Here We Go A-Hormone Tripping (Or, Getting To Know Baby)

Rockstar Trip

The strangest thing about hormones is they don’t just make you feel like puking. When people asked “Any weird cravings?” I thought I didn’t have any. Last pregnancy I got my “kicks” ingesting a horrific number of calories, this pregnancy I’m up 15 lbs having barely entered my 2nd trimester but am not eating anything particularly sinful.

That in itself makes this pregnancy quite different from Rockstar’s. But insofar as the belief there is some connection between preggers you and your baby (I like to call it your body not being your own, having been hijacked, possessed, by this tiny other person who thinks your bladder is a squeeze toy and your natural sleep schedule a joke), I used to play these little games: Do I like music? Does the Rockstar seem to like the same music when he came out? What do I spend/ want to spend a lot of time doing? What does the little person end up enjoying today? 

(And when you can feel the baby kick, I do that with food and the sleep schedule too – what foods I eat seem to make the baby kick the most? Then my Gynea kept saying No lar, Cannot Be lar, you must just have been distracted, not realizing he was kicking sometimes but I remember Rockstar having a party particularly from 10.30pm every night. Because I’m a morning person, and was concerned he was going to be a night owl – when he came out he really was, it was impossible to get him to sleep between 11 and 2am, but from 6-9am he would have the sweetest, most maddeningly peaceful sleep.)

Besides it being just plain entertaining and a rejoicing in the blessing of pregnancy (well I need to throw myself a bone right, it isn’t fun puking over every little smell or even inconceivable catalyst), I also entertained the thought that older babies, little children, learn fast how to “hide” some of the erm, “less rewarding (to them)” traits in their personality. Before they learned (however young or not) to do that seemed a good time to learn what your child is (really going to be) like, which can help you make parenting decisions when they’re a little bigger.

Hence I also used to take note of Rockstar’s behavior as a new baby. (For e.g. he was the most bullheaded, determined, impatient but straight forward child ever – I learned early to stop colliding with him head-on (as a baby when we tried Cry-It-Out he screamed for hours, turned an angry red-purple, then passed out for almost an entire day before resuming – nurses and nannies had similar luck distracting him from what he wanted/ getting him to sleep). Telling him what to do never worked. Slowly instead we nudged the bull in the direction we needed him to go. Reasoning with him helped too – the point was convincing him what I wanted him to do was the right way to go so he wanted it. Then as he understood more language, our lives got better.)

In case you’re wondering why I don’t just go the traditional “Because Mummy says so!” route, it was because I wanted him to retain the determination and erm, tunnel vision, just not direct it at me. I thought fighting him head-on was a “waste” of both his energy and mine, when he could’ve been expending it on a new skill, like jigsaws or un-age-appropriate Lego. So we did “Because when Mummy says so there’s a darn good reason!”

Just one similarity between the pregnancies – I loathe most classical music (not that I particularly liked it to begin with, but…..). Especially tinkling piano pieces. With lotsa scales and arpeggios. They make me feel stressed. I can only do stuff like Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata. And once I was listening to it on a loop (because the other stuff on the CD was giving me palpitations – idly I wonder if a lot of his other pieces are like that because he got deaf and grouchy), Rockstar mentioned that he really liked the piece too. It occurred to me it’s the kind of piece I’d have enjoyed while carrying him as well, as I hated on all the fast piano pieces. And btw, I’d grown up playing quite a few of those pieces so in fact a lot of it sounds familiar. But now I hate ’em all anyway.

I always enjoy gangsta rap. (Though maybe not get my 4 year old hooked on Eminem like a certain other Aussie Mummy Blogger I like to link to haha.) But surely I’m reading too much into it that Rockstar’s been “rapping” out anything that comes into his head onto my iPhone for like a month now. (We should really get him an iPod Touch. I want my cellphone and its 16 GB memory back.) He is not particularly musical that I know of, the whole of Kings’ and half of my family are tone deaf (I’m not particularly musical either, just a fairly good mimic – it’s why I found aural tests tough, and instead went with on-the-spot composition/ harmonization).

Should I introduce Rockstar to rap? Except it’s really hard to find totally clean rap. In my head I imagine him on Youtube with skewed baseball cap (he loves wearing em) and the multi-F-word Eminem “sh*t” – like those kids who look totally Asian but sound totally not, with all the profanity. Haven’t decided, mainly because I haven’t determined if Kings’ll kill me if that happens. (Aw, but how could he, my husband’s a giant nerd and The Rockstar is his “cool” :D)

Anyway here’s the thing this time round: I want to read something. As I slowly get less fuzzy-headed, I crave words. Text. It started off innocuously enough, I started reading the SCMP’s Sunday Post cover to cover – including the cooking and tv guide stuff. (I save the pullout every week for the interior decorating article where they feature someone’s home in HK. Yes I have serious nesting bug.)

Except I watch almost no tv and why the hell would I care about making Hibiscus iced tea and jams? I haven’t cooked in maybe 5 years (Kings wanted the freedom of being able to not come home for dinner on short notice if a client called for drinks – he can have all the freedom he wants if I didn’t spend all my free time in the kitchen.)

Come to think of it I haven’t read for pure “pleasure” in the last few years between working and Rockstar-ing, except on occasional annual leave days either. But now I find books I dropped in favor of Bloomberg articles strangely attractive.

<Move Zuni cow from Metropolitan Museum of Art that grazes in the book case.> Hello, Stuff I’d Bought To Sit Impressively On Shelves, Half Expecting To Be Imbued With Knowledge Via Osmosis.

Cat O’Nine Tales. Just Because. I read all Jeffrey Archer’s short stories. (More bout that later).

Haruki Murakami’s 600-odd page surrealistic Kafka On The Shore. Totally gave up years ago, NY Times best seller list be damned. Might be the cat torture. No, I hadn’t even reached that far.

Of Mice And Men, read while cuddling zzz-ing Rockstar waiting for him to wake one am.

Satyajit Das’ Traders, Guns and Money. Pause. Black Swan Theory? Well if I’m reading anything….. Maybe I should dig up my old derivatives training materials? Why’m I so proud of (of all things) once being in a bank training room with Mr Das? Watching his interviews and stuff on the documentaries about the crises, was like watching a favorite rockstar. No I am not a stalker. Forgot about it til I saw him again.

Should lift Kings’ structured product term sheets. He mentioned sometime back he had some good stuff. I didn’t pursue it for the slight tinge of envy and wistfulness at the action my hub was getting <hang head in shame – but I don’t pretend to become a completely different person overnight> I can read those when I can’t read the other stuff. Save for rainy day.

Walter Wangerin’s Book Of God. (That’s actually the Bible written in novel form, as is his sequel, Paul.) I once bought up the few Bookazine had in stock to give to church friends. Get strangely upset by Sarah’s struggles with the slave woman Hagar before she finally bears a child. Get especially angry with Hagar. What’s up with that? Ok cannot cannot. Skip.

Still circling Life of Pi. Dying to read it, but it came highly recommended by an ex boyfriend with a taste for angsty, tragic tales (bless him – he tried to leave a good engineering job in the States to go into environmentalist, humanitarian- type work. If I recall correctly he is now married to someone he met during a demonstration against the government’s privatization of utilities almost a decade ago in Ecuador. I think it was.) Remember just in time that he warned me when he recommended it. Not with the hormones. Shelve.

Grapes of Wrath. Read half, realize it’s possibly tragic, check out plot, damn, someone’s baby dies and she breastfeeds a starving man too weak to eat. And it’s supposed to be a watered-down version of what really happened back then. Ponder.

Hey. They shot an old dog in Mice and Men. Murakami’s novel has a passage depicting this gross horrific cat torture. That didn’t cost me any lost sleep (unlike the lousy B-grade sci-fi horror VCD cover I haven’t forgiven Kings for leaving around. What kind of person watches The Human Centipede on a break? Still mad at him ok, can’t get the bloody thing out of my head when I wake several times a night.)

Have I taken on the selective empathy of a pistachio nut?

A Rockstar Nutface.

Better not push my luck, I have no recourse to drugs (yeah I know, like I ever really did. Kings had such a heart attack when someone I didn’t know offered me a rolled joint at a boat party years ago). Is there nothing deep-ish out there that is not tragic?

My old work notes. Surely I can read them without the slightest hint of mourning and the occasional (albeit tiny) doubt at leaving now, especially now. Also the cooking articles. Who knew there were people who carry their own boutique salt around in their bags (we are talking un-pregnant women here!)

When I’m done with Rockstar’s Meccano. And let’s take another look at that rap music.