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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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Aug 1, 2012

Three good things – day 3

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It’s been hard tonight to think of my three good things. On paper, today should have been good and a couple of good things popped right into my head, but I generally feel a little off today – too much news of the depressing kind (illness and the like) to make me feel happy really.

  • Catching up and hearing all the gossip (of the non-malicious kind!). It’s always good to reconnect and feel a bit more involved in something again, which is why this made me happy.
  • Discovering a shop that was a complete treasure trove – I’ll definitely be returning! I’d been pretty sceptical about making the trip out to this shop but then it surpassed all my expectations. I guess it is a lesson in not judging a book by its cover, or a shop by its location.
  • That Baby E does not seem to be suffering as much with his teething as Little O did. When I think about this it does, of course, make me happy, but I only thought about this as I went through my day in my head, struggling to find a third thing to be grateful for. So it is a bit of a forced good thing really. Does that still count?

So, my three good things for today. The first two days were certainly easier than today; I think I still have quite a way to go before I start thinking more positively as a natural occurrence. But bring it on!

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Jan 1, 2012

Looking back at 2011

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Photo by Sascha Grant (Flickr Creative Commons)

Like last year, I’ve decided to round up the past year, month by month, and see how 2011 went.

- In January, I decided to get my blogging mojo back by taking part in WordPress’s Post A Week 2011 challenge. Hmmm, it didn’t really go so well for me: by early April I had already skipped a week and then I was silent for the first two weeks in July, and the less about early September the better… One of my favourite posts that month was What’s your style, where I discussed the various different parenting books available.

- The following month, I admitted to being a grammar snob, documented some of Baby O’s teething troubles and embarked on a photography course online.

- Then on to March, in which I changed the design of my blog, tried to discover a strategy to stop Baby O’s new biting habit and got pushy and snagged a place for Baby O at preschool.

- In April, I got very excited about Apple products and POP clothes, and wondered whether Baby O would be walking properly before his first birthday.

- Baby O transitioned into Little O as he turned one in May, started walking and began to say some sounds that could be recognised as words, he learned to stop biting all and sundry and wanted to start feeding himself.

- June was a busy month for us – Little O starting at preschool, learning to communicate more and more, me (secretly) going through the early stages of pregnancy, us spending a long weekend in Budapest, during which Little O had his worst illness yet – but a quiet one on the blog…

- In July, I had an evening of celeb spotting (two in one night!) and updated my blog post on what do to in Stockholm with a little one.

- In the following month, I revealed that I was pregnant, wrote up Little O’s birth story and had a bit of a rant.

- During September, I reached the halfway point in my pregnancy, shared our progress in the Relationship SOS challenge and laughed at some spam.

- The next month, we bought a new stroller and a potty for Little O to test out and I discovered Polyvore.

- In November, I started to feel a little down, with too many things getting on top of me, but then the Gallery challenge for 11.11.11 lifted my spirits, and I finished the month with some pearls of wisdom that I had learnt!

- And in the final month of the year, I got a bit concerned about Klout, realised it was time for Little O to have a haircut and, of course, celebrated Christmas.

So, there we go; that was 2011. And now let’s see what 2012 holds in store.

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May 2, 2011

Taming the teeth

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Following up on a previous post that I wrote about Baby O and his biting habit. I looked at a number of ways in which we could halt this and, on the whole, we have managed to bring the biting down to only a few times a week from a few times an hour.

In the end, we combined a couple of the methods that I had read about and every time that he has bitten us, we’ve placed him in a corner and told him a firm “No”. Then we’ve left him there (but not left the room) and we’ve tried to focus on the bite that he’s given. Then, when he has crawled out of the corner, we give him a hug and say “We hug, we don’t bite.”

I am not sure how much of this has helped to break the habit and how much was just him getting through the biting phase, but I’d like to think that some of what we did has helped him to stop.

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Feb 16, 2011

Top teeth torment

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So as to remind myself next time we go through this (when I will yet again have blocked it out forgotten), I thought I’d write a little update on Baby O’s teething. So far, he has his two front bottom teeth (I know they have a specific name, I just cannot remember for the life of me what it is…). These arrived just after Christmas and just after New Year and I do remember at the time being very glad that they came through as pair so closely after one another. The only thing that I have to go on is a friend reminding me that at the time I had called it “three clingy, grizzly weeks followed by three days of hell”. That’s encouraging…

It now looks as if one or both of his front top teeth will pop through soon. So far, we’ve had a couple of weeks of him just not really being himself. Then the grizzling escalated a couple of days ago, and yesterday afternoon a fever popped up. Baby O has not had a fever before (not a real one, anyway – Husband is apparently an expert on such matters and can list all the times of the day and night when a fever peaks – I just think that these fevers must then have damned good alarm clocks…). Anyhoo, yesterday he had a fever of 38 degrees in the afternoon (not so high, I know), rising to 39 degrees by 8 o’clock yesterday evening. I decamped to our bedroom with him in the early evening with some bedtime story books and settled him down with me for a nap, as he had napped poorly during the day. When Husband came home at 9 o’clock, we were still curled up there. And, yes, I had to admit to Husband that I did like some aspects of his fever just a little: it has turned Baby O into a snuggly, huggy little baby – something you couldn’t accuse him of being before.

Today, we’ve had the same pattern of fever and crying (in fact, sobbing would be more accurate), but, joy of joys, when I applied Bonjela to his upper gums this morning, I felt a definite lump, and certainly larger than in previous days.

Let’s hope that this day two of the “three days of hell”. Please, please, please…

(And, yes, I know that the following teeth will probably only be worse, so the headline is a little dramatic, but that’s how it feels just now. My little boy is so lethargic and quiet and in pain…)

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Feb 10, 2011

Teething troubles?

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Photo © English Mamma

I was all primed to write a post about teething after New Year, as Baby O’s two first bottom teeth cut through immediately after Christmas and then straight after New Year. But then I got caught up in preparing to go on holiday and then being in Thailand (bliss!) and then recovering and readjusting to the cold, and now that I have sat down actually to write the teething post, I cannot really remember what happened.

I know that there was some waking in the night and some crying and a little bit of Calpol and some soothing back to sleep, and I also remember nappy changes that revealed a baboon’s bottom, it was so red and sore. I know there was a LOT of drooling, with clothes having to be changed during the course of the day as they became soaked through. But none of the details have stuck… And the worst is that we now think that a top tooth is on its way, but we have so little recollection of how it was with the first two that we have no indication if the tooth is nearly through or still has some way to go. Occasionally, we can slip a finger in to check, but most of the time Baby O seems to be under the impression that it is okay to bite the hand that feeds, and damn, but those two little bottom teeth are sharp! It’s like feeding time at the zoo if a finger goes anywhere near his face: he grabs whatever is passing, stuffs it in and clamps down hard.

A friend has reminded me that I told her at the time that we had three weeks with a grizzly Baby O and then three hellish days and then the first little pearly white popped through. Why do I not remember this? I suppose as soon as one painful phase is over, we mammas just block it from our minds and focus on the positives. Either that or I have a really bad short-term, medium-term, long-term memory.

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Jan 2, 2011

New Year’s non-resolutions

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Happy New Year!

Well, here I am again, trying to kick-start my blogging. I am not really one for making New Year’s resolutions, so I am not going to promise to blog more; instead, I am just going to try to.

So, what has been going on with us since last time I posted? A whole heap of new developments from Baby O. We’ve gone from “commando rolling” to wriggling on the belly, to creeping and now we’re at “commando creeping” – wriggling along on elbows and belly like that Action Man toy that your brother had. Except that O is now so confident doing it that he can scoot around the whole apartment in that way and pretty damned quickly too. So, yes, we’ve started baby proofing. Not everything, mind, but a great many things have been moved out of reach or one shelf higher. Not that I am sure how long that will last… On New Year’s Eve, he started trying to stand on his own.

Photo © English Mamma

We spent Christmas in the UK, which was great fun for O as he was spoiled rotten by grandparents. And we were able to see how the flight to Thailand could be. As O has not been on a plane since August, when he was only three months old, we were interested to see how his seven month old self would react. He was a star. Our flight was due to take off at 6.20pm, forty minutes before his usual bedtime, but when we checked in we were told that it was delayed until 8pm. Okay, we thought, we’ll just carry on with bedtime at 7pm as usual. So, we fed him his milk, wrapped him up in his sleeping bag and slipped an eye mask on him and he slept from 7.15pm until we arrived in the UK, waking only once for a nappy change mid-flight, even though the plane did not in the end take off until almost 10pm.

This has given us a little more confidence that the flight to Bangkok should not be too much of a nightmare (fingers crossed!). That said, the only thing that is predictable about babies is their unpredictability!

Now that we’re back home, we’re just trying to get O back into a good routine as Christmas threw things off kilter a little. This was mostly because of teething though. Two days after Christmas, O’s first tooth broke through the gum, followed by its neighbour this morning. Huge relief all round as he had started showing the symptoms of teething back in mid-October. In the UK we were able to buy a couple of tubes of Bonjela teething gel and that has been a lifesaver for the nights. O has still been woken by the pain of the teeth cutting through the gum but I am sure that this has been lessened considerably by the gel.

As well as these great developments, O is now only three meals of solids a day (breakfast, lunch and tea) in addition to milk and is proving that he is a little boy with a big appetite, and we are just about to take the big step and move O into pull-up nappies.

Our little baby is growing up so fast!

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Oct 6, 2010

If you can’t say anything nice…

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Hmm, I remember saying that if I wasn’t going to say anything nice, then I wouldn’t say anything at all, and that is really the long and the short of why there has been some radio silence from me.

I’ll get it all out of the way in one sentence and then move on: wonder week 19 is a nightmare and now Baby O has a cold as well (at least, I think he has a cold, although I’ve read that teething signs include the same symptoms as a cold, but surely he’s too little for teeth just yet?).

Done. Now we can move on to all the nice, fluffy things in life. Baby O is surprising us each day with his amazing new tricks – some good, some less good. He can now roll over onto his belly in either direction and can happily play there for some minutes before the frustration starts. The frustration has taken on a new note in recent weeks as he has started emitting a really high-pitched squealing noise…

I bumped into our neighbour a week or so ago and luckily he has not heard a peep from Baby O; in fact, he was surprised that we have a baby at all and asked if he was “very new”. Yes, we have the typical Swedish relationship with our next-door neighbour: we know nothing about each other at all. We only know his surname from his doorplate and he only knows our surname and my maiden name from ours. Tonight we should be helping out with the weather treatment of the communal garden furniture. However, it’s scheduled to start at 7pm, which just happens (luckily enough) to be Baby O’s bedtime. Should I really be making more of an effort to get to know our neighbours? How about you? How well do you know yours? Is it a city thing or a Swedish thing or just a 21st century thing?

I have made myself a promise that I will get back into blogging. One of the main reasons for this is a friend who has just set up a blog in which she writes fantastic posts that prompt me to stand and give a little cheer, and also to return here and commit to writing more regularly.

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