Sickie

Having tried illness and decided that it wasn't all that bad, F went for another bout this week.

Nothing as serious, just a snotty nose coupled with a brief but high fever. And lots of enfeebled wails. And the same insistence on lying on top of mummy on the sofa, eating only the best raspberries and orange juice. I'm not exactly sure when she started feeling better. I have the impression it was some time before she started asking for V's china puffs* and she'd been getting away with a spot of light acting for a bit.

Summer is here. Early, as part of the balancing act that is still inflicting late snow on parts of the US. Our balcony is an excellent sun trap of which F is very fond. She stands in front of the chairs out there yelling 'uh uh uh' until I pick her up as indicated and sit next to her, explaining the windows and the thermometer over and over.

Adult chairs are a big draw at the moment. Adult most things are, of course, which is why I eat more of the food I prepare for F than the stuff I make for me. It's all the same, to be fair, her portions are just minced finer. But she'd still rather eat forkfulls of daddy's quiche lorraine with daddy's fork than touch any of the identical stuff in front of her. Eating it while sitting next to daddy on a grown-up chair was an added requirement the other day.

Actually, I forgot to mention the 'eating with forks' thing. It's about a month now since she suddenly started eating perfectly with a spoon as though she'd always done it. For about four months, she'd been eating whilst holding one, occasionally using it to bless the mouthful she was about to take like some miniature podgy bishop, but very rarely trying to eat with it. Then one morning over porridge, some internal revelation struck her and pow! spoon all the way. Fork followed soon after, although that's still mostly in crosier mode right now.

She also walks. Three or four times in the last few weeks, I'd come into a room to find her standing in the middle. She'd immediately sit down and deny all knowledge, and she still has a preference for having a parent's hand to hold (two for outside). Whenever she started this surrepticious practice, it's certainly paid off. She toddles about independently more and more every day.

I must be tired at the moment (actually, I know damn well I am) - all these milestones would have prompted long and gushing blogs before. Now I'm so swamped in astounding newness, it almost gets a bit ho-hum. Her vocab in Swedish and English is a couple of hundred words, although only in comprehension, she isn't talking very much yet. As with walking and spoon use, though, I suspect she'll start very fast once she finds a use for it. Right now, she can get her demands across perfectly well through the international language of pointing and stropping.

God help us when she can explain what the yelling means in more detail, I suspect. Parenthood is quite relentless, I do feel fairly worn out at the moment. The endless tide of housework, the insistence of routines - although it's good to always have something to do, it's tiring.

As a kid myself, I never understood why parents were so boring when they got together. Sitting down and talking? Given that they could go out and do whatever they wanted whenever they liked (it seemed to me), I didn't understand why they wouldn't be riding bikes round and round the block forever. Or why they'd want to drink coffee. Or sleep in. Or watch the news instead of cartoons.

Funny how times change.


*chocolate covered rice sweets, for those in the UK. The packaging has coolie hats on it, which is unusually un-PC for Sweden. It's one close step away from calling your confection a 'chinky gay'. 

Fever

Inevitably, F succumbed.

What a relief! I've been dreading this moment for ages. After her first minor flirting with illness, way back when, she's been relentlessly healthy. So much so that I kept thinking whatever got to her first would be double-extra-grim. Pea soup off the walls, frantic screeching at all hours, a frenzy of health care professionals whizzing in and out of the flat with drip stands, EEGs, etc.

Nope.

F sat down in the middle of the floor yesterday afternoon, looking a bit flushed and confused, and sobbed miserably a couple of times. She was trying to play. All the usual stuff was there - the gaudy aeroplane, a scattering of poker chips, three or four opened and discarded books and some dominoes. But she just couldn't get anything to work right.

She was burning up, but other than being a bit weepy and tired, she was fine. She spent the rest of the afternoon sleeping and watching TV on mummy, then woke up and marched me relentlessly round the flat with the 'plane, screaming every time it collided with anything. That was quite a lot, she doesn't really steer, and the screaming was to indicate to me that I needed to make a course correction. That's no way to fly, I kept telling her, you should scream earlier. But she wasn't in a listening mood.

She woke up today after her usual twelve hour sleep, still feverish but entirely perky. And now very much of the opinion that her morning and afternoon naps should be on the sofa whilst watching TV. I explained that wasn't going to happen (tantrum) and indicated that if she didn't want to go to bed, she could carry on playing (tantrum, no I should remain on the sofa so she could sleep on me), but I did give her orange juice instead of water to drink.

Using the bottle as a brush, she painted most of it under the coffee table, except what she got in her socks and mummy's hat, so I think she's probably better. I wish I'd had it that easy.

Vomit

It was bound to happen sooner or later, I suppose. Of all the bodily fluids I've had vented on me, this is still the one I dread most. The smell, the instinctive gut reaction to copy the action, the howling.

Lucky, I suppose, that it was just me vomiting and not F.

There's a bug in town at the moment. V had it earlier in the week (and is still recovering, grimly), yesterday was my turn. F didn't seem unduly bothered by the fact that daddy couldn't get off the sofa without changing colour. She just left me there and occasionally bought me things to read or do. Nothing to help your roiling intestines like being smacked in the face with a copy of Den Här Lilla Grisen, I find.

The actual vomit didn't happen until late in the day. I thought I'd got away with it, but no, round five o' clock I had to flee to the bathroom. F followed me in some distress, making 'oh no, daddy! what is this! what is this dreadful happening!' noises. She undermined this touching concern by then craning her neck interestedly to see what was in the toilet bowl and saying 'oo!'

The second set of heaves hit me while I was trying to feed her. I was already anxious that I was a walking plague pit, smearing germs on everything I went near, so I'd been extra OCD about preparing her food. Having to dash out as she ate it was a bad moment; she shouldn't really be left unsupervised in her high chair, for example, but she can't quite squirm out of it yet (as far as I know). So leaving her there for a minute or two was probably more child-care-conscious than spewing into her dinner.

I tried to reassure her I was okay inbetween retching. It is a low moment in anyone's life when you're incapacitated by illness but still more concerned with someone else's well-being. "Bu?" called F from the kitchen, sounding a bit anxious. I wiped my face and hurried back, but I needn't have worried. She'd just seen a bird at the window and wanted me to look at it.

Febrile and slightly confused, I tried to have an early night but really just rolled about in a twist of blankets, alternately shivering and sweating. My fever broke at about three in the morning, loudly enough to wake me out of the half-sleep I was in. It was almost as though I was getting an after-action report from my immune system.

"Yeah, so, what we've done is, we turned all the heaters up to full to blast the bugs out, so you'll need to top up your wet and dry fuel reservoirs, not much left there I'm afraid. Sorry about the smell. Your throat's taken a right pounding, all that coming and going, so you'll want to take it easy on that for a day or two, just until it's settled, and you'll probably find a lot of dead bugs gathered in your kidneys, so if your lower back feels sore for a while, no worries, that's all normal. Bill's on the kitchen table, give us a shout if there's anything else you want done. We'll let ourselves out, cheers!"

We now wait the likely horror of F getting the same bug. I can't see her being quite as equitable about that, somehow.

Reading Age

F is almost fifteen months old. She can read, apparently.

Through the rosy tint of fatherhood, at least. She has been particularly interested in her alphabet books in the last week or so. And I was getting over-excited about the fact she was pointing to the letter O, just as I'd been patiently doing on demand six hundred times in a row, and saying 'O. O.' Except she was also doing the same for the letters G, Q and D, so maybe not quite there yet.

But yesterday we went over to V's workplace, the logo of which is a large, stylised capital F. And apropos of nothing, F pointed to it and said 'Effffvvvvv' very emphatically.

I give you, therefore, Ladies and Gentlemen, the amazing reading prodigy that is my daughter, and damn you all if I look like the preeningly proud parental idiot I most certainly am.

She also counts, very enthusiastically. She counted the first star in 'Mumin räknor stjärnor' about fifteen times before moving on to the next one this morning. Whichever language 'bam bam bam bam bam' is, I'm not entirely sure it counts.

Ho ho.

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It's been sunny and warm all week. This brings winter-crazed Swedes flocking out of homes and offices to lie over any available pak bench like IKEA-themed Dali clocks. For the first few moments, at least, then they get all organised and picnicky.

This means we've been out in the parks even more than usual. Plikta is my favourite, up in Slottskogen, where, amongst other incredible constructions, there's a gigantic exploded whale to climb around in, tiny working construction diggers, a set of descending waterways with drains and paddlewheels and a fifty-metre-long tunnel slide.

Of these manifold joys, F's favourite is a concrete step. She ascends and descends over and over, screaming at me and slapping me away if I try to help when I'm not wanted, or screaming and slapping at me if I don't help when I am. It comes up to her waist, and it's about three metres away from a set of much lower steps that she can get up and down perfectly easily. No challenge there, I suppose.

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I put fruit in the porridge this morning, blueberries and chopped grapes as I have most mornings this week. For some reason, she took against this particular blend this morning, and I had to wash all the porridge off again before she'd eat it.

I suppose if you're going to be a genius, you're allowed to be particular about some things.