Let me explain.

I started out on this journey of parenting George having a minimum of expectations. I had no idea about feeding, sleeping, stimulating, milestones, toys, socializing, etc. I only knew I wanted the baby I carried to come home with us, to be healthy and everything would be dealt with as it happened. I did not do it on purpose, it is just that life with baby was something that I could not imagine, picture it in my head, and now, looking back, I am deeply thankful for that. Because most of the times the things I expect turn out to be not only different, but totally opposite different.

Parenting is like walking on thin ice in the sense that you are pushing forward not knowing what lies ahead or underneath. You think you are on solid ground, when bam! you slip and find the literal meaning of a PITA not that funny. You do not slip because you are skipping like a ballerina, you slip because you just do (the sole got worn out a bit, or an air bubble got trapped in the ice and your weight burst it and caused the surface you stood on to shift, or the wind pushed you, nothing you could have foreseen or prevented). Or there is the case when the ice just breaks. And you find yourself in freezing water. And scrambling to get out. And you do finally get out, dripping wet and afraid of losing toes to frost, and very wide awake, since freezing water is very sobering. And you have to walk on, and you do. And you step very carefully ahead, and wait to see how the ice holds, and move the other leg, and gingerly place the foot where you think the ice is thicker and on and on. Sometimes you have a very long stretch of good ice and there is no more slip up, no more falling, no more ice cracking underneath you. Your confidence is boosted, you think you have learned reading the signs and are by now a master of avoiding disaster. Until it happens again. And you are back in the god damn freezing water again.

You get the picture.

What has broken my ice so far? In no particular order:

- oversupply (and breastfeeding is NOT easy. It gets easier, but it does not start out that way. If it does startout easy and stays that way, there is always something that comes up, like, for example, developping oxytocin allergy. Susan knows all about that. Yeah, it is never easy.)

- sleep regression (4 months sleep regression loved us so much it stayed with us for 10 months. Enough said.)

- picky toddler eating habits (whatever sounds great now, is yucky tomorrow) (or next week) (it does not apply to not-recommended, not-every-day food, like pie or cake)

- teething (I heard one doctor say that teething doesn’t hurt. I still wish I went back and punch his lights out. Idiot!)

With the oversupply, I found myself ankle-deep in the water. With sleep, I nearly drowned. With the eating, I am constantly surprised to have one foot in the water these days. I am still to hear about a child not being bothered by teething.

With an easy baby, parents are graciously skating away in the sunset (leaving the rest of us green with envy). With a normal one (or several), we are constantly trying to stay upright, we pick ourselves up more than we would like to and we are happy when we spend one day without banging our heads against something. And advice, oh well, advice means well, but unless you are in that particular situation, and know all the factors involved (temperature in the air and in the water, ice thickness, weather conditions, magnitude of the ice opening, etc), advice is just encouragement to make it on your own.

I am not saying that parenting is awful. It most certainly is not. It is wonderful and rewarding and also very hard. It challenges me every day, makes me doubt myself often, but it also fills my heart with such joy and happiness that it makes me float.

Oh, and in case it was not clear: Sonja Henje I am so not.

Driving in Europe

I actually mean speeding.
You are in general granted a tolerance of 10% of the speed limit throughout Europe. Try to stay within that. Except in Switzerland and the Netherlands. Honestly, it is so not worth the few minutes you gain. Very expensive. And don’t think that you can get away with it. Swiss precision is not a myth and Big Brother had to come from somewhere. Consider your wallet warned.

Sleep training

My son George had a lot of problems with sleep. A LOT. I wrote also a lot about this (it tends to be a consuming issue). My advice in a few words (a matter of speech) for any of you sleep deprived new or older parents is this: do whatever you need to do to get your child to sleep. Your child sleeps, you can sleep and try to find a better solution another day. Don’t listen blindly to any “specialist” who wrote a book. Listen to your child and to your needs. It might be very hard to believe, but this period does not last forever. It also applies to success, so don’t get cocky if you think you have it all figured out. You don’t, you just get lucky and pray you stay this way. I know this is not what you want to read, but there is no magical solution, no miracle worker device.

When I say do whatever you need to do, I mean just that. If you can’t do CIO, rock, sing, hold the tiny hand, co-sleep, stay on your head, nurse till the rain stops (or the nipples shrivel and fall, whichever applicable), listen to rain forest or vacuuming sounds all night, as long as it gives you sleep. Don’t be scared that they will go to college rocking themselves to sleep – they grow out of it, or at least the vast majority. If your child doesn’t, than at least you will be rested enough to really think about how to tackle this problem.

If you decide to CIO, stick with it at least three days. For better results, I hear it’s better a week, but small targets make daunting goals achievable. So start with three days. You will soon learn if it works for you and your child. And leather, rinse, repeat, for every sleep regression.

You never know before hand if one particular method works or not. Just like you never know before hand how your child will be, some are good eaters, some are good sleepers, some a quiet, some (cough* George *cough) are louder than a brass fanfare in a German Beergarten, you find out in time.

And never forget: you will get through it. I promise that this won’t last forever. Just like your infant changes into a toddler in a blink of an eye, so will this deprivation pass. And you will live to tell about it. And give others advice like this.

Baking

A tip I learned from a French pâtissier: Try to do your dough mixing by hand (in French the process is called pétrissage, comes from stone, turn the flour into dough, basically). It might be more time efficient to do it with a domestic apliance, but if you do it by hand, the ingredients are brought together by the heat your hands produce, you can learn to tell the difference between different stages of the process and it gives you an immense feeling of satisfaction that surpasses the pain you might get from mixing all that dough.

Also, most doughs behave better if the ingredients are at room temperature. Heating them quickly is better than having a go with cold ingredients, but slowly bringing them to room temperature is irreplaceable.

Baking and dough mixing is not fast-food-ish. At all. Oh, but the goodies you can make yourself…

Stuff I learned from my MIL

If it is your first time here, you need to know that my MIL is a dunce. With a big ego, thinks she knows absolutely everything and she really does not like me (I am on a perpetual process of cleaning up my language, for George’s sake) (and because I aspire to be a lady) (a polite one).

Don’t waste your time and energy with stupid people, even if they are important in your life and make your living hellish. Choose your battles wisely and only fight those you think you can win, but expect to lose many of them. It is a fact of life that stupid people are very resilient, otherwise there wouldn’t be so many in the world, would there? You will never win, so let them be.

There was a joke, which went something like this: Why does a bench brake under a stupid person? Because the smartest gives up the first. Be a bench. It is better than fighting the stupid.

And since I have fought many such pointless battles, and expect to still do in the future, due to my inability to keep my mouth shut, I can tell you one thing: getting stuff off your chest does not really help. You think it does, but especially with morons, it is a waste of time and energy. Again, save yourself the trouble.

Although knowing that you lose even when you are right is perhaps the toughest lesson to learn as an adult. But no one said life was fair.

There. This is my free advice of the day. I hope you can use it. Or at least, I hope I did not waste your time.

Then George came home from the crèche with a sore red throat and the doctor said we needed to postpone the vaccine again and wait and see how it evolved. I thought it was going better, and was so anxiously looking forward to returning of the sleeping through the night thing. Which is now so last week. Only now I see he has some red spots on his tummy. He does get a very mild irritation from the water, which is very hard in the area. But it was never like this. I fancy hiring an inhouse ped whose name is not google to answer all my questions. Since this must wait, so must I, until tomorrow, to see how the spots are and decide if we’re going back to the doctor’s office after all.

Talking about the crèche, I’ve realised that sadly I have nothing whatsoever in common with the other parents. Especially the other mothers. Na-da! I was once told that I lived in an ivory tower, only because I did not like to mingle and avoided unnecessary social contact at work (I used to work, not spent my time wasting it with inane chit chat). Now I think that in fact I only connect with a very few people. And thank God I do not need company, am very happy by myself for lenghty periods of time, otherwise I would have been erm… the polite version of ‘fucked up’ which eludes me right now (I try to clean up my language, obviously I need to try harder).

So yeah, the other mummies, nothing clicked. Oh, I forget, it clicked, but not in the right way. I went to pick up George’s sippy cup, and a mother told me that her daughter was thirsty and tried to drink from it and that she hoped that no illnes would be passed between them. We tried to be friendly the day before, since we discovered we are co-nationals. Well, lady, you should have watched and talked to your daughter and not let her use any sippy cup but hers, if you are so afraid of her getting “ill”. And by the way, this is what they do when they are together, build immunity by passing on bugs and viruses to each other, and incidentally, if you were thinking I would be knocking down your door looking for companionship and a playdate for my son, you can relax and delete this from your worry list. Ain’t never gonna happen.

And what irks me is that ever since George started going there, he had all sorts of colds and high fever and sore throat and the lot, which did not happen before. But it is what it is, right, and this is how they build immunity and social skills. But to say that her daughter could get sick because of George… Pretty much as useful as pointing fingers at a clouded sky, blaming for the rain one cloud or the other in a shapeless dark mass.

Another thing that annoys me is seeing the plural of nouns written with apostrophe. As in dog’s are barking or a lot of idiot’s can procreate. Since when did the apostrophe-and-S start being used as more than a genitive mark for singular? Definately after I left school, I would say. Which was, you know, last millenium. Lot’s of thing’s changed since then, huh?

I had a check on Numéro Bis today. It could be a boy, or it could also be a girl, I still don’t know, since cooperation is something my babies are apparently not familiar with. But everything is as it should be, the baby grew a lot, measured one week ahead, and waved and kicked for the camera. I think I can feel some movement, but then I always doubt it and can’t say for sure. So it was great seeing a waving and kicking baby today.

All week I had some very good post bits, which I thought I would remember and share with you. But I don’t. Which means that probably they were not all that good in the first place, or my memory is a tenth of what it used to be. Or perhaps it is linked to my hair colour, which is fading every day, leaving behind (fortunely still on my head) a lot of gray hairs. A LOT. A frightening lot. And yet, I still can’t take a decision considering dying my hair again. Because that would mean maintenance, which I am unable to commit to. Gah!

I hope St. Elsewhere is doing well and that she has good news to share soon.

But for some reason, I am yet to feel the excitement of the new beginning. It’s not the “new year blues”, it’s more of a “weight of the world on my shoulders” that coincides with the start of a new year. I am tired, which does not help with the mood boosting attempts, I can’t hear any more bad news, almost everything else I hear or watch gets on my nerves, from a FB pregnancy announcement made in the Mastercard priceless ad spirit (tacky) to news about my favourite brilliant saabotaged auto brand (take a guess), and documentaries about lakes in Africa that are in danger of disappearing and the conquences of that (for Christ’s sake, not even nature documentaries are safe to watch anymore!), I am fed up with clichés spouted like a parrot by people who have not so much to complain about (cough*MIL*cough)… I want to take all children who suffer and bring them inside, feed them hearty meals, give them treats, play with them and tuck them in warm beds, keep them away from idiots and punch the lights out/poke out the eyes and manually castrate all those who abuse them. I am tired of feeling tears in my eyes and having my throat constrict whenever I hear anything related to children who are just not doing fine. No need to tell me it’s stupid, I know, I can’t possible eradicate suffering form the world, it is part of the bigger picture, duality of life, good/bad, shit, I don’t care, I just want to go back to bubble where I lived in till now. Perhaps it IS hormones, most probably actually, but I have to get out of this weird funk.

Being tired also brings along feeling out of sorts. And I can’t get back to syncronizing my sleep with George’s. Rather frustrating. But George’s mood is synchronized with mine, and he has been whinging, and was more clingy and fussy than usual. What can I tell you, we are a joy to be with these days.

I know it will pass. But until it does, I have to control the urge to bang my head against walls. And to let it out on George and hubs, because they really have nothing to do with it, and they deserve much better. It would help if I just could crawl under a rock for a couple of days. But this ain’t going to happen, so off to find alternative solutions.

2011 was a good year for me. Hopefully, 2012 is going to be even better. And the good part of all this stupid funk is that it does make me realise that my life IS good. The best, actually. And it’s not that I am being ungratefull or unhappy, it’s just a low time, because you can’t be up all the time.

George is doing his robot walk trying to catch a cat tail, which, predictably, is always 1 cm out of reach. Now, that helps lifting my spirits. Goofy child!

I wish you all a very merry holiday season, filled with peace, joy and fun, and the best 2012 that you ever knew until now!

I am 12 weeks today. Tomorrow I go for the NT scan. I wish it were tomorrow already.

My belly got rounder. It was never flat, not even when I was at my most athletic teenage best. It never went back to the pre-George shape. And now it is definitely round. I lost weight, apparently pregnancy hormones nudge my body to behave and demand proper healthy food, with the occasional junk thrown in, just to keep things in balance. I have no need for maternity clothes yet, since all of my normal ones fit.

I may have said it before, but I do not understand the piece of advice to not tell about the pregnancy before the second trimester starts. Why? Whom is this discretion meant to protect? If the pregnancy is lost, the woman will need all the attention, care and compassion there is. If all goes well, most people are either not interested or happy with the good news. I did not put out a stork sign outside my door, nor do I walk around with a “pregnet” t-shirt over my parka. But I did tell the family and a couple of close friends about it. Meaning those I expect to support me, should, God forbid, anything go wrong. I hope this is never again the case. But then hope is just hope. This does not mean that I agree with the Kartrashian announcement. I very much liked how Jennifer Garner handled each of her pregnancies. She is such a lovely lady. Since you were all dying to know what I think about them…

Oh well, some more time passed and I am closer to tomorrow than I was when I started writing this post.

I especially did not tell any of the family about tomorrow, I hate, hate, hate “positive thinking” and hearing for the millionth time ‘Don’t worry, it will all be alright, you’ll see’. Of course I hope everything is alright, but the assurance and tone of authority of this line founded on pure vacuous beliefs that just by thinking positively, things will be fine, well, they all brush my feathers the wrong way. This is why they will get only the result and so I spare myself the entire blown-out-of-proportion show before it.

Tomorrow. I’ll post tomorrow.

The doctor gave George antibiotics, more precisely cephalosporins, which first startled me, but I am not a doctor, and my medical knowledge is erm… not that up to date. After the first dose, the fever went down, after a couple of days he got back to eating solids and now he is running around and playing with his new kitchen. Sometimes he vroom-vrooms the toy cars around the kitchen, but most of the times he is just taking things out off the shelves and puts them back in a different order. He is enamoured with that thing! By the second day all the cuttlery went missing, I have looked under couches and stuff, but haven’t found much. Next place to look is the subwoofer (I have seen him stuffing things in there). In a word, he is better.

Now he learned how to toast tchin-tchin and he brings me the little cups to toast until it gets dark. He is trying to do the same with the cats, but for some reasons they are less cooperant. They just won’t go tchin!

I gave him two pieces of apple. He immediately went to the big kitchen, took out a big tupperware and a small one, put the apple in the small one, which he placed in the big one, and then he climbed inside the big one and started clapping. I couldn’t help but clap and cheer him myself.

While he was sick, I thought of just vegging on the couch, the two of us, watching tv. I had Cranford for a bit, so what better moment to start watching it than when the babe allows me to? I loved it! I like Elizabeth Gaskell very much and the BBC adaptation is very good. And at a certain moment, one character was saying ‘Go, go, go!’ and George looked and said quite clearly ‘Go!’ himself. Why can he mimic the tv and not us? I have gone hoarse telling him words to repeat and he just looks at me, smiles and giggles.

Giggle is still his favourite word. The faster and more said, the better it is.

He had a growth spurt that made him outgrow all of his clothes in two weeks. Now I see that the clothes I got him are, well, just fitting him for now. But the thing is there are no intermediary clothes between this size and the next one. And they differ from brand to brand.

He loves raspberries. We are talking about LOVE here. He usually shares food, especially if daddy or mummy ask, he obligingly softens the croissant for us or puts bits of fruit in our open mouth. But with raspberries, no such thing. He shows them to you, even brings them closer to your eye to see precisely what you are missing, and then swiftly pops them in his own mouth. No matter how many I buy, I do not have the heart of letting hubs or myself eat more than a couple of them, when I know how gaga George is over them. Silly, I know, but I can’t help it.

He loves chocolate as well. First time he had some was at Halloween, when he managed to grab the bonbons basket form the table (nothing is safe there anymore, nothing!). ‘Oh, just let him have some fun, what can he do with them?’ well, he can rip one open and go to town with it. And then, when he sees anyone munching on anything, he comes like a birdie, with mouth open and won’t leave until he has a bite. He doesn’t eat sweets every day, but I think he takes after me and likes them very much, thank you.

Yesterday we went for a quick walk to a nearby shop, to get some basic items that were lacking from our kitchen. We met a neighbour, an elderly lady, very talkative and very fond of children, who, just as any of the elderly of this region, is just the nicest people. We suspect that having been brought up before the wars accounts for their manners and being retired makes them more willing to stop and speak with us. Anyway, this lady, whom I would otherwise label a bit bonkers, opened up her purse for George to pick any chocolate he wanted from in there. He chose a chocolate heart, and ate the lot while we were talking. I told her I do not want him to get used to chocolate so early, and she told me that when she grew up, she had none, and still loves it, so it doesn’t matter, either you love chocolate or you don’t. Sounds reasonable, I must say.

The neighbours across the street must think we are trying to communicate with light signals, but in fact it is only George reaching better for the light switches. Oh, another MIL gem: she looks through the kitchen window, which gives on the street, and asks, very confidently as always, ‘Is the house across the road also yours?’ Yes, it is, we got it especially for you… She said that she got confused and did not know which way she came into the house and yadayada. Lady, no matter what lame excuse you come up, thinking that the house across the street where there are cars parked on is part of the house you are in is not a sign of smartness. No matter which door you used to enter the house…

I am summoned for a tomato-salad stew cooked on the Hello Kitty kitchen, served with chilled Hello Kitty wine. Apparently my hand blender is needed for that, George just took the box out of the cupboard and he’s taking it to his kitchen, so I’d better go and make sure he doesn’t plug it in…

I hope you’re well.