On my reading table
A quick calculation tells me i am spending somewhere between 4 1/2 and 7 hours a day breastfeeding Tegwyn... and while I can spend ages and ages gazing at her sweet face, that still leaves many more "ages" to occupy myself while she grazes.
So I'm reading. The first three weeks were spent reading anything and everything I could get my hands on about breast-feeding and colic - desperate to try and ease the pain and lower the noise. Now that the worst of that adjustment is over, my next "project" was reading about babies and sleep. The most helpful (and yet most difficult to read) of these is "healthy sleep habits, happy child". This is a book I will no doubt revisit often in the coming months.
Equally fascinating is the book "The Female Brain", which I am a third of the way into. It is an easy-to-read scientific look (yes, I know, easy-to-read and scientific go together like military intelligence) into the physiological differences between the male and female brain, with commentary on how this manifests in male and female behavior. One anecdote yesterday had me chuckling: the author was recounting how the past 40 years have posited that differences between men and women are due to socialization. A friend of hers, seeking to give her daughter an "unbiased start", plied the toyroom with everything from dolls to lego to a bright red fire truck. She realized that "girls will be girls" when she stumbled upon her 3 year old daughter during play time with the fire truck wrapped in a baby blanket and her daughter cooing to it "It's okay little trucky, it's okay" :-)
Finally, I'm reading Andrew Feinstein's "After the Party", a sobering account of his time in the ANC. What an interesting man: a white, Jewish, South African economist - who threw his lot in with the African National Congress in its ascendancy, but has subsequently left due to his disillusionment with the new governments' handling (or should I say non-handling?) of the arms-deal. I am only a few chapters in, but it is sobering, enlightening and incredibly interesting to read an insider's view on all that has transpired in South Africa in the past 15 years...
Not a bad use of 4 1/2 to 7 hours a day, eh?
So I'm reading. The first three weeks were spent reading anything and everything I could get my hands on about breast-feeding and colic - desperate to try and ease the pain and lower the noise. Now that the worst of that adjustment is over, my next "project" was reading about babies and sleep. The most helpful (and yet most difficult to read) of these is "healthy sleep habits, happy child". This is a book I will no doubt revisit often in the coming months.
Equally fascinating is the book "The Female Brain", which I am a third of the way into. It is an easy-to-read scientific look (yes, I know, easy-to-read and scientific go together like military intelligence) into the physiological differences between the male and female brain, with commentary on how this manifests in male and female behavior. One anecdote yesterday had me chuckling: the author was recounting how the past 40 years have posited that differences between men and women are due to socialization. A friend of hers, seeking to give her daughter an "unbiased start", plied the toyroom with everything from dolls to lego to a bright red fire truck. She realized that "girls will be girls" when she stumbled upon her 3 year old daughter during play time with the fire truck wrapped in a baby blanket and her daughter cooing to it "It's okay little trucky, it's okay" :-)
Finally, I'm reading Andrew Feinstein's "After the Party", a sobering account of his time in the ANC. What an interesting man: a white, Jewish, South African economist - who threw his lot in with the African National Congress in its ascendancy, but has subsequently left due to his disillusionment with the new governments' handling (or should I say non-handling?) of the arms-deal. I am only a few chapters in, but it is sobering, enlightening and incredibly interesting to read an insider's view on all that has transpired in South Africa in the past 15 years...Not a bad use of 4 1/2 to 7 hours a day, eh?
posted by Bronwyn at 11:13 am
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