Ingrid on the other hand is not interested in going home at 3 o’clock: all her friends are still there and she’s always in the middle of something important. So I can either: (a) take Adrian home, nurse and cuddle for a short while, and then get us bundled up again to return to nursery, (b) argue with Ingrid to make her go home with me, or (c) let Ingrid take her time and just hang around for an hour or so. None of the alternatives is much fun.

And since I leave work so early, and have totally unproductive afternoons that revolve around nursery pickups, I’m struggling to get things done both at work and at home. I’ve been getting in to the office extra early on some days, and occasionally catching up in the evenings, too, but stuff is still piling up.

Yay for weekends, when I can catch up on sleep (because of those early mornings) and make a dent in the piles waiting for my attention on my desk at home.

Quite frequently someone comments on “how strong of you” or “I could never do that” (in Swedish it’s often “att du orkar”). They seem to think it requires a sacrifice from me, that I do this out of some feeling of duty.

But to me this is the easy way out. Pushing a 10 kg stroller up hilly streets filled with sand/snow mush? Getting up and down staircases, queueing for elevators? Squeezing into crowded buses and trains, navigating narrow aisles in shops? Not if I can avoid it.

The fact that it’s cosy having him on my back, resting his head against my back, pointing at the things we pass, is just an extra plus.

I like knitting, and I’ve knitted a number of projects over the years, but most have been slightly “off”, one way or the other. Years ago I knitted an entire sweater that, when I’d finished it, just didn’t suit me – it wasn’t the right pattern for me. I still have it because I haven’t had the heart to throw it out, but I never wear it. The hat I made for Ingrid last year was too thin and floppy – not the right yarn. She rarely wears it. A hat I tried to knit for Adrian last winter came out too small; he never wore it.

I’m hoping this one will be different and will come out the way I picture it.

The schooling in started two weeks ago. He liked the nursery but only as long as Eric was with him. They kept at it, then lost a few days to illness last week, and continued this week.

Most of this week was a mess. Adrian refused to eat lunch at nursery. He has been sort of picky recently but now he refused all food, even bread and bananas and other things that he normally loves. Naturally he was ravenous during the afternoons and evenings – and nights, too, so he’d wake hungry at around 5 in the morning, and have trouble going back to sleep.

So he was tired before the day even started. And he barely slept at nursery – woke from his naps after 40 minutes, instead of the hour and a half he’d normally sleep. He woke crying and tired and unhappy, but wouldn’t even consider going back to sleep. Eric would put him down for a second nap when they got home from nursery, but even so he was really tired by 7 and was out like a light the moment he finished nursing in bed.

Just as I was starting to wonder what we’d do next, he/they/we seem to have turned a corner. Today he was at nursery without Eric, for over 5 hours. He both ate and slept properly while he was there. He’d woken too early from his nap but actually gone back to sleep – and then woken contentedly some time later.

The staff at the nursery have been absolutely lovely, doing their best to make him feel happy and secure there. When they saw the meals were a struggle, they let him be: they opened the door to the lunch room but didn’t try to bring him to the table. Today he wandered in and out and finally found some toys to play with on the lunch room floor. When he was happy there, they brought him a bowl with some pasta and sweetcorn. If Adrian won’t come to the food, the food will come to Adrian… even if it is in the middle of the floor. And he actually ate some. When it was time for the mid-afternoon snack he went to sit with the rest of the kids at the table and ate one whole banana and two large sandwiches.

Fingers crossed for Monday.

What we’re looking for is a reasonably senior web developer. We’re a small software company with just a handful of developers, so we need someone who can pull their own weight, with no hand-holding or detailed management. Everyone is expected to not just code but also contribute meaningfully to discussions about design and architecture. They also need to share our values and mindset – to value code quality, maintainable code, good design.

The interview is complemented by a coding task, where I email the candidate a 1-page specification for an application and evaluate the code they send back. I therefore spend very little of the interview talking about detailed technical matters. The interview is for me to judge their aptitude and attitude at a higher level.

This is not an interview script. I wouldn’t ask these questions top to bottom. It’s more of a checklist for areas that I try to cover during an interview. This is also not a prioritized list.

For the rest of this post, “you” refers to the candidate.

1. Fit

What kind of a job are you looking for? What kind of company would you like to work for? What is important to you in your work? Why are you looking for a new job?

What I’m trying to establish here is whether the candidate would fit our firm. If they are looking for a fast-paced competitive environment, or a firm with international opportunities, they’re not for us.

What would you like to be doing in 5 years’ time? What do you enjoy most about programming? Have you been involved in requirements or testing in your previous projects?

This is to detect the wannabe project managers and business analysts, and people who are aiming for a managerial role. Nothing wrong with those, but we won’t be able to offer them a meaningful career path in our company. This is also to detect the pure programmers who have no interest in anything outside of code, who will consider testing and requirements work and usability studies to be “not their job”.

2. Passion, learning, interest

How do you keep up with current topics within the industry? Do you read any books? Blogs? Do you do any programming in your spare time? What’s your favourite tool?

Here I try to figure out whether programming is “just a job” for them, or whether they are truly interested in and passionate about writing software. It isn’t necessary for the candidate to do all of this, to read books and blogs and have hobby projects – but if they do none, it’s a great big warning sign.

3. Technical insight, critical thinking, big picture thinking

Explain the purpose of a recent project you worked on. Explain the design and the architecture. What choices and alternatives were considered? Why did you make the choices you made? What would you do differently if you had to do it again?

This separates the “drones”, the passive followers from the active minds. Even if the candidate wasn’t in charge of the project they describe, they should be aware of design choices and trade-offs.

Did you use an Agile process? What were the advantages and disadvantages? Did you use test-driven development, or unit tests or automated tests of any kind? How did that work?

If in this day and age the candidate has nothing to say about unit testing, they are not for us.

4. Some technical questions

This is a bit of a smorgasbord; I pick the areas that are relevant for the candidate’s area of strength. SQL and OOP for back-end developers and JavaScript and CSS for front-end candidates.

The home coding task tests general programming skills. Here I focus more on the specific technologies we work with. This whole area also ties in with #3, i.e. their ability to make trade-offs and informed choices.

OOP: Explain to me a design pattern that you have found useful. Why? Explain to me the purpose of the Single Responsibility Principle.

ASP.NET: Explain to me some different ways to save state between page requests. What are the pros and cons of each one? Which ones did you use in your last project? Why?

SQL: I give them an example table and ask them to write or dictate to me some simple queries against that table.

JavaScript: Explain callbacks, and why they are useful. Explain closures, and why they are useful.

CSS: Tell me about what you would use to build a page. Divs or tables? Why? How can you position a div – how can you center it, put it in a specific position on the page, etc.

5. Leadership and self-leadership

What was your role in the project? What were you responsible for? What are your weaknesses?

We need people with drive and initiative, who are able and willing to take on significant responsibility. The weaknesses question is mostly a basic indicator of self-insight.

Last month Adrian learned to walk. Now he’s already doing his best to run. Waddle waddle toddle toddle, faster!

He’s starting to talk more. Often he says long streams of sounds that are totally meaningless to us but the intonation is such that it sounds like sentences. I don’t know if it means something to him or whether he is just mimicking the sound of speech.

But he’s also saying actual words now. He has däddä and mämmä for daddy and mommy – and he shouts for däddä when he’s at home with Eric, and for mämmä when it’s night. There’s titta (“look”), deddä for det där (“this”) and lampa. He has some approximate version of kinni (“closed” in Estonian) which is what he says when he opens and closes my fleece during nursing. Babba means banana (his favourite food) but he also uses it for other fruit. He is pleased when he manages to make himself understood.

He so wants to be a part of our life, to join in all our activities, to help, to do like we do.

It’s particularly visible in the kitchen. In the morning when we go downstairs he goes to the pantry and takes out the porridge oats. He brings them to the kitchen counter and then opens the cupboard and takes out the saucepan I usually use for porridge. (Not just any saucepan but the right one.) Then he stretches up his arms and shouts, to tell me that he now wants to be up on the counter to help me make porridge.

I lift him up and open the bag of oats. I get out two measuring cups, one for each of us. He puts his hand in the bag, takes out some oats, puts them in the cup, empties the cup in the saucepan, and repeats this as long as I am also measuring the oats.

Then I turn on the tap and he does the same with water. Sometimes he misses. In fact he misses pretty often – if he pours 8 dashes of water, one of them will probably end up on the counter or on himself, because he gets distracted. But most of it goes in the saucepan. With the oats I do most of the measuring because his method is too slow for my taste, just a tiny handful of oats every time. But with water he can do the work and I focus on counting. Half a decilitre… another half… a dash… almost full, so we’re now at about two… two and a half…

When I cook dinner (which I don’t do very often, as this has been Eric’s responsibility on weekdays) he picks and inspects the veggies, hands me potatoes from the bag, tastes the sweetcorn, etc. Adrian sitting on the kitchen counter is now a most natural part of the cooking process for me.

His absolute favourite in the kitchen is the microwave oven. It beeps! It has lights and buttons! The insides rotate! You can make things happen! The moment I turn it on, he rushes to the step stool and starts pushing it towards the microwave, almost crying with frustration at the lost seconds.

We have a very simple, child-friendly microwave, with just two knobs to turn: one for power, one for time. I tell him not to touch the power knob but I’m not too strict about the time knob – especially since he almost always turns it towards zero, so the oven stops too early rather than overheating the food. It’s like with him measuring the water: he randomizes it, and I keep track of a rough total in my head, and adjust. And of course there’s the door which is pure magic. Close it, and the light goes on and the plate starts rotating. Open it, and the oven goes off.

When the microwave oven is empty and I’m not using it, he is not interested in it.

Other buttons and machines are also interesting, especially when they make sounds or lights. The toaster, lamps, phones, heaters, the clock radio, the baby monitor, the stereo… One afternoon I thought the house felt cold, and upon inspecting the heaters, discovered that he had turned off three of the four heaters he can reach.

He likes opening and closing my computer, to hear it whirr to life and see the screen light up, and to yank out the power cord. He never puts it back in, and often gets upset when I do so. I think he actively dislikes that little indicator light. The keyboard doesn’t interest him much; he hasn’t yet understood that what he does affects things on the screen.

He is helpful and co-operative outside the kitchen, too. He wants to do right. He pushes the safety gate closed when we go upstairs. He pulls down the toilet paper for me. He puts his arms in the sleeves of the pyjamas when I hold them open for him, and tries to brush his hair.

The one thing he doesn’t often co-operate with is nappy changes. Those he hates, and I often have to hold him down while he screams and writhes. But recently he’s actually voluntarily walked to the changing mat and sat down on it when he’s had a dirty nappy, so it may be that we will have less screaming in the future.

In general he’s pretty well aware of the signals of his body. If he doesn’t want clothes, I let him be naked – and when he gets cold, he takes his trousers and tries to put them on (around his neck) or hands us his socks. He refuses mittens when going out, but then reaches for them when his hands get cold. If he is hungry he goes to the pantry or the fruit bowl and demands food. If he isn’t tired in the evening, I prep him (night nappy, pyjamas, toothbrush) and let him potter around. When he feels tired he will go to the staircase (the bedroom is upstairs) or wave good night to us, and then happily walk upstairs to go to bed. Unlike Ingrid, who will claim that she is not at all tired! even though she is falling over from tiredness.

He still eats unevenly throughout the day. Usually he barely touches his breakfast. Lunch and afternoon meal are usually his largest, although sometimes he skips lunch too and then eats throughout the afternoon. It used to be that he’d try almost everything we served, but now his diet has become pretty limited. Bread of all kinds, fruit – especially banana but also other kinds – and occasionally lots of meatballs.

Other food we put in front of him he mostly ignores. If we actively offer it to him – whether on a spoon or in our fingers – he recoils, peeks suspiciously at the food and then looks as if we were trying to poison him.

For some reason it’s different with drinks. He has been very interested in trying the stuff we drink, rather than just his plain water. He’s tried diluted apple juice (our usual mealtime drink) and oat milk, and liked both.

With this diet he has pretty much gone back to eating with his hands only and ignores spoons and forks. On the other hand he has now learned to drink from normal glasses and two-handled cups. The sippy cup still comes in handy at night or when we’re out and about, though.

Other stuff:
He’s jealous. When Ingrid is sitting in my lap he butts in and tries to push her out of the way.
He likes fridge magnets. For some reason he often puts them in the dishwasher.
He likes it when we mimic him – when he gets us to laugh, to clap our hands, or to put our arms up.

He started nursery a few days ago. We’re still in the schooling in period, but from next week he’ll be there for real. Eric’s been taking care of the schooling-in so I don’t have much to say about this.

A lot of this past month has been taken up by the Christmas holidays, pushing all normal routines to the side.

One of our projects during the holidays was ice skating. This is something Ingrid has wanted to do for a while. We bought skates for Ingrid and myself and went out skating several times.

I have to say, the modern plastic-booted skates they make for kids nowadays are great. I remember sitting on a bench next to an ice rink when I was a kid, pulling at those infernal laces with freezing hands. And still the skates ended up floppy around my ankles and too tight around the foot at the same time. Now it’s just click, click, and the buckles are done, and off she goes.

Ingrid took skating as a challenge, as usual. It seemed important to her to be able to say that she can skate. At first she was claiming she could skate just because she could stand upright on them and move forward while holding on to my hand. I explained that skating while holding on to my hand is like swimming with floaties – you’re moving but it isn’t really right to say that you can swim – and that “I can skate” means gliding (not tottering) and without holding on to anything. She immediately focused on those two things, and made progress straight away. She holds my hand while getting started and picking up a bit of speed, and then lets go for a brief independent glide. Rinse and repeat until tired. I still wouldn’t say that she can skate but it’s an activity that we can enjoy together.

Much of life is a competition for her. Apparently she’s not alone about it. One day a friend of hers was here and they happened to stand next to Ingrid’s Bamse magazines. The conversation went like this:

Ingrid: Look at how many Bamse magazines I have!
Friend: I have more!
Ingrid: I have this one, and this one, and this one…
Friend: I also have this one.
Ingrid: … and this one, and this one.
Friend: I have many more at home.

Eric gave her a “weekly Bamse” as a Christmas gift. (“Vecko-Bamse” to complement her pocket money, “veckopeng”.) It’s not a subscription but a stack of old issues that he bought in a charity shop, and she gets a new one every Saturday.

Bamse is just the right kind of reading material for her. It’s a comics magazine, so there’s lots of pictures. (She still likes books to have pictures on every page.) The texts are short and simple, and in capital letters, which she prefers.

We tried one issue of Kalle Anka (Donald Duck) but not only was it in lowercase, it was also full of words like “ämnes­omsätt­ningen” (meta­bo­lism) and “outhärd­ligt” (unbear­able) and “obliga­tioner” (bonds) and so on. I kept having to read the hard words for her and then explain what they meant, so she kept losing track of the actual story.

But with Bamse she can sit and read on her own. One morning she spent an hour just reading. She doesn’t like it quite as much as the iPad but it’s clearly a fully acceptable substitute when computerized entertainment is not available.

Apart from Bamse, we’ve been reading Tam tiggarpojken, a Swedish fantasy series for 6 to 9-year-olds. It’s a bit challenging for her, but in a good way. Things are not spelled out as explicitly as in books for younger kids.

At first I just read the books, but it turned out that she really didn’t understand large chunks of it. Now I stop every now and again and ask her about what I just read. Sometimes she’s with me, but other times she has no idea what’s going on or why. So I read it again or explain it in simpler words or in terms of something that she can relate to. More and more I do so with other books, too. It’s good for both of us: makes me read more actively and her listen more actively.

Most often it’s the why I need to explain. I wonder if it’s like that for her with life in general, not just with books. Things happen, and she either has no idea why (but it doesn’t bother her) or she makes up some sort of reason for herself that is very far from reality.

Other news:
Lördagsgodis still works well. It’s so nice to be free of the nagging during dinner on weekdays. Yesterday she bought candy for 6 kronor (about a dollar) and it lasted her an hour. She sat at the kitchen table for an hour, reading Bamse and eating candy. The moment she was done she left the Bamse magazine and went and picked up the iPad. (All optimised to follow the house rules: “No eating candy in the living room”, “No using the iPad while eating”.)

Sharpening pencils

I’ve let her use a knife for sharpening pencils and for paring apples, i.e. cutting things that are hardish and held in the hands rather than on a cutting board. She’s a bit of a wimp when it comes to blood and getting hurt, so I’ve been saying no until now because I didn’t want to face the wailing that would come if she cut herself. But she managed it very well.

ReQtest, the company I work for, is looking to add two more developers to our team, one for front-end work and one for the back-end. The foundation for our application is ASP.NET and C#. On top of that the front-end guy needs great JavaScript and CSS skills; the back-end developer needs experience of database development.

We’re a small and growing company so we offer lots of responsibility and variety in the daily work, and a say in just about all matters regarding both the product and the company. We use an Agile development methodology, and we value code quality and usability highly. It’s a great place to work.

Read more on monster.se: front-end developer, back-end developer.

But my friend has a point in that my previous post was too one-sided. So, here is a more nuanced review of 2011.

• Top things I will remember 2011 for: The remodelling. A full year on a milk-free diet.
• Other memorable events: I went back to work after my maternity leave with Adrian.
• Major projects I completed: My felt advent calendar.
• Major decisions: We bought a car.

I was going to list Ingrid’s favourites but then I realized that she loves almost all of them. Some days she plays one, then another day another app gets more time, and after a few days she comes back to the first one again.

Toca Tea Party

There’s Birthday Party and Tea Party, where you start by setting a table, choosing plates and cakes, and then proceed to eat the cakes and drink the tea and lemonade. These have great multi-touch support and work very well for several players. I believe that kids are supposed to invite their stuffed animals to the tea party but Ingrid usually plays with me instead.

Then there’s Toca Store, which is sort of similar but more clearly meant to be played together. One person takes the role of shopkeeper, the other is the customer. The shopkeeper chooses which items to sell, sets their prices, rings up the items on the till. The customer picks items to buy, counts up the coins, puts the stuff in their bag.

Of course you could play those things without an app, with actual physical items – and we have. But the app is 5 seconds away whereas setting up a tea party with real toy plates and cups takes time, so Ingrid is infinitely more likely to use the app than the real thing.

A bit similar is Toca Robot, where you build a robot by picking body parts for it. The graphics are well made and fun to look at: the robots can have arms with propeller attachments and a body like a fridge. When the robot is done you can fly it through a simple maze to pick up gold stars. Updates to the app have brought new varieties of each body part, as well as new mazes, so Ingrid keeps returning to this app.

Toca Robot

Toca Hair Salon and Toca Kitchen are two of a kind – you get some materials and can perform some actions on them. Cut, blow dry, comb, wash, colour hair; chop, fry, boil, mince food. I’ve found these somewhat disappointing – they sound like more fun than they actually are. In Toca Kitchen the choices are too limited, and they’ve skimped on the graphics: the results look dull. Frying things just makes them brownish, for example, so frying an egg doesn’t actually result in anything that resembles a fried egg. In Hair Salon the hair is difficult to control and the results are all too similar to each other, except for the colour and accessories, so what sounds creative boils down to a painting app.

Paint My Wings is actually a painting app where you paint the wings of a butterfly. The wings are mirrored, so whatever you paint on one wing also turns up on the other. There are other nice touches such as the butterflies talking to you (“that tickles!”) and using berry juice for the painting, making this a bit more interesting than just a plain drawing app.

Less open-ended is Toca Doctor which consists of a bunch of puzzles and mini-games. Ingrid liked these to begin with but they’re too simple for her now.

It will come as no surprise to you that the book is full of violence, a lot of it pretty graphical. There’s everything from being stung to death by swarms of mutant hornets, to being hit with a rock. At first I thought it odd that such a bloody book would be marketed as young adult literature, but then I remembered what I read and watched when I was thirteen (Stephen King and Friday the 13th) and reconsidered. Today’s teenagers can be pretty unmoved by blood and gore.

The book was hard to put down while I was reading it, but left no real impression afterwards. It was thrilling but shallow. The book is about death as televised entertainment. From such a setup I would expect the book to rise a step above its contents, to take a critical view of what is going on, to reflect, to comment. Now it felt like we just got a written version of the TV show.

Katniss was all set up for us to like and feel sorry for and root for, but I found her character unconvincing and inconsistent. She hardly reacts to the deaths around her, only feeling sorry when her ally (a sweet young girl) is killed, but otherwise she’s unmoved. Her own likely death doesn’t seem to worry her much, either.

The writing was pretty dull and uninspired, in the journalistic style that I so hate in the detective stories that abound in Sweden. Things are described in a minimal, impersonal manner, giving us no real feel for the places or the people. There is no metaphor, no colour in the language.

One thing that really annoyed me from the beginning was the ridiculousness of the whole setup. A capital city of magnificent wealth, endowed with technologies such as hovercrafts – kept alive and afloat by the productive forces of 12 small, poor districts with backward technologies? One of which focuses solely on coal mining, and another on fishing? Yeah right. And 74 years of hunger games, of parents giving up their kids to near-certain death each year, and no one rebels? Yeah right. And a supposedly demoralizing punishment that involves making celebrities out of the punished, dressed and made up by top stylists, interviewed live on TV? Yeah right.

The whole setup only made sense when I read The New Yorker’s review:

If, on the other hand, you consider the games as a fever-dream allegory of the adolescent social experience, they become perfectly intelligible. Adults dump teenagers into the viper pit of high school, spouting a lot of sentimental drivel about what a wonderful stage of life it’s supposed to be. The rules are arbitrary, unfathomable, and subject to sudden change. A brutal social hierarchy prevails, with the rich, the good-looking, and the athletic lording their advantages over everyone else. To survive you have to be totally fake. Adults don’t seem to understand how high the stakes are; your whole life could be over, and they act like it’s just some “phase”! Everyone’s always watching you, scrutinizing your clothes or your friends and obsessing over whether you’re having sex or taking drugs or getting good enough grades, but no one cares who you really are or how you really feel about anything.

Cheap thrills for a day or two, good to have read so you know what the hype is about, not worth buying book 2.

Adlibris, Amazon US, Amazon UK.

(The one in the photo below was made by Ingrid and not bought at Pressbyrån.)

This year I look back and I can’t point to anything memorable that I have achieved, learned, or experienced. I do useful work, but nothing I do is remarkable either from the company’s point of view or for me personally. I cannot say that I have moved forward from where I was standing the same time last year. And last year was equally dull careerwise, but at least there was the birth of Adrian to remember.

Something has to change in 2012.

The place turned out to be much nicer than I had expected. The pre-dinner activities (simulator racing, bowling and slot car racing) were great fun. I suck at car racing but didn’t do too badly at bowling.

Then we had our julbord (Swedish smorgasbord-style Christmas dinner) and the food also exceeded my expectations, really nice! Delicious herring and Nobel salmon.

After dinner we played shufflepuck for a couple of hours – first for fun and points only, then, as the rest of the company was getting increasingly sozzled, for stakes – developers vs. sales and management. By the time I left, the developer team had won one afternoon fika (sort of like afternoon tea) as well as one week of “coffee service” at the office (i.e. management to make and fetch coffee whenever a developer feels like having some). The third time we wagered 2 hours of manual testing per person (if devs win) against an on-site customer interview (if sales & management win) and this time we lost. At that point I went home but I understand that by the end of the night, various of my colleagues owed each other both lunches and rounds of beer and other things as well.

Shuffleboard. Image © Ballbreaker. The hands in the photo are not ours.

]]> http://www.toomik.net/helen/blog/2011/12/22/christmas_dinner_at_ballbreaker/feed/ 0 http://www.toomik.net/helen/blog/2011/12/20/hot_and_cold/ http://www.toomik.net/helen/blog/2011/12/20/hot_and_cold/#comments Tue, 20 Dec 2011 22:24:40 +0000 Helen http://www.toomik.net/helen/blog/?p=3715 Today, three and a half years after leaving the UK, I finally learned why they have separate taps for hot and cold water. Well, actually, I read two separate explanations that both make sense, but I don’t know which one it really is.

(1) Fluctuating pressure. Mains water pressure can be unreliable in parts of the UK. Hot water coming (with constant pressure) from a hot water tank in your house, mixed with cold water (at variable pressure, especially if someone nearby flushes a toilet) from the water mains can lead to dangerous fluctuations in temperature.

(2) Hygiene regulations. Water in a hot water tank is not boiling and germs could start breeding. If you keep the hot and cold water strictly separate, you can be sure that the cold water (which you use for drinking after all) cannot get contaminated. So mixing mains water and cistern water was actually forbidden in the UK.

By now of course there are taps in the UK that mix the two, but retrofitting all old houses with new taps, new sinks (with one hole instead of two) and possibly new plumbing, too, would be too expensive compared to the limited benefits.

]]> http://www.toomik.net/helen/blog/2011/12/20/hot_and_cold/feed/ 2 http://www.toomik.net/helen/blog/2011/12/19/fifteen_months/ http://www.toomik.net/helen/blog/2011/12/19/fifteen_months/#comments Sun, 18 Dec 2011 23:05:21 +0000 Helen http://www.toomik.net/helen/blog/?p=3709 Adrian now walks. From not walking at all to pretty competent walking took less than a week. All he needed was an insight into why walking might be useful and preferable to crawling.

He could crawl fast and efficiently and with little effort. But on a few occasions I saw him struggle to crawl with a book in his hand. He sometimes tried just simply holding the book while crawling, and sometimes shuffled along on his bottom instead. One day I lifted him up to standing, put the book in his right hand and held onto his left hand – and didn’t let him sit down. Then I tugged him forward just a tiny bit.

He took a step or two but didn’t start walking straight away, but he did take a few steps on his own later that day. And after that there was no going back. First it was short stretches of just a few steps. Then quickly his confidence increased, and within a week he could walk from one end of a room to the other. At first he’d still revert to crawling when he wanted to go far, but by now (about two or three weeks after he started walking) walking is the default.

At first when he was still a bit unstable he’d walk a bit like a crab, sort of sideways, usually leading with his right foot I think.

He doesn’t usually look where he puts his feet. It could be because he doesn’t see the point – or it could be that he actually cannot look at his toes. (There is a big round tummy in the way, after all.) But he knows where the thresholds and floor edges are, and stops and carefully steps across. I think he avoids the door from the kitchen to the hallway because there is both a threshold and a gap in the floor there, wider than he can comfortably cross.

Of course he is his usual confident self and overreaches his ability. He constantly has a gash or a bump somewhere. Currently there is an almost-healed gash underneath his lower lip (where he probably bit himself when he landed face-first on the floor), a larger scabbed-over but not-yet-healed scratch under his left eye (where he hit the kitchen stool) and a similar one on his tummy (acquired at the same time, against the lower step of the stool).

He has not yet tried walking outside. He has, however, tried walking with shoes – with Ingrid’s black patent leather party shoes, which he saw and took a liking to yesterday. He put his feet in, Eric buckled them up, and he actually managed to walk in them, although they’re about 6 sizes too large. It worked because he doesn’t actually roll his foot through a step, from heel to toe. Instead he pretty much just lifts his foot straight up and puts it back down further ahead. And that, of course, can be done regardless of shoes, as long as they stay on your feet and don’t flop.

A book was what got him started walking, and that’s because books have been his great love this month. He can sometimes look at them himself, but what he really likes is sitting with one of us and listening to us “read” for him. He takes a book and comes to us, climbs up onto the sofa and onto our lap, and gives us the book. If I’m already reading for Ingrid, he’ll butt in and push her book aside.

Adrian’s greatest favourites are books with animals – because of the sounds. We have a couple of books with photos or simple pictures of common animals. “This is a cow. Do you know what the cow says? The cow says moo.” Except that we don’t say “moo” but try to imitate a cow as closely as we can, and all the others as well. (Except for the fish, which according to the book says “blubb blubb” but which we read as “mull mull”, meaning bubble bubble in Estonian. It’s as good a sound for a fish as any.) He seems to like the wolf and the owl sounds best, and takes a stab at them (and the dog) himself when we get to those pages, close enough that it’s clear to us what he’s trying to do.

He is also fond of books with songs. There is a lovely series of cardboard books with common Swedish children’s songs, Ellen och Olle sjunger. One song per book, with nice illustrations. En sockerbagare is the current favourite.

We read some very simple stories, too. We began with the Max books (Max bil and Max dockvagn); now those are less interesting and Knacka på is the favourite. These have paper pages and they get crumpled a lot and I’ve taped up a few tears, but it looks like they’ll survive Adrian at least.

He clearly understands a fair amount of what we say, not only when reading books. He’s understood “no” for a while although you could argue that it’s just the tone of voice he reacts to. One day when I was busy and he wanted to play, I told him to “go to daddy in the kitchen” (where Eric was cooking dinner, and Adrian is usually happy to watch). He stood and thought for a while and then went to the kitchen.

But he doesn’t say many words himself yet. “Titta” (look) is a very clear one. There is a “dadda” sound that seems to mean “pappa” (daddy). There are other sounds that clearly mean things but that I haven’t learned to understand yet. He is pretty good at communicating without words, though. When he wants to be picked up, he tugs at our trouser legs. When he wants down, he shows it. When he wants his water cup refilled, he holds out the cup. When he wants to know whether something is permitted as a toy or not, he holds up his finger the way we do when we warn him to not touch something. He is usually very clear about wanting something, and then he WANTS with his whole body, screaming and tensing his whole body and arching his back.

He likes bouncing/riding games: Prästens lilla kråka with Eric, Sõit, sõit linna with me. He is too ticklish to enjoy Baka, baka liten kaka but we do play Kuts läks karja. I’ve tried games involving counting fingers and toes but he doesn’t appreciate those much yet.

He rarely plays with any toys. The one thing he likes is Ingrid’s little toy phone, which beeps and sings when you press its buttons. Just like last month he likes playing with containers and lids. Any time I open a jar or a bottle near him, he wants to try the lid, on and off a couple of times, before I’m allowed to put it away.

He had a period of separation anxiety when he absolutely had to be within a few steps of us. Or was that last month, perhaps? In any case that has now passed, and he can wander off to another room when it is clear that we are doing boring stuff and aren’t willing to play with him. But he is very upset in the mornings when I leave for work. He used to happily wave good-bye but now he holds onto my legs and tries to follow me out through the door. I try to prepare everything and spend the minimum amount of time in the hallway, throw on my coat, grab my hat and gloves and bag, and leave as quickly as I can.

Conversely he is very happy when I get back home. I usually sneak in quietly, then sneak upstairs and change out of my work clothes into a nursing top. Then I show myself, he drops whatever he is doing and comes to me, and we sit somewhere and nurse. These afternoon nursings are now clearly mostly for cuddles and comfort, he takes a lot less milk than he used to. And he no longer nurses off and on throughout the evening. He does like to nurse thoroughly just before going to sleep, and then twice more during the night (on normal nights), and maybe in the morning.

Now he wants to sleep with a dummy again. Since a dummy no longer means that he wakes once an hour, he gets it. Sometimes we hear him wake and cry out but then he seems to find the dummy on his own and goes back to sleep again. He sometimes also clearly wants the dummy during the day, but not often. When he’s done with it, we put it away and he doesn’t miss it.

He’s had a couple of colds and that always messes up the nights. And the days, too, usually. A runny nose is almost the rule here during the winter season. When he’s got a real cold he usually has a slight fever, is tired during the day, and coughs a lot during the night. He can actually sleep while coughing about once a minute, but that keeps me awake, and he wants to nurse more than usual. And it is not unusual for him to cough so hard at night that he actually throws up all the milk he’s just drunk. So the standard procedure when he has a cold is to cover his part of the bed with a thick bath towel folded in two, and keep another towel plus spare pyjamas close by so I can change quickly.

In the beginning of the month he got his first molars, all four of them almost at the same time.

He eats unevenly, usually one large meal a day and otherwise just nibbles. A large meal can be one banana, six meatballs and a slice of bread, or equivalent. When he’s hungry he eats fast and doesn’t get distracted much. Other times he joins us at the table but only takes a few bites now and again.

Quite often he eats standing up. We’ve now swapped chairs: he got the higher-backed one from Ingrid, so he can lean his bottom against the backrest when he stands on it, and he can no longer sit on the top of the backrest.

He is very fond of majskrokar, and usually likes bananas, too. Meatballs, bread, and kiwi are also safe bets. When he eats food he likes, he tries to stuff it all in his mouth at the same time so he can barely chew. He likes nibbling on almonds and cashews but cannot really chew them, despite the molars, so he drools like a maniac and spreads small partly-chewed pieces of nuts around him.

I’ve now sometimes let him taste small amounts of sweet treats: a sip of diluted apple juice (which is the standard mealtime drink for the rest of the family), a gingerbread cookie, a small chunk of saffron bun. The first one was a little piece of meringue that Eric had made. He did as he always does with new stuff: takes a small, cautious bite first. And then he laughed with delight, and wanted more more more.

He is usually not very interested in trying foodstuff that we hand to him, or put on his plate. But he almost always tries to bite things that he sees me use when I’m cooking, as well as fruit from the fruit bowl. Whenever the thing he tries tastes particularly sharp or pungent (such as an unpeeled tangerine) he looks at us and loudly says “eeeh!”

We’ve started to let him practice a bit with a normal lidless mug. Thus far it’s led to a lot of spills: he shakes it up and down, tips it too far when drinking, puts it down with a bang, and generally treats it like his sippy cup.

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Sorry for the few and dark photos. Adrian still loves the camera and I rarely get a chance to take a decent photo of him. This is what I mostly get: nose to camera.

]]> http://www.toomik.net/helen/blog/2011/12/19/fifteen_months/feed/ 0 http://www.toomik.net/helen/blog/2011/12/16/sixty-two_months/ http://www.toomik.net/helen/blog/2011/12/16/sixty-two_months/#comments Fri, 16 Dec 2011 22:21:18 +0000 Helen http://www.toomik.net/helen/blog/?p=3702

Making Christmas cards

The positive moments have been more frequent this month, and the general tone of Ingrid’s life is a little bit less negative than before. In part I think the Christmas calendars are to thank: there is something new to look forward to every morning, and a new video clip to watch every afternoon. So she gets the entertainment she craves, and that keeps her in a better mood.

I’ve been making an effort to spend more “quality time” with her in the evenings. I am not very fond of the concept of quality time but when she is not interested in normal time spent together doing normal activities, then somewhat-artificial quality time is better than nothing. At the same time she is spending fewer afternoons with her friends. We used to have kids in our house two or three times a week; this week we haven’t had a single one. I’m not sure if it is a coincidence, or because of frictions in their relationships – or if this is less important now that she gets more time with me.

We also let her spend more time with “entertainment devices” – movies and iPad games – than before. Previously I’ve tried to limit screen time and asked her to find other activities instead, but we’ve pretty much given up on that. All it leads to is whining and complaining. Now I only say no to movies/iPad when it’s getting close to bedtime, so that she can get a chance to get bored and realize that she is tired.

We (Eric and I) do try to think of activities that impose an active role on both participants, so she cannot just coast along. We insist on taking turns when playing I spy or when drawing together. I refuse to make decisions for her when we’re doing crafts, or to finish the task for her when she gets bored – our recent projects have been really small but they’ve taken several evenings each. She has little persistence and is unwilling to expend any real effort on anything. I often have to remind her to slow down, to do things properly instead of rushing. For her it is more important to make many things fast, while I’d rather see her make a few but with care – regardless of whether she’s making gingerbread cookies or writing Christmas cards.

In creative activities and games she will reuse the same ideas over and over agains, and I’ve started rejecting those. No, we will not draw another princess in the Scribblenauts sandbox – you’ll have to come up with something new.

One small positive development is that she is more likely to choose iPad games instead of re-watching a movie. A virtual tea party on the iPad is a much more passive and lazy activity than a real tea party with her toy china would be – but she is at least doing something rather than just sitting and watching.

She still thinks that almost every activity is boring, and to most ideas and suggestions, her first reflexive reaction is negative. If things are not to her liking, she is immediately deeply disappointed and sour. Sometimes it feels like “nöööh” and “but whyyyyy” are the most frequently spoken words in our household.

When things are fun, she often overreacts in the other direction. She can’t let an activity be just simply fun – she has to squeal and force out a loud laugh and turn it into a performance.

She spends a lot of time reacting, and rarely listens or reflects. I get the impression that it is very rarely that she thinks about what she wants, what she likes, what our suggestions entail – she is governed by emotions. Or hormones, perhaps.

A more interesting development is that she is exploring the power of sneaking and of telling untruths. When dinner doesn’t meet her expectations, she tells us “I don’t like that”. You still have to try it, is our standard response. “But I already have. We had this for lunch at preschool and I didn’t like it.” Well, I can be very sure that they did not have beetroot soup at preschool, nor oven-baked aubergine with mushrooms.

One day I caught her nibbling on a small piece of candy she had taken in a convenience store. We had a very serious talk (but a brief one due to circumstances) about stealing, and I think she understood the importance of it. But the whole situation was also a bit funny and I had to make an effort not to laugh: she clearly knew that what she was doing was wrong, so she had gone into a corner of the store and stood with her face towards the wall. She was so conspicuously up to no good that I could spot it from the other side of the store.

Actually, her poor lying and sneaking skills are a good reminder to me about how immature she really is in her understanding of the world around her, and of other people in particular.

The candy incident made me think that perhaps our current sweets regime is not working for her. Until now we’ve stayed away from the lördagsgodis concept, going for “everything in moderation” instead, but now we’re giving lördagsgodis a try. My hypothesis is that with our current regime she never feels like she’s been able to eat her fill. She’s always left unsatisfied, wanting more. Well, if she gets to eat lots in one go, perhaps she will feel satisfied afterwards. We’ve only tried it for a week and a half so too early to tell if it’s working better. For now the main effect is that the daily nagging of “Are you done eating? When will you be done? Will you be done after you finish what is on your plate now? Can I bring out the sweets while you’re eating?” has been replaced by daily reminders of “I can’t have any sweets today if I want lördagsgodis.”

She is pretty obsessed with sweet stuff. She described this past Sunday as “a happy, happy day!” (“en lyckodag”) – a slightly sweeter-than-normal cereal for breakfast, then saffron buns after her last kids’ judo session for this term, then gingerbread cookies and ice cream at a birthday party.

One thing that’s struck me is how little curiosity she shows. She rarely asks about how things work, how the world works, or about words she doesn’t understand in a book I read for her. Sometimes I pause and ask her, “do you know what andedräkt means?” and she says no. But she never thinks to ask me.

She is reading and writing better than ever, even though she hardly gets any practice. She is even reading a little bit more fluently in Estonian. She is also more confident with numbers – when adding 7 + 6, for example, she no longer counts first 7 fingers and then 6 more fingers & toes and then counts them all together. She says “7” and then counts “8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13” while holding up one finger at a time, which means that she can “count” six fingers without actually counting to six. What she still lacks is a feel for numbers greater than 10. She can in all seriousness suggest that 7 + 7 is 9. But when I pointed out that 5 + 5 makes 10, and 7 is greater than 5 so 7 + 7 should be more than 10, she agreed, and quickly said “10… and 1, 2 makes 12, and 1, 2 more makes 14”.

I am already thinking that next year she’ll be going to school. Schoolwork won’t be a challenge for her. What I’m concerned with is the risk of boredom – and when schoolwork catches up with her, I worry about her ability to apply herself, to actually work. But perhaps it is too early to worry about that now.

Favourite iPad games: everything from Toca Boca, especially Toca Tea Party, Toca Store, and Toca Birthday Party.

Favourite book: Printsessijuttude varalaegas, a pink book chock-full with princesses. We’ve read it almost daily since she got it for her birthday. I am getting really tired of princesses.

Other small stuff: earlier this week she let a friend cut her hair. (You can see some traces of it in the first photo above. Eric evened it out where possible, but there are still some gashes in her bangs.) It’s the kind of thing I’ve read about – kids cutting their own hair – but never thought that Ingrid would try it. We had been saying for a while that we really should cut her hair. I guess she got tired of waiting and took things in her own hands.

]]> http://www.toomik.net/helen/blog/2011/12/16/sixty-two_months/feed/ 0 http://www.toomik.net/helen/blog/2011/12/16/notkram_peanut_butter/ http://www.toomik.net/helen/blog/2011/12/16/notkram_peanut_butter/#comments Fri, 16 Dec 2011 21:11:13 +0000 Helen http://www.toomik.net/helen/blog/?p=3696

Photo: UNICEF

(Scroll down for an English translation.)

Varje dag dör 21 000 barn under fem år. 40 procent dör redan under sin första månad i livet. Den här tragedin brukar benämnas “den tysta katastrofen” eftersom den sällan uppmärksammas annat än som statistik i rapporter.

De flesta barnen dör av näringsbrist, diarré eller andra sjukdomar. De dör av orsaker som med enkla medel skulle kunna förebyggas. Det som saknas är vaccin, medicin, rent vatten och näringsriktig mat. Saker som UNICEF kan leverera.

Den här bloggposten är en del av mitt bidrag. För i och med att jag publicerar den här bloggposten blir inte bara fler uppmärksammade på den tysta katastrofen utan dessutom innebär det att re:member skänker sex påsar av den nötkräm som UNICEF använder vid behandling av undernärda barn. Tre påsar nötkräm om dagen är allt som krävs för att ett barn som lider av undernäring ska kunna överleva.

Har du också en blogg och vill göra något viktigt i jul? Hämta bloggmaterial här! Annars kanske du kan hitta en julklapp i UNICEF’s gåvoshop.

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Every day, 21,000 children under the age of five die. 40 per cent die already during their first month of life. This is a “silent emergency” and rarely gets much attention, other than as a statistic in some report.

Most of the children die of malnutrition, diarrhea or other diseases. They die from easily preventable causes. What’s missing is vaccines, medicine, clean water and nutritious food. Things that UNICEF can deliver.

This blog post is a part of my contribution. Through publishing this post I will make more people aware of the silent emergency. In addition this blog post means that re:member will donate six bags of the peanut butter that UNICEF uses for treating malnourished children. Three bags of peanut butter a day is all that’s needed for a malnourished child to survive.

This blog campaign is aimed at a Swedish audience. But do look up the home page of your local UNICEF office and see what you can do to help.

]]> http://www.toomik.net/helen/blog/2011/12/16/notkram_peanut_butter/feed/ 0 http://www.toomik.net/helen/blog/2011/12/14/some_bookmarks/ http://www.toomik.net/helen/blog/2011/12/14/some_bookmarks/#comments Wed, 14 Dec 2011 20:58:07 +0000 Helen http://www.toomik.net/helen/blog/?p=3602 Some fresh links to good stuff:

• A Brief Rant on the Future of Interaction Design – The currently popular Pictures Under Glass technology is an interaction paradigm of permanent numbness. It denies our hands what they do best: touching things, sensing their tactile response. Claiming that Pictures Under Glass is the future of interaction is like claiming that black-and-white is the future of photography. It’s obviously a transitional technology. And the sooner we transition, the better.
• Gilad Shalit and the Rising Price of an Israeli Life – One soldier swapped for over 1,000 prisoners, most of them convicted terrorists. How and why did Israel end up in a place where they would agree to this deal?
• In ‘Game of Thrones,’ a Language to Make the World Feel Real | NY Times – Hollywood is driving demand for constructed languages, complete with grammatical rules, a written alphabet (hieroglyphics are acceptable) and enough vocabulary for basic conversations. (Estonian grammar gets mentioned in passing.)

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