tla

[The following is a guest post by Mike, who figured that the ongoing story of Sophie's bump ought to be told.]

This morning Sophie woke up a little early and in a grouchy mood. As soon as I turned the light on I could see that the big lump on her forehead had not diminished overnight but had grown. Not only that, she now had an impressive, dark multicoloured bruise on her forehead and more bruising around her eye, and when she opened her eyes it was suddenly clear that she couldn't actually open one of them due to the swelling.

This responsible parent pondered. I could take her to nursery anyway and just warn them to keep an eye on her on the assumption that everything was okay, but then again, well, the swelling was awfully big and the eye thing was a bit worrying so ... yes, she should probably be checked out by the doctor. It was very unlikely that they'd find anything seriously wrong, but I couldn't really take her to nursery like that with a clear conscience.

One phone call to the surgery [N.B. for Americans: "the doctor's office"] later and she had a 9 o'clock appointment. The paediatrician took a good look, asked the usual questions (Vomiting? Nope. Loss of consciousness? Nope.) then pondered for a bit and decided that while it mostly looked fine to her the fact that Sophie was still a bit grouchy and fussy meant that she should be referred to the Chidren's Hospital. They'd probably keep her in for 24 hours for observation and do a CT. And did I need a letter for my employers so I could have the time off? I declined the letter (my employers wouldn't need a letter anyway), took the letter they gave me for the hospital, and headed for the tram stop. [Ed. note: At this point I was of course a bit frantic - my little girl in hospital for a whole day without her m[ou]mmy nearby for a reassuring cuddle??]

The Kinderspital seems to have been built at the point in the city of Zürich furthest from a tram stop, so it was a bit of a schlep. I found the emergency department, who knew we were coming already, did some paperwork and did an initial evaluation of Sophie.

After a short wait the junior doctor on duty arrived to take a proper look. Sophie had her blood pressure taken (with a teeny-tiny blood pressure cuff that went on her ankle), had her pulse taken (with a teeny-tiny sensor that attached to her teeny-tiny toesie-woesie), and was found to be generally normal (and quite cheerful). After a bit of poking and prodding the bump was declared to be very hard and therefore not the kind of thing there was any point in X-raying. Moreover, as far as she was concerned there was no need for observation in hospital as Sophie was happy and playful and flirting with anyone in sight, which meant that there was most likely nothing to worry about. They would be happy to keep her in for 24 hours if I really wanted them to, but I was happy to decline that offer. After all, if there's a medical position closest to "specialist in bumps and bruises on toddlers' heads", it's being an A&E physician at a children's hospital, so I was happy to trust her judgement over that of our paediatrician.

Feeling mightily relieved that she wasn't going to have to put up with a stay in hospital I took her to my office, where she ate some lunch, rampaged around and charmed my co-workers despite the massive shiner above her eye, and then we went home.

I was warned that while the swelling will go down gradually the bruising is likely to spread down her face before it clears up. Well, at least she's going to have something cool to show the other kids at nursery.

Sophie et famille have been visiting the UK relatives for Christmas and the new year, naturally because it is nice to see them, but helped by the fact that the nursery closed between the 24th and the 2nd. This saw the rather overwhelming spectacle of all the cousins gathered under one roof for Christmas.

There are three cousins, all on the British side of the family, aged nearly-10, 7, and nearly-3. The eldest had a great time helping with the bedtime routine of both toddlers, reading stories and the like. That was kind of fun. The nearly-3-year-old was very excited by the idea of seeing baby Sophie, until it became clear that baby Sophie doesn't yet know how to share and can't be sent to the naughty step yet for things like trying to knock her cousin out of the way of the very! shiny!! iPad!!!, and in general is making a grab for a bunch of the toys and also a bunch of the grand-parental attention. It seems to be a lightweight version of "having to cope with not being the youngest anymore", combined with the general unfairness of having to let babies have their way.

Sophie, meanwhile, is by and large having a blast. There are rooms in which to rampage, tons of things to explore, and nearly-unlimited opportunities for toddling around. She has a great big bruise on her forehead from having face-planted onto a tile floor a few days ago, but the following morning she had the entire floor of the Marble Arch Pret à Manger waving "bye bye!" to her, and engaged in other egregious acts of charming the socks off complete strangers, so clearly the knock to the head didn't do much damage.

On a related note, we now have certified words. It was maybe last Monday or Tuesday that she started waving her hands with an accompanying "bah bah"; in the next couple of days she started to understand that this had to do with walking away from someone, e.g. when Daddy was getting her dressed in the morning and she rolled over, pulled herself up, and marched away mostly naked waving and saying "Bah bah!" Or when I was headed out the door for an hour on Wednesday morning and said "bye bye" to her, and she burst into tears. Hm. :/

Her next word followed the next day. For a few weeks now she has known how to hand me things, and I've taken them and said "Thank you!" and then usually let them go back to her outstretched hand. This time she said "Gah gee!" when I handed the thing back. Then she repeated the trick for her grandpa, who was thoroughly impressed. Now "Gah gee!" is what she says when she wants something to be passed either to or from her hand, and is more an order than a form of etiquette.

Other than that, she is babbling up a storm, and we still have yet to recognize any sound that refers to a particular noun. This either means that Sophie is unusual (most babies' first words refer to things) or that her parents are exceptionally slow on the uptake. Her grandpa, of course, considers this a sign of how advanced she is (and it is undeniably true that she is a very social little girl, so maybe not so strange to have her first words be social forms.)

We went to the Science Museum in London the other day and met rmc28 and family; while there, Sophie insisted on walking as much as she could, and had no compunction about blocking the path of complete strangers, grinning up at them, and clapping her hands in glee. The nice thing about a museum like that, fortunately for her parents, is that pretty much everyone there is bound to be kid-friendly. (And how could you not be friendly to such a cute kid, I ask you?!)

We'll return to Zürich on Tuesday, and she'll return to nursery on Wednesday, and they will basically get a whole new baby from the one they last saw on the 22nd. Her parents, meanwhile, will relish the peace and quiet of being back in demanding jobs.

Yesterday Sophie had her 12-month checkup, which included The Dreaded MMR. It was also the first time she's been officially measured since she was 6 months old. I was a little stupidly worried about this, as she hadn't seemed to grow much (in height anyway) at all since about October, and I knew she had got herself up off the bottom of the percentile charts since July so I wanted to be able to show this off like some sort of dumb Competitive Mommy. (No, see, I am not starving my child!) But it seems I had little to worry about, and meanwhile I learned the difference between Americans and everyone else. Her height is percentile 38 for the CDC, 33 for the WHO; her weight is also percentile 38 for the CDC, but 60 (!!) for the WHO. There you have it, American kids are heavier.

I also discovered while there that the checkup comes with a bunch of developmental tests. So pretty much the first thing the doctor did was to ask me if I ever hold out my hand and get Sophie to hand me things.

Er...no, it hadn't really occurred to me to do that. (Okay I hold out my hand sometimes to take something when she holds it out to me, but asking her to give me something? Not so much.) So was there a whole chapter of the parenting manual that I managed to skip, or what? Was my lack of vigilance going to doom my daughter to developmental slowness and medical intervention?

Fortunately for her remiss parents, Sophie got the idea of handing something when asked pretty quickly. She also did okay enough on the other tests to be declared healthy. Then it was time for the dreaded needles. She whimpered for the first one but took it pretty well, but then when she felt the antiseptic spray on her other leg she got this look of utter betrayal on her face and screamed like hell, and sobbed for a couple of minutes afterward in that way I rarely see her do. Poor little thing.

Today was something of a milestone for the parents. Mike's company held its Christmas party this evening, and he signed us up to go, which meant that we were finally forced to track down some local babysitters. It was something of an adventure, finding one who then texted in sick this morning, but offered up a friend of hers who could do it instead, not getting ahold of that friend initially, finding another prospect who turned out to be booked up tonight after all, then finally having the first girl's friend get back to us. It all worked out in the end though, and now I have phone numbers for three or four prospective babysitters. Party time!

When we first brought Sophie home from the hospital, we used an iPhone app (Total Baby) to track Sophie's input, output, and feedback, as it were. There was a cheerful little counter at the bottom, saying that 'Sophie Violet will be 1 in 362 days'. It was perfectly clear to us that 362 == infinity.

Shockingly, here we are. (Actually I am not - due to a poorly timed conference I am in Athens today, and due to travel plans falling through, Mike and Sophie aren't. So she will get her happy fun birthday party on Sunday, and she did get chocolate cake and the 'happy birthday' song today at nursery, and was evidently delighted and clapped her hands.) We went from having a tiny baby who slept a lot, puked a lot, and was generally not too pleased with being out of my belly to having a happy growing just-about-toddler working on her tenth tooth, eating everything in sight, hitting everything else (including the side of her own head) with mallets to test the acoustics, and babbling in an awfully language-like way.

She technically took her first steps while we were in Boston, balancing herself on her feet and then shuffling and pitching forward into my arms. Once we were back in Zürich, she repeated the trick at nursery, and then at home heard Mike come in the door from work, turned, and took a few much more confident steps in our direction. Since then, she has employed her usual Sophie trick of using her new skill as sparingly as possible, preferring to use the magic handles (i.e. the hand of a parent) to get around with less risk of unpleasant falling.

(I had expected to post more while I was in Boston last month, but that trip was shockingly exhausting in fact, not least because she got a stomach bug just before we left, which made the outbound flight more of an endurance test than it should have been and put her off her food for the rest of the week. She got much better by the end of the week though, and we all managed to survive the jet lag that followed.)

So the last couple of weeks have mostly involved increased Sophie mobility, increased Sophie appetite, and increased Sophie tiredness as a result of all this new activity. Now we are just waiting for the great adventure that is language acquisition. She babbles very well, and there are almost certainly words in there. We just haven't identified them yet. She's been using 'da-da' and 'ma-ma' in a fairly indiscriminate way, generally not to refer to parents. That said, the other day she was babbling 'da-da' in my direction, and I kept saying "no I'm mama, dada is over there', and she paused, looked at me, concentrated, and said 'ma-ma!' Aww.

Life goes on in the Sophie household, much as it has been. We have no babysitter this week (or next) so Sophie got to stay home with M[ou]mmy and/or Daddy on Monday and Tuesday.

She is getting better and better at supported walking, and needs less and less support - Mike made a video for the grandparents a couple of days ago that shows off her newfound prowess with the little wheeled cart we got for her a few weeks ago. A week ago, just after the Würzburg trip, Sophie couldn't manage the coordination necessary to walk with the cart (which, unlike a parent, doesn't have a brake for when momentum starts to carry her away); about five days ago, suddenly, she could. She is still prone to falling, of course, and she really hates hitting her head on the floor (who wouldn't?) so we still have to keep a close eye on her through all these adventures.

I really am starting to wonder whether she'll master standing and walking before she gets around to sitting herself up.

When I picked her up from nursery yesterday, I was informed that they had gone out somewhere and taken the bus (they often do field trips, e.g. going to the airport to watch planes taking off) and Sophie was so cheerful, smiling and waving at all the old ladies! Thus the nursery learned that our little girl is an old pro at sucking up to strangers. On the bus home today, she was trying desperately to get the attention of a 4- or 5-year-old girl, but the girl was having none of it, no matter how far Sophie leaned over in my arms to try to make eye contact with her. I, at least, was reduced to small fits of laughter. I don't know what the other girl's mother thought.

On Tuesday, Mike took Sophie out for a walk to give me a chance to work, and they went to a nearby playground, and Mike introduced Sophie to the swing. Highly, highly approved of, evidently.

I've been hit by the insomnia hammer yet again, so why not post?

Things continue relatively steadily with Sophie - we found her eighth tooth this morning, completing her set of incisors. Mike hopes that now we'll have a few months free of teething, but knowing this child I find that extremely unlikely. Part of it is that he keeps looking at the 'normal' teething schedule in hope (the one that says that premolars come in at 13-18 months or so), and I keep looking at the same schedule and knocking a few months off the ages to calibrate. Also I could swear I keep seeing a couple of white spots where a canine should come in sometime.

She is still sleeping through the night, but not without the occasional shriek. The difference now is that we usually don't need to intervene before she settles herself. There's always got to be some stress added for any stress taken away, though - she has more or less stopped going to sleep contentedly. Where a week or so ago she could be rocked a little and then put down to finish falling asleep on her own, now she keeps her eyes resolutely open as long as she's being rocked, maybe finally closing them after a much longer time than it used to take. But if I then put her down thinking it's safe, how wrong I am. The crying only usually lasts a couple of minutes, but it's still pretty dispiriting. I'd come this far without ever just leaving her to cry herself to sleep, and now it seems I have no way around it.

Her naptimes have also taken a turn for the disrupted over the past day or two - a lovely set pattern of '2 hours in the morning, 1/2 to 1 hour in the afternoon' had emerged, but now not only is she fighting her morning nap, she's waking up before she really ought to (judged by how tired and cranky she still is when she wakes up.) I hope this is just a temporary blip, but of course all my pessimistic instinct says 'the honeymoon is over'.

When she's properly awake, she continues to be extremely cheerful in general and less clingy than she used to be (though the clinginess comes back at the first hint of tiredness.) Favorite activities include the walking game, the holding onto things game, the "riding a horse" game (being bounced on my knees), the "upside-down baby" game, the tongue-clicking game, and the following-the-cat-around-and-smiling-madly-so-that-he-will-be-her-friend game. I'm not sure she's going to have much success with the cat anytime soon.

Today was a pleasant, fairly domestic day. The first headline event is that, since the bookshelves in my study are now installed, we moved all the books from the lower two shelves in Sophie's room, so that her room is now that much more babyproofed. I set up a sort of 'Sophie shop' on the bottom shelves of one pair of bookcases, arranging her toys there so that maybe she'll have some extra motivation to figure out this whole 'mobility' thing once and for all.

She was as usual pretty clingy, wanting constantly to be held and shifted into a better position for viewing whatever she wanted to see, then bounced, then moved some other way, etc. etc. and on no account wanting to sit down and play. Then Mike discovered an iPhone app just for babies, that has various nice pictures (e.g. a teddy bear) that move and make sound when you poke them. She was entranced, and forgot all about wanting to be held. I'm sure this makes us bad parents, somehow.

Today's other headline event was a bike trip to a local lake (or pond, depending on your definition). We didn't do much there because Sophie still doesn't have a lot of patience for riding in the bike seat, but it was by and large a successful trip. I did lose the balance of the bike at one point (was dismounted, standing there with the bike balanced with one hand and my leg, only it wasn't balanced anymore) and it tipped over, but I did manage to control the fall so that Sophie had an exciting sideways journey but no bumps. She still wasn't impressed. I really do need to not forget how very heavily top-back-weighted the bike is when Sophie is on it.

Sleeping has reverted to more or less normal-for-now, which is a couple of cranky wakeups overnight but nothing like the madness of a few days ago. Last night there was an episode of sudden screaming, which after half an hour of refusing to be put down, some actual waking up, and a nappy change, finally resolved itself as gas. I hope that isn't caused by bananas, or else we'll have lost our main staple food.

Again it's past 3am, again I'm still awake because Sophie got restless. It started in earnest about 2, and she was just persistently whimpering and crying, so I gave her a nappy change. She did certainly need it, but goodness, is she going to start waking up for all her nighttime nappy needs? This is unsustainable.

By the time the nappy was changed she was well and truly awake, and it wasn't long before she was whimpering again. Just when I thought she'd finally quieted down, the cat started meowing obnoxiously, and woke her right up again. After I'd thrown the cat out (which was what he wanted, fiendish beast) and thought maybe she'd settled, she coughed and woke herself again. Finally out of desperation I gave her some paracetamol, about ten minutes ago, and she's been quiet since, though I have no idea if she's gone back to sleep.

...Evidently not. More coughing, more grizzling.

Well, she had a day today too I guess. She was more cheerful this evening than yesterday, though she wasn't too keen on the bike ride home (I had to stop twice because she was crying, though she stopped pretty much as soon as I stopped the bike, and the second time tried to flirt over my shoulder with a lady nearby) and she wasn't too keen on her dinner either (which for her meant not wanting the last couple of spoonfuls.)

It's getting harder for me to entertain her when she's awake, because she seems to pretty much always want to be in my arms, but facing outward, and/or climbing around in a way that my arms simply are not strong enough for. She wants to be brought to whatever has got her interest at the moment, and I don't have the upper body strength to be her personal Davros-chair, but I don't have much of a choice.

I suspect part of my problem is in fact that it's so easy for me to see what she wants, most of the time, and so it is far too easy to take her yelps and grizzles as some accusation that I am cruelly denying her perfectly reasonable requests. It's why I CANNOT BLOODY WAIT for her to learn to walk. Childproofing will be a breeze as far as my physical endurance is concerned.

Sophie was less than pleased when I woke up this morning, because I'd had potential bad news about fires in Texas near my family, and so needed to check reports online before I could give over my morning to picking her up and paying lots of attention to her. She can look pretty darn betrayed when she puts her mind to it.

Today was a 'babysitter' day - we only have Sophie in nursery for 3 days a week (up from two as of last week) and so for the other two days I have someone come over for six hours and play with Sophie while I get work done. It works out pretty well, and I am so far really happy with the babysitter.

The only trouble is that I then become kind of trapped in my own study, as Sophie is very much in the phase where, if she sees M[ou]mmy, only M[ou]mmy will do, and in fact should be coming to pick her up Right This Very Second!! So after the first bit of trauma and heartbreak that is handing her over, I tend to have to sneak around so that she doesn't realize I'm still in the house, until I'm ready to leave and sit in a cafe or something.

When I left this afternoon, Sophie was asleep and had generally been fine; when I returned, she was rather lethargic and running a mild temperature, just like last Sunday night. Poor little mite. We suspect teething, yet again. Wondering if she'll ever get a break on this. After the babysitter left, I went into the bedroom to lay down with a tired Sophie who just seemed unable to sleep. She lay there in my arms, awake but unmoving (a still Sophie is a very rare occurrence), for a really long time before finally dropping off. Similarly, it took her ages to finally fall asleep at bedtime.

Today's new 'best game ever' is waving at people. She's still pretty enamored of clapping her hands, as of a few days ago, but now she seems to be getting the idea that waving her arm around has this odd social meaning and can provoke reaction and smiles in people. I'll have to take her out on the tram sometime soon and see how many people she can slay with this new weapon in her arsenal of cuteness.

I originally intended to make this post, with a title much like it has, a couple of weeks ago. Since Sophie's weekly routine involves nursery, and since the public transport route to the nursery involves either a long walk on one end or a connection, I've been thinking that what my life really needed now was a bike with a child seat. A couple of weekends ago, we went up to Radolfzell in southern Germany, where I got a bike and a child seat. (Germany, because with the Fr/€ exchange rate being so ridiculous, and with Swiss residency also giving us a VAT bonus, it is currently way way cheaper, transportation included, to shop cross-border.)


We put Sophie in the child seat experimentally with the bike in the house, just to see how she'd react, and the big grin on her face was promising. So the following Monday was a series of firsts - first time out on my new bike (my usual daytime cafe trip), first time on the bike with a child seat attached (the trip to nursery to pick up Sophie), first time on the bike carrying a child (the return trip.) I managed not to do anything embarrassing or dangerous, though I did learn very quickly with some warning wobbles that with such a top-heavy load, I don't get to stand up to pedal up hills anymore.

Unfortunately she wasn't as enthusiastic about fifteen minutes in the bike seat as she had been about two minutes - she started crying about halfway back home, and while I did stop and comfort her there wasn't much else I could do except press on and make reassuring noises. I'm told she will get used to it, and I suspect part of the problem was the heat that day.

We've made the journey like that a couple more times, and in fact on Thursday she hardly made a peep. However, the whole having-a-bike-in-Zürich thing has made me realize that Mike and I can once again go on weekend bike excursions, just like we used to. Well, mostly. No shiny racing bikes, thus no Lycra, and the distances have to be vastly reduced, at least for now. But we tested the principle today with a little trip to the airport shopping center (yes there are bike paths to the airport here, but then, there's a Sustrans route to Heathrow so that shouldn't be so astonishing.) Sophie was fine with the whole idea until we were on the return trip about 5 minutes from home, and then she had suddenly had enough, but at least we didn't have much farther to go. I am hoping that Sophie continues to get used to the seat, and that we can get into a nice habit of family bicycle outings. Zürich has a lot of potential for that sort of thing.

The theme of 'portability' got extended, however, before I ever got around to making this post. The day after the maiden bicycle voyage, Sophie accompanied me on a trip back to the UK for a few days. I had a meeting in Oxford to attend, and I'd found a nursery who had space for her for three days, so off we went, returning to my academic homeland (well, one of them). It was actually a much easier trip than I'd feared, even though I did have to wake up with the baby (I'm usually exempt from that because Mike is a much lighter sleeper than I am.) It helped massively that one of my old grad-student colleagues expressed a willingness to babysit for a couple of evenings, so that I could take Sophie 'home' for her bedtime routine, get her settled and off to sleep, and then go back out to socialize with my colleagues. Made all the difference in the world, especially after the Darmstadt experience last March (and the Birmingham experience of June) of having to carry her in the sling all evening if I was out. That just about worked when she was 3 months old, but was starting to break down at 6 months, and would stand no chance of working now.

This did mean that she came along with me to dinners in restaurants though. This promised to be fun because she is so enthusiastic about food, and indeed on Tuesday night she was a right little charmer. I had a perfect stranger come tell me what a joy she was to watch, dancing around in her chair and smiling like crazy and putting away all that food (bruschetta with ricotta, I think it was.) Wednesday was not such a success, because she was really too tired for the whole thing, not having napped properly at the strange new nursery. Thursday was again Italian, and again better, though she was still a little tired and fractious. At any rate, I was pleased that I managed to make it through three restaurant nights with a baby without getting hounded out of the restaurant by the glares of people who think children don't belong in public after 5pm.

Friday evening, when the meeting was over and the libraries had been visited and the old friends and colleagues had been chatted to over coffee, Sophie and I went to visit her grandparents in Leamington for the weekend, and after a restless Saturday morning she charmed their socks right off. I was just immensely relieved and grateful to get to a place where dinner would be put in front of me and a bed would be provided and it would be a quiet evening in and there would be grandparents to hold Sophie sometimes and give my arm a break. Bliss.

We returned to Zürich on Sunday afternoon. The flight was a little late taking off, and Sophie was a little tired and restless. We played in the kid's play area in Heathrow T5 for a little while, then I fed her some toddler mush and gave her a banana while we waited for boarding. At some point, I needed to fish out Sophie's dummy from where she'd dropped it, and the woman sharing the row with us actually held Sophie up (unbidden) and bounced her, to keep her distracted while I was busy. She lost her dummy again just as we were taking off, down the side of the seat exactly where I couldn't reach it, and screamed and screamed as the air pressure effects kicked in. *cough* I might possibly have unbuckled us well before the seat belt sign went off, when we were still climbing, just to retrieve the dummy. As soon as it was returned to her (accompanied by the extremely relieved looks of surrounding passengers) she crashed straight to sleep in my lap and stayed that way for the duration of the flight. The flight attendant very considerately opened my packet of crisps and put the milk and sugar in my tea, all very quietly so as not to wake Sophie, when they brought the food around. And of course everyone was completely adoring of my cute bouncing-then-sleeping baby, and seemed to kindly forget all about the screaming.

Upon our return, she got what might have been a cold virus but might also have been more teething symptoms. Tooth #7 in fact broke through on Monday, but I have a horrible suspicion that the first molars might be starting to bore their way up through her gums. Little girl doesn't waste any time.