Health Update (by sarah)

Midwife came around again on Friday - the infection appears to have cleared up, I still feel fluey due to the anemia which is also why I am still going faint and seeing stars when I stand up. It is also causing me to be breathless and have heart pangs. Apparently part of this is to do with losing 600 ml of blood during surgery - I didn't think this was too bad - it is only just over a pint and I lost like three prints with Jean's delivery and then continued to have high blood lose (though that did result in me needing fluids put back via drips and talk of transfusions).

But the antibiotics have finished and the large red triangle rimmed in white on my belly has gone (this was hot to the touch and lumpy meaning it was cellulitis - it went from my belly button down and was the reason I wasn't even initially allowed to move hospitals). I have some brusing/blood pooling in the bottom of my belly still where the 'clamps' apparently went but my wound is now only weeping straw coloured liquid which is a good sign. I'm still cleaning it the three times a day - I'm having to run on full body washes as I don't yet have my shower seat and can't get into the bath for a shower due to pelvis.

But! Even the pelvis is not actually that bad! If it wasn't for the wound and the stars I could be out and about with the crutches!

I've been at home for a week now and it is two weeks and a day since Mary was born and I am on the mend - I am a bit run down but that is the Fe issue again. I can't yet face another car journey - the one to get home caused my wound to bleed/weep to the point that I had to go and change all my cloths :/

Mary is fine 🙂 She is infact putting on weight from my breast feeding - which itself is so much easier than it was with Jeany! Her umbilical cord has still not fallen off which we're a bit nervous about so keep making the midwives check (Jean's one got infected so we are being ultra careful and nuerotic about it especially as it is actually a bit fatter than normal - apparently it was full of lots of the jelly!).

I am feeling quiet optamistic about getting better - at the beginning of the week I could bearly lift my feet unless I woddled which strains the pelvis more - now I can lift each foot in turn about an inch and a half off the floor though I cannot sustain this with out pain.

I'm still sleeping on my back but have awoken two days in a row on my side - this causes a lot of pain to move out of but the pain of moving into it did not wake me up so that is a huge improvement 🙂 The right side feels more mobile than the left which was the case after Jeany.

The Dr is coming to visit on Monday and the Health Visitor on Tuesday and there is going to be another Midwife visit next week too so things seem very busy here.

I am getting a little bit board with reading and watching films but at the same time can't really see me going out at all in February to be honest. This translates as your welcome to visit but check first!

Language Developement (by sarah)

Alaric is putting me to shame with Mary and teaching her lojban - Jeany and him have been learning this for a year or so - Jean is a bit erratic with it but evenings often find them both 'cooking' dinner and talking via laptop to the lojban community. With him raising Mary bilingual and him writing poems for WoPoWriMo in the language things are moving streaks ahead.

This does cause me a few problems in that Jean has a tendency to ask me what things are lojban when Daddy's not here which can be interesting but via the internet I have been able to help abit.

I really wanted to give my children the chance of being good at languages incase it was something they either wanted or needed when they grew up. This meant that when Jean was a baby I spent alot of time getting language tapes to play to her - I tried to get non European languages as they tend to be the least similar to English and therefore harder to learn for native English speakers. The first year of a baby's developement is very important as that is when they absorb into their little brains all the sounds of their native language.

There are sounds that adults can not hear in other languages which is why it is one of the reasons it is so hard to learn as an adult. Now I have had arguments with people about doing this - being told it would impede Jean's linguistic development but everything I had read in the research suggested that though being exposed to other languages may result in the child speaking a bit later - they would be capable of a) understanding the syntax and the actual structure of languages better and b) they would do much better in picking up other languages in future.

Not being able to get hold of everything I wanted with Jeany and being told by Al's family that the tapes would not be giving her all the higher sounds and stuff - I used to play music to her - a wide variety of styles - as wide as I could. Musicians tend to be able to hear those sounds in the other languages even if they can not reproduce them, now standard European music on has tones and semi-tones and so is quiet limited for this but stuff like Indian music has micro-tones and covers a wider range of sounds.

I even had a copy of the Koran being sang which my friend sent us.

The result of all of this? Is Jean a fantastic linguist? Well no but she has already suprised us and her teachers by appearing to be not interested in French leasons and then in the middle of supermarkets splurting out chunks of it which in like her first term when she'd only just turned four included counting one to ten in French - she can count the same in Lojban too.

Interestingly one of the things she is very good at is remembering tunes - not perfectly but more than would be expected for a five year old. Now this may well be genetic - I tend to remember a song 'roughly' from one hearing and infact can even sometimes start singing along during the first hearing (this works best with say hymns or pop music - both of which tend to repeat huge chunks of themselves).

She is also picking up guitar stuff faster than I thought she would! She has rhythm which we already knew from her dancing 🙂

(yes I know but I am a gushy proud parent!)

Sadly I lost most of the language tapes and CD's in the flood and the MP3's when my laptop died so I need to start from stratch with Mary - though with Alric and Jean speaking Lojban maybe it's not as needed.

The other thing I did was teach Jeany baby sign - she never learnt more than a few signs but she did understood more and on top of that has remembered them! To be fair I have stopped using 'wait' though it is a mangeled version using one hand as I found I never had two hands free whilst dealing with children and often I am on the phone or eating so can not vocalise a response!

I had wanted to develope it into proper sign language but unfortunatly we didn't have enough money for me to attend the course and the books on it where all quiet expensive - I know a little bit anyway like the alphabet and the names of school subjects. But I do have a slight problem in that baby sign British Sign Language and Mackatain (not sure of the spelling) are all different and I know bits of all of them :/

Again baby sign is very good for linguistic developement - not because it gets your baby talking quicker because it doesn't - but it improves the level at which the child starts to speak - so they are lickely to vocalise later on but they will be talking in sentences!

Baby sign was fantastic for preventing frustrated baby with Jean as well becuase even before she could of physically started speaking she was signing milk! at us. She learnt Milk first followed by poo - later we had more, yummy, wet, thirsty and hurt (followed by pointing to where) - this was also invaluable when it came to potty training 😉 She also made up her own signs like milk! with both hands - this meant she wanted food!

People always comment on how well Jean speaks - plus baby sign helps them develope fine motor movements and hey you have to spend a lot of time with your baby so it's not really like it was much extra effort. Sign languages are good in that though they are the languages that pick up the most dialects or regional variations they are also the languages in which people can all communicate and work out what the other person is saying! They are far more versatile - which is why I personally am sticking to sign language and not learning Lojban with Al and Jean.

I was keen on sign language again due to the issue of my own hearing when I was small - just in case - fortunatly Jean has good hearing (except when you are telling her off!). I think by the end of that first year my friends were sick of being handed a baby Jean and asked to 'speak foreign' 🙂 Oh and we always watch DVD's in the other languages as well as English 🙂

le jbocifnu (by alaric)

As I mentioned before, I'm teaching Mary Lojban.

The project that lead to Lojban was originally started to explore an idea - the Sapir-Worf hypothesis states that language influences thought; in its strongest form, one cannot imagine a concept one cannot put into words (but that's been largely discredited now). The weak version of the hypothesis is that language can hinder or help our cognitive processes.

Lojban was designed as a language with as much expressive density as possible - letting you clearly express precise concepts easily. The idea is that somebody who can think in Lojban can think more clearly than somebody thinking in English, for example.

I've been learning it myself, and I've certainly found it interesting - I'm limited by my slowly-expanding vocabulary, but already, I often find myself using Lojban concepts in my inner dialogue. There are concepts covered by a large class of irregular grammar in English that are just a single word in Lojban, and identifying the commonalities between all these bits of English into one thing is, in my experience, providing a lot of insight.

But it'd be awesome if I could teach my daughter to think awesomely. It'd certainly help us to attain world domination. Some of the more far-out possibilities in Lojban might take a few generations of native Lojban speakers to fully understand!

However, nobody seems to have taught Lojban to a newborn baby before, so I'm having to work out how to do it myself, based on advice from people raising bilingual children in other languages. I'm mainly starting with Lojban's attitudinals before, which are simple words used to attach emotional context - whereas in English, emotion is expressed with subtle yet crude changes in wording and emphasis, Lojban has a rich set of words to explicitly attach attitudes to sentences or any part thereof. They're useful on their own, too, to simply express the emotion on its own without making any actual statement.

They're perfect for the simple emotional world of babies, and they're easy to say. Here's the ones I've been using:

• {.uu .oidai} ("Oooh Oy-die") - "Aw, you're suffering/uncomfortable"
• {.ui .oinaidai} ("Whee, Oy-nie-die") - "Yay, you're comfortable"
• {.i'i} ("Ee-hee") - "We're together"
• {.i'isai} ("Ee-hee sie") - "We're very together" (eg, whole family cuddle!)
• {.oi} ("Oy") - "Grr, I am suffering" (eg, when something goes wrong for me during a nappy change)
• {.oipei} ("Oy pay") - "How are you feeling on a comfortable <-> uncomfortable axis?"

There's a vast repository of more and more subtle emotions that can be expressed as time passes.

But I'm also using some actual sentences, too. Mainly things like {xu do xagji} ("Hoo doe hag-jee"), "Are you hungry?" and pointing out what things are {ti mamta} ("Tee mamta") "That's your mum, that is!". And sometimes I throw in complex sentences, even though she won't understand, because it's useful to get used to the sound of sentences: {.iu lo mensi be do .e lo mamta be do .e mi cu prami do} ("you low mensee be doe eh low mamta be doe eh me shoe pramee doe") "your sister, your mother, and I love you" (said with a loving attitude, which doesn't quite translate into English).

But as she develops, I'm keen to explore the cases where Lojban and English don't match up well, as they are the mind-opening things that have already taught me more about language and thought. {ti mo} is a good question - it literally asks what relationships the pointed-at object is involved in or what properties it has, which invite a wide range of answers from "it's a cat" and "it's black" to "it exists in a three-dimensional space" (which sounds bizarre for a child in English, but {se canlu} ("Se shanloo") is a short phrase in Lojban that is the natural way to distinguish a real or toy cat from a picture of a cat).

All of these are rather verbose technical-sounding concepts in English, but that's part of the beauty of Lojban - they're simple words, forming parts of the core lexicon, and so they are easier concepts to teach in it!

Pictures of Baby Mary from the Hospital (by sarah)

Day One

Day Two

Day Three and Four

For some reason Alaric didn't bring the camera into Stroud Mat - I think he may have taken more photos on his phone though!

Coming Home Sleep Over (by sarah)

Jean is desperate to be involved with the baby which means that on arrival home she worked out how to undo the baby seats straps and was about to lift her out of the seat when spotted by me! I got her to stop for a pick and then had Dad on stand by to supervise her and 'help' her put the baby on the setee for mummy.

I had promised Jean we would have a baby, Mummy, Jeany sleep over complete with film-athon. Above is a photo of the three of us 'watching' a film. Mary spent most of the time feeding and Jean spent most of the time snuggled - I have a bean bag behind me which she sat on for half the afternoon!

We then settled down for the night - more breast feeding and several stories later and they were both asleep - and before midnight too! Jean had been so excited I wondered if she was ever going to sleep!

The sleep over continued on Sunday with Jeany being a Fairy God Sister and there being more films - unfortunatly she did go out to play and ended up with some nasty grazes so we had to mix some chocolate into the day to help her recoup 😉

This was actually quiet alot of fun - but the main point of it is to help Jean feel involved and happy about the babies arrival and feel less worried about me having been away at hospital and the fact Daddy has 'gone'.