Proof

I'm posting these photos of the little man so that I can look at them when he's crying and convince myself that it will pass. Yesterday, between approximately noon and 1am this morning, I would have been looking at them most of the time, because the monster was screaming, shuddering, wailing, burping, thrashing, squealing, kicking, and screeching for about 45-minutes of every hour during that time period. At these times, it's like trying to calm an angry cat.

Don't say colic. Let's just call it the post-womb individuation period ... or something.

I'm sure the neighbors watch me walking around and around the balcony that wraps around our house, clutching a screaming baby, and are completely reminded of Michael Jackson. Maybe I should show them these photos too.

Goodbye

Saying goodbye is never easy. And not being given a chance to do so is even harder. Emeline and I lost a good friend this week, suddenly, unexpectedly, like a hole in the world opening up, swallowing a person, and clamping firmly closed again. Paul shared an office with Emeline and he and his girlfriend -- two English doctors, working here in Dunedin -- supported us throughout E's pregnancy in a quiet, caring and decent way.

We'd had dinner and drinks with them one night six-months or so ago. We chatted at work functions. Later we went to a barbecue at their house, perched on the cliffs above St Clair beach. Paul and I stood on a little patch of grass behind the house and watched big slow waves pounding the coast. And we'd see Paul and Leanne in the crowds at every film festival at the Regent Theatre downtown -- Paul's curly hair was easily visible from half a theatre away. I told Paul once that I didn't know what I'd do if Max had curly hair like he did.

Paul was my surrogate sometimes, denying access to his and Emeline's office to anyone with a cold or a cough; or telling Emeline to leave the office and go somewhere else when workmen were drilling above it, or when the smell of fresh paint in the corridors was too strong.

Max was born just after midnight 10-days ago, on the Saturday before Christmas, and he came home the following Monday. As we carried him across the road to our car, we bumped into Paul. He was our first friend to meet Max. Hugs and handshakes. And Paul was moved and expansive, visibly touched to be seeing the little man who had steadily inflated Emeline's belly until she was almost perfectly round.

And then yesterday, on Sunday, just 5-days later, we switch on the TV and see Paul's photo on the news: Died in a jet boat accident in Wanaka on Boxing Day. It's his departmental work photo, which I see every day: earnest look on his young face, blue jacket that looks like it was obtained quickly for the photo, and a headful of only slightly tamed curly brown hair.

Gone. Here for a while, and then gone. He was 29-years-old -- a young and energetic doctor, far from home. We wish now that we'd spent more time with him, but we seemed to have plenty of time: émigrés far from home in a strange city will always have something to talk about. The world was a better place for Paul having been in it; but I think it would have been better still if he had been given a chance to be in it a little longer. Not so long ago I wrote that our son Max had gone from being an idea to a person overnight. Now our friend Paul has gone from being a person to an idea. He was a wonderful, decent, intelligent, careful, enthusiastic and funny person. The idea of him is just as wonderful and rich and complicated. And that hasn't gone anywhere.

We'll miss you Paul, but we're so glad to have the idea of you.

The First Week: Mission Possible

Our little man changes every day, growing into his baggy pink skin like a puppy. We need to be patient. I feel sometimes like I'm nursing someone through a long sickness that makes him useless.

And he is absolutely useless! A beautiful little useless boy, whose arms and legs shoot out like a string puppet's and scare him awake, and who scratches his own face. We've carefully studied every inch of his body and pronounce him the most wonderful single word you can give to a newborn baby. He's normal.

Seven days in: three hourly feeds; nearly a hundred diapers; not enough naps; and a lot of miles walked around this house, bouncing, burping, coaxing, and whispering in every room, making deals with him for two hours of silence. I already owe him a lot of money. And when he finally sleeps, we perch over him and study his face vigilantly. We are always on high alert. I was just brewing a pot of coffee in the kitchen, while Emeline fed Max in the bedroom, and I panicked when the coffeemaker started to splutter water through the grounds. It sounded just like Max struggling with wind.

I nearly swaddled the coffeemaker. That would not have been good.

At 12:15am yesterday we celebrated his first week with us. He didn't join in. He was feeding. We've realized that most things on earth, small and large, happen while Max is feeding or hiccuping. The sun comes up over the peninsula, burning off the clouds in the valley. He hiccups. The sky behind the house gets dark again, as the clouds over the sea turn purple and violet. He hiccups. It rains. The wind blows. A car backfires. He's still hiccuping.

Our lives are brightly filled with wonder now, and the source of it lies swaddled, frowning and oblivious.

And hiccuping.

Eating

For a little while today, we saw some light at the end of our tunnel. Our little baby Max, who has been stubborn and impatient when it comes to feeding, is starting to get the hang of the things. The change is huge. It feels like taking a boulder off your chest where you've been carrying it for the last six days.

When a baby doesn't want to feed and it's 4am, and he's bright red, hot and angry and wriggling like a cat, what do you do?

You keep trying. And Max has his own rules. For instance: sleep is completely overrated.

So the days become a list of feeding times, by which we start to measure our success. Feeding every 3-hours is the goal. Any less is failure. The writing on the list starts to look a little ragged at 11pm, worse at 1am, almost unreadable by 3am, and by 5am the scrawl on the paper is unfamiliar symbols. The missed feeds. The walking up and down the hallway, bouncing. The bouncing. Bouncing. I'm bouncing as I type.

And then a new day begins.

As our midwife says, Max suddenly has to learn to breathe, swallow and suck all at the same time. That doesn't sound so easy. And then once he's got the hang of it, he's full of wind and doesn't know what to do. It must be very traumatic to have to learn all this by yourself after 10-months of laziness in a nice, warm, cozy spot.

And as I've said to Emeline on an hourly basis since Max arrived in our lives: millions of years of evolution and human development, and this is what we get? I can understand if a baby doesn't get the hang of long division, or punctuation ... but eating?

Let's try harder, folks. As a species. Can we do that?

A little finger

Max and Emeline are home. Our house looks like a disaster area. You'd think a battalion of soldiers stayed here for a few days while we were at the hospital: dirty mugs, pillows, shoes, clothes, used Kleenex, towels, books, newspapers, chaos, disorder. The lights are on in every room, all the time. It's hard to believe that the person most responsible for this mess weighs only 7-pounds, and measures nearly 21-inches.

There are things no one prepares you for. Everyone talks about the beautiful smell of a baby. Come and smell ours then. Phew! He's losing the little bit of umbilical cord left behind by the clamps and it smells like the end of a pier. Truthfully, just like the end of a pier. Hopefully, this doesn't last too long.

I've already learned a useful trick, though. If he's screaming, just stick your finger in the hole. No one can scream with a finger in his mouth. Try it with your own mouth and your own finger. It's not possible. I'm reminded of the story about the little boy who stuck his finger in a hole in a dam, and stopped the water from coming through. I mean, once I've stopped the screaming with my little finger, what do I do then?

A Long Day

This morning, I left the hospital at about 8am after a long night watching and helping my baby being born. It was rainy and wet and gray outside. Sleep deprivation seemed to flatten everything and made me feel like I was walking through two dimensions. On the other side of the road, in the exact parking spot where I'd parked our temperamental Subaru 12-hours earlier, was a car that looked identical to it. But it wasn't the same car. It couldn't be. Because everything has changed.

When I parked our car there on Friday night, Emeline was puffing inside it and reciting the alphabet to try to stay calm through her contractions. That afternoon, I had been keeping track of the contractions by writing the time they arrived on the back of my hand. Outside the hospital, I fussed over our bags and asked Emeline, whose eyes were tightly closed and hidden beneath a frown, whether I should get back in the car and move it forward a foot or two so that it was better placed in its parking spot. Surprisingly, she was non-committal.

We now live in a vastly different parallel universe. Overnight, it became an alternate world. In this new world a boy with hairy shoulders called Maxwell Ezra Kemp, who has an English mouth and a Filipino nose, controls everything we do.

He wasn't here, and now he is. Between Friday and Saturday, an idea became a person. Life was simple, and now it is beautiful.

Maxwell Kemp: Whatever he wants, he shouts for it.

Does that make any sense?

Maxwell Ezra Kemp: December 20th, 2008.

Supposedly, a picture is worth a thousand words. And I have no words. So, pictures should do just fine for now. Perhaps later the words will come.

Pink Lady Cake

All the nesting has been done. We have a mountain of stockpiled diapers/nappies in a spare room, next to a tower of stockpiled baby wipes. If nuclear war breaks out, our baby will have a clean bottom. Emeline has too much time on her hands now. When no position is comfortable any more, you tend to move around a lot, so she's keeping herself busy cooking. We've had delicious soups, wonderful lasagne, chocolate chip cookies, and green tea cupcakes, with green tea-flavored icing.

To the non-pregnant come the spoils.

I've probably gained twenty pounds or so in the last few months. Hopefully, sleep deprivation is a good weight loss tool. Only time will tell.

Most recently, a good friend of ours celebrated a birthday. Even though she won't tell me which birthday she's celebrating, Emeline baked her an extravagant, gargantuan Pink Lady cake. Pounds of sugar, and butter, cupfuls of egg whites. Once made, it probably weighed about the same amount as my total weight gain so far. It was not an inconsequential cake: one piece would feed a family for three or four days. I had a piece all to myself, like a giant pink wedge. I felt like a mouse, gorging on pink cheese.

And I had the simple sensual pleasure of watching it being made, by a delicious pregnant lady who can't sit still on the couch long enough to be lazy. And so, even though I've gained weight, I won't turn down something that I might not get to see for a long long time once our new human arrives.

Stubborn.

I've been telling myself that I'll get used to it all. Somehow and someday just "get it". But the frustrated scientist in me says that I should stop being so damn stubborn and start to learn it instead. I'm talking about putting a stop to walking around aimlessly at the grocery store wondering just how many kilos of peppers I need to buy. Or taking a step outside and thinking "yes, this is what 18 degrees Celsius feels like." I've just been deferring to Chris to do my converting for me or saying to people "that means nothing to me." I'm so obnoxious.

I just need to learn my conversions.

So, this blog entry is more for me than for any of you standard measurement readers. But if you ever visit us and need to answer or decipher the following questions:

Doctor: "How tall are you? How much do you weigh?"
Police: "Do you know how fast you were driving?"
Baker: "This cake is delicious! How much butter did you use?"
Midwife: "Congratulations! You're baby weighs --kilos!" Whaaaa??

you're good as gold, mate. (ETK)

MASS and VOLUME
1 gram(g) = .035 ounce (oz)
100 grams = 3.5 ounces
500 grams = 1.10 pounds (lbs)
1 kilogram (kg) = 2.205 pounds
1 kilogram = 35 oz
1 gallon (gal) = ~3.8 liters (L)
1 ounce (oz) = ~30 grams (g)

TEMPERATURE
degree Celsius (C) = 1.8C + 32 degrees Fahrenheit (F)

LENGTH
1 meter (m) = 3 feet (ft) = 1 yard (yd)
1 kilometer (km) = 0.621 miles (mi)
1 hectare (ha) = 2.47 acres (ac)

COOKING
1 teaspoon = 5 ml
1 tablespoon = 15 ml
3 teaspoons = 1 tablespoon
1 fluid oz. = 30 ml
1/5 cup = 50 ml
1 cup = 240 ml
2 cups (1 pint) = 470 ml
4 cups (1 quart) = .95 liter
4 quarts (1 gal.) = 3.8 liters

Just in case ...
ILLUMINATION
1 foot-candle (fc) = 10.76 lux (lx)

More Dunedin Graffiti

Heathers

Last weekend, the city of Dunedin proudly observed its heritage with its annual Scottish Festival. Och aye, wee laddies and lassies. One thing we've really noticed here in New Zealand is that festivals and parades are very poorly organized, not well advertised, and subject to sudden and unexpected changes. You might walk out of a shop on George Street and find yourself in the middle of a parade no one has told you about, swept up by marchers and drummers and parade floats. At other times, you might go somewhere to attend an event advertised in the newspaper only to find that the times were changed and it already happened. Or it will happen three hours later. Or that it happened last week.

We're not sure why this is.

New Zealand?

The griping is only relevant because I turned up a full week late for the unveiling of the Queen o' the Heather contestants at the local mall. Queen o' the Heather: an annual beauty contest that takes place during the Scottish Festival. I found the idea of unveiling beauty contestants in a mall on a Saturday afternoon quite an intriguing mixture of the shiny and the tawdry -- sort of lowbrow and, well, lower brow. So, I was disappointed when I found out that when the newspaper (which comes out on Thursday) stated the unveiling was on Saturday, it meant the previous Saturday, as in, before the newspaper was printed.

Useful.

Fortunately, a week later, on the final day of the Scottish Festival, which was poorly advertized, and therefore poorly attended, Emeline and I watched the more important half of the beauty contest equation: the crowning of Queen o' the Heather.

There the contestants stood, expectant on the dais, under a gray Scottish sky, with the mayor of Dunedin -- Peter Chin, a Chinese man wearing a traditional Scottish tartan kilt -- waiting to find out who was the prettiest of them all. In the distance, Scottish games were being played. Piper bands were competing noisily in the arena. (Emeline might even write a post about my caber tossing adventures later.) Back on the dais. The tension. The girls. White knuckles. To one side, Queen o' the Heather 2007 waiting graciously. Trophies. The skirl of the pipes. The crown. The cabers. The mayor.

And the announcement: Yes, one of them won! We couldn't hear anything, but, indeed, one of them won.

And gracious was she, Queen o' the Heather.

The Weigh-In

When you're nearly 38-weeks pregnant, there's an urge to weigh yourself even though your belly is now too large to see the bathroom scales. The other night, Emeline decided to answer her urges. But I'm not going to tell her how much she weighs, because she doesn't need to know. With about 2-weeks or so left though, Kemp 2.0 still has time to gain another pound.

Happy Thanksgiving - Revisited!

Ah, half a week has passed since Thanksgiving and we're probably still digesting our dinner. Thanksgiving is our favorite holiday. There are no gifts, or obligations, or expectations. It is simply a time to spend within the warm fold of family, whose members are willing to travel astonishing distances and weather systems (to an Englishman) to be together for just a few days. Even so, asking family to travel to New Zealand for Thanksgiving would have been asking a little too much and, at 35-weeks and change pregnant, Emeline and Kemp 2.0 weren't going anywhere farther than from the kitchen to the bathroom and back again.

And so we had to rely on ourselves. We are officially a family now, even though one of us is in utero and doesn't get to vote on what we have for dinner.

So we took the day off work, and we cooked for hours, preparing roasted potatoes and asparagus, gravy, and sage and onion stuffing with sausagemeat. Emeline made wonderful fresh cranberry sauce, and I oversaw slowly roasted pork shoulder, rubbed with a sage, olive oil and citrus zest concoction of my own making. For hours, our kitchen steadily grew steamier, and warmer, and better smelling. Emeline made a maple syrup pudding, which was ultra-delicious and should be made weekly from now on: imagine egg nog in a crust, unfortunately without the rum (this time anyway) and you'll have an idea of the sweet eggy taste of it. Even the weather complied and, despite it being early summer here, wet blustery winds shook all the TV aerials, and great dark thunderheads marched across the valley, coming in from the sea, hiding the hill behind our house, and drenching the city in cold wintry rain.

It was no substitute for time spent with family, and loud voices in the kitchen, but the three of us enjoyed our warm food-filled day together very very much. This is how traditions are begun. (ck)

Below: Chris making his lemon, orange, thyme, and sage marinade for the roast pork; roast pork being dressed by Chris; cranberry sauce on the boil; nutmeg and maple cream pie in the making; a pre-prandial Chris with our Thanksgiving lot (hasselback potatoes, sage and sausage stuffing, gravy, asparagus also shown).