Gingerbread Cookies

I really do have too much energy for spending my time being idle and doing really boring repetitive tasks. Thus I find stuff to really care about. Yeah, okay, I really care about my kids but it would be really unhealthy to obsess about their development too much. I can just imagine it, "Siiri, I see you drew a sun, again! But you already knew how to draw it! Now try to draw a cat. Practice!" . If I really want to push someone to change and improve themselves for my entertainment, I'd rather it would be me. So I try to learn new things.

I have horrible memory, so at first I tried to do some memory exercises. Pretty soon I realized that it's frustrating to spend my time doing something I'm terrible at. Then I thought I would learn to dance better. I'm not good at it, but it's not nearly as bad as with memory. I took on the challenge to master all the dances on Kinect's "Dance Central 2". That was also going badly enough that I kind of gave up. It's wonderful physical exercise but I'm pretty sure that's one challenge that is not really worth the effort. At least not with my grasp of choreography and my lacking physical memory. Then I thought - I haven't made the perfect gingerbread cookies! 

Gingerbread cookies are not just a sugary treat. They symbolize my favorite holiday!  There's so much tasty food that is only eaten during Christmas. I'm not religious at all anymore and the entire baby Jesus theme is just a nice childhood memory, especially because I barely hear anything about Jesus anymore now that I'm surrounded by spiritualists, pagans, atheists and agnostics. I love Christmas for all the candles and spices, the smell of a spruce tree and the activity of baking and eating fresh gingerbread cookies.  As long as I remember, Christmas has always had those things. Most people don't really think about it but when you have kids, the things you do become their childhood memories. How could Siiri have a childhood memory of family Christmas if we're too lazy to celebrate Christmas. That just won't do! We should make the most of it! I want my kids to have childhood memories of Christmas that are worth remembering. One thing that I always remember about Christmas, is when we were kids, we took a bunch of gingerbread dough and made all kinds of shapes and a lot of cookies. Everything was covered in flour and the entire home smelled like gingerbread spices. We always bought the dough and the quality was different every time. How about if I learn to make our own gingerbread dough, so that it will be good every time. My kids could some day eat store-bought cookies and say, "yeah, it's good, but not as good as the ones mom makes.". It's a silly thing to take pride in but I really want to be able to make something better than can be bought in a store, something uniquely excellent.

I started by researching recipes on Internet. The basic idea is that you melt and caramelize sugar, add water, butter and more sugar, then let cool a bit, add spices, let cool a bit more and then add egg and flour. Easy enough. Except it's such a classic treat that everyone has their own recipe. Another problem is that the recipes have been modernized to contain margarine, "gingerbread spice" and special caramelized sugar syrup. I really wanted an ancient-sounding recipe, like something that grannies might have used decades ago. I picked two recipes that were as different as possible. One of them was a really basic gingerbread dough recipe from an old soviet era cooking book. Those cookies were good but nothing special. The other recipe was interesting, though. I found it in some forum post (that I haven't been able to find again). It said, "This is my great-great-aunt's recipe...". WOW, cool!   A recipe with genuine ancient family background. That's exactly what I'm looking for! Also, the recipe said, "and then add hot coffee". Plus it had twice as many spices and herbs as any other recipe!

Both recipes contained orange zest (orange part of the orange peel) but I know from experience that adding orange zest sometimes it leaves visible small pieces of orange peel in the pastry. My goal was to make perfect cookies so I wanted to avoid that. Then I had an idea - I will dry the peels and then quickly grind them to dust with a mortar and pestle. So I took the orange and peeled it with a potato peeler. Superb thickness, without any of the bitter white part. Then I let it dry overnight. The next morning I got up and inspected it - the long orange peels had turned into long pieces of orange rubber.  I tried to grind one piece. After two minutes of grinding it was still the same piece of rubber. Sugar will surely help! A added some sugar and used the mortar and pestle for another couple of minutes and inspected it - now it looked like an orange piece of rubber half-hidden in powdered sugar.  "No, that doesn't look right!". I searched it on the Internet and found out I was supposed to dry the peels  for 3-4 days. I didn't have 3-4 days!  Okay, but I could just apply a bit of heat. So I put it in the oven at 120 C and the oven fan turned on. About 30 minutes later I was walking around the kitchen being happy with my idea to try the oven until I smelled something strange - cooked orange peels! Gaaah! I rushed to the oven and took them out. They were completely dry and crispy but half of it now looked slightly brown. Well, at least it was dry. So I tried to grind it: in stead of orange dust, it turned into orange sand, leaving visible small pieces of orange peel in the cookies.  Epilogue: The next time I just used a fine grater on fresh oranges and ended up with fine wet powder perfect for the cookies!

Okay, so I'll give you the recipe as well. I'll add the spice names in Estonian because even I don't know the translation of some of them. 1 dl is 100 ml. 100 ml liquid weighs roughly 100g. The first time there wasn't enough water or I added too much flour. The result was a very crumbly dough which couldn't be used until I added water and flour just before we made the cookies. The second time I made it, I added water to the dough before I let it sit in the refrigerator. The second time I also used twice the amount allspice and caramelized the sugar even darker. It looks and smells even better than the first time. 

PS! We actually baked the gingerbread cookies with several friends  and we had four different kinds of dough, including two (Eesti Pagar and Vertigo) that had got the best rating in two separate articles comparing gingerbread doughs sold in Estonia. This dough was most people's favorite that night.
PPS! Vertigo's dough was very good. Eesti Pagar's dough was bland and the cookies turned into wood the next day.

Gingerbread Cookies

2 dl sugar (for caramelizing)

1.5 dl hot coffee

3 dl sugar (originally 2.5-3 dl)

250 g butter

Spices:

---0.5 tsp clove (nelk)

---1 tsp cinnamon (kaneel)

---1 orange zest or 1 lemon zest (riivitud koor)

---0.5 tsp cardamom (kardemon)

---0.5 tsp powdered ginger (jahvatatud ingver)

---a bit of nutmeg  (muskaatpähkel)

---5-6 allspice berries, ground (jahvatatud vürtspipra tera)

1 egg

800-900 g flour (I used pastry flour 405)

3-4 tsp baking powder

Pour 2 dl sugar into a thick-bottomed pot and caramelize. This is the tricky part. I had best result when I used two spoons and when the sugar started to melt, I kept the sides of the pot and the spoons clean of the melted sugar, otherwise it will turn hard in only a moment. When sugar is sufficiently brown, remove the pot from heat and then add hot coffee. Be careful. Mix constantly and beware the steam. Then mix (on very low heat) until sugar is dissolved. Sounds easier than it is. I kept adding small amounts of water because it took so long. Remove from heat and add butter. Add sugar and butter and mix and melt it all together. Let the mixture cool. When it's half-way cooled, add spices. When it's completely cooled, mix in the egg and flour, with baking powder mixed into the flour. Add water if the dough is too crumbly. Refrigerate for a couple of days before using the dough. 

Glass of Water

If I ask you, "is the glass half full or half empty, you will probably say "it's half full" because that's the learned answer. Everyone knows that it's wrong to point out the negative. How about we give it another try. Quick, think of the answer before you continue reading, "Describe winter!". Remember the first words that popped into your head. Did you think of soft beautiful snow or the cold moist wind? Do you see winter as a wonderful season with lots of holidays or a wonderful opportunity to slip on ice and get hurt. For me, the first word I thought of, was "cold, blizzard, being indoors cuddled up in a warm blanket". This includes the problem with winter and a solution to the problem.

I'm a very negative person and I can't change it. I didn't really notice it until I was already in the university. I met so many new people and I talked about old and new topics and I realized that people actually have such different personalities. It seems like an obvious thing, but during school years I was too busy trying to conform to the majority mindset to really understand my own personality. Some people are always positive, no matter what the topic is. It's almost like they live in a different world where the reality is fundamentally different.

I like to think of myself as an energetic and ambitious person but when I have a discussion with someone, I tend to energetically say the most negative things possible. It's horrible! Even when I say something positive, it is often really something negative in disguise. "I love this cereal, it doesn't get as soggy as most of them!", "It's so warm outside ... that all the snow has turned into mud", "This is one of my favorite shirts, too bad I don't have anything to wear it with.". I've tried to stop myself but I can't. Even when I'm in a really positive mood, I'll just have better control over what I say out loud.

It's a weakness and a strength but mostly it's just really annoying. I even annoy myself with it. Can't imagine how others put up with it. It actually makes me less able to go along with new ideas. I notice the potential problems way sooner than the potential gains. Initially I'm usually very pessimistic and trying really hard to hide it and keep an open mind. After a while I have finished thinking about the problems and the possible solutions and I'll realize that it actually is a good idea. Or I'll be stuck on a small problem and I need someone else to point out that the potential gains are still worth it. This sort of negativity doesn't even make me unique or special in any way either, as about 50% of people are really like that.

In the first year of university when I realized that all people are different, I became obsessed with personality theories. And yes, it seems I am always obsessed about something - food, nutrition, extreme embroidery, personalities, reading, drawing, hair, kids, etc. Most of my obsessions pass after a while and leave something behind. Being obsessed with personality theories was one of the biggest obsessions in my life, perhaps even worse than nutrition. Actually I was planning to be a psychologist when I graduated high school but the competition was too tough. Among other things I learned from my obsession that one of the personality dichotomies of Grigoriy Reinin divides people into two groups:  positivists and negativists (that's how they were translated to English).  Roughly half of all people are the "glass is half empty" kind of people whether they like it or not. Well, I don't like it. I think it would be better to think about all the positive stuff first but the best that I can do is to try and hide it better.

I should also mention that being a negativist is not the same as being a pessimist. I notice the negative stuff so I can ensure that I avoid them on my journey to a positive future. Like when I bake a cake, I'm convinced that it will turn out delicious (otherwise I wouldn't waste my time) but while I'm baking it, I'm constantly thinking about the possible ways I could ruin it so that I can avoid them. It's a kind of skepticism which can be very useful but unfortunately can't be turned off.

If half of all people are really skeptical like that then perhaps some of you recognized yourself in this post. Perhaps this personality trait isn't so obvious in my general writing style but that's because I usually write about things after I have already formed an opinion about. My first thought might be negative but when I finish my contemplation, my opinion is rather balanced between positive and negative.

Also, being a negativist doesn't make me any less self-absorbed as we can see from this totally egocentric blog post.

PS! Kids are doing great. Liisa holds her head really well and already tries to crawl. I haven't told her that she won't be able to do that until she's 5-6 months old. Siiri has reached her terrible twos and she gets really demanding in the middle of the night. I'm still planning on writing a longer post about that in the near future so I'll leave it at that.

Daily Torture

Pain tolerance is difficult to quantify. I usually see myself as having rather high pain tolerance, but it really depends on what kind of pain we're talking about. I've experienced several kinds of pain in my life and childbirth wasn't even the worst of it. I think I handled those very well, so perhaps my pain tolerance is quite high, except when it comes to using mouth wash, I am really truly sensitive. I'm like a little baby. Or perhaps I'm making some bold assumptions. I'm assuming people don't usually get tears when they use a mouth wash. Is that normal? Mouth wash stings like crazy. Maybe it's just one of my traits - I'm also VERY sensitive to spicy food. Often when eating spicy food, I feel like my mouth is on fire, tears are running down my cheeks, I'm desperately holding ice water in my mouth and reaching for a handkerchief, someone else eating the same food just shrugs and says, "it's a bit spicey, but not THAT hot" .

Speaking of tooth-related torture, I think dental floss is just brutal. I get shivers down my spine when I think of cutting my gum with a piece of string. Like really! That's horror movie level of horrible. That could be a scene in the Saw movie series and it wouldn't be out of place. Still, I can't argue, it is effective in dental hygiene. I just wish it wasn't so horrible. I started flossing a month ago so I'm still getting used to it and I hurt myself really often. Some of you might think, "you didn't floss before?! OH MY GOD!!! Nasty.". And the rest of, I guess majority, would think, "people actually floss? ". In Estonia people don't normally floss. Perhaps dental floss wasn't available during soviet times. I know some women who started flossing in their twenties but it certainly isn't widespread in Estonia. Even in USA, where people have been taught to floss since they were children, only 10-40%* of people floss daily (*as I read from Wikipedia). 

Oh god, why am I thinking of teeth so much?! Oh yeah, I have a dental appointment tomorrow.

About a month ago I went to a dentist's just to get my teeth checked. The dentist wasn't happy at all. She described how I need about €2000 worth of tooth care. No, my teeth aren't horrible and she didn't even find any cavities. That's the cost of having crowns fitted on the teeth on my favored side. Maybe that's a good idea, maybe not, maybe it's just a sales tactic. I'm going to a different dentist tomorrow to get a second opinion. Actually I'm not going to a different doctor because the number scared me. I'm going to a different doctor because that place looked creepy. I'm not too fond of going to a dentist but the modern dentists offices, full of sterile gadgets and expensive high-tech equipment, are kind of soothing. That place wasn't. Imagine an old soviet apartment building. On the first floor, one of the apartments has been built into a dentist's office. The chair looks like it might squeak but it doesn't. The soviet era reception desk is equipped with a simple laptop. The laptop isn't connected to the Internet (!!!). The drill looks about 10 years old. The dentist ensured me that only the drill tips really matter but the drill did look questionable. The cupboard full of cotton and other such things didn't even have a door. It would have been okay if it was meant that way, but it looked like the door fell off at some point and they didn't have money to fix it. But the prices were somewhat cheaper and the doctor seemed very skilled so initially I thought I would ignore the problems. But then I started paying for the check-up and found out they only take cash! "You don't take card? Uhm, really? No card?". I barely had any cash with me but fortunately spare change at the bottom of the bag made up for what I was lacking in my wallet. I even considered it before I left home and we agreed with Erkki that there is no way they won't accept card. Even some second-hand stores can afford to enable card payments. Even the small corner stores that only sell stale bread and booze accept card. I am not going to carry hundreds of euros in my wallet for each of those dentist's appointments just because the dentist's office is stuck in the soviet time. If I fix my teeth in a place like that and something, anything, goes wrong, I would just ask myself, "Well, what did you expect?". So tomorrow I'm going to Maxilla, which is the most modern, but also the most expensive dentist in Tartu. For a while I felt really guilty about it - I'm going to pay a lot more to have the exact same procedures just so I can pay with a card. But then I realized that I wouldn't even buy a cell phone in a place that looked that iffy.

I still wonder how important it really is to floss daily. Is it like a "must" rule or more like a suggestion. As a mother, I try to take this sort of universal advice seriously. At first I tried to treat all of them very seriously because some of them really do make sense but when you start paying attention, you'll realize how surrounded we are by rules.  Never leave a baby alone in the tub. Always wear a helmet when riding a bicycle. Always wear your seat belt. Bathe children every day. Wash your teeth after every meal, or at least twice a day, 3 minutes. Floss every day. Test your smoke detector every week. Dust every week. Change bed sheets every week, or every two weeks. Eat fish twice a week. Do not eat more than half an egg on average per day. I could fill a page or two with rules that everyone "must" follow, or else! While some of them really are important, no exceptions allowed, this flossing thing seems like more of a suggestion. But I guess it's good for the gums so I keep on torturing myself. And after flossing mouth wash actually is a good idea, so torture is followed by more torture. ...And people think masochism is most widely spread among emo self-cutters. 

Tall Like Us

"Oh they grow up so fast" is something that people in movies and forums say all the time. I'm not sure if that's true. The first two months with Siiri lasted FOREVER. Like really: sleepless nights, getting used to feeding all the time, still trying to maintain some level of activity at home and also social activity. Siiri was a very calm kid but it was tough with the night-time feedings and I sometimes lived for my daily cup of coffee. It was the best moment of each day. Well of course it was great to observe the early development of a baby and the first smiles and her cute struggles to lift her head, but it was always better after I had had my coffee. I remember being very sleepy. Now with Liisa I don't even notice the night-time feedings most of the time. I fall asleep while feeding and put her in bed when I wake up.

The perception of time has been very different with the second child. Weeks just whooosh past me in a blur of multitasking. I sometimes see social events being announced in Facebook and it feels too inconvenient to actually try to attend them. I did go to the events that I really wanted to go to and I don't have much regrets about other events. I do miss movie nights but there really haven't been many good movies lately so it's not a huge loss. What's important is that I don't feel left out. I kinda miss playing role-playing-games (e.g. Dungeons and Dragons) but I really can't imagine how I could do that at the moment. Maybe in a couple of years. Or maybe just short one-session games that don't demand any weekly commitment.

The perception of child's growth had definitely been different with Liisa. With Siiri, as was expected with a firstborn,  I was constantly observing everything. I mentioned to Erkki when I thought Siiri had grown another centimeter, I observed how Siiri played with toys , I counted how many seconds she can hold her head, I fussed about every time Siiri cried loudly and tried to figure out the cause. With Liisa, I just take it easy and just make sure she looks healthy and seems to enjoy her life. She seemed to be growing quite a lot but we had no idea how much because me or Erkki never bothered to measure or weigh her before her first doctor's visit. The nurse finally weighed her and she had grown 5 cm and 1 kg in her first month. That's a lot. The two-month measurements we had to do ourselves because there are no vaccine shots at that age and there was no reason to take her to the doctor's. During her second month she grow another 5 cm and gained another 1,4-1,5 kg. No wonder Liisa keeps growing out of her clothes. She's as tall as Siiri was at three months. Liisa feels very strong.

While Liisa is getting bigger, I am getting smaller. I lost 8 kg in the first month and another 3 in the second month. Out of the 18 kilos, it's 11 down and 7 to go. I'm currently still on the weight loss trend so I expect to reach my normal weight soon enough. I'm also using some of my free moments to do achievements in the physical games of Xbox Kinect which is quite a workout.

One thing that hasn't changed is my dislike for walking the baby like it's a dog or something. Daily walks shouldn't be a social obligation in a place as cold as Estonia. It easily takes over an hour to coordinate the clothing and feedings and diaper-changing to get two kids outside... so I could carefully walk around with them, making sure no one gets hit by a car or falls in the water or steps on dog poop. I only do it for Siiri's entertainment. I was going to take them outside again today and I was guilt tripping about not having the energy to start getting us ready for the ugly cold and wet outdoors but then I realized it was already close to noon, I had been awake for 4 hours and I still hadn't made it to eating my breakfast (a truly rare occurrance) and according to schedule I was already supposed to start preparing lunch. Soon after lunch it would be Siiri's bedtime. I was relieved I didn't have time to go outside.

Schedule is one thing I didn't have when I was at home with Siiri. I ate whatever I could whenever I wanted. Mostly fruit and fairly healthy snacks and then dinner with Erkki. With Siiri that's not enough. She really does get three warm meals per day: porridge in the morning, last night's leftovers for lunch and a proper dinner all together in the evening. It would be stupid of me not to eat with her so I do get to eat regular healthy meals and it makes a world of difference in how I feel emotionally and physically.

Despite all the hassle of sticking to Siiri's schedule and making sure she's enjoying her life, I really enjoy having her around. I know conversations with a 2.5-year old aren't very complicated but it's still much more fulfilling than checking the messenger every two hours to see if any of my friends has time to chat a little bit and going to an internet forum when all my friends are doing something useful. Besides, it's actually very nice to explain the world to Siiri. I especially enjoy describing which casual-looking household items could kill her and how.

By the way, my paranoia about online Xbox is very much justified. I finished all the missions and all the achievements in Assassin's Creed Brotherhood, except for the multiplayer part. I couldn't leave it at that so I made a 3-month purchase to get online access for my Xbox account with Xbox Gold Membership. I got right at it. When the kids were asleep, I logged in to multiplayer and spent 40 minutes getting used to the gameplay. Then Erkki came into the room and I we started preparing dinner so I logged out. The next day Liisa was asleep and Siiri was playing on her own so I logged in. I played a 10-minute match and I was about to start another one but noticed that whenever Siiri says something (and she talks quite a lot), my player's name has a sound icon. I wasn't using any headphones and no one else was using them either! I replied to Siiri, and again there was the sound icon. I frantically started looking for options but then panicked and just turned off the console. As it turns out, Kinect has a built-in microphone and as soon as I logged into multiplayer, it started broadcasting my living room sounds to seven strangers! Oh my God I feel my privacy was so violated. And I feel embarrassed because in AC Brotherhood it's not possible to turn off the sounds of someone else's microphone. Someone had to put up with some casual Estonian conversation between me and Erkki and some Siiri's ranting, but that's about it.

Despite the privacy issue, I still have achievements to get, so I turned off Kinect and joined the multiplayer of the new Assassin's Creed Revelations. Other players there are just as new at the game as I am and it's much more fun this way. Surprisingly, it's so easy to get addicted to the unpredictable nature of online gaming and I have made very little progress with the single player part of the game. Soon I'll have all the achievements of AC Revelations multiplayer and I can get back to the story part of the game.

Porcelain Pony

I've been playing Assassin's Creed Brotherhood and trying to get more achievement points and right now I totally hate the game. There are still many frustrating parts in the game that I can't complete with high score and I'm starting to think it's impossible for me to get maximum achievement score anyway. I could handle the nasty difficult missions but I just can't handle the pressure of joining multiplayer. I don't like multiplayer games. I've tried at least one and I constantly felt awkward knowing that there is a real person behind every human (and other) that are running around on my computer screen. My computer is almost like my safe haven. I don't want anyone running around in it! The same with the TV. It's a part of my home, my own safe zone. But whenever I turn on Xbox, I start to feel a bit awkward. My subconscious keeps reminding me that Xbox Kinect has a camera and it's connected to the internet. And it's filming ALL THE TIME. I don't even know if that's true but it could be. And there could easily be Xbox viruses out there for the sole purpose of broadcasting the video feed to some pervert's computer. I make sure not to get caught walking around in underwear while Kinect is broadcasting... *khm* I mean turned on ...I mean switched on.

I do understand that my paranoia is unnecessary. Still I'm sure most people who own a a webcam understand it. I actually don't know about other people but when I bought a webcam to talk with forum buddies from across the world, I also developed a habit of always checking if it's switched on. I even got a webcam with a plastic slider that physically covers the camera, so that I can safely keep it closed most of the time. Kinect doesn't have such a slider. I guess Microsoft itself is to blame for the paranoia. Xbox Kinect came with a "free game" that had a habit of making surprise photos of the player. I was really surprised the first time it showed me a picture of my living room and in the middle of living room I was jumping. I was wearing very casual clothes and it was a really bad picture. Ever since then I try to look nice in front of Kinect because I never know when it might start making pictures. Basically it makes me really self-concious whenever I notice that Siiri has accidentally switched on Xbox and the room or myself look messy.

This absurd paranoia wouldn't be helped one bit if the people on the TV screen in our living room were actual people who could really see my character walking around. And I really would feel uneasy about XBox Live Gold membership which would allow video conversations with my Windows Live Messenger contacts. Even if I would never use it, Siiri accidentally might.  So I don't want anything to do with Assassin's Creed Brotherhood multiplayer but then I can't get all the achievements and then the game feels incomplete. And if I can't REALLY complete it, then it feels weird to start playing the next Assassin's Creed game which should be released at the end of the month. So now I'm at a standstill. Assassin's Creed used to be my favorite game but now I really truly don't want to do the multiplayer part of the game and that's alienating me from the entire series.

Actually that's not what I planned to write about. There's another issue that has been on my mind. Many issues really. I have too much time to ponder dumb thoughts. Anyway... There's a fairy tale that's bugging me. Me and Erkki bought a fairy tale book titled, "Fairy Tales for Girls". The entire idea of such a book is annoyingly sexist, but it was the only fairy tale book with so many pictures and so many good classic fairy tales that we still didn't have. Apparently Three Bears is well suited for girls, as well as Little Red Riding Hood, Three Pigs and many other Siiri's favorites. There are a couple of novel fairy tales that I certainly didn't hear when I was a little girl, and a good thing that is. The novel fairy tales lack any logic, thus making them perfect for those young future women (makes sense in the twisted mind of a sexist publisher who would publish such a book in the first place). My favorite is a fairy tale called the Porcelain Pony.

Once upon a time there was a little girl living with her father. A strange lady showed up and introduced herself as her aunt who has come to take care of her. The aunt moved in but she was very mean to the girl. One night the father disappeared. The aunt made the girl work a lot and treated her badly and one day when the girl was out grocery shopping for the woman, she found a porcelain pony on a shelf in the store. The shopkeeper had never seen it before and told the girl to keep it. She took it home and hid it under her pillow. The porcelain pony turned into a real live pony at night. They suddenly found themselves outside together and the pony told the girl that he's there to help her father who is locked up in a tower several-day journey away on top of an unclimbable mountain. A cannibalistic monster is planning to eat her father in the morning. The only way to save the father would be with the help of a golden flower that grows nearby and gives the ability to fly, unfortunately no one has ever seen the flower. The girl and the pony set out to find the flower. They search the entire night with no success, but as the first rays of the sun become visible, the girl sees a golden glimmer in the snow. In the snow they find the golden flower. The pony eats it and the girl sits on the pony and together they fly to save the girl's father, so that the monster can't eat him once the sun is up. They reach the tower that has three floors. Each floor has a chest full of treasure that the girl is warned not to touch. She finds the father, gets the key off the sleeping monster, releases the father, then accidentally touches a piece of treasure and they escape the tower with the monster chasing them. Girl and the father get back on the pony and fly back home. The aunt, who is really an evil sorceress, is waiting for them and sends a big storm to bring them down. The pony kicks thunder with his hoofs, sending it toward the sorceress. The sorceress gets hit with the lightning and disappears in a flash of light. They safely land in front of their home and suddenly the pony turns into a handsome prince. He tells them that he's a prince whom the sorceress enchanted to be a white pony at night and a porcelain pony during the day. Now the sorceress is dead and the enchantment is broken. He then asks the girl to marry him. The girl says yes and they live happily ever after.

As you can see, the fairy tale has everything - a white pony that flies, golden flower, treasure, a girl saving the day, and a prince who wants to marry. Everything except logic. Where to begin. Perhaps at the point where they all plummet to their early death at the exact moment when the sorceress gets hit with that lightning and disappears, thus being effectively dead and breaking the enchantment that made the prince a pony. Or maybe there would have been the awkward moment when a girl and her father sit on the back of a prince who has the ability to fly. Actually that shouldn't have been a pony at all because it was no longer nighttime. The fairy tale should have ended with a scene where the girl notices the golden glimmer in the show and starts cheering with joy and hope, but as she turns around toward the pony, she sees a porcelain toy standing on snow, shining in the early morning sun with sad eyes. 


Okay, but imagining that it was a 12-hours-porcelain and 12-hours-alive kind of an enchantment. Kind of rare, but lets imagine that the fairy tale didn't have a gloomy ending. The monster is supposed to eat the father in the morning. Usually in fairy tales that means dawn, but okay, that monster indeed was a heavy sleeper. The pony later said that  the monster will eat the father when the sun is up. So lets say noon. So they  fly several-day's journey in a few hours. If the sun comes up at 8 a.m. and they have four hours until noon, and lets say the "several" is three days journey to that tower (although it might as well be five or six or more). That means they travel 72 hours worth of distance in only 4 hours. I found in a forum that wild west mail courier Pony Express riders averaged about 120 km per day. That's 360 km in 4 hours, or 90 km per hour. WHOOOOOSSSSSHHHHH!! That is quite some speed. Especially if the girl is in her night gown. (The pony woke her up at night and they "suddenly found themselves outside" so I see no reason for her to be in a winter coat.) Spending the entire night outside in the winter with only a night gown would have left her with frostbites but those 4 hours flying through the air at 90 km per hour is totally icing on the cake. They fly towards the father as the girl gets more and more stiff. When they reach the tower, the pony realizes she is long dead.

That's just the tip of the iceberg (no pun intended). Why could the pony teleport outside and away from under the pillow? The sorceress would have never given him that ability. And if she did, why didn't they just teleport to the tower? How did the pony even know about the father and how did he manage to get to that shelf in the store just in time for the girl to find him? How did he "kick" lightning? What happened to the sorceress's smoking burnt body?

Erkki often warns me not to look for logic where there is none. Perhaps some day I will be wise enough to listen.

Wolf Eats Meat

Life is cyclic. And now is the part of my life cycle when I become obsessed with food again. Do you know what your energy consumption is in a day? For most women it's around 2000 kcal and for most men it's around 3000 kcal. Compared to those numbers, it seems extreme of me to aim for an energy deficit of 1000 kcal each day. And, surprisingly, on some days it happens with little effort. Breastfeeding alone uses up 500 kcal per day and looking after two small kids doesn't give the luxury of sedentary lifestyle. I recently started using an Internet website where I log all the food I eat and it calculates all the nutrients and vitamins and everything. Estonian national institute of health development actually manages this website for free, just so they can routinely collect data about the eating habits of Estonians. Pretty amazing since they have entered the correct nutrient composition of many Estonian products that are very different in USA.

 The other goal of Estonian national institute of health development is to get Estonians to eat more healthy. And they're convinced it's healthy to eat 55-60% of energy in carbohydrates, 25-30% in fats and 10-15% in protein. That's the numbers I get when I eat horribly by my standards. Like when I eat a plateful of pasta with a bit of meat sauce, and then some dessert that has some milk in it. I don't mind fats in food - they don't make my blood sugar spike and they usually come with proteins, which I consider the healthiest part of food. On most days I eat 40-50% carbs, 30-40% of fats and nearly 20 % of protein. The program keeps complaining that I don't eat enough carbs and I eat too much protein and I am really happy about that because I'm convinced that the national recommendations are flawed and I'm sure that it's not healthy to eat 60% of energy in carbohydrates. I'll tell you why. Yesterday I let loose a little. I ate half a cheesecake that I had made. I also ate pasta wok, fish pie and oatmeal porridge and I even had a two sugars in my coffee. That's a lot of sugar and carbohydrates, right? Actually that amounts to 41 % carbohydrates, 41 % fats and 18% protein. I still let Siiri eat pretty much whatever. As long as she has appetite for decent warm food, I don't restrict her sugar consumption. I've gotten used to seeing her eat sweet foods without feeling the need to have some too. She spends the day running around in the apartment and she has gotten slimmer and taller in the last few months so I can definitely offer her candy for dessert if I feel like it. I'm very strict about some food additives, especially taste enhancers and artificial food coloring, but sugar is just energy that she'll use up quite fast.

Besides, Siiri needs sugar for brain activity, especially for memorizing fairy tales. Erkki learned to read at a really young age and Siiri has learned all the letters but she doesn't get the whole reading thing yet. She sees us opening the book and telling the same story over and over again. Siiri does the same: she opens the fairy tale book at the right page and starts "reading" from memory. She skips a few words and abbreviates some of the story, but some entire paragraphs are quoted word by word. She even adds the intonation and gestures that we use while reading. She makes cute low voice for wolf's monologue and, being a little girl, she really has to make an effort for that. You can just see the effort in her face and lips. Also, when she quotes, "we will not let you in" she shakes her head and when she says, "we know you are the big bad wolf and you just want to eat us", she quickly nods. She has many fairy tales that she can "read", for example "Wolf and seven little goats", "Three pigs", "Little red riding hood", "Goldilocks and three bears". Apparently she likes animals, and especially the big bad wolf who tries to eat goats, pigs and little girls.

 Liisa stills eats only milk. And Siiri knows all about that. When Liisa becomes restless (she rarely really cries), Siiri states in a matter-of-fact tone, "Lisa wants to eat AGAIN! Liisa drinks only milk.". Siiri doesn't seem to mind, though. She has never requested that I let her suckle as well and she has never made a problem of Liisa being attached to me during feedings. Siiri does sometimes get annoyed that she's not being carried around as much as Liisa but we have two solutions for that: when Erkki is at home, he'll pick up Siiri. When he's not here, I hold Siiri at the first chance I get. If I'm feeding Liisa, I usually stretch out my legs so that Siiri has room to sit on my legs as well. So she sometimes requests/demands the same benefits that Liisa gets, but never gets angry at Liisa for the attention or care that Liisa gets.

We did what we could to make Siiri treat Liisa as her "pack member". People are like pack animals with several layers of packs. People divide others to be either ally or foe. The closest pack for most people is family or household and for a small child that's her entire life. It's not like Siiri has a bunch of work buddies and lots of friends in the gym. Her family is all she has and if some stranger comes and endangers it, she can become very protective. For that reason me and Erkki did our best to make sure that Siiri sees Liisa as her own little sister and a natural addition to our family. We avoid calling Liisa our daughter, instead we call her Siiri's sister. And we call Siiri Liisa's sister. I also avoid mentioning Liisa when I tell Siiri not to do something. Like when I'm feeding Liisa and suddenly Siiri wants to throw a ball at us, I tell her not to throw the ball because I might get hit because I don't have free hands to catch the ball. And I really do my best to do anything that I normally would do even if Liisa is awake. I read fairy takes while breastfeeding, I help put puzzles together while holding Liisa, I dance with Siiri while holding Liisa, and sometimes I make Siiri a priority. Like when I'm almost finished with Siiri's food and Liisa wakes up, I bring Liisa to the same room so she can see me, but I ignore her attention-requesting sounds (except hysterical crying) until I've given Siiri her food. Last time Siiri used that moment to go and stroke Liisa's hair and told me, "Liisa smiled. Liisa smiled a little to Siiri.".

I eat a lot, and Siiri eats lots of sweets, and all Liisa does is eat breast milk, and I often listen to fairy takes where the big bad wolf tries to eat someone, and wolves are pack animals, and people are also kind of like pack animals and wolves eat a lot of meat and I also eat a lot of meat... I like the pattern.

PS! I haven't found a good solution to the emoticon problem. Hot.ee server doesn't have FTP-upload option, zone.ee closes accounts after 12 months by default and requires an Estonian email address for registration and reminders that I should renew my account. None of the good-quality free hosts give simple predictable file locations and I don't trust any of the other ones. I'll deal with it when I get the chance.

... testing...
  <--success

Missing Person

Don't alert the police, don't call in the search squad - I'm still alive!

There are too few hours in each 24-hour day. I notices this in the first years of university when I postponed going to sleep after spending hours and hours behind the computer, but lately it's plain ridiculous!  On most days, I get about 2-3 hours for everything that I want to do. That's the amount of hours each day that I'm awake but both kids are asleep. It sound like a lot of hours, considering that it only takes 10-15 minutes to take a shower and the dishwasher makes it much faster to do the dishes and I can watch something on TV while I chop onions or stir the pot. Also, who needs books anyway and internet news isn't really worth too much time. Most movies could be watched in a day and if I'm lucky, I might even be able to watch most of a movie without interruptions. Very lucky. And with supreme timing! For a while I was really hooked on the TV-series "Grey's Anatomy". I watched 7 seasons of it - mostly while I fed the baby but also during those 2-3 hours. Now I ran out of it and got around to fixing the emoticon problem in the blog. Or at least part of it. I'll eventually fix the older posts as well. 

But really, writing a blog post without the emoticons just takes the fun right out of the entire thing. Without the use of emoticons I can only insert a small part of the dramatic effect that I'd like to add. I get a bit emoticon-crazy sometimes. There have been moments when I'm having a real live conversation with someone and I want to use an emoticon to better illustrate my views. You guys sometimes get that feeling too, right? Right?!

.....

Emoticons stopped working.  (this one is uploaded in blogger)

.....

Damn! It should not be that difficult to put a few moving pictures in a blog. My emoticon collection is nearly 500 files but it's LESS THAN 5MB!!! Most free hosting services offer 100 MB so I could just use any one of those, but I already tried that and that's why I started having problems in the first place. I'm quite convinced that if I just get another free web hosting service, I'll end up having the same problem in a couple of years. If I don't owe them anything, they don't owe me anything and the entire thing is very unstable. Except if I find a company that has a reputation to uphold. Then I might get lucky and get a few free mega bites of space that will be reliable for years with very little downtime. I thought I found that with hosting.eu.pn but now it is sometimes working and sometimes not and it shouldn't be having this problem.

Now I have a few options. 

1) I could contact hosting.eu.pn 24/7 customer support. Uhm... No way! Let it be a lesson to IT-companies. Some people would rather look for an alternative to get in contact with actual customer support. I can't be bothered to start troubleshooting the visibility of a gif image. It's a simple situation. I've uploaded a gif image and blogger sometimes can't open it. Perhaps the hosting service sucks. I want an alternative!

2) I could find another free random hosting service. Not reliable enough.

3) I could use Google Sites. As far as I saw, they don't even have FTP-uploading option! It's not free hosting. It's some ridiculous dumb-user website builder. I couldn't even upload my own HTML file!

4) I could upload all the emoticons to blogger one by one. All 500 of them. One. By. One. And then I could insert them with the "Insert image" function. I'm not some elitist code-writing web programmer but I do  prefer to use a little HTML code if it makes my life easier. And honestly, it really wouldn't be easy to insert each emoticon and then remove the code that makes it stay in it's own center-aligned paragraph.

5) I could upload them using Picasa Web Albums, since it would be easier to upload images. Lets test it...

(uploaded with Picasa and using HTML code to insert it.)

Now the ultimate test: if I upload the images in one catalogue, will the image URL stay predictable? I need only the file name to change and the rest of the address to be the same for all the emoticons. So if I copy the image link and change the file name in the code, I should be able to see other emoticons as well...
(fail!)

Nooooooo!!!!!!!!!!

Maybe I should just contact hosting.eu.pn customer support. I mean - how bad could it be?

(imagination goes wild) "Have you tried turning it off and on again?"

NOOOOOoooooooo!!!!!!

Bit of a Cow

 First of all, I'm having problems with emoticons, again. The server where I host them seems to be down all the time lately and it seems I have to find another place where to upload all my emoticons and then I have to manually go to each post to change the website in the image link. Fortunately MS Word "replace all" tool will be of great help but I still have to find a reliable server where to keep the emoticons so I never have to do that again. Any suggestions where to host a bunch of emoticons? Until I solve it, I will just skip the emoticons.

Back to the title of this post. I don't really feel like a cow but I just couldn't resist using this title because I probably should feel like a cow for two very valid reasons. First reason, I keep being milked. My main task lately is to sit on the couch and produce milk for a very hungry little creature. Her life consists of eating, creating dirty diapers and sleeping. Like really, no exaggeration what so ever. She wakes up hungry, gets stuffed with milk, gets burped, is hungry again and eats, then fills a diaper and gets it changed, is hungry again and eats, and then falls asleep while eating. A couple of hours later repeats the entire thing from the beginning.

The milk thing has been much more simple the second time around. Last time there was the entire fiasco with a midwife getting me upset over starving my baby and then stuffing a bottle down Siiri's throat in the hospital. The midwife wasn't very successful at getting her eat the substitute milk but managed to make Siiri desperately caugh it out because some foul-smelling liquid was practically poured down her throat. It took me 5 days for the milk to come in and only then I could start breastfeeding on demand without any pumping or offering substitute milk. This time I knew better. I had read a lot about how breastfeeding works and the first couple of days I was just breastfeeding on demand to stimulate milk production. The principle of breastfeeding is that it happens on demand. When milk is removed, new milk is produced. When milk is left over, then milk production decreases. When milk is being sucked out when there is none, milk production is stimulated and there's more milk next time. When the baby is given substitute milk then she feels little need to waste energy sucking a boob so that alone could guarantee the need for substitute milk in the future.

Liisa seemed fairly content and used up diapers (good signs) but she was hungry all the time. On the second day weighing it became clear that Liisa was losing too much weight. All newborns lose weight in their first days of life and doctors ignore weight loss up to 7%. Liisa had lost 7.8% already so they brought me substitute milk and a large syringe (no needle of course). Okay, so that was a bit of a shock. I thought it was going so well this time. She seemed so full of milk all the time so I didn't even suspect that anything was wrong. With Siiri it took me an hour of despair to get used to the idea that breastfeeding isn't all that simple. This time it took me 10 seconds. I took a moment to let it sink in and then made a plan. My plan was pretty obvious: I decided I need to start pumping milk as soon as possible. That's what helped last time and I was sure it will help this time as well. They have a pump in the hospital, usually used to prove to mothers how bad their milk production really is and how they should just start giving their babies substitute milk already. I used the pump so milk would come in sooner. I gave Liisa a couple of small portions of substitute milk as well and also breastfed and by next day she had already gained 80g (that's 2,2% of her birth weight!). I left the hospital with doctor's orders, "Forget about the substitute milk and just breastfeed on demand.".  YAY!

The second reason I should feel like a cow is weight. With this pregnancy I gained about 18 kg. The baby weighed 3,6 kg, placenta weighs about 1 kg, amniotic fluid weighs about 1 kg and  I lost about 0.4 kg of blood during labor and a lot afterwards (that's quite normal). So, simple math... I got home from the hospital after giving birth and I had lost 3.6+1+1+0.4 kg= 0 kg. Wait, what?! I stepped on the scale and I had lost 0 kg of my pregnancy weight. So yeah, they fed us well and I ate about 1000 kcal worth of extra food and I drank 3 liters of fluid, mostly water, every day I spent in the hospital. I felt my body needed all that for both recovery and milk production and I felt very healthy. In hindsight, I'd still eat and drink the same amount because I did recover super fast.

Any ideas how to lose 18 kg in a few months without any effort? Preferably even 21 kg because I was in winter weight just before I got pregant. Currently I have just decided that scales are evil and I will not step on a scale until Liisa is a month old. I won't diet or try excessive exercising for the first weeks. I'll just try to regain proper posture and I'll start using Xbox Kinect exercise program in a couple of weeks.

I should feel like a cow but I'm actually quite content. As long as I don't step on the scale I manage to delude myself into imagining that my body is getting leaner every day and breastfeeding is actually quite enjoyable. It's so relaxing in many ways and the baby is so cute while breastfeeding. It could just be the hormone oxytocin talking - it's also called "love hormone" because it creates the feeling of bonding. Both of my kids have looked the most adorable while breastfeeding. Liisa is super cute, Siiri is very cuddly lately, Erkki's at home from work and life is good. I'm really happy with everything.