Remember my obsession with Ingrid’s sleep, and how powerless I felt about her bad sleep? Other babies seemed to go to sleep on their own (and without crying, would you believe it!) and sleep through the night, while Ingrid would only go to sleep in a sling (crying even there) and wake up every few hours at night. Even small achievements such as me being able to soothe her back to sleep were post-worthy news.

Somehow, very gradually, things changed. The latest and greatest development is that she can now go to sleep all on her own. Magical! We go into a dark room and nurse. When she’s done I lay her in the big bed surrounded by pillows, wait a short while to see that she really was done and is content, and then I leave. Most of the time she lies there quietly for a while, sucking her thumb, and soon drifts off to sleep. Some days she can jerk half-awake after a while, which seems to make her a bit confused and worried. She complains a bit, I go in and pat her on the back, she lies back down again and goes straight to sleep. But most days I don’t need to go back in at all.

It took me a while to figure out that she was able to do this, because for weeks (or maybe months, I haven’t been counting) we’d get a lot of that slightly anxious jerking awake and sitting up, and I needed to lay her down repeatedly. Then I found myself sitting in the dark bedroom, more and more bored, until one day I realised that I probably didn’t need to. Even then it took several days before I was able to really believe this. It feels like such a turnaround compared to the early months.

Once again I am glad that I let her learn this at her own pace without forcing the issue. I know several of you said it would work out like this in the end, but at the time it seemed quite impossible. You were right after all!

Regular night-time waking, however, seems to be here to stay. Ingrid wakes roughly every 3 hours and will not go back to sleep without a good-sized meal of breast milk. It’s not a matter of needing comfort and company – we still co-sleep and I’m as close as she could possibly want me. The “feed me” wakings are very obviously different from the times when she wakes up and just needs a pat on her back. Sometimes she accepts a drink of water first (and is then clearly quite thirsty) but she always wants to follow up with milk. A combination of thirst, hunger, and habit, I think.

I’ve been thinking off and on about night weaning her. On the one hand I’d love to not be woken at night. On the other hand I’m actually quite used to it, and despite my broken nights I am not nearly as tired as I was when she was younger – I’m not even joining her for naps because I don’t feel I need them. I’m only really bothered by her night feeds when our sleep cycles don’t mesh at all for some reason, and she happens to wake me just as I’m in my deepest sleep. In fact I’m more bothered by her early morning waking (she’s back to around 6:30 which is far too early for my taste) than the night feeds.

And there is no doubt that breastfeeding is still important to her, during the day as well as the night, emotionally as well as nutritionally. My few attempts to get her to settle without feeding have been total failures. Sometimes she just gets more and more upset until I give in because I don’t want to see her in such distress. Other times she does her best to try and go back to sleep, but only manages a very light doze, while she whimpers and keeps looking for the breast. So night weaning would probably take quite an effort. Eric and I had been thinking that Christmas would be a good time for night weaning, because we’ll both be home for a few weeks. But now I am again leaning towards just letting her continue until she seems more ready to stop.

It’s strange. You take Christmas pudding, which on its own is overwhelmingly sticky-sweet. And you take brandy cream, which on its own is overwhelmingly sticky-sweet. And you put the two together, and the result actually tastes quite good. How did that happen?

The carers at Ingrid’s nursery have a habit of saying “good girl!” or “good boy!” when the children do something they (the carers) like. It’s not just them, of course. “Good girl” seems to be the standard response when a parent wants to tell his child that he is happy / impressed / pleased with what the child did.

I don’t like that. In fact it really annoys me. Alfie Kohn says it even better in Five Reasons to Stop Saying “Good Job!”:

Once you start to see praise for what it is – and what it does – these constant little evaluative eruptions from adults start to produce the same effect as fingernails being dragged down a blackboard. You begin to root for a child to give his teachers or parents a taste of their own treacle by turning around to them and saying (in the same saccharine tone of voice), “Good praising!”

Still, it’s not an easy habit to break. It can seem strange, at least at first, to stop praising; it can feel as though you’re being chilly or withholding something. But that, it soon becomes clear, suggests that we praise more because we need to say it than because children need to hear it. Whenever that’s true, it’s time to rethink what we’re doing.

I see several problems with the “good girl” approach. Firstly it’s the way the phrase is standardised and becomes an almost mechanical response. To me it means that you’ve let your praise become routine, an automatic response. You may care about what your child did, but you’re certainly not showing your interest particularly well. “Good girl” feels, well, impersonal. It’s like handing out mass-produced store-bought candy instead of a home-made cookie. There is no real connection. Robin Grille puts it well in Rewards and Praise: The Poisoned Carrot:

When giving a positive comment, are you trying to seduce the child into pleasing you again, into making Mama or Papa proud? Or are you genuinely glad to see the child accomplish something that pleases him, or genuinely delighting in her being? Therein lies a paradox: that which is not intended to reinforce, but merely to “connect”, is the most reinforcing.

“Good girl” is also not helping the child understand what she did well, or why it was good. I’d much rather say “Thank you for giving the spoon back to me” (instead of throwing it on the floor) or “Yes, let’s put the socks back in the drawer, nice and tidy!”

But what I like least about “good girl” is how it is used to praise achivements that don’t need to be praised, and shouldn’t be praised. The best reward for learning something new, or doing something fun – running, jumping, climbing, throwing a ball – is the joy of doing it, not being praised by someone else. Praise turns play into work. Something that was simply fun is now being judged as good (on some sort of scale). If you’re a “good girl” for taking your first steps, does not walking make you bad?

(The English “good girl” is the most egregious example, because of the immensely loaded word “good” in it. The Swedish “duktig” and Estonian “tubli” are somewhat less judgmental, but still mean that the child is being evaluated and praised for living up to parents’ hopes and expectations.)

Earlier this week I went to a toddler play room with Ingrid. Two other small girls were running and climbing around – the younger one about 2 years old, the older maybe 3 or 4. The little girl climbed all the way to the top of a big slide, and immediately I heard her older sister say “good girl” with that special sugary tone that parents use, obviously learned from hearing it many many times from their mum. Already at the age of 3, she had learned to respond with canned praise rather than shared joy… I found that quite sad.

If I had any doubt about this at all, if I felt the least bit tempted to call Ingrid a good girl, my golden rule (“As above, so below”) would dispel the last of my doubts. You wouldn’t do so to an adult, so why do you think it’s OK to do so to a child? Would you say “good girl” to your wife, other than as a joke? Would you want to hear “good job” after you’ve proudly managed to make your way down the slope on a snowboard for the first time? Personally I’d feel rather insulted.

In both of our London apartments the hot water is a while coming. (The homes before these two were so long ago that I cannot actually remember how the taps behaved there.)

Whenever we turn on the tap, we get only cold water for a good several minutes. If I want to shower, I turn on the water first, then do something else for a while (such as brush my teeth) and then come back for the shower. For quicker things such waiting isn’t worth either the time or the wasted water, so we make do with water that can range from coolish to distinctly cold. Washing the face and hands can be done perfectly well with cool water. Dishes can generally also be washed in cold water without any real trouble, as long as they’re few and not too greasy. (And before you get all anxious about the germs, you should know that the FDA says that washing hands in hot water does not kill bacteria better than washing them in cold water.)

The end result is that I am now so strongly conditioned to expect cool water that anything else feels wrong. When I want to wash my hands after going to the loo at work, or to wash my face in a hotel bathroom, I turn the tap handle well over towards the cold side, in order to get that familiar feeling of cool water. Cool feels refreshing. Warm is for showers, and for thorough scrubbing of really dirty things. Warm water for brushing teeth? Yuck!

Today we made it to the Shell Wildlife Photographer of the Year exhibition that we missed last time.

This year’s exhibition was set up just like last year’s, and the one before that, and was as pleasant an experience as the previous ones were. The organisers have obviously worked out a great concept and continue to run it successfully year after year.

The exhibition is relatively small – 45 minutes’ worth of photos, an hour tops – but well worth seeing. The photos, of course, are generally interesting and all of high quality (although Eric said this year’s best photos were not as striking as last year’s, and I had to agree).

The photos are also well presented, so the atmosphere of the exhibition is quite pleasant. The number tickets sold is limited (which is why we didn’t get to see it last time) so it never gets too crowded. The room has good but soft light, and the photos all back-lit and displayed with no glare (which can otherwise kill any exhibition of photos or paintings). Each photo is accompanied by a brief one-paragraph comment by the author, and another paragraph about the subject of the photo.

Like last year we noted without much surprise that almost all the photos had been taken with a digital camera. Interestingly the two exceptions I noticed were both photos of plants.

Another trend was towards more and more technology (remote cameras, infrared triggers etc) which felt, well, sort of like cheating. If you just point your camera at animals and let it automatically take thousands of photos, then the result may be original, educational, beautiful etc, but to what extent can you really say that you took that photo?

There were also several photos which had been produced in highly contrived settings that in my mind are not really suitable for such an exhibition. Putting out food to attract animals is one thing, but putting out an aquarium to catch a view of a heron or a window frame to frame a swallow definitely feels like cheating.

But despite these minor quibbles I found the majority of the exhibition well worth seeing. If you are in London and have a spare few hours, this would be a great way to spend them.

If you’re not, try the online gallery which has all the photos. It’s not a very satisfying way of viewing them (too small) but will give you a taste at least.