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Oct 12, 2011

Living for the weekend

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At the moment, I am just counting the days and hours until the weekend rolls on. The past few days have been manic: Friday, I flew down to Copenhagen and worked from our office there for the day, did a presentation, met up with Husband and Little O, jumped on a train and then spent the weekend with the in-laws in southern Sweden. We flew back Sunday evening, then it was up early on Monday for the usual work/preschool collection/afternoon with Little O/crash out at 8.30pm routine. Yesterday, I flew to Oslo for the day, did the same presentation as in Copenhagen, spent the rest of day in the office there, flew back yesterday evening after Little O was in bed. Today, up early and into work to do the same presentation and then the same routine as Monday. Tomorrow, it’s another early start, a flight to Helsinki, doing the same presentation yet again (fourth and final time), spending the rest of the day working from the office there, flying back in the evening after Little O is in bed. Then Friday will be presentation-less (hooray!) but the same tight routine as Monday.

So, yes, Friday evening and an hour at the hairdresser, followed by date night on Saturday… well, it cannot come around fast enough for me. And the added bonus about Saturday is that it was Husband’s idea – and this means he’s fulfilling his part of the bargain for Karin’s Relationship SOS Challenge over at Cafe Bebe without even knowing it.

And now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m off to bed. Zzzzzzz…

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Jan 3, 2011

2010 review

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To celebrate the new year, I thought I’d take a quick look back at 2010, month by month.

January: I got itchy feet. Just knowing that I only had a couple of months left in which I could travel but not really enough time to do so, made me want to get the hell out of Sweden and go abroad. I also discovered the joy of the Mother-to-be treatment at Centralbadet (bliss!) and the perils of eating spicy Thai curry when five months pregnant.

February: We ordered our pram. I started to walk like John Wayne. My midwife became convinced that my job was going to cause me stress – little did she know that the stressful moments are what make my job. And I discovered just how hard it was to understand the in and outs of the parental benefit system here in Sweden.

March: I found out that yoga, Baby O and I did not a good combination make. I tried everything to combat the dreaded stretch marks. I lost sight of my feet. The T Family went skiing, and I slunk around the resort feeling sorry for myself at not being able to join in. I listed ten things that people do not tell you before you become pregnant. I discarded Rennies in favour of Gaviscon in an attempt to stop the heartburn and acid reflux.

April: I read as many books as I could find to prepare myself for every eventuality. Baby O allegedly reached the size of a watermelon. I started packing my hospital bag (little knowing that it would not be used). I stopped working. My inner control freak came to the fore. I had a pregnancy photo session at home.

May: I celebrated the purchase of a new camera lens by setting up a photo blog. I decided that the imminent arrival of Baby O would not give me enough to do, so I signed up for the Day Zero Project. I tried different tactics to encourage Baby O into the world, including city walking and hill walking. And then, on 11 May, Baby O was born!

June: I struggled with breastfeeding. I heard about the Wonder Weeks. We travelled to England and I found blogging increasingly difficult to fit into the day.

July: I struggled further with breastfeeding and started Baby O on formula once a day. I fell in love with the Baby Björn carrier. And my blogging became even less frequent.

August: Baby O was subjected to his three-month injections. We encountered another Wonder Week. And I tried to win new friends at my Swedish mothers’ group.

September: I was such a bad blogger that I did not even log one post during the month of September…

October: We booked our flights to Thailand.

November: Baby O mastered “commando rolling”. And I promised to try harder to blog…

December: Hmmm, well, that was one promise out of the window, as in December I again failed to blog. However, I do have a batch of excuses to hand: O started “commando creeping”, then got sick, then started teething, then got sick again, then made me sick, then we went to England and he made my mum and grandmother sick, then a first tooth popped through and then we came home!

So, 2010 was a momentous year – the year that we went from being a couple to a little family. It is certainly a year that we will never forget, with ups and downs and ups again and full of happiness.

Happy 2011!

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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 12, 2010

Watch out, Thailand, here we come!

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Photo by PC in Shanghai (on Flickr)

One of my main tasks set by Husband this week is to go to the travel agents and pay the balance for our January holiday.

Yes, after much to-ing and fro-ing, we finally decided on Phuket and booked a two-week trip in January, taking part in the annual Swedish migration to Thailand to escape the potentially grey and miserable, but certainly cold, winter (for a few weeks at least). The  way we look at it is that we might as well take advantage of flying with Baby O now before he is more mobile. After two short-haul journeys in the summer we found that he is quite comfortable with the cabin pressure (in fact, far more comfortable than his mamma, who has to dose herself up with nasal spray to be able to contend with take-off and landing if she wants to be able to hear for the following week…). So we decided to risk a long-haul trip.

Of course, deciding that we were going to go to Thailand was only the first stage. Next, we had to choose an airline. We did consider going charter and possibly even booking a package trip. However, after “discussions” with various package holiday agents, we plumped for a Thai Airways flight and sourcing the hotels ourselves. (If my Swedish were better, I would have told the woman in one agency point blank just why we didn’t need to go to the hotel with the children’s club – not least does it bring me out in a cold sweat, but Baby O will only be six months old and the last thing he needs is a teenager dressed up as a bear scaring the living daylights out of him (and his mamma) on a daily basis.)

So, the next task is to find a hotel on Phuket that is both baby-friendly and decent (I’m sorry to say that Husband and I are hotel snobs). So far, we’ve found a number that seem to fit both criteria. And many of them seem to feature that magic word: spa. Even better.

Although all of these offer a kids club, they are from little ones of four years and up (surely it is the same for the package holiday resorts? I wonder why she told me that as a family we could ONLY stay at a hotel with a kids club?) but they offer babysitting and most have a separate, shallow children’s pool.

So, once we choose the hotel all I then need to worry about is what jetlag will do to Baby O’s sleeping routine. Well, it wouldn’t be an average day in the T household without me worrying about something, would it now…?

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Aug 11, 2010

Hello again

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Yes, we’re back. After spending five and a half weeks in the UK, we popped back to Stockholm for three days before heading down to the south of Sweden for more family visits.

But now, Husband, Baby O and I are back in town. Which means I can resume blogging. I will resume blogging. I will, I will. But not so much today. Today Baby O turns three months and the BVC (barnavårdscentralen) nurse has scheduled his three-month injections. Poor little thing, he’s fast asleep at the moment and completely oblivious to what fate holds in store for him. Much the best way.

Fingers crossed he doesn’t get too upset!

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May 5, 2010

The Gallery: Heritage

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Photo © English Mamma

The Gallery challenge this week from Tara at Sticky Fingers is: the world we live in.

This is a picture I took on a long weekend trip to Budapest in May 2007. This imperious lion is one of two guarding the entrance to Budapest Castle.

Husband’s family are Hungarian (meaning he is frequently far more Hungarian in nature than his official nationality of Swedish…) and this was the first time that he took me to Budapest. I just fell in love with the city. In fact, we ended up visiting three times that year.

I love this picture and it brings back so many good memories of our trips to the city. We intend to revisit as soon as we can and introduce gyermek to part of his/her heritage.

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May 2, 2010

Day Zero

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Photo by Beth77 (on flickr)

No, not a post about reaching my estimated due date without the arrival of gyermek… Instead, this is about the Day Zero Project, where you set yourself 101 tasks to complete in 1001 days.

Unfortunately, pregnancy brain really seems to have taken hold and I wrote this post with the intention that I could complete another task, that of writing a blog post every day for a week. However, when I returned to the list I found that that wasn’t actually one of the tasks that I had set myself. It does mean that I am 25% of the way towards task no. 13 (to blog every day for a month), although I would be incredibly ambitious to believe that I could complete this run, given that today is the due date and if gyermek doesn’t make an appearance in the next 14 days, I will be induced. Oh well, I’ve still got more than 950 days to go… 

Day Zero tasks

  1. Eat at 10 new restaurants – already three new restaurants down (mainly because we’re getting out and about as much as we can in these last few days before gyermek arrives).
  2. Read 10 non-fiction books – two down, eight more to go!
  3. Finish off the nursery (part 1) – this will be complete once the cot arrives (any day now.
  4. Learn some new knitting stitches – learned how to do extended moss stitch this week; not quite sure when I’ll allow myself to call this task completed – how many is “some” after all?!
  5. Write a letter to myself to open in 10 years
  6. Ice skate on a lake
  7. Buy something from Etsy
  8. Attend a film festival
  9. See the Northern Lights
  10. See 10 classic movies I’ve never seen
  11. Go ice skating
  12. Host a tea party
  13. Participate in NaBloPoMo
  14. Learn how to play poker
  15. Make snow angels
  16. Don’t complain about anything for a week
  17. Take a photography class
  18. Make my own bread
  19. Photograph a landscape from the same location, capturing all four seasons
  20. Bury a time capsule
  21. Visit 5 parks or public gardens
  22. Take more photos
  23. Host a board game night
  24. Visit Japan
  25. Visit Australia
  26. Learn Swedish
  27. Make a font out of my handwriting
  28. Learn CPR
  29. Bake bread
  30. Improve my posture
  31. Visit 5 new museums
  32. Read War & Peace
  33. Learn how to play chess
  34. Blog at least once a week
  35. Learn more about wine
  36. Wear false eyelashes
  37. Floss at least once a week
  38. Inspire someone else to make their own 101 in 1001 list
  39. Visit the Ice Hotel in Jukkasjärvi
  40. Wear nothing black for a whole week
  41. Visit the Eden Project
  42. Start a new family tradition
  43. Get rid of 101 things I don´t need or want
  44. Take a photo of 26 things, one for each letter of the alphabet and post on my blog
  45. Drink more water
  46. Tie notes to five balloons and let them free
  47. Go to the library, close my eyes and pick a random book that I have to read
  48. Get a cleaner
  49. Sell something on Etsy
  50. Send someone flowers, just because
  51. Take 1001 photographs
  52. Attend wine tasting
  53. Buy cakes from Betty’s
  54. Walk the York wall
  55. Read 100 books from 1001 books to read before you die list
  56. Lose the baby weight that I have put on
  57. Finish knitting gyermek’s blanket
  58. Finish putting our wedding photos into the album
  59. Learn how to use the DSLR camera properly
  60. Buy some artwork/photos for the walls
  61. Make use of Spotify more often
  62. Teach myself the basics of calligraphy
  63. Call my personal trainer and restart training
  64. Remember birthdays
  65. End the 1001 days with the same plants I started with
  66. Keep my desk at home tidy
  67. Buy a piece of secondhand furniture and renovate it
  68. Finish off the nursery (part 2)
  69. Learn CSS and update blog layout
  70. Visit Patagonia
  71. Travel somewhere by steam train
  72. Revisit the British Museum
  73. See a Formula One race live
  74. Take a trip to see the Norwegian fjords
  75. Buy a summer house
  76. Read five books that have won the Booker prize
  77. Take that large pile of clothes and shoes to the charity shop
  78. Have a difficult conversation instead of deflecting and avoiding when it arises
  79. Make eye contact and smile with each person I encounter for a day instead of looking away
  80. Organise wardrobe and give what I don’t want to charity
  81. Learn to ski properly
  82. Put away 101kr for each completed task – the total to be spent shopping at the end of my 1001 days
  83. Run Tjejmilen in Stockholm
  84. Comment on others’ blogs more
  85. Learn a new word in Swedish every day for 4 weeks
  86. See an opera here in Stockholm
  87. Revisit Budapest, taking the little one with us
  88. Drink champagne for breakfast
  89. See the Changing of the Guard in London
  90. Visit St Paul’s Cathedral
  91. Have a meal at The Fat Duck
  92. Have a meal at Noma in Copenhagen
  93. Have a meal at Mattias Dahlgren
  94. Start a photo blog – another challenge completed (English Mamma’s photos)
  95. Have a meal at Frantzen/Lindeberg
  96. Visit the Victoria & Albert Museum
  97. Learn how to use Photoshop properly
  98. Go mushroom picking
  99. Write birth plan – tick!
  100. Finish packing hospital bag – tick!
  101. Finish adding 101 tasks to this list! – tick!

Why not have a go too and let me know how you get on. I’ll be posting on my progress from time to time (4% done so far) up until my deadline of 2 January 2013.

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Apr 1, 2010

Week 35 update

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How far along?: 35 weeks and 4 days

Total weight gain/loss: Around 11 and a half kilos, give or take…

Stretch marks?: Still hoping that there’s none there on the “underbelly” – bit hard to see these days. But at my pregnancy massage at the weekend, she said that she could not see any.

Sleep: Patchy, but that’s to be expected.

Best moment this week: Lamaze classes on Monday and Wednesday – halfway through now and it’s really interesting to learn the breathing techniques and especially for Husband to learn the massage techniques (those he really needs to be practising in the run-up to birth!).

Worst moment this week: A bit of a downer this morning when I found out that a friend has called her little boy the name that we had picked out if gyermek is a boy. (We haven’t shared our choices of names, so it’s pure coincidence.)

Movement: Still lots, although I now have one patch that feels quite sore as it receives the bulk of the kicks.

Belly button in or out?: In, just about

What I miss: Being able to put my shoes on myself

What I am looking forward to: A relaxing train journey down to southern Sweden and catching up with friends over Easter.

Milestones: Realising that if we really practise with the breathing techniques that we have the possibility of an amazing birth experience. (I was sceptical about how well I’d be able to master them, but at the class last night our teacher demonstrated by pinching us hard while we breathed – and it worked! Let’s just hope that I can do them correctly when the time comes.)

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