Before you all start worrying about the lack of updates here, let me say that I’m still alive but somehow always too busy to find any time for blogging. I haven’t found a sustainable balance yet since Eric went back to work (i.e. since we have two working parents and two small children). It’s clear that I need to cut down on something in my life but I do not yet know what or how.

Adrian has contracted a rotavirus infection and has been sick since Wednesday afternoon. Very little sleep for either of us, and lots of cleaning up (of Adrian, us, his clothes, our clothes, the floor, the furniture, the bedclothes etc.) He’s improving but still unwell. Hence, no blogging.

Rotavirus

This was Adrian’s first full week at nursery. It is going better and better: he has found a carer that he trusts and has bonded with, takes proper naps, is pretty happy during the day, and usually eats at least a sandwich or two. But his mood starts veering towards unhappy after their mid-afternoon snack, which takes place at about 2 o’clock, so I’ve been picking him up before 3.

Ingrid on the other hand is not interested in going home at 3 o’clock: all her friends are still there and she’s always in the middle of something important. So I can either: (a) take Adrian home, nurse and cuddle for a short while, and then get us bundled up again to return to nursery, (b) argue with Ingrid to make her go home with me, or (c) let Ingrid take her time and just hang around for an hour or so. None of the alternatives is much fun.

And since I leave work so early, and have totally unproductive afternoons that revolve around nursery pickups, I’m struggling to get things done both at work and at home. I’ve been getting in to the office extra early on some days, and occasionally catching up in the evenings, too, but stuff is still piling up.

Yay for weekends, when I can catch up on sleep (because of those early mornings) and make a dent in the piles waiting for my attention on my desk at home.

Ingrid spends quite a lot of time with the iPad. The apps she uses most (apart from a movie player app) all come from one studio: Toca Boca. They make a variety of apps, some better than others. Originally the best ones followed a common structure but now they are branching out into more different kinds of play. We have every single one except the Helicopter Taxi which needs the iPhone camera to run.

I was going to list Ingrid’s favourites but then I realized that she loves almost all of them. Some days she plays one, then another day another app gets more time, and after a few days she comes back to the first one again.

There’s Birthday Party and Tea Party, where you start by setting a table, choosing plates and cakes, and then proceed to eat the cakes and drink the tea and lemonade. These have great multi-touch support and work very well for several players. I believe that kids are supposed to invite their stuffed animals to the tea party but Ingrid usually plays with me instead.

Then there’s Toca Store, which is sort of similar but more clearly meant to be played together. One person takes the role of shopkeeper, the other is the customer. The shopkeeper chooses which items to sell, sets their prices, rings up the items on the till. The customer picks items to buy, counts up the coins, puts the stuff in their bag.

Of course you could play those things without an app, with actual physical items – and we have. But the app is 5 seconds away whereas setting up a tea party with real toy plates and cups takes time, so Ingrid is infinitely more likely to use the app than the real thing.

A bit similar is Toca Robot, where you build a robot by picking body parts for it. The graphics are well made and fun to look at: the robots can have arms with propeller attachments and a body like a fridge. When the robot is done you can fly it through a simple maze to pick up gold stars. Updates to the app have brought new varieties of each body part, as well as new mazes, so Ingrid keeps returning to this app.

Toca Hair Salon and Toca Kitchen are two of a kind – you get some materials and can perform some actions on them. Cut, blow dry, comb, wash, colour hair; chop, fry, boil, mince food. I’ve found these somewhat disappointing – they sound like more fun than they actually are. In Toca Kitchen the choices are too limited, and they’ve skimped on the graphics: the results look dull. Frying things just makes them brownish, for example, so frying an egg doesn’t actually result in anything that resembles a fried egg. In Hair Salon the hair is difficult to control and the results are all too similar to each other, except for the colour and accessories, so what sounds creative boils down to a painting app.

Paint My Wings is actually a painting app where you paint the wings of a butterfly. The wings are mirrored, so whatever you paint on one wing also turns up on the other. There are other nice touches such as the butterflies talking to you (“that tickles!”) and using berry juice for the painting, making this a bit more interesting than just a plain drawing app.

Less open-ended is Toca Doctor which consists of a bunch of puzzles and mini-games. Ingrid liked these to begin with but they’re too simple for her now.

We have an eclectic tree with everything from delicate hand-made glass ornaments and Chinese cloisonné eggs, to giant paper crafts projects from preschool.

Ingrid is busy overseeing the opening of Christmas gifts.

Adrian couldn’t care less about the gifts but loves the raisins and gingerbread cookies.

At times it feels like half a full-time job just keeping everybody clothed. The kids’ clothes need to be kept reasonably clean (minor hopeless stains excepted), reasonably whole (almost-invisible holes excepted), about the right size, not too warm and not too cold. As a result there is an almost constant flow of clothes that need buying, name-tagging, washing, hanging, folding, mending, packing, sorting, unpacking.

Ingrid can now wear the same size for over a year, and some warm clothes from last winter still fit this year. Adrian may be able to wear his current gear for about half a year, probably no longer. How easy it is for adults, especially if you’re OK with ignoring the trendiest fashions! I’m not joking when I say that some of my clothes are 10 years old.

It used to be that all of Ingrid’s clothes could be packed away when she outgrew them, to wait for the next baby. Now I regularly have to throw clothes out. Ingrid doesn’t like trousers and greatly prefers tights and leggings, which don’t always survive long when she wears them when playing outside. She also manages to ruin the sleeves on most tops – somehow especially the white ones (which she likes to wear underneath sleeveless dresses) seem to attract paint and other crafts materials.

My shopping list for children’s clothes never gets down to zero. If it isn’t the next size of bodies for Adrian then it’s new socks for Ingrid, or it’s time to buy snowsuits for the winter, or Ingrid’s outgrown her pyjamas, or they need something presentable for Christmas.

I’m very grateful for the existence of Tradera (the Swedish Ebay equivalent). I used to buy new clothes because I was reasonably sure that I could save them for the next kid. But now Ingrid is definitely past the age when I could buy “inheritable” clothes for her. If I try, one of them (or more likely both) will be unhappy with the clothes. I can force Ingrid to wear a snowsuit that she hates, in the hopes that Adrian might be able to use it later, or I can make her happy with a second-hand pink one for less than half the price.

This was my day yesterday. A reasonably typical day for us, except for the content of my work. Normally I would spend most of my day on a larger feature but on Fridays we focus on fixing bugs. Compare and contrast this to last year’s post.

5:30 Nurse Adrian, semi-awake. Check his nappy (we use disposables at night) and of course it has leaked again and there is a big wet patch on his pyjamas. Rouse myself enough to strip off his wet pyjamas and nappy and put on a clean nappy. Can’t be bothered to go downstairs for dry pyjamas so I take him in under my blanket. Both quickly fall asleep again.
6:30 Woken by Adrian who is now clearly awake for the day. We nurse.
6:40 Get up and go downstairs with Adrian so we don’t wake the others. Change Adrian into his cloth nappy and put some clothes on him. Groggily potter around and cuddle with Adrian. Bring toys for him to the bathroom.
7:00 Take a shower while Adrian plays on the bathroom floor.
7:10 Pack my lunch for the day. Brush breadcrumbs from around the edges of the kitchen floor. Get the porridge going. (2 dl mixed grains, mostly oats; half a finely diced apple; 4.5 dl water; a chunk of butter.)
7:20 Go upstairs. Pull up the blackout blinds so that Eric and Ingrid can start waking. Get dressed.
7:25 Go downstairs. Take the porridge from the stove. Set the table for myself, Adrian and Ingrid, who will all be eating the porridge.
7:30 Eat breakfast. Help Adrian eat by loading the spoon for him. Adrian is not very interested in breakfast and would rather nurse some more, and pick with the groceries in our temporary pantry.
7:45 Brush teeth. Notice that I have a few minutes to spare before I have to leave so I photograph our newly painted bird feeder and our Halloween pumpkin which is still looking pretty fresh. Put on my coat and hat and gloves.
7:50 Leave for work.
8:00 Get to the train station, arriving at the platform just as the train rolls in. Get on the train. Read the most recent issue of the Economist.
8:10 The train stops at a red light just before Karlberg. The driver announces that due to a fracture in a rail, there is a queue of trains in to Stockholm Central and we will be going slowly. I continue reading.
8:30 Finally reach Stockholm C, 15 minutes late. Unlock bike, cycle to the office just off Östermalms torg.
8:45 At my desk. Check our support inbox, archive yesterday’s email conversations with customers.
Email our server host about problems with our outgoing mail (which is getting blocked as spam by one major US internet provider) and ask them to get their mail server removed from the blacklist.
Notice that the nightly regression tests have come up red with an error message that we have sporadically seen before; set the regression tests to run again. (They come up green 20 minutes later.)
9:00 Continue where I left off on Thursday: working on our tool which analyses our application’s translation files for unused translation strings. Improve the parallel processing code in the tool; fix some bugs in it; go through the results and remove unused translation strings.
11:11 Note that it is 11-11-11 11:11. Text message arrives from Eric, saying the same.
11:30 Break for lunch. Go upstairs to our shared kitchen, heat up the packed lunch, eat. (Jasmine rice, vegetables in satay sauce, blueberry muffin baked by Ingrid and Eric.) Chat to colleagues while eating.
12:00 Back at my desk. Fridays are bug report days which means I am free to choose which bugs or minor improvements I want to work on. I decide to improve a feature in our test runs module (which will update test runs with any changes that have been made to the test cases it contains).
12:45 The code works but the user interface is not updating as expected. Take a break, spend some time answering customer support emails.
13:00 Investigate why the user interface is not refreshing. Discover weird caching code. Fix it so the cache is invalidated when appropriate.
13:30 Remove some unrelated code that I noticed during that work, and remembered it is no longer needed. (We used to validate VAT numbers entered by our customers against a web service provided by some EU agency, but the web service is so unreliable we’ve been forced to give up on this.)
13:45 Fix a bug: a link from our login page needs to be updated because the URLs in our public web site will change as of the next release.
14:00 Fix a bug: on certain pages, the navigation menu does not remember its state. The reason turns out to be a different ClientIdMode setting on those pages.
14:45 Talk to colleagues about some planned changes to our public web site.
15:00 Fix a bug: a particular value in a special field is not sorted correctly in the charts in our application.
15:15 Fix a bug: a certain user setting should be saved in the database instead of cookie, to match the behaviour of other related user settings. Notice that the code could do with some refactoring first. Refactor.
15:40 Start working on the actual bug.
15:55 Pack up and leave.
16:00 Cycle to Stockholm C.
16:10 At station.
16:13 Train leaves.
16:25 Train arrives in Spånga.
16:35 At home. Ingrid is playing with a friend and in their game I immediately get the role of grandmother. Luckily I am not expected to do much more than talk a bit. Adrian throws himself at me. Go upstairs to get changed. We nurse. A quick trip to the basement to fetch my winter coat – the weather has turned cold almost overnight.
17:00 Eric starts making pancakes. Dinner will be half an hour earlier than usual (17:30 instead of 18:00) because Ingrid’s friend E tires earlier than Ingrid and will be going home just after 18:00. Adrian and I hang around in the kitchen. I can’t do anything productive because Adrian won’t let go of me.
17:15 Adrian looks very hungry so I put him in his highchair and give him a pancake.
17:20 The girls come to the kitchen asking for pancakes. We set the table, get out all the accessories, and start eating the pancakes just about as quickly as Eric can make them. I alternate between eating and serving more pancakes to the children. Adrian squirms out of his highchair and comes to sit in my lap.
17:45 The girls are done eating. I continue. Adrian also decides to eat some more.
18:00 All done. Start cleaning up the kitchen while Eric finishes eating.
18:15 Friend E’s father J arrives. They and Ingrid hunt for E’s clothes – for some reason she and most of Ingrid’s other friends change into Ingrid’s clothes when they’re here. They go home.
18:30 Continue cleaning up and other minor household tasks.
18:40 Adrian looks ready to go to bed. Change him into disposable nappy and pyjamas. Brush his teeth. Take him upstairs.
18:55 Nurse.
19:05 Adrian tosses and turns and sits up and lies down and does his best to wind down.
19:15 Adrian falls asleep and so do I.
19:45 Wake. Get downstairs. Check email.
19:55 Play Ludo with Ingrid.
20:20 Ingrid is getting too tired to sit still and focus on the game so we pack up. Eric prepares Ingrid for bed while I read some blog posts.
20:30 Go upstairs with Ingrid. Read a story. Sit by her bed and read blogs while she goes to sleep. She has difficulty falling asleep so this takes quite a bit longer than usual.
21:15 Go downstairs. Talk to Eric.
21:25 Work on a Christmas felt applique/embroidery project.
22:40 Adrian wakes and “calls” for me. Quickly brush teeth. Go upstairs. Nurse. Fall asleep.

Junibacken: playing and climbing opportunities for kids of all sizes.

Now that I have two kids:

• Running errands with just one kid feels like vacation
• Nursing while eating dinner seems like an excellent use of time and scarce resources (such as adult arms)
• Barbie dolls, pencils and toy china tea sets turn out to make pretty good baby toys

Not satisfied with recklessly endangering my own children, I am planning to put all of Ingrid’s friends in mortal danger on Sunday during Ingrid’s birthday party. I will be giving them all whistle blowers (gasp!) – thereby totally violating important safety rules, I’ve now learned from The Telegraph.

The EU toy safety directive […] states that balloons must not be blown up by unsupervised children under the age of eight, in case they accidentally swallow them and choke.
[…]
Whistle blowers, that scroll out into a a long coloured paper tongue when sounded – a party favourite at family Christmas meals – are now classed as unsafe for all children under 14.

Any parents who object better not bring their kids here.

Raised surface! Near stove! Knives! Power outlet! Glass items!