making bets on avoiding meltdowns in museums

I am not a betting man, at least not on football or horses or raindrops sliding down a window. But I am a betting man on a day like Sunday, a gray damp autumn day in Stockholm, a day when I venture to take a toddler and a baby downtown to the national museum to expose them to art.

I was inspired by Olivia’s mother. Olivia, if you don’t know, is a sassy storybook pig. My sister gave NK the first Olivia book for her birthday. We now have four more from the library (for the first time, NK actually missed a returned library book too – “The library is not allowed to borrow our book!”)

In the first Olivia book, Olivia goes to the museum on rainy days and appreciates art. Her little brother Ian stands around and looks at the paintings too. Hmmm, I thought. NK is not as old as Olivia. But she is probably older than Ian. We can go look at big landscapes. She’ll think it is fun!

This is probably partially compensating for the fact that I had big aspirations for exploring Stockholm when I was on parental leave with NK for six months around her second birthday. And we never left town – park, pool, open preschool, park, pool, balcony.

Anyway, there I am with the baby tucked in the sibling stroller and NK sauntering happily beside me. I did little thinking at all until down at the subway stop (under the “big walls!”) I went to feed the baby and realized I left our food bag at home. I am not sure, but I think my decision making is a bit more dad than mom, always calculating the odds that I will avoid major meltdown.

Calculation one. Can I get by without the food bag? And the diapers? Can I buy emergency food for the baby? What are the chances I need a diaper? How low is the toddler’s blood sugar?

A big sigh. No gamble. We walk back home. The toddler refuses to ride in the stroller. We walk back to the subway stop. The toddler still walks. My patience wears thin, but the whole thing is my fault, so I keep mostly, though not completely, quiet. (I am mad at myself, NK. You are mad? At myself? You are mad? At myself. At yourself?)

Calculation two. Do we have time for the museum? Running late now, the window closing, I decide to push for the museum. It can’t work, but we are downtown, dammit.

Calculation three. Should we pay? We wander the gift shop, hungry, a little panicked. Then I spot the one free exhibition. So the eight contemporary takes on Caspar Weinrichcasdfhadf whatever his name is will be our test. The big Olivia moment. NK glances at the first painting and walks as fast as possible back to the main hall. We go to the children’s room and play with toys of food for half an hour. NK then draws her first ever picture of an actual face.

Calculation four. How far can we push lunch? And the baby’s sleep? Not enough to stay downtown. We hustle for the subway.

Calculation five. Can we skip lunch altogether? The baby is losing it. There is no way he will last the line at McDonald’s (a rare “treat”). But his sister will not accept skipping her hamburger now. I sacrifice the baby. We go into the mall.

And NK falls asleep. I turn around and hustle home. Studying at the library, E offers to bring food home later. Yay! I won!

And sometimes your luck just runs out. I come home and get the baby to sleep. I lay down. Nap, blessed nap. Then 25 minutes later, he wakes up. While I am rocking him to sleep, his big sister wakes up. She is despondent we are not at McDonald’s. Now, even if I had cold, soggy fries in a bag, it would not have saved me. For the baby woke up. And NK woke up. And then I faced a long afternoon with two tired, grumpy children.

It went fine.

the streaming rewards of cosleeping and sleep deprivation

We have two children; we have two light sleepers. Well, the toddler is sleeping pretty soundly. So, really, it is now all about baby sleep.

We also cosleep, meaning that we sleep in the same bed, or more accurately, a series of ever shifting beds in ever shifting combinations of parents and children (the toddler does go to sleep in her own bed in her own room, but usually with me beside her, and she never ends the night there).

We believe in this, really believe, if you know what I mean.

Which means we suffer, have suffered exquisitely on two continents, in a bat-infested house in New York and through the Swedish winter, through hard pregnancies and in a tiny apartment. We speed past the point of breaking, zoom around and go past that point again and then, just for fun, race past it again.

0ne constant – the kids have stayed in the bed with us.

In the latest chapter, I have spent hours in the past weeks walking around the apartment in the darkest night holding a baby with jangling, kicking, crawling legs. For long stretches, he simply cannot sleep on his own. Way too busy. So I am not just walking. I am high stepping or jogging or singing or turning on faucets for the noise (horrible, I know, I know – but we do not own a car, that is my answer to all enivronmental guilt).

His sister crawled in her sleep. I know babies do this. But he is in the middle of a months-long learning to sit, scoot, crawl, stand, walk continuum of poor sleep.

Then he wakes up at 4:30. This behavior we have tried to manipulate – early bedtimes, late bedtimes, extra naps, no naps.

It always comes back to about 4:30. It always comes back to choppy sleep at best, no sleep at worst.

More than three years of this.

But suddenly, there is a light in the night. Specifically, the light of a computer screen, the light of playoff baseball.

And in the mornings, if I want, there is the dim bulb of the NBA regular season, though I find I cannot actually watch the games, so boring that I can’t justify drawing the attention away from the baby, who is cute and charming even at 4:30 in the morning, even when I am pretty grumpy with him for waking up.

But the baseball. Glorious. I watched Johnny Damon steal two bases the other night. I have seen A-Rod strike out in the clutch and hit homers and doubles. I watched the Dodgers lose (always a pleasure to a San Francisco boy). I finally have watched the Phillies with regularity and realize how much I like that team, and not just because I went to college in Philly.

I kind of, sort of, even hope that the baby will be too fussy at 3am for me to put him down. Because if I do soothe him and he hits that blessed deep sleep, I can’t quite justify watching sports in the middle of the night. Sleep is too precious. The bones ache just a mite too much.

But game six of the World Series starts at 2am Central European Time.

Hmmm, he seemed awfully fussy tonight. I might just have to stay up and hold him an extra hour – as long as the Phillies don’t fall too far behind …

sundays in the autumn in sweden

Sundays are slow in Sweden, especially when the weather is bad and you can’t go outside. Around our house, which is not in the center city, but is also not in the middle of nowhere, there are two options on cold, dark, November days. We can go to the library or we can go to the butterfly house.

The butterfly house is really cool, a huge heated indoor space in a castle filled with butterflies and fish and frogs. But it is a little far away, and it is so exciting that both NK and I end up screaming of exhaustion/excitement in front of the poisonous frogs.

So this was my Sunday with my kids.

Leave home, aiming for a walk around the nearby lake. Toddler decides to walk the other way, towards the mall.

Standing in a dirty underground passageway, watching a homeless man make some breakfast, I ask the toddler if she wants to ride the train. She says yes. Her baby brother laughs.

We ride the first of many slow, smelly elevators down to the tracks. We take the subway one stop.

We ride an elevator up and walk around an empty modernist square, devoid of all charm. The baby eats a corn puff and takes me keys. NK is fascinated by a sculpture of pillows. Disappointed they are not soft.

We ride two elevators back down.

We ride the subway two stops back up. We walk to the grocery store.

In the store, with really small aisles, we get stuck in a crowd of Asian tourists. We buy emergency food for everyone involved.

I realize outside that I forgot the real reason we came to that store – to buy NK’s special oat-based yogurt.

Back inside the store, back behind the tourists.

Walk home very fast, very tired, the toddler eating yogurt and the baby whining, close to crying, then close to screaming.

Get home. Pick baby up. Toddler falls over with the now unbalanced stroller.

“Was that a little fun?” I ask.

No, it was not.

We eat lunch together. We sleep. The sky darkens.

A Sunday in Sweden.

clearing corners, finding peace

The nagging sense of clutter, the slight unease of the light off the white walls, the chaos of a few toys on the floor — they have vanished. Our living room has become a zen zone of calm. It is clean and yellow and it glows from the leaves falling from the trees outside and covering the rocks just beyond our window.

E finished painting last weekend, with a toddler in tow. And we moved masses of furniture and toys and more to the storage space. E and her sister went and bought lots of baskets and containers for the bookshelves. For it turns out that as much as I love books, they are too small of units. They clutter. When they are stacked inside wicker baskets lined in a bookshelf, that creates bigger units, less business, at least in our apartment.

It all came out of the painting. Once the walls were yellow, E could put up the curtains, which meant the curtain rods no longer stuck up from a corner with a bunch of extra picture frames, which went into storage. Once the walls were painted, we could see where more shelves worked and where we needed fewer pictures on the wall.

After months of blathering about compact living, I think we might finally have accomplished it. The children already play in newly opened corners, our cool rug dominates the room the way it should, the walls reflect the rocks and trees and light outside the window, and that window is a big reason we live in this small space.

I never knew we could get more simple. I guess that is the lesson. You always can.

scooting and falling down and no sleep

Our son has a differently philosophy to baby life than his big sister. At nine months, he has six teeth, eats a lot of real food, scoots around, stands up, falls down, stands up, falls down, cries and cries. At nine months, his sister not really eaten even baby food yet, was getting her first tooth, had just started to push herself backwards after months of happy sitting and rarely cried.

I marvel at how different BT’s life is from his sister’s. This is the sort of comment that, if I said it at lunch at work, would draw nothing but blank stares. Duh. Obvious.

Maybe it is that NK was a baby in a Victorian house in a small town in upstate New York, and BT is a baby in a tiny apartment in Stockholm.

Maybe it is that I have been awake half the night holding him with his little legs crawling in his sleep. So I have time to think all this over, or sort of think it over, well, more like vaguely consider it before I trip over a toy in the dark.

The sleep deprivation – and a recent wave of family illness – are sneaking up on me too. I get by on shockingly little sleep now. I used to be a nine hour a night guy. Now I sail by on five or six – and choppy sleep at that, broken up by lifting toddlers to her mother, hugging squirming babies.

But I can tell. Not at work. And not with the kids, as I have controlled a slightly fraying temper (didn’t want to end up in a New York Times story on yelling …)

No, I have a different problem. I can’t read a book. This particular book. I reallly want to read it – The Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann – for a lot of reasons. But there is a hitch. It is set in a tuberculosis sanitorium in the Alps. So, basically, everyone in the book has consumption, feverish, coughing, pre-antibiotic fatal consumption. And I can not get my head around it; reading each page makes my head spin and my stomach tingle. I do not want to think about TB.

I am not usually afraid of illness either, though have had these attacks a couple other times – curled up in the fetal position on a gym floor during an anorexia movie in the 9th grade, or paralyzed in a chair 14 years ago in Chicago when a roommate told us all that he had diabetes.

No, it has to be the sleep. I may just have to put the book down and start reading magazines. Just nothing medical …

tall girls play basketball to a new cheer

I took NK to a Solna Vikings basketball game this afternoon. We saw the women play, not because I took my daughter but because the women play in the afternoon, the men play in the evenings. She has taken to throwing our basketball off the couch, barely missing her little brother’s head, so I thought it would be good for her to see how the “tall girls,” as I put it, really play.

We walked through the afternoon dark to Solnahallen. There were only about a hundred or so people in attendance, and they did not make much noise. The press table was empty. There was the requisite loud music.

I am fascinated by minor sports here in Sweden, across Europe actually. I just read a pretty good book by an American guy who played in Greece, Spain and Russia, among other places. Sweden is levels below that, but, still most teams have a couple Americans on the roster, a few fans, some minor TV deal for the championship series and uniforms covered with sponsorships by the local auto body shop.

The Solna woman have been the dominant team in the league this decade and you could tell by the uniform, covered with sponsors. Their opponents, Umeå, had far less, though they did have an add for a travel agency right under the armpit. How do you negotiate that placement?

Umeå also had what sounded like an Irish coach, and I was proud when NK said she could tell he spoke English. He was loud and positive and all over the place. The Solna coach was a tall, stern woman all in black who stalked the sidelines making dramatic hand motions, and, frankly, intimidated even me in the stands. Solna was the better team too – more disciplined, better shooters, in better shape. But I ended up rooting for Umeå, seemingly congenitally attracted to the underdog.

The quality of the basketball was hard to pinpoint. The women all had pro-level size, meaning they were really tall and really strong. But I have to put the level of play somewhere around my graduate school intramural team. This is not the insult that it sounds like. We had three very serious, fringe European pro-players on that team, won the grad school league, and only just lost the overall Columbia championship to the undergrad winners, who were all guys who had quit the varsity, plus a really good woman. I was that extra fifth guy with glasses and two knee braces wearing hiking boots (really, my basketball shoes had fallen apart) trying to play good defense and run around on offense and not get passed the ball and not get embarrassed.

But back to Solna, where the best thing I got out of the game (we only saw half because NK just announced we were going home) was a new cheer. Forget thundersticks and the wave. My daughter pulled a beater from a mixer out of her bag. She pointed it at the court and yelled, “BEEEEEEEEEE!!!”

Totally worked for me. You should get it going at the next game you go to. Imagine 50,000 people at Yankee Stadium tonight pulling beaters out of their pockets and yelling, BEEEEEEEEE. The other team would have no chance.

heading for the light (paint)

Sweden is gloomy already in late October this year. The light is fading, and the sky is slate, and every morning I walk through new puddles of rain to drop NK off at daycare.

But I am not really that scared this year. Maybe it is our planned Christmas trip to the sun. Maybe I have been in Sweden for a while now. Maybe it is still October and I am simply deceiving myself.

But I believe in the lights, and not the “cozy” candles that everyone pushes but do me no good. I believe in the sunlight above our dining room table. I know where the sunlamp at work is (in a storage room). And I am overjoyed that E painted one-third of the living room yellow today.

Our walls are something that you could call Stockholm white, which is a big color in, ummm, Stockholm. It is a white that creates some space and probably sets off expensive light wood furniture quite nicely. But I find it draining and soulless and cold. It belongs in a waiting room.

Now we are getting a nice yellow that already makes our small room smaller. But I don’t care because of the warmth, of the extra light, because it reminds me of my childhood room and, subsequently, the California sun. Maybe it will help the sunlamp too, so our room does not look like it is under a searchlight on a frigid Cold War-era border, though that does not matter as much as keeping our focus inside rather than the late morning or early afternoon night.

the overnight train, a lifetime later

I am riding the rails all night tonight, traveling for work. It takes me back a decade or more, when I used to sleep on trains or in train stations all the time.

I was usually cold and nervous or fighting for space from some huge Russian guy or obnoxious German woman and her loud kids. The trains were stuffy and my backpack was always too heavy and I was always worried that I would go hungry, so had bought lots and lots of food before I left. I was headed towards rural Romania or Venice or out to rural blown up Croatia, which was also going home, which seems so weird now.

I also loved every moment of it.

Tonight I will have my own compartment, paid for by the company (I am flying home tomorrow afternoon). I will be on an expense account, though have already packed extra food because, well, I am still terrified of getting hungry on a train. I will take a taxi when I get in to Helsingborg, and I will take that taxi to a corporate office building.

And I do not want to go. I keep trying to build up the romance, but I would rather stay at home with the screaming sick baby and the fussy toddler and my wonderful wife. I think my trip to India last spring killed the buzz. India was magic but I thought the plane flights would be cool and liberating for a relatively new dad. They were not.

But who knows, maybe the romance of the rails will reassert itself tonight. Maybe I need to get a little chilled and slump down in a corner of the waiting room first, then buy too much food and haul a huge backpack to the corporate office. Maybe I will be rocked to sleep in that solo compartment. For four hours, until I have to switch trains. Then I am second class all the way …

the silence of scandinavia

In October, the dark descends with the gray mists, and the silence deepens.

The moon is out in late morning now, and the changing leaves of autumn are subdued by the rain and gloom, the color draining from the trees and sky and the earth itself.

You descend to a subway station on a Monday morning, and, deep under the rock, there is no echo. Instead the rock muffles what sounds there are, basically just you talking to your wife on a cell phone.

You get on a train, and the silence is more profound because the train is full of people, of the pale and colorless with their thousand-yard stare. The train goes in and out of tunnels, but not one head turns. There are no headphones either – this is not a silence with inner music. This is just silence.

Then you realize that the train is not all Scandinavian stock. Far from it. There is a black woman next to you. Two black men down the train. An Asian man slumps against a pole. There are two women with almost their entire faces covered. A Middle Eastern-looking man, a South Asian woman. The one woman talking on her cell phone – though so quietly you can not hear a word – she looks vaguely Hispanic.

No surprise on a train to an outer suburb, where the immigrants get shunted. But the silence was. People acclimate. You acclimate, with no headphones and your own thousand-yard stare. You take in the silence born of centuries of darkening damp Octobers.

You remember that your toddler screamed with joy when she could see the moon again on the walk to daycare. Screamed. With joy.

That was good.

the art of giving in with insufferable superiority

The room was dimly lit, or at least seemed so. The two daycare bosses sat on one side, we sat on another, with the big boss, the woman who we ventured into the depths of city to meet, sitting off by herself, eyes slightly closed, talking softly, giving us the crazy parent shut down stare.

We were there to discuss how our daughter’s daycare keeps giving her milk, when milk sends her into anaphylcatic reactions. We were there to discuss the letter we sent demanding that the daycare be reorganized, that they start an allergy daycare, that they find us another spot.

And the big boss was clear. The daycare does not need reorganizing and there will be no allergy section. The big group – six teachers supervising 36 toddlers – works just fine. The latest incident was a simple case of staff failure.

Then she proceeded to tell us that they would reorganize the daycare so NK gets a smaller lunch group. She offered us a spot in a special needs daycare because there are more trained staff and smaller groups there. Then she offered us a spot in another daycare, one with smaller groups.

Hmmm, that big group is just dandy, isn’t it?

During the meeting, I was so offended that I had to hold on to the chair so I did not start yelling in English, or run out of the room. I suffered through awkward pause after awkward pause as everyone fell silent in this swirl of mixed messages.

After the meeting, as I secretly changed the baby’s diaper in the corner of the library, with NK smashing peas into the floor nearby, I realized that, actually, they gave us everything we wanted, poisoned by the nasty attitude.

But I will have to rise above my reflected spite and find a way to walk up the hill to daycare again and drop off my little girl, for that new lunch group is a good solution.

But I will not like it.