Mothers' Day 1/3

My family is over from the UK! And Malaysia. International clan, the Hoggs these days, so a full family get-together is a pretty rare event.

F was very pleased to meet her family from abroad. After the first rather suspicious meeting, where she said no a lot and went off to play alone, she was happily sprawled on her Uncle P's knee for an endless repetition of a tickling rhyme.

Dot dot

Line line

Spider crawling up your spine

Tight squeeze

Light breeze

Now you've got the shiveries

New one on me, that. New one on F too. She's just starting to get back into trying new things, after several months of adamant repetition of routines.

We had a big family meal out on Saturday night at a good steak place. F was excited about this until we got there and it turned out that 'eating at a restaurant' translated as 'sitting at a table being boring'. She almost liked the salad bar, because it was arranged a little bit like her favourite pick'n'mix sweet shop. But a lame version, where the broccoli wasn't even gummi. Only swift production of mummy's iPad saved the evening from becoming a tantrum.

And even then, her eyeline gradually emerged from Youtube videos about playdoh as she realised everyone seemed to be having fun without her. By the end of the night, she was running up and down a row of benches with Uncle D at one end, howling with delight. Swedes don't do howling babies in restaurants all that much, they're too reserved. The plaited family at the next table would have looked horrified, except that to display the emotion would have been to admit that something was wrong. So kudos to them.

We went home, put F and the super pregnant and tired V to bed, then I went out to the pub to meet most of the others and watch the cup final. Was it a cup final? I don't know, football isn't really my thing. Arsenal Villa were playing, I think, possibly against United. United Airlines? United Arab Emirates? United Nations? Google hasn't helped me here. Anyway, Fifteen seconds after arriving and greeting the others, my phone went.

V's waters had broken, please could I come home again.

Nothing to Report

No news on gender, weight, name, etc, etc - none of that. The baby is still dormant, by which I mean it's taken a vow of restlessness which V is obliged to go along with. Occasionally it kicks her hard enough in the middle of the night that she kicks out as well, like some kind of giant puppet. So I get kicked by proxy. Nobody wins in this arrangement.

Not much to write about over the last month, then, as the days are increasingly full of waiting for its arrival. Plenty of preparing instead. Some of it is mental prep, lying around doing nothing at any opportunity as if stocking up on rest and sleep might remotely work.

The rest of the preparation is shopping. Blankets so tiny I cannot believe F ever fitted inside one. An assortment of plastic teats, straps, rings and bottles. Hilariously overpriced toys. We spent some time today trying to pick out a doll for F to play with, the present with which we'll try to assuage her inevitable attention jealousy.

"Which one of these do you like?" we asked her.

"I buy the baby new clothes!" she told us proudly, ignoring both dolls and holding up a toy shopping basket before loading it up with doll outfits from the rack. Doesn't matter if it's a boy or a girl, then, as long as you can use it as an excuse to go shopping.

We got a new sofa, so mummy has a place to sprawl during feeding sessions or general exhaustion. F went from being very excited about the new sofa to being very excited about her new sofa to being very excited about her new trampoline over the course of an hour. Once she'd split chocolate on it, she had clearly taken it for granted and stopped talking about it altogether.

Still hard to gage F's understanding of the baby. We read her a book about a new baby arriving in a family today, which she listened to with close interest. "Did you like that book, Freja?"

"That mummy had no clothes on," she said, rather concerned. Still on the clothes, then. Priorities all sorted.

James' beard remains well. The vistigial remnants of James are still lodged amidst its proud roots, and it hopes to soon move on to pastures new. 

Incoming

So, yeah, a couple of posts back I alluded to the fact that V is pregnant again. Left it hanging there, actually, unmentioned since.

Part of this is natural hesitancy - you don't necessarily want to go enumerating unhatched chicks, so to speak, especially in the weird pseudopublic realm of the internet. I wouldn't want to have to explain it hadn't actually worked out on Facebook, leaving people no easy way to use their Like buttons.

The other part of it is being busy. This post is therefore All News, All the Time. Other than the first bit, obviously. And this bit, where I'm over-explaining it.

FAQ

How pregnant is V?

V is extremely pregnant. People keep stopping her in the street to tell her she is definitely carrying twins and wonder if she'd noticed. That, or they just can't squeeze past her, we aren't sure. Along with random joint aches, sleepless nights and savagely variable hormone levels, this means she is in a really super mood and would definitely like you to tease her mercilessly. After all, you don't really need both arms, do you?

When is it due, then?

The baby is due to arrive round the beginning of June, according to medical professionals, so not that long left to go.

However, V has a history of defying professional medical opinion, to the extend that any part of her medical history could be considered more like propaganda than factual reporting. This has included deciding on her own (new and more interesting) symptoms for illnesses and a marked immunity to advice. F was early, this new baby is already beyond huge, and it's not impossible it might turn up within the next month.

Does F know she's going to be a big sister?

Yes. She says hello to Mummy's Tummy in the morning and pats it cheerfully, in the manner of a medieval peasant touching a hunchback for luck. She is aware the baby will sleep in our room and sit in the new baby chair in the kitchen, but has been keen to stress that it will not get in her bed or be allowed to use her toys.

F has helped us pick baby names, by screwing her face up to our entire list of suggestions and shaking her head vigorously. "Well, what should we call it then?" we ask, and she shrugs and says "Baby" as though this were patently obvious to any but the most gurning simpleton. Similarly, the baby will be neither boy nor girl, "just a baby".

Are you all very excited?

Yes. Also quite stressed, occasionally in mild denial or frankly completely oblivious to what on earth the fuss is about. Second time in, there's been a marked drop in the levels of starry-eyed hope and a sharp increase in flashbacks to three am nappy changes. I can almost smell the meconium.

What are you doing to prepare for the new arrival?

Stressing, I just told you. Also buying things from Blocket (a second-hand site a bit like eBay), rooting around in the cellar for F's old clothes and wondering if vasectomies can be applied retrospectively.

What else is going on right now?

F has emerged from her Pippi Longstocking phase and is now into reading letters and making things with playdough. Mostly she makes caltrops, which (for those of you less au fait with fantasy wargear than I) are multi-spiked metal shards scattered on the ground and used to hobble charging cavalry. Playdoh is by far and away the most efficient material for the contruction of caltrops ever created by man. It also makes excellent, if rather eye-catching, patches for carpets, trousers, etc. Personally, I've gone off it.

V is somehow still working full time. I've passed another language exam and am now learning SAS-G, which is what six-to-ten year olds learn. At this rate, I'll be able to communicate at my mental age before the summer, because mentally I'm about twelve.

What the Christ is that on your face?

I have a part in a play about vikings, an adaptation of one of the Icelandic Sagas I love so much in fact, that starts rehearsal in a couple of months. I'm very excited about it, as I'll be performing in Swedish (probably). I auditioned in Swedish too, but decided that wasn't hard enough and translated the piece I did, famous Anglo-Saxon poem The Wanderer, specially for the occasion. I only wish I could accurately portray the looks on the faces of the audition panel as I hammered through it with my most enthusiastic foreign acting. I also had to dance (never pretty), demonstrate my acrobatic prowess (I did a handstand) and swordfighting skills. The latter against myself. With a mop.

Regardless of this impressively insane experience, my lazily untrimmed winter beard went on to swing me the role. I was asked to keep growing it and I'm now about eighty percent facial hair by body weight*, much of which is just inside the corners of my mouth. I keep seeing movement in my peripheral vision. When I whip round to see who's creeping up on me, I find my coiling sideburns, sieving the air for nutrients like the tentacles of a hungry anenome.

*The other twenty percent is a claggy accumulation of egg yolk, herring bones and the mockery of bypassers.

Har du sett min apa?

We had a Pippi Longstocking month last month.

Bit of a departure for F. If she sees real people on the telly, she usually wrinkles her nose up and denounces them as being a 'mummy program', by which she means Dr. Phil, CSI Denver or whatever other generic daytime crap is chuntering on in the background while V does something else entirely.

But Pippi somehow passed this acid test, and we had several marathons of watching all of it back to back. And singing the theme song, which is now a bedtime staple. V called F 'my little firecracker' the other morning. "Ne-Hej!" said F loudly and angrily, as she does if you call her anything other than her proper name or do anything before she's told you to do it. "But Pippi is a firecracker," we explained, and then she grinned widely and accepted her new title.

Pippi, whose surname is actually Långstrump, is a peculiar rolemodel for children. F quite quickly understood that you shouldn't really jump up and down on top of tables, eat birthday cake for breakfast or jump off the edge of buildings. It's funny when Pippi does it, but not in real life. F realised this quickly because Daddy was extremely fast in giving serious explanations of gravity, nutrition and other science facts, as though Open University was using the show as a teaching example - "Let's just pause the action here and think about what Pippi is doing for a moment. If you consider the acceleration of a free-falling body in normal atmospheric conditions..."

It's a great bit of old telly, though, made in Sweden in the 70s with brilliantly duff special effects. Proper heritage stuff. The nearest equivalent I could think of was the old BBC Narnia adaptation, the one where Aslan was a motheaten sock puppet and the Beaver family was the Talking Animal equivalent of putting on Blackface.

F's favourite episode of the whole series was of course the one with the worst possible connotations in English. It's where Pippi, idly considering some of her treasures one morning, comes up with a strange new word. She decides to use this word for everything until she finds the thing it really means.

The word in question, sadly, is 'Spunk'. It's quite hard to stay deadpan when the episode is riddled with classic dialogue like 'all the best sweet shops sell spunk', 'oh, what a sweet little spunk!' (to a baby, as well) or 'Don't you know it's dangerous to drink spunk?'

But it's stay deadpan or explain to F why I'm sniggering, and that's a conversation for a later date. When she's, say, in her mid-thirties.

Food Waist

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.

Pappagris

I seem to have become indispensable.

F's morning chorus starts with vague murmurs that gradually mutate into a two-tone cry of "Mummy! Daddy!" like a clingy ambulance. That doesn't mean she's awake, though. If you fall into that trap, you get crossly told "Nej! Sleeping," as she rolls over and pulls a stuffed bear over her head.

You know when she is awake, because the two tones become one. "Daddy daddy daddy, daddy daddy. Daddy! Daddy daddy. Pick up." Then it's mummy's turn to roll over and go back to sleep, and I can go and make breakfast.

Daddy must also come and play. And hold her hand. And this morning, come and watch her watching the iPad. And run and get her paper and crayons. And get a glass of milk. Daddy must not, on pain of screaming death, be on the computer, talk to mummy, fold laundry or do cooking until instructed so to do.

It's sort of fun being in demand? Up to a point. That point being the point at which you need to do any chores, or even (god forbid) entertain yourself in any way. There's only so much rapt beholding I can manage before even the joy of seeing toy cars being repeatedly extracted from a smurf mushroom house palls. Five minutes, in all honesty, is the absolute maximum, and that's when it's still seven in the morning and I can stare into the middle distance for weeks without seeing anything.

It's certainly not fun seeing how rude F is to V at the moment. "No! Vill inte ha mummy! Mummy is bleh!" is a typical rejoinder to an offer of a kiss or a cuddle. She can be pretty chilly for no reason to either of us, but V definitely gets the worst of it. There's nothing much behind such vehement rejection, no more than there was behind the expertly executed right hook to the jaw she gave me last week. She tearfully went straight to the naughty chair all by herself when she saw my face after that particular stunt, which rather tore the heartstrings out of my ire. Canny wee lady, her.

Knowing that she just hasn't got the hang of the polite no just yet doesn't help it feel less personal, though. And her polite yes is no better. Asking her if she'd like some breakfast gets the most sullen sounding 'yeah' I've heard from anyone outside their teens. Then you have to dash through the obstacle course of her wildly flip-flopping demands (Butter on the bread! No butter on the bread! Milk! Red milk, not blue! In the other glass! With the pink bib! Too slow - give me yoghurt now!) to make sure she eats anything.

Luckily it's balanced with occasional displays of extremely generous affection, which leavens what might otherwise be bitter bread. "Mmmmm, nice warm daddy," for example, with a big pressing cuddle. Or "I'm stroking mummy's hair," whilst curled up on the sofa. So if it's tough work right now, at least it's very rewarding.

Eat Your Browns

"Go on, just try a little bit."

"No fank you."

"Go on! It's nice! You like it!"

"NO! Will inte! Will har den här!"

"You've finished all of that, there's no more. Come on, try this."

"No! NO!"

"Look, here's just a little tiny bit on a fork. Put that in your mouth and taste it."

"BLERGHHH NOO ARRRGH WAAAAAAA"

This would be an entirely standard mealtime conversation with any toddler, certainly, And therefore unremarkable, bar the facts that

• I'm offering F chocolate cake 
• She wants to have more boiled carrots instead

There is no pleasing some people.