Mrs Frisby and the Rats of NIMH by Robert C. O'Brien

From the favourer: "37 years of primary school teaching inevitably led me to reading an enormous number of novels as serials to my classes. 'Mrs Frisby and the Rats of NIMH' stood out as my own personal favourite, as well as being the favourite of many of the listeners. It's funny how a kid's book can end up as an adult's favourite...perhaps this is a statement on the teacher concerned?"

Given the amount of children's books that have turned up on this list of favourites, it's not uncommon for an adult's favourite book to be a book written for children. And given the amount of beautifully crafted nothings that circulate on the adult literary circuit, I think it makes sense for everyone's favourite book to be a children's book. Sorry, ranting. I'll stop now.

Mrs Frisby, a recently widowed mouse, lives during winter with her four children in a cement block buried in a wheat field. Each year when the thaw comes, the family move to their summer house away from the field, to avoid being chopped up by the farmer's plough. But this year, something is different. Little Timothy has had a close brush with pneumonia, and any exposure to cool air, even as the days temper towards spring, will be the death of him. When by chance Mrs Frisby saves the life of a crow, he offers to repay the favour by flying her to meet the wise old owl. The owl is initially unable to offer any advice about Mrs Frisby's situation, but when he learns that she is the widow of Jonathan Frisby, his manner changes. He suggests that she goes to see the rats that live in the rosebush. Mrs Frisby is puzzled - how could the rats help, and what do they have to do with her husband?

But these are no ordinary rats. Ordinary rats don't move in formation, work with electrics, and they certainly don't read. And their secret is bound up with Mrs Frisby and her family.

I first read Mrs Frisby and the Rats of NIMH in grade 3, and remember being fascinated by the story of the rats, and wondering vaguely why Mrs Frisby was in it at all. Later I saw the animated film, which was great, but completely shifted the focus from the rats to Mrs Frisby's story. Which probably made for a good film, but it was really the rats that intrigued me, and probably many other readers.

Robert C. O'Brien intended to become a professional pianist (don't we all), but after working at a boys' summer camp as a student he learned about stories, and storytelling. He 'found that in the dark you don't read stories, you tell them, and this is the best training of all for learning what kinds of stories children like'. Later he worked as a newspaper reporter. When you read his fiction, you can see the influences of these two experiences on his writing - he writes a damn good story, and he writes it economically.

Mrs Frisby and the Rats of NIMH is only 197 pages long, and there is not a single word wasted. It's pared-back, story-driven writing where every word works carefully to build tension, character and plot. There's no fluff. No wonder it worked well as a classroom serial. It's a killer story, and every time my baby woke up from a nap and I had to stop reading, I did the thing where I walked down the hall s-l-o-w-l-y to the nursery, still reading, to get a few more lines into those 10 steps. It's also a very serious book. There's the odd moment of dry humour:

' "When we don't know what to do, we ask [the owl]. Sometimes he answers our questions, sometimes he doesn't. It depends on how he feels. Or as my father used to say - what kind of humour he's in."

Or possibly, thought Mrs Frisby, on whether or not he knows the answer.'

If you've seen the movie, there's quite a bit of hilarity injected into the story, mostly via the crow Jeremy (who is an absolute riot in the movie, by the way. "OOH, A STHPARKLEEEEE"). In the book he's a minor character, almost a plot device, barely curling out a couple of chapters. He's certainly not the comedic foil of the movie:

But draw of the story is really created by the rats - their capture, the experiments performed on them at NIMH, and how this lead to their new life (and their aspirations for a rat utopia). I think it's why O'Brien won the Newbery Medal for this book in 1972 (won this year by Neil Gaiman's Graveyard Book). The science in the novel is vague enough not to date, but specific enough to be believable, and the way O'Brien builds the tension of their story is perfect. Even if you've never felt sympathy for a lab rat running a maze, you will after reading this book:

'I never got used to that feeling - no one ever does - but I did experience it many times, and eventually learned what it was: electric shock. It is not exactly a pain, but it is unbearable...You might ask: Why would I bother to run through it at all, if I knew it was only a trick? The answer is I couldn't help it. When you've lived in a cage, you can't bear not to run, even if what you're running towards is an illusion.'

A part of this book I really hadn't remembered is the emphasis on reading and the impact that being able to read and write has on a person (or rat). Reading can be a way of growing, escaping, but the knowledge it provides imposes new limits on the reading animal. The rats experience this in a fundamental way: 'By teaching us to read, they had taught us how to get away.' This sentence is embedded in the story, but it resonates above the literal sense it has here. The rats are liberated by their ability to read, but it also puts them in danger. They are different, and they need to adapt to manage their difference in the world. They also need to manage the heightened moral awareness that their knowledge provides.

That's a lot for a nine-year-old reader to take in. And I didn't, then. But it says a lot that this slim volume can provoke those sort of thoughts for me, 20 years after I first read it.

And also, it's such a damn cracker of a read.

A Suitable Boy by Vikram Seth

From the favourer: "My criteria for favourite book is that I weep when I've finished because I feel like I've lost a friend. This is a rare event. 'A Suitable Boy' has lived with me every day since reading it."

I've been reading this 1474 page book since a week before Luka was born - so basically, my whole life.

It's been propped up against the couch for hands-free reading-while-feeding, back in the days where he took more than 5 minutes to feed. It's been carried about in the pram basket so that when Luka went to sleep I could stop, have a coffee and a bit of a read. It's been lugged in my handbag to read on the train on my first night out sans baby (though I had to take everything else out of my handbag to fit it in). It's been removed from being propped up against the couch because at 4 months Luka found the cover fascinating and was much more interested in touching the book than having a feed. And it's been discovered by a now-mobile 9 month old, and gently but effectively chewed.

And now I've finished reading it, I'm at a bit of a loss. What do I do now?

Oh yes: blog. Right.

I have an (apparently) shocking tendency to have a shifty at the last page of a book before I start reading. Before you strangle me with my own impatient stockings, I've found that the last page of a book doesn't usual spoil much. Killers or secret lovers aren't revealed on final pages. But I now have a solid defence for my back page habit. When I checked out the last page of my second-hand copy of A Suitable Boy, I discovered it looked like this:

The ARGH is mine. If I had discovered this only after 9 months of reading, it would have cast a somewhat pissed-off pall over my reading experience. Whether anything important happened or not, when a book is this long you really want to be able to read the last paragraph. So I got another copy out of the library, photocopied the missing bits, and glued them in:

While my patchwork makes reading the final pages a bit like Tetris meets Choose-Your-Own-Adventure, at least the words are there now.

When I first picked up A Suitable Boy, I just knew the blurb was going to describe it as "sweeping" (it does). This generally means "long". But although it's long, I'm not sure that "sweeping" really applies - this book doesn't sweep; it luxuriates, explores, satirises, exasperates, bores, amuses and moves. It doesn't sweep, it envelops. You don't really read A Suitable Boy, you kind of live with it.

Set in 1950s India, A Suitable Boy follows the interactions of four families, at the heart of which is Mrs Rupa Mehra's search for a suitable boy to marry her daughter Lata. But that is hardly the only subject of this 591,552-word beast. It navigates post-independence political changes, land reforms, spiritual conversions, riots and disasters, shoe-making, university machinations, rhyming couplets, and births/deaths/marriages, all as they relate to the four families. It's not a book you can keep in your head all at once, it's more like a long-running tv series. There's a cast of thousands for one thing - one reviewer described it as Middlemarch multiplied by Bleak House - and if it was any shorter you'd be really confused. As it is, the length of it means you end up working out who everyone is, and remembering, well, most of them.

Also like a long-running tv series, for parts of it I was really involved: laughing, crying, horrified and intrigued, and for parts of it I was tuned out - I found the extended courtroom scenes incredibly tedious and took to skipping them (very naughty, but I'd just had a baby so cut me some slack).

I've come out the other end of this book - bedraggled and a bit dazed - as part of the families. I'm in on all the family jokes (Kakoli-couplets, what it means for a car to be 'Kuku-ed', Mrs Mehra's diabetes diet that alters conveniently according to the quality of the food), and I have my 'favourite family' (the hilarious Chatterjis: "an intelligent family where everyone thought of everyone else as an idiot").

I found Seth's playful sense of humour completely appealing, and kept folding down page corners to remind me to quote them here. Unfortunately, there were so many that my book looks like a bit of a concertina at the bottom.

Some are just asides:

"The conversation ranged from politics…to English literature (where, with a few misquotations, Haresh asserted that Shakespeare had been written by Shakespeare)..."

Some play on expectations:
'The rickshaw-wallah said: 'It was a nice town – before the cinema-hall was built. Now what with the dancing girls and singing girls on the screen and all that loving and wiggling and so on' – he swerved to avoid a pot-hole in the road – 'it’s become an even nicer town.'"

And some are just funny exchanges between people who know each other very, very well:
"'You seem very well,' said Savita.
'Except I’m not,' said Maan. 'I fall upon the knives of life, I bleed.'
'Thorns,' said Pran with a grimace.
'Thorns?'
'Thorns.'
… 'Anyway, I’m going to send her a note today. I’m going to threaten to end it all.'
'End what all?' said Pran, not very alarmed. 'Your life?'
'Yes, probably,' said Maan in a doubtful voice. 'Do you think that’ll win her back?'
'Well, do you plan to back up your threat with some action? To fall upon the knives of life or shoot yourself with the guns of life?'"

Seth loves wordplay, snippets of which litter the pages. One character suspects he is a "mere meddler among Mehras", another, "being a bit of a layabout, he lay about a bit."

There are digs at writerly types: "He's just a writer, he knows nothing at all about literature." Amit the poet seems based on Seth himself, and expresses his difficulty with writing (one I'm familiar with): "I often like my work when I'm done - it's just the doing that is so tedious."

And Mrs Mehra provides constant and indignant comic relief. At one point Lata tries to reassure her of the innocuousness of a prospective night out:

"'Nothing to worry about. There’s just a large crowd and a band and dancing.'

'Abandoned dancing!' Mrs Rupa Mehra could hardly believe her ears."

These sorts of exchanges are just so much fun. But the other side of being so involved with these families is that you get attached to them. You become part of the chain of family that Seth evokes so simply with an image of relatives leading each other, hand in hand, through a crowd of people: "She, her son, his sister, her husband, and his mother – a chain of love, and consequently, of fear". When there are riots, disasters and injuries, you worry about the characters (and worry about what might get up to when you're not reading).

In the hazycrazy of a new baby, I've found it a relief that there was always more of this book to get through - as I neared the end a few days ago I started to get panicky. It was like the last season of Buffy all over again. There's not going to be any more!

But apparently there is going to be more - a sequel is in the works, due out in 2013. Having had a baby boy along with A Suitable Boy, I really should have another child - a girl - to coincide with A Suitable Girl.

How very suitable.

Letters to myself

I've kept a diary since I was 9 years old. I've always called it a 'diary', but like the rest of my writing my diary-keeping has been neither prolific nor regular. The result is a somewhat erratic record of my life from 1989 to present, culminating in this handy 14 volume set (pictured right).

But more memorable (and easier to heft) are my letters to myself. When I was 12 years old, I wrote a letter to my future 18-year-old self, sealed it, and tucked it away in my 1992 diary. I remembered this first letter every now and then over the next 6 years, but didn't open it until I was 18. The act of writing the letter wasn't an original idea on my part - I ripped off the idea from L.M. Montgomery's Emily of New Moon (in fact, I plagiarise Emily twice quite shamelessly in my letter, which readers familiar with the Emily books will have to excuse). But I think the act of keeping the chain of 6-yearly letters going is mine.

This is my letter:

It reads:

"Dear Eighteen,

How is year twelve? Year seven is very easy. You'll have to excuse all these mistakes, the correction tape on the type writer has just run out on the last letter I wrote.

The end of term social was on last Wednesday, and Nilumi and I went as Yin and Yang. Are you still friends with her? Do you still want to be a vet?

I hope you're not laughing at me. Don't be all stuffy, be dramatic and romantic, I love those things.

This writing paper will have long run out by the time you get this. Do you still keep a diary? I am on my one with the cherubs kissing. It's quite small.

Pete has brought home a gym mat and a trampoline for me to do gymnastics on when I feel like it.

Do you still love Alice Anne? I hope you write a great book soon! Hey, do you have a car? A mazda 121? I doubt it. You probably have a beat old minor or something.

Do you have a boyfriend?

You had better still love reading. If you don't then I don't know you very well at all.

I give you a handful of moonshine, ten kisses and the soul of a leaf from a chinese tree, I hope you Haven't quite forgotten your foolish Old Self xxooo"

I love this letter. I love the blend of mundane fact (the expired correction tape, the new diary that is 'quite small'), floweriness and curiosity ('Do you have a boyfriend?' gets a line all to itself). I love my own assumptions that I'll be able to drive and that I'll be heterosexual. I love my own mixed ambition to be a vet who writes great books. I love that I am still friends with Nil, and that I sold Alice Anne (a porcelain doll) on eBay.

At 19, I wrote another letter to myself as a future 24-year-old:

It's a somewhat different letter, and no longer nicks phrases from other books. Actually, it does nick one, but I meant it as a reference - no, really I did. But the tone is the same - curious, passionately encouraging and unflinchingly sentimental and earnest. Before I wrote this blog I wasn't going to transcribe it, as the last time I read it a few years ago I thought it was still a little too close to home. But on reading it again, I've changed my mind (though a couple of paragraphs of it I'll omit to protect the innocent).

"Dear Twenty-Four,

My, how you've grown! I sit here, your nineteen-year-old self, propped up in bed on a soft warm night. The window is open, and breaths of cool air are rolling occasionally across my arms. It's the right sort of time to address the future.

There are so many questions. By my calculations, you must have finished your Arts/Science degrees last year - and now - ? Are you doing an honours year? Or have you launched into the wide world of work? I'm presuming you left UC [residential college] eventually, and have found yourself a flat. Do you live with someone? A boyfriend?

Are you still friends with dear Laura? And what about Nil and Mara? There's too many questions to ask.

Do you still keep a (rather erratic) diary? Do you still have a passion for children's literature and cappuccinos?

But most, most, most importantly - are you still getting closer to being that person you always dream of being? You'll get there, my dear, don't let yourself sink into ever thinking you won't. Your life is yours to play with. Your family love you, you've a brain in your head, you're not dying of cancer (yet - ha ha), and you can write well enough to get better and better. I just know you're going to learn and learn and learn until it lifts you beyond what you only dream you can do. Cling to that.

Do your remember you once told me you had decided to be an extraordinary person? Keep doing it. Sink your teeth into every opportunity and take on the whole bloody world, my girl. You're the luckiest woman I know. Think about it. This is the point of Babette [quote from Don Delillo's White Noise]. Things go right for you - always have.

Now look out the window, remember Emily of New Moon, and drag out the wild, dramatic poet in you. Take her for a run over the other side of the Hopkins, and keep working towards being that extraordinary person you want to be. Be romantic, never lose that to mere reality. Do what you've always been able to do - glory in small happinesses, and never forget me.

Because I am rather fond of you.

Smile for me, for the memory of

your affectionate,

Self xx"

I love this letter too, and it gives me the same mixed feelings of love, embarrassment and inspiration. I love that I still make assumptions, and that I'm still so ruthlessly supportive of my future self. I love that I am still friends with dear Laura, Nil and Mara. But most of all I love the fondness I feel, both as a 19-year-old looking forwards, and as a 29-year-old looking backwards at myself.

Tucked away in my 2006 diary is another envelope:

To Anna at Thirty-Two, From Anna at Twenty-Six. Plus cocktail stickers. It's still sealed, of course.

I've got no idea what I wrote in there. Every time I write one of these letters, I think I'll remember what I've written, and I never do. I guess 6 years is a long time.

But I can guess that when I'm 32 and I break it open, I'll smile, squirm with embarrassment, probably go a bit misty,

but still feel very affectionate towards my

funny

old

Self

The belated rabbit

A belated and lovely message from the favourer of The Velveteen Rabbit:

"I love the book because I feel like that rabbit (especially at my age and having been surrounded by and engaged with so many kids who sing Apples and Bananas and get jokes, have a vocabulary, and aren't afraid to make up a poem). I also like it because it gives dignity to those on the "scrapheap." It shows how they weren't always there and that we all one day will be there."

I was actually singing Apples and Bananas to Luka yesterday morning.

His favourite is the "oo" verse.

Ooh look to oot, ooh look to oot, ooh look to oot, ooples and banoonoos...

The Velveteen Rabbit by Margery Williams

From the favourer: "I am in the 'This is my favourite book in the history of the world, ever, and no better book will ever be written, ever' category, except that I would add: 'of this type.'"*

One Christmas, a Boy is given a Velveteen Rabbit as a present. He's a lovely rabbit, 'fat and bunchy, as a rabbit should be', and while the Boy plays with him for a while, he's quickly forgotten in favour of more modern and complicated toys, and spends most of his time in the cupboard. There he chats to the Skin Horse, the oldest toy in the nursery (with an excellently creepy name) about being 'Real':

"What is REAL?" asked the Rabbit one day, when they were lying side by side near the nursery fender, before Nana came to tidy the room. "Does it mean having things that buzz inside you and a stick-out handle?"

"Real isn't how you are made," said the Skin Horse. "It's a thing that happens to you. When a child loves you for a long, long time, not just to play with, but REALLY loves you, then you become Real."

"Does it hurt?" asked the Rabbit.

"Sometimes," said the Skin Horse, for he was always truthful. "When you are Real you don't mind being hurt."

"Does it happen all at once, like being wound up," he asked, "or bit by bit?"

"It doesn't happen all at once," said the Skin Horse. "You become. It takes a long time. That's why it doesn't happen often to people who break easily, or have sharp edges, or who have to be carefully kept. Generally, by the time you are Real, most of your hair has been loved off, and your eyes drop out and you get loose in the joints and very shabby. But these things don't matter at all, because once you are Real you can't be ugly, except to people who don't understand."

When the Boy loses the toy he usually sleeps with, his Nana grabs the Rabbit out of the cupboard, and from that moment the Rabbit and the Boy are inseparable. The Rabbit doesn't notice that he's getting shabbier and worn out, he's too busy being loved and having fun with the boy. Nana admonishes the Boy:

"You must have your old Bunny!" she said. "Fancy all that fuss for a toy!"

The Boy sat up in bed and stretched out his hands.

"Give me my Bunny!" he said. "You mustn't say that. He isn't a toy. He's REAL!"

The Rabbit is delighted to hear this, but when he meets some actual rabbits in the woods, he discovers they think he isn't quite as Real as he could be. Despite his love for the Boy, the Velveteen Rabbit is drawn to the live rabbits, and when they abandon him because he smells funny, the Rabbit waits in vain for a long time, 'hoping they would come back.'

Then the Boy becomes ill, and his loyal bunny sees him through scarlet fever. But as the Boy recovers, the Rabbit finds himself whisked away with all the other 'contaminated' items to be burnt. 'Of what use was it to be loved and lose one's beauty and become Real if it all ended like this?' thinks the Rabbit. But as he cries a 'real tear', the 'nursery magic' that the Skin Horse spoke to him about is invoked, and the Velveteen Rabbit is rewarded with a new sort of Real-ness.

I found this copy of The Velveteen Rabbit in Alice's Bookshop, sticking out of a box of well-chewed picture books. The version I've read is the one with new illustrations by Donna Green, but I've since had a look at the original pictures, and though Green's oil paintings are beautiful, I much prefer the character of William Nicholson's original 1922 illustrations:

Donna Green's cover

Original William Nicholson cover

Donna Green's fairy

William Nicholson's fairy

Donna Green's rabbits

William Nicholson's rabbits

While my opinionated old copy of Who's Who in Children's Literature dismisses the conversations between the Rabbit and the Skin Horse as 'mawkish', my sentimental-clap-trap-antenna didn't quiver at all as I read the story, in fact I had a bit of a cry several times. Perhaps having a baby has made me go soft, or perhaps the line between sentiment and sentimentality is allowed to be blurry. I think part of it is that as a child I always tried very hard to convince myself that my own soft toys were real, and loved any story that suggested they got active every time I left the room (my favourite was a Scholastic title called Doll Hospital).

I did find the Rabbit's interactions with the live rabbits an interesting inclusion, and one that isn't really resolved - he is torn at that moment between wanting to be with the Boy and wanting to be with the live rabbits, and never really gets to choose between them (his decision is made for him by 'nursery magic'). This tension between the desire for love and the desire for independence has been analysed from a Kleinian perspective by Steven Daniels: ‘as the story never acknowledges the Rabbit’s desire to grow away from the object of his attachment, and hence never acknowledges the basis for his entry into the depressive position, it cannot credit him with working through it.’ Lois Kuznets' commentary on Daniels' essay puts it more plainly: 'If the Rabbit rather than the Boy is supposed to be undergoing important psychological development, then he fails, for Rabbit, who both longs to remain with the Boy and to go with the wild rabbits, does not resolve these ambivalent feelings in the course of the story.' Bit hard on the bunny. Kuznets has a sense of humour about the analysis though, remarking that perhaps the Rabbit 'himself needs a transitional object' to resolve this tension. Tee hee.

In her essay 'The Play of Toys', Kuznets also finds the Rabbit's conversion by 'nursery magic' problematic as it 'swerves away from an understanding that a metamorphosis into flesh and blood means mortality and inevitable death'. While this is true, in this book to be 'Real' doesn't necessitate being 'alive'. Whether he knows it or not, the toy Rabbit is 'Real' long before he becomes an actual live rabbit, and what may happen to him once he is made mortal (for magic is magic after all, maybe magically converted toy rabbits have a different lifespan) isn't the focus of the story.

If I seem to be tying myself in knots a bit here, it may be because I've got a 6-month-old boy sitting on my lap (who we often refer to as 'the Boy', but whose favourite toy is not a rabbit, but a plush octopus named Saki) and it's hard to think clearly when you're being periodically whacked in the face with a drooly fist.

But I think the most interesting question for children reading The Velveteen Rabbit is this notion of 'what does it mean to be Real?' - and that most children would agree with the Boy - that we make things Real by investing them with that property ourselves.

*I've had to quote the original general email from the person who nominated this book as a loved one, because he is slack and hasn't sent me a more specific sentence about why The Velveteen Rabbit is one of his favourites.

Fans of Green Knowe

Since my post on visiting Lucy Boston's manor (aka Green Knowe), I've received some emails from other fans of the books.

From Ashley:

Just discovered your blog about your visit in 2004 to Hemingford Grey.

What a lovely visit! Thank you for sharing. I have been a fan of the Green Knowe books (and, yes, Nothing Said, too) since I was a child and they are still my absolute favorite books. I have yet to visit the Manor though I was able to purchase books, postcards and the replica of Toby's mouse some years back. They arrived in time for Christmas and provided me with a wonderful holiday. Your honeymoon sounds as spectacular!

Again, thank you for sharing.

And from Helen (whose email had the lovely subject "Kindred spirit!"):

Dear Anna

You won't have a clue who I am, but I've just read your piece about your recent visit to 'Green Knowe' and simply had to mail you.

I thought it was just me who was utterly enchanted by the Green Knowe books, but I'm seeing that there is an under current of worship bubbling away across the world. I visited The Manor about 3 years ago and was totally stunned at the reality of the books within that glorious house. I was singled out as the book fan too (at that stage I was 29!) and was given Toby's mouse to hold. I cried! I was so overcome with the magic of the place.

I was given the box set of Green Knowe many years ago be a beloved Aunty. I only started reading it after the BBC series in 1986, but from then on I was hooked.

Hearing about the new film made me crackle with excitment. Just hope it does "Chimneys" justice. I'm sure it will, Maggie Smith is a treasure!

I have wintersweet in my garden and am due to aquire Daphne and Witchhazel. My own little Green Knowe patch!

Here's to the forthcoming release of From Time to Time and may Green Knowe live on forever!

Best wishes from Manchester, England

I must admit I've been rather delighted to get these emails - not only to know that people other than my Mum (Hi Mum) are reading my blog, but also that there are more fans out there of Lucy Boston's work than I thought.

Gone all warm and fuzzy.

Speaking of warm and fuzzy, the trailer for the adaptation of The Chimneys of Green Knowe is out!

I'm trying really hard...

...to do things, despite a small creature who occasionally decides that breastfeeding 10 times a day for weeks at a time and grizzling in between those feeds is a fun thing to do.

Things I am trying to do:

1. Read Jenny Valentine's "The Ant Colony" and Suzanne LaFleur's "Love, Aubrey" to review for Viewpoint's next issue.

2. Stockpile enough expressed milk so that I can go to 3 films at MIFF. Which is a lot of washing, sterilising, pumping, washing, sterilising and pumping.

3. Actually read the MIFF program and work out which 3 films I both want to see and can get to see on Paul's days off.

4. Keep reading "A Suitable Boy" for my Favourites project.

5. The washing.

6. The dishes.

7. Not buy takeaway.

8. Be attentive to friends.

9. Wash my hair.

10. Be nice to my lovely husband at all times, even at night.

11. Read books to Luka.

12. Understand that breast milk only takes 90 minutes to digest, so yes, he is allowed to be hungry a lot.

13. Write in my diary.

14. Answer the 10 penpal letters currently in my "letters to answer" pile.

15. Email my mum lots of photos and videos of Luka to show my dad before he goes back into hospital this Friday.

16. Not worry about my dad.

I'm trying really, really hard.