I’ve put up some new photos in the gallery, including some pictures of Ingrid “opening” her birthday parcels. We gave them to her yesterday and she has made some progress with some of them but not got all the way inside. When she gets tired of them as parcels, we will open them and see what’s inside!

Sorry for the lack of updates. Ingrid’s illness got worse instead of better, until this afternoon, so we’ve been rather busy here. (And tired, because Ingrid has been waking about once every hour for three nights running.)

Eric took her to see a doctor on Thursday and was told that it probably wasn’t anything serious. I kept pouring Calpol into her which brought the fever down for a while but then it always went back up again. Yesterday her eyes went red and puffy, and today she developed a red rash over most of her body. The fever kept going up as well, getting to over 39° on several occasions, and she looked so ill that we went back to see a doctor again. This time the verdict was ’upper respiratory infection’ (= common cold), combined with a strep infection, plus conjunctivitis, but the rash was probably just a heat rash and nothing infectious.

In any case we came home with antibiotics, Nurofen, more Calpol, and eye drops. (The kitchen counter looks like a regular pharmacy now, with medicine bottles, thermometer, measuring syringes and spoons, and notes on which one was given when.) The Nurofen got her temperature down straight away and she perked up within a couple of hours.

I have decided to stop expressing milk. After 6 months of twice-daily milking sessions every day I’m in the office, I am, quite simply, tired of the whole thing. It takes a good 40 minutes out of my working day, and makes scheduling meetings hard. This week I stopped. It feels like the right thing to do. There are still a few bottles in the freezer so Ingrid will get her afternoon milk at the nursery for a few more days, but that’s it. This weekend we’ll see what she thinks of cow’s milk.

I have no immediate plans to stop breastfeeding, though. Unlike expressing, breastfeeding is comfortable, enjoyable and relaxing for both of us, as long as it happens during the day. In fact it is generally relaxing at night as well… When Ingrid wakes in the middle of the night and gets upset and wants the magic boob, I can sometimes feel really annoyed with her for waking me and then screaming in my ear. But once we both lie down and she gets the boob, the annoyed feelings go away and are replaced by tenderness again.

It’s interesting, I think, that the things that help calm Ingrid when she is unhappy or wound-up – breastfeeding, wearing her in a sling, rocking and swaying, singing and humming – all help relax me as well. There is the immediate effect, of course, of not having to hold a crying baby any more, and that makes a huge difference! But even once she has stopped crying, I feel more and more relaxed as I go on doing whatever I’m doing to calm her. Nature has created an interesting and pleasant dynamic there.

Today was the second day of no expressing. Yesterday I didn’t notice any difference, but today I felt like I had a lot of milk (probably because Ingrid fed earlier than usual this morning) – enough to feel distinctly uncomfortable. I think this was the first time I looked forward to getting home and breastfeeding, more than Ingrid did!

Yesterday’s lack of fuss just lulled us all into a false sense of security. Today Ingrid had lots more spots, proper fever, her worst night ever, and all the other stuff that goes with serious illness.

Among the good news, she didn’t mind sitting in the pushchair and was in fact happier there than in the baby carrier. Less warm and itchy, maybe? She even leaned back and rested in the pushchair and finally fell asleep for a while – I cannot even remember the last time she did that. Must be months ago.

A clear sign of sickness: she just sat in the bathtub instead of crawling around, and by the end of her bath time some of the bottles were still standing on the ledge. I think she liked being in the bath, though.

Ingrid was sent home from the nursery about an hour after getting there, because she turned out to have chickenpox. She had no spots when I changed her in the morning, and lots of spots just 2 hours later. Luckily she doesn’t seem to be bothered by this at all – a bit less energetic than usual, but generally happy.

Some time during the past month, a subtle line has been crossed. Ingrid’s gone from being a baby to being a little child.

I cannot really put my finger on any one thing that’s changed – it’s her whole manner of interacting with the world around her. She just seems a lot more aware and engaged with it, and exploring it a lot more aimfully. She tries to pick things up, look at them from all directions, bang them against other things. Some things bang well, others don’t. She tries to pick up my hair, the stream of water coming from the tap, and the puddles of water on the table (which, despite great improvements in her pincer grip, has never succeeded yet). And she experiments: she’s discovered that milk comes from my breasts but not from my navel, that she can hold two wooden blocks in the same hand but not three.

There is also no doubt that she has now mastered the concept of object persistence, and understood that things continue to exist when she cannot see them. She knows that when she cannot see me, the first place to look is at my desk, and the next one is the bathroom. If the bathroom light is on and the shower curtain drawn (or maybe she goes by the sound of the shower?) she has no difficulty figuring out that I’m behind the curtain, and she will pull at it until she finds me. However I have been able hide from her by lying down on the sofa, because she doesn’t think to look for me there. I so rarely have time to lie on the sofa.

She is still a creature of chaos, and likes nothing better than to destroy order. Her favourite occupation is to pull things out of shelves, drawers, boxes and bags, to knock down ordered piles. She doesn’t stack her stacking cups – she knocks them down, or if they’re nested, takes them out. It is as if order offends her. Sometimes it looks as if she doesn’t even enjoy disordering things, just tries to get it done as quickly as she can, and as soon as she’s torn them down, she loses interest – she doesn’t even play with them until I line them up again.

But it seems like she is now discovering the opposite concept as well. She has sometimes placed wooden blocks inside the box we store them in, and today she was putting a little ball inside a cup, instead of just taking it out.

She has discovered drawers and realised that new and interesting things can be found inside them. We’re vaguely considering some sort of locking mechanism, but for now it seems enough to move some things about, and keep an eye on her in the bathroom where the drawers contain household chemicals. She never goes there on her own so I’m not worried about safety yet. She’s also discovered doors and realised that they can be pushed one way and the other.

Another popular game is the thank-you game, where Ingrid gives me something and I take great care to thank her, and then I give it back and she says thank you (Estonian: aitäh). To my ears it clearly sounds like aitäh, especially because she also says it in appropriate situations outside of our game. So her two clearest words are now mme for emme (“mummy”) and aitäh (“thank you”). The third sound I think I’ve heard her use intentionally is nänn which I believe is her word for food.

In all this playing it’s been interesting to see how strongly she prefers to use her right hand. If I hand her something, she never reaches for it with her left hand.

She continues to walk with support – along the sofa or a low table, or pushing a chair in front of me. She prefers furniture to holding on to my hands. But she won’t let go, even for a moment. When she’s holding on to a chair and tries to reach the table, and it’s just a centimetre out of reach, she won’t take that leap. She’d rather sit down, move across, and stand up again. I don’t think she knows that it is possible to stand without support.

In Stockholm we also discovered that she can climb up stairs, as long as the steps are not too high. But she obviously has no understanding of danger, or of gravity, so she would happily try to sit down halfway up the stairs when there was nothing behind her. We have no stairs at home so further practice will have to wait. She does, however, practice climbing on me.

Random fact: she hates being held fast. Toothbrushing is a one- to two-second affair, and then she starts screaming. She rarely lets me hold her hand to show her how to operate a toy, or press a button. And there is no way she would sit on my lap to look at a picture book together, although she will explore them on her own.

PS: It’s getting harder and harder to get good pictures of her, because she doesn’t stay still long enough!

1.

Ingrid has been practising holding a spoon for a while now. In fact she’s been doing that since before she was eating solids. She wanted to sit with us at the table, so in order to keep her occupied I used to give her a spoon to play with. So she can hold a spoon, and she knows that the spoon occasionally holds food. She knows which end of the spoon is the business end. In the last few days she has even learned to take hold of the spoon when I offer it to her, and put it in her mouth.

But she hasn’t understood that the spoon gets its goodness from the bowl, even though she sees me put the spoon in the bowl again and again. Every time she takes the spoon out of her mouth, she puts it down on the table, without even trying to point it towards the bowl. I have to refill the spoon and give it back to her. Today I started leaving the filled spoon in the bowl for her to grab – maybe that will bring the point across.

I’d demonstrate it for her with a piece of food (take spoon, put food on spoon, give spoon to her) if it wasn’t for her habit to turn the spoon upside down before putting it in her mouth. Instead of taking the food off the spoon with her lips (which is what we do) she licks it off with her tongue, and that of course is much easier if the spoon is upside down.

2.

Whenever we go grocery shopping, I give her something to hold and play with, so she doesn’t get bored. She does get bored rather quickly otherwise. A packet of cheese works well, or a bag of carrots, or other not-too-big unbreakable items with interesting shapes. She turns them around in her hands, tries with her mouth, occasionally throws them on the floor. Bags are especially good because I can put the bag in the trolley and “accidentally” leave it within her reach, so she can pick them up herself. She likes that.

Except that today I discovered that a bag of carrots will, in fact, not work so well any more. When I took the bag from her to put it on the checkout conveyor, I noticed it was rather stickier than usual. They’re almost always a bit wet from the chewing, but this time I discovered small carrot flakes on the outside of the bag… and lots of little indentations in the carrots. Oops… forgot about the teeth! I guess she knows how to use them.

3.

Plums are in season, so I’ve been giving her some almost every day, and she likes them. They’re slippery, so I give the pieces to her from my hand rather than putting them on the table. She’s quite good at getting them to her mouth and rarely drops them. I cut the plums into segments so the pieces are long and narrow and easy to grip. (I also peel the pieces for her, because she cannot really chew fruit skins yet, and they tend to get stuck at the back of her mouth and make her gag. So I’ve been eating lots of plum skins recently.) The plum strips are quite big for her, bigger than one of her fingers, but she rarely bites off a piece – no, it all has to go in her mouth in one piece. Which means that she gets one end in and then sucks the rest in with a wet slurping sound.

4.

Sometimes she shows no interest in the food on the spoon, because she doesn’t know what I’m offering her – for example when I switch from veggies to yogurt. But when I touch her lips with the food she realises that it’s good stuff and does her little bird impersonation.

On the other hand, she always knows when she’s really had enough, and shows it clearly by turning her head away. I wonder if the head-shaking for “no” originates in babies shaking their head to avoid a spoonful of unwanted food?

Ingrid has learned a new skill: climbing over the pillows that separate her cot from our bed. This morning I was woken by someone butting against my legs.

We have a cot, but we’ve been sort of co-sleeping since the very beginning. I like her sleeping next to me. It’s cosy. During weekends and on my days off, I often join her for her morning nap, and then we sleep side by side in the big bed. I actually fall asleep more easily next to her than on my own, so I can imagine it’s the same for her. And I wouldn’t like bars separating me from my family when I sleep, so why would she?

But our bed is a little bit too narrow for all three of us together, so I compromise. Most of the time Ingrid spends part of the night in her cot, and part in the family bed. The cot stands right next to our bed, with the side removed, so it’s sort of an extension of the bed. She usually goes to sleep in the big bed (but sometimes not). Before I go to bed, she nurses, and then I usually lift her over into the cot just before she falls asleep.

I get the impression that she wakes more frequently when she sleeps closer to me, and I guess it might be because she smells the milk. So when she (inevitably) wants to nurse in the middle of the night she comes to the big bed for a snack, and then generally moves back. Other times she seems to sleep a lot more peacefully and wake less when she’s cuddled up next to me. So when she’s ill or otherwise upset for some reason, or when she has difficulty going to sleep and I’m too tired to bother, she gets to stay all night. (Basically I just do whatever feels right, or feels good, at the time.)

Unfortunately co-sleeping often means less sleep or stiff backs for Eric and myself. She sleeps a bit more deeply now than she used to, and kicks less, which is good, and I am less worried about accidentally crushing her during the night, which is also good, but on the other hand she is bigger and shifts around more and takes up more space. I think the solution might simply be to get a bigger bed.

The top two incisors have arrived, and the time of purées is nearing its end, to be replaced by the time of messes.

A month ago Ingrid was still mostly eating mashed and puréed veggies and pulses, plus porridge. (And milk, of course.) For a long while she wasn’t particularly interested in feeding herself – she wasn’t trying to grab my food and put it in her mouth, as I hear other babies do. No, if she got hold of food, she would play with it. She particularly liked hitting any spilled food on the table with the flat of her palm (SPLAT!) and sending food flying everywhere – or smearing it around with big arm movements. Another favourite was taking a piece of food in her hand and then squeezing it hard, until it all oozed out between her fingers. Despite her habit of putting all her toys in the mouth, and despite her skill at picking up and correctly using the sippy cup, the idea of using hands to actually feed herself just didn’t seem to click.

So some time after she got her first teeth, I started feeding her small pieces of soft-boiled vegetables. I had to pop them in her mouth myself – she would open her mouth wide like a little bird, but not pick up the food herself. But after a while she got the point, and started trying for herself. Her little chubby fingers weren’t exactly adept at picking up slippery lumps of veggies, but she persisted, and developed a rather messy, but quite effective eating technique – the Full Hand Mash. Pick up the piece of food with her thumb and first two fingers. On the way to the mouth, the food will slip into her hand, and the more she tries, the more the food slips, until it ends up in her palm. She chases it with her mouth, until the hand is open and the food cannot flee any further, and is caught by the mouth. At this point the hand covers half her face, and food is everywhere. Here’s what it can look like. (An optional follow-on is to then scratch her ear with the same hand, to make sure that all her face is evenly covered with food.)

Since those early efforts (just a few weeks ago), Ingrid has practiced a lot and improved her eating technique a lot. She can now eat even such slippery things as banana and juicy plums and nectarines. And she is now much less likely to hoard and later spit out any lumps in her food, although some pieces go back and forth between her hands and mouth a few times before she actually swallows them.

In fact her taste is becoming quite mature. She prefers complex flavours to bland purées: any quick meal that I make from our frozen mashed veggies is generally rejected unless I add a bit of spices or tomato sauce or creme fraiche etc. Her favourite is, of course, whatever we eat: even things that I had thought would be too strong for her (such as a moroccan tahine roast) have gone down well (but she was really thirsty afterwards!). But she will also happily eat the basic good stuff: fruit, bread, yogurt (I buy Little Rachel’s organic yogurts because they have no added sugar), cheese, porridge.

And just like us, she likes variety. If I offer her only one thing for lunch – a veggie mix, for example – she will get tired and start shaking her head at the spoon after a while. But if she then gets some bread, and maybe a bit of fruit, she gets her appetite back, and we can go back to the veggies again, and then go another round.

Unlike us, though, she is not vegetarian. She gets chicken and fish at the nursery, and whenever we feed her jar food (which is only when we’re travelling) we make sure to choose the meatiest ones. And unlike us, she doesn’t get any of the sugary stuff. Luckily for us she doesn’t yet know what she is missing.

I’ve only noticed one thing that she doesn’t like, and that’s peas. Although I’ve only tried puréed peas (not yucky boiled mashed ones, but a coarse purée of fresh green peas) – maybe she’ll like whole peas better.

Ingrid has been skipping naps since last weekend. She’s hovering in the vague zone where one nap is too little and two is too much. She is tired in the afternoon, so she’s grouchy and clingy, but not tired enough to fall asleep. Some days she has slept in the sling. Today I got her to lie down and rest by my side in the big bed for half an hour or so. But it won’t be long until she only takes one nap a day.

What am I going to do then? I need her naps! I like to join her for the morning nap if the night goes wrong, or if she wakes up unusually early. And her naptimes are the most productive parts of my day. That’s the time when I can get things done without interruption. My work-from-home Fridays are about to become a bit more challenging, I suspect.