experience of swinging to a steady heartbeat and enough waves to drown a whale. I think I’ll start calling it the “womb room”…

All I’ve been doing this weekend is sleeping! Oh, with some occasional laundry tossed in. I had a craving for ramen yesterday, so we ended up at my favorite ramen stop in L.A., Atch-Kotch, on Fountain & Vine. I ordered my favorite: shoyu ramen with garlic, hot & spicy, fresh egg, fried chicken and nori. Mmm. (You start with basic ramen and add your own toppings.) It’s always so good that the owner, Yosh, knows to pack up the last dregs of soup for me to take home, no matter how little is left in the bowl!

The spouse and I are off to the Grove to go to the Apple store and try and get my poor-battery-life iPhone replaced. (Wish us luck; the last time I tried this at the Century City one, the guy tried to tell me my four barely-used email accounts were sucking up battery life. Doh.) While we’re there, I’ll get in my walking around; I’m so not a mall shopper, so we’ll probably wander around the Farmers’ Market. I’m sure I’ll end up having the roti chanai at Banana Leaf, even though I know the rotis are frozen rather than fresh and the curry is generally bland. (Hey, when you’re almost 30 miles from the only decent Malaysian restaurant in Southern California, you get desperate sometimes.) I also noticed somewhere that the Gumbo Pot has beignets? Are they any good?

Some of my other favorites places to eat in these last few weeks:

• The Bowery. Had the Bowery burger, medium, with St. Andre & grilled onions. All sized to fit on a toasted English muffin bun, it was the perfect portion for a tiny pregnant tummy.
• Fabiolus. Ah, order anything here, everything is good! Eat half and save the rest for the midnight snack – most things taste just as good the next day, especially the pesto dishes.
• Buddha’s Belly. Haven’t been here yet, but it’s bound to happen, since I’m dreaming of the Tom Yam Seafood Soup and a side of their fabulous Seaweed Salad.
• Bossa Nova. Brazillian cuisine with a huge menu. I really enjoyed the Willy’s Burrito with shrimp, to-die-for fried plantains and their cheesebread is awesome.

I’m a geek. The classic self-employed, work-from-home (mostly) geek. I didn’t think this would be a clash with parenting too much until I spoke at a conference last year, got bitten by the speaking bug and have spent the last 8 months of pregnancy just a teensy bit depressed that I’ll have to wait at least a year to have the time, patience and brainpower to resume speaking. The spouse knows this and recently sent me this post from Kirrily Robert’s Infotropism via del.icio.us:

Yesterday I attended Web 2.0 Expo SF, an O’Reilly conference at the Moscone Center. In fact I was mostly there to chair a panel on Troll Whispering with three prominent women in the field of Web 2.0 community management: Christy Canida from Instructables, Teresa Nielsen Hayden from Boing Boing, and Amy Muller from Get Satisfaction.

The four of us arranged to meet downstairs in the foyer beforehand.

“I’m easy to spot,” I told them. “I’ve got bright red hair.”

“I’ll be wearing a fuzzy orange and leopard print coat,” said Christy.

“I’ve got a cane,” said Teresa.

“I’m the one with the baby,” said Amy.

I spotted Amy easily; she was, indeed, the one with the baby. Her daughter, Tesla, is 4 months old, and Amy’s been juggling her work as Chief Community Officer at Get Satisfaction with childcare. Her husband, Thor, is supportive and helps look after the kid when necessary; he’s the CEO of Get Satisfaction. Get Satisfaction, by the way, is one of the most clued in Web 2.0 companies around, and a bit of an O’Reilly favourite. They even help O’Reilly with their customer support.

Anyway, it’s a good thing Thor was there yesterday to mind the baby. It turns out that babes in arms are not permitted on the expo floor or in the conference area of Web2Expo. “Sorry ma’am, we can’t allow anyone under eighteen years of age,” is what the security guard told Amy.

Back in the first dotcom boom (and probably still today), company founders and executives were sometimes under 18. I’ve heard stories about them having to get special exemptions to attend or speak at conferences. So I guess I’m not surprised to hear that Web2Expo is an 18+ event. But I can’t find anything on the website that says so. Perhaps it’s in some kind of T&C that I didn’t read, but I don’t think so.

So, Amy Muller, co-founder and Chief Community Officer of a company that really gets the spirit of Web 2.0, and an invited speaker at the conference, had to ask her husband, co-founder and CEO of the company, to hold the baby and hang out down in the lobby while she attended her panel.

I didn’t even think something like this could happen. I mean, sure I’ve seen the mothers with kids in tow or in strollers around the lobby areas at OSCON, but I didn’t think a conference would have a no-children policy. Gah. I know OSCON is out for me this July because it’s within weeks of my supposed due date, but I had thought that next year it would be easy to at least attend a few sessions, if not speak there. Perhaps it was a pipe dream, but I had visions of being there in some capacity with a (hopefully) well-behaved baby in a sling for short periods of time. *sigh*

Every year, I see more and more women (and geek families) at OSCON. I seriously hope O’Reilly gets the message and at least attempts to do something useful about this for the conference-going community. In the meantime, maybe there’s a way to organize a childcare BOF, or some such?