Picture time! Our baby will be 18 months old in 12 days. She is sporting 3 1/2 teeth by now, her current favorite pastimes are climbing everything that seems remotely suitable for it and putting things in order – I have honestly no idea where she gets that from.  Our little girl charms everyone with her generally cheerful disposition – wherever she goes, she smiles and is friendly with people. I love that quality about her so much, I attempt to soak up her positive and happy attitude and try to make it my own. Anyway, on with the pictures. I always try to reduce the amount of photos I want to show to three or four when I sort my way through the recent pictures, but end up using way too many regardless. I can’t promise that’ll change anytime soon, I am afraid.

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The last couple of weeks have been quite strenuous for us. When I collected the Munchkin from Kita one Thursday, I heard a little girl in her classroom cough quite badly. I felt reasonably sure then that we would be graced with the appearance of a cold sometime soon.

The Munchkin was restless throughout the following night, but seemed otherwise ok. On Friday then, her condition deteriorated after I picked her up from Kita. Her temperature rose up to 40 degrees Celsius (104 Fahrenheit) and I was unable to lower it for any length of time. She also developed a terrible cough and became increasingly lethargic. When she seemed to have trouble breathing and her overall condition worsened, the Laddie and I took her to the Emergency Room.

Turns out our baby was suffering from acute spasmodic laryngitis (spasmodic croup) and obstructive bronchitis, so her breathing pathways were basically blocked both ways. The doctor explained to us just how dangerous spasmodic croup can get and gave us a room on the pediatric ward of the hospital. We (the Munchkin and I) stayed there for four very restless and exhausting days. The Lad came to be with us every day from about 7:30 am and left when it was time for our little girl to sleep. Our nights at the hospital were filled with frequent visits by nurses and one alarm or other going off approximately every ten minutes or so, startling awake both the Munchkin and myself.

At some point during our hospital stay, the Lad voiced what I had been thinking about all the time, too: We have never been this scared for our daughter. I felt utterly helpless and useless, seeing my baby hooked up to the monitors, getting poked with needles, taking cortisone, inhaling every few hours. My poorest child. I took comfort in the fact that I was very close to her all through this time. The Munchkin spent the first night at the hospital sleeping on my belly. For the remaining three days, she snuggled up very close beside me at night – thankfully they had pushed two beds together for us, so our sleeping situation was similar to what we’re used to.

We arrived back home last Monday and the Munchkin spent the remainder of the week with me. Yesterday was her first day back at Kita and she seems to have missed that part of her routine a lot. Leaving the classroom on Monday, I read that scarlet fever is an issue at Kita right now, too. I guess I should get used to that kind of thing.

In other news, the Lad celebrated his 27th birthday on October 8th. Due to our stay at the hospital and the resulting stress and chaos, I was unable to make his special day truly special for him. We did spend the day together, but things were just really unorganized, messed up and generally lacking. By October 7th, a feverish cold had knocked me out, too, so I was basically rendered useless once more. I feel absolutely terrible about how this year’s birthday went for the Lad – I hope I will be able to make it up to him somehow.

Our Munchkin is asleep, the Lad and I will snuggle up now, have some homemade chicken soup, watch a movie and hope the next illness isn’t looming on the horizon just yet.

I just realized it’s been quite a while since I last posted pictures of our Munchkin, so I will dedicate this entry to new pictures. It’s incredible how much she’s changed in a few months! Huge amount of pics to follow

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Our little Munchkin is now 15 months old and has started Kita on August 11th. Kita is the German equivalent to the American daycare and right now, we’re in the middle of the ‘Eingewöhnung’, the adaptation period.

For about one week, I went to Kita with my baby at 9:30 am every day and stayed there for one hour while she played – after that, we’d go home together. She immediately was incredibly interested and happy to be around the other kids, to just be and play in a big room full of toys. Only when her teeth were bothering her, she’d come to me and sit in my lap (yes, at 14 months, the Munchkin finally started teething! We now have two bottom teeth to report).

After the first week had passed without incident, we started going to Kita 1 1/2 hours at a time and my baby was fine with that, too. Last Thursday then, we tried the first separation of ten minutes. Our Munchkin did protest a little bit at first when I left, but did not cry – so I continued to go out and sat down somewhere out of her sight. Things were going really well, so we extended the separation by five minutes. When I came back outside to be with her, my baby did not seem to have missed me much *sniff*. I’m ok, really *doublesniff*

Since everything went so smoothly that day, we attempted a 30 minute separation on Friday. This time, my baby did not object at all when I gave her to her nursery teacher and she was fine for the whole half hour. I felt weird, sitting in the teachers’ conference room, listening out for any crying or other noises of distress from my baby. When I came to pick her up again, my Munchkin reached out for me, smiling. She waved bye bye and on our way home we went.

We’ll be back to Kita tomorrow. The plan is that I sit with our Munchkin for about 15 minutes and then see if she’d be ok with me leaving her there. I’ll stay close by, but I guess it’s intended that she stays there for a good while without me. I’ll have to be honest, this whole thing seems to be much harder for me than it is for her. Of course I am happy that she is so enthusiastic about going to nursery, but it’s still a big, big step for me.

Our Munchkin has never been babysat by anyone. For the last 15 months, I have been separated from her only very rarely and if so, it was only for a few hours at a time, while she was out on a walk with the Laddie. It’s not that I wouldn’t have let someone else watch her, but our baby to this day is still nursing and won’t go to sleep without me. Sadly though, even if that weren’t the case, my sister, the only close relative we have around, is not particularly interested in seeing her niece on a more or less regular basis.

Anyway, all this means my baby and I have been very, very close ever since she was born. So her going to Kita by herself for a good few hours every day is really a big deal.

Next week, it’ll be decided whether the adaptation period can be considered successfully completed or not. If all goes as planned, I will then have a few hours each day to study for my Masters, which I’ll hopefully have completed by May next year. Geez, too much to think about right now. I’m losing my baby, sort of. Must go and wallow a bit.

Our Munchkin turned one year old on May 13 and even now I hesitate when people ask me how old she is – she is still just my baby, it seems impossible she should have been with us for the past 12 months. It feels like she is very close to taking her first few unaided steps – she cruises along furniture like there is no tomorrow and uses her baby buggy to whiz through our increasingly crowded apartment.

Our Munchkin will start attending daycare in August and I am far from ready to let her go. Alas, I have no choice in the matter, as I have to return to uni to complete my Masters. Next May then, I will have to return to work as well and I’d prefer to have uni behind me at that point. I can’t begin to imagine what it would be like trying to juggle work, uni and family life with a toddler. We shall see how all that will work out, though, as we seem to have a bit of a problem even finding an adequate childcare facility. There are so many things involved that I can’t quite seem to wrap my head around – I am running in circles and at this point simply can’t make the decisions that need to be made.

Before this tiny little nonsensical post turns into even more of a ramble, I will leave you with new pictures of our littlest baby girl.

First, for all to see, a picture of the birthday dress I made for our Munchkin:

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I have felt terribly miserable and quite sorry for myself lately, so I didn’t really think I had anything worthwhile to contribute to this here blog. Seems a bit silly not to blog about personal and/or the more difficult stuff in our lives, in hindsight, since this blog is in fact a personal one – it would seem there’s no need for me to force myself to remain on a subjectively perceived appropriate level. So I’ll just take things as they come now and see where that takes me blogwise. Anyhoo, on to Baby News.

Our little Munchkin is so incredibly active right now, she pulls her tiny self up literally everywhere she can grab hold, walks along furniture and ‘talks’ a lot. She seems very interested in people, especially other little children, smiles and waves whenever she sees them.

On that note, I find the mentality of people in Berlin revolting most of the time. Our baby is so friendly and eager to interact and very often, people notice, but can’t be bothered to show any kind of friendly behavior. Yesterday, for example, the Laddie and I took the Munchkin to a park near our house. She was just really happy to be outside and contently looking at people, when she saw a mommy turn the corner with her little boy strapped in a stroller. My little girl stood up on my legs, smiled at the boy and waved at the mommy. The mother just looked at her briefly, then looked away again and walked past, never even changing her facial expression. My baby looked after her in a sort bewildered manner and eventually shifted her attention to something else.

This kind of thing really does break my heart. It happens more often than I care to admit, but I just can’t get used to this kind of indifference. It’s beyond me how anyone can behave this way. Whenever I see other children do things like this, I can’t help but smile, no matter my mood on that particular day. I personally find it terrible that my child is introduced to the ‘real’ world this young.

Berlin and her people have not presented themselves particularly child-friendly to me within the last year or so, if I’m honest here. Right now, the Laddie and I frankly feel sick of the Berlin mentality and the technicalities of big city life. I’ve had to keep the Munchkin on my lap all this time at the park yesterday, simply because there were things lying on the ground you don’t want to imagine your child getting close to. It’s so sad that we can’t go anywhere with our baby where she could play and crawl around freely, without her parents anxiously hovering over her all the time – it just feels so restrictive.

The Munchkin has just fallen asleep and I have tons of things yet left to do, so I will leave you with pictures of our little sunshine. (more…)

Here’s what the rocking horse looked like after I applied the first coat of paint.

I didn’t really think it looked quite white enough, so I put on another layer of white.

Almost done now, I think. I ordered a bit of cloth to make a pillow from. As I’ve never sewn anything properly before, this might turn out to be a bad idea, but I’ll try my best.

The Laddie and I are otherwise trying to deal with a lot of problems right now, which is paralyzing in more than just one way. Jobs, money, studies, childcare, family, friends…Everything just seems to be going downhill. In the midst of it all, we are trying our best not to let our Munchkin feel any stress or strain. A monumental task at the moment, really, a draining exercise. Hopefully things will look up again eventually.

Here’s what the rocking horse looks like right now, after the sanding action:

I will try to paint it on the weekend – I hope it’ll turn out ok!

As I’ve had sort of an emotional meltdown today, there won’t be any other updates just right now, but I will try to post again sometime this weekend.

This weekend, I’ve been busy sanding down a wooden rocking horse that I bought on ebay – for our Munckin, naturally. Here’s what it looked like when it was delivered:

I’ll go and get white paint for it this week. After that, I am not sure what to do with it, I’d like to add some sort of a floral pattern, but can’t seem to decide on anything. Hm…I’ll post progress pictures soon. Hopefully.

Our little Munchkin is almost nine months old now! I cannot believe how extremely fast she’s developing. She’s been semi-crawling (moving across the floor on her belly, dragging one leg like a wounded soldier) for a while now and continuously practices getting up on all fours. She’s ‘talking’ so cutely with us, too. We still have no teeth to report, but I am told not to worry about that until she turns one year old.

When she was seven months old, we started our girl on solid food and by now she really likes the pumpkin-potato combo (sometimes mixed with chicken) that I am cooking for her. Apart from these foods, she now eats and likes apples, bananas, cereal and rice cakes (unsalted, of course). We’ll be starting her on the next meal (lunch) next week. I am still nursing my Munchkin, of course, but she also likes to drink water. Unfortunately she can’t seem to figure out the Avent Magic Cup. She does drink out of a regular cup, but that’s a really messy thing and she always ends up totally wet, so I am hoping to find some sort of a better solution for that eventually.

Our baby girl by now has also gotten over her first mildly serious illness – she suffered a really high fever between 39.6 and 40 degrees Celsius over a period of six days! Most of this time she spent snuggled into the crook of my arm, too weak to even crawl or play, alternating between nursing and sleeping. It was really heart-wrenching to see her that way. Unfortunately I’d passed my flu on to her, so we were both doing less than stellar for a while. This period was also where I realized again just how much it sucks to be completely alone here – there’s noone I could turn to when things get a bit rough. When you’re too ill to take care of your own child properly and have to spend most of the day seated on the floor for fear of your circulation failing, it does not exactly make you feel great. Nothing I can do about that, though, so henceforth I’ll just hope not to get sick anymore.

In July or August, if everything pans out, my baby will start daycare. I can’t even begin to tell you how much that bothers me. She’s so tiny yet, it just breaks my heart. Alas, I need to finish my uni studies somehow and in order to do that (and to eventually make money) I need time to study.

On a lighter note, I will busy myself with the gift list for our Munchkin’s birthday over the next few weeks. There are so many things I want to get her, I need to prioritize. For today, I will leave you with a monster load of pictures.

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