Oj, what a week. Which is Swedish for 'Oy, vhat a veek'.
Things are fine, pretty much. Not much has really happened. F is bigger and stronger, V has been a bit flu-ey, I've been up earlier and to bed later than is probably ideal for me. But it works well for the others. Up early as F likes to get up and play at 0600, and V is not a great lover of mornings right now. Late bed times so that I can potter about by myself once the ladies are asleep, and do nerdy things like paint tiny plastic men or write blogs.
Parenthood is very much a wall that keeps hitting, really. A few weeks back I reached a sort of exhausted state entirely unfamiliar to me. Even when I was a junior doctor and obliged to get up at 0300 to attempt to deal with things like massive post-surgical blood loss or maniacs who needed grappling until a nurse could sedate them, I don't remember getting as tired as this. I got days off, after all.
We went to our first parenting class a few days ago. I understood less than usual, I kept zoning out. V kindly poked me awake at one point and gave me a growl and hard stare, which I felt rather aggrieved at. She pointed out afterwards that I'd zoned out whilst stroking my beard and staring directly at the breasts of the young mother next to me as she feeding, so fair enough, I clearly looked like a massive perv. Hopefully the young mother in question was also fairly zoned out and didn't notice.
All of us seemed to be, though. A room of eight new parents, three couples and five babies, all of us sat in bemused silence that was either exhaustion or the infamous Swedish Polite Reserve. Swedish people often ask me 'don't you find Swedes really unfriendly?' I don't, actually, just fanatically polite. Too polite to give you more than an austere nod and some muttered coughing by way of an introduction, but I'm English. If anything I find the coughing uncomfortably forward and demonstrative. Most Swedes are very friendly and talkative if you get things going, I think.
Not so at parent class. For an hour and a half we sat with forced expressions of interest as the midwife showed us conversation provoking videos of child psychologists explaining how not to care for your tiny baby. It all seemed fairly sensible stuff. Not too much stimulation was the only one that made me feel guilty, as I remembered F at the Universeum.
But the conversations were feeble, stilted things. The other two dads present both looked bored and annoyed, and one left early with a jaunty spring in his step. The kids either slept or yelled or smiled at the nice strangers, the midwife got increasingly jittery as her planned topics fell flat.
Until she left, and then we all started comparing notes on how little sleep we had. "How can I get her to sleep longer?" asked the lady I'd been ogling in my sleep. "She only sleeps for four hours at a time!" We tried to make our laughter sound supportive rather than scornful.
What else, what else? Not much. I've learnt one cannot complete one's first Swedish tax return one-handed whilst cradling a squalling baby. Also that holding a loaded baby over your head for an aeroplane ride is tempting fate to turn the aeroplane into a bomber. I hummed the Dambusters' March cheerfully to myself as I mopped the vomit out of my beard.
Friday, April 26, 2013
Thursday, April 18, 2013
Thiiiings
Pretty much every parent who I spoke to in the first couple of months offered the same opinion. "It gets better," they said, taking in the haunted red eyes, grey sagging skin and yoghurt epaulettes that mark out the new dad.
This was of no consolation at the time, of course. Thanks a lot, I wanted to say. The fact that you have survived this endless hell of screaming sleeplessness and can now look back with a rosy and affectionate twinkle at my dishevelment makes me feel much better.
It's also of no consolation to discover that they're right. Smug gits.
Three months seems to be something of a watershed for babies. You can start setting routines and their sleep improves, according to midwifery. It's not hard to improve their sleep, of course. Just now, I used Google Translate to learn the Russian word for dog ('sabaka', to crudely transliterate). This is an improvement to my Russian, but I'm not ready to offer lessons yet.
Her connected drowsing record is up to 7 hours. She can sit in her rocker for up to half an hour, partly buried in toys, and remain content. She now likes bathing, except for having her hair washed. And she's settled into a reasonable routine, one which now delineates our day.
As the sun rises, currently just after 0600, she wakes up fully. She also wakes with deadly accuracy every three hours for feeding. Then she sits up and plays for half an hour, usually in her chair. Then she needs to be cradled in someone's arms until she's sleepy enough to nod off again. Bathtime is half five. Bed only works for more than ten minutes if it's after nine o' clock. She's flexible with all this, but only if it means getting fed earlier.
We facilitate it, in rotating roles as foodbuckets, washers, changers and jesters. F likes being around us, watching TV or listening to music. She's started singing along with my lullabies, sort of. It seems to be singing, even if it's only one word ('nnnnn') on one note (D above middle C, roughly, it drifts a little). If we're eating, she has to sit at the table; if we get down, she needs to come too. It's good. It feels more like family than the early weeks, which were mostly nursing care.
What else? Not much. It's been a week of small, interconnected firsts: -
1. First Vaccination
2. First Actual Tears
3. First Medicine*
4. First use of the Force**
* Fruits of the forest flavour alvedon, which drew her second ever loud 'blergh' connected to food. The first was when she latched on to V before V had a chance to wipe the feeding surface free of lanolin.
** Mr Peacock is currently supplanted by Mr Very Hungry Caterpillar, who can do the extra trick of spinning round and round when twirled from the bottom of the chandelier. When his momentum runs out, F concentrates and thrusts her palm towards him in the traditional manner. Strong she is in the Force, but she is not a Jedi yet, so I tend to fill in before she gets frustrated, abandons her training and hurries into a near-deadly confrontation with Vader.
This was of no consolation at the time, of course. Thanks a lot, I wanted to say. The fact that you have survived this endless hell of screaming sleeplessness and can now look back with a rosy and affectionate twinkle at my dishevelment makes me feel much better.
It's also of no consolation to discover that they're right. Smug gits.
Three months seems to be something of a watershed for babies. You can start setting routines and their sleep improves, according to midwifery. It's not hard to improve their sleep, of course. Just now, I used Google Translate to learn the Russian word for dog ('sabaka', to crudely transliterate). This is an improvement to my Russian, but I'm not ready to offer lessons yet.
Her connected drowsing record is up to 7 hours. She can sit in her rocker for up to half an hour, partly buried in toys, and remain content. She now likes bathing, except for having her hair washed. And she's settled into a reasonable routine, one which now delineates our day.
As the sun rises, currently just after 0600, she wakes up fully. She also wakes with deadly accuracy every three hours for feeding. Then she sits up and plays for half an hour, usually in her chair. Then she needs to be cradled in someone's arms until she's sleepy enough to nod off again. Bathtime is half five. Bed only works for more than ten minutes if it's after nine o' clock. She's flexible with all this, but only if it means getting fed earlier.
We facilitate it, in rotating roles as foodbuckets, washers, changers and jesters. F likes being around us, watching TV or listening to music. She's started singing along with my lullabies, sort of. It seems to be singing, even if it's only one word ('nnnnn') on one note (D above middle C, roughly, it drifts a little). If we're eating, she has to sit at the table; if we get down, she needs to come too. It's good. It feels more like family than the early weeks, which were mostly nursing care.
What else? Not much. It's been a week of small, interconnected firsts: -
1. First Vaccination
2. First Actual Tears
3. First Medicine*
4. First use of the Force**
* Fruits of the forest flavour alvedon, which drew her second ever loud 'blergh' connected to food. The first was when she latched on to V before V had a chance to wipe the feeding surface free of lanolin.
** Mr Peacock is currently supplanted by Mr Very Hungry Caterpillar, who can do the extra trick of spinning round and round when twirled from the bottom of the chandelier. When his momentum runs out, F concentrates and thrusts her palm towards him in the traditional manner. Strong she is in the Force, but she is not a Jedi yet, so I tend to fill in before she gets frustrated, abandons her training and hurries into a near-deadly confrontation with Vader.
Friday, April 12, 2013
Baby Steps
Sigh. After a half week of really good sleeps (up to six hours! In a row!), F has reverted to an earlier type. Every half hour or less brought a scream of protest from the cot, signalling some untoward horror befalling our young. Like she'd dropped her pacifier again, or her mobile wasn't turned on.
It's a good mobile - it's called Rain Forest. It's a hand-me-down from V's brother, we couldn't work out why it had that name for well over two months. A big plastic thing that hangs over the side of the crib, it's got a few palm leaves with ribboned tassels, a blue elephant, a pink monkey and a leopard, which is leopard coloured. When you turn it on, the animals rotate with a faint grinding noise, flowers are projected in soft warm light on to the ceiling and 'Sheep May Safely Graze' by Bach plays until you can't remember any other music. Nice, but not exactly Rain Foresty.
It turns out to have a switch round the back that I never saw. Hit that and you get authentic rain forest noises to help your little one drift off to sleep. F is a fan. So much so that when the track runs out, she wakes up and starts screaming. I suspect this isn't the intended effect, but you never know. Fisher Price are fishy bastards.
F makes huge progressive strides otherwise. Baby manuals and online guides to raising children, of which there are an unlimited amount, all in wild contradiction to one another, do all seem to agree that around three months or so you can start helping train your baby's muscles for crawling. You do this by putting them on the floor, possibly face down or possibly with small supportive blankets or pillows, and hopefully expecting them to lift their heads and smile at you winningly.
F does no such thing. She remains resolutely face down, screaming into the blanket, until rescued. This isn't because she can't lift her head - she totally can. It's that she has decided to skip the crawling stage, and will only respond to being supported under the armpits so she can practise walking. She mostly puts one foot in front of the other, starting from my waist and progressing until she has reached a position of dominance.
She took a healthy interest in our breakfasts this morning, another leap forward. It leaves us two options - either leave her in her baby sitter and enjoy our breakfast to the sound of bloody murder being committed on innocent lambs with a dentist's drill, or hold her in one arm and play shove-ha'penny with the plates. Both are good.
Foolishly, I tried to expand on all this advanced behaviour by adding flying. She enjoys flying, i.e. being swooshed round the room while I go 'nyyyaaaaoooooww'. It beats walking. Walking practice now engenders screaming and my shoulders feel like I've accidentally commenced military training. Sigh.
It's a good mobile - it's called Rain Forest. It's a hand-me-down from V's brother, we couldn't work out why it had that name for well over two months. A big plastic thing that hangs over the side of the crib, it's got a few palm leaves with ribboned tassels, a blue elephant, a pink monkey and a leopard, which is leopard coloured. When you turn it on, the animals rotate with a faint grinding noise, flowers are projected in soft warm light on to the ceiling and 'Sheep May Safely Graze' by Bach plays until you can't remember any other music. Nice, but not exactly Rain Foresty.
It turns out to have a switch round the back that I never saw. Hit that and you get authentic rain forest noises to help your little one drift off to sleep. F is a fan. So much so that when the track runs out, she wakes up and starts screaming. I suspect this isn't the intended effect, but you never know. Fisher Price are fishy bastards.
F makes huge progressive strides otherwise. Baby manuals and online guides to raising children, of which there are an unlimited amount, all in wild contradiction to one another, do all seem to agree that around three months or so you can start helping train your baby's muscles for crawling. You do this by putting them on the floor, possibly face down or possibly with small supportive blankets or pillows, and hopefully expecting them to lift their heads and smile at you winningly.
F does no such thing. She remains resolutely face down, screaming into the blanket, until rescued. This isn't because she can't lift her head - she totally can. It's that she has decided to skip the crawling stage, and will only respond to being supported under the armpits so she can practise walking. She mostly puts one foot in front of the other, starting from my waist and progressing until she has reached a position of dominance.
 |
| Victory is Mine |
Foolishly, I tried to expand on all this advanced behaviour by adding flying. She enjoys flying, i.e. being swooshed round the room while I go 'nyyyaaaaoooooww'. It beats walking. Walking practice now engenders screaming and my shoulders feel like I've accidentally commenced military training. Sigh.
Sunday, April 7, 2013
Banker
V and I are a little under the weather at the moment, some kind of low-grade flu-like exhaustion thing. It's not just the standard exhaustion. Taking a few hours out to sleep (leaving the other half on baby duty) doesn't help at all, it just makes you more confused. But that's what we need to do. We both need rest, and F needs attention.
One way of making sure there's enough peace in the flat to sleep in is to take F on a walk. This combines well with mundane shopping duties. Yesterday, I woke up feeling extra hare-brained after a long and apparently useless afternoon nap, then decided to go out in the lovely spring weather we're having. In your face, Britain - crocuses and sunshine abound over here, and you're all stuck with George Osbourne.
I had a cheque to cash. One from the government, a travel expenses claim for job-seeking (in your face, Britain again). To be honest, I didn't really want to go to the bank. The prospect of speaking Swedish was a bit much for my addled mind, and I actually got a bit tearful at the prospect. But it needed doing, so I attempted to man up anyway.
Didn't work. Waiting in line at the local SEB, or, well, scratch that. You don't always wait in line in Swedish shops or banks, you more usually take en nummerlapp and stand in a small and politely impatient pack of Swedes until your number comes up on the tannoy. It makes everywhere remind me slightly of a GP's surgery in the UK - there's a system, you know you have to wait your turn, but nobody quite believes in their heart of hearts that it's working properly and that guy over there got here after me what the hell.
So anyway, as I was waiting in the bank lobby, F started screaming a bit. She doesn't usually when we're out. Maybe she was picking up on my mood, or maybe the bank was just particularly ennervating. I'd go with the latter. Of the two cashiers, one kept looking up at the two of us irritably as F yelled. Fair enough, it's not a nice sound. And seeing you're going to be serving the red-eyed, grey-faced mumbling foreigner with what appears to be an angry ewok strapped to his chest isn't ever going to make your cashier's day. All the same, I could have done without the two minutes of pretend paperwork as she waited to see if her colleague might finish up first, or the huge resigned sigh as she pressed the button to summon me forth.
"Don't you have any pacifiers?" was one of the first things she asked me, once I'd laboured through my explanation of what I wanted and she'd explained to me which forms I needed to sign. Well, no, not with me, F tends to spit them out when she's in the Baby Björn, but I couldn't say that because I only know about half the words I'd need, and none of the grammar. So I lurched through an explanation that she doesn't really like them and we're both really tired.
"You should buy some pacifiers. You can't pay into this account," said Helpy Helperton, "it's not yours." No, I know, it was my wife's, but now it's a joint account. I have what V (in a very rare lapse in her English) calls 'power of eternity' on the account. I like that, it makes me feel vaguely like He-Man, you know, 'I Have The Powerrrrrrr' and so on. I tried to make this clear, in a not very clear way.
"Yes, but this is a private account," I was told. And even though I've got a bank card for the account and my name is on their system, they wouldn't take my money. Which is probably a first for banking. "Go and buy some pacifiers," she said by way of dismissal. Broken, I shambled home, cheque in hand. F stopped screaming the moment we left, quite understandably.
I'm sure it wasn't easy trying to serve me. I made a number of tiredness-based errors, like getting my personnummer wrong twice in a row. And I'm sure a lot of her finer linguistic points were lost on me. She did ask about F in a genial 'how old, is it your first, how cute' way, as though reading from a prompt on her screen.
Once I relayed all this to V before crawling under a duvet to hide from the world, she got a certain look in her eye. "I'll be no more than twenty minutes," she told me as she left, thus announcing to the world the minutes left in the cashier's miserable life. There was no cheque when she came home; there was no blood on her hands either. She's meticulous that way.
One way of making sure there's enough peace in the flat to sleep in is to take F on a walk. This combines well with mundane shopping duties. Yesterday, I woke up feeling extra hare-brained after a long and apparently useless afternoon nap, then decided to go out in the lovely spring weather we're having. In your face, Britain - crocuses and sunshine abound over here, and you're all stuck with George Osbourne.
I had a cheque to cash. One from the government, a travel expenses claim for job-seeking (in your face, Britain again). To be honest, I didn't really want to go to the bank. The prospect of speaking Swedish was a bit much for my addled mind, and I actually got a bit tearful at the prospect. But it needed doing, so I attempted to man up anyway.
Didn't work. Waiting in line at the local SEB, or, well, scratch that. You don't always wait in line in Swedish shops or banks, you more usually take en nummerlapp and stand in a small and politely impatient pack of Swedes until your number comes up on the tannoy. It makes everywhere remind me slightly of a GP's surgery in the UK - there's a system, you know you have to wait your turn, but nobody quite believes in their heart of hearts that it's working properly and that guy over there got here after me what the hell.
So anyway, as I was waiting in the bank lobby, F started screaming a bit. She doesn't usually when we're out. Maybe she was picking up on my mood, or maybe the bank was just particularly ennervating. I'd go with the latter. Of the two cashiers, one kept looking up at the two of us irritably as F yelled. Fair enough, it's not a nice sound. And seeing you're going to be serving the red-eyed, grey-faced mumbling foreigner with what appears to be an angry ewok strapped to his chest isn't ever going to make your cashier's day. All the same, I could have done without the two minutes of pretend paperwork as she waited to see if her colleague might finish up first, or the huge resigned sigh as she pressed the button to summon me forth.
"Don't you have any pacifiers?" was one of the first things she asked me, once I'd laboured through my explanation of what I wanted and she'd explained to me which forms I needed to sign. Well, no, not with me, F tends to spit them out when she's in the Baby Björn, but I couldn't say that because I only know about half the words I'd need, and none of the grammar. So I lurched through an explanation that she doesn't really like them and we're both really tired.
"You should buy some pacifiers. You can't pay into this account," said Helpy Helperton, "it's not yours." No, I know, it was my wife's, but now it's a joint account. I have what V (in a very rare lapse in her English) calls 'power of eternity' on the account. I like that, it makes me feel vaguely like He-Man, you know, 'I Have The Powerrrrrrr' and so on. I tried to make this clear, in a not very clear way.
"Yes, but this is a private account," I was told. And even though I've got a bank card for the account and my name is on their system, they wouldn't take my money. Which is probably a first for banking. "Go and buy some pacifiers," she said by way of dismissal. Broken, I shambled home, cheque in hand. F stopped screaming the moment we left, quite understandably.
I'm sure it wasn't easy trying to serve me. I made a number of tiredness-based errors, like getting my personnummer wrong twice in a row. And I'm sure a lot of her finer linguistic points were lost on me. She did ask about F in a genial 'how old, is it your first, how cute' way, as though reading from a prompt on her screen.
Once I relayed all this to V before crawling under a duvet to hide from the world, she got a certain look in her eye. "I'll be no more than twenty minutes," she told me as she left, thus announcing to the world the minutes left in the cashier's miserable life. There was no cheque when she came home; there was no blood on her hands either. She's meticulous that way.
Thursday, April 4, 2013
Premonitions
Meeting other people's kids is always interesting. Even more so when you become a parent. I find myself doubly nosy, not just to see what combination of noses, ears and so forth has been inherited, but now to learn as many parenting tips as I possibly can whilst simultaneously indulging in smug moments of thinking 'well I'll never do that'. Smug and doubtlessly short-sighted.
I remember thinking that I'd never inflict my giant baby carriage on an unwilling coffee shop. Also that people who start rabbiting on about being a new parent as though it's a new religion they want to recruit you into should be shot into space from a giant cannon. This entire blog is a jolly piece of blatant hypocrisy in that regard, of course, I love being a parent and want to share that feeling. I hope I'm not being too rosily evangelical, though. Yes, becoming a parent knocks the scales from your eyes and casts your entire life in a new perspective. I'm also exactly the same sarky arse I've always been. If I occasionally speak like a cult convert, it's because I'm heavily sleep-deprived.
Anyway - we've had F's little cousin staying round the house for a few days. This has been good not only for parental kibbutzing, but also to get a glimpse of what our life may be like in a year or so. Having people with kids to stay is another new experience for me, I've previously only entertained for an afternoon or less. I've seen firsthand examples of how to bribe or cajole infants into eating properly (feed them remotely from inside a blank cubic space with no distracting influences, as I understand), but a full day gives insight into sleep cycles and the establishment thereof.
What have I learnt?
1. Don't expect a quick bedding down if Aunty R is next door dancing to the soundtrack of Mamma Mia
2. In a pinch, CD cases can make great cymbals to accompany said dancing
3. Once sleep is established, you can get away with watching Team America so long as you're willing to replace the entire final 'dicks and assholes' speech with Thank You For The Music at short notice. Not Parker and Stone's original intention, I'm sure, but still very watchable.
I think my brother, whose wife is expecting a second, also got a lot of insight into his future - seeing me trying to balance F in her Baby Björn with one arm whilst helping Cousin S down a steep flight of stairs with the other, for example, or listening with glee as his supposedly-sleeping daughter responded to F's evening yells by delightedly identifying who was screaming. As futures go, it must look pretty tempting.
F is also using her cousin as a crystal ball, soaking up tips on walking, talking, not eating fish fingers and trying on grown-up shoes. Mind you, she was also fascinated to watch Aunty R and Uncle P do the washing up. Fingers crossed, that one sticks quickly.
I remember thinking that I'd never inflict my giant baby carriage on an unwilling coffee shop. Also that people who start rabbiting on about being a new parent as though it's a new religion they want to recruit you into should be shot into space from a giant cannon. This entire blog is a jolly piece of blatant hypocrisy in that regard, of course, I love being a parent and want to share that feeling. I hope I'm not being too rosily evangelical, though. Yes, becoming a parent knocks the scales from your eyes and casts your entire life in a new perspective. I'm also exactly the same sarky arse I've always been. If I occasionally speak like a cult convert, it's because I'm heavily sleep-deprived.
Anyway - we've had F's little cousin staying round the house for a few days. This has been good not only for parental kibbutzing, but also to get a glimpse of what our life may be like in a year or so. Having people with kids to stay is another new experience for me, I've previously only entertained for an afternoon or less. I've seen firsthand examples of how to bribe or cajole infants into eating properly (feed them remotely from inside a blank cubic space with no distracting influences, as I understand), but a full day gives insight into sleep cycles and the establishment thereof.
What have I learnt?
1. Don't expect a quick bedding down if Aunty R is next door dancing to the soundtrack of Mamma Mia
2. In a pinch, CD cases can make great cymbals to accompany said dancing
3. Once sleep is established, you can get away with watching Team America so long as you're willing to replace the entire final 'dicks and assholes' speech with Thank You For The Music at short notice. Not Parker and Stone's original intention, I'm sure, but still very watchable.
I think my brother, whose wife is expecting a second, also got a lot of insight into his future - seeing me trying to balance F in her Baby Björn with one arm whilst helping Cousin S down a steep flight of stairs with the other, for example, or listening with glee as his supposedly-sleeping daughter responded to F's evening yells by delightedly identifying who was screaming. As futures go, it must look pretty tempting.
F is also using her cousin as a crystal ball, soaking up tips on walking, talking, not eating fish fingers and trying on grown-up shoes. Mind you, she was also fascinated to watch Aunty R and Uncle P do the washing up. Fingers crossed, that one sticks quickly.
Monday, April 1, 2013
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