Anneli has turned 6 months old! There are a few recent pictures here.
Here’s a preview:
Our big little girl is now able to sit up by herself! Sometimes she has to support herself with her hands, sometimes not.
More photos here.
It has been gently snowing here for about 3 days, and we’ve built up a nice wintry look around the neighbourhood. The fjord has a layer of ice and snow on it – not very thick ice (we won’t be taking the car for a spin on it) but a couple of centimetres.
We went out for a walk down to the beach yesterday – photos here.
Anneli pretty much slept through it all:
There are some new photos of our sleepy snowbaby here.
When I wrote my last post on Jan 31st, I had no idea how close Squirt was! At around 9pm the following day (Feb 1st) my waters broke and at 03:49am on Feb 2nd little Anneli was born at Forlossning in Varbergs Sjukhus, Sweden.
She is completely perfect and we’re all feeling very well and very happy (if a little tired). Expect blog posts to be a bit infrequent for a while!
Click here for more photos.
Well, “full term”, according to the medical establishment. I’m 38 weeks pregnant now and in theory that means that Squirt could make an appearance anytime from now.
I think that the bump is starting to drop down a little lower, which is a good sign. When we asked the midwife if she thought Squirt was a large/small/average baby, she said it was “väldigt lagom”, which basically means “very just-right”.
All our stuff arrived from London on Friday. One of the things that the packers liked to do was to create giant boxes by taping multiple boxes together. And some were big enough to fit a full-sized Swede inside!
Another thing they liked to do was use up bubble plastic. Each box we unpack is approximately 50% bubble plastic and 50% belongings. They were a little random with the application of bubbles, though – for example, I found unbreakable items (such as lids for plastic containers, and a tub of shoe polish) wrapped up in plastic, and other items (like a bottle of whisky) not wrapped at all.
We are in the midst of unpacking chaos now, and the house looks a bit like this:
We have a new dishwasher (that is happily installed in a corner of the kitchen), and a new-to-us fridge (that is in the process of being waggled into place tonight). Since I’m now 38 weeks pregnant, and Squirt could make an appearance any time in the next 4 weeks, I kindof want as much unpacking as possible to get done soon. All the boxes were wheeled into the outside guest room, and we’re bringing them in one by one to unpack. But in a month’s time we need to be able to wheel my mother in there, so it would be good if it’s fairly clear.
Before my hands got too sleepy to knit, these were the last things I finished.
Baby mittens:
Are they not cute?
And a little hat:
There is one more hat, but I haven’t woven in the loose ends yet. How am I doing on the gender-neutrality?
I saw a physio on Friday and got one wrist brace for my right wrist, and another one for the left should be coming in the mail. It has definitely helped me to sleep at night, and what has also helped is drinking a shedload more water and being taken out on little walks by Linus when we manage to remember. If I get more improvement from using the braces, I may manage to pick up the needles again before squirt gets here … we’ll see.
Mmmm, fresh bread.
This was made using the super-easy bread recipe here. It is insanely simple and really delicious. According to the instructions, you can keep the dough in the fridge for up to 2 weeks, during which time it acquires more of a sourdough flavour. However, despite mixing up enough for 4 loaves at a time, we haven’t managed to keep a batch for more than a few days, so I wouldn’t know.
I’ve also been doing some sewing, since knitting is off the menu while my hands are all sleepy. I made some cushions for the kitchen sofa:
And I’m working on covering a piece of foam for a seat-cushion for this sofa as well. All this fabric was a super bargain at Ikea – 39kr each for rolls of 1.2m x 3m (about £3.20 or $8 NZD). I’ve also sewn up some curtains for the kitchen.
The weather has been fluctuating between fairly warm and fairly cold. Last week we woke up one morning to an outside temperature of -9, and a frozen water pipe that prevented any hot water from making an appearance in the bathroom. Luckily L’s recent tool-buying bonanza had included a heat gun, which he could use to defrost the pipe and get things working again. It had dropped to around -15 in the night, which is probably about as cold as it gets in this part of the country. After that everything warmed up a bit, and it’s been above zero (3-5 degrees) up until last night when we headed back into frostiness.
The baby room is all prepared now, and we got two lovely big parcels of baby goodies this week from Mum and Aunty A in England. The baby will now be clothed! We still need to buy nappies but I feel quite a bit more prepared. The insanely cheap Ikea flooring looks pretty good, and we have a cabinet with a changing bench assembled.
In pregnancy news, I saw a physio today about my sleepy hands, and I got a pair of wrist splints to wear at night which should help me sleep. Well actually I only got the right one, because they couldn’t find a left one in the right size so she will post me one and I should have it next week. So here’s hoping that it helps keep my hands awake so I can get a good night’s sleep!
I hope everyone had a fun new year – we roasted a chicken and watched “Dark Knight”, then stood on the deck and looked at everyone else’s fireworks. Swedes don’t have a Guy Fawkes type event during the year, so new year’s eve is their big chance to play with fireworks, and they really go for it. It seemed like every house around us was setting off rockets, and a few were coming from the beach and further away. Across the water we could see a line of fireworks marking the other side of the fjord. The sky was lighting up all around us – I’m pretty sure I have never seen so many fireworks all going off at once!
We’ve been hard at work preparing the baby room at home. The wallpaper was in pretty bad shape in some places, so we patched it up here and there before painting. We’ve done two coats of paint, and one more should finish it off. Today we also ripped up the old carpet and bought some ridiculously cheap laminate flooring from Ikea. We were thinking of just putting down cheap vinyl, but the laminate was SO much cheaper that we decided we’d use it. It’s only 35 kronor per square metre – that’s just over £3 for you English folk, or about $7.50 in NZ dollars. It’s not too handsome – you get what you pay for – but we are planning to do major building work in 2-3 years time so it will do the job rather well until then.
We also attempted to buy a changing table/cabinet thingo while at Ikea, but it was out of stock. We did get a changing mat and fleece blanket though, and I was allowed to buy some fabric from one of the sale bins – I love Ikea fabric!
The big achievements of the day were that we managed to order a sofa (although we can expect to wait up to 10 weeks for it!) and we managed to get mobile phones. It was a real struggle to get phones, and we ended up having to get L’s mum to order them for us as she is already a customer and we are lowly new residents with no credit history. But apparently in 6 months we will be responsible enough to be the masters of our own telephones.
New pregnancy symptom: carpal tunnel syndrome. Yes, the plague of computer users has struck me down at last. I’ve been a software engineer for 11 years, and spent 4 years learning to be one, so I’ve basically been in front of a computer for the last 15 years with no wrist problems to speak of – and now pregnancy-related tissue swelling is squeezing up nerves and causing my hands to take random naps.
It is worst at night (very annoying when my hands can sleep but I can’t) but they also start to tingle when I do almost anything that involves gripping anything – holding a knife, lifting a heavy kettle or bottle, knitting (oh no!), and a little when typing. During the day, a quick shake of the hands will usually relieve it, but in the nights I need to flap my hands around and change arm positions till I find a way to wake them up.
We had a quiet Christmas day in the house – we had planned to go up to Gothenburg but I was headachey and tired so we stayed in. We started painting in the second bedroom and then I had an afternoon nap while Linus pottered. On boxing day we hit the big sales and bought a TV and some new LCD monitors to use when working. We also looked at a few million sofas, but haven’t made a final decision on that yet. That evening we went for a delicious turkey dinner at L’s aunt & uncle’s.
Yesterday we ordered ourselves a baby buggy & car seat, and I’m somewhat relieved to have done that now. It’s a Britax travel system, where the car seat can snap into the buggy frame. It also comes with a flat bed and another seat, so apart from needing a bigger car seat at about 1 year you can continue using the system up till about age 4. We’re planning to use the flat bed as the baby’s first bed inside as well.
In the evening we had L’s cousins over for dinner, and they helped out with a whole lot of lifting and carrying and organising and painting. The second bedroom is now painted white (including the random black wall sections added by the teenage goth who lived in it before) and since our bedroom is quite small we will basically use that room as a giant wardrobe. Next chore is to clear out the third (smallest) bedroom so we can put a baby changing table and some storage in there. The baby will initially sleep in our room, but when it moves into a cot that room will be the nursery. However it is currently full of boxes of junk and it needs painting and has some old and dusty carpet that we probably want to replace.