It's ours!

It's true, it's final, it's official: the apartment is ours! The keys are ours! The mortgage debt is ours!

We learned when we went out there this week that the whole complex is heated with geothermal heating, and all the water is pumped in from the sea and desalinated on site. We'll start moving (slowly) after we return from the US mid-April, with the intention of being out there full time by the beginning of May. August will start at his new dagis (a Waldorf preschool) on May 5.

Even Leif is excited:

Here's a video walkthrough, replete with construction noise:


Beautiful wood floors, marble windowsills:

Fresh appliances that no one has ever used before! 

Pretty much all the white space you see out the windows is water:

You look like a happy mama

I was walking home from the furniture store with Leif this morning when a kind-looking, middle-aged man walking towards us said something in Swedish. "Jag pratar inte svenska!" (I don't speak Swedish) I replied as he passed by, and he said, in English, "You look like a happy mama. That makes me happy!" I kept walking, he kept walking, and the encounter was over.

My first thought was, How un-Swedish of him to say something (kind!) to a stranger! My second thought was, Well, yeah! He's right. At the exact moment he said that to me I was fantasizing about couches (we bought one!), but I am, in fact, very contented with my life as a mama. With my babies. With these boys who fill my days and nights with wonder and joy, poop and snot, contended sighs and tiny voices.

And it helps - oh, how it helps! - that Leif's sleep has miraculously, instantly improved! The night I wrote bemoaning the situation, it changed. Three overnight wake-ups instead of five; last night Leif did two four-hour stretches of sleep. He's connecting his sleep cycles and I'm finally completing sleep cycles! Here's hoping this trend continues even through our intentional travel next week....

The puddle jumper and my sleep travails

Let's just start with something cute.

Oh, guys. This sleep thing. It's so rough right now. I've mentioned it before, and I'll belabor the point -- I'm not sleeping, but I am losing my mind.

Like clockwork, Leif wakes up every two hours at night (except when he wakes up every hour!). Which means that after waking up myself, feeding him, going to the bathroom, and getting back to bed, I sleep about 1.75 hours at a time until early morning (4ish), at which point Leif usually wakes every hour until August gets up and demands my presence in the kitchen at 6. It doesn't matter what time I go to bed or what time I turn of screens - I just can't get enough sleep. I can't even complete a single sleep cycle!

And I'm feeling it. I'm moody and exhausted, yes, but more insidiously, I just can't quite get things right. I forget times and dates. I miss (obvious) details. I can't remember the word I was looking for - and sometimes the word is as obvious as "knife" and I have to say something like, "the long thing you use at dinner on your plate" (that really happened). Simply put, I cannot be trusted with anything, much less anything important. And blogging feels almost entirely out of the question.

We don't know why Leif is waking so much - whether he's genuinely hungry that often, or doesn't know how to connect his sleep cycles, or he's cold, or his teeth hurt, or he'd prefer the sound of rain falling on a tin roof to the "summer rain" white noise we play for him - or if it's all of these things. Maybe he's just out to sabotage my sanity.

The irony is that we've put way more effort into teaching him how to sleep on his own than we ever did with August, and it turns out August was a better sleeper. Leif can put himself to sleep for some naps and he used to do it regularly for bedtime at night. I've been working on helping him learn how to get himself all the way to sleep rather than always nursing him to sleep, as we did with August, or rocking, walking, bouncing, or holding him until he's asleep. Sometimes he's fine on his own, sometimes he needs the tiniest bit of help (by which I mean I lie down next to him and he takes my face into his hands with the grip of death, lets out a contented sigh, and falls asleep), and sometimes it's a more involved process. But there's no doubt that he's actually getting good at getting himself to sleep with minimal parental involvement.

After our travels to the US, we're going to take strategic action. We don't know quite what the strategy will be, but we've got to do something.

So, here's your puddle jumper:

The spectators:

The poser:

Captain Chaos and the Hooded Dumpling

James is away in Berlin for a couple days, and I'm flying solo with the wee bairns (credit to Joshua). I'm mostly exhausted, but that's nothing new, right? He'll be home in the morning, so I only have about twelve more hours of musical beds to play.

One of James's best friends is in town with his wife, and they were gracious enough to bring takeout over this evening (gluten-free pizza) and play with August while I helped Leif go to sleep. It's nice to have old friends here.

August loves riding bikes and peddles furiously when he has an open pitch. It's a bit terrifying to watch, but he's actually quite good at steering and (narrowly) avoiding obstacles and collisions.

This little one has spent a lot of time in his stroller as we do dagis pick-up, and he's getting better with waiting patiently outside while I'm in getting August dressed to come home. If you can zoom in on this first picture, you can just make out his new teeth!

August

Sorry I've been delinquent.... So very tired.

In these pictures, August was enraptured watching a tractor pick up, haul, and dump leaves into a dumpster.

Cafe baby

I'm so behind on my posts - I have pictures from the last two weeks that I keep meaning to post but never get to (mortgage and taxes, finding a new preschool, etc.). James and I had lunch together two weeks ago and took this little guy with us:

Big walkabout

Two weekends ago we had one of the first beautiful spring-like days, and we went for a long walk around town. We started by playing at a big park nearby, and then put the boys in the stroller for their naps while we walked along the water through much of the city. We ended by stopping at a historic house in our neighborhood.

Oh - and yesterday was James's birthday! He wanted a day of food, so he treated himself to his favorite cafes for breakfast and lunch and then our favorite Indian restaurant (thanks, Mom!) for dinner. Also, one of James's best friends from his PhD is visiting Stockholm with his wife, so we spent a couple hours walking and talking with them. We finished the night with one candle in a batch of homemade brownies after the boys went to bed. I have pictures of none of this.

But I do have pictures of our big walkabout!

Double nap in the double stroller:

At the historic house:

He's so cheeky! And we've taught him to say "cheeky monkey":

Chasing Chaos

James was teaching last week (and will be again next week), so I was in charge of pick-up every day. I love picking up August from dagis: I try to sneak up so he doesn't see me, so I can see what he's doing and watch how he plays when he doesn't know I'm around. But, all the kids know the parents now, so as soon as one of his little friends spies me, I start hearing "August mama, August mama!" and then August starts looking for me. As soon as I walk through the gate or into the building, a little friend will come up and tell me "August är där" and point in whatever direction August is playing. It's very cute.

But. August has been having a hard time with James being gone at work even just a few hours longer, so he's had a hard time this week. So after I've picked him up, we three (Leif and I remain inseparable, as needs be) have gone to a big park to play until James can join us.

This usually ends up with me chasing August.

Taken a different day from the above shots - what it looks like when we get home without Baba:

This page is from a book called Weslandia that August enjoys. This afternoon he pulled my hand mixer from a kitchen cupboard and took the beaters out. "Wes-land-ya!" he shouted, and ran to his room. A few minutes later I followed him to find this - the beaters, to him, looked like the lacrosse stick-like implements they're using in this game. I thought it was so cool to see him making that connection between totally unlike, unrelated objects.

The ferocious street tiger

Well, you decide how ferocious he is...

Little napping wonder

Our sleep experience with Leif has been a trip. We've gone from it being impossible to get him to sleep to him easily putting himself to sleep for every nap and bedtime back to it being a major chore to help him get to sleep; from four or five 45-minute naps per day to a couple one-three hour naps per day; from getting up every two hours overnight to only getting up once back to getting up every two hours. As soon as we get used to a sleeping pattern, it changes.

When we visited the nurse yesterday she basically said Yep, that sounds right. With all the developmental stuff going on, and his shifting milk requirements, it's normal for sleep to be wonky at this age. It is so nice to have our health care provider tell us this and reiterate how normal it is. In the US, you can be shamed to think that if your baby isn't sleeping through the night at a ridiculously early age (3 months!), you are doing something wrong and have probably f&*ked up your baby's chance to become a good sleeper for the rest of his life. Here in Sweden, the biological norm is understood and accepted: segmented sleep is just the way it goes for a while. You aren't a bad parent if your infant sleeps like...a baby.

I used to post a ton of pictures of Augie sleeping; because Leif sleeps in a much darker room I don't have many of him. But, here:

Leif and I went on a little adventure yesterday to our new neighborhood to check out preschools for August. It was a gorgeous spring day in the countryside.

 I didn't like one of the schools but really like the other, but the one I liked is a bit out of the way so I don't know if we'll choose it. It's a Waldorf school.

A little art installation by August:

Double whammy

So this happened after preschool pick-up today:

August actually climbed out of the stroller while we were moving. Twice. I even have a sound recording of both of them screaming at the same time, but I'll spare you that joy.

This joy, however, I'll share:

My little Leif at 5 months

Yesterday afternoon Leif mastered the back-to-front rollover. He'd been very close for a week or so, and then finally yesterday, while August and I were doing some scissors work (cutting strips of blue and green paper for an art project today that failed miserably), I glanced down to see him finally make the roll all by himself. He repeated two or three times, and then again with James. Today he's rolled a bunch of times, too, so I'd say that trick's in the bag. But, he hasn't done the front-to-back roll in a long time, which I say is good because it means he's still mostly stationary and we don't have to wrap his head in bubble-wrap. Yet.

It also seems like he's been wanting to be a side sleeper for a few weeks now but hasn't quite figured out the hip part of it: he gets his shoulders all twisted around but his hips aren't stacked, so as soon as he falls asleep his shoulders slingshot onto his back and he wakes up all pissed. Hoping he can put all those pieces together soon, too, and start sleeping better on his side.

August has been sick, burning with fever in the nights, but mostly fine -- if the tiniest bit slower -- during the day. He seems a bit better this evening.

Without further adieu, the pictures.

And the video (try to ignore me cooing in the background):