We went to the first of two refresher prenatal classes last Wednesday night. It was in the same room at the hospital where we attended a whole series of classes for first time parents last time, where three and a half years ago we learnt how to fold nappies as well as feed, bath, burp, and birth the first of our little ones. I remember feeling quite terrified by the whole package back then. I sat there not being able to believe that I was about to start spending my life looking after something so fragile and tiny when the most I had ever done was to nervously hold three different babies on three different occasions, quickly handing them back to their mother’s after a polite, token effort.

But from the last lot of classes I also remember lots of laughs, fresh faces and girls wearing full faces of makeup. Optimism, nervous chatter and that wonderful knitted womb. This time around the main thing that made an impression on me was how incredibly exhausted and disheveled everyone looked, especially the dads who seemed to be dropping off in their seats, and if not dropping off then doing that tired stretching and scratching thing with red watery eyes, and repeated glances at the clock. 9.30 is now a late night. There wasn’t a lot of excitement in the room, at best just a kind of cheerful resignation.

We listened to everyone’s birth stories which were recounted in scary detail. There was lots of gasping and moaning at the accounts of lengths of labors, number of stitches and positions of babies on the way out. While it was educational and interesting, it was also downright terrifying, especially for someone like me who had a cesarean last time and is interested in trying natural labor this time. While the midwife reassured everyone who had been through it before that a first labor is far worse than subsequent labors, she confirmed my fears that yes, I will have to go through all that first labor stuff this time around. I definitely liked it better in the last lot of classes where we were all oblivious together.

Something that did comfort me from all this was that out of the 11 couples there were three (including me) who had cesareans last time are all planning to try a natural labor this time, meanwhile all 8 of the other couples were coming back again (some after only 12 months) despite all this excruciating-agony-of-childbirth stuff and while they seemed a little jaded there was not one single person who said “Give me a voluntary cesarean, there is NO way I am doing that again”, even from the women who visibly paled at the recollection of their own horrendous stories.

So that’s something. Isn’t it?

Well, all I have to say after all that after all that blah blah blah yesterday, last night Amelia was up at 1.30am and awake until three wriggling in bed next to me after a nightmare about one of the Little Robots putting her in its mouth. I tried to do the relaxation again this evening and she simply would not settle at all, until I left the room in a very unrelaxed, frustrated state after about 15 minutes.

Huh. Serves me right for being all smug.

But more excitingly, I just read on Kelly’s blog that the publishers of Make Magazine (of which Big-P is a subscriber, and a huge fan) is about to release a new magazine called CRAFT: Make Cool Stuff. And yes, they are some of Jess’ robots on the cover! Can’t wait.

Other cool robots that have come along recently (that don’t look like they will eat my daughter, but then again, who would have thought the Little Robots were that scary?) – Mimi’s beautiful robots #1 and #2, and some linked to on Drawn!: Tom Torrey’s Flickr photos, Anne P Smith’s robots, Lockwasher’s Flickr photos, and Nemo Gould’s work.

It takes Amelia a little while to calm down and get to sleep each evening. We have a pretty strict bed time routine to help which consists of the usual dinner, bath, stories and then bed… but in the last few months we have also had to add in the liberal sprinkling of invisible “mummy dust” (which I seem to have unlimited amounts of coming out of my finger tips – very useful in all sorts of circumstances – thanks Anne!) to ward off bad dreams accompanied by me lightly tickling her nose and then her toes and saying “from your nose all the way down to your toes”, followed by a long lullaby session. This is unvaryingly Paul Simon’s “Under African Skies” slowed right down and repeated about a bazillion times over until she is calm and about to drop off or actually catatonic. This particular song has always had a soporific effect on Amelia, and likewise for me. Some nights as I sing it over and over I feel like I am in that dream, falling and calling (see lyrics) right through the floorboards, or head first onto the bed in pure exhaustion. Let me tell you that her doona, even if it is covered in Buzz, Woody, Teddy Long Legs, Curious George, Warm Kitty and all her other nocturnal buddies, looks incredibly inviting on these long evenings.

Since Kinder began (and maybe also as the baby’s birth gets closer) sleep has become even more interrupted and the lullaby session has moved into the realms of the extended remix b-side dance version. Sometimes I give up when she is still wiggling around or fretting or interrupting with topics such as “Clairey*, why do you think that the My Little Pony dvd is trash?” which then means she calls out for us for up to two hours later. She has also been a little more unsettled during the day so this week I decided to get all new-age on her ass, and introduce RELAXATION to this already weighty evening routine.

And it’s really working!

I haven’t done Yoga for a couple of years now, but it’s amazing how quickly I can recall the almost exact words that my teacher used in our relaxation session at the end of each class. I have adapted it a little so that it suits a 3 year old’s understanding so there is less talk about tension release or muscles or breathing into the diaphragm. I simply get her to do a few rounds of deep breathing and then run over the parts of the face talking about how each feels soft and relaxed, and then work down the body until we get to the toes. The important bit really seems to be my voice and the word “relax” repeated after each body part, in a kind of soft drawn-out whisper.

I also spend a lot of time asking her to imagine floating on a cloud in the warm sunshine and how comfortable and safe she is. On the first night I made the mistake of comparing the cloud to a marshmallow and BLING! she was totally awake “Clairey, why does the Bookshop Cafe only give you one marshmallow [with a babychino] and the Big Cup gives you two?” so we had to start again. But since then I remember to use only safe, very neutral words (forget marshmallow, froth, butterfly and for some reason elbow). And I have to say “Imagine you are…” a lot otherwise she will perk up “But Clairey! There is no sun! It’s dark!” etc. I also have learnt that I must vary it every evening… add a little bit more “breath in deeply…” stuff or more cloud things, because if she gets used to the same words she gets flustered when I don’t repeat them verbatim – which is pretty hard unless you are reading it.

And now she is dropping off before we get to the toes, she seems to sleep most of the night through on the nights we do relaxation and even her daytime stresses seem to be disappearing. Those yoga people are really on to something.

Tonight I have done a quick google search for relaxation for children and have some links to add:

Relaxation for Children Audio CD… I can’t offer any criticism of this cd at all, not having listened to it but if I had a 7-10 year old I would probably give it a burl. The description is pretty good and I usually trust stuff stocked by the ABC Shop.

On E-bility found this article about relaxation for children which talks about breathing, muscle relaxation and visualisation techniques and is a good, quick read.

Here is a script for a Progressive Muscle Relaxation for Children. This has been included in a family clinic website’s ADHD section, but I am sure could be useful more widely. I know Amelia would be jumping on the bed swatting imaginary flies and chasing baby elephants if I attempted this one, but perhaps it would work for older kids.

Great, short article from the Early Childhood Australia Inc website; “A time to simply ‘be’: Building resilient and happy children through relaxation techniques” with tips on how to create a relaxation space.

*For some reason we are no longer Mummy and Daddy but Clairey and Philly… she is a truly modern child despite us trying to get it across to her that we are an old fashioned kind of mum and dad. None of this 1970s first name stuff please.

This is me today. Big (32 weeks!), quite cheerful after dinner at a friend’s place last night followed by a good night’s sleep, loving the Autumn with the amazing colours and evocative smells – rain, earth and woodsmoke. Around my neck is my favourite bright red-orange necklace which I have just got back from the jewelers, having had it restrung to its full length after Amelia managed to break it into several smaller lengths recently. I am sure this is moments after I’ve eaten several pieces of Haigh’s Turkish Delight and the sugar rush which follows means ideas for a new project I am planning are spinning around in my brain. Have you tried to come up with a domain name recently? I haven’t had to come up with a good web site name which also happens to be available for years, and these days it’s almost impossible!

But back to this picture. I am probably standing on the front deck having just put a bunch of stuff in the recycle bin and inside Amelia is either happily occupied crudely copying pictures out of an Ed Emberley book, or she’s doing her new incredibly loud moaning, whining thing that seems to have taken hold these last few weeks. I’m smiling so it’s probably the former. Big-P has pizza in the oven (wonderful) and on the coffee table I have a new copy of Living Etc (which I have only just discovered and I love it) for flicking through later in the evening, before tearing apart to stick in my inspiration scrapbook, and on my bed side table there is a good, easy read to put me to sleep tonight.

I have been finding lots of good things to point you to lately:
Flick through Kaz Cooke’s Kid Wrangling, download Brendan Welch’s Burn, download Chris Ware’s 29-page comic series Building Stories for the New York Times Magazine’s Funny Pages kindly offered by Drawn.ca for a short time, read Preparing Your Home for Eating Healthfully by Dr Joel Fuhrman and listen to his podcast Getting Children to Eat Well.