Dalekboy

Basic details are born 2:40am, Monday 2nd August. Weight 4.135 Kg (9lb 2oz), length 50cm. Lungs & appetite - huge!

Name - maybe Zoe, not sure yet whether she's a Zoe, or an Elizabeth, or a Tigerlily Sunshine-Bell.

Labour was around 3 and a half hours, go to woah. Shaz was in a little more discomfort than with Lex, but needed no pain relief. Both mum & bub are doing fine.

Pictures below the cut, contain very, very mild nudity, so ( NSFW )

so so so sosososo busy, and I have little to show for it. But on the plus side, things should improve once we have a newborn in the house as well.

I shall likely become slightly more busy when I get email working again *grumble*

Bernadette, my biological mum is visiting so she can be onhand to help mum with Lex while Sharon's in hospital pumping out nipper #2. Bern and mum are getting on really well, and she's yet another guest who is really good & low maintenance. We've had a very lucky couple of months, but this is particularly lucky as this is far and away the most time my birth-mum and I have spent around each other. Would have been a shame if I'd wanted to strangle her on the second day.

In other good news, I just looked at the net for the first time in a couple of days and saw this link on Hespa's LJ - it's times like this that I really, really love fans. I wonder if we could get large groups of cosplaying fans to protest at everything these mongrels attend?

My favourite sign - Is this thing on?

As I aged, my visual memory, which used to be pretty good, started to fade. Then I had my stroke, and it took me a while to realise that my visual memory had virtually vanished.

See, the way I used to remember people, things and events was as images in my head. Jocko used to tell people how I'd have a pile of unmarked video tapes, and then would go through them and pick out the exact tape I needed. To him it was identical to all the others, to me it was obviously the right tape. ( Read more... )

April 1st, 2006, that's when the universe decided to play a practical joke on me - it gave me a migraine. One that lasted for two weeks. The upshot of which was that the effect on my brain was the same as a mini-stroke. Oh, how we laughed!

So, in a matter of weeks I went from being bouncing, energetic Danny to constantly giddy, no concentration Danny. What made it worse was that after months of waiting to see a neurologist, the one we got was pretty useless. He always seemed to disregard the migraine as a starting point for the problems I was having, concentrating instead on the giddiness, and basically suggested that I take it easy until other symptoms presented themselves so he could make a diagnosis.

It wasn't until a little while after we moved to Canberra that we got someone who joined the dots in a truly Sherlock Holmesian manner. Asking weird questions and putting my answers together. I still remember when he'd said he was 90% certain that I'd had a Basilar Migraine - one based around my brain stem - and I brought up something I'd forgotten to mention, that the scent of my body had actually changed, and he nodded and said that it was just more evidence backing up his theory.

Of course the first and most important thing to do after a stroke is to start retraining one's body and brain, something I hadn't been doing because I'd essentially been told to take it easy. I had started jogging a month or two before the diagnosis because my legs had been getting weaker, but I was basically ten months behind. The doctor we'd seen said that while there was no reason I couldn't eventually make a full recovery, these things are unique to each individual and I may not.

So, where am I at? ( Read more... )

So been doing the Twitter thing, following famous people and friends I like, being followed by friends and the occasional stranger.

On Friday I put up a post that said, - Don't hate me because I'm beautiful. Hate me because I will short-sheet your bed at the first opportunity. Got a couple of replies from friends and I thought to myself, here's a little bit of creativity I can inject into Twitter for myself.

I've realised I need that creative outlet, no matter how small. It's basically why I don't visit Facebook very often. I like some of the games and stuff, but it doesn't make me want to do more than play them. It sucks at my time but doesn't give me an outlet for the things I need an outlet for. That's not going to keep my interest very long, no matter how much some of my friends who use it mean to me, and how much I like playing Scrabble.

So I basically figured I'd try to do a new Don't hate me because I'm beautiful. Hate me because... every day that I had net access ('cause I'll be damned if I'll pay SMS costs to Tweet). It's fairly light-on, but I figured I'd have fun coming up with stuff.

So yesterday I posted - Don't hate me because I'm beautiful. Hate me because that time you thought you'd misplaced your keys, I had deliberately hidden them. - I did it just before I started following Roger Ebert. Ebert retweeted three of his new followers, as he seems to do every day, I was one. ( Twitter weirdness follows... )

So, today I left Lex's room and called him to follow me and get something to eat. I got down the hall and nothing happened. Normally food over-rides almost everything else, but obviously not this time. I called him again. Still nothing. I called him a third time, then went to go get him. This is what I found... ( Pictures under cut )

Just one of those days where I look at how much I've done and go, "So that's why I'm tired..."

( Nothing of interest, just a list of the day's activities... )

Well, stephiepenguin did a post on pictures that she took during 2009. So I'm pinching the idea and doing the same. All pictures of people, many of whom are holding Lex for some reason, and they're in chronological order. Every photo was taken by me, or was pretty much entirely set up by me and then I had someone else press the button.

I was quite pleased when I compiled this. I had felt like I'd hardly taken any pictures this year, but in actual fact I had hardly taken any travel pictures. There's plenty with people.

Goal for next year - more pictures of people (and hopefully some travel pics).



( +34 more, includes some harmless nudity, but consider yourself warned... )

One of the things I've become conscious of in recent months is my priorities. They haven't changed, I'm just aware of them now.

While my health and fitness has improved slowly but steadily since the stroke, I still have a fairly limited amount of spoons, and even when I'm doing well, it doesn't take much to steal them all if I'm not careful. I've been tending to beat myself up a bit for not getting things done, but then recently I realised how it is I work my limited resources. ( Read more... )

In the last week, Lex has suddenly hit his stride with a bunch of words, symbols, and concepts coming together for him. He's understood sign language previously, but for whatever reason wasn't using it, but this week that changed.

He's now doing his own adaptation of the sign for book by clapping his hands together as if he were shutting a book. Sometimes he will accompany this with the word "dat" which is his most common word for book. The next most common words for it are "dot" and "dook."

He also signs for food now by opening his mouth and then putting his hand over it. Very handy one, that. He sometimes also combines the sign with the word "mum."

"Shluck" is his word for sock.

"Car" is now used for pictures or actual cars.

Of course he already had "Kal" and "mum." Any words he has can get used for other things. For instance, the other day he named my nipples. One was called "mum" and the other was called "Kal."

Other times he just says the words because he likes the feel of the word in his mouth, something I also do. But all the words mentioned have a pretty consistent use associated with their respective objects and lifeforms. I tend to wait until I've seen an ongoing use and connection before I credit him with actually understanding the word.

Today, for the first time, he said "da" as he pointed at me. Will be looking out to see if that's repeated or it was a one off.