Always a new thing

We went on a trip last week to see relatives in Holland. It was great, and I won't bore all of you (all ye two or three readers out there) with lots of details. We had fun, we had wonderful food, it was cold and rainy and there were tulips in abundance. We learned that our child is NOT going to sleep when she's on a PLANE! A PLANE! Nina on a PLANE! Whirrrrrrrr! Plane! Another plane? See another plane. Plane again? 

And after the plane? Oh wow. It's a bus. Long gone are the days when you got off the plane and walked along a little enclosed ramp to the terminal. Nope. Those lie unused and empty, while we all load ourselves onto a bus to drive 37m to the terminal door. One can only surmise that airlines pay a fee for the use of those ramps, and a lower fee for the buses. And after the bus? Well, there's OMA, with a BALLOON!

We learned a few other things. Our child is more than ready for more advanced toys, and we've got to get rid of the babyish toys that clutter up our flat. There were a couple of toy camper vans, and these provided hours of narrated entertainment ("Mummy in the back! Mummy shower. Mummy in the back, Nina in the back. Wheel! Round and round, round and round. Look, a bed ... ") She got a duplo bus for a gift, and we opened it just before the long car ride to Keukenhof. It was so cute when she realised that it was, in fact, a toy bus. "It's a BUS! A BUS! heeheeheee .. heh. heh. a BUS." We put the little doors on it, loaded in the little lego guys and put their luggage underneath.

She also got some little toy dishes, and I wondered how she'd react. Within minutes she was stirring things and offering me some tea and soup. Today, she got out the lego luggage from the bus, and deftly pinched thumb and finger together to take the imaginary treats it contained, and then said "Mummy have it!" and handed it over. I know - it's typical kid stuff. But I thought that pretend tea parties happened when kids were 3 years old, not 22 months, just like I didn't realise that 19-month-olds tried to draw circles and airplanes (with, I admit, limited success, although some of the circles were pretty good).

We've also decided that we need to change the plan with food. We need to make dinner and eat together and not just give her whatever she wants whenever she first asks for it as long as it's healthy, which is sort of what we had been doing (at least on weekday evenings if she'd already had "tea" at childminder's).  The new plan is to actually make a meal and not let her snack much while it's being made, and then provide it and see if she eats it. What a nightmare. Today the thing (risotto with edamame instead of peas, and asparagus) wasn't ready until 6:30, 2 long hours after she'd had a jacket potato at childminders. She pretty much had a complete and total toddler meltdown at about 6:20. I was reminded of why we had our old system (you want olives? great! here's an olive! Here are 10 more olives ... can I cook now?) in the first place. But she ate it. Was it worth it? I think it will be.

 

A bus a splash splash! a bus again!

I've written before about how much Nina likes mechanical things - anything she can manipulate, turn, latch, open or close, spin; things with wheels, anything with buttons. A few weeks ago she worked out how to turn on the digital camera, and somehow set it to display an inset image along with the full image, after you've taken a picture. Neither of us can get it back. Last weekend she broke the camera, prompting me to look up how much it's worth. I thought that since it's a bit old it'd be easy to get another one, but nope, it's still about 300$. We googled around, and finally the much-recommended 'bang your camera on a hard surface to un-stick the lens-extending mechanism' worked. It took me back to last summer: 

T

That's a baby who's really annoyed that she's not allowed to play with the camera. Oh, and there's an Irish castle in the background.

Another favourite thing is water: bathing, splashing, and especially swimming. The other day we rode a BUS ('a BUS! a wheel! around and round! Mummy! Look! There's a BUS! Nina ride a bus! Nina bus! People up and down ...') past a FOUNTAIN, otherwise known as a "plash splash!". Later we went to play with the fountain, which was extremely exciting, what with all that water splashing around everywhere.  Where's this going, you wonder?

 Well, the other day Nina woke up from her nap and was very very cranky, so cranky that she was on my lap and I was trying to distract her from the seemingly urgent need to shriek in my ear. So I opened up the laptop and asked her if she'd like to see a bus.  'Eeeeeeeyyeaaaahh!' She said. So google was helpful enough to provide a large number of quality bus images. And then I found this wonder of toddler entertainment:




I'm always impressed that there are people out there, uploading these things, seemingly just for me, as if they knew that one day there would be a woman somewhere with a toddler who would just LOVE this... how did they know?

Baby barista

Payeh the penguin isn't obsolete after all! But he's not an essential part of every outing, an essential part of every bedtime ... sometimes he takes a turn on the slide, in his little pink stroller. I guess sometimes he's still a comfort.

A

A mini-barista. Train 'em young, I say. Or at least, entertain 'em so I can have my coffee already.

Baby "chuni"!

But by the end of the day things were looking rougher. Bath time.

Nina's got "I" and "my" confused, which we have finally noticed. I feel a bit bad now: a few times, as she climbed up to a slide on the playground, where there were a number of other toddlers, and loudly proclaimed "MY slide", I corrected her and explained that this was a shared slide for all the kids. What she meant, we now know, is that SHE would like to slide too. So we're trying to teach her the difference, and sometimes she gets it. I get such a kick out of her language, both how it's developing and how it's still not quite there. For example: 

A: Nina, can you say "I brush my teeth"? 

N: "My brush a teeth, My brush my teeth, Nina brush Nina teeth. Mummy brusha teeth! Mummy turn!" 

A: Nina, can you say "I walk to the kitchen"?

N: "My walk a chicken!"

BBC radio 3

It is 7pm and dinner has been made, but not eaten. I'm astonished at how relaxing it is around here when A takes Nina to the park. It's sunny, and about 10C, out there. I am trying to adopt the attitude that this is SUMMER. 16C at midday, and sunny: about as good as it gets around here, or at least, as good as it's been for the last 2 years. It does occasionally reach 20+, but only for a few isolated, unpredictable days. Our Augusts have been so rainy that our luggage (!) and our shoes (!) and our coats (!) went moldy. Yep, mold is NOT just for fruit, or things left too long in the fridge, around here. According to google, mold doesn't have a natural predator. Can this be true? Anything that ate mold in this country would take the place over. I'll have to go on Ask A Biologist and find out.  Meanwhile, in line with the pretense that it is in fact summer, we're taking Nina to the park a lot, eating lunch in the gardens on campus, and generally making an effort to be outside. So he went out and I turned on BBC3 and made a simple dinner. 


Every time I try to re-involve my life with music I can't imagine it not being there. At home I used to be an avid CBC2 listener, and I particularly loved Disc Drive with Jurgen Gothe, and Music for a While with Danielle Charbonneau. They've changed it all now - Shelagh Rogers doesn't do the morning one any more since they got rid of Take 5 (which I liked), in favour of Studio Sparks or whatever ... but that was all ages ago and now a lot of it is jazz/world/rock. I like jazz, and "world" (is that like "ethnic"? meaning, not white? or what? aren't we in the "world", and wasn't Beethoven, too?) Anyway, it's all different and I'm all gone, and all that. And I haven't gotten familiar enough with BBC3's programming to listen regularly, but I've just re-read An Equal Music by Vikram Seth, and have again decided that I have to reconnect with music somehow ... Lately BBC3 has been just the thing. I imagine, like in Seth's book, that children across the UK who otherwise might not hear classical music are out there somewhere, in villages, in cities, listening to Piazzolla, to Lieder, hearing the sound of voices joining and thinking: I have to be part of that. So tonight I might finally make it to my Irish music jam. And I've been slowly and sporadically working on a few projects: teaching myself basic harmony (much progress has been made and I can now harmonise simple Christmas carols and folk songs pretty quickly, not that the resulting arrangements are terribly interesting), practicing scales and arpeggios with my eyes closed (really helpful! and not as boring as with eyes open), planning to start transcribing music I hear (I got as far as printing out blank sheet music pages) ... And of course I want to work out how to best expose Nina to music. She can play around on the piano, saying "bam! bam!" as she hits the keys hard, and "pling pling pling" as she plays them softly. She can mimic simple rhythms. She can try dance and sway her arms, sort-of in time (so cute). She can sing "twinkle twinkle" in tune, with a mish-mash of words from abc's to twinkles to yes sir yes sir three bags full. She sings a few other little phrases, life is but a dream ... 

Any advice? How do I bring music into her life in a fun way? I wish I'd had music lessons much earlier, not that I want to force it on her. 

Oh, and another thing: on Saturday, A and I and a friend started this program. Just so you know, I'm not doing the full ones, but they are. So far, so good - and I'm surprised by how many different muscles got just that bit sore. The goal is to be able to do 100 by Nina's 2nd birthday, approximately 8 weeks away. I will add healthy eating, regular running, developing upper body strength, transcribing music, learning more classical harmony, learning introductory jazz harmony (after probably some simple blues), music games with Nina ... baking bread ... and a million work-related things ... to my ever-growing list of projects. Hmmmm...

Journey of 1000 colds

Some stats on the common cold: The average adult gets 2-4 colds a year, according to the NHS, while children get 3-8 colds a year. This year, I've had about 12 colds. I don't even know how many Nina's had. No doubt some of mine were just me not quite recovering from one and getting symptoms again, so virologically speaking they were probably not distinct colds, not that I care. The NHS doesn't provide me with a detailed breakdown: how many colds does the average young academic parent of a toddler have if said adult has moved recently from another continent? Hm?  And do they really fall in a statistically significant pattern after I go for a nice long run on a Sunday? I think they do. Other parents either say "nope, that hasn't happened to me at all!" (and happily, they say it, with clear voices and clear noses, and without tissue at hand; these lucky folks are more likely to be men, or to be natives of this island that stay home with their kids), or "oh yeah, I was sick for 6 months once!" or "yep. I've been sick since December" (more likely women, more likely other young working parents who have moved around a lot). Hmmmmm.  And it's Monday, which is the night of my usual Irish music gig that I try to go to, but I hardly ever do now because it's moved farther away and there's always a reason, usually to do with a cold, or being tired, or being about to get a cold... Hmph. Someone should do a study. Someone else.  

Well, it's 8:30 pm. Atypically for us, dinner has already been created and consumed, lunch for tomorrow has been packed. A. has arrived home from work and the child is on her way to bed. Because she's now 22 months old, this (finally!) doesn't involve 45 minutes of carefully singing Baby Beluga, tiptoeing out of the room hoping she doesn't notice we are leaving, or 90 minutes of breastfeeding followed by 30 minutes of attempting to put her down and then breastfeeding again ... I had this book that said "you may have to do this 4 or 5 times but your baby will learn to sleep away from the breast".  HAHAHAHA! Try, 40 or 50 times. A day. For a week or two. But yes, she did learn to sleep, and then eventually she didn't even want to breastfeed any more. This involved a very cute week when she needed to go to sleep with the breast *just* a centimeter or two away. I sure miss those baby days, and one day, we'll have another one, or at least, we'll try. But THEN how many colds will I get? Maybe I'll have some immunity by then, or I'll give up on the running, or something. 

Pizza

I forgot one thing yesterday when I was writing that long post about all the ways Nina's like my brother: pizza. She's not too fussy about food, certainly nothing like the stories you hear about toddlers needing their peas not to have touched any other foods, or anything like that. I know one guy whose child only wanted fish sticks and chicken fingers, although I suspect he was exaggerating. (I wanted to say: just don't BUY those! but I didn't). But she's not exactly going to eat whatever we make, either, and until now we haven't ever been sure if it was her teeth bothering her, so we haven't insisted on it, and maybe that's been a mistake. But ... I don't like the idea of forcing or coercing children to eat. She'll survive if she skips meals now and then. And frankly, if she doesn't love food *quite* as much as we do, it's probably just as well.

Anyway, we've been trying to introduce her to the idea of cooking. We both like to cook (and we like to eat). So a few weeks ago when we were making pizza, we got her to help roll out her own dough, and spread sauce, olives, tomatoes and cheese on it. She loves olives, tomatoes and cheese, so much so that she kept just taking them off the uncooked pizza and eating them. Anyway, she was a bit worried when we took the whole thing away and put it in the oven, and then I'm sure she wondered why we put it in there if it just got too hot to eat anyway. But then: she loved it. Can a 21-month-old eat an entire 12" pizza? Yep, pretty much. 

Oh, the bliss! And then she said "I LOVE pizza" for about 3 days. 

Just like my brother

Most of you out there reading this are my family and friends, and so most of you know my (younger) brother. Some of you even knew him when he was Nina's age. Well, there are some similarities, eerily so, as I don't think I've taught her any of these things. Can toddlers' daily likes and dislikes be genetic? As far as I understand it, when people find a human gene that is "linked with" something, it accounts for maybe a 2% change in risk of that thing, or accounts for 2% differences between groups, or something. My point is that it's complicated. There are confounding factors in people's environments, upbringings; there are other genes too, and other physiological factors, and genes (and other things) can interact. How can it be that my daughter doesn't like to paint with her fingers, but instead holds her hands up, and says "Haaaand. Dirty! Washa hand! I washa hand. Mummy wash a hand...?" It's the same when she gets bits of food on her hand, and she doesn't play in the dirt. Both my Dad and my brother really just don't like having sticky hands, and neither does my baby girl.  Amazing. 

And there are other things. For example, apparently when I was little, I was very sensitive to faces in books, and could tell if they were just a teeny bit sad. I still can't watch any film rated above about 15 for violence, and I'm even more sensitive to cruelty in film. Nina's favourite book right now is called "Woobie discovers music". My aunt got it for her at the Concertgebouw in Amsterdam. Little Woobie tries to clean his uncle's tuba, but he uses soap and water, and bubbles come out everywhere at the concert. My point is that on the next page, little Woobie is worried and crying. Nina says "woobie crying. woobie sad. Woobie CAR! Red car!". Woobie is pulling a red car on a little string. And she's a bit concerned about the crying but wow, look at that car. MY car. Woobie car. SHARE car. She also really likes buses, so much so that we took her to city centre on the bus last weekend and she is still talking about it. The wheels, you know, they go 'round and 'round. I was showing her pictures of buses on the internet and she loved them. We came to a school bus and she said "Goo bus! GOO BUS!" and she's never even seen one before but my brother just loved them and also called them goo buses. She loves gadgets, any kind of buttons to press, latches to figure out, little things to manipulate and to turn. She can figure out how to get my digital piano to do this amazing demo arpeggio thing that I have never heard before, despite having owned the thing for 12 years. And when she does it, it's an astonishing sound to hear a 1-year-old playing on a piano. 

Nina is, as babies go, pretty good about sleeping in. She's unfortunately got me trained now and I wake up at 7:30 with various work issues boiling around in my head, unable to get back to sleep. Often, like today, she's up shortly after 7 singing to herself. But often she's not, and doesn't wake up until 8 or so. I guess when she goes to school it'll be different, but I am very glad not to have to get up at 6:30 like my friends do. 

Well, congratulations to the brother in question, who is now ... married! Thanks for the pics, you both look really happy and we are looking forward to the party even if Nina will probably not be a flower girl after all :)  

Meanwhile the bedtime thing brings me to another topic: picking battles. As in, we pick some battles, and we let others lie. If you try to fight all the battles, you are always fighting with your toddler and telling them 'no, no no no no' all day long and in the end, how can they take it seriously? and they can never please you, which presumably would be frustrating for them, and wouldn't they stop trying eventually? and that'd be sad. So here are some battles we have picked:
- we brush her teeth. And wow, that IS a battle. But I don't want her "brushing" her own teeth. I don't want her to end up with teeth like mine.
- the carseat. Everyone's got this one. It has taken a while but the carseat is now referred to, by Nina herself, as the "no crying seat". Has she realized that there is no amount of noise she can make, no amount of frantic skyward pushing of the hips, no amount of redness in the face, of desperate tears streaming down her cheeks, that will convince us that it's ok to drive to the pool without her in the carseat? Could it be? 
- we do not carry her home from places, especially when we have the stroller with us. It undermines our childminder, who has other children to care for, and who just can't carry her; besides she is almost 13kg now. But that can be a real battle because sometimes we *do* carry her, for stretches, like across a busy street or if she isn't feeling well.
- shoes in the pub. We live in England and pubs are probably our favourite thing about that. But Nina needs to have shoes on to walk around in the pub, even if the shoes come  off for her to jump on the couches. More on pubs some other time. They are truly a happy part of our lives. 
 - bedtime: come whatever, barring SEVERE illness, that kid goes to bed AFTER 7:30. Like I said I do NOT want to start getting up at any time that starts with a 6. Ever. 


No doubt there are more battles that we have picked, things like not eating Organix cheese puffs for breakfast, not standing on the furniture, not throwing books (that's a big  one, it turns out), not throwing hard things at Mummy, etc etc etc. Those ones just jumped out at me. Here are some we haven't picked: 

- eating out of the yogurt container. This is now standard practice for those under 1m tall in our household.
- crayons. The big fat non-toxic ones just don't work. There is a reason that crayons aren't edible or whatever. The little ones may break into chokable pieces, but they draw. Nina never eats them anyway. Come to think of it there are loads of things she plays with that probably aren't technically safe for under-3's. Whatever. We all survived it, and she's not playing alone, and she really never puts things in her mouth anyway.
- "please" and "thank you". We may be updating this policy, but we don't insist on it to the degree that our childminder would like, or that my friends do, although Nina does say them and we encourage it, if gently.
- Routines. Enough said. We don't like them and we don't insist on a set dinner time, although of course there are patterns and we do the same thing before bedtime, etc, so we have some routine. But if we feel like going to the park at 7pm, we go.

Battles I wish I had picked: 
- eating some of what we make, not a variety of other stuff like olives, cheese, a cracker and 4 bites of apple. That would be really nice. 
- teeth (earlier) so she would let us brush them already, drat it. 

 ... no doubt there are more.


What about you? Are there battles you wish you'd picked or wish you hadn't?