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