Now that I have two kids:
Not satisfied with recklessly endangering my own children, I am planning to put all of Ingrid’s friends in mortal danger on Sunday during Ingrid’s birthday party. I will be giving them all whistle blowers (gasp!) – thereby totally violating important safety rules, I’ve now learned from The Telegraph.
The EU toy safety directive [...] states that balloons must not be blown up by unsupervised children under the age of eight, in case they accidentally swallow them and choke.
[...]
Whistle blowers, that scroll out into a a long coloured paper tongue when sounded – a party favourite at family Christmas meals – are now classed as unsafe for all children under 14.
Any parents who object better not bring their kids here.
Sundays. I wonder what other people’s Sundays are like. Or Saturdays, for that matter. For us, they almost always fall into one of two categories.
There’s the active Sunday when we go places, usually someplace outdoors, or some child-oriented place like Junibacken, or errands in the city, or maybe, very occasionally, a museum. With two kids in tow anything like this becomes a full-day project. We start packing and preparing as soon as we finish breakfast, and get back home just barely in time to mix up something quick for dinner. Pasta and a tin of tomato sauce is the usual solution, or something equally unambitious. By the time we’ve eaten, I am usually knackered, and looking forward to Monday when I can rest and recuperate at work. Which feels sort of backwards.
There’s the get-things-done Sunday when we mow the lawn or lay paving stones or carry furniture from one end of the house to the other. One of us works while the other tries to keep Adrian out of the way. Who takes what role depends on the job, and we usually switch throughout the day. Ingrid spends most of the day complaining about boredom. At some point during the day one of us takes both kids and goes to the supermarket, or drops Ingrid of at a friend’s, to try to minimize the complaining. On these Sundays we are more likely to plan and cook a proper dinner, usually even something slightly more fun and elaborate than the usual weekday fare.
My dream Sunday starts with a fine Sunday breakfast and ends with a fine Sunday dinner, and in between the day is both restful and fun. But in reality there is no way I can fit all of those things into a single day.
This morning Ingrid and I ran across a horse chestnut tree with an abundance of fresh shiny chestnuts underneath it. We picked a bunch, and made chestnut animals.
Ingrid made giraffes
and a two-headed monster.
I made sheep and hedgehogs and pigs.
Eric made a creepy-crawly.
It’s been warm and sunny for several days now and I’d been keeping my fingers crossed, hoping that this luxury would last until the weekend. It totally did; we had t-shirt weather today. After a week of sitting in an office in front of a computer I was itching to spend some time outdoors so we cycled to Ursvik and then to the Mulle Meck playground.
The Ursvik recreation area is a corner of the Igelbäcken nature reserve, a pine forest with running tracks, picnic spots, and – of most interest to us – a mini obstacle course for kids. There are tree trunks to balance on, rope nets to climb, hanging bridges and so on.
The course is almost (but not quite) too easy for Ingrid. But luckily a tipspromenad quiz had been added since our last visit, with a question next to each station of the trail. The questions were nicely printed out in big type so Ingrid could read them herself, and mostly at the right level of difficulty for her to answer them, too. Ingrid was racing me from one station to the next and never even thought to complain about tired legs.
The Mulle Meck playground has been one of our favourite weekend spots since we first discovered it, shortly after moving here. It is a playground with an attitude. The equipment and decorations are all inspired by a series of books (which we haven’t read and which frankly seem to educational for my taste) about some inventor or tinkerer, so gadgets and engines are a recurring theme at the playground.
It’s a playground that isn’t afraid to be hard, knobbly and slightly dangerous. Whatever isn’t made of wood is made of metal or concrete. There is a cable ride with a serious bounce at the end, and a “don’t touch the ground” trail out of engine parts and chunks of concrete. The most recent addition is half a ship and a shallow pond – shallow enough that there is no danger of drowning, deep and wide and enticing enough that almost all kids who go near it will end up with their feet wet. As a parent I guess you’ll love it or hate it. It seems that many love the place; often it is really crowded.
Babies vs. blind people: two groups with opposite needs. You wouldn’t think so at first glance, but it is true. And the people designing the Stockholm public traffic system clearly favour the visually impaired. Every time I get on a commuter train or the tube with Adrian asleep, a bell goes DINNGG!!!! on the platform when the train is about to arrive, or station names are announced in a clangorous tone. And inevitably Adrian’s eyes also go DING! and he is wide awake. Bleh.
Yesterday the Estonian playgroup got started for this season. For Ingrid it clashed with a birthday party, so Adrian and I went on our own. As usual, Adrian loved the new environment and the crowds and the action. But afterwards when we got home he was pretty knackered.
This was also my first long outing with him without a stroller. I’ve been doing shorter trips with him on my back, especially to the supermarket, so by now I am pretty confident that it works well. He used to not like back carries when he was younger but now he has no objections. And he is tall enough to be able to almost look over my shoulder, or around me, which also means that I can reach him to give him the dummy when needed. For all the stuff we need to bring with us, I take our trusty IKEA shopping trolley.
This is a much more mobile setup than a stroller. Yes, I know, a stroller is a contraption on wheels that exists in order to provide mobility – but on steep hills, escalators, and cobblestoned streets, it can be suboptimal. (The photo here shows what our destination looks like – the entrance to the Estonian school is at the far end of the house on the left, almost at the top of the hill.) Without Ingrid and without the stroller, I think it took us 15 minutes to get from the train station to the playgroup, instead of the usual 25.
I let Ingrid paint my face again today, while Adrian and Eric had gone out for a walk. When they came back and Adrian saw me with my painted face, he was shocked into speechlessness. Rather than crawling or leaning towards me to be picked up, like he usually does, he sat quietly in Eric’s arms and just stared at me, without making a sound. Then he picked and poked and pulled at my face for a while. Then we nursed, after which he poked some more. When I washed off the paint after dinner, he was quite happy to see my real face again.
Admittedly Ingrid’s rough brushwork tends to lead to scary-looking results, even when she chooses a non-threatening design to imitate. This time the design she was guided by was a cute kitten. The outcome… more like a bloody ghost.
Ingrid has been talking about and looking forward to swimming lessons for about a year now. This spring I signed up for lessons for the autumn term. (Most swimming clubs here offer lessons for kids from the year they turn 5. For younger kids, parents are expected to join them in the water, which wasn’t an option since I had Adrian to take care of as well.)
Then during the summer she realized that swimming lessons meant swimming without her floaties. That led to some hesitation and then growing anxiety and finally “I don’t want to go to swim school!” She probably imagined being thrown in at the deep end and forced to sink or swim, or something equally horrible.
Today it was time for her first lesson, with Spårvägen Sim in Vällingby swimming pool. I promised her that she could take her floaties if she really wanted, and she reluctantly agreed that we could go have a look at least.
Once we were there, things soon fell into a natural flow and before she knew it the teachers had led her and all the other kids into the water. She also found an almost-friend, a girl she recognized from last year’s dance-and-play group. The teachers were nice and friendly, the activities in the water not too demanding, and by the time she came out she exclaimed, “Swim school was so much fun!”
This is more than enough for me. Even if she doesn’t learn to jump in from the edge or to dip her head under water, as long as she enjoys it and wants to continue, I’m satisfied.
1. This is when I really wish babies could talk. Adrian has had a fever and a runny nose and a cough and generally been miserably ill all day yesterday and today. Today, he was at his happiest in the very evening when Eric stripped him naked to put him in his pyjamas. So I guess he had been feeling too hot (even though he was in short sleeves) all day. I wish he could have told us so.
2. One of the upsides – pretty much the only one I can think of, actually – of having a sick baby is that they fall asleep easily. At least both Ingrid and Adrian do so.
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