Dangling over the Thames

Tower Bridge has a glass floor. You look down on the traffic and the water, both rushing past. So many things about London in the past are strikingly just as they are today ; before Tower Bridge was built, there was only London Bridge and it got (you guessed it) too crowded. The pictures they had of London Bridge, overcrowded, were so like yesterday afternoon on Westminster Bridge. Crowded and pricy, and enjoyed anyway -- London.

My view: part London, part mini-gymnast. This is Westminster (the London) and Nina (the gymnast). 

A few pictures

Maybe this app will make it easier to post a few pictures now and then...

How could she already be 6?

Nina is 6! 
We had a party, at a local "adventure playground". The ethos of these places is that children can go there and play independently, and learn to take risks. It's the kind of playing (they hope) that we all used to do when we went out and played on our own. There is a large park near my parents' house; I used to make forts, slide down the hill in the snow, even skate on the pooled water at the bottom that used to be a tiny creek. But in London we'd never let our children just roam the streets. Anyway, this place (and the other adventure playgrounds) is free to use, but children have to be 6, and she's been counting the days. She thinks it's really unfair that most of her friends have been 6 for ages. The party was a fun mix of children from school (who I mainly don't know at all, nor the parents), and old and new friends of ours. It was fun and everyone liked the cake (Alton Brown's Devil's Food cake, with purple icing, made by me). 

Nina at her 6th birthday party

  But I'll miss her being 5. She's been such amazing fun at 5. Being in Menerbes (Provence) last year, her so happy there with Max; playing games in Highgate wood, taking her to Canada and sliding down the snowy hill in that same park, taking her to the observatory and seeing Saturn, feeling her excitement as I held her up to the telescope and she saw it for herself. Seeing her get her Student of the Week award (most recently for knowing how to prepare an artichoke; once for climbing the rope all the way to the top of the school hall), her first chess games (guided), her first delighted songs on the piano, the way she loves playing them in all kinds of different ways. She even wrote one herself.
  She noted that you can count by 9s by going up 10 and then subtracting one, so there's a pattern; that when you do that, you never get to 11, and that when you count by 2s or 3s you also never get to 11. This was Nina at 5 1/2: on her way to discovering primes. But she believes in the tooth fairy. She has lost 3 teeth. 
  I loved watching her teach Annika the little dances for the pre-primary ballet exam. There are so many things I'm not thinking of right now. She gives Annika the window seat on the bus, and makes sure Annika can win the little mini-races we do when we're walking together. 
 My point: Nina is fantastic. Happy birthday, Nina. I will miss you being 5, but we'll have tons of fun while you're 6. 

Vegetables, ice cream and innocence

We have started getting a riverford weekly organic vegetable box. I think it's been healthy for the adults in the family -- we eat considerably more bok choi and kohlrabi than we used to. It's a good thing to do, gives farmers a reliable and fair price and all that. The tomatoes and carrots have been delicious. 
  But I don't think it's been that great for the girls. After all, they won't touch a ginger and lemon stir fry with cashews, carrots and kohlrabi no matter how good I say it is (to be fair, Nina will try it and eat a little). So they end up eating a selection of creative soups (including, believe it, a soup made by pureeing a cashew, carrot and kohlrabi stir fry, which Nina in fact loved), or they have more crackers with cream cheese, carrot sticks and apple slices than is reasonable. 
  Amps is too willing (in my opinion) to bribe them with the promise of ice cream. With him away, I roasted some organic squash and some organic red peppers. I briefly cooked some organic carrots and blended Annika a soup with milk, carrot, roasted squash. Nina loved the soup, Annika said she'd have it for breakfast. They both had some nuts and milk. Whatever. Nina was still hungry, and I made a fatal error: I commented that there should be a prize for someone who eats that extra piece of squash. 
  She was really, really disappointed when the prize wasn't ice cream or chocolate. She was whiny and sulky about it.
  I remember about 4 years ago, Nina was 2, and I had a moment when I realised that any latent food issues I had would have to go. I didn't want her growing up thinking that you only eat healthy food to get to unhealthy food, or that thin people "deserved" more chocolate than larger people, or that we "deserved" a sweet treat after we did something active or something good (not that I thought those things, but these are attitudes you can find out there in "the culture"). I didn't want her growing up afraid of being fat, stigmatizing fat people, or even thinking about fat-ness and size, not as long as I could avoid it. I didn't want her thinking that what you do when you want something really fun is eat -- even if that's true. It's not the only thing people do, we do, for fun, so why should she think that way? And I think that we have pretty much managed that. We mostly eat pretty well (except maybe for Annika). Of course we enjoy treats, but we haven't typically held them up as the big reward, the most fun thing to do together. 
    Anyway there I was, Nina whining and sulking away. And I did something I wish I hadn't. I sat down beside her, pointed out her perfect muscular stomach, showed her my rather less perfect version, and started to be perfectly frank about how women feel about food, about fat, about food as a reward, about how hard it can be to consistently make healthy eating choices every day. About how most of us just don't manage it. About how there are so many people out there who worry and think about this every day, when they put on their clothes, when they meet new people, when they go to a party. About how I wanted her to have good feelings about food, and about good food - not to get in the habit of eating to get to "treat" foods. I told her some people get so intense trying to be thin that they stop eating and become very ill. I told her that if I had ice cream and chocolate every time I had healthy food I'd have to get clothes from special shops because I wouldn't fit into my normal clothes (all true, sadly enough). She looked pretty shocked.
    I hope she didn't care too much. I actually hope it didn't sink in. I feel like I got angry and took away a precious bit of innocence, and I can't ever give it back.
    I wish Amps had never started with the treats, but it's not his fault. I picked Nina up from gardening club today - planting radishes - and we went to get some hummus. We passed a few of her friends, all about 4-6 years old, each holding a styrofoam container with at least 2-3 cups of fries. Some of her friends get ice cream at the ice cream van every day -- and all this is none of my business, until I have to keep explaining that we don't do that. 
   One day she'll grow up. I'm glad it's a long way away, but it seems too close today. She'll no doubt be less perfect one day, at least in her physical perfection, though I think I'll always see her perfection. We all decay with time. I just wish the clean slate I tried to start 4 years ago could have lasted a few more years, a decade, two more decades. I wish I hadn't said all those things.  
  
 

Penguins and giraffes

Annika loves the zoo, and with my parents' kind gift last year, we are members. The London Zoo (ZSL, for Zoological Society of London) is small, and according to online reviews, it frequently disappoints visitors from places with more space and fewer high costs. It costs a fortune to go in just once (25£). As a result, it's not dysfunctionally crowded like some other child-centric places in London. It's not far from where we are, and we go there quite a bit. 
  I have many great memories of the Bristol zoo, where I used to meet up with friends fairly often. We were members there too, and it was also small, and even closer to where we lived. It has lovely flowers. Just over year ago, at the London zoo with Annika, I was impressed that she had spent 6 hours looking at animals. And I realized that I remembered Nina playing with the little toddler rides - you know, where you put a coin in and it jiggles gently for 1 minute while your child pretends they are on a bus. I remembered Nina peeing on the playground, being afraid of hand dryers in the bathroom, running on the grass, wanting to go on the inflatable slide, playing with friends, climbing things, climbing other things, splashing in the pretend creek. What I didn't remember was Nina engaging with animals. I'm sure she looked at some. I do remember taking her to see the seals, which were (naturally) swimming around. Their pool area had a gentle artificial wave-maker and I remember watching the seals and her shouting "Mummy look!  A door, a splash splash door!". She was more interested in the door that pushed the water back and forth to make waves than she was in the seals. 
  Well, Annika loves the zoo. Her favourites are the giraffes. She likes to take her toy giraffe to show the real giraffes. She wants to be a giraffe doctor when she grows up. We were there a few months ago and she watched them for half an hour, and then came home and announced that she wanted carrots, cut in sticks just like the giraffes had. The other day we were there, and the giraffes turned out not to be too interested in her toy giraffe. The penguins, however, were fascinated: 

Nina still likes the more physical things. Here she is on a swing. 
  

  

The British seaside

We did see Saturn! And while it wasn't as detailed as the picture I posted, it was amazing. The rings were so bright and so clear, and we saw Titan, too - one of Saturn's moons. Nina was so excited. It was crowded there, and we had to wait, but we got to see Mars just before they turned the telescopes on to Saturn. Everyone there was very nice to us, and they were charmed to see such an enthusiastic 5-year-old. 
   On Sunday we went to Brighton, had lunch, got a car club car, and drove along the coast. I quite like the car club (city car club), but it turns out that of the approximately 60 million UK residents, a surprisingly high portion of them were in Brighton traffic on Sunday afternoon between 2pm and 5pm. And Brighton has an infuriating one-way system, which together with road closures mean that it was very hard to leave the centre, and then it took us 30 minutes to drive the last km to return the damn thing. And of course you can only extend your booking if no one else has booked, no matter how much fun you are having at the beach. This all causes much stress. Ironic that to avoid being stuck in traffic, central London is actually a very good place to live. Anyway, we had a great time, much fun was had at the beach, and there was only one vomiting incident in the car (Annika, who said so early enough that Amps caught it in the beach bucket). 
    

It was 22 degrees and the ocean was what I would call foot-achingly cold: when you stand in it, your foot starts to ache. Nina was not deterred by this in the least. 

Information

I mentioned the other day about the book I borrowed, and the empathy I found myself expressing over the frustration of wrongly-coloured dinnerware. Another part of the same book describes the idea that giving children information and letting them make a decision is a better approach to getting cooperation than the usual suspects: lecturing them, shouting at them, telling them to pick up their coat RIGHT NOW, saying no to their unwise scheme, etc etc. I've tried it, with some success: "Annika, if toys go to nursery they sometimes get lost!" --"Oh," she says, "... um... maybe Olivia can stay in your bag". "If coats are on the stairs, we might fall" ... pause ... 
     Tonight I'm going to take Nina to the Hampstead Observatory. They have a few telescopes and Saturn is visible tonight (if it doesn't get cloudy in the next 90 minutes). Amps took Nina a few months ago and they saw the Galilean moons of Jupiter, and its bands: pretty cool. Nina was absolutely thrilled. She knows all the planets, which ones are gas giants, which is the hottest/coldest/farthest, the fact that Pluto used to be considered a planet and isn't any more. She likes reading her astronomy books and even watching astronomy documentaries on youtube (a little). I was home with Annika; these things tend to happen after bedtime. For tonight, we've booked a car club car, which I'll go and collect while Amps wakes Nina up from a deep, deep sleep. They're going to start focusing on Saturn at 10:30. Apparently it won't be visible here again for a decade; Nina will be nearly 16 by then. She's been reminding us that it will be visible in May for months now, and saying how she can't wait for May. It's May now, and amazingly, the sky is clear.
      All this reminded me of Mother's day in 2012. Nina was nearly 4. They had a little celebration at her nursery (at my work), and her key worker was reading out things the children had said that they loved about their mummies. The previous week, Nina had given me an invitation to this little party, which I had liked, and put up in the kitchen. That morning I had said I was happy to get the invitation and I was looking forward to coming. Anyway, little Sophie loved her mummy's stories, little Shiv loved his mummy taking him to the park, etc etc. Nina had said "I love my mummy because she gives me information!". Her keyworker read this out, much to the amusement of colleagues, acquaintances, and friends. Yep: it's all leaflets at our house.
     It turned out she meant the invitation, not information. We do, of course, provide plenty of information. 
     I won't be able to take pictures through the telescopes. But if all goes well, maybe we'll see (well, ok, it won't be this detailed, I'm sure - but it'll be cool):

source link

The colour of a plate

I have borrowed this book from a dear friend who recently had to experience me rather losing it with Annika. It's great, actually (the book). I had heard of it, because I'm on mumsnet quite a bit and it's often recommended. The authors begin by making some points that should be obvious, really: children are people, and are likely to respond to situations the way people usually do. In particular, if there is a problem, it's best to offer some empathy, instead of a response that tells them not to feel what they are feeling, trivialises what they are going through, or belittles them. Fair enough. I am trying it, with some excellent results. 
   But it does put me in some awkward positions. Sitting in the forest having a picnic, Annika panicked when a curious dog ran up at full speed. Instead of saying, oh, don't be scared, it's just a little dog, I said something like: oh yes, that can be scary. Cue dog's owner huffing, offended: "she's not scary!". Well, I wasn't going to impress the dog owners of Hampstead anyway. 
   Yesterday at dinner ... let's just say Annika is not a fan of eating. It'll probably be great for her in many ways if she's always like this, but it must be hard for her because the rest of us quite like eating, and food generally, and Amps and I are quite happy cooking food, talking about food, planning more food, and trying out London's plethora of restaurants. We were going to do this yesterday, so we fed the girls some leftovers; it was a rather sparse dinner of plain rice, a tiny bit of broccoli soup, and various bits like carrots, cheddar, etc. I carefully checked with Annika - would this be ok? Yes. I got the soup, heated, in a ramekin. "NOOOOOOO!!!, NOT LIKE THAT!!" ... "But you said it would be ok". --"I want it like THIS:" (motions with two hands, fingers together, all pointing down). "Oh. Ok. You want it on one plate, but separate?" --(crying) "Yeah, uh-huh, yeah". 
  So I got out a plate, got the rice and the (rather thick) soup, got it warmed up, put it down: Annika bursts into tears. Full on crying -- this plate had flowers on it. 
   Deep breath. Don't shout at the toddler.  Don't walk out of the room, leaving the other frustrated parent to handle this (sure to escalate). Don't trivialise; empathise. 
   "Ooooohhhhh", I said. "You wanted another plate". --"Yeah!!" (sniffle sniffle whine whine). "That's really annoying!", I said. "You wanted the Mr Happy plate!". --"YEAH!!" (whine whine). (repeat, x3, with variations). "That plate shouldn't be in the dishwasher!", I said. --"Get it out! Get it out for me!" ... --"Well, we'll wash it. That's what we'll do. And then you can have it next time". --(quiet whining, sniffling, terrible sadness)... "...yeah". "You tell me when you're ready; if you have this food from this plate, then when you're finished you can have a cookie" (bribery). 
   Eventually the food and the cookie were eaten. I don't claim this is a perfect implementation of the strategies in the book. But the fact is, I have reached a point where I regularly need to pretend that it is in some way reasonable to give a rat's ass about whether you have the blue fork that matches the blue bowl, the plastic yellow fork that goes with the blue spoon and bowl, whether the plate on which you're going to eat your miserly dinner of 3 challenging tablespoons of soup and some plain white rice has the audacity to have flowers on it, of all things. However insane this is, it is sane to her. 

Kim Jong Bonk

It's been more than a year since I posted here, and I'm going to start up again. Really. "Last day of 1" - my last post? We recently had the last day of 2, and I am delighted to report that there will be no more 2-year-olds in this family. Not until one of the girls has their own. Let's just summarize a year's missing posts: 2 was rough. The day Annika no longer cares whether her cup, bowl, fork are blue I will buy a bottle of good champagne. Enough said. 

We sometimes call Annika "Bonk". It's originally from a joking "Ank-ster bonk-ster", followed by some bonks when she started walking. After that background, here is a tidbit from today:

Annika: "I want more pasta!"
Amps: "Mummy's turn."
Annika: "Mummy! Get. It. Now!"
Me:
Annika: "... Please?"
Amps: "Kim Jong Bonk has SPOKEN!". 
Nina: "Who's Kim Jong Bonk?"
Annika: "Me! I am!" 
Nina: "You just want to be the boss of the world."

2 has given way to 3. Happy birthday, Bonk. 

The last day of 1.

This is the last day that I will ever have a one-year-old, barring major changes to the life plan. I watched the two girls in the bath this evening, happily playing, and I thought to myself: what if in a couple of years, there was a 6yo, a 4yo and a 2yo in this tub? ... Nope. But this is the exact age Nina was when I got pregnant with Annika, thinking that it might take a year, that I knew I wanted another child, that I wanted a baby... Let's just say it didn't take a year. That was two years and 9 months ago. Tomorrow she will be 2. 

It does feel kind of poignant, until of course she wakes up screaming. Or calling for me at 6:30 am. Well, no more babies here. We're all toddlers/big girls now. And I will, somewhat sadly, somewhat with relief, never have another one-year-old.

For posterity, here are some of the cute things she did when she was one. She matched that blue hat and that pink dress, for one - more fashion sense than I've got! She put her hands out to her sides, palms up, and said "where? ba-bap, where" (bird; replace with anything or anyone else she was looking for). She jumps up and down to express pretty much any emotion. She thinks 'carry you' is a verb (Mummy carry you me?) She loves animals. She sings! She knows that Twinkle Twinkle and Ba Ba Black Sheep are the same tune. She LOVES to put little metal balls in containers and move them all around. She loves it a lot. She can slot circular pieces into a Connect 4 game for an hour (!!?). She loves her shiny pink shoes, the ones she didn't want me to buy for her, for 5£ in a shop (they are nice brand name ones believe it or not...) because it threatened her connection to her wellies, to which she was devoted. Throughout the year she has loved shoes, with their implicit commitment to going out. She loves going outside, being outside, seeing birds, hearing birds. She loves her routine, and her friends at nursery. Woe betide the mother who thinks Annika might put a coat on without a sweater first: think TANTRUM. She loves it when Rosa brings her home. She loves her horsey coat (aka snowsuit), her Matthew jammies, and her owl T-shirt. She flips through Bear Snores On, on the tube; she wants to see pictures of horses, of Susannah, of Annika's funny faces, of my funny faces, on my phone. She says "HI PEOPLE" to people who sit down near us, 'thankoo' when someone gives us a seat, and charms everyone with her enormous smile. She calls her backpack the 'backap'. She and Nina call out: Mummy, we love you, come and cuddle us! in the morning. She wants to do ballet just like Nina. She dances. She loves music. 
  For a month or two I've been thinking of her as my two-year-old; probably since the first tantrum about putting her wellies away, followed by her absolute insistence on putting her wellies away every day thereafter. But I should have been thinking of her as my one-year-old, because now it has already slipped away. 

Happy Birthday, my smaller child. My baby. 

After my good long rant the other day about colds, I have made some decisions. Usually I don't take the view that we can really control things. But this thing needs some extra attention and I am going to make some extra effort. So I'm going to ask people for advice, and I'm going to follow it. I'm going to follow all of it (within reason). There is a hilarious segment on a This American Life episode of years ago where Sarah Vowell gets advice about insomnia and tries to follow it all; it includes dreadful things like not having caffeine (!) or alcohol (!). 
 So, here is what I have collected so far, from myself and others: 
- handwashing: aggressive, regular, vigorous, proper handwashing
- washing of other people's hands, particularly those people under 4' tall who are likely to insert their hands in my mouth/nose/ears/eyes
- hand sanitising/sterilising (especially the small infectious vector-creatures as above)
- multivitamin
- zinc
- echinacea (particularly when getting a cold)
- vitamin C
- oil of oregano (thought to induce mild fever, thus assisting to 'burn' rhinovirus out of the nose, as it prefers a 33C environment)
- on a similar note, using a blow dryer, make the inside of the nose both hot and dry
(what is the half-life of the viral particles, though? Do I need to do this for 3 hours or something? happy to try it for a few minutes - after all, it's unlikely to hurt me unless my hair gets pulled in or something)
- ??? 
If anyone has any more tips, keep them coming. I am (gasp) going to ask on (dreaded) facebook too. That is just how desperate we are here ... 

In other news, took the bike today after Wednesday's tube tantrum in which Annika spat out bits of a rather nice pain au chocolat I'd bought (after she whined relentlessly), and flicked one of the spat-out bits on some poor sucker sitting next to us. It was pretty bad. We biked, yesterday and today, and got wet today. It was drizzling hard. We were fine though. 

Tantrum on the tube

  
  

Whining, coughing, and snot

Colds. I really hate colds. There's a post somewhere back years ago called something about 1000 colds. We've had, we're having, our first big one of this season. I am looking down the cold, wet tunnel that is this winter, and I'm imagining all the hours I'll spend beside a box of tissue, almost completely incapacitated by endless sneezing; all the nights I'll spend with a roll of toilet paper beside the bed, all the embarrassing hacking chesty coughing I'll do during seminars, meetings, concerts, and I'm filled with dread, with a desire to sell up, buy myself a desert island somewhere and retire. Annika got sent home on Friday, not two hours after I took her all the way over there. I was sick too - that's yet another thing I hate about commuting to childcare: having to go all the way to work when I'm not feeling well because the other alternative is to take care of an active baby when I'm not feeling well. Anyway, she got sent home (as did I, effectively), I took her to the doctor even, and he said her ears were very red and no wonder she was so miserable. I was completely flattened by the damn cold on Saturday to the point of wheezing and chest pain, and I can't even bring myself to describe where that led. Now Nina's showing signs of it and A- has it. 
    All this work I do, all this stuff - some days I feel like turning it all on its head and trying to cure the common cold. I mean, why not engineer some virus that can out-compete the common cold in the host (ie, in your nose)? (not that I can do that but maybe someone else could...). It should have very low virulence (ie it would not make you sick). So you wouldn't sneeze it out, and it wouldn't be transmitted. So it wouldn't survive, naturally - the other colds would win. But, if we all went to the pharmacy and bought the damn thing so we wouldn't get the worse colds, it could win after all - it would transmit by social media, by capitalism, by word of mouth rather than by actual mouth and daycare centres and snot-to-snot toddler contact. And it would make someone very very rich. And it would make me very very happy. And, although I admit that it's kind of creepy, is it more creepy than this? (warning: gross). Actually, the problem isn't creepiness, the problem is that the little thing would mutate and turn into god knows what and recombine with all the flus and whatnot out there and that presents all manner of risks. But what gain, oh, I think it might be worth it. 
    Ok, enough about colds. I'm doing a big grant proposal, it is almost done and I am enjoying thinking about it being done. I actually don't mind writing proposals; it's fun to think about all the amazing stuff you're going to do when everything goes perfectly and you can hire great people and your ideas all work out. It just gets a bit much as you keep writing and re-writing. I've noticed that a very large portion of what I do is writing, oddly enough for someone with my training. In other news, Nina's reading is coming along in leaps and bounds. Annika is talking lots and generally being cute. She has taken up a dummy/pacifier, which she got interested in just before we went to Canada, and which I somewhat indecisively let her have, thinking that anything to ease a 10hr flight was well worth it. She calls it 'game'; I have no clue why. She loves it, and it is so incredibly easy to put her to bed because it's in the bed (it stays in the bed). We joke that she's got game. A- found a wine description on a menu that said the wine goes well with game. We chuckled. Oh - and I'm joining a choir; I auditioned, and I got in. Given that I already had the cold, had to walk 20 minutes in the rain from the tube to get there, had very little time to practice because we had a visitor, and practiced the wrong things because they misinformed me, I feel pretty good about it! (well, either I did well or they have low standards - guess I'll see). I'm hoping Nina can come to the concert in December; she'd have to stay up late, and Annika would have to have a babysitter.
   In the meantime, I am hoping to take up very very frequent hand-washing, vitamins, and I'm going to really try not to go to work when I feel horrible. And maybe I'll get an inhaler or something in case the horrible wheezy thing returns. If anyone reads this and has great cold prevention or eradication ideas, please let me know. Please. 

First day!

It was Nina's first ever day of school today! Here she is in her little uniform. She had a good day. She was really looking forward to it, which was cute. I'm feeling happy overall, and mostly positive about the school; they did a home visit where we got to know the teacher and TA a little, and I think that was really helpful for her. They noticed that she had made a friend when we visited the school for a play session, and they've put her in the same class as this girl. And she enjoyed herself.
    Here's what she did - according to her: she went across the monkey bars by herself, swinging (ie, hanging from her hands); she ate pizza with vegetables, broccoli and yogurt for dessert, and got a sticker for eating most of her lunch; they did the bear hunt story and two songs ('twinkle, twinkle' and 'if you're happy and you know it'), and they made things out of buttons that click together. The school is letting her go full time this week rather than settling in slowly - thankfully; for one thing we don't have alternative childcare and for another she's been so psyched about going that she really appreciated it. She even said to me, "thank you Mummy for asking if I could start on Monday". Overall, the teacher seems very nice, the school seems friendly and happy, and Nina was happy. 
    And here's why I feel a little ambivalent, I think. First off, when you pay for private nursery or a childminder you have a bit of power; when you're in the state school system, or any school system, not so much. The school could announce any number of odd and inconvenient policies pretty much at any time, though they haven't yet; they could equally make it really hard for working parents to participate or communicate with the school, they could (gasp) fail to understand how absolutely wonderful my child is and how brilliant and amazing and talented and smart and, and, and .. she could get bored or any number of things could befall her. Everyone feels this ambivalence, I imagine, or lots of people, anyway (not that she's not brilliant and all that). 
   To be honest this wasn't our first choice of schools. It's rated 'Good', and it seems 'Good'. The Ofsted report does, however, mention that more could be done to challenge the children. There's an 'Outstanding' school closer, which we weren't quite close enough to; who knows if it would be better. I imagine that at some point in the next few years we'd get an offer there, but maybe not. So that's one reason for ambivalence. The next is that they sent home a newsletter with two relatively big grammatical errors. Sentence fragments. A reminder that even teachers don't know what sentences should be. Like this one. Drives me crazy. Grrrrrrrrrrr. There's a note in there about parent volunteers, prompting A to suggest that I offer to proofread their written materials (!). I know: teachers of four-year-olds don't need to know about sentence fragments, right? But, but, but ... it's a school. 
   Anyway, Nina: I can't believe you are so big, looking all grown up in your uniform, and I'm excited for you that this is all just starting, and I can't wait to share it all with you. 

Meanwhile, we have a baby, too .. she is talking lots more. The other day Nina was upstairs whining because she wasn't feeling well. Annika said to me: "Nini, whine?". It was cute. Annika loves being up, out and about; she will bring everyone their shoes and head for the door. If you're sitting, she'll come up, and say, firmly, "up". If you then try to pick her up, she'll say "Noooooooo! mummy up", or papa even, and she'll pull your clothing or your hands. She loves animals, loves watching and hearing birds and mimicking their sounds, and her smile is to die for. She doesn't eat. She's putting more words together; we'll have sentences next. "ball, down ..", "mik, where? papa". She knows where the ball is, who's getting the milk, whose shoes are whose, and that you need shoes to go outside. 

4

Nina turned 4 yesterday. She was so sick yesterday that we didn't do much to celebrate (and fortunately her party is next weekend). Today we bought her her first pedal bike, which she rode all the way home from Finsbury Park. You can tell that Annika was aware that the fuss was not particularly about her and that she didn't get a new bike. 
   I had told Nina a couple of months ago that if she got really good on her balance bike (no pedals) we'd buy her a pedal one for her birthday, and she's been out practising, and is now really good with balancing. So we took the training wheels off after we got back, and she can ride fine while pedalling, but she can't start pedalling yet. It'll take some trying, which she got too tired for, but I'm excited about her learning. 
   So 4 years ago today we were in Bristol with our tiny first baby, feeding, and feeding, and feeding, and feeding. And recovering from labour, in my case. I remember it started getting light at about 3:00 or 3:30; I'd know what time it was by the shade of blue, sitting up all night in that living room, looking at the fireplace, the ugly sofas (but not yet the yellow and green slide, which later because a fixture). I remember Amps and Andrew taking her out for a few hours and those 3 hours of sleep feeling just so good. I remember the first time she cried and it wasn't hunger (a few weeks in), and we didn't know what else to try. We've kind of made a fuss of her birthday but it's actually not because I think she cares that much, though she cares somewhat, of course. It's because I'm pretty amazed at myself, having done something this intense for four whole years and not being quite entirely nuts by now. I remember the midwives telling me to enjoy her, and thinking 'huh what?' and everyone telling me how fast it goes, and wondering how if it goes so fast, can one night take so bloody endlessly long? And it doesn't go by all that fast, really, it just goes by and then it is completely irreversible in a way that old times with old friends or old places aren't quite; the context of that tiny baby in that room in that year and time of your life just can't be revisited (such as it was; that summer was wet and everything we had went mouldy causing much anxiety on Amps' part, and some amount of wiping of suitcases and bleaching things and tossing of shoes and rueing the day we ever moved to this damp place, on mine...). 
   Four years on, Nina has her little accent, is perfectly capable of telling me what's a jumper vs what's a cardigan, thinks those little red bugs with black dots on them are ladybirds, and wants a chocolate cake in the shape of a train, which will of course be a Bakerloo line train, because chocolate is brown (and for those of you not in the know, the Bakerloo line is drawn in brown on the tube maps). A native. Well, all that, and she wears a sundress in June and doesn't feel cold. 
  Happy Birthday Nina. I'm so proud of you. 
    

Commuting

So, I've decided to post more often, and (probably) less each time. No long stories about why I haven't been posting, but I'll do more. Promise. If anyone is still reading. 
   And why "Commuting"? 
   It's the bane of my existence. It's what I blame for this constant sense of struggle, of not wanting to wish these days away, while basically, at least sometimes (daily), wishing them away - wishing I didn't have to drag my kids on the tube in rush hour every day, wishing I could find some way to get more work done (or at least feel great about what I'm doing while I'm doing it), to spend more quality time with the girls while they are small and precious and still in the mode where doing things with me is such an obvious joy, get more, and more reliable sleep, go out more and hence have a better relationship with A., and fix all the remaining irritating, ugly, things about the house. And find some way to have music in my life: buy a piano (ie convince Amps that I have, 20 years after leaving home and 8 years after finishing a PhD; 5 years after getting my first permanent academic job, actually finally waited enough already) ... and play the new piano. And take some holiday: we never go anywhere and once Nina starts school it'll be harder, we'll have to take time (if we ever do) when everyone else does.  
   And don't even get me started on the disaster that is the state of our plans for this summer. As of now, we have one way tickets to Spain; we'll be there indefinitely as of late July. 
    So, back to commuting. Sometimes we ride our bakfiets, and we all like it. But today I had this cough, the tail of the zillionth cold, and it was rainy. I don't mind if it's rainy on the way back but I do draw the line at getting soaked before my day even starts. And the wind was just howling. 
   Today's morning trip was ok. The train came pretty soon (it always does but if we wait 2-3 minutes it's full, due to the law of cumulative lateness -- all the previous stations have had a wait too, and the train gets packed). We got seats at King's Cross. Annika smiled at me and was happy and gorgeous. The bus from Knightsbridge came soon, and we had a seat. Arrival: 9:30. Office: 9:45. The trip back was a pain; Nina was terribly whiny about how she wanted to run on the ramp, then didn't to do so enough, blah blah whiny whiny blah whiny whiny all the way to the tube basically. Annika just about had her first full on tantrum when I took the water bottle away from her after the 2nd time I had to retrieve the lid she was playing with. Little monster hit me in the face. I got desperate enough to take some pictures on my phone, just to entertain them; they look delightfully happy in the pictures. Left office: 5pm. Left nursery: 5:24pm. Arrival at home (after a brief 3-min stop at the shop to get much-needed Leffe and Hoegaarden): 6:23pm. Did that take me the better part of 90 minutes? Yes. Damn, where my life goes. 

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: 

I kid you not

Cupboard dry! Iron dry (ie, wet). Cupboard dry plus!!? And, for those who bought a tumble dryer to, er, make their clothes actually pretty much dry, we have the special option: Extra dry. Wow. This place will always amaze me.

forward and back

Today I came back to the city where we've been based for almost 4 years. One thing that bothered me about this city was its poor public transit. It is expensive, and extremely, ridiculously, execrably unreliable, and the drivers are often both rude and unhelpful. The first thing that happened on my arrival today was that I paid 2£ for my £1.80 ticket and instead of giving me 20p the guy printed out an EXTRA long ticket, which, if I had endless time at my disposal, I could return to their office for my cash, or so I gather. You just couldn't make this stuff up.
      On the way to my packed afternoon full of work meetings we passed places where I'd been miserable (often transit-related, as it happens) and places where we'd been just so happy. I realised how much of my life experience now, how many of my memories, are about Nina (with a little of baby Annika in there too). There are untold hours at playgrounds, alone, with my lovely lovely friends and their little ones. Many hours, all together, walking the quick 10 minutes to and from their old nursery, Nina climbing on everything. Oh god, do I miss that commute with the desperation of someone who now commutes in London with a 7-month-old screamer and an exhausted, if very game, 3-year-old... Driving to/from her toddler gymnastics, taking her to the museum, spending time with her friends and ours, looking at the fountain... I walked near the hospital where they were both born, remembering the roaring, the trauma, the thrill of it, the warm lump of tiny baby suckling for the very first time... I passed the church where when Nina was a baby I took her to the baby music group; we still sing the little songs for Annika, or we tweak them to mock difficult bits of ours lives. I passed the bench near the Sainsburys where you sometimes see drunks but where I once, trying to get home probably from the music group, breastfed and breastfed and breastfed and couldn't get Nina to settle in her stroller, and eventually walked the 12 minutes home with her completely FRANTIC, worrying that I looked like a terrible mum. My neighbour said "don't you worry what anyone might think, if your child is making that noise she is going to be just FINE". I asked how old her daughter was, and she said '34'. I was so consoled. Her husband later told me he used to try to sleep while his foot rocked the buggy to get their baby to sleep, but he never quite got a good sleep while doing that :) 
     How did the distinction between me enjoying something and Nina enjoying something get so blurred? When she's happy, we are happy (and, er, conversely - that's probably it in a nutshell). It's not that I don't have a sense of self, or selfishness, believe me, I do. But in my picture of a 'really fun thing' to do, Nina is there, with her little grin of pure delight, as a huge film bubble rises around her at the bubble show last Sunday at the Science museum. 
     I think there is nothing that having children makes me aware of more than the passage of time. 
     Photos preserve an image, but in the end, don't we remember the photo and not the moment? How many moments do I really remember from Nina's babyhood? How can I preserve Annika's, those smiles, those wispy giggles, those little hands pinching my arms while she breastfeeds, those early 'da da ga ga's and the whole-body exuberance she shows when she's lying on her back and I come in the room and move towards her? And the other side: those screams, increasing in frantic intensity, during an epic trip home that should have been a 45 minute walk in the park (literally) that turned into more than 90 minutes of stopping for bathrooms, buying dinner, breastfeeding, formula feeding, puree-providing, cuddling, shoe-fixing and of course sneezing, all with a bad cold. And then there are the moments of tiredness, perpetual, endless, tiredness, tiredness whose pervasiveness wears you down so that you stop even mentioning that constant companion: tiredness. Since A. started dealing with Annika at night, mostly, this has faded. My hero. 
     Does writing about these moments lead to better, higher-quality memories of them than photographing them or making videos? Or will nothing really allow us to keep our babies forever?     


  

Our news in brief

The baby has a tooth!
Hyde park is gorgeous on a crisp fall morning
Nina loves the new nursery
I am so angry about our endlessly delayed house purchase that I can't talk about it
We are in an underground fluorescent dim den of a flat near lancaster gate but we have to leave Thursday and move... not to our HOUSE of course
Short term rentals suck and are very expensive
Nina still likes buses
London has a LOT of buses...
And that's our news in brief