Preparing for our upcoming vacation, we went shopping for beachwear: a new swimsuit for Ingrid, plus a pair of flip flops that happened to be on sale for 10 kr, and a bikini for me.

On our way home we splurged on a large juice from the Squeezed Up juice bar.

Adrian has learned to sit up without support in just the last two or three days. Four days ago he’d fold over and fall to one side, now he remains sitting. And he likes it.

Ingrid is definitely getting bored with being at home with me. I’m hearing frequent complaints about how she has nothing to do, how her legs are tired, how boring it is to go the supermarket.

Almost finished Adrian’s new hat yesterday but then I ran out of yarn, with about 100 stitches to go… I will have to buy another skein so I can finish it.

Yesterday something went wrong with one of the wheels on the pushchair. First it was a bit hard to push and then one wheel stopped turning altogether. When I inspected it today I found what seemed to be a ball from the bearing, stuck between the wheel and its bracket, so I guess we will have to get the wheel replaced. Bother. I made do with just the slings today, but it’s not something I want to do for many days, as long as he refuses to sleep in a back carry.

My new theory about Adrian’s tummy troubles is that perhaps he’s allergic to shellfish, too, in which case it would be the prawns in sushi that cause trouble. I’m now considering taking him to a specialist to get some more clarity about this. As long as it was just cow’s milk, it was easy, but now it’s beginning to get complicated.

Yesterday was a routine Wednesday with playgroup for Adrian. A friend of Ingrid’s came home with us in the afternoon; the house looked like a battlefield afterwards.

Today we went to town to buy a birthday present for my mum, and managed to get a whole bunch of other small errands done, too: everything from an oven mitt to a princess tiara. (Whenever Ingrid has a friend over, the dress-up clothes come out, especially the princess-ish stuff. We had two tiaras but one broke, and there’s often friction about who gets to wear the remaining one. So now we have to again.)

We had what I thought was a super-safe lunch, sharing one tempura dish and one small sushi. I skipped both the tempura sauce and the soy sauce for sushi. (I believe Adrian is sensitive to soy protein and not just milk – I forgot to mention this in the 5-month post.) And STILL Adrian spent an hour screaming later in the afternoon, the worst such episode in many weeks. Main learning point for me: do not mix two foods when eating out, because now I don’t know whether it was the sushi (something in those fake “crab” sticks?) or the tempura.

Went to Ingrid’s dance-and-play group only to find out it’s not on this week because of school holidays. She was disappointed but the leisurely trip back home (with Adrian asleep all the time, exhausted from his earlier screaming) almost made up for it, with jumping over puddles, poking holes in snow banks with a forked branch, etc.

The broccoli, thoroughly demolished

Spent almost an hour in the morning walking back and forth in the living room and kitchen while Adrian slept an unquiet sleep in the sling, reading The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet. During his next nap (walking again but this time with the pushchair) I called the guys at work, for the first time in several weeks. I kind of miss it but it feels very distant, almost unreal.

Today’s meals for Adrian: pear and broccoli. Both made a good and proper mess. He attacked the broccoli with great intensity, as if that was what he’d been waiting for all his life. I do think I actually saw him swallow some of it, too.

Adrian and I slept horribly; don’t know what it was but it felt like I spent all night patting him and popping in the dummy. No long awake periods, not much crying or screaming, but not much proper sleep either. We took a very long nap in the morning.

Adrian got to try his first piece of solids: a chunk of crust from home-made bread. He put it in his mouth, probably expecting it to be like any other toy, and was all googly-eyed when he found out it had FLAVOUR. It was a bit too soft and crumbly for his rough grip, though – I will need to come up with more squeeze-resistant food for him. Apple, perhaps.

Went to the library with Ingrid in the afternoon.

The one thing I will remember about this month is the drooling. It’s not like Adrian produces occasional dribs and drabs of dribble. No, it’s more like a river of saliva. He is never without a bandana bib while awake. There is always a row of them drying on the heater: each one lasts an hour, maximum, before it’s soaked through, almost so you can wring it out.

If he was my first child, I’d say “surely he must be teething”. But since Ingrid drooled for many months (although never quite this copiously) before any signs of teeth, I won’t. I think he just drools.

It’s no wonder he eats/drinks so often. He must get dehydrated from all this fluid loss. He still usually feeds twice during each awake period (more often in the evening) and about every 3 to 4 hours at night.

He also spits up a lot, so I try to always have a wash cloth within reach. There’s always a handful spread out in the house, and there’s one in most of my photos of him. In our changing bag, bibs and wash cloths are as important as clean nappies.

He falls asleep pretty easily in both sling and stroller, and in bed with the help of a little bit of nursing. But the only time he sleeps in bed is at night, or when I want to take a nap, too – otherwise I find it too inconvenient.

Quite often he interrupts his naps with screaming. Nowadays I can often get him to go back to sleep – usually I just need to pop in the dummy, and hold a hand on his cheek, and give him a finger to hold. The physical contact he gets from being in the sling is not enough: he wants skin against skin. He also likes holding our fingers when he’s awake but tired.

Lullabies also soothe him. I can see and feel him relax within seconds. This is something I never experienced with Ingrid – as far as I could see, she couldn’t have cared less whether I sang or not.

This past week he’s been sleeping very badly at night. At first it was (probably mostly) due to congested airways – after a few hours of lying in the bed he could barely breathe through his nose. Now he just seems to sleep very uneasily. He wakes more often than normally, sometimes with no more than an hour between wakings. He is hard to soothe, often screams and cries inconsolably.

He’s pretty good at using his hands now. He grabs toys (not with perfect precision but decent enough) and can turn them in his hands. A few weeks ago he would use this skill to stuff everything in his mouth, but now he’s as likely to just look at things. When there are no toys in front of him, or when they’re all out of reach, he complains pretty quickly. He is not so good at letting go of things yet: sometimes I can see that he wants to grab a toy but cannot because his fingers are griopping something else and he doesn’t know how to get rid of it.

His fingers also have a complicated relationship with the dummy and its clip. Frequently the hand accidentally hooks or grips the strap and pulls the dummy out of his mouth. But he’s also working hard at taking the dummy and trying to get it back in his mouth. The challenges are (a) getting it turned the right way, so he gets the teat and not a hard edge, and (b) not getting the fingers in there between the mouth and the dummy.

We’ve packed away both the play mat and the bouncy chair. He’s never been fond of lying flat on his back, asleep or awake, so the play mat got very little use. Now we just have a blanket on the floor where I can put him down on his tummy. He likes that somewhat better. And he doesn’t much like leaning back, either: he started doing situps in the bouncy chair, to the point where I thought it looked both unsafe and uncomfortable. Since he is totally not able to sit on his own, we bought a second highchair instead (IKEA’s Antilop), which is light enough that I can easily carry it with me anywhere in the house.

Carrying him with me is a frequent necessity. Adrian is not at all OK with being left alone. When I put him down and move out of sight, it takes just a few seconds for him to start making unhappy noises. So when I want to put away clean laundry in the bedroom upstairs, for example, I have to take him with me, or listen to him screaming all the while.

Or alternatively, ask Ingrid to entertain him. She enjoys that; his reaction is a combination of bafflement, enjoyment and mild fear. She heaps toys in front of him, or makes some stuffed animal walk and jump on top of him, or hangs rattles around his wrist, all the while singing nonsense words to some random tune. She’s not ungentle but she is quite loud and often very close to his face. She loves it when he looks or smiles at her.

He is also always very happy to see Eric. Eric gets big smiles when he comes home in the evening.

Took Ingrid to preschool so I could go to playgroup with Adrian. He loved it, again. He loves watching all the other babies. It’s pretty much the only time he’s willing, even more than willing, to spend time on the floor, on his tummy.

Actually he also spends time on his tummy in his bed, when he’s wide awake early in the morning morning, just after 5, because he’s pooped again. He keeps doing it, and it annoys the heck out of me. I try to doze while waiting for him to get sleepy again, and when he starts making frustrated noises I either pop in the dummy, or turn him over, from front to back or vice versa.

After playgroup I took a long walk with him in the stroller, together with two other mums from the playgroup. We looked at nice houses in Flysta: many old houses like here in Solhem, but more “fun” and varied with verandas, small towers, etc.

Then to preschool because Ingrid had insisted that I should pick her up early. Of course she’d now changed her mind and did not want to go home at all. I went home, and back again at 3 o’clock. This time I insisted she come home. Nevertheless she doesn’t want to go tomorrow – but does want to be there on Friday when they usually do fun stuff like face-painting, or have a disco, or watch a movie.

She wanted to play with friend J in the afternoon but J was at the playground. J, her sister L and their babysitter N stopped by on their way home instead, and the girls played together for a while.

Ingrid still insists on staying with me rather than going to preschool, and really is at her best behaviour almost all day long. It’s worked unexpectedly well.

She is starting to miss her friends, but as she pointed out herself, all but one of them are in a different group at preschool anyway, so she wouldn’t get to meet them much even if she did go there. I’ve decided to take her there anyway on Wednesday so I can go to playgroup with Adrian – bigger kids are not welcome there on baby days.

In the morning, a trip to the clinic for Adrian’s 5-month vaccinations and the inevitable weighing and measuring. (8.2 kg and 68.5 cm.) Then to the pharmacy to pick up a cortison cream for a patch of eczema he has, plus some cream against his cradle cap, which isn’t bothering us in and of itself, but it’s covering his eczema and making that hard to treat.

In the afternoon, grocery shopping and a visit to the library.

A contractor was scheduled to come here today to start put up scaffolding, so the builders can start working on the new roof. But this weekend we got the builders’ estimates for the remaining tasks. (We’ve been nagging at them since before Christmas about this. I guess paperwork and estimating isn’t their idea of fun.) And the roof came in at about twice their original back-of-the-envelope estimate, so we cancelled the scaffolding immediately. With the sums we’re now talking about, the new roof is not going to happen. Not because we don’t have the money but because it’s not worth it. As an investment, it would never pay for itself – we’d never get that money back if we had to sell the house. Had it been cheaper we could have done it anyway, just because we ourselves would be happier with the house that way, but not for this kind of money. We can think of many better ways to spend it. So it looks like we’re stuck with our shoe box of an extension. Sigh.

Ingrid didn’t want to go to preschool today either. She said she wanted to be with me instead. We talked about it… I told her that I needed to go to town today for some urgent shopping, and would do a lot of walking. I needed to buy a christening gift, and had left the shopping way too late (the christening is this Saturday) so online shopping was not an option. And I told her that she’d probably get bored without her friends, and that she wouldn’t like all the walking I do. (“I haven’t got anything to do” and “My legs are tired” are two ever-recurring refrains here.) But she insisted that she would not complain about either of those things. Fine, I said, we’ll give it a try.

And would you believe it. Not a single complaint about either boredom or tired legs.

It took us a while to get to town – there were severe disruptions to the train traffic. Just as we were approaching the station I was so glad that we’d make it just in time for the next train… and instead we found out that that train was cancelled. As the time approached for the next train, there were messages about it being delayed, first 10 minutes, then 20. So instead of just making it, we waited over half an hour.

By the time we were in Stockholm Central it was almost lunchtime. Because it was so late I skipped some of the shops I had planned to visit. A quick visit to a jewellery shop (which had nothing nice), the children’s department at NK (where I found both a nice gift and some chewy toys for Adrian), then a sushi lunch, and finally on the way back to the station we stopped by at Krabat and Iris Hantverk. I think Ingrid quite enjoyed the shopping experience: toys and handicrafts and other fun stuff to look at. She probably wouldn’t have liked it as much if I’d been shopping for shoes or curtain fabrics. Well, actually, she might have liked that, too…

In the afternoon she didn’t want to go to her dance-and-play group either. We read a bit, she actually helped me hang laundry, and then played on her own for some time while I was making dinner etc.

Adrian was unusually cranky in the afternoon. Didn’t want to be carried or held, didn’t want his dummy or his toys, didn’t want to eat or sleep… I was getting really annoyed (pointless, I know, but I couldn’t help it) as I tried everything I could think of. Then he started screaming and finally I realized it was his tummy again. Felt really bad about being annoyed with the poor guy when he was in pain.

The only things I ate that I hadn’t cooked myself were one piece of bread, and the sushi lunch. The bread had all its ingredients listed and it was almost the most basic bread you could imagine: 2 kinds of flour, yeast, salt, sesame seeds. And I couldn’t see anything milk-like in the sushi either, no weird rolls with cream cheese or anything like that. According to the internet there’s no milk in surimi (“crab sticks”). What can it be?

This is really bad, because if I cannot even eat bread or sushi, what am I going to do for lunch in the future? Bring my own sandwiches every time?

Adrian smiles and “talks” a lot more. The most reliable way of getting him to smile is for me to blow raspberries towards him. He did a bit of that himself, but then lost interest.

About 10 days or two weeks ago he became cranky and currently he spends a fair amount of time complaining. In part I suspect he is simply bored. It used to be that I could park him in his bouncy chair and let him watch me hang laundry, or put him on his play mat for a while and let him kick his legs. Now he won’t accept either. He is pretty hard to entertain right now.

He has become quite sociable and likes to have people around him. He is a lot happier on weekends when the whole family is at home, than on weekdays with just him and me, because then he can watch us talk, move, do stuff. He was most happy when I took him with me to visit my colleagues at the office: five people sitting around a table, all talking and smiling.

Another thing he really does like is going for walks in the pushchair. The seat has to be completely upright and the pushchair better be moving all the time so that he can look around. If I try to tilt the seat back, he will start pushing against it with his head or attempting sit-ups. He also falls asleep in the pushchair very easily now. His eyelids sort of just start drooping, and even if something then disturbs him, he continues to slowly slide towards sleep, until he just nods off. Very convenient. Usually he wakes as soon as the pushchair stops moving.

He can sit pretty well in the highchair as long as we stuff a few rolled-up towels at his sides to keep him upright. This way we can have him with us at the breakfast table, with a heap of toys in front of him.

He’s not yet very good with his hands: when I put something in his hand and curl his fingers around it, he can hold it, but he doesn’t really manage to grab stuff on his own yet. With the toys in front of him, he sort of just sweeps them towards himself with an arm. He does try to grab them, and sometimes he manages it, too, but not at all reliably. And even when he holds something, often he cannot get it to his mouth.

The hands themselves, though, make their way to his mouth pretty often. Sometimes he even finds his thumb and sucks on it. But when he’s going to sleep, he wants his dummy.

This baby definitely hasn’t read Gina Ford or Tracy Hogg (The Baby Whisperer). I started out with the usual sleep-eat-play rhythm, plus some extra feeds in the evening before bedtime. But nowadays he usually wants to eat more often than that, usually twice in each awake period. It took me a while to figure that out, but now I know that when he starts fussing about an hour and a half after waking, it’s probably more food he wants and not sleep.

He needs and wants more sleep than Ingrid did at this age. His takes about 3 naps per day, ranging from 40 to 90 minutes, and sleeps 12 to 13 hours per night. As long as we time it right and don’t try to put him to bed too early, he goes to sleep very easily. Also when he wakes at night, he feeds and then goes back to sleep without a problem.

He drools like a maniac, and we’ve invested in a bunch of new bandana bibs.