Bad start...!

My mum has something like 5000 cookbooks. Sometimes she shows me these books, tells me the name of the colour of the cover and then she tells me that she cant wait to introduce me to the various tastes of the world. Until today I used to get carried away with her enthusiasm, and I used to watch her and my dad curious when they were eating. But no more. I've started to have my doubts. Serious doubts -and for a good reason.

I'll tell you what happened. Today my mum wanted to start to give me solid food ! She had prepared her self mentally and equipped herself with all the necessary things, the vegetables, the ricemeal etc. and then started making the brodo. After half an hour she tasted the brodo and was quite happy with the results...mmmm he is going to like this, she thought. Yeah, right! Then she continued doing whatever she was doing and forgot all about the cooking, until she started to smell something in the kitchen...! She thought of all possible reasons for the smell, until she had to face the facts:
MY FOOD IS BURNT!!!
My mum had to use miracle-products to save the pot -you know, one of the things they show on TV that you just spray on the crust which gets so scared that it runs away by itself. It didn't really work like that, some old fashined scrubbing was also necessary. But the pot has been saved, and my mum says it's ready for a new attempt tomorrow!
But maybe it's best just to stick to breastmilk and fruit for some while..!!

More friends

Since I've started introducing you to some of my friends, I'd like to introduce you also to a particularly good friend of mine. This is Tommi. He lives in France with his parents (Marghi and Mauro), but luckily sometimes he comes to pavia to visit friends and family. Me and Tommi have done things together since we were just a couple of mm long. Before our arrival was official our mums went together to Lyon, to the countryside around Grenoble and "climbed" to the top of the Fort de la Bastille in Grenoble. Later we went to Iceland together where we climbed mountains, bathed in natural pools and went for long walks in our mum's bellys. Now we are a bit less mobile, but we are growing very quickly so who knows which adventures await us!

Friends

I wanted to introduce you to some of my friends, Matteo, Lili, (Me), Carolina and Luca. I think we are rather lovely all of us, don't you think? These babies have been part of my life since november, yes you read right...since before I was born- when I used to go to the pre-natal course with my mum (Riccardo, Marta and Martina are missing from the photo). After we were born, and our mums stopped being like complete zombies, we started seeing each other again regularly, so that our mums could exchange advises and stories, and well, talk to someone that is as interested as themselves in talking about sleep and shit and all! We normally meet in the park in front of the castle of Pavia. The first time we met it was rather cold, and you could see tired mums, with dark rings under their eyes and running noses (for it was still cold) sitting on the benches of the park, breastfeeding (the record was 5 mums breastfeeding together...what a sight -should have brought the camera then) or cuddling their puppies and checking if everyone was getting as little sleep as themselves or if the colour and frequency of our "waste" was within the normal range. Now that summer has arrived we put a blanket under a tree and then we play with eachother while our mums continue to exchange stories and advises.
If you look closely on the picture you will see that I'm holding Lili's hand. Well, actually both her and Carolina are sort of my girlfriends (if you've visited my photo-site recently then you've seen me holding hands with Carolina as well!). Well, what can I say? The girls are crazy about my hair and as I'm the biggest and oldest lad in the group the girls are not interested in the other guys! But even if I like both Lili and Caro (which by the way are very heterozygotic twins- or better to say, hetero-parental twins, i.e. they are born on the same day, but have different parents!) then I think I'm too young to commit, so I just enjoy the attention that I get! Well, and getting the attention of young mademoiselles like them is quite a change from the attention I get from the nonne of our neighbourhood!

FIVE MONTHS

Isn't it scary how fast time is flying? My parents have just learnt to say that I'm four months old, when I become fourandahalf (and at my age it is much too imprecise saying that I'm four months old when I actually have half a month more!!) and then they just blink their eyes and I'm five months old! I'm becoming bigger every day, I learn new things every day and life continues to be pretty good. Oh, and in case you are wondering, it's official: I am a good sleeper :)

Summertime

I was wondering if this was maybe the best time of the year to be born -i.e. if you are born in Italy in times of global-warming and all. Think about it -you would leave the pleasant 37°C environment of the womb (...che nostalgia!) and the only difference that you would notice, once you'd be out, would be the lack of amniotic liquid and all that light!
But when you're born in winter like me (even if my parents say that this year we only had pseudo-winter, for it never really got cold), and your mum makes you go through a hard viking-training (after which wind, cold and rain don't scare me at all) -then you start to have difficulties when the quicksilver starts boiling in the thermometers! This week the temperature has been around 35 degrees...in the shadow -probably over 50 in direct sunlight, and we are close to the temperature of the sun in our car! AND IT'S STILL ONLY MAY!!!! How warm will it get in june...or...july...or, well, august!!! This temperature should be forbidden by law. Well, and can't they send just a few degrees to Iceland where it was actually snowing last week? Because of this temperature me and my mum go out for walks only early in the morning and late in the afternoon, and still then we're sweating. For the rest of the day we just doze off in our flat, or play that we are Pekka in the Sauna! Just as good that we're going to Iceland for a month and that we've just booked a flat by the sea for one week in June.

Another downside with the summer are the small spitfire-planes!! They are really annoying! Maybe you are just about to fall asleep when they approach you with the speed of light and the sound that warns you of an imminent attack. I got two bites last week -which maybe wouldn't have been so bad if my mum hadn't overreacted and bathed me in some after-bite solution -before reading that it contained ammonium!! Not only was I stinking (!) but my delicate skin reacted badly and I looked as if I had something terminal!
My parents tell me that Pavia is particularly popular amongst the spitfires -there are hundreds of millions and billions of these annoying creatures here. My parents are planning to pack me and my bed into mosquito-nets to protect me from future attacks, but I'm a bit afraid that the spitfires might be able to bomb their way through it!!!

The third and last downside with the summer is more personal. My mum has just bought me a pair of sunglasses -which is actually good, because the sunlight disturbs me a bit!!! But the downside is that after trying on all sunglasses made for small babies that we found in Pavia my mum decided that they were all either too expensive or too big for me. In the end she found a compromise between the two, i.e. the size was right and they didn't cost a fortune -only that she forgot to check if they looked good on me or not! So rather than looking extremely cool with one of the too-big-too-expensive sunglasses that we'd found, she got me a pair that made me look like a baby-Elton John!!! No wonder people laugh when they see me wearing them!! I hope she takes this as a lesson -you can't put a price-label on looking good!

O happy days...

I did NOT have a sleeping-problem. I had NOT inherited the bad sleeping habits of my parents. I was NOT teething. The change of season was NOT effecting my sleep-pattern. Then what? Well, I was simply the offer of bad habits of my parents. The fault was theirs, not mine (although they did what they thought was best for me, not knowing better). But the important thing is not to look for the guilty ones (yeah, you can see that my mum lends me her fingers to write this) but that things have actually improved. I sleep well both during the day and during the night.

So in one day the pattern changed from waking up 2-6 times a night -as I've done the last few weeks- to sleeping 11 hours without interruption with the great bonus that I fall asleep by myself now -something that my parents have been hoping that would happen for some time -but dind't know that I had it all in me, all I needed was the opportunity to try. Needless to say my parents are on cloud nine and I'm blissfully happy myself. Of course it means also that I have said goodbye to my fairy for the last time (we hope). I miss her a little bit, but hey, one has to go on with his life, and she knew that she wouldn't be able to visit me forever.

I can hear you asking what the trick was. Well, imagine going to sleep in your bed as every night; after a few hours you wake up finding yourself on the sofa in the living room. Wouldn't you be terrified? Even an adult would start screaming not knowing which supernatural force had moved him at night. Then imagine a baby falling asleep either in the arms of the parents, or even while breasfeeding, and then wakes up in a bed (even if it is its bed) without the parents around. It never failed to scare me I tell you...! So I'm sure you'll find it normal that I called my mum, which would arrive, terribly tired, nurse me and then put me to bed. If I wasn't completely asleep, I would start to complain the moment I was put back to bed, my mum would take me in her arms again, I would calm down...and so the night would pass with neither of us getting good sleep. But how did we get out of this vicious circle?
Welll, on friday my mum when to sign me in to the daycare. She arrived at the moment that the kindergarten-teachers were putting the babies to sleep. My mum sighed and asked how could they make all these babies fall asleep when she had this great problem with me. The teacher let my mum talk for a while -she was a very good listener-and then she suggested a solution. Previously my mum had talked to my doctor and to the psicologist that had given the prenatal-course, but neither of them had listened and neither of them could point out a solution. The doctor had actually suggested that my parents give me camomille-tea when I wake up at night ("for he is probably just a bit thirsty!") and the psicologist had said that some babies do and some babies don't have a problem like this. Both of them said that it would pass, although no-one could give a guarantee of WHEN. But the teacher, who is used to look in the eye of tired parents (my mum had slept only 2.5 hours the previous night) knew what she was doing. She suggested a book called "Fate la nanna" written by a Spanish sleep-expert called Estevill and said that many parents had solved the problem using the method described in the book. My mum was enthusiastic to say the least. She ran home, breastfed me and then we were off to the center where she stormed the bookstore and bought the book. Then we went straight home where I was put to play by myself while she practically ate the book. That same night she put in practice the method described by the book with the results that after two minutes of crying I fell asleep by myself before 9 o'clock and I slept until 8 the next morning. For weeks and weeks we had been TWO MISERABLE MINUTES OF CRYING FROM A GOOD NIGHT SLEEP! My mum was so excited during the night that she didn't sleep at all, she kept saying to her self IT WORKS, IT WORKS and her blood was full of adrenaline.
Maybe it's still early to say that I'm a good sleeper, but the trend has been turned with great consequences on both me and my parents. I'm more relaxed during the day, they are more relaxed and we all have more fun than before. Life is simply GOOD

P.S.
On the picture above you can see how I fell asleep in my bed yesterday afternoon (I slept 2 hours, which was very rare the last few weeks), lying sideways in the bed, hugging Yogi the bear.

Food for thought

A couple of weeks ago I started to widen the spectra of tastes! After 4 months of exclusive breastfeeding my parents decided it was time that I tried something new. Don't misunderstand me -it's not because I don't like the milk or that the production of this fluid of life has started to go down. My parents simply thought that it would be nice to try something new, it would get me used to the spoon at the time they start to introduce solid food and it will give me some extra vitamins and minerals -which cannot but do me good. Besides, it was suggested by my doctor! So now, after the breastfeeding sessions my mum puts me in my chair and gives me a kind of dessert ! By now I'm familiar with the tastes of apple, pear and banana. The first time I tasted the apple and the pear I wasn't that thrilled about it, they tasted a bit -well, what can I say -different! My mum tried to add a bit of her own milk to them, but it wasn't quite the same. Still, after a couple of days I started to eat them with great pleasure. The banana on the other hand was love at first sight. My mum finds me a bit funny while I eat, for I chat all the way through the feeding
-mmm mmmm mmmm mmmm
something like this is what I say and my mum likes to interpret it as "yummie yummie" an interpretation that wouldn't be so far from the truth.

The introduction of fruit to my diet has had dramatic effects on the contents of my nappies -which after my sleeping pattern is the second most interesting subject to my mum. Can you imagine! In the last 4 months my mum has actually aquired a technical vocabulary of nappy-content that is so rich that she could give a University-lecture about it. The fluidity, the colour, the frequency and the abundancy, all is a subject of her daily examination (which she then dutifully reports to my dad when he comes home from work -much to his despere). And so it was that after the first time I had eaten banana my mum was extremely startled when she changed my nappy. She took the nappy and examined it closely (sincerely I thought she was about to eat the content, as she kept it so close to her face). Then she let out a small shriek and ran to show it to my father.
-He's got worms. WORMS...maybe that's why he's not sleeping so well (remember she was on an eternal search for the root of that problem). LOOK!
My dad was actually brushing his teeth at that moment and from his face it was clear that he was pretty shocked as well -although I suspect that he was more shocked by the fact my mum thought that he would be intersted in such a close nappy-inspection, than actually by it's contents!
After a short, but intensive conference, my parents concluded that what they saw in the nappy wasn't actually worms, but the fibers of the banana! What a relief. Although my mum was just slightly disappointed not to have found the reason for my sleep-problems!! A couple of days later the contents of my nappy became again the subject of close inspection. I had eaten apple the day before, and when my mum changed my nappy she could (sniffing in the air -hm, as one does) actually smell the apple! My mum wouldn't have been more surprised if there had been a 500 dollar bill in the nappy! Then she argued that, well, when he eats only milk, the nappy-contents actually have a sweet milky smell (it IS frightening how familiar she is with all aspects of these things), so why would it be surprising if it smells of apple after eating one? The thought actually cheered her up -apple smelling shit, maybe there was even market for it! Then she continued cleaning me (yes, for she had ignored her duties while doing her little research -leaving me dirty and a helpless witness to the scene). It was then that she realized. EUREKA! It was the wipes that she used to clean me that smelled of apple. The nappy-content had just its, well, usual nappy-content's smell (don't force me to analyse it closer!). In a couple of weeks my parents will start to introduce solid food to my diet, and who knows which surprises it will offer at the time of nappy-change to my curious mum!

P.S.
I've started sleeping 10-11 hours without interruption during the night, and I've learnt to fall asleep by myself, but I'll write more about that in my next posting

Update

Fidd-fiju
(my mum claims that this is a whistling-sound) ...I'm calling your attention for we're back in Pavia -well, actually we came a week ago, but hey, we have had other things to do than just hanging on internet all day long :) The trip back from Arezzo was quite nice. I surprised my parents by sleeping until Piacenza -I would have slept all the way if it hadn't been for heavy and slow traffic around Firenze which delayed the trip by half an hour. This was very unexpected (the sleep, not the delay around Firenze which should always be scheduled in your travel plans!) as lately I don't sleep so much during the day (not to talk about the nights...but that's a different story!). At the pay-toll station in Piacenza we stopped to empty the milk-tanks and then the last part of the trip I trained for the infant-multitask-championship. I chatted continuously until we arrived to the doorstep in Pavia, while keeping up to 5 fingers in my mouth AND kicking my socks of. I challange any baby my age to do better :)
The first few days at home were a bit sad, only me and mum -no dad, no grandparents, no big garden to play in and no cat to play with. The weather was also rather bad, after months and months of dry weather we had heavy rain for some days. My mum had to bring me out in the kangaroobag, armed with an umbrella, trying not to be hit by the lightnings. You can see the hail that we had one evening on this picture! And the answer is NO, we did not go out that evening, even if it might have been an important part in my viking-training! Now the high-pressure area has arrived in Italy and the forecast is for 30°C this week. We're already sweating!

Lately my parents have been informing themselves on their own sleeping pattern while they were young. Well, my sleep-problems shouldn't come as any surprise to them..I guess they are living their own kharma with me...! If that's possible! My mum hardly ever slept during the day and my dad went through a period where he didn't sleep at all during the night! The sum of the two of them is...well, ME !