Achievements

Last post, I was complaining about what a shitstorm January had been and how I wasn't going to mention it again. Come on home, January, all is forgiven. I've rewritten my will, you're going to get the farm.

V went back to work this month, so I've been home on paternity leave. What am I taking paternity leave from? Er, not a lot, fair point. Mostly my senses, I think. One kid good, two kids better, as Orwell put it. I don't think he made it to four. Nor will I.

This month's statistics just in:

Nights of Unbroken Sleep: 0
Times I Fully Hoovered the Entire Flat: 2
Fishfingers Cooked: 26
Fishfingers Eaten: 17
Days Spent Convincing F to Finish her Meals Without a Fight: 19
Hours Spent Ladelling Children Into and Out of Clothes: 372
Diets Begun: 1
Diets Broken: 0
Jobs Obtained: 2 (flexible hours and long term contract, wheee! I'm earning again! Plus a short film in Stockholm)
Babies Taken to Work With Me: 1
Recording Jobs Incomplete due to Technical Staff Flirting with Babies: 1
Children's TV Series Theme Tunes Stuck in Mind: 3 (Raa Raa the Noisy Lion, Lassie, Pelle Kanin)
Pictures of Daddy Drawn in Crayon: 4
Years Spent Cleaning the Kitchen Surfaces: 14
Seconds Kitchen Surfaces Remained Clean: 8
Nights Out Drinking with Friends: 3
Nights In Drinking with Wife: 1
Liverpool: 3 West Bromwich: 0
Average Temperature of Gothenburg in Celcius: 1
Average Time Spent Crawling on Floor/Day: 3 Hours
Average Pairs of Jeans Ruined by Floorcrawling/Day: 9
Average Number of Personal Artistic Projects Postponed Due to Tantrums, Colds or Fatigue: 3/day
Average Mental Age of Parents: 4, accounting for exhaustion
Nappies Changed: 300

Happy New Year

Let's not talk about January. The deaths of numerous beloved famous people (and Terry Wogan) was just the tip of the iceberg. Not that it wasn't without some bright moments...

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"Look, F! What's this?"

This is a bright red sled with a steering column and slick black leather-effect seat big enough for two. It's been placed strategically outside F's door, so that it will be the first thing she sees when she wakes up from her afternoon snooze. There's about six inches of snow outside, which means that V has spent about six hours hunting this down. Everyone else in Gothenburg has been buying them too, and it's been quite a trek to get it. 

F looks at it with wide eyes. 

"No!" she says, the eye widener revealed as horror. "No! I wanted one with wheels one!"

Much screaming ensues. Quite what she means by a wheeled sled (a snowcat?) remains mysterious, but buying one without is a hideous crime committed only by the worst parents.

- 

C flips over onto her stomach, then grins enormously up at me. 

- 

"It's a Tristan!" says F. Her third birthday has been and gone. Tacked onto the rear of Christmas (of which we had second helpings once we got back to Sweden), she's been getting presents solidly for about a month. As the sled incident proved, this has made her rather spoilt. 

On her birthday proper (breakfast in bed, new play-doh, duplo abundant) and on her birthday party (trainset from her Swedish family, awkwardness when she opened the 'don't feel left out' presents for all the cousins and claimed them as her own, Tinkerbell cake), she was swift to remind us of her wish list. 

"I want to have a train and a Tristan, Daddy and Mummy."

No Tristan dolls exist, further proof of how sexist toyshops and toy makers are. Someone I know on Facebook was angrily decrying the lack of female Force Awakens action toys - the lead protagonist is a woman, but the shops here in Sweden aren't going to stock any of the merch because 'girls won't buy it'. Tristan is a male character, one of about three, in a predominantly little-girlsy franchise. There were two dolls made, several years ago, and both are out of production. 

A Short Poem About Parental Anxiety Just Before A Birthday

Hooray

For eBay. 

About eighty quid later, we found something that could be shipped from the States somewhere. It arrived late, but was worth it for F's delight. It lasted until she discovered the dandelion airship toy it came with was top heavy and wouldn't stand up easily, about five minutes. 

"Augh! It's not working!" she screamed, the 'augh' at the beginning being her equivalent of 'fucking hell' in terms of vehemence and deployment. 

- 

C screams penetratingly. It is six a.m. Sometimes three a.m., usually most of the hours from seven until nine in the evening. It is an angry, hurtful noise. It can only be stopped by allowing her to clutch your face like a cuddly toy, or occasionally by feeding her whether it's feeding time or not. Her cot is just at the right height to give you back ache after about two minutes of reassuring contact. 

She tries to walk whenever you hold her hands, and she wants to let go and do it by herself. F never did that, she was content to be led around. Not C, she wants to get into F's room and try out all the tiny choke hazards in there. Now. Or she'll scream. 

She likes eating. She sulks if she doesn't get food while we're eating, so either V or I has to let our food go cold as we feed her first. I can't play with F without C issuing piercing demands to join in. Luckily, the two of them clearly love each other and love playing together. Sometimes I can let them get on with it from a small distance, and rest my knotted back for a while. 

Now it is eight a.m.. I've been up for two hours already, and am lying on my face on the sofa, trying desperately to stay awake. F is hitting me in the face with a purple balloon and telling me to read her Tinkerbell and the Great Fairy Rescue. C is in her baby walker, two metres away, and screaming because she wants to go back to bed. I wish I could do that. I wish it would work. I get up, tuck C up, slump on the sofa and try to oblige F. 

Twenty minutes later, F pries my eyes open again. 

"Say thank-you, Daddy," she says, "because I let you rest."

- 

It's the third time down the slope on the sled, and F is still screaming furiously. 

We get to the bottom, and she turns to me. "I wasn't screaming because I was scared!" she tells me amazedly. "I was screaming because I was happy!"

-

...it's just that most of last month was eaten up by tantrums, illness, darkness, sleet and the dull, growing acceptance that I'd eaten far too much for about a month and already couldn't fit into my new shirt properly. Diets, potty training, early mornings, broken sleep, an oppressive winter sky, horrible news about the right-wing violence against immigrants in Sweden, the deaths of friends - January was a grim month. I'm no rush for another.

So I'm taking it off the record. Happy New Year! I hope you enjoy 2016. Hard to accept I've been writing this blog for three years now. V's back to work tomorrow and I'm back to being a Lattepappa. Perhaps this time I'll actually score some lattes.