I spend such a large part of my day looking at Ingrid’s little face that I am now unused to adult faces. The other day I was holding her and looking at the two of us in the mirror, and I found myself thinking that my own face was big, coarse and bony, Her small, round, soft face has become the standard.

Speaking of faces, it looks like she has inherited my eyes – blue and somewhat deep-set – and possibly my hair as well. Her hair is downy-fine, wispy and very fair. I think I had the same kind of hair when I was small.

As time goes by, I seem to be gravitating towards simplicity and purity, without expressly having decided to do so. It just happens naturally and slowly, as small choices accumulate.

I’ve been a vegetarian for over 14 years. (For a while I occasionally ate seafood, but haven’t done it more than once a month or so for the last few years.) While I was never a heavy boozer, I used to have a drink now and again. Even before the pregnancy I had become less fond of alcohol, and the pregnancy gave me a reason to stop completely. Since then I haven’t had any drinks, apart from a small dash of sauternes on my ice cream once, and half a cup of glögg. I don’t miss it at all.

A few years ago I used to wear perfume regularly, and sometimes even a little bit of make-up. Almost-empty bottles of my two favourite perfumes have been languishing at the back of the bathroom cabinet for years. I don’t have the heart to throw them out, even though I never use them. I last wore make-up for a friend’s wedding in 2003. For a long time I used to think of getting a tattoo; now I cannot even imagine piercing my ears because I feel it would break something that is currently simple and clean.

I am less and less fond of buying and owning things, of being surrounded by things. Every time I have to buy something that then has to take up space in our flat, I do so reluctantly. I feel an urge to purge, to throw things out, to give stuff away. (Not books, though. Books are different. And plants are good, too.) I think this may be part of the reason why I like digital things – a blog instead of a diary, digital photos, a digital job. It doesn’t clutter up my surroundings.

I don’t really know where I’m heading with this post or what to make of this… I’ve just been thinking about this for a while and wondering where this is going. Maybe I will end up living on a deserted island or on a mountaintop, surrounded by lots of nothing. And books.

I read in a blog that today is Mother Tongue Day (emakeelepäev) in Estonia.

I feel my mother tongue slipping away, ever so slowly, as I get little daily exposure to Estonian. It used to be that I didn’t ever need to think about grammar or wording. Now I find myself unsure. Can I say this? Is this a real Estonian expression or am I just translating from Swedish or English?

And all those new words they come up with all the time. “Jätkusuutlik”, and “tasalülitus”. Or perhaps they always existed but I never read texts with such fancy words as a teenager?

Nevertheless, at some very deep level Estonian remains my mother tongue. I couldn’t speak any other language with Ingrid without it feeling forced and false. I am Estonian; it is natural that I speak Estonian with my child. I hope she grows to like Estonian and won’t find it frustrating that she has to speak a different language with me.

Resolution: I will start commenting regularly on the Estonian blogs I read. I will pipe up as soon as I can think of something (anything!) to say.

As I’ve started reading Lise Eliot’s What’s Going On in There, I’ve realised that my brain, at least, works the same now as it did in university. I cannot read a work of non-fiction and expect to remember its contents, unless I actively work with the text. Exercises, quizzes, taking notes, underlining and summarising… Otherwise I read, take in the text, think “Aah, this is interesting!”, and yet I remember very little of it later.

After reading 2 chapters of this book I looked back and realised I couldn’t tell you a single thing I’d learned from it. So I’m going back to the beginning and starting over, this time taking notes. And since typing is faster than writing by hand, I’m going to post my notes here.

A blog I happened to read some while ago (how I got there, I no longer remember) pointed out a common feature of many blogs: all too frequently, they descend into endless ranting.

…one thing I have realized is that posting without complaining is a hard thing to do. About a year ago I decided I wanted to try to only post positive things and my post volume has been through the floor ever since. I guess it’s just a lot of fun to post to the world and bitch about whatever it is you feel is wrong with what’s going on. Hence forth, I’m rejecting that position and returning to criticizing all that I think is crap.

Just like the author of that blog, I decided – already when I started this blog – that I would stay away from complaining. I wanted to blog about things I would want to remember and be reminded of later – and to spend my time thinking and writing about things that are worth thinking and writing about. Nevertheless, here I am, in that same sinkhole of complaining.

But unlike that guy, I do NOT want to return to “criticizing all that I think is crap”. On the contrary, I think it is time for betterment. I hereby resolve to stop complaining.

Last Thursday Ingrid was due for her 4-month immunisation. For some reason I was totally sure that Friday was the day, and only found out I was mistaken on Friday morning, when I wanted to check the exact time.

Today I was on my way to the Estonian embassy to get a passport for Ingrid. Halfway there I realised I had forgotten my own passport at home.

So while the acute sleep deprivation phase may be mostly over, long-term chronic sleep deprivation is definitely still here with me, with all its subtle ways of undermining me. My brain feels broken: I forget and misremember things. I cannot concentrate. I am short-tempered and irritable during the day. My immune system is messed up: I was actually really sick for several days, for the first time in at least 3 years.

I need at least 8 hours of sleep a day in order to feel rested and fully charged. In wintertime, with those long dark nights, slightly more. Now, of course, I’m nowhere near that.

A typical night can go something like this:

• Go to bed at 10. Give Ingrid a last feed. She is done and sleeping by 10.20. I fall asleep a bit later, maybe 10.30.
• Ingrid half-awake at 0.30. I try to get her back to sleep because if I feed her now she will be hungry twice more before it’s time to get up. Give up at 1 and feed. She falls asleep at 1.20. It takes me a while to go back to sleep since I’m now wide awake.
• Ingrid wakes again at 3. Feed. So drowsy that both of us are asleep again within 10 minutes.
• Ingrid starts making noises at 4 – probably because the previous feed was so short (since we both fell asleep halfway through). Feed again. Ingrid asleep 4.10; myself 4.20.
• Ingrid starts shifting around and floating out of her sleep around 6. I manage to keep her almost-sleeping for another 30 minutes by gently rocking her now and again. At 6.30 she’s awake for real, kicking and wanting to play. I take her out to the living room, change the nappy, and let her spend a while on her own. I go back to bed and doze for 15 minutes, by which time she is bored – not crying, but making enough noise to wake me again. I move her to a new place and doze for another 10 minutes.
• More noise from the living room at 7. Give up and get up.

Time spent in bed: 9 hours.
Sleep: just under 6 hours, broken into 34 pieces.
Dozing: around 1 hour.

Somehow I still function surprisingly well despite this constant shortage of sleep. Mothers have been doing this for hundreds of years, after all.

Ingrid’s recently discovered ability to fall asleep in the bed has meant a huge improvement in this regard. I used to have to wait until the weekend for a chance to catch up at least part-way. Now I can get an extra hour or so, if I’m lucky, during her morning nap. When the morning nap didn’t work (this weekend) I was reminded again what a difference it makes. I was so relieved when I managed to get her to sleep in the bed again today!

For some reason, I’ve become a slow eater. I’ve never been a particularly fast one, but recently I’ve noticed that I’m really slow. When Eric and I eat identically sized servings, for example, I often have a third or even half of my portion still on my plate, when he has finished. And it’s not because Eric’s a fast eater – I’ve noticed the same thing in company with other people as well.

At home it doesn’t really matter that much. But it’s almost becoming a problem when I eat in company. When I’ve had lunch with people at work, for example, I’ve started buying myself a smallish lunch and added a dessert that I’ve eaten afterwards at my desk. Even so, everyone has usually finished their huge plates of meat and veg, and I’m still sipping on my soup. I have also started to pay more attention to when I talk – I try to keep my contributions to the conversation between courses and let others talk when there is food on the table, in order to have a chance to keep up. Not that it really works, though.

I don’t really know why this has happened… I don’t like my food very hot, so I’m slightly slower to start. I like to drink quite a lot with my meals. But this doesn’t seem sufficient to explain such a huge difference. Do I chew longer? Have a smaller mouth? Don’t know.

On the positive side, slow eating is supposed to be good for you – “the secret of longevity” and all that. And it gives me more time to enjoy my food, because I do enjoy eating.

After my two-week Christmas holiday with Eric at home, I started this year rested and with lots of energy. (Relatively speaking.) I was determined to get more done – to get out more, to have more fun during the days, and generally just try to avoid getting stuck in a rut.

It is very easy for me to get worn down by the endless repetition of small stuff, and lose all ability to take initiative. After a few rounds of breastfeeding, nappy changes, and slinging Ingrid to sleep, my brain just slowly shuts down and I let the rest of the day pass by without doing anything much. Even though I like to read, I can’t be bothered to pick up a book. Even though we have lots of good movies at home, it’s easier to simply surf the web for an hour.

One of the changes I’ve made – probably the most important one – is to go out for a long walk every afternoon, as long as the weather isn’t atrocious. This one change alone has worked wonders on my energy level, and that in turn has led to more good changes. Mental energy, unlike the physical variety, generates itself like a perpetuum mobile – you really can get more energy out of an activity than you put in.

I am also trying to find regular activities that I could commit to. It’s easy to skip a walk because it’s drizzling outside, but if I was signed up for a course, for example, I would be more likely to ignore the weather and go anyway. Now that I think about this, the best kind of activity would be something where others depended on me – I have such a strong sense of responsibility that I would make a real effort to do what I have promised. Hmmm… something to ponder.

Anyway, I have only found one weekly activity thus far – a local NCT coffee group, i.e. a group of local mothers who get together and drink coffee (or pomegranate and raspberry juice) and eat cookies and talk about their babies.

I went to a coffee group for the first time last week. Most babies there were older than Ingrid, around 7 to 10 months, but there was one other 3-month baby there. And she was so tiny next to Ingrid! She looked no larger Ingrid did at 1 month. And she also seemed about as strong as Ingrid was then. Ingrid looked like a pro wrestler in comparison, with her ability to lift her head and wave her legs around and all that.

I couldn’t help feeling really proud of my baby. I know that most probably very little of her rude health is due to anything I have done, and she would probably look and be as robust if someone else was taking care of her. She happened to be of slightly above-average weight at birth, and happened to be good at eating and growing. The other baby happened to be born small, and possibly grow slower. There’s not much a mum can do about this. But still, I couldn’t help it. I was inordinately proud of my big strong beautiful baby, and still am.

Look, world, this is my baby! I created this lovely creature! It came out of my body! And it’s my milk that’s made her so strong!

This is something my hormones do to me, I’m convinced, to make sure that I take good care of her. It’s a bunch of selfish genes wanting to survive and procreate and then in 20 or 30 years’ time they can make her feel the same so the genes get to go another round. And every other mum’s genes do the same to her. Doesn’t matter. I’m still so proud of my baby.

While Ingrid is a lovely baby, and getting lovelier by the day, I really cannot say that I enjoy staying at home and taking care of her all day, every day. It’s challenging and boring at the same time.

First of all, it can be immensely frustrating because there is very little feedback, and the little that there is, is very unclear. She is a black box: I am taking care of a system whose workings are hidden from me, and whose feedback is generally limited to two states: “I’m OK”, “I’m not at all OK, fix me!”. When she seems hungry, there is no gauge to say whether she is very hungry, a little bit hungry, or just feels like snacking on the breast. When she seems tired, there is no way to know whether she really is tired or simply bored. And no way of knowing whether what I am doing to calm her is (1) just right but needs some time to work; (2) almost right, just needs some tweaking; or (3) totally wrong and making her more upset. All guesswork. And to make it worse, even when I think I’ve figured out some part of it, that part is sure to change so my solution stops working again.

At the same time, I find it quite tedious to take care of a baby. My days are very repetitive. Change, feed, burp, keep her awake, try to get her to sleep. Wait an hour or two while she sleeps, and start over. And repeat all over again. And each step is the same every time. Getting her to sleep is especially boring: it generally involves patting her while rocking / swaying her in a sling, for 10–15 minutes, and again if she wakes up halfway through her nap. So every day I spend about an hour rocking and bouncing from one foot to the other.

The part that rankles me the most, I think, is the utter lack of flexibility. I cannot ask her to wait just a few minutes – when she wants food, she better get it immediately, and when she is crying out of tiredness, she cannot wait until I’ve finished my meal, for example.

I really am looking forward to a more communicative Ingrid. Much of this does come down to communication, doesn’t it? When her feedback becomes more nuanced than just “this is good” and “this is awful”, when it becomes possible to play with her while she’s awake, when she starts understanding what I say… this should all become much more enjoyable. I hope so!

The zombie-like state of the first three weeks has passed: this week I have actually felt like a human being again. I hadn’t really realised how tired I was before – I only see it now, looking back.

Suddenly there is room for other sensations than tiredness in my brain. During the first two weeks I often ate and drank only because Eric reminded me to. (I think I lost 3–4 kg during those 3 weeks. Oops.) Now I feel hungry again, and eat almost as often as Ingrid does. And as an interesting side effect of breastfeeding, I feel thirsty during the day. This is a new sensation for me; previously I have only been thirsty due to hot weather or physical exertion.

Most importantly, though, not being exhausted means that I now finally have energy for positive emotions. During the first weeks Ingrid was mostly just a chore, and sometimes a very frustrating one.

It is a lot easier to feel loving kindness and show love towards her now that I am not so tired.