One of the main things that I got up to last week was resurrecting my photo blog. I love posting photos on here of Little O and Baby E and what we’ve been up to, but I fear I am getting into the bad habit of just posting my daily photos here and not doing much else. And much as I love taking daily photos, that was not really what I started this blog for.

So, my solution is to post my daily photos there and post a digest of the week here:

I started the week with a pedicure. And then of course the rain started and temperature plummeted. Typical! On Tuesday, Little O’s preschool was closed and so we went to Skansen for the morning to see the animals – brown bears, wolves, seals and owls were all spotted. At lunchtime, Little O decided not to take a nap… On Wednesday I made my photo blog decision and on Thursday I decided to document Little O’s growing Duplo collection after tidying it away for the umpteenth time.

On Friday, we got out the bouncer for Baby E to use and Little O was his usual bossy self, telling Baby E exactly what to do with it. It made me laugh so much. And I have no idea where his bossiness comes from… On Saturday, the atrocious weather continued. We had planned to go out and cheer along the runners in the Stockholm Marathon but the weather was just too bad. Instead, we too refuge (along with half of Stockholm, it seemed) in BR toy store in Gallerian shopping centre. Little O had such fun playing in there. The joy is that he does not yet realise that you can blackmail your parents into buying toys each time. He regards it as a large play land where the toys are put back on the shelf when you are finished with them. And long may that continue!

As Little O seems to have decided to drop his daytime nap, on Sunday I took the advice of a preschool teacher and did not try to get him to sleep but instead darkened his room a little and put him in his cot with three or four books to read. I then put on his music box and left him to decide what he wanted to do; if he wanted to looks through his books, he could do that, and if he wanted to sleep, then he could also do that He chose just to chat to himself and look through the books. Fair enough. I gave him 45 minutes of this “quiet time” and it seemed to work pretty well. He was a little more rested when I got him up again, I’d had a little time to eat lunch and drink a cup of coffee and we had not had a battle over sleep. Win-win. And a third win, as we had fun afterwards when he dragged his potty from the bathroom into our bedroom and asked me to read to him from the books on my bedside table.