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.
Tuesday, 27 March 2012
Monday, 12 March 2012
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:
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:
Wednesday, 16 November 2011
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.
Wednesday, 2 November 2011
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?
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?
Tuesday, 18 October 2011
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
Monday, 5 September 2011
Baby rice
Annika's almost 6 months now. She hasn't shown much interest in food, really. But the last couple of weeks have been a little rough, with her. She's up too much in the night. Last night she slept well through the evening, fed a lot at 12, then 2:20 a bit, then a few times (ARGH) between 2:30 and 5:15, then really well between 5:15 and 6ish, after which I had trouble getting back to sleep. And then the little squick woke up just after 7! I fed her AGAIN, then dumped her on Amps with instructions to beg the nursery to have her, and drop them both off there as soon as possible. He finally left in a torrent of in-and-out, door clanging, baby-screaming, Nina-singing chaos at 10. I got up shortly after that, went to work, and was still tired all day.
Anyway, it's like this with babies, and we should feel lucky that the past couple of weeks have really been the first time the little sweetie has actually ever been any real trouble. But now the theories come out of the woods: is it that she can't fall asleep on her own? (probably). Do I feed her to sleep too much? (probably, yes). Should we try 'cry it out' (CIO)? should we try 'pick up, put down' (PUPD)? Should we wait until she's actually 6 months (15 more days, folks!) and is officially "ready" to sleep through, and "ready" for behavioural sleep interventions (no acronym common)? Should we ignore it and realise that she'll grow out of it whatever we do, and just not stress about it (ahhh, probably, yes)? When things get hard, the urge to do something grows, obviously. But what? And now that mumsnet, and the internet in general, are out there, all these theories and plans and other peoples' anecdotal experiences and disagreements and similarities to us and differences from us are laid out, easy to find. And how is it that she naps at nursery? They don't breastfeed her to sleep or drive to Clevedon in the car (last post). Apparently she'll sleep for 1:15 there, compared to about 6 min 30 seconds around here ...
Well, anyway, she seemed a little reachy at mealtimes, and going for inappropriate choices, like pints of ale. So yesterday we bought some baby rice. I didn't think she'd go for it, really, as despite being really quite interested in breasts (mine), she isn't a big eater. She was pretty puzzled at first, kind of sucking the spoon, turning her head away and then back again, spitting it out, opening her mouth again. But she took to it. She sucked it down, and then we made some more, and she gobbled that too. So maybe she's been hungry, poor little 9th-percentile-for-weight child.
Anyway, about babies and sleep, I had read online that when they do something new, like roll over, pull up to standing, or start "solid" foods, they can get excited about it, and wake up thinking about it or practising it. I was telling Amps this when we realised that I had just suggested that 3 tbsp of lukewarm, tasteless, sludge could actually be so exciting as to keep someone up at night.
Anyway, it's like this with babies, and we should feel lucky that the past couple of weeks have really been the first time the little sweetie has actually ever been any real trouble. But now the theories come out of the woods: is it that she can't fall asleep on her own? (probably). Do I feed her to sleep too much? (probably, yes). Should we try 'cry it out' (CIO)? should we try 'pick up, put down' (PUPD)? Should we wait until she's actually 6 months (15 more days, folks!) and is officially "ready" to sleep through, and "ready" for behavioural sleep interventions (no acronym common)? Should we ignore it and realise that she'll grow out of it whatever we do, and just not stress about it (ahhh, probably, yes)? When things get hard, the urge to do something grows, obviously. But what? And now that mumsnet, and the internet in general, are out there, all these theories and plans and other peoples' anecdotal experiences and disagreements and similarities to us and differences from us are laid out, easy to find. And how is it that she naps at nursery? They don't breastfeed her to sleep or drive to Clevedon in the car (last post). Apparently she'll sleep for 1:15 there, compared to about 6 min 30 seconds around here ...
Well, anyway, she seemed a little reachy at mealtimes, and going for inappropriate choices, like pints of ale. So yesterday we bought some baby rice. I didn't think she'd go for it, really, as despite being really quite interested in breasts (mine), she isn't a big eater. She was pretty puzzled at first, kind of sucking the spoon, turning her head away and then back again, spitting it out, opening her mouth again. But she took to it. She sucked it down, and then we made some more, and she gobbled that too. So maybe she's been hungry, poor little 9th-percentile-for-weight child.
Anyway, about babies and sleep, I had read online that when they do something new, like roll over, pull up to standing, or start "solid" foods, they can get excited about it, and wake up thinking about it or practising it. I was telling Amps this when we realised that I had just suggested that 3 tbsp of lukewarm, tasteless, sludge could actually be so exciting as to keep someone up at night.
Wednesday, 24 August 2011
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