… I wrapped all Christmas gifts and reorganised Ingrid’s clothes drawers.

… I bought the last Christmas gift, and cleared out all camera-related junk from my desk (left there since I bought a new camera a few months ago) and an old magazine. Puny, but still, it’s progress.

… I went through the last two bank statements (6 months’ worth of transactions), the pile of DVDs on my desk, about 50 blog posts from the “to process” list, and a few loose papers.

In other news, Ingrid’s finally well again but had her crankiest, whingiest day in recent memory. Nothing was good, everything was no no no. Probably because she hasn’t had a proper meal since Monday… When she gets too hungry, she gets stuck in a vicious circle: her mood becomes so unstable and contrarian that she will even say no to food, just because she’s in a bad mood. This time a handful of grapes broke the circle and after that she was as happy as ever.

Today I finished sewing a curtain which I’ve been working on, off and on, for over a week. Finally at least one of the windows in this house has a curtain! It was getting sort of urgent because (1) the window in question is that of the veranda door and was noticeably cold, and (2) the window sits right opposite the bathroom door, so anyone looking in that direction from outside has a view straight into the bathroom.

The hardest part was finding a suitable fabric. It was very easy to find Christmas themed fabrics, and to find traditional furniture fabrics. (You know the kind – they’re heavy, tend to have scrollwork or fleurs de lys or similar designs, and often very rich colours like brown, red, cream and gold. Not at all suitable for a relatively narrow hallway in an early 1900s wooden house.) I ended up ordering 2.5 metres of a fabric that was expensive relative to what I saw in most shops, but considering that I intend to have this curtain hanging there (and have to look at it daily) for the next 15–20 winters, it was well worth it.

Besides, it turned out that fabric ordered directly from the manufacturer is delivered on a roll, which means no creases at all, which means no ironing!

On day one I measured twice and cut once. No, actually I measured four times and cut twice, once for the main fabric and once for the lining. Then I pinned the lower hems.

On day two I sewed the lower hems and measured and cut the eight little loops.

On day three I zigzagged and then hemmed the edges of the eight fiddly little loops. 32 darn seams, meaning 64 knots to tie, and by the end of it I had knots swimming in front of my eyes even when I looked away.

On day four I pinned the loops in place between the curtain and the lining, pinned and sewed the top edge, and pinned the two sides.

On day five I sewed the two sides and reinforced the bases of the loops. Then I got overconfident and topstitched the top edge without pinning it (I had the main seam there to keep things in place, after all!) but the lining was slippery and the two layers ended up slipping so it didn’t hang straight.

On day six I did penance for my hubris by unpicking the entire topstitching seam.

On day seven I pinned the top edge and topstitched it again and hung up the curtain and was quite pleased.

PS: The fabric is from Sandberg and I bought it at Var Dags Rum.

Due to favourable calendaric alignment (lots of holidays falling on weekdays) I’ve got two and a half weeks of vacation time this Christmas and new year, for the cost of only 6 vacation days. My ambitious plan for these weeks is to do all the stuff that has piled up and not gotten done over the last few months. I hope to:

• Take down the wall between the kitchen and the living room
• Clean up my desk and get rid of the many (but admittedly relatively tidy) piles of papers, magazines, CDs, DVDs, letters etc on it
• Do a proper GTD review, emptying my head of all the things I know I need to do and getting it all down on paper
• Unpack some more boxes from our move
• Sew a skirt for Ingrid
• Decide what kind of laptop to buy
• Do my UK tax return for last year

Despite Ingrid’s continuing illness (it now looks to be something flu-like) I got off to a good start today:

• Finished a curtain I have been working on for the last 10 days or so
• Got rid of one pile of paper from my desk by typing in all my expenses for the last month or so
• Processed (named, rotated and sorted into folders) all my photos from the last month or so

Let’s hope I don’t run out of energy before I’m done.

Nothing new to say, since I haven’t done anything much in the last few days because Ingrid’s been ill. Runny nose, cough, fever (peaking at over 40°C on Tuesday) and feeling generally tired and miserable. Every few minutes she tells me “jälle nohu!” and wants me to wipe her nose. Today she was so tired that she even let me wear her in a baby carrier for over two hours, for the first time in half a year.

I don’t think we’ve done anything majorly new or interesting this month. Just the same old stuff. So this month I’ll focus a bit more on life’s basic parts – the kinds of things that I haven’t written much about for a while, and won’t be able to remember when I look back at this time 5 years from now.

Slouching in front of Teletubbies

Eating. Ingrid eats surprisingly well and with surprising skill. I’m pleased to say that she eats almost all kinds of food: starchy stuff, dairy and eggs, pulses and vegetables, and since I’ve heard no comments from nursery, probably meat too. She is fond of sweet stuff of course: she picks the raisins out of her buns, loves to drink juice with her breakfast, and wants a lot of jam on her pancakes. She licks the butter of the bread, and eats sour cream with a spoon.

Food tastes especially good when we’re preparing it. She’d much rather eat the ingredients while I’m cooking than the finished meal. Canned beans in particular – often she eats so much from the jar that she’s full by the time I’m done cooking.

I think she’s also started to pay attention to the shape of food. She sees shapes in her half-eaten pieces of bread, likes to eat “butterfly pasta” (farfalle), and prefers heart-shaped gingerbread cookies to round ones. Just a matter of time until she starts building porridge mountains and milk lakes.

The amount she eats varies a lot. Sometimes I wonder how she can possibly subsist on the tiny amounts she eats. But just now she’s come out of a major eating phase when she ate twice her normal portions, with no more than 3 hours between meals. Nevertheless she is much slimmer now than ever before (except as newborn). Not a skinny girl by any means, but not the little sumo wrestler she used to be.

Sleeping. Back in June it looked like she might be giving up naps but that reversed and she now naps every day again. Sometimes she objects, but when I go to the bedroom she’d rather join me than play on her own. Once we’re there she’s happy to lie down with me, and soon after that she falls asleep. The evening bedtime routine takes longer. I tell her a story and then give her a cuddle, and then wait about 15 minutes for her to actually fall asleep. Not too bad, all things considered: it takes a while but there’s no struggle.

Once she’s gone to sleep she sleeps well and soundly. Occasionally she kicks off her covers and I need to pull them over her again. Around 5:30 or 6:00 she shifts into lighter sleep, and any movement in the room will wake her. She sort of goes back to sleep when I lay a hand on her, but neither of us gets much proper sleep after that. I imagine she would sleep longer in the morning if she slept in a room of her own, but there’s no such room to be had right now.

Potty. Ingrid’s nappy-free most of her awake time now, but still wears a nappy for naps, and when we’re out on town and cannot always get to a potty fast (e.g. on the train). Sometimes she tells me she needs to go potty, and sometimes I ask her and she says yes. The occasional accidents happen when I suspect she needs to go, but she says no for some reason – probably because she has more interesting stuff to do. And she almost always ends up pooping in her panties. I know she knows when it’s about to happen, but for some reason she doesn’t want to do it on the potty.

Helping me pin a curtain hem

Skills. She picks her own clothes every morning and generally puts them on herself. She now likes dresses and skirts – but unfortunately only has one of each. She used to have no interest in clothes and would wear whatever I dressed her in, and I haven’t quite caught up with this new interest in clothes. (I tried to find more skirts but couldn’t find anything in the shops that looked good and seemed comfortable.)

She knows how the microwave oven works and how we cook food. She hands me stuff while I’m cooking, measures and pours water for me (with quite a lot of guidance from me). Her favourite task, apart from eating the ingredients, is to put veggies in the saucepan for cooking. She knows that the stove and the saucepan are hot, and that the water must be boiling (must have “big bubbles”) before we put the food in. And then we wait until the knob on the timer reaches the little O and makes “rrring”, and then the food is done.

Language. Swedish is definitely gaining the upper hand. Whenever Ingrid talks to herself, it’s almost always in Swedish. I still always speak Estonian to her, and she mostly responds in Estonian, too, although Swedish words sneak in quite often. A losing battle.

She can mostly keep apart the words, but grammar is harder. She often mixes the two: “en hobune” – one (Swedish) horse (Estonian), and “juurde emme saapad” – next to mummy’s boots, Estonian words but Swedish word order, and even “på laua peal” – on (Swedish) table on (Estonian).

I think she’s close to figuring out pronouns now. She talks of herself in 2nd person (du springer – you are running, sa tahad juua – you want to drink) because that’s what she hears from the adults around her. Sometimes even in 3rd person – I guess she hears how the nursery teachers talk about other children. But I get the feeling that she knows it’s not quite right, and I’ve started to say things like “Ingrid says ’I am hungry’” rather than saying “you are hungry” to make the distinction clear.

She understands simple questions (what, who, where) but she doesn’t ask any herself. She can ask “Kus on Ingrid?” (where is Ingrid?) when she wants me to play hide and seek with her, but she’s repeating a phrase she’s heard me use, rather than asking the question herself. Likewise she can say “Mis see on?” when she wants me to guess what sort of shape she sees in her biscuit, but when she really wants to know the name of some thing, she says “Den!” (“that!”) in a demanding voice instead.

Recently I’ve started asking her what she did at nursery and sometimes I actually got coherent answers from her. She’s told me that they’ve sung Happy Birthday for Elin, another girl at nursery, and that they’ve played, and that she didn’t like Ahmed because he hurt her. Quite often the most important thing for her is to tell me who was there and who wasn’t.

We still read and sing quite a lot, even though an hour of each evening is consumed by Teletubbies. We go to an Estonian playgroup every other week, and spend about 40 minutes singing, and they spend some time singing every morning at nursery too. She may sit and stare mutely while she’s there, but she often sings the songs later at home. Now her singing clearly has a melody, and she can sing several simpler songs from beginning to end. Some that she hasn’t heard for a while get abbreviated to the most important parts: “Lilla bocken Bruse… Alla bockar Bruse… i skogen!”

Last month I mentioned puzzles, and Triin told me that her son, who’s a few months older than Ingrid, can manage a real jigsaw puzzle with help. Eric got a 16-piece wooden jigsaw (with farm animals) for Ingrid, and we both guessed that it would probably be suitable in a few months time. It turns out that we severely underestimated both her interest and ability. She’s played with it every single day I think, often putting it together several times in a row. Initially she needed a lot of guidance but now she can do it all on her own. It’s got a frame to guide her, which helps a lot, but mostly she does it by memory. “Horse piece… here. Sheep. Cow piece… here.”

Following the leader

She’s actually played with both the jigsaw and her Duplo set all on her own a few times, but generally she still spends very little time on her own. She remembers and likes to re-play the same games with me. When we build with Duplo, we don’t just build: we build a “snake” or a “wall” or a “house for Bu and Bä” (two of her soft toys). And whenever we build a house for Bu and Bä, it’s always for those two toys and no others.

We’ve played hide-and-seek, which means that she crawls in under the table and tells me “Where is Ingrid?” and I’m then supposed to go looking for her while loudly commenting – “Is Ingrid in the oven? No! Is Ingrid on the step stool? No!”. Sometimes we play follow-the-leader where we both lie on the floor and kick, or stretch one leg towards the ceiling, or “cycle” with our legs, etc. She also likes running, jumping up and down, twirling until she’s so dizzy she cannot stand straight, and tumbling around on the floor with me. She’s not a climber though: I never find her climbing on the sofa or even the low table.

I read the book when it was first published, back in 2002. This year it was republished as a graphic novel, illustrated by Craig Russell.

Coraline and her parents have recently moved into a big old house. One rainy day, when it’s raining too hard for Coraline to explore the grounds, she decides to explore the inside of the house. She finds a door that goes to the other side of the house, where everything is fun. She finds her “other mother” and “other father” there, who are just like her parents except they are always happy to see her – and they have black buttons for eyes. They’d love to have her stay there forever. There’s only one catch: she would have to get black button eyes, too.

A child’s dream come true – “why couldn’t my parents always be nice and always have time for me?”. But as always in fairy tales, everything has a cost.

Coraline decides she doesn’t want black button eyes and comes back to her own side of the house, where discovers that the other mother has somehow stolen her real parents. So she returns to the other side in order to find them and bring them back.

It’s funny and spooky-scary and very well written, as all of Gaiman’s books. And Coraline is a great character, an unusually sensible and brave child protagonist, despite the lack of magical powers or grand quests.

The illustrated version is nice, but as often happens, it has lost a good part of its horror compared to the original. When reading a book, my imagination provides its own versions of the scary possibilities and spooky places and situations. Inevitably someone else’s pictures of the same thing are less frightening. Words are for me more powerful than pictures – I’d rather have a thousand words than one picture.

But I am looking forward to the stop-motion film coming out next year (trailer).

See a preview of the book at HarperCollins.

Amazon UK, Amazon US.

Half a year ago Ingrid preferred walking to riding in the pushchair. I remember reading some sort of brochure to parents and laughing out loud at their advice: “Let your child walk sometimes instead of always sitting in the pushchair”. Ingrid was rushing around like a madman all the time and wouldn’t sit still.

Then the running habit disappeared and suddenly she hardly ever wanted to walk. Always the pushchair. And then she even started watching TV – a true couch potato!

Now all of a sudden she’s in a walking mood again. Several days this week we’ve walked home from nursery, and today we walked all the way from the nursery to the supermarket. Which is great, and I like that she’s walking… except that it takes absolutely forever.

The nursery-to-supermarket walk takes me no longer than 5 minutes, and would maybe take 10 with her short legs. If walking actually meant walking forward in a straight line, that is. Today it had been raining and there were puddles everywhere, and Ingrid could not pass a puddle without jumping in it. The first, really large one, stopped her for several minutes, and she could have stayed there much longer if I hadn’t suggested that we go see if we can find some more puddles, some new and even better ones. From then on we walked from puddle to puddle. At each one she would stop, carefully position herself at just the right distance, and then jump with both feet. If it was a really good puddle then she jumped some more.

I was so pleased that she was walking that I didn’t want to force her into the pushchair, so I let her jump. Besides, I expected her to actually tire of the puddles after a while. She didn’t, of course, so the 10-minute walk took us well over 20 minutes. I was actually relieved she wanted to sit in the pushchair on the way back…

We had our work Christmas dinner yesterday, at a nice old manor house, with everyone’s partners and everything. It was interesting (but not exactly surprising) to see that the colleagues who I enjoy talking to, also had partners I enjoyed talking to, and the colleagues I’d never felt a connection with had partners I couldn’t connect to either.

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

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