I had a sonogram this week, too! It’s so much bigger! Beautiful. EDD: 28th of October. HR: 180 BPM. Gender: Unknown, as yet. Anout 75% of people are swearing a girl, but I think most are just saying that because I already have a boy!

I’ve got the nausea and some of the vomiting. Gum works well for me.

I want two new baby products this time around: a Moby wrap and a high chair. I want the Moby wrap because this time around, I’ve GOT to have use of my arms! A sling caused my back to go into spasms, and this is supposed to be better. I love baby-wearing. It’s the easiest and least troublesome way of taking care of a baby. It keeps baby happy, and happy babies don’t cry. *g* I want the high chair because there’s no way I’m letting a baby eat at the good dining room table, and the kitchen table got moved to the covered porch because there isn’t room in the new house. (Downsizing!)

My whacko, granola-crunching thing to try this time around? Infant potty training, AKA elimination communication. Yeah. So you’ll all be laughing your heads off at me as I’m holding my newborn over a toilet and going “Pssss!” in the vain hope that it will do something other than blink at me in confusion. But I shall not be ashamed! If it makes me miss the knock-down, drag-out potty training fight the Bear and I had (which involved defiance-peeing, I kid you not), it’ll be worth it. Never mind the months of changing diapers long after the kid was perfectly able to use the potty if he so chose…. (He had–well, has–a phobia of plumbing, which made it worse. That’s right. My kid’s scared of plumbing. Other kids are scared of monsters, but no, not mine. First time I let the water out in the tub while he was in it, he began screaming in terror. It went on from there.)

I am, however, obscenely busy. I finished line edits, I’m finishing another non-LJ book, I’m working on the next LJ book, and….we’re homeschooling fulltime. Tada!

The Bear is reading his first 6th-grade-level chapter book right now. Too cool! The Lexile Level is 920L. The mid-year interquartile range (that is, actual reading levels of students in the 25th to 75th %ile) for 10th grade in the US is 905L to 1195L. Even though some of it is over his head, he’s stumbling over only 1-3 words a page. So that means my 5-year, 2-month old can read better than a good quarter of 10th graders at Christmas, in grade level if not reading speed. (He real reading ability level is probably even with the dead middle of sixth graders at Christmas, or more compatible with texts at a late 5th grade/early 6th grade level.)

That really is terrifying because he truly can’t read all that well, abysmal speed aside. What the heck are we doing to kids in school? The funny thing is that in actual literacy levels, the US does quite well internationally in both the 4th and 8th grade. In alliteracy, though, we’re appalling.

If DH would rent another RPG, his reading level would jump up at least another grade level. Sad, but true. The Bear is addicted to watching DH play RPGs. He watched most of Mass Effect (except for two particular scenes in which he was whisked from the room, *ahem*), and he loves reading the subtitles to all the speech. DH plays as a good guy 98% of the time, so there’s not much of the naughty stuff to see, anyway–the Bear wouldn’t tolerate him being mean, anyhow!

Reading speed is still agony here. It’s not just the words per minute that’s killing me. No, it’s actually mainly the total time he takes to read a given passage, including discussing things and drinks of water and the like. With this book, we’re sitting around 20 WPM as a gross rate. That is please-kill-me-now-and-end-the-agony slow. His rate depends upon font size and reading difficulty. It can be well over 100–more like 130–for a super easy book with large font that he’s reading for his own entertainment. It’s the pauses, though, that get me the most. He stops dead, goes silent, and looks at the page–typically not the part he’s supposed to be reading–before picking up again. And I still can’t get him to reliably see small words, especially when there are many together. He tends to miss them entirely. Ah, the joys of dyslexia. I wish I could help him more, but all I can really think to do is more practice. *sighs* But improvement is so slow. The kind of ability that the Bear has to read complicated words at first sight, and then his problems with seeing *word divisions,* for goodness sake…the combinations of strength and weakness somehow seem just wrong! But we shall persevere, and all that. After this hard book, we’ll hit picture books for a while (of varying levels) and then try some super-easy chapter books in quick succession and see if we can’t get the fluency up at the harder levels. Right now, working on his spelling will, I think, help him “see” all the letters quite a bit better, too, as he’s started to ask me questions about the differences in spelling between similar words.

(And yes, of course we’ve always done phonics instruction!)

This month, there will be a feature on SHADOWS on their site. It will have an excerpt, an interview, and a guest blog on March 10th.

Too cool!

Yes, we have a great yolk sac, length, and heartbeat!

(I’ll add pics as soon as I’m back at home.)

…because morning sickness–morning! HA!–is bad.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m glad–I had almost no pregnancy symptoms with the babies I lost. But it makes it hard to do anything. Yesterday when I felt better, I did some frantic cooking, but I don’t know whether cooking’s going to be in my future for a while here.

I’m going to see the perinatologist again in two hours. Let’s hope for good news. I’m optimistic because I’m miserable!

What have I found online this week?

Well, the first thing wasn’t online. It was, in fact, in the grocery store: canned bread. Apparently, this is an odd New England thing. It sounds interesting enough that I think I’m going to try a recipe of it, but there’s no way I’m paying $3 a can for it, which is what it is here. It’s not gruesome (like chitterlings–properly pronounced chitlins, you know), but it is…WEIRD.

The second is spray-on condoms. Those Germans. They are so…German. In the heat of the moment, imagine your DH/SO whipping out an AEROSOL CAN, sticking his erection inside, and pressing a button to get sprayed from every direction for TWENTY SECONDS.

Oh, and it comes in colors.

Yes. It is mine.

So on Friday the 15th of February, I’m looking at my stomach in the shower and going, “Hmmm. You know, this is distinctly…poofy. I don’t get poofy before a period. Maybe…maybe something’s up.”

So on Saturday while grocery shopping, I pick up a home pregnancy test. I get a two-pack because, of course, I’m almost certainly not pregnant. I’ve had three miscarriages in the nearly five years now I’ve been trying to get pregnant, and only one of those even stuck around long enough for me to pee on a stick and get a line.

But this one…this one is positive. More positive even than the one for the baby I lost in Nov. 2004. Positive.

Oh, shit.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m excited. I’m also scared out of my mind and am a complete bouncing nutcase at this point and will be until A) I lose this baby, too, or B) I hit 12 weeks. A betting man would choose the former, based on my obstetrical history. Hence my current lunacy.

Sooo, I did a very optimistic calculation and guessed I away maybe five…call it six weeks along at that point. (Ohpleaseohpleaseohplease let me be that far along….) I wanted to be that far along because the farther along I am, the safer I am, see?

I slathered myself in progesterone cream. Progesterone cream does NOT prevent most miscarriages. But if you have a luteal phase defect like me, it does. Basically, my body is one big freaking RU486 pill. RU486 is a progesterone antagonist. It kills progesterone, making you have a miscarriage whether or not they baby’s fine. My body just doesn’t react to or produce the right levels of progesterone after ovulation, so it throws out a pregnancy at the end of the month like five-day-old trash. Yeah. Fun stuff.

I made an appointment on Monday. Saw a nurse-midwife on Thursday–I have a high-risk pregnancy but, if I make it, will have a normal risk birth. Gently dissuaded her from sending me to the homeopath (who also specializes in healing touch!) and insisted instead on getting a referral to a perinatalogist, AKA a real doctor who actually specializing in high-risk pregnancies.

I saw him on Tuesday of this week and had an ultrasound. I slept all of 15 minutes the night before. And damn. I was hoping I was 7 weeks along by this point. But the U/S showed a perfectly healthy five-week pregnancy.

Five weeks. Am I five weeks? A more realistic calculation than my wildly optimistic initial hope (which would mean 7 weeks on Tuesday) would lead to Tuesday being exactly six weeks. (I have a long cycle that’s only ever regular within about three days, so the usual chiry “what was the first day of your last period?” doesn’t mean jack with me.) Five and a half weeks wasn’t at all unlikely. In fact, even four and a half could distantly be possible.

Five weeks. So I am either five weeks pregnant as of Tuesday, or I have a blighted ovum. I am choosing to believe, until my next appointment next week for another ultrasound, that I am five weeks.

God bless the perinatologist–he was originally going to have me come back after two weeks, but looking at my obstetrical history, he’s having me come in early so that I don’t have a psychotic break. Four and a half years trying to have a baby is a long time. And three losses hurt. A lot. It was very, very hard to fill out my paperwork. Number of pregnancies, including this one? 5. Term births? 0. Pre-term births? 1.

Ouch. What a whole lot of failure in those little numbers.

Perinatalogists only deal with high-risks births, so that means that there’s something wrong with every woman in the office. They also do post-multiple-miscarriage workups, but all the rest of the women in the room were obviously pregnant. (How can that be so inspiring and discouraging at once?) So there’s a macabre part of my mind that I’m trying to ignore that is matching the women to possible risk factors. Ah, so you’re clearly Advanced Maternal Age. You? I’m betting on warning signs of pre-eclampsia. Hmmm. Young. Fit. Placenta previa? Nah, not this early. You must be incompetent cervix!

Ugh. It’s like a train wreck…

Here is my vow for the next week:

I will get some sleep at night. And if I vomit, it will be from actual morning sickness, not from sheer terror. (Morning sickness, WHERE ARE YOU? I’ve been queasy now and again, but I can’t tell if I’m actually sick from being pregnant or simply going insane. Could be either one. Could be both.)

I will breathe. I will work. I will spend time with the Bear. I will try to be normal.

I’ve been asked by professionals several times in the world of publishing if they are corresponding with me or my personal assistant or if they should send things attn. to me or my PA.

Oh, dear God, what I would give for a personal assistant! Who exactly do they think I am, anyhow? *g* How much money do they think I make?

I can’t imagine getting even a part time a personal assistant until I clear more than 100k a year. I do just about all my WEB work myself, much less everything else. That podcast? Yep. I recorded it. I edited it. All me and my Adobe software and my lovely Loopology royalty-free music CD. (I hate the way I sound when my voice is recorded, but I decided to grit my teeth and get over it because I ain’t hiring anyone to do the voice for me.) And I’m going to eventually figure out how to post the sucker on iTunes. (Yes, I’m having problems! My RSS feed seems to be incompatible with iTunes. To that I say: Pfffth. I CAN learn how to hand-write RSS code, but I really, REALLY don’t want to take the time. If anyone else has done it EASILY…help?)

What I want desperately right now is a part-time housekeeper. Oh, I’d give my eyeteeth, even if I would look pretty silly without them. One of the reasons I want to work my backside off this year is because I reaaaally want someone to clean my danged house, especially since I’ll be homeschooling full-time starting this summer. (No, that sound you hear is NOT me whimpering. I don’t care what you think you hear. I am not. I am stoic and brave.)

I’m hoping to be able to afford someone to come in 4 hours one day a week next fall. And maybe by next spring, twice a week. You’ll know I’m rich when I have someone working for me 20 hours a week. My house would stay spotless! My heart would sing! (Except, of course, for the kid toys and rooms. I have very strong feelings about kids learning to pick up after themselves. Yes, I am the original Mean Mommy.) I am a slob who craves order.

And then…eventually…I’d love a personal assistant to maintain my website, pay my bills, do my filing, make my appointments, play chauffeur for kids, and just take care of all the STUFF that snows me under when I’m stressed. Like now. (Positively twitching, BTW.) At first, just four hours a week. Some day…some century…maybe half time.

Ooooooh, wouldn’t that just be heaven?

(Oh, and Lauren? Saw your post. Thanks and hugs! One of the reasons I’m backing off posting much right now is the insane, mind-boggling amount of work that rebuilding my site is taking. The other main reason is going to be posted on Saturday.)

SHADOWS is coming out next month, and there are already a few reviews! I really think this is my best-crafted book from a storytelling point of view–my first novel that I might call a true, through-and-through success in this regard. (VEIL was pretty darned close, but that was much less ambitious.)

I don’t want to go into what I was like while I was writing this–the crazy meter was certainly going whoopwhoopwhoop–but you get to reap the rewards of all that. *g* I think I’ve finally conquered the Demon of Pacing and have banished him to the nether regions of hell. (Well, actually, WICKED INTENTIONS, which I just finished, has pacing issues at the end, but I know it does and am fixing it in line edits right now.)

SHADOWS tells the story of Colin and Fern Radcliffe. You meet them on their wedding day. They know one another socially–that is to say, hardly at all–and have decided to marry for all the conventional reasons. They have every expectation of a conventional marriage, but swiftly, they each discover that a conventional marriage is the one thing they cannot tolerate.

In Booklist, it is a Featured Review–totally hot stuff!

Brilliantly blending atmospheric elements from Ann Radcliffe’s classic gothic novels with a generous dash of Bronte-esque romance, Joyce creates an elegantly dark and intensely sexy Victorian historical romance that is certain to cast its own mysterious spell over readers.

Romance Reviews Today calls it a “must read”:

SHADOWS OF THE NIGHT is a very unusual story, certainly not a run of the mill historical romance. It has excellent writing and good pacing [WOO-HOOO! *clears throat* Dignity. Yes, dignity.], as well as a very original premise. Colin’s wife makes him feel alive. Everything had always come so easily to Colin that his life was filled with ennui, but now, all is beginning to sharpen and change. Fern is both attracted to Colin and dismayed by him. As Colin feels the change in his life, so also does Fern begin to feel her power. Besides being a hot sensual romance, a fascinating mystery evolves at Wrexmere that could destroy the Radcliffes.

SHADOWS OF THE NIGHT is a captivating and absorbing story that readers will definitely want to put on their “to buy” list, a must read. Congratulations to Lydia Joyce for a most original tale.

Converting money between historical times and the present is notoriously difficult. It’s not that prices change; that’s a given. It’s that prices change relative to one another.

So, what does that actually mean in practical terms? Versus today, in the 19th century:

-housing was much less expensive, being no more than 10% of a middle class family’s income

-servants were much less expensive–again, taking perhaps 10-20% of a middle class family’s income

-laundry was hugely more expensive, taking up to 10% of a middle class family’s income

-lighting and heat were much more expensive, even though each new technology lowered the price. Paraffin (kerosene in the US) was cheaper than oil or candles at its introduction. Gas was cheaper than paraffin at its introduction. Electricity was cheaper than gas at its introduction–and electricity was relatively much more expensive than it is today. Coal was much cheaper than wood, but only the very rich had fires in every room they spent time in. Bedrooms, particularly, would only be heated during times of sickness in most middle class houses because of the expense. The English stubbornly clung to inefficient fireplaces despite far superior iron stove heating technology as far back as the 1700s. Masonry heaters, which were essentially closed fireplaces that provided heat to large areas through their thermal mass, were widely used in northeastern Europe but were unknown in England. The change from fireplaces to steam heat made heating the entire house affordable for the first time, and it also greatly lowered the level of dirt in English homes.

-food was much more expensive, taking perhaps 30% of a middle class family’s income
–wine was much more expensive and could be considered an investment!
–gin was cheaper than today
–but meat was less expensive relative to vegetables and fruits most of the time than it is now

-clothing was a bit more expensive except that the family had fewer garments requiring a lot more work on the part of the wife, taking perhaps 5-10% of a middle class family’s income

-most consumer goods were quite a bit more expensive

If you go back before the industrial era, prices for everything except housing and servants generally rise relative to the others quite a bit. The prices for servants fall. Clothing rises the most, to the point where an average middle class family would consider itself well off to have one new set of outerwear and a couple of sets of body linens per year. Servants in the middle ages, in fact, might get little more than food and one change of clothing per year as their entire pay–the rest could be so small that it would be properly considered pocket money.

Here’s a great link.

As a preamble, I will say quite definitely that Terry Pratchett is a brilliant writer. He’s been a hardback auto-buy for me for years–part of a very short and privileged list. But the level of devotion to him among his fellow professional writers is amazing. Everyone seems to love him. And despite his brilliance, it makes me wonder why.

See, there are a fair number of other brilliant writers out there, but no one else seems to hold the same appeal. And Terry Pratchett isn’t entirely without fault. He has a great grasp of language and a fabulous storytelling sense. But he reuses jokes. He repeats words clumsily instead of for effect sometimes, which can be quite evident in his very spare, simple style. He can verge on the didactic. Sometimes, his incredibly crafted endings just don’t quite work. And most of his books have the same or very similar messages.

Remember, I love this guy’s books, and I was bereft when his publishing schedule changed so he no longer came out every November–November’s my birthday, so it always felt like a present! But he’s not perfect. No one is. So why is he so widely beloved among authors when other writers who are just as talented with just as much potential mass appeal aren’t?

Well, the reason’s simpler than you might think. We writers are an egocentric lot, and Pratchett tells us the one thing guaranteed to earn our never-ending adoration. He tells us that human reality is made up of stories and that storytelling is, therefore, the most powerful force in human existence. He considers mankind to be homo fabulis. So who would be the most important people in the world? That’s right. The people making up the stories!

It is a very alluring idea to authors in particular, and it’s certainly not entirely wrong. After all, much of how we define ourselves as a society is based on the fictions that we tell ourselves about others and our own past. We lie to ourselves about the Victorian era (stuffy and repressed!) and the middle ages (socially repressive and backward!) to portray ourselves in contrast. We lie to ourselves about the Romans (noble and intrepid) and the Greeks (democratically just and scientifically minded) to associate ourselves with an imaginary golden age. We lie to ourselves about what science is now, about biology and psychology, and about medicine–all to make up a story about our present that matches what we want to believe about ourselves. So little of it is fully true, but its falsity doesn’t matter to the internal validity of our image of the world, despite how poor of a representation of reality it is by any halfway critical examination.

And writers… Well, we’re a peculiar bunch. We take a lot of lies, wrap it in a pretty package, and in that way, we hope to get at some truth that is deeper and more universal than mere facts. And society believes this, too.

So Pratchett isn’t wrong, but he isn’t entirely right, either. He does realize this, of course, and has spoken of it at length. His world, the Discworld, is a far better model of a mental world than the real world is. In Discworld, human stories do shape external realities, something that is universal to fictional worlds but becomes explicit in his own. In our world, on the other hand, human stories shape only the mental world, not the physical, and an external reality does exist that is very important to the actual development of society and the outcomes of individual lives.

Nevertheless, Pratchett gives storytellers great importance in his books and, shameless egomaniacs that we are, we love him for it.

Myself included!