Ingrid’s latest favourite “toy” is a sticky plaster. Has to be the little pink one, the larger blue ones won’t do. She doesn’t want to put it on, and she doesn’t seem to do much with it, just hold it and carry it around. She takes it with her to nursery in the morning (and then loses it during the day and must get a new one when we get home). Yesterday she took one with her to bed, too. And I wasn’t allowed to put it on the bedside table – it must be on her pillow. The first thing she said when she woke up in the morning was “plåster!” and wouldn’t rest until we’d found it, under the blanket somewhere.

Ingrid likes her buggy. We like her buggy. Now, while the buggy is en route from England to Sweden, we’ve let her walk as much as she wants, but after a few hundred metres she generally shows us that she’s had enough and wants up. She weighs over 11kg and that’s more weight than I want to be carrying unaided for longer than 5 minutes or so. Perfect, put her in a sling, you might think! Unfortunately Ingrid is becoming a sling resister. She has no objections to sitting on my hip, but carrying all that weight on one side of the body is not at all comfortable after about 5 minutes. I would much rather have her on my back, but she doesn’t want to go there. On a few occasions I’ve actually put her on my back (because we had to go out and I’m not strong enough to carry her any other way all day) while she is yelling and pushing me away, and that felt awful… I’m forcing something that should be all fun and pleasure. It’s like force feeding ice cream to a child, or forcing them to hold a cuddly puppy.

Two more days until we get the buggy back, and slinging can again be voluntary and fun for everyone involved. I never thought I’d miss the buggy so much.

Experiments with water and sponge

It’s striking (and funny) how ignorant babies are – how little they know about how the world works. Things we take for granted are all new to them, including such basic concepts as “things fall down” and “you can’t grasp water” and “you can put a small thing inside a big thing but not a big thing inside a small thing”. It’s fascinating to see Ingrid learn this kind of things.

It’s also fascinating to “see” the differences between her brain and an adult brain. Apart from experience, our main advantage is the ability (and tendency) to generalise. I’m guessing that an adult would reach a reasonably firm hypothesis about gravity after having seen, say, five different things drop to the floor. He would probably keep testing this hypothesis occasionally with things that appear markedly different from the original five (things that are very large, or feel very light, or look very red, etc) but he’d probably mark that problem as “tentatively solved” pretty quickly.

A baby, however, will keep dropping things again and again for a long time, and watching them with great interest. She will learn after a while that solid objects fall to the floor. But she will still be surprised when she sees that, when you turn a spoon upside down, food will fall off. And once she has learned that, she will still be surprised to discover that when you turn a bowl of water on the side, the water will also fall down! It’s not obvious for her to expect water to behave the same as a spoon.

We learn to expect consistency, and we learn to expect new things to be similar to old things. Which is practical, but also takes away much of the childish sense of wonder.

I have discovered that while it is nice to spend some time with the family, two weeks with a toddler is almost more work than work is. A full day at home with Ingrid has us all climbing the walls by the evening. (Perhaps it is just a phase… but I suspect it’ll turn out to be a long one.) She needs new places and ideally other children around her.

So during our two-week Christmas vacation we made sure to get out every day and give Ingrid some place to burn all her restless energy. We cycled to big parks and playgrounds (Victoria Park and Southwark Park). We took the tube to Bramley’s Big Adventure and to Zoomaround and to Discover Story Centre. We made several visits to the two child-friendly museums near us, the Museum of Childhood and the Museum in Docklands. We went to the local children’s library. To put it briefly, we kept Ingrid busy.

Then came the stomach bug. Bah. And then came the two days after the worst symptoms had passed but we didn’t dare take her to nursery, or to any place where she’d get too close to other children. Argh! Two days of enforced idleness at home plus the “hangover” from a stomach bug was an awful combination. On Tuesday, out of desperate boredom, I actually went shopping with Ingrid, and I hate shopping.

I think we were all happy to go back to our day jobs.

Our baby monitor runs on batteries.
The batteries last about a week.
The batteries have to be taken out for recharging, because the base station provides electricity but does not recharge batteries.
And the battery compartment closes with a SCREW.

Truly, sometimes I think some corporations are simply evil. Someone somewhere is rubbing their hands and thinking with glee of all the time that parents will spend screwing and unscrewing that darn thing.

There is a Swedish children’s song about a spider. It goes like this:

Imse vimse spindel klättrar upp för trå’n.
Ned faller regnet, spolar spindeln bort.
Upp stiger solen, torkar bort allt regn,
Imse vimse spindel klättrar upp igen.

It never made sense to me as a song. It doesn’t rhyme, for starters. It seems to describe a rather random sequence of events. Why would the rain wash the spider away from its thread? And what the heck is “imse vimse”, anyway? I wondered for years why anyone who sets out to write a children’s song would come up with such a weak effort.

Then one day I heard it in English. Suddenly it all said click.

The eensy weensy spider crawled up the water spout.
Down came the rain and washed the spider out.
Out came the sun and dried up all the rain,
And the eensy weensy spider climbed up the spout again.

The lyrics rhyme! And they make sense! Instead of climbing up a thread, the spider really crawls up a water spout – and of course when it rains there’s lots of water in a water spout, which would flush the spider out. Instead of the meaningless “imse vimse” the spider is a perfectly sensible “eensy weensy” spider (or “itsy bitsy” if it’s an American spider). And the “Swedish” song is really a bad translation of an English one.

Interestingly, though, even the English version seems to be degrading and slowly slipping towards meaninglessness. I’ve heard the first words being pronounced more like “incy wincy”, and indeed Google finds 49,800 hits for “incy wincy spider” but only 47,600 hits for “eensy weensy spider”. (The American version “itsy bitsy spider” gets 465,000 hits.)

I have a lullaby. Exactly one. It helps her calm down when she is sleepy and tired, and knows that she is tired (so that she is no longer trying to crawl all over the bed) but still isn’t quite comfortable just going quietly to sleep. I don’t know whether it’s just the fact that I sing, or because it is a tune she is used to, or perhaps because it is a good lullaby – simple and repetitive melody, lots of humming mmm sounds etc.

The song is a very well-known one that every Estonian will recognise: Karumõmmi unelaul. It is about a little bear (karumõmm) who cannot sleep, because there is no one to sing for him. A honeybee (mesimumm) flies by and tells the bear to sing to himself. Bears say mõmm-mõmm in Estonian, and bees go summ-summ.

I have been singing it to Ingrid for many months. By now I know it so well that I can sing it almost unconsciously, even while I am half asleep. Sometimes I come to the end of one of the phrases (“mõmm-mõmm, mõmm-mõmm, something karujõmm”) and then I realise I don’t know which one it is, because I have sung the lyrics without any thought. I suspect that sometimes, in the middle of the night, I’ve looped the first verse several times before going on to the next one. (Nowadays I rarely need it in the middle of the night, but I used to use it more often some months ago.)

Unlike the bear, Ingrid is not yet listening to suggestions that she might sing to herself. However I am quite impressed that she is now willing to lie quietly while I sing to her, given how distant this possibility seemed 9–10 months ago.

As if we hadn’t had enough illnesses to worry about recently, today we were told that there had been 2 cases of measles at the nursery, and were very strongly advised to get Ingrid vaccinated ASAP. The fact sheet that the nursery had been given by the local health advisors says:

Measles has become uncommon in some parts of the UK because many children have been fully immunised. In and around the London area, various issues have resulted in many children being unprotected. The reasons include a high rate of mobility and many parents deciding to not have their children vaccinated due to the misunderstandings surrounding the safety of the MMR vaccine.

So I now have to worry about Ingrid catching measles, because other parents are not vaccinating their kids. Not happy.

Tried to work during the day but didn’t get much done, apart from keeping up with email traffic.

In the afternoon we went to the Museum of Childhood (which is close by in Bethnal Green, half an hour’s walk) for a short while. Ingrid liked the sensory area (different-coloured LEDs and some light shows, and a touchy-feely wall) and the long staircase up to the 2nd floor, and the Lego table.

She wore her new dungies for the first time and I have to admit she does look like a boy in that outfit… she needs some pink glittery hair clips, except she doesn’t have any hair to put them in… or maybe just a big sign that says “It’s a girl!”.

Touchy-feely wall

Ingrid’s 5-day course of penicillin is finished. No more strawberry red stains on clothes, no more night-time fiddling with the measuring syringe, trying to find her mouth without waking her too much.

Also, no more eye drops. She hated them.