Lots of love

Grandma love...
... mormor and my Godmother love...
...katrin love only a few hours old...
...more grandma love....
....Hannah love... in deep conversation with Viktor over their shared Birthday.

Always loved the idea of an extended family. Love to see the kids interact and love when the house is buzzing with kids and friends and the kids' friends and our friends' kids. And love to infuse babies with love, with good help from the extended family that is our circle of friends.

Martin and the kids

There is always something going on in the background...
and we get to use both our arms all the time.
Cara decided she wanted black hair....
... and believe it or not, finally I got my little Martin-girl. What a perfect quick-fix! It suits her well - more pictures another day.

I really enjoy this big crazy family! I go to work and come home tired to dinner and stories of new adventures. And every day I go to bed very thankful for what life has brought me this far. The first feeding at 5 am and last at 11 pm is a small price to pay to be able to get to keep the cake and eat it.

leaving sigge is heart-breaking.

Leaving Sigge to Martin is not the issue-martin is as good a carer as me and Sigge will be fine - but I will be missing time with our new precious little being.
This last week has been a good ending to a lovely summer - here at björnö - swam for half a day.
Cara and Viktor loves Brunnsviken and it is only a short bike-ride away.
and this has been the best breast-feeding scene this summer.

me, me, me.... just wrote a long teary piece about going back to work - which I am really looking forward to but it is heart-breaking to leave an infant too. Equality is tough. nuff said, this blog is supposed to be about Sigge, not his whimsical mother. Martin will have a splendid time. Now I will feed my baby boy, and I post a few snippets of my high-lights lately. This summer has been fantastic!

The bliss of getting Sigge

Cara shows what we all feel - this wonderful little being is such a treat we all want to eat him - and Sigge lets us shower him in love.

how do we introduce our children to the nastier sides of humanity?

Cara was born a few weeks after September 11th - remember sitting watching the news with a hand on my belly wondering what kind of world I bring kids into. With Viktor it was London, Sigge turned up in time for Oslo - it is a new world of European terrorism which is hard to get a grasp on - there is nothing we can do to change that. What I find more difficult are the reports from Africa's horn. Famine seldom appears over night and it all starts and ends with governments not caring enough to make sure it's people is fed. Wars and bad infrastructure, ignorance and absence of schooling - no amount of money to the Red Cross will change that. I haven't given money to the current catastrophe yet - will surely like I always have in the pastbut need to find a way to comprehend why nothing has changed since Biafra. And if there is a smarter way to help. Not even sure if going volonteering will be worthwhile in a life-perspective as the famines keeps coming back. Oops, this milky scented baby blog suddenly get very political - but it has all to do with what kind of world we want to give our milky scented kids. The starving children are all over our newspaper that Cara reads and I need to talk to her about it but struggle to find words of reassurance. And then I think of how there were starving kids in Europe only a few decades back and how we now, obscenely enough, are combatting obesity whereas others starve.

In sharp contrast to all the terribleness of the world we have had a glorious summer together. The weather has been fantastic. We have been on little day-trips to different parts of the Stockholm archipelago and Sigge is starting to turn around. We meet up with friends when they are around but mostly we just do our own thing. And now I have two days left of my parental leave - will come back to it in a few weeks but for now I try to conserve the last moments of the wonderfulness of late summer.

Hand-over week

Martin's turn to get the vomity wonderfulness of Sigge for a bit.
and my turn to go to work without my little buberle
I have been tired lately, something to do with the three month dip in hormones I guess, I loose handfuls of hair every day and the days feels like a massive wall of thick jelly I have to get through. Had the same with Vik and Cara - cold showers works beautifully but at the moment the water is not cold enough.

all this hair doesn't help - Sigge likes grabbing it and today I had enough

so I cut it all off. Meanwhile Martin took the kids to an ice-cream shop and a park so Sigge could talk to some branches. Yesterday we went for a dip in the archipelago, lots of branches there, tomorrow a garden-party, Thursday probably back to the archipelago, Friday I work but I am sure Martin will find Sigge a nice tree and then the first phase of my parental leave is over, Martin takes a few weeks on his own to get into the rythm of Sigge and then we share - very excited to find out how it will work.