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.

Raised surface! Near stove! Knives! Power outlet! Glass items!

I see other kids eat cinnamon swirls for their mid-afternoon snack and eat candy off and on throughout the day. And they still don’t gain weight or have trouble with their teeth.

With Ingrid we need to worry about both weight and teeth. Eric keeps an eye on his weight, and I have weak teeth, so I guess Ingrid inherited the worst from each of us. Se’s definitely got the Bergheden body type, broad and strong and tending towards overweight if you don’t pay attention. Adrian looks like he’ll be following in Ingrid’s footsteps.

The standard Swedish solution for keeping kids’ teeth healthy is lördagsgodis, “Saturday’s candy”, i.e. sweets on Saturdays only. And then they get lots, lots and lots and lots. Many of them really get to gorge themselves on sweets. The argument is that if you eat your sweets all in one go then your teeth get to rest from sugar in between Saturdays. (The whole idea was introduced by the worried public health authorities in 1957, according to an unverified source.)

It’s also supposed to instil in kids an understanding and a habit that sweets are a treat, to be limited, not everyday fare. If a Swede sees kids eat sweets on another day then s/he will probably comment on it, whether in his head or out loud.

But while mid-week candy turns heads, many Swedish parents exclude cakes, fika, ice cream and other such stuff from their definition of sweets, so those are OK on other days, too. And pancakes for dinner are not “sweets” either. Judging from the kids’ menus at restaurants, for many Swedish families pancakes is not a treat but a normal meal. And then there are all the other lingonberry-jam-accompanied kid-friendly everyday meals such as potato griddle cakes and black pudding and meatballs and so on. So the whole Saturday candy thing suffers from serious cognitive dissonance issues.

I also think it leads to an unhealthy attitude towards sweets, and eating in general. Many adult Swedes I know tell me that when they are offered sweets, they are unable to eat just a little, they feel compelled to eat lots. This is not an issue I’ve noticed among my Estonian friends. So instead of teaching kids to limit their intake of sweets, the Saturday candy thing teaches them to obsess about sweets all week long and then gorge themselves. (Pretty much the same problem that adults in many countries have with alcohol – but not in countries where there is a tradition of having wine with your dinner.)

So we don’t “do” Saturday candy in our home. We do “everything in moderation” instead. As a result Ingrid is limited to one small-sized treat per day on weekdays, and two on weekends, when she can have a sweeter breakfast (toast with marmalade, or a sweeter kind of cereal) as well as ice cream after dinner. And pancakes with jam most certainly count as a treat in our home. It seems to work; the long-term results remain to be seen.

For example, there is nothing on my list about things I want my children to do or to like. There are things I would like them to do, but these things are not important enough to make it onto the list. Their own choices are more important. I would not agree with their choices, I would be puzzled perhaps, but I would not feel like I’ve failed them as a parent.

Enjoying learning new things, or reading, or writing. Being creative. Being successful. Getting a higher education. Good things, all of them, each in their own way, and the Internet has lots of people who want these and similar things for their children.

But if my children consciously choose to not go in that direction, that is OK. If they decide to live a quiet life on a small farm in the middle of the forest, cut off from society, not learning anything new, that’s fine. If they decide to skip higher education and instead focus on some personal project, that’s fine. As long as they do this because they really want to, and have thought through the long-term implications.

Then there are the things that I don’t agree with, that I specifically do NOT want for them.

I don’t want obedience. I don’t want faith.

I don’t want self-sufficiency. Independent thinking and decision-making, yes. Being able to take care of themselves, yes. But I do not want the kind of self-sufficiency that seems prevalent in some parts of Western society, where the ideal is that you shouldn’t really need anybody. I think it is perfectly OK to need other people in your life, to want intimacy, to ask for help.

The parenting principles that I wrote about four years ago still apply. But they’re not all there is, of course. My day-to-day parenting choices are also influenced by my values (which I could also write about at some point) and my general preferences (ranging from my enjoyment of reading to my dislike of wasting food, for example) and probably more stuff on top of that.

One angle for thinking about this is what I want to achieve. What would success look like? If I look at my children when they’re grown, what would I want them and their lives to be like?

• I want them to feel loved, valued and respected, and to be able to love, value, respect and trust other people around them. They should never need to doubt that they are loved.
• I want them to approach life with joy and enthusiasm.
• I want them to be honest and non-violent. (This is almost too obvious, almost like saying I want them to be human, but still.)
• I want them to have a sense of confidence and competence, to want to try things out, to not fear failure. “I can do it!”
• I want them to be responsible, to think about the consequences of their actions, and to be able to make sensible decisions. To decide rather than to give in to whims. To have self-control.
• I want them to think for themselves and to take charge of their lives. To be active rather than passive.
• I want them to make their choices not for somebody else’s approval (especially mine) but because they want it. This goes for their choice of hobbies, of music, clothes, career and more.
• I want them to have a healthy lifestyle and also a healthy relationship to health. I want them to enjoy good healthy food and exercise – not just to do it but to enjoy it.
• I want them to be able to cope with the practicalities of life. They should be able to manage their own lives and later also their households: personal finance, cooking, and so on.
• I want us to have a good and close relationship, to trust each other, to talk to each other, and to enjoy each other’s company. I want us to be willing to spend time together even when they are grown and no longer obliged to be with me.

I wonder what I’ve forgotten – what might so obvious to me that I don’t even think about it.

Non-violence towards children is the norm in Sweden, unlike some other countries where I understand that there are people who publicly hold the opposite view. Here, if you spoke for spanking (and not in joking) you’d be viewed as seriously misguided at the very least. If you’re a parent and you told someone you hit your kids, I suspect that you’d find the social services at your door soon, or the police.

My views on this is not what I want to discuss here. Perhaps another time.

I’ve been reminded of this cultural difference by several books I’ve read for Ingrid. Occasionally we come across mentions of adults hitting kids. In some books it is talked about very openly, while in others it’s a more oblique reference. I often struggle with how to treat such collisions between our reality and the story. Do I let it pass? Do I explain?

In Pätu the father mentions getting his belt. In Sleeping Beauty the cook reaches out to slap the kitchen boy. Even Pippi Longstocking, when telling about how she sends herself to bed, says she threatens herself with a good hiding if she doesn’t obey.

Many of the briefer and more passing references probably don’t make any sense for Ingrid at all, and pass more or less unnoticed. “Ett kok stryk” or “keretäis” (“a good hiding”, in Swedish and Estonian respectively). She isn’t even familiar with these words, it is nothing we ever feel the need to talk about in this household. And fathers reaching for their belts or for birch rods? What for? These I explain when she asks, which she rarely does with things she doesn’t understand in a book.

But when we recently read Kipling’s story about how the elephant got his trunk (in an old Estonian translation) and the poor elephant child was beaten again and again by his family and relatives, and he didn’t react with anything but sadness, I felt I had to explain. That many many years ago people thought it was OK to hit kids, but not any more. That parents mustn’t hit their kids. That no one should hit anyone.

If you are a non-violent parent, how do you deal with such stories?

First, Small presents an overview of relevant aspects of human evolution – about how our upright posture and large brains lead to babies being born “unfinished”, and about the parent-child bond that is essential for babies’ survival.

Then she takes on a world tour highlighting cultural differences in parenting. The !Kung San train their babies’ motor skills so that the babies can cope with their nomadic life; the Ache carry their kids until the age of 5 to keep them safe in a dangerous forest environment; Gusii mothers don’t talk to their baby because children are viewed as low-status family members and expected to watch and learn rather than talk; Japanese mothers encourage dependence and a close bond between mother and child; American parents expect babies to cry a lot and don’t think it is necessary to respond to all crying.

Next there are more in-depth looks at three central elements of baby care: first a chapter on sleep across cultures, then a similar chapter about crying, and finally about breastfeeding – all from both an evolutionary and cross-cultural point of view.

It’s a slim book and a quick read. It could be slimmer still with some editing: at times it felt repetitive and padded with more words than it needs (perhaps in an attempt to make it feel more substantial). Disappointingly for me as a reader 60 of the 300 pages are filled with references, footnotes, an index etc. It does, however, set the book apart from all the books about babies that are really opinions served as fact, “do this because I say so”. This is, instead, “this is what other people do and here’s why”.

Throughout the book, the author remains an anthropologist, an observer standing to one side, and never quite expresses any firm opinions about what she describes. But if I were to summarize the book in just a paragraph, both what is said and what is repeatedly hinted at by leading questions, I would say this:

Babies evolved to be close to the parent, since they cannot survive on their own. They evolved to be carried rather than transported in plastic seats, to sleep with the parent rather than alone, to breastfeed frequently throughout the day and for years rather than months. Western child-rearing is to a great extent fighting against millions of years of evolution. If you work with your baby’s nature rather than against it, you will make life both easier and more pleasant for both yourself and your baby.

Amazon US, Amazon UK, Adlibris.

One evening in Gran Canaria, I noticed a book lying abandoned on a deck chair, next to a pretty pink scarf. It was still there the evening after. The third evening someone had moved both items from the deck chair (probably they wanted to use it!) onto a ledge. The scarf looked nice but not my colour. The book I picked up because it had a smiling baby on the front cover. If no one had claimed it during three evenings, I figured I could adopt it.

From the back cover of Why Love Matters – How Affection Shapes a Baby’s Brain:

Why Love Matters explains why love is essential to brain development in the early years of life, and how early interactions between babies and their parents have lasting and serious consequences.

Sue Gerhart goes through all the various ways in which human contact and human relationships affect brain development, and how experiences during the first months and years of life can leave marks for life.

The main thesis is that a baby cannot regulate its own needs, physical or emotional. It needs the help of a caring adult. If that relationship is dysfunctional, if the adult is unable or unwilling to fulfil the baby’s needs, the baby suffers not just immediate discomfort but also longer-term effects. Brain chemistry becomes subtly imbalanced, some parts of the brain do not develop properly, inappropriate emotional habits are founded. In the long run, all kinds of mental and emotional troubles can arise, and Sue Gerhart shows how the former can lead to the latter. Babies of depressed mothers get used to a lack of positive emotions; babies of angry, resentful mothers learn to suppress their feelings. Babies who get no help with soothing negative emotions do not learn how to keep on an even keel.

While some other author on the back cover says “I would recommend it to all new parents” it really isn’t written so as to be accessible by most parents. I would guess it really wasn’t written for the general public but for politicians, social workers, those in charge of childcare facilities, psychologists etc. In particular the book is unlikely to be read by those who need its message the most: those depressed mothers, or the parents who meet their babies’ demands with anger.

A reviewer in The Guardian expresses resounding support and provides a thorough summary.

If there is one thing to take with you from this book, it’s this excerpt (p. 91):

Good timing is a critical aspect of parenting, as well as in comedy. The ability to judge when a baby or child has the capacity to manage a little more self-control, thoughtfulness or independence is not something that books on child development can provide: the timing of moves in a living relationship is an art, not a science. Parents’ sensitivity to the child’s unfolding capacities can often be hampered by an intolerance of dependency. This is partly cultural and partly the result of one’s own early experience. Dependency can evoke powerful reactions. It is often regarded with disgust and repulsion, not as a delightful but fleeting part of experience. It may even be that dependence has a magnetic pull and adults themselves fear getting seduced by it; or that it is just intolerable to give to someone else what you are furious you didn’t gt yourself. [...] Often, parents are in such a hurry to make their child independent that they expose their babies to long periods of waiting for food or comfort, or long absences from the mother, in order to achieve this aim. Grandparents only too often reinforce the message that you mustn’t “spoil” the baby by giving in to him.

Unfortunately, leaving a baby to cry or to cope by himself for more than a very short period usually has the reverse effect: it undermines the baby’s confidence in the parent and in the world, leaving him more dependent not less. In the absence of the regulatory partner, a baby can do very little to regulate himself or herself other than to cry louder or to withdraw mentally. But the pain of being dependent like this and being powerless to help yourself leads to primitive psychological defences based on these two options.

[...] The dual nature of the defensive system seems to be built into our genetic programme: it’s either fight or flight. Cry loudly or withdraw. Exaggerate feelings or minimise feelings. Be hyper-aroused or suppress arousal. [...] Whichever way the individual turns to find a solution (and these strategies may be used consistently or inconsistently), he or she will not have mastered the basic process of self-regulation and will remain prone to being overdemanding of others or underdemanding.

Adlibris, Amazon US, Amazon UK.

Super-Helen is my secret mummy identity. She is just like me, except that she has a lot more patience. She doesn’t get annoyed and frustrated as easily as I do, and can keep calm and behave in a kind and friendly manner even when the kids around her are definitely not.

When things get too much, when Adrian is screaming right next to my head while Ingrid is dragging her feet on the way home, when both are crying for food RIGHT NOW, when I feel like either hitting them or locking them both in the house while I go for a walk… I think to myself, What would Super-Helen do? And usually Super-Helen’s solution works for me, too. The hard part is keeping myself together enough to remember to ask Super-Helen.

This has been a month full of whining, complaining, yelling, and general contrariness. Ingrid finds fault with everything we say or do. It’s like having a teenager in the house, I imagine.

It appears that she has, for some reason, decided to be unpleasant and unfriendly towards us. She can be perfectly polite to others, but when she addresses me, it’s often by shouting or screaming. When she wants me to pour milk, it’s no longer “Can I have some milk please” but “MIIILLK!”. Once she even started with “Can I…” but then interrupted herself and shouted “MIIILLK!” instead.

When she wants me to help her get her boots on, she refuses to come stand where I am sitting. (I refuse to crouch on the floor when I’ve got Adrian in the sling, because it is very uncomfortable for both of us.) Sometimes she even yells when she wants me to play with her or read to her. “Du ska läsa för mig du ska läsa för mig du ska läsa för mig!” (“You must read for me”) she screams, and of course I must do nothing of the sort, I must leave the room instead in order to keep my temper.

Anything I suggest is rejected. Anything I mention in a positive tone, she decides to dislike. “Look, there’s one piece of apple left!” she gladly says. “Yes, I thought you might want one more so I left it for you” I say. “I don’t want it” she responds sulkily.

And she wants help with everything. She can even ask for help moving a plate to the side of the table, and complain that she doesn’t have the strength to move it, and demonstrate by poking at it with a limp hand and an exhausted face. When Eric and I can’t help but laugh out loud at that, she gets very upset and cries that we mustn’t laugh at her.

My guess is that this is a reaction to Adrian’s arrival. A bit delayed, you might think, but then again Adrian was much easier to take care of during his first month. Now he requires more of our time and attention, and even though I do my best to spend time with Ingrid, she cannot have all the attention she wants. Is she testing us, perhaps? “Do they really love me? Do they love me if I do this, this and this?” Or perhaps she is simply mentally tired and stressed by the change and by the new order.

Tellingly she really only behaves that way with me and Eric. When, for example, another parent at preschool notices that we are having trouble (read: Ingrid is yelling at me without pause and asking for help while refusing my way of helping her) and asks if s/he can help, Ingrid explains reasonably politely what she needs help with and gladly accepts it.

During all of this I try to remind myself that:

• I cannot control her behaviour but I can control how I react to it (and that covers both my internal and external reactions).
• If we are to break the spiral of negative emotions and negative behaviour, it’s up to me to do it.
• I can choose to treat her the way she “deserves” to be treated, or the way that is likely to break the spiral.

When she yells for help doing something ridiculously easy, I may think that that kind of request really deserves to be ignored until she addresses me in a more polite manner, or refused because she can do it herself perfectly well. But all that achieves is an escalation of the spiral. Instead I can interpret her shouting as a way of saying “I feel ignored and tired and unloved and I hate it and I want company”, gently remind her that I would prefer if she asked me kindly instead of shouting, and help her.

But there are times when she has decided to not cooperate at all, and then it can be physically difficult for me to help her. I cannot lift her when I am carrying Adrian; I cannot put her mitten on if she keeps her hand all limp. And there are times when my patience runs out and I just cannot take her yelling any more, and I walk away from the room or the situation.

It is bloody exhausting to have two cranky kids. I don’t tolerate loud noise well, and when two children are screaming right next to me, it leaves me tired and with frazzled nerves, even less willing to indulge in Ingrid’s whims or to get engaged in her activities.

Another reaction to having Adrian in the house: Ingrid has started telling us that she has a stomach ache, when she clearly has no such thing (and forgets it as soon as she gets distracted), most likely because we have explained to her that Adrian cries so much because his stomach hurts. If it works for him, and gets him lots of attention, why not for her, too?

Ingrid’s favourite “toy” is our iPad. She watches movies on it, plays games, draws, plays dress-up and so on – together with me or Eric if possible. We also read (a good activity to combine with breastfeeding Adrian), do crafts, and play games (board games, card games and such).

She likes to pretend she’s a wizard or a fairy or an angel, and do magic. (Fairies and angels seem pretty much the same to her – pretty girls with wings – and since I don’t see much actual difference myself, I haven’t bothered trying to explain the very different cultural backgrounds of the two.) There have been magicians and fairies in many of the movies we’ve seen recently, as well as in fairy tales, ranging from the story of Sleeping Beauty, via Disney’s The Sorcerer’s Apprentice, to Shrek and Aladdin.

She will ask me what magic she should do, wave her wand and say some magic words, and present me with the result. Sometimes she clarifies that “it’s just pretend”, that I shouldn’t expect real wings or that she cannot really magically bring daddy home early. I’ve begun using magic as a distraction when she’s in a bad mood: “wouldn’t it be nice if we could magically grow wings, then you wouldn’t have to walk home on your tired legs”. It sometimes works.

Often she or one of her soft toys is a kitten, walks on all fours and miaows pitifully. The kitten has lost its parents while picking berries in the forest, is sad and wants company. (We’ve read an Estonian fairy tale about a girl who gets lost in the forest while picking berries.) Now most recently the kitten has actually been abandoned in the forest by its father (since we’ve read about Hansel and Gretel).

Whenever I ask what she did with her friends at preschool, she tells me they played mummy daddy baby. She usually gets to be the baby, being among the smallest and youngest kids in their huge group. At home she plays she’s the mummy, and various toys and dolls get to be babies. She breastfeeds them, picks them up when they cry, and puts them to sleep. Sometimes she wants to be a mom for me, and I get to be big sister. She asks me how my day was, what I learned at school, and I am supposed to act the way she usually does. When she borrows my camera, for example, I am supposed to badger her “let me see, let me see [the photos]”.

There is also a fair amount of talk about being in love, and marrying. Contagion from all the older girls at preschool. She is in love with me and with Elin (a friend) she says, and will marry us both. Being in love means you like someone a lot, she says, and getting married means you live together.

When she draws or paints, it is only girls and princesses. Just plain girls more often than princesses, nowadays. They all follow the same template: head like this, dress like that, long hair on both sides. Very boring for me.

She has effectively learnt to write. Often she still wants one of us to tell her the letters, but when I instead say the word again, or just ask her what letter she thinks should come next, she gets it right 9 times out of 10. The most common mistake she makes is skipping a letter in the word. For example when she wante to write PIRN (for “pear” in Estonian) and had done P and I, she said that N should come next. But when I said that that would make PIN, she thought a bit and figured out on her own that R should be there too.

It’s like when she learned to stand and walk: she wouldn’t actually let go and do it until she was 100% able to do it. Back then it was some sort of subconscious or instinctive behaviour, but now it’s more conscious. She simply has a strong aversion to failure.

Speaking of walking, Ingrid is still not fond of walking so she cycles to preschool every day, if at all feasible, and most other places too. We had to walk when the streets were full of snowy slush. But when there are just some icy patches here and there, we take the bike. Slipping and falling a few times causes less fuss and complaining than having to walk all the way, especially on the way home in the afternoon. Even better than cycling is having a cycle race, meaning that she sets a goal (“first one to that brick house wins”) and races ahead on her bike, and I walk after her as fast as I can (cannot run with Adrian in the sling, he either throws up or wakes up) while shouting “this time I will surely win” or “now it really is my turn to win” and she laughs at me.

She can now hop on one foot (her right one) for a good 12 to 15 jumps, all the way across the kitchen. On her left she manages just a few.

Likes: painting my face (they do face painting at preschool on Fridays). Making silly faces and waving her arms around when I try to take a photo of her. Winning. Ice cream. Sundays, because then she gets ice cream. (Sometimes she starts counting down to Sunday already on a Tuesday.) Selecting clothes for Adrian. Torches. Balancing on pavement edges, ledges, and power cords on the floor. Playing rock paper scissors during train rides. Also during train rides, playing shop and selling me the houses, cars, boats and towers on the seat fabric. (Can’t find any official pictures; a slightly fuzzy photo can be seen here.) Plates, cups and cutlery with pictures or patterns.

Does not like: our tasteful green china. The colour black, or brown or grey. Waiting. Missing a train – even when I tell her the next one will be there in 2 minutes, she is upset.

I don’t know where the time is going, but it definitely feels like two children take more than twice the time as one. There is more to be done, and less time to do it. I seem to recall a certain amount of leisure when I was at home with Ingrid as a baby. Now there are nursery hours to keep, errands to run, and busy evenings trying to juggle the needs of two children at the same time. I am glad that Ingrid is as old as she is, and as sensible as she is – this would be a lot harder otherwise.

I’ve bought a (used) carry cot for our stroller (an Urban Jungle, which replaced the Bugaboo I didn’t like, which in turn replaced our beloved Stokke Xplory when Ingrid grew too heavy for it).

Why not use the Stokke? One, you can’t attach a standing board to it, and I do want to have that option for Ingrid for longer trips. Two, in Sweden’s climate we couldn’t make do with just the seat, we’d have to get a foot muff, or (more likely) a carry cot and a sleeping bag for it, and that would become expensive. Three, the Stokke is not very good in snow. So it will have to wait in the basement until spring.

I’ve also discovered that the concept of moses baskets is totally unknown in Sweden. I am now considering whether to make do with the carry cot we have (which is rather too heavy for that kind of use, really), or to buy a kind of a soft carry cot that some Swedish strollers use, or to make my own.

Clothes then and now

I have inventoried the baby clothes we have since Ingrid’s baby days. I had thought that we should have lots, probably won’t need to buy anything. But when I actually fetched the bags marked “0–3m” I saw there was hardly anything there. After a moment’s thought I remembered that we had borrowed a lot of clothes for the first 6 months. Now we’ve done some shopping at the Erikshälpen and Myrorna second hand shops, so we have something at least.

And, just as the Stokke was enough for a London winter but not for a Swedish one, I’ve realized that we will need to buy more warm clothes, hats and such. But I’m thinking that we should be covered for late September weather at least, so I’m leaving those purchases for later.

Speaking of clothes, I have learned that there is no official one-to-one conversion of clothes sizes from the UK scale (0–3 months, 3–6 etc) to the international one (measured in centimetres). Depending on the manufacturer, 0–3 months may correspond to 56cm or 62cm, 3–6 will be 62cm or 68cm, and so on.

By the way, here is what I wrote about buying for your baby and more specifically about buying baby clothes back in 2007.

One month later, I gave up and decided to get a new Stokke. The Bugaboo wasn’t a bad pushchair, really, but Stokke suits me much better. (Eric spends less time pushing the pushchair about and wasn’t as interested in the choice as I was, but he also liked the Stokke better.)

The deciding factor for me was the ease of “driving”. The Bugaboo started misbehaving as soon as the road sloped sideways. The pushchair was pulling me off the road, and the struggle to keep it straight left me with achy wrists every single afternoon. Add a heavy load of groceries and I was near tears at times. I never had that kind of trouble with the Stokke. I think the frame of the Bugaboo has a fundamental design flaw, at least for my body: the angles at which I can apply force (determined by the angle, attachment points and shape of the handlebar) were very inefficient given the direction I wanted to push or turn it.

Also, the handlebar on the Bugaboo can be raised and lowered, but its angle cannot be changed. When I had it at a comfortable height, I was walking way too close to the pushchair, so my toes kept hitting the rear axle. I had to either walk with my arms outstretched, or the handlebar too high, in order to avoid that. The Stokke doesn’t have a rear axle – the lower section of its frame is sort of x-shaped – and both the height and the angle of its handlebar are adjustable, which made it much easier to adapt to how I stand and move.

The two pushchairs are quite similar in many ways – robust design, well constructed, adaptable, expensive – and if you haven’t tried them you might well think that they’re pretty much the same. But once you take a closer look, it turns out that there are a lot of differences.

• The Bugaboo has suspension on its front wheels. It’s also got foam rear wheels, while the Stokke has hard wheels with a layer of rubber. So the Bugaboo offers a smoother ride, especially on uneven roads, and is slightly easier to push up and down over pavement edges. But I think the suspension contributed to its headstrong behaviour on sloping roads.
• The Stokke has better options for adjusting the handlebar. The Bugaboo only allows you to adjust the height, and changing it means unscrewing and then rescrewing two screws. Which means you wouldn’t adjust the handlebar every time you hand over the pushchair to your partner when you’re out walking together. With the Stokke we definitely do that. In fact adjusting the handlebar is so easy that I change it for a 100 metre uphill stretch, when I want a slightly different angle, and then put it back when I reach the top.
• The Bugaboo allows you to reverse direction by just flipping the handlebar to the other side, so you end up with the large fixed wheels in front and the small swivel wheels at the back. Their instruction manual says it’s good for tricky terrain, snow and sand and such. The Stokke has nothing like that.
• The Stokke has a more convenient basket. The Bugaboo basket has a curved bottom which makes it harder to pack (especially with boxy things like cartons of milk and juice) and it’s a bit difficult to access (almost impossible with the carrycot in place). The Stokke basket/bag has a flat bottom and is perfectly accessible with the seat facing backwards, and relatively convenient with the seat facing forwards, too.
• The Bugaboo is lighter: 9.3 kg vs. Stokke’s 12.5 kg according to the official stats. Which was a real surprise to me, because the Stokke feels lighter when I’m pushing it.
• The Stokke can go up and down stairs: you don’t need to lift it, you can pull it up step by step, i.e. less strain for your back, and no need to wait for someone to help you. This is less important in Stockholm where all train and tube stations have lifts, but in London this feature made all the difference.
• On the Stokke you can raise and lower the seat, and at its highest, the seat comes much higher up than on the Bugaboo, or any other pushchair I’ve seen for that matter. I like that a lot, especially when Ingrid was a baby.
• The Bugaboo carrycot has a carrying handle and can be used as a Moses basket. The seat can also be lifted off the pushchair and used separately. The Stokke doesn’t give you that option.
• The Stokke comes with an infant insert for its seat, so the seat can be used from about 3 months’ age. (We never even bought a carrycot and got by with just the seat, since we didn’t use the pushchair much in the first months.) The Bugaboo has quite a deep seat so when it’s upright, small children tend to sink down into a “sack of potatoes” position.
• Releasing the seat for reclining can be done with one hand on the Stokke, so the other hand can stabilize the seat and slowly lower it down. On the Bugaboo you need two hands to push two buttons on either side of the seat, so the seat always reclined with a jerk. Or perhaps there is a trick that I just didn’t discover yet.
• The Bugaboo has a more “normal” shape, while the Stokke has a central axle which means that you need a special “split” foot muff and can’t use any old sleeping bag. It’s also a bit tricky to wrap a sleeping kid in a blanket when there’s a stick in the way.
• The Stokke has a removable plastic footrest. Especially in autumn and winter, I often removed the footrest to shake off the gravel and dust. On the Bugaboo, the footrest is part of the seat, i.e. made of fabric and not removable, i.e. it gets pretty gunky pretty fast.
• The Bugaboo has much more convenient brakes: the brake handle sits on the handlebar and is easy to put on and off. On the Stokke, the brake is operated by a little lever that sits down by one of the wheels, so you can only reach it with your foot, and sometimes I need to jiggle it a few times before I get the brakes on or off.

Edited on October 4th to add another paragraph (on brakes).

• Sluta! (Stop that!)
• Skärp dig! (A direct translation would be “Pull yourself together!’ but I guess in English you’d say something like “Behave yourself” instead.)
• Vad är det för fel på dig?! (What’s wrong with you?!)
• Nu lägger du av. (You will stop that right this moment.)
• Varför ska du vara så jobbig? (Why do you have to be so difficult?)

Every time I hear a variation on this theme I can just imagine the toddler thinking, Thanks for the reminder – I had totally forgotten that crying is not the accepted method of argumentation in this setting. Of course I will stop. Not.

(Ingrid has not discovered McDonald’s yet, so the IKEA restaurant is her idea of fine dining. Meatballs! With jam! And you can watch TV afterwards!)

I think we (Eric and I) managed to prove to everyone that we are incurably odd, since we decided to walk home from the party, even though it’s about a half-hour walk and it was raining a bit. But after 3 hours of sitting and stuffing ourselves we really felt a need for some fresh air and exercise. The Swedish smorgasbord-style Christmas dinners almost seem to be designed to make everyone eat too much.

Ingrid was at home watching Teletubbies with my mum. Her last time with a babysitter was almost a year ago, and we were a bit unsure about how it would go. In the end it went as smoothly as anyone could wish. She didn’t even ask for us, not even when it was time to go to bed. I warned her in advance that grandma would come for a visit and mummy would go out and Ingrid would stay at home. The first time, a few days before, she didn’t like the idea much at all: big teary eyes and trembling lower lip. The second time, the day before, she looked a bit cross and said she wanted to come with me. The closer we got, the less she cared, and by the time I was about to leave she didn’t even care enough to come to the window to wave me good-bye. So to all those who claim that children need to be left early on with babysitters in order to train them, and that all this co-sleeping and babywearing and liberal cuddling will cause trouble later, I just say “hah!”.

Parents experience lower levels of emotional well-being, less frequent positive emotions and more frequent negative emotions than their childless peers

and

In fact, no group of parents—married, single, step or even empty nest—reported significantly greater emotional well-being than people who never had children. It’s such a counterintuitive finding because we have these cultural beliefs that children are the key to happiness and a healthy life, and they’re not.

There’s also an essay at Babble.com, which has as its starting point Daniel Gilbert’s book Stumbling on Happiness. The essay features this chart which also seems to say that married people without children are happier than those with children:

Stumbling on Happiness also mentions a study trying to ascertain which activities women enjoy most, and reporting that “taking care of children” is rated lower than grocery shopping, sleeping, or socializing.

The initial angle for both stories is that parents lie to others (perhaps because it isn’t socially acceptable to say that you were happier before you had children) and maybe even delude themselves:

“Perhaps parents find it psychologically advantageous to talk themselves into thinking this is a great thing,” theorizes Oswald, who has two daughters. “It would be psychologically difficult to come to the view early in life, I’ve made a huge mistake having these children. I imagine that humans are good at the flexibility of thought that stops them from taking that view.”

I don’t find that explanation very convincing. If parenting consistently made us unhappy, then we’d have died out long ago. So there must be more to this.

Firstly, this might be a new phenomenon, as Newsweek recognises: changes to family and work patterns may have made parenting a lot more stressful than it used to be. We don’t live with our extended families, we are stressed and hurried. (Perhaps even more so in the US, where these studies have been performed?) And our expectations have changed as well: rather than having kids so they can help you on the farm and one day inherit it, people now expect parenting to be a fulfilling experience, a way to realise themselves. And indeed people in the Western world are having fewer and fewer children. Perhaps they have indeed concluded that children aren’t worth the bother, the money, or the loss of freedom.

Another explanation is that the studies may have asked the wrong questions. Parents may not enjoy “taking care of children” but that doesn’t mean their children don’t make them happy. You wouldn’t conclude that beautiful clothes don’t make women happy because women don’t enjoy “taking care of clothes”, to pick a random example.

But even more importantly, I think the studies have looked at the wrong measure of happiness. Average happiness is not how we judge our lives, and not what we remember afterwards.

“How do [the experiences of parenthood] balance out?” Gilbert asks. “It turns out that if you average all the moments, they balance out a little on the negative side. Being a parent lowers your average daily happiness. But average daily happiness isn’t all there is to be said about happiness. Indeed one could make the case that average happiness across a day isn’t what we’re trying for. As human beings, it’s not our aim. It shouldn’t be our goal. What we should be looking for is special transcendent moments that may even come at the cost of a lower average.

This is what a childless / child-free adult’s happiness levels might look like over some arbitrary time period unmarked by any major life events:

And this is what they might look like for a parent:

The little ups and downs of normal life have been replaced by a rollercoaster. The lack of flexibility and freedom and time have dragged down the average, and there are more troughs than before. Those are the troughs of teething, sleepless nights, and tantrums, and later on “I hate you mummy!” and so on. But you also get more peaks, of the kind that make your heart melt and that you wish you could remember forever: the early morning snuggle, the happy child running to greet you with a hug.

Finally, long-term happiness is different from short-term satisfaction. Satisfaction is about the balance between feeling good and feeling bad. But for durable happiness, something more is needed. I myself think of it as growth. Gretchen Rubin, one of my favourite bloggers, has a slightly different angle and describes it as feeling right: “to be happy, you must think about feeling good, feeling bad, and feeling right”.

Parenting makes you grow as a person. It’s corny but it’s true. You learn things about yourself, and you change, and you become a more mature person. You aren’t fully adult until you have taken care of someone else.

Links:
Newsweek: True or False: Having Kids Makes You Happy
Babble.com: Are You Happy? Are You Sure?
The Happiness Project: Do your children make you happy?
Momaroo: Do Kids Make You Happy?
Walrus Magazine: Parenting makes you miserable. Discuss.
National Post: Do our kids make us happy? Answer: It depends what you mean by ‘happy’.

Things would have been different even just a few months ago. Breastfeeding has been an important source of comfort and security for her. Whenever I have tried to cut out night feeds (and I’ve tried this every few months or so) she has been very upset. Sometimes she understood what I wanted and tried her best, really tried, but she couldn’t go back to sleep – she just lay there, tossing and turning and whimpering, for close to an hour. (After which I gave up, fed her, and we were both asleep within minutes.) As a result, both of us got even less sleep than usual during those nights, which is why I didn’t repeat the experiment too often.

This time she was upset the first night I wasn’t there, and then she accepted the new deal. For several nights she still woke once or twice, but didn’t even ask to breastfeed: just rolled closer to me, confirmed that I’m still there, and went back to sleep. The last 2 nights she’s had a cold, slept worse, and missed breastfeeding again, but now that I know she can do it, it’s a lot easier to refuse.

I was slightly concerned that this might be the end of breastfeeding for us. I feared that a 2-day separation plus no more night feeds would cause supply problems, and then she’d be less interested, leading to even lower supply, and thus even less interest. But that hasn’t happened – she’s still breastfeeding at least once a day, and generally both morning and evening.

You might think that 2 years of breastfeeding is enough, even more than enough. Somehow it’s become the cultural norm to wean as soon as you can, and definitely before the child’s a year old! (I have my theories about why this may be so, but that’s a separate topic.) Had you asked me two years ago how long I’d breastfeed, I would never have guessed that I’d go on for this long. But that was then. That was before I knew how enjoyable these moments would be for both of us – and before I had seen how natural and right this feels.

At root I’m not a particularly patient person. I twitch with impatience when I cannot walk up the escalator because people are standing in the way, or when the people in the queue in front of me cannot find their way around their own wallets because the wallet is stuffed with junk.

But now I have learned to sit quietly in a dark bedroom for 20 minutes (or longer, on a bad day) doing nothing but waiting for Ingrid to fall asleep. And that’s after 10 minutes of bedtime story + lullaby. It was hard in the beginning, but now I manage to wait it out without any real frustration, night after night.

Hmm, I just had an idea – audiobooks! Why haven’t I thought of that before? Thank you, blog.

In London all we had was one large room that served as kitchen + dining area + home office + living room, plus a separate small bedroom. In our new house we actually have multiple rooms. This is a novel experience, and one I will have to get used to. (We intend to fight it, though: the wall between the kitchen and the living room will come down soon.) This means that we suddenly need to think about what room we put things in.

We used to store bibs in a dresser with all the rest of Ingrid’s clothes. But the dresser is in the bedroom, which is at the other end of the house from the kitchen. So before every meal one of us would walk all the way to the other end of the house to get a bib for Ingrid. Until finally a light went on, and I moved the bibs from the dresser to the top kitchen drawer, next to the cutlery.

Parent hack #2: Use empty cereal boxes as drawing paper.

Ingrid likes drawing. Actually mostly she likes to watch me draw, and occasionally she does some brief but energetic scribbling. We used an ordinary A4 pad of paper to begin with. But her scribbles often ended up outside the paper, or the paper got wrinkled by her vigorous actions, so I figured we needed something bigger. The only large piece of paper I could find was an empty box of HavreFras, that I split open and flattened. It keeps its shape a lot better than plain paper – not only during drawing but also when I fold it up and tuck it away between our drawing sessions. Now I keep all our cereal boxes, and sometimes find myself thinking that I should finish that cereal so I get a new box to draw on.

Parent hack #2b: Draw on a carpet.

Despite the larger surface, Ingrid’s scribbles still often veered dangerously close to the edge, and I had to scrub crayon marks from the floor. Then a few weeks after we’d moved we finally unpacked and unrolled the carpet, which covers most of the free floor area in the living room. Naturally we ended up sitting on the carpet and drawing on our cardboard box (something you couldn’t do with a plain sheet of paper). And I realised – crayons don’t leave any marks on a dark carpet! You’d have to really work hard to make a mark of any sort with a crayon on a soft carpet. As an added bonus, dropped crayons don’t roll as far on a carpet as they do on a bare floor.