The baby is walking

Annika walked! She's been wanting to for a while now and the last couple of weekends have been tiring, what with her always wanting someone's fingers to hold on to while she practices. It's cute and endearing, but somewhat inconvenient when you're trying to, say, cook, or just take a minute to go the bathroom, and you find a small cute creature attached to your pants at the knees. 
  Today Nina was playing with the new wooden vegetables (a very clever toy: they're in pieces, that attach together with velcro, and it comes with a wooden knife so you can cut them up), and had also recently made a large duplo castle. Annika was standing, near me, and then she un-self-consciously took 4 steps towards the castle (breaking the top off when she got there). Then she took 5 or 6, then 7 or 8, in different spots. Then Amps finally came home, and then we made some videos: 

I'm so proud of her. She's been trying so hard, for so long. After all, a few weeks is a relatively big fraction of her life.


In other news, we had a first birthday party for her on the weekend. She turned 1 a week ago today. The party was as much for us as for her; this year has been so hard, and we've mostly come through it intact, though we bicker more now. I should write more about her being 1, about how poignant it is, how she's not an infant, how we'll never have another infant (god forbid! I'd die), how much she's changed, and how she still suckles, and I still feel the last and final remnants of sweet, sweet newborn when I look down at her lush, long eyelashes and perfect baby cheeks. How the central paradox of children remains: one long sunday when your husband suddenly announces he has to work all day and you've got two kids to entertain, one of whom needs constant hand-holding (I mean literally, here!) and the other is whiny with a cold, one sunday like that just never ends. But infanthood, babyhood, toddlerhood just slip away unnoticed. 


Annika: congratulations, baby. We are so proud of you and when you grow up we'll love our nights of sleep but we will miss your gorgeous baby smiles and giggles, the feeling of your tiny hands clasping our fingers as you balance, the smooth touch of your chubby baby cheeks, your fine wisps of thin dark hair, the way you charm the people on the tube with your little waves and your sweet sweet smiles; the way you say 'ba! ba!' for a duck's quack, the way you crawl up hopefully, bringing a book. I'll miss your pure joy you show when you see me come in to a room, the sound of you crawling fast towards me, the slapping of your tiny hands on the wood floor. There's so much more; we love you just so, so much. Happy 1st birthday, Annika. 


And the other child? She can READ! She sounded out 3 words: fun, nuts, and seeds. (The last were in a cookbook we recently were given, which I was flipping through and she wanted to know what it was about). I'm sure she'll do more soon. And another amazing thing: she knows what an exclamation mark is! She said, see, it says "zoo!", not just "zoo", because of that upside down 'i'.  :)  So cool. I'd told her about that a couple of weeks ago when she asked what it was, in the story about the little owl who falls from the nest and has to find its mummy. So, congratulations to you too, Nina: you're entering a whole new world, a whole new set of worlds, and I can only hope that I can find ways to help you love reading as much as I do, in your own way, however you choose.    


   

Commuting

Not always this easy!

I haven't posted for ages - but now I have a new laptop, a macbook air to be precise. It is very sleek, and light, and my other one broke months ago, which is mainly why I haven't posted. I don't post at work .. and so if not at home, well, then not at all.
   We do this commuting just about every day. It's hard. It's just like having two small children (sorry, Nina - one big, and one small...) on the tube in rush hour. Fortunately we usually look so desperate that we get seats. People are really nice, actually, and usually get up, or they play with Annika's little hands and smile at her smiles, or they help me with the backpack if I'm struggling. We're mostly used to it, I suppose, but doing it every day takes its toll on all of us. 
   So, life has been hard. I've got this long-lasting cough that won't quit. The house is finally ours, after a long struggle to actually get ownership of the garden bits. It's been ours since November 4th. We moved in and spent 2 1/2 months living here without our stuff, in varying states of chaos and renovation, missing our coffee machine, sleeping on inflatable mattresses and wishing we had furniture. Eventually we had a wall taken out between the kitchen and living room, and then in the midst of masses of plaster dust we went to Holland for Christmas. Annika learned to crawl. Eventually we had the floors put in, and Amps and two guys painted the place. Our things got here in January, or maybe early February. And I thought it was going to get easier, but then the dreaded winter bugs arrived: flus, colds, flus, more colds, sore throats, and The Cough. It never really got easier. I try to tell myself that having two small children, full time jobs, our first house, renovating the house, and finally moving, would just be hard anywhere. Nothing to do with London. I guess. Though the long sequence of bureaucratic nonsense prior to owning the house, and the weeks of stress hopping from one temporary flat to another, and then having to live somewhere that was being renovated, surely didn't help -- there's a British-ness to our suffering. 
But we do have some fun: