More baby signing goodness! After “all done” and “boob” Ingrid has more or less learned “sleep” and “drink” as well. Both quite useful signs.

The boob sign has turned out to be particularly interesting. The signing makes it very obvious how often she really thinks about boobs. I knew that she likes breastfeeding when she gets up (in the morning as well as after naps) and in the evening, and sometimes when she’s hungry, and sometimes when she’s upset. But she also signs “boob” at random intervals during the day. “Here’s a toy, hmm let’s see what I can do with that, oh look there’s mummy, BOOB!”

Ingrid has also started combining the sign with the word (in Estonian), pronouncing it clearly enough to leave no doubt that it’s a word and not just noise. This is her third more-or-less clear word which she uses on her own initiative. I’m not sure but I get the impression that the signing helped. Perhaps giving her a very simple and unique symbol for an important concept made it easier to learn the word as well?

All of her other words really sound the same… there’s “baba”, I think, for “daddy” (“pappa”) but also “bapa” for “navel” (“naba”) and “päppä” for “lamp” (“lampa”).

For some reason Ingrid has been fascinated by my navel. Most times when we sit down to breastfeed she starts by pointing at my navel and saying “bapa”. She has discovered that the navel looks similar to my nipples and to a birthmark, and tried using the “bapa” word for all of these – “little round thing on mummy’s skin”, perhaps?

I have discovered that while it is nice to spend some time with the family, two weeks with a toddler is almost more work than work is. A full day at home with Ingrid has us all climbing the walls by the evening. (Perhaps it is just a phase… but I suspect it’ll turn out to be a long one.) She needs new places and ideally other children around her.

So during our two-week Christmas vacation we made sure to get out every day and give Ingrid some place to burn all her restless energy. We cycled to big parks and playgrounds (Victoria Park and Southwark Park). We took the tube to Bramley’s Big Adventure and to Zoomaround and to Discover Story Centre. We made several visits to the two child-friendly museums near us, the Museum of Childhood and the Museum in Docklands. We went to the local children’s library. To put it briefly, we kept Ingrid busy.

Then came the stomach bug. Bah. And then came the two days after the worst symptoms had passed but we didn’t dare take her to nursery, or to any place where she’d get too close to other children. Argh! Two days of enforced idleness at home plus the “hangover” from a stomach bug was an awful combination. On Tuesday, out of desperate boredom, I actually went shopping with Ingrid, and I hate shopping.

I think we were all happy to go back to our day jobs.

Today Ingrid understood how spoons work, I think.

She’s been playing with spoons since she started eating solids but would rarely use them for eating – it was up to me to get the food to her mouth. She got a little cutlery set as well as a silver spoon for her first birthday and has been practicing a lot more since then.

The big challenge was gravity. A spoon fits much better in the mouth when it is upside down (try it!), with the concave side touching the tongue. So inevitably the spoon in Ingrid’s hand would turn upside down at some point on its way from bowl to mouth, which led to much food dripping onto her bib.

The other difficulty was understanding how food gets onto the spoon. She would dip the spoon upright in the food – peck, peck, peck – and lick off the little that stuck to it. Or she’d wait for me to put food on the spoon, and then take the spoon to her mouth, and then put the spoon back in the bowl and look expectantly at me.

But today for the first time I saw her try to scoop up food with the spoon, and then guide the spoon to the mouth without turning it. I think it’s clicked for her. It’s fun to see this kind of thing happen!

I’ve uploaded a bunch of new photos.

Our baby monitor runs on batteries.
The batteries last about a week.
The batteries have to be taken out for recharging, because the base station provides electricity but does not recharge batteries.
And the battery compartment closes with a SCREW.

Truly, sometimes I think some corporations are simply evil. Someone somewhere is rubbing their hands and thinking with glee of all the time that parents will spend screwing and unscrewing that darn thing.

The book is subtitled “Three adventures of Vlad Taltos”. Vlad is an assassin and a minor crime boss, with an intelligent mini-dragon as a pet.

The stories take place in a world where humans are a minor race, and the dominant people are almost-human Dragaerans, who look down on humans. Dragaerans are near-immortal, powerful wizards. Humans are puny.

Quite an interesting world which becomes more complex and more complicated as we learn more about it. Brust throws in more and more stuff as the pages go by: reincarnation, a complex social/political system, two different kinds of magic, etc. One important part of magic is that it can revive the dead. This obviously makes an assassin’s job somewhat different.

As far as the story goes, the Taltos books are mystery stories, really, rather than traditional fantasy. There are numerous assassinations but the focus is not on the act itself but on the planning or the foiling of a plot to kill someone. The style is not the usual fantasy style, either. It is relaxed and modern, with lots of humour. An Amazon reviewer compared it to Futurama and that’s quite apt.

There is a lot of dialogue and a lot of elaborate plot, yet very little description. I guess that’s in keeping with the hard-boiled mystery style, but I thought Brust pushed it a bit too far. I have no idea what the world or the people look like, apart from a very few basic descriptions. (Dragaerans are tall and slim; humans have mustaches.)

The story itself was not entirely believable. First of all there’s Vlad’s relationships with some of the most powerful Dragaerans. Dragaerans are said to generally view humans as worthless scum, and yet here some lords actually chat to Vlad and go out of their way to help him. An explanation is given at some point but not a particularly satisfactory one.

Then, more fundamentally, there’s the matter of assassinations, and making a living as an assassin, and becoming what’s described as a first-class assassin, in a world where assassinations are illegal and rare. On the one hand Brust implies that there’s a whole business of assassination, with standard fees and general procedures to be followed when ordering one. On the other hand Vlad mentions, at some point, that he has 42 assassinations under his belt, and that was (I think) over a period of some 5 to 10 years. So he only kills a person once every few months. That doesn’t add up. It’s too little to give him a chance to become good at it, and too little to make an assassination a normal occurrence.

On the whole the book stands out from the general mass of fantasy books: quite entertaining, memorable, never boring. But it’s not well enough written to stand with the best of them (the repetitive dialogue quirks became annoying after a while). Good for a rainy weekend or two.

Another review I liked.
Amazon US, Amazon UK.