Day 142:

Like crack for toddlers

Here in Sweden, Välling is the bedtime drink of choice for babies from 6 months and toddlers. It’s a milk-based drink with various grains in it that you typically give them as a bedtime drink. We give Little O the one without yoghurt, fruit or extra flavours as I don’t really want him having those just before bed. However, even without those, his excitement when he sees the bottle come out of the cupboard (he knows what to expect as this is the only time that he does not use a zippy cup) is unbelievable. He hops from foot to foot and calls out “Vee, vee, vee!” – his name for välling.God only knows what they are putting in the stuff to cause this kind of reaction. So, I decided to make this a week of change; not only would we attempt to cut back Little O’s dummy (pacifier) use to just nap and nighttime (more on this later, as it deserves a post of its own…), but we’d also start to mix the välling with warm milk to try and reduce his dependency on the välling. So far, this is going well. Cutting back on the dummy use, on the other hand, is a different story…

Day 143:

Dare to bare

Woo hoo, summer has arrived! Yes, I let out the toes for the first time this year.

Day 144:

Holding hands

Little O’s very cute new habit is holding hands with Baby E – this picture makes my heart melt.

Day 145:

Crack den chic

From the crack-like properties of välling on Monday, to crack den chic on Thursday. Much as I love the sunshine of a Stockholm summer, I do not love being woken by a playful baby at 4.25am because it is board daylight in the room. Yes, I could buy blinds, but seeing as we’ll be moving out in a few months, I decided to take the cheap way out and tape newspaper to the window panes. And if newspaper doesn’t cut the sunlight out, then I am quite happy to go the whole crack den route and resort to tin foil on the windows instead.

Day 146:

Birthday wish list

Husband, take note! I would very much like this book (A Guide to Stockholm’s Architecture: 400 buildings from 800 years) for my birthday next month!

Day 147:

Heja, heja, Sverige!

So, Saturday night, I settled down in front of the Eurovision Song Contest with the iPad in one hand to keep in contact with the CPH girls who used to attend my annual Eurovision parties and a glass of rose in the other. I have to admit that I was not a huge fan of Sweden’s entry, Euphoria by Loreen, but it was beginning to grow on me as I had heard it repeatedly over the previous few days…

Day 148:

“The world and Zlatan congratulate Loreen”

…and then she bloody well won the contest. Woo hoo! And apparently even Zlatan joined in with the rest of the world to congratulate her. Now Husband is just hoping that Loreen will have something to congratulate Zlatan for in just over a month’s time. We shall see…

Picture postcard Phuket

This week’s Gallery theme is “picture postcard” and when I read it, I just knew that this picture would be perfect. I took it last January when Husband, Little O and I were on holiday on Phuket. We had a fantastic time on the holiday. Little O was just beginning to use furniture to pull himself up to standing and was trying to crawl. He spent every day in the pool and demolished a fair few Thai meals.

I would go back at the drop of a hat.

He has many words that he uses correctly and “passed” the test with the nurse at 18 months of knowing at least ten words. Interestingly, the way he seems to be learning new words has changed as he has grown. Initially, when hearing both the Swedish and the English word for something, he would typically choose the easier of the two to say. Now, however, he seems to use both words and he is beginning to understand that Husband and I use different words for the same thing: he’ll say “train” to me and “tåg” to Husband and bring us books in our own language to read to him. It never ceases to amaze me the extend to which our little people can understand and pick up things around them.

Where I start to get a little concerned though is that he is not yet really saying phrases to us. Other children of the same age that I hear in the playgrounds here (and who are presumably monolingual) are already stringing three or four words together into small sentences. But the nearest that Little O has got to doing this is “No, Mamma” and “Nej, Pappa”.

At first I was not too worried about it as it has always been said that bilingual children will often be a little behind in some area of their language development. But that theory has now been discounted now, with the cognitive benefits now stated as being great. Googling “bilingual toddler speech delay” did help somewhat as most of the cases there were of children not speaking at all, and when he’s on form, Little O is barely quiet for one minute. The problem is that little of what he says is recognizable as proper words in either English or Swedish. He’s still just babbling.

I’m not ready to rush him off for speech therapy just yet (!), but what do you think? Is he just a little behind and likely to catch up? Or is this something that we should be keeping an eye on?

Day 135:

A quiet evening’s entertainment

I took this photo to show what I was planning to do next: paint my nails and then read while waiting for them to dry. Of course, best laid plans and all that, and so I ended up pottering about on the internet for too long to start on my nails and I still went to bed too late. Fail.

Day 136:

A head full of measurements and grand schemes

Another spent on the computer for far too long; however, this one was actually spent doing something that Husband would approve of. I had taken down quite a few measurements when we went over to our new apartment during the day, so I started to annotate the floorplan and start thinking about what we should actually be putting onto the walls come July when we get the keys.

Day 137:

My little star

Baby E seems to be continuing with his good growth. We’re not due back with the nurse for another weigh-in until the beginning of June but he really is piling it on. I love this picture because he looks like a little elfin, but actually when he doesn’t have a hood on, his face has chubbed up nicely!

Day 138:

Pappa and Baby E

You see what I mean about Baby E – getting nicely chubby!

Day 139:

Mamma and her boys

Husband managed to get this shot before Little O was on the move again. Seriously, sometimes it just exhausts me watching him on the go.

Day 140:

Going through a Wonder Week?

We had another few unsettled days with Baby E this week. We attribute it partly to Wonder Week 19 and partly to us forgetting his Biogaia probiotic drops. I had not been convinced before that these actually worked, but now I really believe in their magic. Luckily, my brother-in-law was able to take Husband out for a trawl around the villages and towns of Skåne to find a large enough pharmacy to buy the drops. I doubt either of them minded, given that they were in a Ferrari borrowed from a friend of my brother-in-law.

Day 141:

Sleeping beauties

Two of my three favourite boys, snapped early this morning after Baby E’s first feed of the day – and he allowed us a lie-in until 6.15am today. Thank you, Baby E! Typically, after feeding him, I was wide awake, while the boys went back to sleep. Oh well, I guess my early start means I should really get off the computer now and get to bed…

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While I catch up on my zzzzzzz’s, head over to The Boy and Me and check out what everyone else has been up to this past week.

Yep, I really am. So, starting over – next Sunday I will write up a proper blog post, but until then, here’s what we’ve been up to for the past few weeks…

Thumbnails for April

Thumbnails for May

In brief: we’ve sold our apartment (hooray!), enjoyed some good weather, hidden from the rain, discovered some new parts of the city, enjoyed Baby E’s latest weigh-in, brought out the Bumbo, celebrated Little O’s second birthday (time flies!) and eaten cake.

I am a very happy mamma today following our visit to the nurse for Baby E’s weighing in. Yep, he’s back on the curve and growing well. (And let’s see if he also sleeps through a third night as well tonight – holding my thumbs, as they say here in Sweden!)

Baby E: three months old

In my Drafts folder, I have had notes for a blog post that I wanted to write about breastfeeding. The draft has been sitting there for about seven weeks now. The notes that I wrote in it were about how breastfeeding seemed to be established after our initial struggles and that we had it sorted now.

Now the breastfeeding rug has been pulled out from under my feet. Baby E is now taking two bottles of formula a day and is likely to increase that to three in the next day or so.

When I took him to the BVC (the baby and child department at the doctors’ surgery) this week for his injections, the nurse weighed him again as two weeks ago, when he was last weighed, he had dropped down to two lines below the curve. In the past week or so he had been extending his feeds to 35-40 minutes, but the day before his feeds had dropped right back to just 15-20 minutes. I was really hoping that this was a sign that he had upped his weight in the previous week and now was getting back on track. However, he had dropped a little further down on the chart and she said that could now see on him just by looking that he was underweight. Not words that any mamma wants to hear.

She recommended either breastfeeding him more each day or to give him formula for some feeds instead. She did not say it directly, but she was certainly leaning towards the second option and even gave me a large tub of formula powder for babies with a milk allergy.

I left there with very mixed emotions. I have not ever really loved or enjoyed breastfeeding that much, but I feel sad that it is coming to an end, simply because this time I have fought so hard to keep going with it. On the other hand, I just don’t love it enough to fight hard for three more months of breastfeeding Baby E when we are under so much stress at the moment. In fact, Husband and I believe that it is most likely this stress that has contributed to this problem. Since Baby E has been born, we have been travelling frequently down to southern Sweden to spend time with Husband’s sick father, we have bought an apartment, we have packed up numerous boxes of our possessions, tidied and cleaned our apartment into a minimalist white box, put the apartment on the market; and we have very recently made a last-minute trip down to Skåne to say goodbye to my father-in-law, then travelled back down for his funeral, and finally this week been through a real estate trauma. All this while juggling life with a toddler and a newborn. I guess my stress level might have been a little higher than usual.

But still, I cannot help but feel to blame for Baby E being so underweight. Shouldn’t I have noticed this before? What about a mamma’s intuition? He has not been crying out for more food, he has not had problems sleeping, he has not seemed short of any of the developmental milestones. The only sign that he is underweight has been his weight when measured by the nurse. Yes, he is small but then both boys were smaller than the Swedish average when born and both have so far remained smaller the average. However, now that we compare Baby E at three months with how much Little O weighed at the same age, we can see there is almost a one kilo difference.

So, my goal now is fatten up my poor little boy, and if that means formula, so be it. It certainly has done his big brother no harm.

The beginning part of this week, I was still down in southern Sweden with the boys, staying with my mother-in-law. Husband flew down on Wednesday morning and then we all flew back up to Stockholm that evening. It feels like we’ve been back far longer than just a few days, but that is because of all the drama since we’ve returned…

Day 107:

The only way to travel

We took a trip with my mother-in-law to the large supermarket in a bigger town on Monday evening and the boys were transported around in style!

Day 108:

Aviator cool

I managed quickly to snap this photo before Little O took these sunglasses off, but doesn’t he look cool? (Okay, yes, I am biased…)

Day 109:

Mummy's boy

This trip had turned Little O into a total Mummy’s boy, but that is already starting to fade now that we’re back with Pappa!

Day 110:

Automat

I spotted this vending machine at Kulturhuset. Little O had been at their Rum För Barn children’s area running off some steam before bedtime. However, best laid plans and all that… We spent the following 25 minutes walking around and around in the garage underneath our building, waiting for the real estate agent to let us know that he had left with some prospective buyers. They spent 40 minutes looking at our apartment!

Day 111:

"Night night, Baby E"

After a very long day with a visit to the doctors’ surgery for Baby E to be weighed and receive his first batch of injections, two additional viewings on our apartment, a day-long rainstorm and a whole load of nail-biting “will they, won’t they” real estate drama, we ended up back at square one with the sale of the apartment and facing another two weeks of keeping the place looking immaculate. I could cry – in fact, I did… The only bright spot in the day was when Little O kissed his baby brother goodnight.

Day 112:

Three months old

My gorgeous baby one celebrated a quarter of a year on Friday. He can look so serious and intense, so I just love it when he sees me or his Pappa or his big brother and bursts into a smile like this.

Day 113:

A rare portrait with Mamma

Husband managed to persuade me to have my photo taken with the boys. I really think that a) I should not wear that t-shirt again and that b) the mamma boot camp session that I have signed up for tomorrow cannot come soon enough! I had thought that I had managed to shed most of my baby weight, but this picture tells a different story… Little O also decided to dress up for the occasion, insisting on wearing his beloved “nee-nah” vest over the top of this pajamas!

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