Food or Not

Imagine you're in a strange new place full of curious objects with various textures and smells. How do you decide what's edible and what's not? Well Siiri, in her fresh baby wisdom , has figured out the solution this question: if it's on the floor it's edible!

Siiri likes going treasure hunting for food. When she gets tired of her toys she sometimes crawls to her feeding chair. The floor there is often covered with food crumbs. Siiri is quite a neat eater but still the floor often has something to discover. That's because Siiri makes sure to maintain her secret food stash. Almost like a squirrel hiding nuts in the soil, Siiri casually throws bits and pieces of her food on the floor. Just a couple of days ago she spent minutes eating half a slice of bread and then she asked for the other half. I looked away for a moment and suddenly the bread was gone! "Siiri, what happened to the bread I gave you?". She gave me an innocent look , as if she had never even seen that bread. I went closer and stepped on something - then I saw that she had carefully ripped the bread into inch-by-inch pieces and tossed them all around her feeding chair. I laughed, collected all the pieces and asked her with a smirk if she knew why there's bread on the floor. She stretched out to see the floor and started to giggle.

She has obviously already learned that you reap what you sow because she often finds a moment during her eating time to sow some of her food for future need. I check that part of the floor at least twice a day. I'm usually not that fond of cleaning floors but I need to make sure she doesn't eat any spoiled food. A day old bread is dry and crunchy but otherwise perfectly okay. Even a week old cereal puff is still a cereal puff. However, if she finds anything moist with meat in it that's been kept at room temperature for more than 24 hours she is likely to get food poisoning.

She finds food elsewhere as well. I keep raisins, nuts and dried fruit in a drawer that Siiri can reach. She likes to take out the packages and shake them. I make sure they're all properly sealed and if she does manage to get her hands on any raisins, I simply confiscate them. My babysitter (the one I found on the Internet) is less skilled it seems. I came home and found some nuts and raisins on the floor. She didn't comment any of it but one bag was ripped open seemingly in an attempt to confiscate it. I didn't think much of it. I collected everything in sight and forgot about it. Until later that day. I was cooking and Siiri was free roaming on the floor. I noticed she was quite concentrated and she was eating something. I jumped to her and asked her, "Siiri, what are you eating? Please open your mouth." I pried open her mouth and retrieved one complete hazelnut and another one chewed in pieces and half gone. The American Academy of Pediatrics suggests avoiding peanuts and tree nuts until the child turns 3. Hazelnut is the food that Erkki is most allergic to which means Siiri is in the risk group for also developing an allergy to hazelnuts. I was planning to wait for a LONG-LONG time before I offer any hazelnuts to Siiri but apparently she had other plans.

Obviously, not everything on the floor is what I'd call food. She likes to try anything she gets her hands on, even if it's a lamb wool tuft or a piece of paper tissue. When she finds anything odd she picks it up, shows it to me from across the room and quickly flips it in her mouth. Then she turns around and crawls away as fast as she can while I go after her. I thought she's only eating such things to get me to chase after her so I taught her, "no, don't eat it" and I pointed at the trash she had found and I shook my head. She knows head-shaking means "no". She looked at me, looked at the piece of trash in her hand and shook her head, then gave me another glance, flipped the trash in her mouth and turned around to crawl away as fast as possible.

I only wish she was that adventurous about food when she sits in the feeding chair. In my opinion her menu seems a bit too bland. She likes cereal puffs (Estonian product called "Kamapallid") but she doesn't want them them with milk or yogurt so she eats them plain and dry. She often likes yogurt as well but only plain yogurt. She is suspicious about any new foods that I offer her. Perhaps I should just leave any new foods on the floor for her to discover on her own. Perhaps I would if it wouldn't be so similar to how people feed their dogs!

Although I myself would never try eating random bits from the floor I've heard such behavior is great for the immune system. Bon appetit!

Raising Pink

I just got back from the movies where I saw Clash of the Titans in 3D. Yes indeed! They finally upgraded one cinema to 3D here. It was a surprise for me. I simply wanted to go to the movies and when I checked the time table, Clash of the Titans was marked as 3D. Well actually I had read that the cinema announced they were going 3D but they announced it on April 1st and I thought it was an unusually cruel April Fools joke. I saw the movie with several friends and when the movie had ended I felt really positive about it. I loved the adventure story, I enjoyed the cast, music was amazingly thrilling, 3D was really cool and I truly enjoyed the fairy-tale-like drama. I mean, it doesn't get much more dramatic than this: Save the princess and defeat the monster! To my surprise, my friends thought it was a really pointless movie with amazing action scenes. It didn't seem at all pointless to me, which could mean two things: first, being a mother and not having time to read the news has really dumbed me down. What seems pointless to others is fun and entertaining to me. Second, it could mean I need to go to the movies more often! Or perhaps, as I just realized, it could simply mean that among my friends, I love drama and fairy tales the most.

In this fairy tale they even had Pegasuses, which is almost as cute as unicorns. I still remember how mesmerised I was when I saw unicorns in Legend (with Tom Cruise). I'm not much of a horse person. Horses eat with their mouth open and they crap where they eat. Normal animals have the decency to dig a hole or at least they move a bit further from where they live but horses just don't care. In that sense, horses are about as cool and amazing as cows! Still, for some reason horses are one of many girly symbols. I would understand talk about the prince who arrive on the horse, but little girls are really interested in the horses themselves. Or better yet, ponies. I used to assume it was peer pressure, until I noticed that Siiri likes horses a lot. She hasn't been around other little girls who are enthusiastic about horses. It's almost as if horses automatically trigger girly "It's so cute, can I keep it?"-response. Siiri also likes pink and anything that glitters. She is extremely fond of glittering tiaras. Siiri seems to be even more girly than I am! I can just imagine a room decorated with pink and fluffy furniture; toy ponies and fairy tale symbolics everywhere.

I recently bought Siiri a new spring outdoors clothing set and it's VERY PINK! When we go out, Siiri is as pink as it gets from head to toe and it suits her so well. Gender-neutral colors just aren't the way to go. With children's clothing the choices are: girly, boyish and ugly. Anything that isn't clearly meant for either boys or girls is a random mix of brown and green. I normally like green and I could have kept buying it for Siiri but lets be honest, green just isn't her color! Pink works with her complexion so much better.

I do understand the entire issue of raising our daughters to be self confident women who stand up for what they deserve in this patriarchal society. I understand that there is a theory about the negative effects fairy tales have on girls and how girls shouldn't be taught to wait for some prince to rescue them. I've even heard that little girls and boys are treated differently from very early age. Girls are treated like small fragile dolls while boys are playfully wrestled with. I do agree that girls should be raised with great self worth, so they do what they like, in stead of what our society tells them to do, and boys should be raised so that they can do (some) girly things if they REALLY want to. The right way to raise gender-unbiased children isn't by dressing our children so that no one can tell what IT is. Girls are still girls and boys are still boys. Dressing a baby as IT might mean that IT gets no gender influenced treatment but my goal isn't to have Siiri treated as some undefined IT.

Also, one thought that always argues in my favor - if we had had a son, would Erkki and all our feministically-inclined friends think it's okay to occasionally dress him up in a pink dress and let her play with dolls? That would be plain freaky! Very sick! Parents who dress their baby son in a pink dress need to get their head examined. Such false gender treatment could lead to an inability to find friends in school. Yet Siiri has worn clothing that is clearly made for boys and she has played with toy cars. How much further do I let it go? Should I also deprive her of fairy tales and little pony figurines? No! Siiri, as a little girl, has a right to as much pink and glitter as she could possibly want.



There must be a way to still raise Siiri to have a high self worth as a female. Perhaps I'll read her the story of Snow White and then later comment on how she married the prince way too fast without even knowing him! Anyway, whats wrong with teaching Siiri that she should never lose hope no matter how bleak life seems? Bad luck can turn into good luck and everything will turn out well in the end.

Roomba Review

This is a what you've been waiting for, whether you knew it or not. This is what you wish to learn more about, even if you hadn't thought of it before. How many of you have been cleaning your home and thinking, "This is a job even a robot could do. So why isn't there a robot that does it?" In this sense, Roomba is the great dream come true. It's the robot that does your tedious work for you.

When I first saw Roomba, the vacuum-cleaning home robot, I was surprised it was so big. Then I realized it's the smallest vacuum-cleaner I've ever seen, except for the hand held mini-vacuums I've seen on TV. Then Erkki turned it on and I was surprised it was so loud. Again, I must have had some odd illusions about Roomba because it's much quieter than our normal vacuum cleaner. Roomba made cool R2D2 beeping sound (that's the beeping robot in Star Wars) and started to do it's little task of vacuuming all floors. It went on its way in our apartment, from one end of the room to another, making abrupt unexpected turns and moving in annoyingly random patterns.

We knew it would take a long time for it to finish but we didn't expect it to take a couple of hours. Doesn't seem that much now, but I was looking at my watch every 10 minutes, "Roomba STILL hasn't finished!". Finally there was R2D2 beeping again and we rushed to see what Roomba had accomplished. The floor looked cleaner than before but there were several uncleaned blotches covered with crumbs and hair. I was quite disappointed. Until we cleaned and emptied Roomba - it was so full it was hard to believe it had all come from only one room. It looked like the room had never been dusted before. There was so much fallen hair I instinctively started to look for bald spots on my head. Even though Roomba missed some spots it is obviously a much more thorough duster than I am.

I gave it some time until I wrote this review because I wanted to see how Roomba would work over a longer period of time. Now we've had it for 3 months and I'm very satisfied. I've learned that Roomba works best in smaller space. I close it in a room for 20-30 minutes and then turn it off and take it to another room. Roomba is supposed to use it's dock for orientation but I just want it to do it's random movements until the room is clean enough for me. It takes a while to finish the entire apartment but it doesn't require much active time from me. I can play with Siiri in another room while Roomba is working. Siiri called it "oomb-oomb" a couple of times.

Anyone who is worried about the Terminator scenario and robots taking over the world, should just observe Roomba working and they're guaranteed to sleep better at night. Roomba bumps into things, gets lost behind simple pieces of furniture and gets stuck in the most unexpected places. One time it had jammed itself under the dresser and persistently tried to move forward getting more and more jammed. Watching Roomba makes people say things like, "awwwww, don't go there. awww. It's lost again." People treat Roomba like a dumb pet.

All in all, if you give Roomba some borders and enough time, it will do an excellent job. I'm glad we have it.

And I'd like to leave you with this:
Youtube video: Roomba Terminator vs Cat