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May 4, 2013

Settling in

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After Baby E completed the three-day inskolning process at preschool, he had a week and a half of shorter hours to ease him in. However, it didn’t really turn out like that. Monday went fine – he spent the day at preschool from 9am to 2.30pm. Tuesday he woke with a fever, so we kept him home, and it continued on Wednesday and that night. On Thursday he woke without a fever but still not quite happy, so we kept him home again. He went back on Friday and had a great day.

This week, he was in on Monday and all was well. Tuesday was a half day of work for Husband and I ahead of Wednesday’s public holiday (1 May). I got home, got changed and got the call. Yep, fever again, please could I come and collect him early. The next day, Husband had the day off but I had to work, so he was home with the boys and all was fine. On Thursday both boys started early at preschool – the new schedule to fit in with our working hours: dropped off early, collected early. Little O was in his element as this meant being outside for an extra hour and a half. Baby E was not quite so sure – he really does not like to get his hands dirty and a few grains of sand leads to screams of terror and disgust – and he started to be upset when he saw other children being dropped off by parents. The staff were not worried though and he had a great day overall.

Yesterday it was the same apparently, with Baby E becoming upset when he saw other parents leaving their children. But again it was a great day overall. And we knew that he would find it a little harder than Little O ever did – he’s a more sensitive soul than his brother and he has had a much more disjointed settling-in period.

But once he has settled in fully, I might have to come to collect the boys 15 minutes after I have been doing. It took me 25 minutes yesterday to get Little O to stop making sand pancakes and it was only with the help of one of the staff that he would relinquish control of the spade and agree to come home…

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Apr 20, 2013

A week of change

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An English Mamma in Stockholm: First day at dagis / förskola / preschool

First day nerves?

Hectic would be the word for this week. Or perhaps draining, or maybe even exhausting.

Monday was a normal day: up early, off to work for 6am, finish work at 2pm, home, change for the gym, an hour’s training, home, dinner, play with the boys, get the boys into bed, and then fall into bed myself. The only difference was that my mum was looking after Baby E, as Husband started back at work after two months of paternity leave.

Tuesday, however, was where things started to get chaotic. Up at 5.30, log on to work from home, computer gets slower and slower and slower, until it takes 5 minutes to switch between Word and Excel. Stress levels rising, 6.45 is the deadline and it is drawing near, call a colleague to help me. Log off at 9am, corral the boys, bundle their octopus-like limbs into snowsuits (yes, spring still hasn’t really sprung here and we’re still in winter gear) and rush out the door. Arrive at förskola at 9.30am for inskolning (a three-day introduction process) for Baby E. Spend the next five hours at preschool with him, bundle him back into his snowsuit, walk across to Little O’s group, get him into his winter outfit, rush back home, in the door, boys to my mum and then log on for another five hours of work, interspersed with the boys’ dinner and their bedtimes. Crash in bed around 10pm.

Repeat process on Wednesday and Thursday – not forgetting to head to the BVC on Wednesday after preschool for Little O to have a three-year check-up and Baby E to have his MMR shot.

I’m exhausted after just typing all that.

And then Friday: wake at 4.45am (no idea why…), up, log on, work three hours, get the boys into winter gear, off to dagis – it’s all sounding quite familiar now, isn’t it? – and then “Bye bye!” and hand Baby E over to a member of staff, a kiss on the cheek, a wave goodbye and he settled in for a day at förskola on his own. And when I went to pick him up at 2.30pm, they said he had had a great day, had ate and slept well and had not been upset when I left. Perfect.

Now we have a couple of weeks with shorter hours, to ensure that he settles fully in. And then we’ll have two preschoolers. How time flies.

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Feb 10, 2013

Week 6 – Project 365

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A week free of sickness – hooray! Little O was off nursery (or förskola as it is called here) on Monday and Tuesday, just to make sure that he was fully recovered, so we had a lazy day in on Monday, and on Tuesday, just when I was despairing as the boys attacked each other for the fourteenth time (I think they had had a little too much of each other’s company…), there was a knock at the door and this beautiful bouquet arrived. It really put a smile on my face.

On Wednesday, Little O was back at förskola and ready for the weekly excursion to a local park, all dressed up in his reflective vest. And the week got even better on Thursday  when a letter arrived saying that Baby E has been offered a place at the same förskola as Little O (and, in fact, in the group that Little O has just left, so we know all the staff really well already).

An English Mamma in Stockholm: week 6 project 365 photos bouquet flowers

Baby E was in a good mood on Friday and enjoyed scooting around with his toddler wagon. He has now become interested in trying to walk if we hold his hands, something that he hated to do until recently. It will be interesting to see when he decides to try his first steps unaided, as Little O had already started to walk about ten days before his first birthday. Just another way in which these two are so very different.

Little O demonstrated yet again how active he is – he just does not stop moving. Sometimes I feel exhausted just watching him. And so today we decided to let him run off some steam at the park, although, of course, his favourite thing to do there is swing.

An English Mamma in Stockholm: week 6 project 365 photos snow swings

How was your week? What did you get up to?

• • • •

TheBoyandMe's 365 Linky

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Jan 17, 2013

R2BC: The snow workout

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This week seems to have flown by and it’s already Thursday, and that means: reasons to be cheerful.

  • Little O has been settling back in at preschool much better and has had a good week. We had a large snowfall on Tuesday and so our journeys to and from preschool involve stopping every 100m to eat the fresh snow.
  • All this snow on the pavements means that I get an extra workout each day, pushing the boys in the buggy and on the board!
  • And the snow means that the days are not as dark as they should be, which gives me hope that spring will be on its way soon (fingers crossed!).
  • Baby E has cut a new tooth and it didn’t seem to have been to painful a process as we only realised once it was poking through his gum. That’s tooth no.3 now – he’s a bit of a late one on the teething front.
  • We are starting to find the time to get the apartment even more organised – a big task after living on a building site for four months.

After a couple of weeks of readjustment, we are getting back into our routines and life is settling down and becoming a little easier. And that feels like a huge relief. Who knew that Christmas would prove so disruptive!

 

Reasons to be Cheerful at Mummy from the Heart

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Oct 5, 2012

R2BC – Seeking out the positives

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toddler baby boys playingI know I’m a day late with my Reasons to be Cheerful, but then this week has had its ups and downs – and mainly downs, unfortunately.

However, I’m going to ignore them and focus on the positives, of which they are some good ones.

And I’m also going to make an effort to join in R2BC more often, as it really does have a positive impact on the way that I feel.

  • Crossing fingers and toes and everything else that can be crossed, our apartment renovation project should be finished by early November. Woo hoo! We’ve been living in a couple of rooms now for five weeks, so it feels like about time!
  • We finally have a fridge-freezer. You cannot imagine how exciting an event this was in our household, after five weeks of being without one.
  • The kitchen will be ready even sooner, and we can start filling up the cupboards from the middle or end of next week.
  • We love Little O’s new preschool. Although he cries every day that I leave him [sob], they say that he is cheerful again within two minutes of my departure. He is out every day, twice a day, he plays in the water room, he is learning numbers and colours, and we are so happy to have made the move.
  • We had such a fun playdate on Thursday with a friend that Little O has known since he was born. They have recently moved as well, and it was wonderful to see the boys running around and playing together. It makes me even more excited about how normal life will be again (is there such a thing as normal?!) once we are properly settled in.
  • I took a video yesterday of Little O and his friend running backwards and forwards chasing each other. About 15 or so months ago, I took a video of them crawling up and down a corridor. It is so fun to think how much they have grown and changed in that short time.

Reasons to be Cheerful at Mummy from the Heart

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Sep 13, 2012

R2BC – autumn sunshine

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This week I am revelling in the cooler days and the beautiful sunshine that Stockholm has to offer at this time of the year. I forget every year but then autumn rolls around and I remember, once again, that it is probably my favourite season. The slightly crisper days, the light of the milder sunshine that seems to flatter the buildings here, reflecting on the water and bringing a smile to my face. (Although the day after I typed this, the sun made a stronger reappearance and I put the boots back away.)

stockholm autumn sunshine

Stockholm in the autumn sunshine

Little O had his first session at English club at his förskola on Monday and loved it so much that on the following day he headed straight to the classroom where it was held and was most put out to discover that he was only required to play in the playground. I was so pleased to hear that he had enjoyed it, as I was concerned that his attention would not last the 45-minute span of the session. Seems my fears were misplaced.

We’re starting to get the apartment into shape and now have “only” 20 boxes marked Essential left to unpack. However, that means that we’ve unpacked 30 already, so we’re more than halfway. It is looking unlikely that the rooms will be ready by the revised date of late September (originally mid-month), so I guess we’re camping out until mid-October, in all likelihood. However, we’re getting more and more into the swing of this. And as soon as we get a fridge, it will be even easier!

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Aug 26, 2012

All change!

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förskola preschool children education

Image © Stockholm Stad

I think that I might have mentioned here and there in other posts that Little O is changing to a new preschool. He has been attending a private* bilingual preschool since June last year but we stayed in the queue for our five chosen state-run preschools. Normally, you would sign up for a state-run preschool when your child is six months old and decide on a starting month (any time after they have turned one) and then you would be guaranteed a spot at a preschool – not necessarily one of your five choices or even in your immediate area, but you’d get a place. However, if you take a place at another preschool before that point, you can stay in the queue but you lose the right to a guaranteed place.

So we signed up Little O when he was six months old and then accepted a place at the private preschool just before he turned one (for him to start when he was 13 months old) as we were so far down the queue for our five choices that we could not imagine getting a place at any of them. It now seems that we would have got a place at one, but it was just so hard to judge at the time. We remained in the queue for the five and then in April this year, we finally got a place for him at our first choice. Cue many celebrations!

Preschool problems

We had become increasingly disillusioned with the preschool he was at (a mixture of high staff turnover, quite high child turnover, many teething problems (it was newly opened), issues with nappies and illness and, finally, a biting epidemic, which we felt was (and is still being) handled ineffectively). Also, his new preschool is midway between our new apartment and both of our offices, so it will be ideal when I am back at work next year.

Bilingual support

When we received our welcome and information pack from the new preschool I was so pleased by some things I found in there. Each child has a book that we stick pictures of family into and which all his drawings and artwork from preschool will also be stuck into over the course of the year.

They have a great policy for encouraging bilingual children and the book should be labelled in both languages that the child uses. The information provided in very thorough, which is something that I felt has been lacking at his current preschool. He’s two and he needs structure and a solid framework around him on a daily basis.

The more we read through the info pack, the happier we became. We had, of course, visited the preschool on an open day but that was before Little O was even six months old, so we could not remember all the details.

Now we just need to work out how we handle moving apartment in the same week that Little O has his “schooling in” (inskolning) days to introduce him to life at the new preschool!

• • • • •

* although private just means that it is run by a company, and not the local authority; you pay exactly the same fee as you do at a state-run preschool (I’m still trying to get my head around this concept…)

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May 22, 2012

Bilingual babbling

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So Little O turned two just over a week ago and is now turning into a little boy – he’s definitely no longer a baby, although he’ll always be my baby. I try so hard not to compare what he can do with what other children of his age can but sometimes it is hard not to. The one area where I can help but compare is language. We are raising him bilingually. I speak English to him, Husband speaks Swedish and Husband and I speak English to each other. At the moment, Little O attends a bilingual (English/Swedish) dagis (preschool) but that is likely to change if he gets a place at a Swedish state-run dagis instead.

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?

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