At long last it seems like I’ve found some sort of balance. I’ve gotten through both the first months’ exhaustion and overwhelmedness, and the subsequent boredom, and then the worry about how Ingrid would cope in daycare with me at work. I feel like I have a good balance between time spent working and time spent at home, and I enjoy both. I feel like I know what I am doing and I feel confident about taking care of Ingrid. (I certainly didn’t during the early months!) I get enough sleep, enough to eat and enough exercise and fresh air.

For the first six months, I generally felt that I could cope with “it” (life, the universe and everything) in the current state for a while, but not forever. Now, on the other hand, the situation actually feels sustainable.

Which most likely means that everything is about to be turned upside down soon, ha ha – if I’ve had time to get comfortable, the next change is probably overdue!

We’ve been practically internet-less for several days, with the connection coming and going and being very slow even when it was there. It turns out that our router may have been part of the issue and we now have a new one.

So I will hopefully be able to post again, and (more importantly) to work again on Friday. This weekend I had to scrounge hours here and there whenever the connection was up, and didn’t get as much done as I would have wanted.

I have spent the last few months (yes, MONTHS) looking for bags for our vacuum cleaner. We have a Swedish vacuum cleaner from Electrolux, and while other Electrolux vacuum cleaners are sold in England, this one is not and has never been. So it appears almost impossible to find bags for it.

I know I must have succeeded in the past somehow, but I have no idea how or where! Soon it’ll get to the point where it is easier to buy a new vacuum cleaner than to find replacement bags for the old one.

I’m happy about having gone back to work. I enjoy my job, I enjoy getting out of the house and doing something other than caring for a baby, I enjoy having adults around me during the day. The days are quite rushed now – I need to leave early in the evening in order to get Ingrid home in time, so she can get her meal and bath before it’s time to go to bed. I also take 2 breaks for breastfeeding during the day. So I try to get to work as early as I can, which means the mornings are hurried as well.

And part-time work suits me very well right now. After getting 3 days of adult company and intellectual stimulation (and 1 day of working from home), I can really enjoy my 3 days with Ingrid. I enjoy my days at home much more than I did before I started working.

Today was my first day working from home and it went about as well as I expected. It was hard to concentrate on work with Ingrid demanding attention. Nevertheless I got just over 4 hours’ worth of work done, most of it while she was napping. This leaves about half a workday that I need to make up for during the weekend.

I think I will have to plan my Fridays very carefully – above all to make sure that I can spend all of her naptime working, so that I don’t need to use that time for eating lunch for example. The next best time for working is after she’s woken and eaten – she’s relatively happy to play on her own for a while. As we get closer to the next nap, she gets more tired and wants more and more attention.

If you are interested in, and perhaps even following, the current debate around the various anti-religious books (Dawkins’ The God Delusion being one of them), you might find this “musing” at 3quarksdaily an interesting read. It examines three main classes of criticism that the books have been subjected to, and has attracted some well-written comments as well.

I’ve concluded that the bug we had was the notorious winter vomiting virus (vinterkräksjukan) which I had previously only known by name. It is also known as viral gastroenteritis, acute nonbacterial gastroenteritis, and (colloquially) stomach flu. The WVV is apparently distinguished from other stomach bugs by the very sudden onset of symptoms (vomiting and diarrhea, plus sometimes stomach pains and low fever). Symptoms last 1 to 3 days and clear up on their own. The disease is most common during November to April (here is a chart of reported cases in Sweden), hence the popular name.

The WVV is caused by caliciviruses / noroviruses and is highly contagious. The Swedish health advice service says that 10 to 100 virus particles is enough to infect you. The virus spreads through direct or indirect contact, not through air – washing your hands is the best way to try and avoid it, but in practice it makes little difference and it is almost impossible to avoid the virus, says an expert at the Swedish Institute for Infectious Disease Control. The incubation time is 12 to 48 hours, and you’re still spreading the virus up to 2 days after the symptoms disappear. There are many different strains of norovirus and immunity is short-lived, so even if you’ve just had it, you can get it again.

The Swedish NetDoctor site says that about four-fifths of those who come into contact with the virus catch it, but one-fifth don’t. And it’s not because they have developed resistance due to a previous infection – it seems to be a genetic thing. Apparently we are among the four-fifths.

Some people seem to get stuck in a certain era in fashion. Look carefully and you will see people who are still wearing 1970s clothes (or as close as they can get) or still have a 1980s hairdo – not because they think retro is cool but because they truly think that that is what things SHOULD look like.

Other people get left behind the technology train: they cannot and will not learn to operate a VCR, or refuse to use mobile phones.

I think I might be on the verge of missing the technology train. I don’t get the point of the things the younger generation is doing. I can see the point of blogs, of PSPs and wifi and digital cameras and wikis. But most of the Web 2.0 craze that has some people so excited just puzzles me. Tumblr? Twitter? Yahoo Pipes? MySpace? Who has time to fill these sites with all that junk, and who cares?

Am I growing old?

Tomorrow is back-to-work day.

Get hair cut: check.
Unpack clothes: check.
Iron shirt: check.
Test baby carrier: check.
Pack bag (shoes, phone charger, mouse, snacks): check.

It’s a strange feeling, going back to work after such a long period of leave. It’s not at all like coming back from a holiday. It feels more like starting a new job. I have no pending projects, I have no idea what’s going on or what I will be doing. A clean slate.

I’ll be working part-time, three days a week in the office (Tue–Thu) and one day at home (Fri). Ingrid will be in a day nursery when I’m in the office, but on Fridays I’ll be working and taking care of her. In practice I expect I will get about half a day’s worth of work done with her at home (even if I save the most interruptible tasks for Friday) and do the rest either in the evening or during the weekend.

But even if sharing my day between Ingrid and work is inconvenient and leads to late evenings, I’d rather do it this way than have her in day care another day. I want her to spend more time with family than with “strangers” – I don’t want the strangers to become more familiar than family. That just feels wrong. In fact if I was forced to choose, I would rather stay at home than work full time at this point.

There is a nursery where I work, offering mainly backup care (in case your nanny is ill). But they also offer a place for mums returning to work, for the first month. So that’s where Ingrid will be for the next four weeks. The main advantage is that this way I can go on breastfeeding throughout the day for another month. And of course I can go down there to see her if I start to worry about her – but her first half-day last week went so well that I don’t think there’s anything to worry about.

After the first month she’ll transfer to a nursery close to home. We found three nurseries within reasonable distance and visited all three, and liked this one best. (Ingrid didn’t have an opinion because this happened months ago – there are sometimes long queues to these places.) The place looks bright and cheerful and relaxed, and I imagine that I would like to be there if I was a kid. The staff seemed to enjoy their jobs, and the kids seemed to like the staff.

Time does not move at the same speed all the time. I remember thinking after the first few weeks of maternity leave that 6 months was an eternity, and then thinking the same again halfway through. Then, with about a month and a half to go, time sped up and the days started disappearing fast. I think it’s mostly because the days are far less tedious now, because Ingrid’s company is much more fun than it used to be.

Now during the last few weeks I have suddenly become really busy, discovering all sorts of important tasks every day, and even though I’ve been trying to get things done before I go back to work, my to do list is growing rather than shrinking.

Today I took a day off from baby-watching and left Ingrid in Eric’s care for the whole day (except I kept the milk bar open). Just knowing that I don’t have to worry about anything – that she is being taken care of, that I can ignore all her noises – meant that I could focus fully on whatever I was doing. I got more done during two hours this morning than I normally do in a whole day. I can totally understand parents who take their children to day care even when they are not working.

I’ve never been particularly fond of shopping. I dislike the time it takes, having to go from shop to shop to find the right thing. I dislike crowds. I dislike the way department stores fill the ground floor with perfume disks and the whole place stinks until I can barely breathe. I dislike queues.

When I was looking for maternity clothes and was shocked by the lack of choice and the exorbitant prices, I “found” eBay. I’d bought the odd item there before, but now I finally realised how great it was. Not only was the range of clothes much more varied – everything was really cheap too. So cheap that I could buy them unseen and untried: even if one out of five had turned out to be not as expected, it would have been a great deal. In the end, only one top was not as good as it had seemed on the screen.

Then I had the same epiphany about web shops in general – the range of things I can find is far far wider than anything the shops can offer, especially when it comes to less common things. Everyone buys jeans and socks and plates and pots, so there is reasonable choice in most shops. But maternity bras? Baby carriers? Digital camera accessories? If you’re lucky you’ll find one or two kinds in a shop, while the internet has dozens or hundreds, new as well as used.

On the Internet there are no queues and no crowds. There is also no need to make an instant decision (or waste hours going home and coming back later). If it’s a piece of clothing I am buying, I can try it on in the peace and quiet of my home, and send back the ones that don’t fit.

I’ve done more web shopping in the last 10 months than during the entire rest of my life. I am totally in love with the concept – it’s saved me hours and hours of frustration. Yay for the Internet!