Toddlers love attention. We all do, generally, except that most adults only want the right kind of attention, while children

…will usually aim for the best level of attention they can get, and if the best is not on offer they will descend through the grades until they find one that gives them what they want

as Dr. Christopher Green puts it in his “Toddler Taming”.

Recently I’ve had that demonstrated very clearly for me. The other day I was talking to someone and trying to keep Ingrid quiet for those few minutes that I needed for that conversation. That was not appreciated. She tried talking to me for a while, I wouldn’t respond with more than a “hmmm”. Finally she took my sunglasses, said “emme kuri” (“mommy angry”) and then threw the sunglasses on the floor, peering at me all the time. She knows very well that throwing things is a sure way to make me angry!

Mommy gets angry, Ingrid gets sad. When she’s upset, it’s just that and nothing more… but sometimes she is really sad and unhappy and tells me “Ingrid ledsen”, looking at me with big sad eyes and a quivering mouth. I’m not glad that she is unhappy but I am very glad that she understands this herself and can tell me!

Sadness and anger are the two emotions she has words for. Positive emotions have generally been expressed through smiles, laughter and “thank you”. But I guess we should give her some more positive words, too!

While we lived in London, I’ve tried to go to Estonia once every year. It’s naturally become a summer trip, since that’s when most people have vacation, and that’s when the weather is best. This year the timing of the trip was pretty much decided by Ingrid’s nursery start. Eric started working August 1st, and Ingrid didn’t get a nursery place until August 21st, so my vacation had to fill the gap in between.

I usually visit those of my family who live in Estonia, plus a few childhood friends, and do some sightseeing and shopping. All that was still part of the trip, but one important aspect has been added, and will remain a priority in the future: getting some Estonian practice for Ingrid.

Part of the plan was to buy a lot of children’s books in Estonian. Partly because of this plan to fill my bag with lots of heavy books I decided to go by ferry rather than by plane, which I’ve normally done. (There was also the fact that flying is such a hassle nowadays, plus I had the pushchair to consider. I could probably take it on a plane, but not be sure what state it would be in when I get it back.) The ferry trip was a big success. They had a nice play room, with a ball pit, a small slide, toys, crayons, and most importantly, other children. Ingrid was perfectly happy to spend most of the evening there, and most of the morning as well. She also liked the ferry itself: the long carpeted corridors were great for running, and there were lots of lifts and staircases and windows. And the sea was interesting, too: we had a window in our cabin, and she would sit there and look at the sea, and point out the smaller boats we passed.

Initially I thought we would spend a lot of time in my father’s summer cottage. But (a) the weather was bad, and (b) it turned out that Ingrid did not like the countryside. She would not go more than 10 steps from my side, and was happiest when we went indoors and read a book. The only outdoor activities she accepted were playing in the sandbox (with me by her side), playing ball with me, or eating strawberries in the forest. When it was late afternoon and time to take the car back to town, she suddenly perked up and ran to the car, even though she isn’t fond of car seats at all! Too much greenery? Too wide open? Too few people? Whatever it was, it meant that we spent more days in Tartu than I would have done myself. I guess 18 months of London life have made a city child out of her.

It appears that long-time city living has affected me as well. I seem to have become sensitive to mosquito bites. Mosquitoes are part of a normal Estonian summer: every child and every adult is familiar with the itchy red spots that their bites cause. But whereas the mosquito bites I remember from my childhood were half an inch across, mine now grew and grew until each one was a palm-sized swelling, red and painful like a bad bruise.

Our days in Tartu (and later in Tallinn) were not that dissimilar from our days in Stockholm. We spent a lot of time on playgrounds, and made occasional trips to child-friendly attractions, such as the toy museum (which has a great play room) and the animal park in Elistvere, and a swimming pool in Tallinn. Unlike in Stockholm, Ingrid had other children for company: three of my childhood friends have children of roughly the same age, and Ingrid had a great time with them. Looking at them they didn’t seem to be playing together. Sometimes they followed each other (if one went to the swing, the other one followed), sometimes they played side by side, and other times they just happened to play in the same room. But somehow it still made a great difference. Just moments after leaving them, Ingrid would already say “varsti tagasi” (“soon back” – meaning she wanted to meet them again soon).

The book-buying aspect of the trip went well, too. I came home with almost 20 children’s books of various kinds. A few are for slightly older children and won’t see much use this year. Some are already in use. Others I’m saving for later so she can get a new book every few weeks. Among them were a few of my first books: small cardboard books with simple texts in block letters. One of them is the first book I remember reading myself, on my own.

Sorry for the silence. Our modem died in a thunderstorm last Thursday and we have been Internetless since then. A new modem will hopefully arrive in the post soon.

Language development continues apace. Two-word combinations are now old hat, and combinations of three words and more happen every day. In fact they are so common that I’ve stopped noticing them. She also learns new words at such a speed that my astonishment has worn out and I am simply accepting this miracle as an ordinary thing.

We’ve just spent two weeks in Estonia, and she figured out very quickly that Estonian is the thing that works with those people. By the end of the two weeks she was using very few Swedish words when talking to us. But for some words she took care to point out that pappa says something else. She might say muna about the egg on her plate, and then look at me and say pappa ägg. Bilingualism is obviously not going to cause any difficulties for her.

Some of the words she learned very early on remain in their early state – she still says “Ije” for “Ingrid” for example. Otherwise her pronounciation is now good enough that even strangers can understand some of what she says. As long as she picks the right language, that is.

I love all this talking. It’s so nice that she can tell me what she wants, point out things that she sees or hears or wonders about, or just express her thoughts. The best thing about it is the insight I get into what is going on inside that head, what she understands, what she is interested in, what she thinks she is doing. A window into her mind. Today, for example, she has been commenting a lot on noises she hears, such as airplanes, passing cars that she cannot see, PA announcements and so on. Had she not been speaking, I would probably not have noticed it, because it’s not something she can point at.

Puddle!

Her talking has also made it clear to me just how much she understands: concepts like soon vs. later, things happening quickly vs. taking a long time, “first we do this, then we do that”, etc. I’ve also realised how much she remembers, and thinks about things we have seen or done or read during the day. When we run out of milk during breakfast, and I tell her that we’ll buy more in the afternoon, she confirms this at lunch, and then mentions it again when we go out in the afternoon. At bedtime she may repeat the ending of a particularly memorable book we read in the morning, or remind me that I promised we would buy her a pair of rubber boots soon.

Ingrid is still very fond of books, and now it’s definitely stories she wants. Preferably stories with pictures on every page, and no more than a few sentences per page, so we don’t have to look at the same page for too long. Rhymes are also good. She has never yet turned down an offer to read a book. And while previously she would often begin the day by telling me “uuut!” (go out), now she is more likely to tell me “läsa bok!” as soon as we get up.

On a whim, while we were stuck waiting somewhere and she was bored, I started pointing out letters to her, and how they make up words. She loved the game! Then she would pick up a newspaper or some advertising material with big letters on it, and point at them and say “I, E, O, E” as if reading, to show me that she wanted to play that game again. We bought an ABC book and it’s a great favourite.

We’ve also counted things a lot. She has a firm grasp on the concepts of one and two, and often tells me, for example, that she is putting two berries in her mouth at the same time. But beyond that I’m not sure. I know that she knows that number words come in a certain order, and she knows how they are used, but her own counting often goes üks, kaks, viis, kuus, kümme, meaning “one, two, five, six, ten”. And it’s always those specific ones, plus sometimes kaheksa (“eight”) in the right place, too. She always, always skips three and four. I suspect it’s because she cannot say the L sound (the words are kolm and neli in Estonian) so she doesn’t like to even try to say those words.

Lifting, not pushing the wheelbarrow…

On the physical side, I’ve noticed improved dexterity. She can now eat quite well with a fork, and can build towers out of Duplo blocks. Long and slim towers, preferably of the smallest 2×2 pieces… But she still prefers large things and big movement. Climbing frames are great, especially those that are really meant for older children, so that she really has to stretch to reach. Otherwise it’s too easy, I guess. Kicking a ball, balancing on things, hanging from things… The best toys are the large ones, and the best use for them is to carry and lift them. We bought her a chair, and while she does sometimes sit on it, she mostly carries it from one room to another.

Dolls are begginning to become more interesting. Dolls get to eat cheese, and wear her bibs, and sleep in our bed, sit on our chairs. (One of them apparently needed a nappy, too, but unfortunately the mismatch in size was just too big.) She even let me brush her teeth without struggling when she got to brush a doll’s teeth at the same time. Dolls and toy animals all like kisses, too: give her two stuffed animals and they will soon be rubbing their noses together while she says “puss!”.

I’m going to Estonia for 2 weeks. Posting will be light.

Enjoy the remainder of your summer (or winter, if you’re on the other side of the Earth).

The front of the house faces the street, but the opposite side (with the veranda) also feels like the front, because that’s where we spend most of our time. The garden side is the sunny side, the green side, the living and playing side. (The third side feels mostly like a passage between the two front sides, and the fourth side I rarely think about.)

My favourite place in the garden is at the steps leading down from the veranda. The steps are often comfortably sun-warmed, and there are plants on every side of me. I have a good overview of that half of the garden from there. It’s a good place for reading, snacking, or doing slow tasks like peeling lots of potatoes. I also like just sitting on the steps, looking out over the garden and whoever may be there (Ingrid, Eric, birds, or the neighbour’s cat). Surveying my kingdom.

Eric and Ingrid also like sitting there.

Sweden is expensive. People used to tell me that this was the case, but until I moved I didn’t believe it could be worse than London. But it is. And don’t forget that salaries here are nowhere near London levels.

Eating out is the worst. Every time I eat lunch outside the home I am surprised by the prices. You won’t find even the simplest lunch for under 65 SEK, and it goes up to 80 if you want a hot lunch. A small bottle of juice: 20–25. A piece of cake (cakes are the worst!) often goes for 35.

For comparison: 1 USD = 6 SEK, 1 EUR = 9.5 SEK, 1 GBP = 12 SEK.

In some ways a toddler is easier to care for than a baby. In other ways it’s a lot more complicated. On the one hand, a baby’s needs are simpler, but on the other hand, a toddler can tell you much more clearly what she wants or needs, and a toddler can actually take responsibility for their needs to a surprisingly large extent.

Sleep is a case in point. Ingrid was a lousy sleeper for a long time. It was really hard for her to fall asleep, and it took a long while for her to understand that falling asleep is not a terrible thing to be avoided at all costs. Now she knows that sleep is good, and actually wants to go to sleep. When she starts looking tired, I ask her if she wants to sleep. Often she says yes and runs towards the bedroom, waiting for me to follow. If she says no, I try again 5 minutes later, and again, until she says yes. She always does, after a while. I think there was one evening when we came home really late and she was really cranky and was saying no to everything, so I carried her to the bedroom despite her NOs, but once there, she was happy to go to bed.

Food has always been simple with Ingrid. I’ve never had to worry much about her eating habits or weight gain. She’s been happy to breastfeed and happy to eat, and especially happy to feed herself. There was a period when I thought she ate too little, but I could see that she still had more energy than she needed, so obviously she got enough food somehow. And then I read that 50% of parents think so about their toddlers, so I stopped worrying. (I still don’t understand how she can get by with so little food, though!) In any case she now eats without any fuss, and eats a reasonably varied diet, too.

The one thing I’m struggling slightly with is potty training. From what I’ve heard and read, she seems old enough for potty, but we’ve had very little success. We tried in May to let her go without a nappy. She peed on the floor lots of times and was very distressed every time it happened, so we gave up. We tried again in June, and while she was still peeing on the floor all the time and not much on the potty, she was no longer unhappy about it. We tried again in July, and still most of it ended up on the floor. She never says when she needs to go. When I suggest that she should sit on the potty, she generally refuses, or sits for a while and then runs away, and then pees on the floor two minutes later. (Luckily she points out where the puddle is when I ask her, after I notice that she’s all wet.) It is getting a bit tiresome to dry up all these puddles. I don’t know whether there’s any point continuing or whether we should take a break, go back to nappies, and try again in a month’s time.

I like working with good tools. Work is more fun when I feel that the tools I have make work go faster and more smoothly, and give better results. It’s important to me that the kitchen knives I use have a good edge, that the chopping board is solid, that my pruners are sharp and the cleaning cloths are absorbent. I do not understand how people can make do with dull knives and cheap plastic chopping boards.

Likewise I like to work with good software. I need good software. I don’t understand how people can stand having Notepad as their text editor, not because they are uninformed and believe that Notepad is all there is, but because they can’t be bothered.

My two latest favourites are Selenium and SourceMonitor.

Selenium is a tool for testing web applications. Very easy to get started with, powerful, and flexible.

It’s got a “recording” module which records your actions in Firefox – what pages you open, what links you click, what text you type – and also lets you easily specify test conditions such as “verify that, after I’ve clicked all these things, this particular text is present on the page. You can save the tests in html format, and the file structure is so simple that anyone can edit and extend the tests. But you can also export the tests in your favourite programming language, or, if you prefer, write the tests from scratch in that language.

I used the Firefox addon to record the first tests and exported them to C#, and then went on writing the rest of the tests directly in C#. The whole process was very straightforward. We now have about 45 automated tests for core high-level functionality.

Plus, it’s free!

SourceMonitor is a tool for estimating code complexity. It is also free.

I’m very aware that our code needs refactoring, because large parts of it are so complex that they are effectively unmaintainable. But because everything needs refactoring, and I’m still not familiar with all of the code (because it is so hard to read), I don’t know where to start.

SourceMonitor has been very helpful for finding the hot spots, for prioritising the files and methods that are in most urgent need of cleanup. It quickly shows which files and methods are largest or seem most complex. It can sort them by size, complexity, levels of nesting, number of calls out to other methods, etc. This can be done for the project as a whole, or for a particular file. SourceMonitor also saves the results of each analysis run, so you can see how things change over time. I like seeing measurable progress, so this feature really appeals to me. There is something immensely satisfying in knowing that I have just reduced the size of our code base by 400 lines and at the same time made it better.

Before choosing SourceMonitor I also looked at FxCop and NDepend, but both were too complex for our current needs, and did too much. We’re nowhere near the level of control that these two applications provide, such as enforcing naming rules. I expect that I’ll try them again in half a year’s time. I might have chosen NDepend anyway, because the demos look so slick, but it costs money, and given how little of its functionality we will use for now, I would find it hard to justify the cost.

FxCop is free just like SourceMonitor, and I did try it out, but it was not particularly easy to get started with. The main hurdle was that FxCop needs compiled assemblies to work with, which makes it very difficult to use with ASP.NET web sites. SourceMonitor analyzes source code instead. I also found SourceMonitor’s sparse interface much more comfortable on the eyes and the brain than FxCop’s flood of messages.

It may seem a million miles away
But it gets a little closer everyday

1.

The code base I work with is large, amorphous, and ugly. By now I’ve cleaned out the obvious junk (unused variables and methods, commented-out code, files that weren’t used). But the rest is still in a bad state. There are 3000-line classes and 500-line methods, and lots of copy-paste code.

Ugly code makes me feel uncomfortable, anxious, tense. It’s like an itch, or an unpleasant noise. I have clean it up because I couldn’t stand the knowledge that I’d have to look at this every day for months, or years.

Cleaning it up on the other hand gives me such a feeling of relief. Refactoring is a pleasure. I refactor when I am bored. I take a break not by eating ice cream, or going for a long lunch, or going out shopping, but by setting aside my main coding tasks and refactoring instead.

2.

The house and garden are a never-ending project. There is so much to do and so little time to do it. Even though I normally get home shortly after 6, I don’t get a chance to do much around the house until after Ingrid goes to sleep, which often happens as late as 8:30 or 9.

So I try take small steps in the right direction: half an hour here, half an hour there. It took 3 sessions to clean out all the dead branches from the lilac hedge. Every few days I spend 15 or 20 minutes exterminating cherry seedlings and the remains of sloppily cut-down cherry shoots. (They are all over the lawn – everywhere I go, I’m stepping on sharp stubs.) Every weekend we try to buy at least one of the things we’re missing: one day it’s a new saucepan, the next maybe some shelving.

I’m OK with these projects taking a long time, as long as there is progress, as long as every day makes things just slightly better.