V read a website last week, one of those 'normal childhood development milestones' ones. They're great. One quick read provides 90% of your RDA of paranoia and fear. F was looking pretty good - bits of walking, talking, etc, plus what it referred to as 'increased levels of activity', which is certainly true. It also said 'starting to use a spoon.'
Nope, none of that. She's trained me to do it for her, more or less. But if some random website says normal children can do that by this age? Well, by God and St. George! I shall immediately commence a rapid programme of spoon training, and devil take the hindmost.
I had a simple approach - feed F about two-thirds of her usual breakfast porridge, then offer her both bowl and spoon and let her work it out.
Learning Notes
Day 1
Porridge feels good. Good on the face, good on the elbows, good on the floor.
F can now keep her baby skin smooth and soft with regular oatmeal peels.
Two metres is still inside the splash zone.
F has mastered this skill Matrix style. Yes, that's right - there is no spoon. Thank you, I'll be here all week.
Day 3
Porridge can be used like a drum.
Porridge can be used like glue.
Porridge can be used as a projectile weapon.
Porridge should not be used as porridge. That's boring.
Day 5
Sudden progress! F can now fill the spoon. Then she meticulously wipes it clean with her other hand, turns it upside down and chews the other end. Every little helps, I guess.
All the same, holding the spoon and dipping it into the porridge after a mere five days seems like a tremendous rate of progress. I don't know when she's practising between meals, but she must be slipping it in somewhere. Middle of the night, maybe? When she wakes up yowling at 0300, it may represent some new breakthrough in spoon theory. I did find porridge on her blanket this afternoon, which may prove this hypothesis. Either that, or eight metres and a wall is still inside the splash zone.
Monday, August 19, 2013
Monday, August 12, 2013
Both Ends
Freya is talking now.
Proto-talking, to be fair. Like 'Mama' does mean 'mummy', but also 'myam myam' (as in 'give me more food'), 'pick me up' and 'I'm awake, come get me.' 'Baba', which seems to denote me, also has multiple connotations. I don't think I get all of them yet. I'm also interchangable with mama, which for F's purposes is quite accurate.
It's funny, she actually first started saying 'mama' about three months ago. She said it over and over again for about two days, then totally lost interest in it and wouldn't repeat it at all, not for love nor money. We didn't actually offer her money, to be fair. Maybe that's where we went wrong.
Suddenly, whatever linguistic switch that operates these things is back on, though. She shouts for whoever takes her fancy when she wants to change positions or get dropped toys.
She shouts a lot, actually, just happy babbling. The best one is the long held note she does when you push her pram over cobbles. She clearly enjoys the way the bouncing makes her voice shake. Gothenburg has some pretty rough streets. They're the ones that make her sound like a yodelling competition.
As though to balance out the endless stream from the top, though, she got constipated yesterday.
F isn't a complainy baby. Pretty calm, generally, which means V and I aren't used to her having a day when she's all screams and miserable faces. Maybe it was a week of very hot sweaty weather, or maybe eating too many majs krokar, don't know. I do know she passed an interesting collection of pinecones and snail shells, perfectly sculpted out of poop.
No wonder she wanted to spend the entirely day lying stomach-down on mummy's legs, it looked exhausting. We went out and got a healthy supply of prunes and fresh fruit, including a punnet of raspberries. They're one of F's favourites, one of the first whole fruits she tried.
She can eat them all by herself now. You can recreate the spectacle of F eating a punnet of raspberries in your own home. Simply load handfuls of them into a shotgun and fire them at a chair from above. Once your house looks like the aftermath of a Guy Richie film, you have the general effect.
It worked, though, very smiley and active today. Also poopy, but in a good way.
Proto-talking, to be fair. Like 'Mama' does mean 'mummy', but also 'myam myam' (as in 'give me more food'), 'pick me up' and 'I'm awake, come get me.' 'Baba', which seems to denote me, also has multiple connotations. I don't think I get all of them yet. I'm also interchangable with mama, which for F's purposes is quite accurate.
It's funny, she actually first started saying 'mama' about three months ago. She said it over and over again for about two days, then totally lost interest in it and wouldn't repeat it at all, not for love nor money. We didn't actually offer her money, to be fair. Maybe that's where we went wrong.
Suddenly, whatever linguistic switch that operates these things is back on, though. She shouts for whoever takes her fancy when she wants to change positions or get dropped toys.
She shouts a lot, actually, just happy babbling. The best one is the long held note she does when you push her pram over cobbles. She clearly enjoys the way the bouncing makes her voice shake. Gothenburg has some pretty rough streets. They're the ones that make her sound like a yodelling competition.
As though to balance out the endless stream from the top, though, she got constipated yesterday.
F isn't a complainy baby. Pretty calm, generally, which means V and I aren't used to her having a day when she's all screams and miserable faces. Maybe it was a week of very hot sweaty weather, or maybe eating too many majs krokar, don't know. I do know she passed an interesting collection of pinecones and snail shells, perfectly sculpted out of poop.
No wonder she wanted to spend the entirely day lying stomach-down on mummy's legs, it looked exhausting. We went out and got a healthy supply of prunes and fresh fruit, including a punnet of raspberries. They're one of F's favourites, one of the first whole fruits she tried.
She can eat them all by herself now. You can recreate the spectacle of F eating a punnet of raspberries in your own home. Simply load handfuls of them into a shotgun and fire them at a chair from above. Once your house looks like the aftermath of a Guy Richie film, you have the general effect.
It worked, though, very smiley and active today. Also poopy, but in a good way.
Saturday, August 3, 2013
Friday 2nd
0700 - F and V are both up at the same time. V is getting ready for work and having breakfast. F is, well, basically the same, I suppose. While V eats, I feed F, then myself, and then play with F for a bit until she goes back to sleep.
0800 - V has left, F and I are sleeping. So flat out that when the digital TV installation people call, I don't notice, and wake up to their polite note on the doormat. It's pretty polite. I suspect their attempt to rouse me was pretty polite too, I don't usually sleep through doorbells, but you never know.
0900 - F has a second breakfast, banana flavour porridge with some mango and apple puree on top. She liberally applies this to her face and hands, accounting for her excellent complexion.
1000 - As I sit and look for acting jobs on the internet, I'm struck by the aroma of feces that seem heavy in the air. Looking round, I can see F in her stroller with a nice sticky tail of poop extruding itself down her right leg. Amazingly, it avoids the stroller, floor and toys altogether, instead accumulating nicely all over the inside of her clean clothes. And then, shortly afterwards, Daddy.
1100 - More sleep for F, some writing for me.
1200 - Out and about, picking up groceries from Willys (a Tesco analogue), a package for V and an iced coffee from Espresso House (a Starbucks analogue) for me. After all, this is my second official day as a lattepappa, staying at home while my wife works. I got off to a bad start, I didn't have any coffee at all yesterday.
1300 - Lunch, which is chicken with rice and vegetables today. We've run out of fruit puree, I didn't think to pick any up from Willys, and F is extremely vocal about her displeasure. Instead, we make do with vanilj krokar. These are basically vanilla-flavour wotsits (and just as awful as that sounds), but F loves them.
1400 - F is napping solidly, after a rousing few hands of Sweep the Smurfs. I need to invent some kind of self-redeploying smurf escalator (a smurfscalator?), otherwise I'm solely responsible for maintaining a constant supply of pixies to the bookshelf. It's like working in a tiny blue bowling alley before the automation of pinsetters.
1500 - I'm practising an unaccompanied song for an audition next week. F helps by accompanying me, first on the piano, then by singing, and then by mashing the wordsheet into the piano keys. This helps because I can't rely on the words any more, I have to learn them.
1600 - We go out for a walk to the botanical gardens. It's a very hot, sticky summer day here. August is called Rotten Month in Sweden, because all your food goes off twice as fast in the cloying summer weather. F cools off by splashing around in the fountains, where she's extra interested in the other naked toddlers doing the same thing.
1700 - Still out walking, wandering through Haga and looking at the outside of a flat we're interested in. F is more interested in the teddy bear blowing bubbles outside a toyshop. I explain to her that we can't add that as a requirement to our flat-hunting, but she doesn't seem convinced.
1800 - We all sit together in a little cafe that's on one of the bridges over the canal. V and I have a cool beer and some chilli nuts. This enrages F, who can't see why we get exciting fizzy drinks and crunchy things where she gets nothing. And I've left the thermos of water for making velling (her evening milky drink) at home, so we have to make do with more krokar.
1900 - F goes to bed and falls very totally asleep. V and I sit up on our computers, searching for flats or reading about advanced philosophy.
Okay, not really. V goes to bed around ten, I sit up playing computer games until late (0100), because it's Friday and I let myself do that on Fridays. Sorry. Maybe I'm a terrible parent.
But would a terrible parent buy their daughter this?
0800 - V has left, F and I are sleeping. So flat out that when the digital TV installation people call, I don't notice, and wake up to their polite note on the doormat. It's pretty polite. I suspect their attempt to rouse me was pretty polite too, I don't usually sleep through doorbells, but you never know.
0900 - F has a second breakfast, banana flavour porridge with some mango and apple puree on top. She liberally applies this to her face and hands, accounting for her excellent complexion.
1000 - As I sit and look for acting jobs on the internet, I'm struck by the aroma of feces that seem heavy in the air. Looking round, I can see F in her stroller with a nice sticky tail of poop extruding itself down her right leg. Amazingly, it avoids the stroller, floor and toys altogether, instead accumulating nicely all over the inside of her clean clothes. And then, shortly afterwards, Daddy.
1100 - More sleep for F, some writing for me.
1200 - Out and about, picking up groceries from Willys (a Tesco analogue), a package for V and an iced coffee from Espresso House (a Starbucks analogue) for me. After all, this is my second official day as a lattepappa, staying at home while my wife works. I got off to a bad start, I didn't have any coffee at all yesterday.
1300 - Lunch, which is chicken with rice and vegetables today. We've run out of fruit puree, I didn't think to pick any up from Willys, and F is extremely vocal about her displeasure. Instead, we make do with vanilj krokar. These are basically vanilla-flavour wotsits (and just as awful as that sounds), but F loves them.
1400 - F is napping solidly, after a rousing few hands of Sweep the Smurfs. I need to invent some kind of self-redeploying smurf escalator (a smurfscalator?), otherwise I'm solely responsible for maintaining a constant supply of pixies to the bookshelf. It's like working in a tiny blue bowling alley before the automation of pinsetters.
1500 - I'm practising an unaccompanied song for an audition next week. F helps by accompanying me, first on the piano, then by singing, and then by mashing the wordsheet into the piano keys. This helps because I can't rely on the words any more, I have to learn them.
1600 - We go out for a walk to the botanical gardens. It's a very hot, sticky summer day here. August is called Rotten Month in Sweden, because all your food goes off twice as fast in the cloying summer weather. F cools off by splashing around in the fountains, where she's extra interested in the other naked toddlers doing the same thing.
1700 - Still out walking, wandering through Haga and looking at the outside of a flat we're interested in. F is more interested in the teddy bear blowing bubbles outside a toyshop. I explain to her that we can't add that as a requirement to our flat-hunting, but she doesn't seem convinced.
1800 - We all sit together in a little cafe that's on one of the bridges over the canal. V and I have a cool beer and some chilli nuts. This enrages F, who can't see why we get exciting fizzy drinks and crunchy things where she gets nothing. And I've left the thermos of water for making velling (her evening milky drink) at home, so we have to make do with more krokar.
1900 - F goes to bed and falls very totally asleep. V and I sit up on our computers, searching for flats or reading about advanced philosophy.
Okay, not really. V goes to bed around ten, I sit up playing computer games until late (0100), because it's Friday and I let myself do that on Fridays. Sorry. Maybe I'm a terrible parent.
But would a terrible parent buy their daughter this?
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| Baby V Cthulhu in Facial Feeding Frenzy Championship. Result - 1:0 |
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