The Cerebral Mum

After going through about a gazillion wordpress themes at Theme Viewer and any other place I could find, I’m still trying to figure out what exactly I want this damn site to look like. My original choice was to use J Quindlen’s QGrunge because I really liked the arched layout and the way the header stretched across the full screen while the page content was limited to a width readable on most people’s computers, but using someone else’s theme isn’t very personal (or creative) and after a few misguided attempts to customise it I realised it wasn’t the best place for a beginner to begin.

So I went back to the default Kubrick theme, using an Egon Schiele drawing as a starting point for the new design. After a bit of CSS fiddling and a lot of work in Macromedia Fireworks I got it to look as it does now, still with the arches I liked and a gradient fill across the top to unify the header with various screen sizes. I still haven’t rigged it to work with a single post display, though.

And after all that…

I’m still not happy.

She looks pretty, doesn’t she?

But now I’m thinking that I should strip back the layout and lose the arches so that one header works with everything. And the content border seems to dominate the actual content. Most blogs I’ve looked at have very zen design and I’m wondering if what I’ve done so far is just overkill. A blog, after all, exists to be read, not just to be looked at. Kind of like me. Should my site be wearing so much eye-liner at her age?

And then there is of course the really big issue, raised at Lorelle on Wordpress (the place to go if you’re starting a blog!) in the article Should You Design Your Own Blog? : What does my design actually tell a visitor about the content? Even if people think it is nice to look at, how can they know that it is something they want to read? In the end, isn’t this just as generic and impersonal as using somebody else’s theme?

Maybe that didn’t matter so much when I first decided to do this, but I have found a couple of other uses for this space apart from just keeping friends and family up to date so I need to get it all together. It would be good to get some outside opinions about this but as I haven’t even told the friends and family yet, let alone getting it listing properly on the search engines, I shall continue to flounder about here (where, using Lorelle’s brilliant guidelines, I think I have already done every single thing wrong) until I feel that it is really ready to go.

But… learning by doing. It always works in the end. That’s why little girls steal their mother’s make-up isn’t it?

We finally had the ENT (Ear, Nose, Throat) Clinic appointment yesterday and met the surgeon who’ll be putting the grommets in to fix to Caspar’s hearing at the same time he has his palate repair. I say finally because the hospital scheduled the clinic for me in March without bothering to notify me. Plastics has to wait on ENT before a surgery date can be set and I was worried about the delay. The longer we wait the more behind he gets in terms of language development. His file still has a rough time frame of midyear though, which is great but may coincide with Mum’s visit and I’m in two minds about that.

She’ll be here for most of July and while it would be nice to have someone to visit us while we’re in hospital (It’s a 5 day stay for both of us), it would also be nice to spend all of that time with her. There are no guarantees when the surgery will be, however, and when it comes down to it, sooner is better than later.

Cas is on the waiting list as Category 2 - Semi-urgent so the surgery should take place within a 90 day window. I do know that some other cleft patients haven’t had their surgery until 12 months old, but I’m feeling pretty hopeful we won’t have to wait that long. I’ll get a letter 2-3 weeks prior, so I’ll just keep checking the mail and be ready to go when we have to go.

But back to the appointment…

We had the audiology tests yesterday as well, so I don’t have to go back to the hospital next week. Now that he’s older the tests are much more fun. The newborn tests are done while sleeping and take forever because getting a baby to sleep while things are being poked into their ears and electrodes are stuck to their head is something of a challenge. The tests yesterday could actually confirm (rather than “indicate”) that there is fluid in his ears limiting the movement of the ear drum which shows that there is a conductivity problem rather than a sensorineural one that can’t be fixed. Almost all cleft babies have this problem and once the grommets are in the ENT surgeon told me that it is 99.9% sure that his hearing will be perfectly normal.

There was also another test done to measure his response to sound. Caspar faced the audiologist while she played with toys and made faces at him and the volume of a speaker was slowly adjusted to measure when he would turn to see where the sound was coming from. When he turned he was rewarded by a box lighting up and flashing to reveal a toy cow. Unsurprisingly, he did need the volume higher than a baby with normal hearing before he would respond, but I was quite proud of him anyway as this test is not usually reliable until the baby is ten months old. He might not hear perfectly yet, but he’s smart!

We also had his weigh in at the Maternal Health and Childhood Centre this morning. His current stats are:

Weight: 9.41 kg (75th percentile)
Length: 69 cm (75th percentile)
Head Circumference: 46 cm (90th percentile)