Sorry for the long pause. It's been, in some ways, quite a tough month.
Something about the end of winter - I've become more Swedish in that sense. When the first rays of spring sun come out, I'm not standing askance and looking wryly at the desperate Swedes standing pathetically out in them, almost lapping at the air to extract the warmth. Rather, I'm there with everyone else, strung out like sun-tolerant vampires and feebly glad to have made it through the dark months. Instead of struggling through another bitterly cold, gloomy day, you can wash up on the shore of spring for a bit, and take a breather.
F continues to be a bit over two. Last year, she was pretty cheerful most of the time, easy-going and playful. Now, she's either like that but ramped up to about thirteen and extremely insistent that I join her, or she's lying bonelessly on the carpet, screaming. She lies in bed in the morning saying "Come on, Daddy! Open the door!" even though she's quite capable of getting out of bed and doing it herself. She'll demand specific foods, then shun them if they're produced.
Given that I have the heart and soul of a labrador, it's not really surprising that I eat everyone's leftovers at home. This is starting to tell, rather, especially at the moment when F's appetite is pretty capricious. If I cook fishfingers for lunch, I have to try and guess how many she might eat, factor in how I want, then cook the total. There's always one more than I can comfortably eat, maths is not my strong point. I feel a little heavy these days.
Even though I balk at eating, say, a half-platched bowl of yoghurt containing soggy Special K, I still feel terribly guilt throwing it out. But what else can you do? Sack after sack of perfectly edible grub is tossed either down the hatch in the hallway or the one in my face. Neither feel like good solutions.
To compound this, F has decided sharing can be fun.
"Please can you pass the blueberries," I asked her at breakfast.
"Lots and lots!" she said, and kept passing big, mildly crushed fistfuls to me and sniggering.
I know I shouldn't complain. But V did more or less the same last night. It was National Waffle Day (how I love Sweden) yesterday. V's appetite is a bit all over the place right now, so she ate half of one, then tossed the rest over to me. I must have looked a surprised, because she explained that she didn't want it slightly defensively.
"You don't have to eat it," she said. Of course I do, you've put it on my plate! Don't you know what happens to people who don't clean their plates? They get no pudding! That's what I was thinking, anyway. I couldn't say anything, there was too much waffle in the way.
And why is V's appetite all over the place, you might ask? Ah well, there's a thing.
Här kommer en till.
