In just one month Adrian has gone from almost-crawling-but-not-quite-there-yet to very competent, pretty effortless crawling. He’s not quite racing across the floor but he has no trouble going from the hall through the old living room to the new living room. He can even crawl from the wooden deck into the living room, which requires crossing three steps and a threshold. That took some effort to learn; he was practicing hard for several days.

Because of all the thresholds and steps around the house, he’s modified his crawling style. Instead of the usual hands-and-knees, he usually goes around on his hands and feet, or perhaps hands and one foot and the other knee. I think he started doing it this way when he first learned to crawl in & up from the wooden deck. We have sliding doors there, and those slide along a rail on the floor, a sharpish strip of plastic. Going over that on your knees is not comfortable at all, I’m sure.

He has not yet shown any real interest in the stairs going up to the first floor – mostly because he has no reason to. We’re all always down here. Eric installed a gate at the top of the stairs; we’ll see whether we need one at the bottom as well.

He’s also very good at standing. He can pull himself to standing holding on with just one hand, to just about anything, even something as wobbly as my trousers. Occasionally he grabs onto something really unsuitable (such as a blanket lying on the sofa) and falls on his bottom but otherwise he rarely has accidents. Once he is up and standing he can look around, shift his feet, grab stuff, and shuffle along his support (sofa, step stool, myself etc.). This afternoon he actually let go with both hands to hold on to some toy. And he can carefully bend his knees and sit down again in a controlled manner, rather than fall.

And all of a sudden he is OK with being left on his own. He no longer needs to be within a few metres of someone. I wonder if it’s because he now knows that he can follow us when he needs to? Or has he simply understood that we do not disapper when we leave the room (object permanence)? On a few mornings when he’s woken me particularly early I have gone downstairs with him, changed his nappy and then put him down among his toys on the living room carpet, and then dozed on the sofa. He’s crawled around, explored the toys, then crawled into the hall or the adjacent room and looked through the stuff there, and only after 10 minutes or so does he call for my attention.

Adrian has now also reached the stage where every item is interesting and works as a toy – as long as it is new to him. Kitchen utensils, Ingrid’s toys (ranging from princess tiaras to toy stethoscopes), bike helmets, pencils, keys, you name it. This combined with crawling means that we need to be careful about what we leave on the floor or otherwise within his reach. Books in particular are very attractive. He sees me and Ingrid play around with them all the time and he really wants to try them, too. Right now there are still safe places in the living room, and he is not so fast a crawler that we can rescue the things he’s heading for. But I foresee a period of some destruction ahead.

We’ve introduced the concept of No, for pulling at people’s hair or Eric’s glasses, or chewing power cords, or trying to crawl from the bed to the bedside table (with its water glass, clock, lamp and other off-limits items).

He eats happily and a lot. He still likes starchy stuff like bread and pasta and cereal, but also meatballs, broccoli, and butternut squash. Most fruit is good, too: recently he’s eaten a lot of apricots and grapes, and some cherries. He now happily eats banana which he used to spit out in disgust. He’s just getting the pincer grip to work and can pick up sweetcorn kernels. Rice grains are still too fiddly for him.

Adrian watches with great interest when we eat, and seems to be very aware that sometimes we eat different stuff than he. Food from my plate is better than food from his plate.

He is lazy when it comes to fruit peel and often spits out the peel with lots of edible bits still stuck to it. We actually peel his grapes for him, because if we do, he eats them, but otherwise he spits out most of each grape. But this also means that I am not afraid to give him a whole cherry: he will bite on it, spit it out, I pick out the stone, and he puts the rest back in his mouth. Quite a lot of the fruit he eats goes in and out a few times. It took him a few tries to figure out cherries. First I had to cut them in half because he didn’t understand they were worth biting into. Then he learned that they were good, and now he’ll crawl across the lawn to get one.

He has a weird relationship with the sippy cup. When we hand it to him, he never uses it for drinking. He turns it in his hands, bangs it against his tray, or turns it upside down and chews on its bottom. Which leads to water everywhere and a gooey mess on the tray, so we usually don’t give him the cup. When he drinks, we hold it for him. And he knows not to pull at it then.

Adrian has become much more varied and clear in communicating with us. It’s not just happy sounds and faces vs. unhappy sounds and faces. He can reach for the sippy cup to tell us he wants a drink. He can “tell” us that he is not happy with the food he is getting and wants something else – and that signal is different from when he is done eating. He understands very well when we sign and say “all done” and readies himself for being lifted out of the highchair. He can look questioning, interested, irritated, bored, joyful, mischievous… A sort of “mma” sound for “emme” might be emerging. And the other day I think he may have signed “nurse” to me.

He totally hates nappy changes and putting on clothes, and screams as if we were torturing him. I’ve tried to change him standing up, and tried finishing putting on his clothes while he’s sitting, thinking that he just doesn’t want to be flat on his back, but it makes no difference. And he fights me so much that I often end up putting him flat on his back anyway.

He likes his swing, but usually for short periods only.
He likes to fiddle with my bra strap while he’s nursing.
He likes playing with cardboard books, opening and closing and turning them in his hands. No interest in looking at pictures yet.

The day before yesterday I ate a small chunk of goat’s cheese with my dinner. No complaints from Adrian. Yesterday I boldly ate a slice of cheese after breakfast, another small chunk of goat’s at lunch, and finally two slices of cheese in the afternoon. That was apparently too much; Adrian woke and cried a lot during the night. No cheese sandwiches for now.

Butter on the other hand is now tried and tested and works well. I love butter. Just plain good bread with butter on is delicious.

Today the builders finished their work, packed up their stuff and went home. Just in time for the weekend, and just in time for my vacation! (Today was my last day at work, I’m on vacation for the next four weeks.)

The very last thing they did was sand the floor in the old hall. When they started work in there, back in January, they tore up the laminate flooring, and the glued cork tiles beneath them, and uncovered the original pine planks at the bottom. The cork layer had been glued right on top of the pine and left ugly patches everywhere. For half a year the floor looked atrocious. But now after sanding it is pristine again, and looks lovely.

We now have pine plank floors in all three rooms on the ground floor, as well as that hall. In the old living room the floor is varnished; in the other rooms the new floors are untreated as yet. We have ambitious plans to leave them that way and simply care for them by scrubbing them with linseed oil soap, which both cleans and protects the floor, a bit like oiling it.

You can see this kind of floor in some old Swedish houses, and after a hundred years it both looks and feels wonderful – silvery gray and satiny smooth. This is especially nice if you walk around barefoot at home, like us. I’ve been told that it doesn’t take a hundred years to get there. Should the floors not turn out nice, we can always change our minds later and treat them with oil.

Today I gave the newly-sanded floor its first scrubbing. Now the hall smells of linseed oil soap. To me it smells like a very old but well-cared house, like an old rural schoolhouse that’s been turned into a museum, or an old Estonian farmhouse. A very cosy smell.

If you can read Swedish, you can learn about using soap for floor care from Skansen.

I had butter on my bread yesterday evening. Adrian has not yet reacted to it. Yippee!

This month’s big news is, of course, that I have gone back to work and Adrian is at home with Eric instead. After a rocky start (in part because he was ill the first few days) they settled into a routine and now it’s all going swimmingly. I express milk at work, and he gets it in his sippy cup. (Blue cup for breast milk, yellow cup for water.)

He is happy to see me and wants to nurse first thing when I get home – I usually run upstairs to change out of work clothes and into a nursing top, and then settle down with him in the sofa. He nurses frequently in the evenings but no longer stuffs himself until he throws up.

During the day he usually eats happily and well. Bread and cereal remain his favourites. Broccoli is no longer interesting at all; instead he eats black pudding and apricots and grapes.

Adrian is very very close to crawling but not quite there yet. First he learned to rotate in place and move backwards on his tummy by pushing off with his hands. He still does that at night – I wall him in with pillows and rolled-up blankets to keep him from falling off the bed. When I go to the bedroom I never find him sleeping where I left him. I’ve started teaching him how to get down from the sofa feet first – on his own he heads for the edge head first.

A few weeks ago he learned to keep his knees fixed while pushing, so he got up on all fours instead of moving backwards. Then he learned to get up on all fours by pulling in his knees under him rather than by pushing back with his hands, so he stays in place rather than inexorably moving away from where he wants to go. But he once he was up on all fours he couldn’t move, he just rocked back and forth.

Now he’s learned to reach and lunge forward from there, but as he does that he flops back onto his tummy so he can only do it once. But it is enough to get him marginally closer to the thing he wants. Sometimes, if the thing is close enough, he can do a few lunges and actually get there in the end.

He’s got a love/hate thing with crawling. When I put him down sitting he often turns and gets on his tummy immediately, but a second later he starts complaining loudly because he can’t get further.

Standing is much more fun. Give Adrian two fingers to hold on to, and he will pull himself up to standing straight away. A pair of hands is the best support for getting up, but if that isn’t available, he sometimes manages with a chair or a step stool. That way is harder because he needs to untangle his legs (whereas when he holds on to my fingers he can go straight forward from sitting so the legs aren’t in the way). He can reliably get onto his knees that way, but in the last few days he’s gone all the way to standing a few times.

He is confident and stable enough on his feet that he can let go of his support with one hand (or even two, and just lean his upper arms on the sofa table) and grab a toy. He’s also stable enough that I now leave him standing there without sitting right behind him to catch him. When he tires, he can sit down rather than fall.

Sometimes he slowly shuffles sideways along the edge of the table, with very small and slow steps. I don’t think he knows what he’s doing – he wills himself towards something and his feet naturally but unconsciously move in that direction.

I’ve found him hard to “read” in the past. Now he’s communicating much more clearly. He reaches towards the person he wants to be with; he reaches for the sippy cup when he wants to drink. He lets go of my hands and leans towards me when he’s tired of standing and wants to be picked up. He waves his arms in a certain way when he’s done eating, or start slapping the tray on his highchair. At night he turns on his side, facing towards me, when he wants to nurse.

He uses his crying more to communicate and less to simply express frustration. One day when he was crying I picked him up and walked around with him. I went to the hall, and he stopped crying. I went back into the living room, and he started again. He was very clearly telling me he wanted to go out. He’s done the same with the bedroom to tell me he wants to sleep. If he wants to go from me to Eric he makes happy noises when he sees Eric, and switches to crying when Eric walks past us.

We’ve started using a few signs with him but not as consistently as I’d like. We sign for “all done” (after mealtimes), and I sign “nurse”. Sometimes we remember to sign “food”, too, but often not. He definitely understands “all done” and we think his arm-waving might be efforts to sign back. When we sign “all done” he knows that he will be lifted out of his highchair so he prepares by holding his arms out. He also helps when it’s time to put his fleece jacket on for going out.

He is attentive and observant. He follows us and our doings with a very focused gaze. Especially at mealtimes, when we all sit together, close to each other and at roughly the same height. He stares when Eric opens a can of beer for dinner, or when we make particularly happy noises about eating strawberries.

Random small stuff: we tried bathing him in the kitchen sink instead of the small bathtub, and it was a great success. Previously his baths have lasted a minute or two, just enough to get him sort of clean. Now he was so happy there that afterwards Ingrid insisted on trying, too – if Adrian enjoys it so much then it obviously must be great.

As before: he very much insists on company and won’t be left alone. Sometimes it’s enough to be in the same room with him, but more often he likes to be within a metre or two.

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 busy day: it feels like these remaining days are my last chance to get things done at home.

Some more painting of the play house while Adrian slept. Playgroup. Supermarket. Went to the hardware store to see if I could borrow their fan deck of NCS colours. (Unfortunately he answer was no, because they’ve lost too many of those expensive decks, despite taking down folks’ names and numbers.) Weeded and dug through the top layer of soil in two of our planting boxes with strawberries.

Adrian has, in the last few days, started to demand solid food. Previously I’d just put him in his highchair and give him some food when I wanted to eat, so he could get used to the concept, have some fun, and we’d keep each other company. But now he has been fussy and I’ve gone through my checklist (sleep? boredom? breast? nappy?) and then offered him food, and seen him wolf it down. His and my meal schedules are thus no longer in sync, so I’ve spent more time than usual preparing food and cleaning up him and the kitchen afterwards.

I’d planned to take Ingrid shoe shopping after preschool but she was not at all amenable to that. Too hot (it was another hot and sunny day) or too tired or hungry or thirsty, or all of that – in any case she was in a very precarious mood all the way home. Then we put a picnic blanket under the cherry tree, I made us both some smoothies with frozen raspberries and blueberries, bananas, and apple juice, and we relaxed together. She felt much better after that.

I noticed wasps on the kitchen windows on at least five separate occasions, and never in any other part of the house, or near the door. Now I’m wondering if they have a nest somewhere inside the walls there – there are gaps around and beneath the newly installed windows, and they could be coming out of those. If that’s the case we will have to plug those holes quickly.

(Actually I missed one wasps’ nest in my list yesterday – we also found an old, abandoned one above the ceiling of the old veranda. I guess wasps really like our house.)

Sat outside in the warm spring sunshine during Adrian’s morning nap and mended clothes. (A rip in one of Ingrid’s tunics, as well as seams along the bottoms of zippers in one coat and one cardigan and one bath robe.)

Packed away my floor-length fleece skirts, I don’t think I will be needing them again this season. Dug out some thinner trousers more suited for the current weather.

Wrestled my bike and our bicycle trailer out from the garage, over piles of building materials. Installed a baby seat in the trailer. Tried putting Adrian in the seat and realized he wouldn’t fit, even though he’s within the age and size limits, so I had to remove it again.

Cycled, with both kids in the trailer, to Ingrid’s dance-and-play group. The weather was so nice that I really did not want to sit in a stuffy bus. Good workout, with all the hills in this part of the town. This was perhaps overly ambitious for Adrian’s first time – late afternoon, tired baby, first time in weird new contraption – but it worked OK. He was really tired and thus pretty unhappy on the way home but luckily Ingrid was sitting there right next to him and could pop in the dummy whenever he spat it out.

Adrian is sleeping very well during his first two naps but the third, late afternoon one, is a struggle now. He is mostly staying awake for about two and a half hours between naps, so the afternoon nap doesn’t fit into his day any more. He doesn’t get tired until so late that I really don’t want him to nap any more. Then I have to keep him up until it’s time for his night sleep, by which time he is too tired and cannot relax to go to sleep. Kahte vähe, kolme palju – two is too little and three is too much.