Routine & first times

I'm glad that we are no longer traveling and finally established some type of predictable routine. I like to plan, I like to know what will happen during the day, I like being able to set myself few simple task to do and actually manage to accomplish them. Sadly blogging doesn't seem to be part of the current routine, though maybe I should just aim to write one post per week?

I'm trying to use my creative time in a more structured way and learn few basics. At the moment I'm concentrating on the colour theory (huge topic). However, I also want to have some fun, so hoping to make one simple item each week. Last week I learned how to make another Chinese knot and made this Pan Chang Knot necklace:

Last week Cat and I also got to try out felting in the Russian playgroup, which takes place only few train stops from us and was discovered by me complete accidentally after we made the decision to move to this area. (Did I mention that this area seems to have everything one may ever want?). The playgroup is very structured: dancing/exercise, singing & finger rhymes, snack with a short puppet show of a Russian folktale, simple craft activity (playdough or colouring) and free-play with lots of toys (I suspect that one is kids' favourite). Last week's felting took up most of the time. Like all the other kids, Cat is too young to concentrate for that long, so she choose the colours and the placement and I, like all the other mothers, got to do all the hard work of felting.

In a way doing or seeing something for the first time together with my daughter makes it more special to me. I'm aware of the uniqnuess of those moments to her, of the strong impression they have on her, of their power to expand her world view and therefore of the same effect they have on me.

We had another first last week - we went to the plantearium. I want to go again :-) and like my husband, who went many times as a child, wonder why I never did before.

Additional snowmen

Being stuck inside the house with a toddler, who thinks that she no longer needs an afternoon nap, isn't much fun. Specially when I know that she'll be tired and grumpy by about 5pm. So yesterday we ventured outside again to build more snowmen.

And afterwards we had a good excuse to drink hot chocolate.

From cold to cold

Our exploration of the new area was slowed down by both Cat and I catching a cold and spending a whole week mostly at home with occasional short trips to the shops. And just as we got better the weather turned really cold (for London), the snow came down (London has seen the heaviest snowfall in 18 years, weather experts said.) and we are staying indoors again. We did brave outside for few minutes to play with the snow and build a tiny snowman.

Poor Clive didn't have the same option and just spent TWO and A HALF hours getting to work, since most London public transport is suspended or experiencing sever delays.

Discovering the world: the joy of having a backyard

Specialy when we keep on waking up before 5am


P.S. If anyone wants a postcard from Melbourne send me email with your postal address to fioleta at gmail dot com

Discovering the world: baking

Back from New York

Katya and I came back from New York yesterday. The poor thing didn't handle the flight very well this time. I'm always impressed by people, who travel extensively with small children. However, I'm starting to accept that traveling far away with a toddler isn't for me. I would rather find interesting things to do close to home while keeping our routine intact, avoiding having to search for the food she would eat and having to discover the new tricks to get her to sleep while she is overexcited about new surroundings.

I'll post about all the things we enjoyed in New York once my husband comes back with my camera. He had to stay behind for few more days and I left my camera with him as I wanted to have as few items of luggage as possible and it wouldn't fit into my backpack. (Should I buy a bigger backpack, smaller camera case or both?).

Today the fire alarm system went off in our building during Katya's nap. There wasn't any smoke, but I didn't want to take a chance and decided to get us outside. Despite the loud noise right next to her bedroom, she was still sleeping, but talking in her sleep saying "Папа там" (papa is there), which just proves how much we miss him. The fire alarm was due to the system malfunctioning, but it took fire brigade almost an hour to get it to behave again.

Enjoying London

Last two weeks our Gymboree class was extremely crowded; today I didn’t feel up-to spending my morning in the small room packed full with loud, energetic kids and since we’ve been listening to the first 5-10 minutes of the Paddington Bear narrated by Stephen Fry I took Cat to the Paddington station instead to look at the stature of Paddington Bear, .

Cat loves trains at the moment and was highly impressed with the big loudly humming ones there. Afterwards we walked to the Kensington Gardens to look at the birds and the fountains, chase the squirrels and observe the slow fall of leaves. And we got to see few tractors pulling the wagons with collected leaves. Cat loves them almost as much as trains and even started saying tractor/трактор few days ago.

I’m reading John Holt’s How Children Learn and am surprised by how much I’m learning from this book as a parent. For example instead of seeing dangers everywhere, I am able to relax more and trust Catherine to know her own limits. Today instead of grabbing her to prevent the potential fall into the fountain, I peacefully watched as she first sat on the edge and later leaned in to take a closer look at the water. Free from worrying thoughts I was able to see perfectly well that she wasn’t in any danger. Being a relaxed parent is more fun than constantly worrying one - I'm glad we stopped watching news in the morning as they constantly have conflicting segments on dangers surrounding kids, negative effects of overprotection and various debates on parents failing to do the right thing, whatever it deemed to be on that day.

Counting

Despite me counting the stairs in Russian every time we walk down from the third floor and back up, Cat recently started saying “one, two, three” while climbing onto her highchair and before running down a hill. She actually “counts” in Russian as well, but totally out of order with most numbers being три (three) or шесть (six).

And at the moment she is in her bed doing her own rendition of “Row, row, row your boat” instead of sleeping despite looking exhausted for hours.

Strange afternoon

What a funny afternoon we had yesterday. It started very normally with Cat asleep and me embroidering the eyes for the latest sewing project. I was listening to the sound of rain and eventually got the feeling that the rain was inside our building. Maybe the neighbours are having a shower, thought I. They do have showers at odd times, yet it didn’t really sound like one. Eventually Cat woke up, but wanted to stay in her cot to look through some of her favourite books, so we both read for a bit. And then on moving to the living room we discovered water dripping of the wall around the balcony door. It didn’t look like the water was coming from the outside, but from the flat above. So I went outside our flat to investigate and found out that the downpour was much worse in the communal corridor. At this point the fire brigade arrived and turned off the electricity and the water.

Trying to act normal, but unable to go outside for the worry of coming back to drowned furniture, we played inside periodically empting containers of collected water. Since electricity was off I couldn’t cook us dinner (our stove is electric), so we nibbled on fruit, crackers and had some breakfast serial with yogurt. After it got dark I lighted the candles and recited as many nursery rhymes and tales as I could remember. I wonder what my little girl thought about all this, it must have been pretty strange to her – sitting in the dark, listening to my voice and the sound of the dripping water.

We saw the fire-engine leave earlier, and by about 7 I started thinking of going to bed, since no one had any idea if the electricity will be turned back on. And of course as that thought came into my mind I heard the knocking. Some official looking guy brought electrician to check out the damage. After checking the leakage I was told that the electricity will be back on in under an hour – it actually took them less than 10 minutes. We didn’t get the water back on until around 10 pm at the same time as Clive arrived back home from the office. By chatting to the workers, who just fixed the water flow, he found out that a cold water pipe burst upstairs on the sixth floor, which is taken up entirely by a penthouse apartment and since no one was home it flooded the whole apartment until water found a way out and gushed down flooding the fifth floor and eventually sipping down to the fourth and our third one. The water damage was so bad upstairs that people on the fifth floor moved out and last night we were the highest floor to have electricity. We weren’t badly affected, ending up only with the small bit of soggy carpet and some soggy toys. Pretty lucky, I wasn’t looking forward to functioning with candlelight and no running water. Today in the morning I found out that our neighbour’s flat on the other side of the building got much more water damage and was deemed too unsafe to have electricity.

To get some normality back into my life, after putting Cat to bed, I finished the Green Kitty Pillow. The pattern is free from Amy Butler website.

Discovering the world: wooden blocks

1. Short & tall, 2. Dinner time, 3. Nap time, 4. Someone isn't sleeping

After seeing Cat stack up cardboard boxes, I remembered the wooden blocks my parents bought at the beginning of the year and took them out for her to play with. She is using only round blocks to create tiny towers (you can see one on the main photo), but loves watching us make elaborate constructions and enjoys knocking them down.

P.S. She is past her sickness, though still has a horrible sounding cough.

Up

Not only Cat insist going up and down the slide on her own, today she also insisted on walking up the stairs without any help from me all the way to the third floor (that's fourth for the normal people, who count the ground floor as the first one) where we live. I, myself, am uncomfortable with heights and therefore feel very much terrified of her falling down, but am trying to be encouraging of her independence.

Video quote

Today's quote comes to you in the video format, because we were reading this tiny rhyme all week long and I love the way Cat says the last word (ignore her slightly distracted look - she was trying to figure out what papa was doing on the other side of the room, which luckily prevented her from trying to turn the camera around to see the baby on the other side).

Chasing or spot the squirrel

These photos are for those of you, who mistakenly got the impression from my previous photos that Cat is a gentle child, who doesn’t chase pigeons and other small creatures.

One year ago

Exactly one year ago Cat had her first cold (though I didn’t blog about it until the day later) and we spent most of the day cuddling up on the couch. The only reason I know this is because I finally bought some photo albums and today started to choose photos to put into them. This year I have a cold and would’ve loved to spend all day long on the couch. Instead we entertained each other the best we could. Bored with my sluggishness Cat went to explore, found the case for my glasses, took out the wipe cloth and proceeded to wipe all her books in turn. Thankfully we have many, so I had a nice break lying next to her watching her clean.

P.S. It is hard to believe that a year ago she couldn't even crawl

More words

This week Cat started pointing at me and saying “Mama” throughout the day. About time! I was getting slightly grumpy at being called generic “Eee!” or hearing whiny “Ma-ma-ma-ma-ma!” when she was super hungry or in desperate need of comfort.

I also realised that she says few Russian words, like:
где (where), usually it’s где bum (where is ball?) or где ты (where are you?);
туда (there), as in “let’s go there” when I’m going in one direction and she is insisting we go in the opposite one;
один (one), два (two), три (three), we usually walk downstairs counting the stairs instead of catching the lift and since we are on the third floor there are a lot of stairs to count. Though when she counts on her one she usually says один, один (one, one) or один, три (one, three), but asked how many legs she has she replies две (two).
And she also says up in English. There are few other words, which I can’t think of at the moment.

Within arms reach

A while ago I had to move a set of plastic drawers with Cat’s clothes further away from her cot, because instead of napping she managed to get the top drawer out, spread the clothes all over her cot, turn the drawer upside down and climb on it to make loud stomping noise.

See this small bookshelf located just outside her cot? The bottom shelf is full of English books, the middle one has Russian ones and the top one houses the books from the library. (We actually have many more kids books, but others are for slightly older kids) Last night upon investigating loud crying I discovered most of the surface of Cat’s cot covered in library books, which she somehow managed to pull from the shelf to her cot. For now I’m going to put the library books to the other side of the shelf, but I wonder if I’ll have to re-arrange the furniture again. Choosing the best location for all our and Cat’s stuff is becoming more challenging than the advanced levels of Tetris. So if you don’t yet have kids and are ever caught playing Tetris instead of doing something more important just say that you are practicing a very important skill necessary for successful parenthood.

Fun playmate

Two mornings in a row we spent playing with my friend’s much younger brother, who was visiting for a short time with their parents. The Little Girl was totally mesmerized by him and wanted to follow him everywhere, specially because he had a range of play balls. If we got too distracted chatting to throw the ball back to her, we would instantly hear “Bum! Bum!”, which is her attempt at saying “Boom! Boom!” and the word she uses to mean ball. Sadly he went back to Australia and we can only dream about finding another such patient and fun playmate.

Three favourite rhymes

Incy Wincy spider climbed up the water spout.
Down came the rain and washed poor Incy out.
Out came the sunshine and dried up all the rain.
And Incy Wincy spider climbed up the spout again.
English nursery rhyme
--

We have a CD of nursery rhymes and Incy Wincy spider is Cat’s favourite song. She keeps on asking for it, by trying to do the action of Incy Wincy spider climbing up the spout with her little fingers. I heard this song so many times in the last few days, that whenever I have a quite moment to myself to relax or think I end up singing it instead. This little rhyme is also preventing me from thinking of any other quote for today’s post.

The other favourites are “Five little ducks went swimming one day” with the loud quacks and attempts to imitate the hand actions from the Little Girl; and “Old MacDonald” – Cat does a very good “Ee-I-ee-I-oh” sound now.

(I don't have a picture of ducks, so a swan will have to do instead)

Out of the 26 songs on the CD Cat only wants to listen to these three, I hope, for my own sanity, that she’ll progress to a wider range of favourites or will get tired of this CD altogether.

(Re)discovering: the fun of building indoor tent

Since it was raining for most of the week I had to think of new activities for us to do inside. Yesterday I tried to build a tent to play in and totally lost track of time. I loved both building it and playing inside. The Little Girl looked very confused at first, but soon joined in the fun.

Discovering the world: sand and sea

While in Odessa The Little Girl got to experience walking and playing in the sand for the first time. At first she totally didn’t like the feel of the sand and tried really hard to avoid standing on it. Every time I would try to put her down she would cling to me with all her strength and lift her legs up as high as she could. However, when I put her down on our beach blanket she was happy to grab handfuls of sand, let it go and see the grains fall down. Soon the blanket was covered with the sand and the Little Girl finally braved walking on it to try to get to someone’s beach ball (she loves playing with the balls at the moment). Later Clive and she built a sandcastle and she was perfectly happy to crawl all over it.

She was slightly unsure about the sea water at first as well, but warmed up to it very quickly (I wish the water would warm up to us as it was very cold). She enjoyed walking in and out of the water, looking at the tiny waves, searching for the wet stones (collecting stones is another recent love) and even managed to fall face down into the water ones. Somehow I find it sad that she didn’t get to walk or play in the sand earlier. I noticed that all the kids playgrounds I saw in Russia had sandy surface unlike the asphalt one of England – the sand probably has it’s on downsides, but I think I would prefer it to the hard grey asphalt.


The photo above was taken by my husband using his "new" (at least to him) Mamiya camera.