December 29, 2005 -Merry Christmas and Welcome me back after a year and a half!

The buggle’s third Christmas has come and gone. Where oh where does the time go??? I haven’t updated this journal in so long now that it’s shameful. But every day I spend as a mommy, sometimes being the only witness to the silly & crazy & wonderful things that come along with the territory, I think about how bad it is that I have given up recording things. So I will at least take this moment, this hour, to recap what has happened in the last 18 months since I have written about my daily mommy life. And hopefully I will manage to get back into a routine of regularly updating this journal. Anyway, the biggest update to make is that I now have two children, not just one! Elias was born in August, a few weeks before Aleksi’s second birthday. But before I start going on about recent events, let me backtrack to my mom’s visit to Finland in 2004, and how that went, and go forward from there. My mom arrived and had a rainy, ugly time here in July 2004, but she loved the mild summer weather. She said it reminded her of her years in San Francisco, and it was the perfect weather (when it wasn’t raining) to take long walks exploring the city I live in without getting too hot and sweaty. She stayed at Matti’s grandmother’s apartment (she goes to her summer cabin in the summers) in town, and was able to walk over to see us every morning to play with my little man, and then head back to her own quarters to retire in the evenings. It was a marvellous arrangement and she enjoyed herself very much. We did all go (with our friends Tommi & Nanna, and our American gal pal Krystal) to Stockholm for a couple days and that was really fun…it’s the last clear memories I have of really slinging our buggle around for long days of sight seeing before he became quite mobile himself. He was nearly 1 but not walking yet and loving being in the sling for active outdoorsy days. The old city was a pleasure to tour, as usual, and we spent an afternoon picnicking on an island park. Aleksi started walking at 13 months, as the days became quite short, and the outdoors very unappealing. We spent most of the fall just staying indoors and playing together, and being quite reclusive. I tried getting him to incorporate solid foods into his life, rather than soley breastfeeding, but he wasn’t too interested. The only food we could count on him regularly eating was Pike Perch fillet, a rather expensive daily meal, but we got it for him almost every day anyway. He is and was a boobaholic, I give him that. I was in a bit of mourning from September onwards as the reality of Krystal’s departure started to hit me. She really was such a big and important part of our lives for more than 10 months and it was sad to not have her around. She had to finish college back in Oregon, though, and I understood. I did meet another American mommy friend, a pregnant woman from New Mexico who surprisingly met her Finnish husband on the same website as I did—www.match.com! She also lives here in Tampere, and was expecting her first child. We quickly became friends and I showed her around my favorite coffee shops. Matti, Aleksi, and I took a trip to Estonia (hanging out mostly just in the old city of Tallin—quite a fun & quaint spot to vacation) in both September, and again at the start of December, which was when I had just found out I was pregnant again. When I was 4 weeks pregnant, the same week we went to Tallin, I got major around-the-clock nausea, and started needing serious help with the buggle while I laid in bed miserable. That only lasted two weeks and then sort of just ‘went away.’ I did occasionally wake up in the early morning hours horribly nauseus, and at one point had the worst migraine of my life alongside some running-to-the-kitchen-sink-to-puke nausea and I thought I wanted to die. I just laid in the floor of the kitchen trying not to cry but sobbing anyway, as the crying made my headache worse, which felt like someone was jamming an ice pick into my skull from the back of my neck, slightly to the left, all the way up and over the top of my head down into my left eye socket. We were out of pain relievers, and I woke up my husband and begged him to go get something. The drugstore wasn’t open for a few minutes and I made him hold my hand and try to distract me from thinking about my headache until he could go downstairs and into the next building where the drugstore is to get me some safe-for-pregnancy pain reliever. Twenty minutes after I took it the ice pick feeling started to slowly subside, and I was able to sleep again, but then of course Aleksi woke up ready to play with me. Such is life of a mommy (and one stricken with pregnancy symptoms at that!). Christmas came and went, and I just snapped and begged Matti to grab a plane ticket for me to take our son and visit my mom in Tennessee for a couple weeks to get away from the awful dark weather. The holidays are hard for me around here being away from family and in the worst part of the year, daylight-wise. It also starts getting really, really cold at that point and if it’s a windy day, forget hanging out outside unless you want to feel like your face is being bitten off by ice monsters. Matti found business he really wanted to attend to in person in Hong Kong, and decided we could all travel in February, me & the buggle to Connecticut to see Jen and then Tennessee to see my mom, and him to Hong Kong and China, staying with a good Finnish friend who lives there. My pregnancy symptoms subsided after the holidays, and I got through January and early February by looking forward to my trip. Traveling with Aleksi on my own wasn’t easy. My tummy started to protrude at that point, and made babywearing (having him strapped to my front, riding on top of my little bump,) rather uncomfortable. But how else to move from place to place with an 18 month old who only reacts to the verbal requests you make of him when it suits him? I spent the two weeks at Bill’s home, my mom’s partner, as he has a separate wing my mother arranged to be quite comfortable for us. We had mattresses on the floor to sleep on, which is how we co-sleep at home to solve the ‘falling out of bed’ issue, and things went well. I enjoyed reconnecting with my friend Jennifer, from high school, and admiring her pregnant belly. Aleksi ate really well there, too, (solids still not a big hit with him) and bonded well (again) with my mom. My milk started noticeably disappearing, despite all the reading I had done and natural measures I had taken to keep my milk supply up. Aleksi didn’t appreciate this but still wanted to dry nurse all the time anyway. He started waking up having major, awful tantrums. Just waking up crying and within moments, the whole scenario escalating to him being an absolute rabid creature, screaming himself hoarse and kicking and clawing at anyone who came near. Very upsetting to witness and really hard to fix. The only thing I could do was to wrestle him into position where his mouth was within centimetres of my nipple, and he would instantly latch on and his body would go limp and relaxed. This wouldn’t happen in the middle of every night, but often from that age onward for the next few months, and usually about 4+ hours after falling asleep, so out of the deep sleep stage. When we returned to Finland they started occurring, these supertantrums, during the day also, when a normal-pitched tantrum didn’t get quietened fast enough. Trying to figure out some sort of rhyme or reason to the episodes, I did pick up on the fact that he hated to wake up all sweaty, so I tried not to overdress him for bed, and I noticed if any sort of excitement or change in routine happened, supertantrums followed. For instance, jet lag and getting over the stress of a transatlantic journey was a big trigger. But we would have a couple of weeks without tantrums as the winter faded into spring, and that was nice, as I was getting more and more tired and starting to feel those lovely Braxton Hicks contractions and just not feeling physically up to these stressful scenes. We arrived back in March, as the ice covered scene started to slowly melt into a swampy spring situation by April, and I started getting out and about every sunny day with Aleksi, enjoying the longer days and how much easier it was to pass the day out and about in town. We started frequenting the main playground in town every day, sometimes twice per day. Libbie introduced us to her new daughter, Suvi, and I met Susanna, a lovely mama with a daughter a few months younger than Aleksi, and Aurora and Aleksi played and Susanna and I became friends. We met up with them almost every day at the playground from March through May, and I started to feel so much more upbeat about life with a social life of some sort. Simply getting out of the house more often than not was a huge change from the dark weeks of the fall/winter before, and the spring seemed brighter in many ways. Then I had a discomforting visit to the doctor whose ultrasound showed that my cervix was quickly ripening, at only 27 weeks into the pregnancy. Very scary to think that I may be on my way to having a micro-preemie, and I was put on immediate bedrest for the next 7 weeks or so. I called my mommy and begged her to come help me with my high-energy toddler, and she found a ticket to come for all of June, July, and August which was a huge relief. Matti and his family scrambled around taking turns walking Aleksi down to the playground or just playing with him in our living room while I tried to stay off my feet. Aleksi became more and more verbal and my mother taught him all his letters (in English, of course). He freely mixed up his choice Finnish phrases with his favorite English ones, and even seemed to favor the French article, “le”. Often he would say, “Täällä le money” (“Here’s the money” –when he saw coins on a table- in Finnish/French/English!). His ‘first words’ were kukka (flower) in Finnish and ball in English, and didn’t seem to get that his Farfar speaks in Swedish until much later. The seemingly endless weeks on bedrest were stressful on everyone, especially during our chilly month of June when my mother first arrived and stayed with us. She was in a lot of pain from the stress of the long journey combined with no physical therapy options for her in our neighborhood, and life was struggling along for her while she tried to just enjoy bonding with her grandson. My husband was stressed and worried that the baby may be born way too early, and I also worried about that and even weaned Aleksi for a couple of weeks, as the nursing triggered contractions. Once I got to a safe point in the pregnancy I resumed nursing him, and with so many family members playing with him, he scarcely noticed the break in nursing. July was quite hot, and my mother settled in at Matti’s grandmother’s apartment and began to feel a bit better once she started getting the rest she needed (supertantrums still going on, sometimes in the middle of the night in our small, not-soundproof, apartment). Man, my mothering.com addiction and cloth diaper shopping hobby really kept me sane while on bedrest. Lots of fluff was ordered for the baby and lots of email correspondence was properly kept up with. I even met another American mother out here in Finland with children, as she bought some cloth diapers from me off of ebay! We began corresponding and becoming friends, and she and her family came to visit us during the last weeks of my pregnancy and we picnicked by the nearest large lake in our city. Whilst at the lake with Irene and her family, a British man and his 3 year old son walked by and we struck up a conversation. Steve, the father, and Cristo, his son, were quite the charming fellows for me, anyway, with their native-English-speaking, and all, and we all got together soon at their home to meet Steve’s entire family. His wife Jaana was a charming Finnish woman, and his 1 year old daughter Maija was really sweet. Aleksi got along well with the whole family, except for their two large greyhounds! Jaana and Steve introduced us to Julie and Carlos, along with their two little boys, a lovely Irish family. We started getting all our kids together, as an English speaking playgroup, on a regular basis. Elias finally arrived when my mother had just 2 weeks left of her stay, one day before his due date. We decided during the last weeks of the pregnancy to try for a homebirth if I got far enough along in the pregnancy. We found a privately practicing midwife who had been attending homebirths for 30 years, and he met with me once before the birth and came immediately once labor was imminent. He and his apprentice seemed wonderful but didn’t speak English and that was, of course, a drag. My husband isn’t the best translator, and it was a major obstacle in having the experience I wanted. However, I was blessed with a labor that progressed quickly and beautifully throughout the course of a lovely, balmy August night, one of the last warm evenings of the year. I received sterile water injections and tried basking in a pool set up in our sauna, but really neither method really helped terribly well—my uterus is a fierce mass of muscles and does its work very seriously and intensely. I just relaxed in bed with my husband and soon my midwife was telling me that if I wanted to get the show on the road, he could break my bags for me so the baby would descend and we could deliver him. I agreed, and within half an hour, our baby was born. It was amazing being at home for all this, and I now can’t imagine choosing a hospital setting to birth a child. Having my mother around at the birth and during the first two weeks to help me with the transition of becoming the (tandem breastfeeding) mother of two was really helpful, and I dreaded her departure. She did leave, finally, right before my sons’ second birthday, and reality as the mother of two set in. I can’t say the first three months being mostly on my own with the two little boys was easy…Aleksi started becoming quite verbal but getting easily frustrated as his little brain tried to communicate with only budding abilities in his three languages, which often got confused. This in combination with not being the center of mom’s world any longer, got the better of him often, and staying indoors meant sometimes a major screaming fit, often seemingly for no reason, every hour. I packed them up and got out of the house for as much of the day as I could, as it was much easier to manage them when they were happily watching the world go by from the pram/sling. I was going mad from the sound of my two small children screaming and crying for my attention simultaneously, and these episodes were much rarer when not at home, so I avoided long stretches of time at home. It just seemed like the clock stood still when we were home and bedtime seemed so far away….at least even just walking up and down the main street gave us something to do to pass the time during which both boys seemed satisfied. I still had some rough moments when Elias needed to nurse and Aleksi needed to steal child’s sized shopping carts from one of the stores in the mall near where I was breastfeeding on a bench….but I tried to hang in there and just take one day at a time. The days becoming quite short and the weather wet and awful in November really started to affect me more than weather has ever affected me before! By early December all I could think about or talk about was getting out of Finland. I believe we had 3-4 weeks where the sun didn’t shine at all and every afternoon was only a brief period of grayness, which was followed by only more pitch blackness. The snow fell and actually stayed in the second week of December, and the days seemed a bit lighter and better, and we had a few days of actual sunshine, and a Christmas party at Steve & Jaana’s, and I felt things were getting better. Then the boys both got sick with a horrible flu that only today has gone away, and we’ve been indoors in our little apartment recovering from it for weeks. I’m dying for a life again, the cabin fever is bad! At least the scenery from the windows has been lovely—not always light but always a snowy wonderland. Now it’s way below freezing and windy, so I don’t really want to go outdoors, but I’m not thrilled with the cramped feeling of staying in our apartment all the time with two kiddos to entertain either. However, the really bright spot to this story is that since the second week of December, when the flu got Aleksi, his language skills seemed to blossom really quickly, and he started speaking in much more proper sentences, with much better vocabulary, etc…. And his disposition improved considerably! He has been much easier to be around this whole Christmas season, despite being cooped up indoors and sick with the flu. I’m hopeful this has been the signalling of a real maturation, and not a temporary lull in frantic, tantrum-ing behavior that drives me mad indeed. Things are really looking up if he is becoming more reasonable, and the days are getting slightly longer every single day now! We decided to spend next winter in Tennessee with my mom, but I hope that doesn’t discourage her from coming to see us again in the summer. Well I think I’ve caught things up well enough for now, and I’m going to have my husband put all this new text online!

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