On a slippery road

07-P1050483She is right on her way to her first Birthday, our beautiful clever Cookie girl. Does it pay off to have a clever child? She started walking at 10.5, at 11 months she was running around, climbing steps, letting herself bum first of the sofa, spinning around. her enthusiasm and curiosity always amazes us. She tries to put everything that looks slightly edible or chewable into her mouth apart from things she is really unsure off – she brings them to us shows them and looks expectantly waiting for verdict. She know most of her food now and there is no banana, nu or guava that would skip her attention. She shakes, screams points at it and commands “that”. It was enough to leave her for a couple of hours with her island mama and papa who watched TV and she realised that the remote control serves for changing the channels. She also knew that the closer she comes to the TV the easier it gets.

33-P1050517She now tries to dress herself making us laugh when she tries to slip on her tiny foot her dad’s flip flop or sock.There are three items of clothes I put on her when we go to the beach – top, white cotton panties and white cotton hat. after I put the top on her she picked the white cotton panties, presumably thinking it’s her hat, placed it on her head and proudly paraded in it pointing at the door – ready to hit the beach

so is it always so great? Today she decided to mimic her dad and wash the windows just as he did – resulting in big smudges made with tiny hands on just polished glass. She is getting better in using the toilet, now she stopped even clapping top herself when she makes a pipi, it became normal, but now she thinks she advanced to the next level. seeing her parents picking the inlay of the potty to flash in the toilet she decided to do the same. She managed to pick up the inside part lift it and walk to the toilet with it. Unfortunately she was stopped there by her mum who followed wet traces on the floor.

Now should I applause the initiative or tell her off for decorating the tiles with her mimi?

She is on the road to become a clever little one year old – slippery road it is

 

61-P1050411

 

Oma und Opa

You and us, your parents, had a nice visit. We all enjoyed your grandparents staying here for the whole 5 weeks.

The first week, even though you were friendly and curious you scared your grandma a bit when you wanted to be with your mum and only with your mum, specially in the evenings when you were getting tired and needy.

18-P1040780You would laugh with your Oma and Opa, extend your hand to them trying to get their attention, ‘chat them up’ but when either of them wanted to take you in their arms you would cling onto your mama and not let go.  this made them at first a bit apprehensive about taking you for sleep overs but few days later they took the risk.

I knew that even though it looks so hard and you were getting so upset when I tried to give you to anyone else, even to your dad, few moments after i am gone you would go normal again and soon get used to new situation and lovely.  This is exactly what has happened. So you stayed for a night with your opa and Oma and give them all that joy you give us every morning.

They were playing with you and teaching you new things, you had long walks and fun in the water, they would sing you, potty train you and do all the things grandparents do with such a joy, love and patience that your parents sometimes lack.

I missed you each time you were away but we were able to enjoy the adult time an for this we were also so grateful. Sometimes it is difficult to have a little cheeky curious time and attention demanding little monkey like you with all the aunties, uncles and grandparents far away in Europe.  So we enjoyed each other, long bubbly breakfasts, adult discussions, long swims while you were enjoying every precious minute with two people who love you very much and came all this way to see you.

Your opa was hoping that next time you see them on skype video call you would recognise them and respond to them.  Sure enough you got very excited, even if just for few minutes as soon you were distracted with all the stuff on the table and the computer keyboards and on a mission somewhere but these first couple of minutes you spend looking at your grandparents and calling to them and you even looked behind the computer too see if they are not hiding somewhere there.  You will see them soon again and not just on the screen. Bet they can’t wait,,,

Mum’s special day

As your mum just celebrated her birthday in style i was reminded of just how special she is. Always remember this, little one!

Whilst you as a child might find this island just fine to have under you little feet and it is in fact one of the best places on earth for children to grow up in there isn’t really that much exciting to do apart from the sometimes questionable activities on offer.

So your mum made quite a sacrifice to make this our home, decorated the aging beach house as best as anyone could for the day and has modest but effective plans to make it even better which we will continue to work on until we head for Europe when the winter sets in.

Please always remember just how much your mum has done for you and us.

Love

Your dad

Christmas special

christmas eve will be always special for me. Dispite of its pagan, quite barbaran origin of Saturnalia, christmas also became a christian tradition, weather one is religous or not. it’s a family time too, a special time of sharing time and food.

Christmas are always special for children,either because they are being spoiled with presents or because they like the magic of it.  I hope you will have a chance to spend soon one of your Christmases with snow. white christmas seems far more enchanted and magical then the carefree, casual tropical ones.

You won’t be getting many christmas gifts my little one.  the best gift anyone can give you will be a chance to go to Europe to see your family and some new experiences so perhaps instead of many toys your family, our families can do just this – help us make sure we can take you to them and when you are there gift you a special trip, unusual day, new discovery…and so Christmas should be special for you, on the night of Christmas Eve we will tell you some tales of distant countries, their customs, places we will take you too, people close to you you will spend time with, things you will do, something to wait for and dream about

Christmas is particularly special for me because this is when marcus asked me to marry him – on a failed trip to see Christmas Eve night mass, on the footsteps of closed church, in the tropical summer breeze, in the middle of night, under hundreds of fairy lights. He had no ring and he forgot the head flower garland ei he had for me for this occasion and despite of this it was a perfect moment.

It was a big decision for both of us and each year we spend christmas together we can look back and think how right it was and be grateful for each other and for you too

Dad is baking an apple cake with advocate and we will soon go to Thomas to celebrate Christmas with his family and friends, big local Maori party with piles of food and heaps of children playing around, merry and fun

Merry Christmas our little one

 

Season’s Greetings – Weihnachtsgrüsse – Radosnych Swiat Bozonarodzeniowych

Season’s Greetings, Grown-Ups!

Polski Weihnachtsgruesse auf Deutsch English Feliz Navidad

xmas lights picMeine Mutti unterhält mich unermüdlich und gestern hat sie mich sogar tanzen lassen. Klickt einfach hier um es mit eigenen Augen zu sehen :).

My Mum tirelessly engages me in all sorts of activities and last night made me dance! Check it out by clicking here or on your language Flag above!

SV Haumea

When we visited auntie Katrin and uncle Jens in August, uncle Jens was slaving over the hulk of a boat that was sitting in the Garden. In his usual can-do fashion, a mere two months later these pictures were taken of a beautiful craft that is now named   HAUMEA. How cool is this. You also received a large and wonderful Christmas parcel and a beautiful letter from Katrin which we will keep for you.

You also had a long video session with Auntie Katrin today and have been such a good girl, shaking off sickness, travel, drama and hardship with an ease many of us grown ups would like to posses.

SV Haumea

Uncle Jens and Auntie Katrin built this beautiful boat from Scratch and named it after you! A unique vessel in the german fleet.

filled with love

OMG, I am so filed with love. Perhaps overfilled with love, it keeps spilling out. Your dad always keeps giving me more reasons to love him more but you have opened me to that, until now, unknown kind of love. I just came back from the vaccination, I loved you when you cried and hurt with you and it really really hurt me when you felt the pain. You see the other person I love with no limits is your dad and I feel bad for him when he doesn’t feel good, I feel sympathetic and I want him to feel better, I am sad about his pain but I do not suffer with him.

With you it’s so different. I would so much rather feel your pain instead of you and it hurts me too. And I love you

Then I love you again when you stop crying and are being really brave and strong, then I hold you and you snuggle up to me, put your head on my breast, turn towards me so no one else can see your face. I love you again.

Your dad said he keeps falling in love with me over and over again each day and sometimes I ask him so today? And he tells me yes, several times and I ask when and sometimes there are the most funny or peculiar reasons I would never think could make anyone fall in love with me but he says it makes him fall in love again.

I don’t know if you can fall in love with your baby but I experience these waves of love all the time. Then I love you again when you laugh to all the ladies at marcus’s office, wrinkle your little nose and they can’t believe that you just came back from your vaccination – you are not moody or crying, you are just happy little you, curious and beautiful

Then I put you on the floor of the car on the blankets your dad spread. We didn’t take your chair and I was picking up the car from his work so we had to come up with a way to drive you. And you are happy there and smile to me and I love you again and I love you when you fall asleep. I didn’t want to wake you up when we came back home. Now there is high tide and I could sneak pout for a little swim but I prefer to write this because there was so much love in me I had to spread it out and I am thinking I am crazy, when ever before I would have miss a swim in the lagoon to talk to someone and here I don’t even talk to you, I just write for you to read it, probably years and years down the road.

Well, love is strange and crazy. Can’t wait to talk to you, soon I hope you will be able to talk back. You seem to understand so much now and you know now about object permanence, when we hide something from you, you know it is still there, you look behind, you try to get to it. You also realise if something is too far for you to reach but as soon as something comes within your reach you will surely get you hands on it. And you are not even 6 months old yet.

Now I just can’t wait till you wake up, can’t wait till your dad comes back home!

Love you and this makes me so so happy

 

 

Walking in their shoes…

What an adventure it is to have you and your mum around. I am still reeling from the delightful realisation that we left our home with a docile little newborn a mere two months ago and came back with a small child, with a mind of her own, astonishing abilities and mobility (remember your adventures with the train seat, Tristan’s couch and climbing out of all sorts of contraptions designed to keep you INSIDE of them?.) Before we knew it you could sit up and look around, take a drink bottle and finish it, take things and learn how they feel smell and most of all TASTE, realise that some things may be too big and too heavy for now and that your parents are there when you need them.

In the course of the trip you dazzled so many people, starting from queues of curious and cordial waitresses in Thailand, to your grandparents, uncles and aunties in Germany and Poland and even your grand grandmother to whom your gave the greatest parting present by just being there and smiling, to seeing your dear uncle Claudio for the first time to young and oldies ladies and gentlemen all over Italy and our friends in California who were a catalyst for me so looking forward to have you.

What’s more, i am so very proud of you and your mum which actually is a novelty for me. I may have met and spent time with a number of people in my life but your mum and you took it all to a new level. I just didn’t know these feelings exist in the real world and attributed them to fairy tales and cheesy literature. What i so like about our family unit is that it feels far less obliging than it feels liberating and fulfilling.

We have seen you undergo an amazing development in a very short time. We will try not to let this go to our heads a demand great deeds sooner, faster and better than others. After all, we love you and we merely look forward to have a smart, witty and great daughter.

Just one piece of advice: Man with beards can generally be trusted. Yellow buckets on the other hand are to be treated with suspicion. Ask your dad when you can read this 😉

Poznan, August 2012

the morning smile

Sometimes I may write these blogs in the third person. At times the writting seems easier when you step out and look at things from a different angle, you become an observer of your life, a narrator of the story.

Some things I would also like to share not just with you our sweet baby girl but also with others, with our families, friends, people who may never thought about having children and parenthood looks to them like a boring full time job, a drastic and dramatic change to your life, all for worse, a burden and a drag. These people, funnily enough, are quite similar to me, as I used to be before you changed my world. Maybe not this extend but I also thought that becoming a mother would be such a change to my free spirited lifestyle, i did not really want to take a risk. i knew at some point there may be something i may miss out on but to make a conscious deccission was to me like leaving a place you know, sunny, friendly, exciting and going some new place where things will be different, they may be even better but if not there won’t be a way back.

I hope you will read it once too, maybe when you are a young woman and think about motherhood yourself and maybe reading this as a story and not a letter to you will make this sound more universal. I don’t know how easy it will be for you to listen when your mum talks, how intimate we will be able to be with each other so perhaps making it a third person story will make t more comfortable. I hope though that we will know each other well like I never knew my grandma, like I still don’t know my mother. There are questions that does not seem easy to ask your parents, but maybe it is just the way I was brought up, the parents were more of an authority, someone who was there to tell you what to do not to share what they did.  maybe it will be different now, I hope we will be your parents and your best friends.  I  love you darling…

~~~~~Morning Smiles~~~~~~~~~

There was not a morning in the last weeks when Haumea would cry at night or wake us up crying in the morning. She is still in our room, mainly because it makes feeding easier.  I also don’t believe this little being so used to my body and human contact, that little being that arrived in this world not long ago and everything is new and different, should be put in the room alone. Of course that little new person has to learn how to be on her own but this can be a gentle, gradual process. let her be on her own during the day, looking around, discovering, when she feels unhappy she will cry and then mama will be there, she will know that mama is never far away, then when things around her become more familiar mama will be there but maybe not always all the time around, she will come and touch, she will say something and then go away again.

In the evenings when i feed her she falls asleep happily on my body, cuddled onto me but the moment i pull her away she starts crying. So she is more happy falling asleep listening to the voice of her dad reading a novel to her mum before they fall asleep, she is more happy waking up and knowing that people she knows who love her are right next to her.

This shows so clearly, when i wake up i often see her big eyes watching me, she is happy playing with her hands, stretching, watching her parents asleep in each other arms, when I lean above her,  touch her face or say hello she smiles.  She smiles that beautiful bright happy baby smile, toothless, open mouthed the most beautiful smile I have seen, the one that warms my heart.  she lets us wake up slowly and spend time together, sometimes she says something and we laugh or make a baby noise back while looking at each other enjoying the morning together.  I may drift off  into a light dreamy sleepy state  on marcus’s arm for few more moments while he strokes my neck and hair and the baby is happy too and waits.  As imptient as she is to get her feed the rest of the day she always waits patiently in the mornings, happy each time we look at her and when we finally pull her to us I often sit her on my tummy leaning her against my legs so she faces us so we can get few more of these happy morning smiles before i put her onto my breast and marcus will go to make some fresh coffee

Despite of that joy of having my babygirl close to me and seeing her happy face first thing in the morning I know i have to soon make her a cosy space in the other room so that she can make her first step to independence and we can have our intimacy without baby affecting our relationship. at the moment the love flows freely between all of us, if anything, my love to marcus became stronger because of how carring he is, because of the knowledge how strong our relationship is. i do not want to replace what i feel for him with my new overwhelming feelings for the baby. now the relationship is deeper and having baby with us and working around her sleeping and feeding time may be fun but won’t wor just as well in the long run and when the baby is bigger and observes things around her with far greater comprehension.

I haven’t just became a mother and stopped being who I was before from one day to the other.  To connect a womanhood and a motherhood, to remain being who you were and becoming something else on top of it not instead is a challenge but this is what i would like to master .  i suddenly realise that being a desirable woman is nothing when you don’t have a child. firstly you did not experience yet the essence of that womanhood secondly you often needed to do nothing to be who you were, the attraction depends in such a great percentage on how you look and a natural behavior you have, once you become a mother you need to make a conscious effort to be a woman, an object of desire, you work against nature almost, you master who you want to be, you have to design it. the nature may tell you that now your life is for the baby and your womanhood is to cater for that new life, you do not need a partner to procreate, you just fulfilled your role and should be now satisfied.  but we do not live in the era when this was exactly the truth. We can still enjoy being a woman whilst being a mum. we can fulfill two different roles at the same time. yes it is a challenge , one is easy, you just drop into it or put yourself in it and stay, once you there you just carry on. Unfoprtunatelly being a mum and a lover at the same time is not possible and  so in one moment you have to change.  luckily I think I know it is stil in me, both the lover and the mum.  as I have discovered on occasions you may be at the same time too, this is a challenge for your partner, he can now enjoy a different type of lover, a strong feminine being whose body is that of a miracle, it carried the baby and fulfilled it’s one of its feminine role, but just one, the other one is still there to be fulfilled over and over again.  .  “So the baby is still sleeping in your bed” asked someone i know’ “She is in the same room close to us so we can pull her to bed when I need to feed her in the middle of night. Some nightes I sleep on her side, sometimes Marcus does and he gives the baby to me, it’s easier when she still needs requires to be breastfeed at night but we will soon start putting her in the other room” ‘our is already 1.5 year old and STILL sleap in our bed” it seems that for his little baby who he loves a lot that man had to give something up.

perhaps in some cultures a woman who just delivered and is now nursing her child may not be sexy for the man but it seems that it is mostly women who seem to change and focus their attention entirely elsewhere.

After our beautiful babygirl was born i never felt more loved and desired by Marcus.  And even though there was now more things o do and someone else to love I never wanted to give him more either, feeling so close to him and united by this miracle of life that happened right in front of our eyes, between us.

The latest books hip books about preganncy, nursing and bringing up babies in France, “bringing up bebe”