As part of what I learnt from the book, I’ve moved many of the banners out of my sidebar, reclassified my categories and put a new drop-down menu up there at the top of the page (What I write about), where you can see the new categories. Only small changes but I’m pretty pleased with them.

One of the main things that I keep on reading about it targeting your niche. But if I really stick to just my one niche – parenting toddlers in Stockholm – I think it would make for very narrow reading. On the other hand, this isn’t really a full, all-round blog either. I quite like that I just sit here in my own little space, doing my thing.

What do you think? Do you think you need to find your one true niche, or can you be a bit more relaxed about things? I suppose this is the difference between the big bloggers and bloggers like me. And although I learnt a lot from the book, I think I’m also quite happy with how my blog is just now.

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Photo from Amazon.com

Over the past few evenings, Little O and I have been reading a book on the Kindle app called The Small Mice of Homesville by Linda May Kallestein and Elias Kallestein, who have set up Kallestein Publishing together.

This book – the third that they have published – is beautifully illustrated by Elias Kallestein with charming drawings of the mice and I loved the red thread illustration that runs along the bottom of every page, finishing in a ball of wool at the end of the book. Little O and I had fun tracing the pattern of it across the pages.

We split reading of the book over three evenings before bedtime because of Little O’s age; however, I think that if he was a year or so older, we could have read the story in one sitting (or maybe it is just his inability to sit still!). It is broken up into a number of short chapters, which does make it easier to stop reading at different points if you do need to read it bit by bit, as we did.

The story gives you many things to talk about, primarily taking care of younger siblings, so in that way, it suits us perfectly. I am looking forward to us reading it through again and seeing what Little O remembers from the first time. At almost three (this weekend, can you believe it?), I think Little O is at the young end of the scale to enjoy this book, and I think it is something that children would like for some years on because it could also be a book that children read themselves.

The book costs $6.24 on Amazon.com, which works out at around Skr 41, less than €5 or some £4. (I am not sure of the retail price on Amazon.co.uk as it does not allowed me to see the UK price of Kindle books.) Their first two books – Baby Animals and Animal Kingdom Alphabet – are also on Amazon and cost the same price.

Disclosure: I was given a free copy of this book by the author for review purposes. However, the review above is written solely by me, in my own words.

While I and then Husband were on parental leave, he was used to waking at around 7am, having a leisurely breakfast and then going to preschool for a 9am start. Now that both of us are back at work, however, Little O has to be at preschool at 7.30am – on the plus side, I can pick him up earlier and we have the long spring afternoons for play.

Over the past couple of months, we have had some problems getting him to stay in bed and go to sleep before about 8.30pm. This wasn’t ever night though, so we thought that it might correlate with how much he was sleeping during the day at preschool.

So we asked them to restrict his nap to 40 minutes and crossed our fingers that this would help. And at first it did, but then we realised that some days he would nap for half an hour or so and the next he would not nap at all, and we were again seeing him appear in the living room when he should be tucked up in bed asleep. (Another problem is just how cute he looks when he runs in to chat with us after bedtime – it is hard not to be amused – bad, I know.)

We decided that, at that point, there was not so much to be done as Little O would soon be switching from a 9am to a 7.30am start at preschool, and we thought that would solve the problem after a few days.

We’re now a week in to him starting earlier and the bedtime situation is only getting worse. We’ve had evenings when he makes every excuse possible not to sleep, nights when he has got up 12-15 times, and it culminated last night with me taking him in to our bed with me at 9.40pm when he still was not asleep. And the worst is that he was so very, very tired, but so very, very determined to stay awake.

What have you done in these situations? Do you think this just needs a few more days to resolve itself? Or a should we be looking for new strategies?

It really is something when a nearly three year old is awake later than his mamma…

Little O is a typical little boy; all of his trousers are ripped at the knees as he spends every moment outside scrabbling around, crawling, climbing and all things that little boys do.

So we need yet again to buy him new trousers.

Luckily, I spotted an offer in the window of Polarn o Pyret as I passed by this morning: 25% off chinos for club members.

Let him do his worst to these!

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I let very few pictures of me pass, mostly because I am the official photographer of the house, so I get to delete them ones I dislike in the editing process, but also because I am the official photographer of the house and so I’m rarely at the other end of the lens. (Seriously, Husband has many, many skills but taking decent photos is not one of them – the DSLR and him is a disastrous combination.)

Something happens when I put on sunglasses though. Maybe it is the summery feeling that I get, maybe it is that they hide the bags under my eyes and cover up half of my face; whatever it is, photos of me in sunglasses get allowed nine times out of ten.

And it looks as if Little O is following in my footsteps (and he even managed to get them on the right way up this time!).

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