My only online source of Estonian news just threw up a paywall. And it’s not what I would call cheap, either. Not expensive, really, but given that the quality of journalism is less than stellar, not worth the money. Postimees.ee also hides its longer articles behind a paywall. So where will I now keep up with what’s going on in Estonia?
Better today. Adrian both ate food and drank milk while I was away and could therefore feed more calmly when I got home.
Ingrid’s preschool celebrated its 30th birthday this afternoon, with cake and balloons and face painting and soap bubbles.
After four days in the office I have yet to touch a single line of code. But I have now looked at code and even talked about code. No, sorry, I’m not being entirely honest – I did actually write a short Excel macro for a colleague. It’s funny: any one of us three developers can write C# code, which is generally more valued, but I’m in demand as the VBA expert, though VBA is usually not so highly regarded.
A man (a vain, selfish, cocaine-addicted porn star) is severely burned in a car crash. While in hospital, his new life in his new body seems meaningless to him, so he spends most of his time planning his suicide, once he is released. He is befriended by a woman who tells him stories – among others, the story of how he and she were lovers back in the 14th century. While he thinks she’s obviously deranged, he also enjoys her company. Romantic love ensues.
The story and the short stories inside it are perhaps not thrilling but more than enough to keep reading. The main story line doesn’t have much point to it – nothing particularly interesting happens – other than to trying to prove that a woman can change a man as long as she loves him strongly and deeply enough. The idea would sit well in a romance book but for a book with literary ambitions it is pretty silly.
The 14th century story is much more interesting, as are the short stories – at least stuff happens – even though they also suffer from an overly romantic world view. Salvation through suffering is a recurring theme – dying for your love somehow makes that love worth more.
The whole thing leaves a poor impression. The main character’s emotional development seems quite unrealistic to me, as does the description of the relationship between him and the maybe-crazy woman. They don’t do anything much together; she does her stuff, he reads books, and she helps bathe and exercise his damaged body. And finally a sappy ending.
A mediocre book – OK to read on a long flight and leave at the airport when you get there; not worth keeping in your bookshelf.
Today did not feel good. When I came home, Adrian had barely eaten anything since he nursed in the morning, just before 7 o’clock. He therefore fed ravenously when he woke from his nap at around 2. Large infrequent meals bring back his reflux, so he cried and threw up milk for some time afterwards. Then he did the same again at 5. After that he nursed more frequently (at 6, 7 and now again at 9) so he felt better afterwards. I hope tomorrow goes better.
It is such a luxury to have both adults at home during the afternoon and evening. Unhurried dinner preparations, time to spend with both kids, no one feels stressed out or ignored. We can eat dinner slightly earlier, too, which means that the kids aren’s as tired, so mealtime is a lot more relaxed for all of us.
Topmost in my mind right now is the fact that Adrian now stays at home with Eric and not me. This means less breastfeeding, the introduction of a bottle, and a general disruption of “how life used to be”. He also has a bad cold, and the days before that he was teething. With all this going on it is hard to say how he is taking the change – we will see in a few days.
When I was at home with him, he’d always smile at Eric when he got home from work. It is pretty nice to be on the receiving end of that smile. It usually takes him a few moments: when I get in he doesn’t notice me at first, and then when I call his name he looks at me, thinks for a moment, and then smiles and leans and stretches himself towards me.
His favourite activity is watching people do stuff. The best thing we can do in the afternoon/evening (now that both Eric and I are at home at that time of the day) is for one of us to cook and the other to hold Adrian so he can watch. When I did it on my own, I’d often have him on my hip most of the time, and put him down only when he was obviously incompatible with the task at hand (such as pouring boiling water). Often he will try to lean far forward, to get closer to the action and to try and grab whatever I’m working with.
It is much less fun to be sitting in a highchair next to us, with some kitchen utensils to play with.
Toys are generally of little interest. He can spend a little time chewing on a wooden block, or fiddling with the tag on some soft toy, or banging a wooden spoon against the table. But he tires of that quite quickly. The only “toy” he likes is paper that he can chew on, but since that ends with me digging out a gooey lump of wet, chewed paper from his mouth, I don’t like that activity very much.
Eating has gone from play to serious work. He seems to get less enjoyment out of food, doesn’t explore it with as much interest as he used to, but on the other hand he is very interested in eating it. I used to have him join in our meals – now I join him in his. If he doesn’t get food, he complains, and then wolfs down the first few handfuls he is served. Bread, pasta and dry cereal are his favourites, and he will usually eat some veggies, too. Kiwi fruit, sweet potato, grilled bell peppers, courgette. Liver paté was rejected and meatballs are not of much interest, either. He can pick up small cubes of about a centimetre or so, but cannot manage peas or rice.
When done eating, he will start rocking his body and slapping the tray. He usually doesn’t like to be removed from the community around the dinner table so I take him on my lap. He then proceeds to try and grab my fork, the edge of my plate, my glass or my food, so I have to move it all and eat from a safe distance. His arms may be short but his reach is long, because he puts his whole body into it.
This is something I still forget sometimes, which makes things “fun” at the supermarket for example – I have to take care to park his stroller far away from anything grabbable. He also likes to grab people’s hair when he gets a chance (which Ingrid isn’t enjoying much). He likes touching and exploring my face and my ears, too. And my nipples: after nursing he will sometimes sit in my lap and look at my nipple, poking at it and trying to pick it up, all the while making very contented noises.
Breastfeeding has become somewhat less important but he still gets much of his nourishment from breast milk, and nurses regularly and thoroughly. At some point he pretty much stopped throwing up milk. We used to always have a washcloth at hand to wipe him clean, and never put him down directly on a carpet. Old habits die hard – I still have a blanket for him on the living room carpet.
Last month he was fond of sitting; now standing up (holding on to someone’s hands) is the new thing. It is hard to put him down sitting; he will land standing instead. Sometimes he accepts being put down on his tummy, but more often he will hold out his hands and legs so that he lands on all fours instead. He doesn’t really know what to do in that position and soon lets his legs slide out from under him, ending up on his tummy anyway. He then pushes with his arms so that he moves backwards, or turns in place like the hands of a clock. Usually he gets frustrated with this pretty quickly, although some corner of a blanket or a carpet may entertain him for a few moments, but for some reason he can be pretty happy on his tummy in bed, just after waking. It’s not because the floor is too hard – I’ve tried putting him on his tummy on the changing mat but that was no better than the floor.
He sleeps from roughly 7 in the evening to around 6, plus/minus 30 minutes, in the morning. If he wakes before 5:30 I refuse to get up and keep him in bed until he falls asleep again, otherwise his daily routine gets too messed up. During the day he sleeps pretty well in sling, stroller or bed. He falls asleep most easily in the stroller, but the longest naps usually happen in bed. Most days he still has three naps. When he sleeps in the stroller he will spend a good while taking out the dummy and then getting all upset about losing it. The way around it is to either hold his hand, or to put his hand on the bar of the stroller that he can then hold onto.
He now has four teeth fully out (top and bottom middle incisors) and three more visible and palpable (that eye tooth that made its appearance a month ago, unchanged, and the next two top incisors). He grinds his teeth; it sounds awful. We’ve started brushing his teeth. At first he had no objections, now I make some token brushing movements for a few seconds and then hand over the brush to him.
He does not like nappy changes. He is ticklish, especially around the neck. He does not like singing games where I tilt him backward, like “Prästens lilla kråka” – instead he struggles to remain upright. He did not like the door bouncer I bought for him. (And he barely fit inside, because of his cloth nappy.)
As of this morning, his measurements were 9.4 kg and 69.7 cm.
PS: I just realized when preparing this post that I have no photos of him smiling during this month. Intense focused stares: yes, yes, yes. Crying: yes. Smiling: no. It’s not that he never smiles but it is definitely not his default expression.
At work: more software installations. Visual Studio, Resharper, SQL Server Management Studio, TortoiseSVN, AnkhSVN, CCTray, Notepad++, Office, Filezilla, and probably some that I’ve forgotten already.
During the afternoon I replanted the three tomato plants I bought 10 days ago, and cleaned out all the paper junk that’s accumulated in Ingrid’s room. Almost every day she brings paper home from nursery, sometimes with drawings, sometimes with scribbles, sometimes just folded up and wrapped up with sticky tape. Of course she wants to save them all, but then a few days later she forgets all about them. I plan to go through all her toys someday soon, too.
Adrian is still semi-ill, and eating and sleeping badly. I think I got about four hours of sleep this past night, in three separate pieces. But tonight he fell asleep on his own: we nursed, I turned him on his tummy, he twisted and tossed for a while, and then he was asleep.
Eric took him to his 8-month checkup and it was uneventful. He can sit unsupported, he is not cross-eyed, his babbling includes non-vowel sounds: check, check, check. 9.4 kg and 69.7 cm.
We had a lovely storm during dinner, with lightning and thunder and hail and pouring rain. Falling cherry petals filling the air made the storm look even more fierce.
My first day back at work. It wasn’t a good day for going back to work: Adrian’s teething cough transformed into a plain and simple cold during the weekend and he was feverish and unwell all day yesterday. Neither of us got much sleep during the night. And he was totally not interested in food and just wanted to nurse, so I left Eric and him with a bottle and a heavy heart – and hurried back as soon as I’d finished my half-day of work.
In the end they managed pretty well of course, and Adrian had accepted the bottle, but he was happy to nurse when I got home.
At work I spent most of the day getting my new computer up and running and installing Windows. Installing stuff is, I think, my least favourite task at work. I’d rather scrub the kitchen than battle with network card drivers or look for the right download files on MSDN. A gazillion flavours of Windows 7, all of them with long names that look almost identical at a glance, so finding the right one is a real chore.
By the time I left the office my lower back hurt. Even though I only worked a half-day, and I do not sit still when sitting in front of a computer. I am just not used to this much sitting any more.
I had also forgotten that it is a good idea to bring something to read on the train.
A month of ups and downs. For a week or two Ingrid was sunny and happy; then she became moody and whiny again like she was last month. There is a lot of complaining about “why do I have to do everything”.
The one thing she is consistently happy about is going to preschool and being with her friends. She is almost aggressively social. With Adrian she gets up close, is loud and very much “in his face”. She dances and waves her arms and sings loudly and tickles him. She isn’t aggressive but not gentle either. Overwhelming, I guess.
With her friends she’s always the one to say “now let’s do this” and “come, we’ll do that”. She tends to boss them around. And the others are generally happy to follow as far as I can see. Whenever we bring one of them home with us, the others will gather around and say that “me too, I want to go to Ingrid’s house, too!”
Perhaps this is why I’ve been experiencing friction between the two of us: I will not have her ordering me around. She has not learned to ask politely, or does not want to ask politely. Being the one who decides is sometimes more important to her than the actual subject of her request. Setting a good example has obviously not made any difference whatsoever; reminding her to ask politely leads to huffing and demonstrative exaggerated phrases of rote politeness (“dear mummy could I please have the …”); ignoring impolite requests leads to a battle of wills. Giving in and doing what she asks even though the request is impolite and patently ridiculous (asking me to help her cycle by pushing her even though she’s on a downhill stretch) is sometimes an OK short-term fix when everyone’s good mood matters most, but it is not a general solution. I have not yet been able to find one.
She writes more and draws less. Whenever we bring stuff home from preschool it is usually short written notes. These can contain anything from a friend’s name (when Ingrid and a friend switch names and hang name tags with each other’s name around their necks) to “Happy Easter to the whole family”.
Her drawing is very much still the formulaic, symbolic kind. When she does draw, it’s still mostly girls of various sorts. One day she and two friends wanted to draw some fish so they could play fishing, and they were unsure how to draw a fish. The oldest girl drew one and since then that is how fish have to be drawn. A few days later Ingrid asked me to draw a fish and it absolutely had to be done the same way. My kind of fish were not right. She tried herself but couldn’t quite get it right so instead she instructed me exactly as to what should be done how.
She continues to learn to read. Short words she sometimes manages straight away but often she needs to try and pronounce the word a couple of times before she can figure out how to put the parts together. Especially in Swedish where one letter can stand for different sounds (like in English but not as bad) and, the length of each sound is not obvious, and neither is the stress. “Toomater, tåmateer, tåmaater!” when reading “tomater” (tomatoes). And the Swedish letter sounds infect her Estonian reading, too. When she’s trying to read an unknown word and it happens to be in Estonian, I often have to tell her that it is in Estonian before she can make any sense of it. Swedish is her default assumption.
Often she will try to guess the word before she’s properly read it. She reads the first few letters and then makes wild random guesses that are nowhere close the real thing.
She has really learned to judge whether she is tired or not and will go to bed voluntarily and without any fuss in the evenings.
She has been falling down more than usual when running and cycling – or perhaps we just notice it more now that it’s warm outside and falls actually result in scraped knees.
Some fresh bookmarks from delicious.com:
Finally finished painting the play house. Since I haven’t been able to spend more than maybe half an hour per day on it, it’s taken a while to finish. Most of it now has two coats of paint but I skipped the second coat on the underside of the bench and some other minor parts that are both protected from the weather and not so visible. It is now a very colourful feature in our garden. I wondered at first what the neighbours would think, whether they might find it an eyesore, but came to the conclusion that it’s none of their business – I wouldn’t worry about whether they’re OK with the colour of my car (if I had one) and this is not that much different.
In the afternoon, it rained for the first time in weeks. Good for the lawn.
Adrian is getting yet another tooth. Does he really need so many?
Ingrid hurt her sucking thumb. It was just before bedtime, too, so she was both tired and hurting and could not suck her thumb, which compounded the hurt. She had to make do with the other thumb for falling asleep, which was not as good by far.
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