I have tried pair programming a few times. It works (from my point of view) when both of us are roughly on the same level, and only when there is a problem that clearly needs more than one pair of eyes, because it’s risky or complicated. It’s worked well for some tricky SQL queries, as well as for a complex web page (a mixture of UpdatePanels, Repeaters, and javascript with embedded C# code blocks).

If the other developer is clearly more junior than me, pair programming kind of works as a method for knowledge sharing. I could get the job done noticeably faster on my own, but then we’d need additional time for handing over or explaining what was done, so the two might as well get done together. In those cases pair programming should be considered as a teaching/learning method rather than as a programming method.

But I do not like to do it for general run-of-the-mill coding – there has to be a specific reason for it.

Saying you should pair program “just because” is an inflexible approach, sort of like saying “hammer works for nearly any purpose”.

I do not need another person to help me focus (which is one of the advantages often mentioned). On the contrary, if someone is looking over my shoulder while I code, it really distracts me. Whereas if I am looking over someone else’s shoulder, I get incredibly frustrated by how inefficiently they work – because almost always they will be inefficient compared to my standards. They don’t know their tools, they don’t use keyboard shortcuts, they type slowly and carelessly. And I sit there and wait and sigh quietly.

I imagine I would enjoy pairing with an experienced and efficient programmer, but there aren’t any where I work – there’s no one more experienced than me. This is actually the greatest drawback of this job. I have no one to learn from; I can only learn by doing and by reading, and that’s only going to take me that far. I am a big fish in a small pond, whereas I would much rather be a tadpole in a big pond.

Connie grows up with her aunt and uncle, who take care of her out of duty and with not much love. The rest of the people in her life are not much different. She finds them boring and intolerant, and no one understands her. She has trouble at school (difficulty sitting still and concentrating, and often she falls asleep) and only one friend.

All this bleak dullness around her makes it all the more understandable that she loves her father Ted – because he is fun. Ted enjoys defying all social conventions and expectations, telling tall stories and making mischief. He steals garden gnomes from his neighbour’s garden, takes Connie to a porn movie, and sneaks them into a circus tent by crawling under its edge. Connie looks up to him, and takes after him: she hides a forbidden hamster in her room, rides without a ticket on her weekend trips to her dad, and leaves turds in front of neighbours’ doors.

Connie spends every other weekend with her father. Or rather, she is supposed to, but sometimes her father forgets. The more you read, the more you realise that Ted confuses unconventionality with selfishness: what he likes to think of as his rebellion isn’t anything high-minded like an effort to change the world or to show people what is possible, but simple disregard for others’ lives. Connie herself sees this only after many years of disappointment.

The story initially seems fun, but is sad inside: the almost infinite love and loyalty of a child is ignored by her father, and no one else in her life cares much for her, either. She is seen as trouble, and perhaps pitied. Today (or perhaps even in the 1970s, if she had caring parents?) she would probably be diagnosed with some kind of letter combination and get help at school. Or maybe not. And even with that help she would still not fit in anywhere in a conservative small town.

As semi-autobiographies go, this one wasn’t too bad, but not too good either. Connie was well written, but Ted’s character doesn’t quite work. He’s described as a womanizer, always introducing Connie to new girlfriends, but he comes across as ridiculous rather than charismatic, and it’s hard to understand how he’d attract all those women. A greater weakness is the book’s repetitive nature. Not much changes or develops over time, and it all becomes an endless list of Ted’s escapades. No matter how wild they all are, it becomes boring after a while.

You can buy it on Bokus.

Speaking of walking and talking, she has just learned to jump with two feet and is very proud of it. Her jumps are tiny, with both feet just barely leaving the floor, but she enjoys it a lot and will happily demonstrate this skill for us many times.

On the language front she is now grappling with grammar. She understands singular/plural (koer vs. koerad) and genitive (pappas tallrik) as well as some basic verb forms (springa vs. springer). More recently I’ve noticed that she is starting to use the definite forms of Swedish words (hämta boken) and to figure out some Estonian verb forms (oota / ootama / ootan). That last one is going to be a hard one; Estonian grammar is not for the faint-hearted.

Her love of letters (which I mentioned two months ago has cooled somewhat, but now and again she still likes me to point out letters for her. Somehow she’s also learned to count to 10. It’s not something we’ve practiced specifically, but I do count to 20 while brushing her teeth to get her to sit still long enough. (I count very fast when she’s really tired and cranky, and really slowly when she’s preoccupied and happy to let me brush. Time is relative.)

Last month’s emotional turbulence has settled and life is calmer here again. Or perhaps we’ve just become more adept at managing it? It seems to me, anyway, that it’s not as important any more for Ingrid to control every small aspect of her life, and she doesn’t react as strongly when things don’t go her way. We have found a workable balance again between our wants and needs.

My life also became a fair bit smoother when she discovered the wonders of Teletubbies. Now she spends about an hour watching Teletubbies every evening. When she’s tired she wants me to sit there with her (so I read a book or a magazine) but quite often she’s happy to watch it on her own for a while, which leaves me time to prepare dinner (for example). Very convenient.

I was somewhat less happy when she discovered the joys of candy. Of course all candy is near the checkouts in the supermarket, at eye level for a toddler. I made the mistake of letting her buy candy a few times, and then she came to expect it every time. When I realised where this was heading and started setting limits (no, it is not OK to eat a pack of sweets every day before dinner) she was quite upset. Luckily she’s more interested in buying the candy than eating it, so my current solution is to let her buy some occasionally, but then only let her eat a small part of what she bought, so that next time we’re at the supermarket I can tell her that she cannot buy any more because we still have candy at home. Or even better, I do the grocery shopping on my own – this way she doesn’t even think about candy, and rarely asks for it at home.

Ingrid watching TV, with cow and sticky plaster

Luckily Ingrid has found several other new interests, too. Singing is one of them, and she likes it almost as much as reading books. She brings me a songbook and asks me to sing for her, one song after the other. She also knows a lot of them by heart and sings them herself. (Well, not quite sings, but she speaks the lyrics with a special tone of voice, and sometimes there’s a bit of melody and a rhythm.) Any mention of a star or sight of a star (quite frequent this time of the year, with Christmas decorations popping up everywhere) is likely to set her off singing “Twinkle twinkle little star”. And many times she just picks a random song and starts singing it. Of course with many of the songs she has no chance of understanding the lyrics (“fjärran lockar du min syn / likt en diamant i skyn”… no chance!) but she still generally manages to pronounce something that we recognise.

Drawing and painting is another favourite – but painting with a brush, rather than with her fingers, which toddlers generally begin with. She had tried finger painting a few times at nursery, but not liked it much, so I wasn’t in a hurry to try it at home. But when she got to try painting with a brush (at the Estonian playgroup we go to) she really enjoyed it. So now we occasionally do that at home, too. She generally doesn’t like to get “stuff” on her hands, whether it’s sand or mud or paint, and tries to wipe it off straight away. When she finger paints, she does it carefully with the tip of one finger. When she draws with a pen or a brush she seems to feel a lot freer, and the result is far more vigourous.

Even some toys are interesting now: all kinds of puzzles. We’ve got a whole bunch, ranging from stuff that we thought she had outgrown (a knob puzzle with five large wooden geometrical shapes of different colours) through just-hard-enough (a set of four wooden jigsaw puzzles of 3 pieces each, with pictures from Disney’s The Jungle Book) to some that she definitely needs help with (a nine-piece cube puzzle).

Ingrid’s approach to knob puzzles is clearly based on memory: she’s got one with four blob-shaped pieces with animal pictures, and she puts each one in the right slot without having to think about it. With the geometrical one, she knows where the pieces fit, but she tries other approaches, too, discovering that while the rectangle will fit into the square slot, the square then won’t fit; and that the circular piece can be rotated in place but the others cannot.

She solves the jigsaws in two phases. First she finds the three pieces of the elephant (for example) because she knows what the picture is supposed to look like. Then she fits them together, based on shape (knob vs hole) and picture. The pictures make it easy, because they’re generally cut in three (head, body, feet) and she knows that the head should be above the body and the feet below.

But with cube puzzles, where there are no knobs to guide her, she always needs help. She can find the cow pieces on all cubes, and lay out the cubes with the cow side up, but she hasn’t figured out how to match adjacent cubes. Sometimes she lays them in a row, sometimes in a square (if she has the box to guide her) but she puts them in random places and with random orientation. I try to tell her that she needs to turn them to make them fit together, or switch them around, but she doesn’t understand how it all works.

And it’s a very slippery sludge, by the way. In fact it’s so slippery that ice is an improvement, because the sludge is thick enough to be slightly lumpy and uneven when it freezes. So when it’s above freezing in the morning I aim for the bare black parts of the road, and when it’s below freezing I aim for the frozen sludge.

I thought leaves used to be cleaned away well before they turned into mush, by men with leaf blowers or big street cleaning machines. Is this a new way to save money? Or are our streets too small for the city to care about?

Thanks to his powerful father the family is sheltered from most of the troubles that come with the war, but even so Bruno is not a credible 9-year-old. A boy of that age could not possibly miss that there is a war going on around him, or not know who the Führer is, or not have heard of Jews. (Come on, the word Führer is a normal German word meaning leader – how could a German boy NOT understand the word?) He would have to be incredibly stupid, or to live with his eyes shut and his ears covered, singing “la la la I cannot hear you”. This makes it rather hard to get engaged in Bruno’s view of life.

There’s not much else in the book to be engaged in, either. Everything except Bruno’s thoughts are very sketchily described, including his relationship and conversations with the one friend he finds. Perhaps Boyne does this to keep the book simple enough for children, but the end result is patronising and superficial.

The book is marketed as a child’s view of the Holocaust, but I wouldn’t give it to a child to teach them about the Holocaust. Firstly the book is sufficiently coy and indirect about what is actually happening, that a child reading it wouldn’t learn much unless they already knew a lot – and if they knew it already, they wouldn’t get anything new from this one. And secondly Boyne takes great liberties with various facts in order to make his plot work, so the reader would get a seriously misleading and sentimentalised picture of what it was like.

Very disappointing.

Amazon UK, Amazon US.

I pass some random person in the street, and for a brief moment I know it’s someone familiar – and it’s always someone who couldn’t possibly be there, because I know they’re in another country. Then my brain catches up and I see that there’s barely even a likeness. But for that fleeting moment there is such a strong connection that I cannot think about anything else, and when it’s gone, there’s always a sense of loss.

A few times this summer I “saw” colleagues from London. I remember several similar occurrences from when I first moved to Sweden 16 years ago. It says something about the strength of the sensation: even now I can remember where I was walking (outside my high school) when I “saw” one of them.

Interestingly I have never “seen” the people I used to see most often, or the people I missed most, but acquaintances whom I hadn’t even thought much about before moving.

Everyone is talking about quinoa everywhere, even the NY Times. It’s the in thing to eat, apparently. There were half a dozen different varieties of quinoa on the shelf in one of the supermarkets I went to recently. (On the other hand they had no pearl barley, which is what I was really looking for.)

So I tried it. And it was like eating styrofoam. Everybody says it has a “delicious mild nutty flavour”, and I thought it had almost no flavour at all. Perhaps it tastes good when compared to parboiled white rice… But it’s got no chance in competition with thai rice, or brown rice, or pearl barley.

It gets some plus points, though, for looking like tiny worms when cooked.

Are you a quinoa fan? Am I doing something wrong?

Ingrid’s latest favourite “toy” is a sticky plaster. Has to be the little pink one, the larger blue ones won’t do. She doesn’t want to put it on, and she doesn’t seem to do much with it, just hold it and carry it around. She takes it with her to nursery in the morning (and then loses it during the day and must get a new one when we get home). Yesterday she took one with her to bed, too. And I wasn’t allowed to put it on the bedside table – it must be on her pillow. The first thing she said when she woke up in the morning was “plåster!” and wouldn’t rest until we’d found it, under the blanket somewhere.

Erica is a successful copywriter, in a happy relationship with her partner Tom. One night Tom tells her that he wants to take a break from their relationship. She goes home and tries to drown her despair in alcohol. Then someone knocks on her door. She opens and meets a man who says he’s Death. (He was supposed to visit the man upstairs, he says, but went to the wrong door.) Erica is by now so drunk that she isn’t even scared.

A few days later (after Erica finds out that the man upstairs has died from a cerebral hemorrhage) Death comes back to visit Erica. They talk. He turns out to be charming and funny, and not at all scary. He sleeps in her sofa, and makes her a luxurious breakfast the morning after. Soon he’s sort of moved in with her, cooks her gourmet dinners and even does the dishes. He asks Erica to accompany him to a few jobs, and after a while asks her to take care of some souls herself. Without thinking twice, Erica uses the opportunity to “solve some problems” among her acquaintances.

It’s weird combination of thriller and chick lit. Mostly chick lit, though: after all, the book is mostly about the love life of a hip young woman, plus some sprinklings of her work life, told in an irreverent tone and with lots light humour. I don’t know if it’s a chick lit thing or not, but I found Erica annoyingly stupid and really couldn’t sympathize with her when things started to go wrong for her.

I like reading about natural forces presented as people, because there are often interesting angles to those stories. Here this plot device isn’t used too well: Death gets to deliver too many philosophical lectures. And Erica herself gets involved in a project about genetic testing, so we get those debates as well. Because of the setting the discussion cannot be anything but superficial and banal. And when Death is joined by the Devil, and later it turns out that Jesus is still alive as well, it all becomes too much.

The story also spirals somewhat out of hand, but the final twist is a good one.

The book isn’t badly written, but it’s like all the other Swedish books I’ve read in the past 6 months: the language is that of a journalist. There are facts and descriptions, but there is no beauty in it. The author has no voice of her own. Disappointing, really.

Bokus. No Amazon links because the book hasn’t been translated into English.

But it all felt uncomfortable and weird rather than fun. How did it become OK to just go out and beg?

There is a somewhat similar tradition in Estonia kadripäev and mardipäev or St Catherine’s day and St Martin’s day, one for girls and one for boys. But the girls and boys who go out as kadrisandid or mardisandid give something in return. At the very least they sing: first behind the door, asking to be let in, and then more songs once they’re in. Traditionally they would also bless the household but I’m not sure how much of that is still done.

In fact I’m not sure if the tradition is still alive… perhaps it’s been drowned by Halloween. I remember doing this when I was around 10 years or so, and I remember receiving kadrid later than that. But now I’ve been away for 15 years of course.

In any case, it was fun to get a visit from a gang of kadrid. It was a show. The family would gather in the hallway and listen. These kids came, got their candy and left. Where’s the fun in that?

One evening last week, when she had skipped her nap and was cranky and tired (tired enough to say no to all kinds of activities but not tired enough to sleep), I sat down in front of a computer with her and turned on Teletubbies. She sat there as if she had been hypnotised, staring at the screen, totally happy.

Now she is addicted. Almost every afternoon when we get home from nursery, she asks for Teletubbies. Sometimes she asks for Teletubbies as soon as we get up in the morning. When the one-hour episode ends, she asks for more. (We’ve limited it to one round, i.e. she can watch all of one DVD but only once, and only in the evening.)

And by the way, that’s when she’s only seen one disc of a three-disc set. She’s perfectly happy watching the same one hour over and over again, day after day. I haven’t even mentioned the other two to her.

Today something went wrong with the computer and there was no sound. No matter! Ingrid accepted silent Teletubbies, too.

This is how TV addiction starts, I guess…

The Lady and the Unicorn is a famous series of woven tapestries, created in the 15th century, when tapestries were all the rage among the rich and powerful.

Jean Le Viste, recently ennobled, wants to show to the nobility of France that he is as good as them, so he orders a set of tapestries for his house. He wants them to show the battle of Nancy, but his wife decides that something less violent would fit the dining room better. She wants an allegorical series instead, with unicorns.

The story is told from the points of view of half a dozen people who affect the making of the tapestries, consciously or not. There’s the artist who draws the design. There’s the family of Brussels weavers who make it. And then there’s the lady and the daughter of the Le Viste family, who inspire the artist as he draws the pictures.

Chevalier jumps between the viewpoints, as they all see the creation of thea tapestries from very different angles. The stories overlap and hook into each other – a rather obvious metaphor of weaving.

Nicolas, the artist, is the warp that keeps all the stories together. He’s a horny young man, chasing all the women he meets, seducing them with the myth of the unicorn and its potent horn. At the same time, his love for women and his ability to, nevertheless, see them as individuals is what makes the tapestry a masterpiece.

It’s a lightweight but enjoyable book, and my opinion of it keeps shifting depending on the mood I’m in.

One the one hand it’s very readable: the story flows smoothly with hardly any padding, and the characters really come to life. It’s also a very evocative book: it made me wish I could see the tapestries myself. As usual, Amazon reviewers complain about vulgarity and unlikeable characters, but I found both of these flaws to be limited. There’s plenty of vulgarity and imperfection in life, and as long as it’s interestingly presented, I don’t mind.

On the other hand there’s no denying that the book is superficial and the characters simplistic – Nicolas in particular feels very one-dimensional. A slight smell of cheap romance hovers over the book, with some rather unlikely events and far too modern thoughts in the head of, for example, a 14-year old girl raised in the sheltered confines of a Catholic, noble family.

A good and memorable read but not enough to make me go Wow.

Numerous reviewers had come away disappointed because they had previously read The Girl with the Pearl Earring by the same author. Since I found this one first, it sounds like I have something even better to look forward to.

Amazon UK, Amazon US.

(Ingrid’s quite fascinated with photos: every time I try to take a photo of her she runs to me and wants to look at it on the camera screen. Often she does this before I’ve even had time to take the picture, which makes it quite hard to get any photos at all…) I didn’t have the time to take any photos of the birthday party myself, so I’m hoping the guests will send me theirs. Hint, hint…

We had two yellow candles for her, and spoke about how she’s now two years old. I don’t think she understands what a year is, but she understood that the number two has something to do with her now. Whenever we run across a “two” somewhere in a story or a book, she pauses, and very proudly tells me “kaks aastat!”

On a whim I went to Frisörakademien (“haircutting academy”) which is what it sounds like: a hairdressing school. I pass it every morning on my way to work, and then again in the afternoon, and every day I see their sign advertising haircuts for 99kr which is dirt cheap. Worth a try.

The haircut I got was a good one. I got more care and attention from the guy than I normally do from a hairdresser. He was very focused on doing the best possible job, took note of the various whorls in my hair and so on. More experienced hairdressers are more likely to give me their Stock Haircut #14. I looked good when I walked out of there, and I still looked good this morning when I’d slept away his styling efforts.

It was interesting to hear them talk about haircutting technique, too. The whole process turned out to be more standardised and organised than I had realised.

What I gained in price and attention, though, I lost in time. The haircut took almost an hour and a half. I was all stiff and my bum was sore from sitting still for so long, and I was almost falling asleep there in the end. On balance, I don’t think I’ll be going back there… I’m willing to pay money for not sitting still for 85 minutes.

Just as I was ready to give up all hopes of good sushi lunches, one of my colleagues found one. It was delicious. Salmon and prawn, of course, but also 2 kinds of tuna, plus a macquerel or something. And really full of flavour, too.

Even better: that place is about halfway between our current office and the new office we’ll move to in February, so we can keep visiting it!

Sushi Devil on Tegnérgatan.

Yesterday’s post was all about Ingrid’s emotional rollercoaster life. Today’s is about more practical things.

Last month’s big news was the nursery start. This month it’s become routine, and Ingrid now really enjoys going to nursery. Most days I leave for work first, and later Eric drops her off at nursery. On the few mornings that I’ve done it, she’s gone straight to one of the nursery teachers, smiling all the way, and then carelessly waved good-bye to me. In the afternoon she’s always happy to see me and ready to go home, but already she’s sometimes telling me that she’d like to play some more, and that she wants to go to nursery the next day again.

While I don’t know exactly how she behaves there during the day, I get the impression that she’s as social there as she is at home. When I get there she’s almost always engaged in some activity together with a teacher. She knows the names of her own three teachers, and a few others that she sees when all the different groups are playing outside in the yard. She knows the other kids’ parents and tells me who’s whose mum.

Playing on her own is not her thing. In fact playing is not really her thing. At home her toys mostly languish in the box. If I join her, she doesn’t mind building with her Duplo blocks for a while, but not for long. She’d rather we read books together. I remember when she was smaller, she used to sit with her books all on her own. But that was before she learned that there are stories in the books, and I can get the stories out of the books, while she cannot. I’m very glad we got all those books when we went to Estonia in the summer: they’re very popular, and it’s great to be able to read in Estonian rather than translate Swedish books on the fly.

She’s also very fond of singing. They must do a lot of singing at nursery, because I often catch her singing snatches of songs that I don’t recognise. (Those songs are often followed by a “bravo!” which must also be something she’s picked up at nursery.) In Estonian we sing Põdra maja with all the movements, and Süda tuksub (which I remember my grandmother singing to me) and the one that goes mis need käivad kiiga-kääga. All sorts of “hopping” songs are great fun, too – Sõit, sõit, linna etc. I thought at first that I’d somehow only stick to Estonian songs, but I’ve realised that that plan was unworkable and abandoned it. Imse vimse spindel is too important, as are Bockarna Bruse and others.

I was a bit concerned that speaking Swedish all day at nursery would make her prefer Swedish, or that she’d be slower learning Estonian. No problems yet: most of the time she’s quite comfortable switching between languages. It gets a bit confusing for her when I’m also speaking Swedish (to the nursery staff, for example). But generally, when she says something that she only knows in Swedish, I reply in Estonian. She usually picks that up after a few repetitions and uses the Estonian word from then on. But there are some phrases that she has heard a lot in Swedish, and hardly ever in Estonian. She tends to stick to Swedish with these. (“Mommy will come in the afternoon” is one example that she probably heard many times during her early weeks at nursery.)

As a preventative measure we’re going to an Estonian playgroup every other Sunday. There’s a lot of singing there, which she likes, followed by some sort of creative activity. She’s tried painting with a brush there, and liked it a lot better than the crayons we’ve at home for a while. I think she was getting bored with them because there were too few colours, and she had to press quite hard to make a mark with them. The brushes made big marks quickly. Now I’ve bought a set of colourful felt-tip pens, and those are a lot more popular. She can draw things with these that she couldn’t make with crayons: small dots and big sweeping curves.

But I can’t spend all my evening drawing or reading, and it’s only fun for a short while if she’s on her own. She’d rather “help” me wash the dishes or load the washing machine. And in fact sometimes she does help rather than “help”. She can take the cutlery basket from the dishwasher and put away all the cutlery in the right compartments in the drawer (as long as I take care of all the irregular items there). She can put on her shoes and sometimes manages trousers or socks, too. Jackets and tops are harder: she can get them off but not on.

She wants to do like I do, and be like I am. When we eat dinner, and I lay out a fork and knife for myself, but only a fork for her, she wants a knife, too. When I hurt my finger, she wants a plaster, too. She points out all the things we have in common: that I put on a shirt, and that she is also putting on a shirt; that I go to work, and she goes to nursery.

Ingrid also points out all sorts of other things. We talk a lot when we’re out and about: both of us, not just me. She’s become quite verbal quite fast. We speak about how leaves fall off the trees, and how some trees are all bare now, and the leaves are on the ground. How the ground is wet after rain, and how it gets dark in the evening. We speak about things we pass: trees and cats and lawnmowers and garbage trucks. Quite often, she also mentions things that have happened before. This is where we saw the cat go into the bushes. This is where the garbage truck was standing yesterday. Here is where Ingrid fell from the swing and hit her head. And that was back in August I think: she’s got a long memory.

Twenty-four months. Two years. It feels like some sort of longer-term retrospective is in order but I can’t think of any good angle for it so it’s not happening today at least. Just the ordinary monthly thing.

In one sense, this has been a month of consolidation. She hasn’t mastered any major new skills, and there haven’t been any big changes in her life. But at the same time I feel that she’s changed a lot emotionally.

Ingrid’s become a lot more independent-minded. She has opinions on just about everything, and it’s become more and more important for her to have a choice, to make up her own mind, to feel in control, and to do things herself. She wants to choose what clothes she wears (which leads to some rather garish choices, such as an pink top paired with red and orange striped trousers). She wants to decide which towel I dry her with, and which route we take when we go home from nursery. She wants to turn on the bathroom light herself, and to take off the cap on the toothpaste herself, and to pour her own breakfast cereal. There’s a constant stream of “ise!” (“myself!”) all the time.

And these things are IMPORTANT to her. Her reaction to when things go “wrong” (meaning, not the way she would have done them) is instant and very emotional. There are floods of tears, and “Ingrid sad!”. (She generally reacts with sadness rather than anger.) She’s never been quite this emotionally fragile before. This independence and emotional fragility remind me of my own teenage years, as far as I can recall them. I’m guessing that this is as tough for her as teenage is for teenagers.

Quite often I forget these small things – I haven’t quite internalised the importance of who gets to turn on the bathroom light – so we end up redoing things. I turn off the light again and then she gets to turn it on. Since it’s obviously much more important to her than me, I don’t mind.

Of course, there are times when we will do things my way. We will take off a soaking wet nappy, no matter what she thinks about it. (For some reason she’s become really averse to nappy changes recently.) And we will go grocery shopping in the afternoon, even though she’d rather sit at home and read a book, because otherwise we won’t have anything to cook for dinner.

Those occasions are quite enlightening, actually, because I can see that her crying is not due to any sort of defiance or hoping to get her way, or a performance somehow aimed at me. She is truly upset. This afternoon, on our way out to go grocery shopping, she bawled all the way as she walked (on her own, ahead of me) out of the house and down the steps in the garden. She’d understood that I wasn’t going to change my mind, and that she had to do this, but she was still oh so unhappy about it. When both of us had reached the bottom of the stairs and I’d strapped her into her stroller, and we’d started walking, she wanted to point out a tree to me (because it had no leaves) and she could barely get the words out through her sobs.

Running with a handbag in one hand and a dry leaf in the other

Luckily the emotional storms pass quickly. We hug each other, or something distracts her, or we get the unpleasant task done and move on. Distractions help: a nappy change is more OK if I sing to her while we do it (despite my total lack of musical talent) or if she gets some puzzle blocks to play with. Early warnings also make things smoother (“we will read one more story, and then we’ll go brush your teeth”) and so do promises of better things to come (“we will go grocery shopping now, and when we’re home again we will draw pictures”).

I’ve also noticed that she feels more comfortable when things follow a routine, and are done the same way every day. People always say routine is good for babies, but I notice it a lot more now that she’s a bit older. We have our going-home-from-nursery routine, and our morning bathroom routine, and our bedtime routine. She also likes small things to be done “the right way”: she quickly reminds me when I forget to light the candle on our dinner table, or when I give her a piece of bread but no plate.

Sort of in the same vein, fixed rules often work better than one-off decisions, assuming the rule can be explained in terms that she understands. “You cannot splash in puddles without rubber boots. No nursing during the night. You cannot sit in my lap while I’m eating. No drawing on hands, clothes, or table: only on the paper. We can eat when the timer rings.” She understands these kinds of rules very well and can repeat them to me herself. It’s harder to get her to accept decisions like “we must change your nappy now” or “we cannot go for a bus ride now because we need to go home and cook dinner instead”.

Our weekends are routineless almost by definition, firstly because she’s not at nursery, and secondly because that’s when we do all the odd tasks we don’t have time for during the week. But I believe I will try to find a fixed routine our weekday afternoons, going grocery shopping every day even though every other day is really enough, just to make life run more smoothly.

The book is written in first person, from the point of view of Amir, a young Afghan. Amir grows up in a prosperous family in 1970s Kabul, together with Hassan, the illiterate son of the family’s servant. Both boys are motherless, and they spend their entire childhood together. Hassan remains unshakeably loving and loyal, even though Amir sometimes cannot help treating him as an underling. Amir struggles to earn his father’s love and never quite succeeds. Then war forces them into exile in the US, where Amir’s father loses some of his power and influence, even though they both still remain close to the Afghan community. An old friend, now dying, asks Amir to return to Afghanistan, and various complications ensue.

The main weakness of this whole story is that it isn’t a cohesive story. It’s the union of three disparate parts: first the childhood memories, then the years in exile, and then the trip back. And there’s not enough glue to hold them together: they all have different tone, and the links between them are weak.

The first section of the book, the childhood in Afghanistan, was interesting and beautiful, even though some events were rather predictable. But when Amir moves to the US the story changes abruptly into something rather ordinary, with a love story, a death, some unexpected news etc. This part is far less interesting: events slow down, and Amir doesn’t have anything particularly interesting to say.

The third part, the return to Afghanistan, is different again. Now there are action scenes and danger. Finally, pointless complications are introduced at the very end, that would have made sense if this was an autobiography, but don’t work in a fictional context.

These three sections are sort of linked by some events and facts, but some of these links seem rather contrived, the way people in soap operas find out that their husband’s twin did not die in childhood after all but is now back with a vengeance, and so on. And just like soap operas, the book manages to combine improbability with predictability.

Some reviewers have wondered whether the book was written with Hollywood in mind. Others have questioned whether perhaps Hosseini tried writing just about his childhood, and was then told by a publisher that he needed a plot, that the book needed to make a “point”. Either of these would explain the odd mixture in this book.

The writing itself was average at best, with lots of clichés and the almost-obligatory sprinklings of farsi words in all dialogue.

It was interesting to read about pre-war Afghanistan, but I can’t say the book gave me any real insight into the culture or history of Afghanistan. Despite being set in Afghanistan, the book felt American. My guess is that the book will mainly appeal to readers who want “riveting dramas of betrayal and salvation”, with the exoticism of Afghanistan adding some extra spice. Mass-market entertainment.

Amazon US, Amazon UK.

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.