Long Time No See

Life is a blurry rollercoaster. Stuff happens and time goes by. Siiri's turning 2 years old today and has started to talk in sentences. My last post was a month ago so she didn't have much time to learn it but I like how she does it. Most of you know that Estonian grammar is HELL . There's 14 cases. Even the most basic words like water can be vesi, vee, vett, veega, veeta, or other. Or the word home can become from kodu to koju or kodus and so on. It makes it so difficult to widen one's vocabulary, but it makes it even worse to find the right word for the sentence you're trying to piece together. Well, Siiri's much better at it than I would have expected. Maybe all kids are, but she's the one whose progress I've been observing. Just a month ago she wasn't combining words at all, and in the past couple of days she's said "Seda putru ei taha" (This porridge I don't want) and "Siiri joob vett" (Siiri is drinking water). She even used a plural for dinosaurs when she referred to several at the same time. She uses very few made-up words. Her version of "tüdruk" (girl) is "küke". It's always küke, even though for nearly all other words she really makes an effort to say it exactly right.

She likes her dinosaurs - small rubbery toys that she constantly dips in her glass of water, commenting, "Saurus's are drinking". I guess that's somewhat better than what she did the other day. I heard "Rabbit drinks" and stopped her just barely from dunking her hairy soft stuffed toy feet first in a glass of water. She likes to comment her actions in words. Today when she went to bed, she suddenly felt too crowded with her four bed toys, so she sat up, pushed all of them to the foot of her bed and announced, "Out of (my) way. Girl to sleep." (Estonian: "Eest ära. Küke magama!") And then let herself fall on the pillow again. She can be so wonderfully clear in her wishes. Or bossy, if that's the word you prefer. She's really growing up to be a strong-willed person who'd probably do well even in military if she wasn't so girly and pink and fond of pretty glittery things.

Siiri's also quite orderly and neat, but I'm not quite sure what causes it. Her stuffed bed animals always get her attention in one specific order. Rabbit always comes first and then Puppy and two small puppies, first black-and-white and then brown. She might be holding one of her puppies but if she decides to give her toys some water, she'll drop the puppy, ignore it, and go looking for Rabbit.

Pretend games are really IN with a 2-year old. She likes the invisible crown that is so easily accessible on the picture printed on her pajamas. She asks for the crown, we "take it" from her shirt and then put it on one head after another. It's important to remember who's wearing the crown. One time she had me put the crown on her pillow. When she lied down, she had very little room left at the edge of the pillow so I "pushed aside" the crown to make more room for her. She also picks flowers from books and tells me, "Two of them" (kaks tükki) , then puts them in her pocket for safe-keeping. She has even brought me something I couldn't really see, so I asked her, "Siiri, what did you give me?" and she replied, "A flower" and walked back to her book. The game took a whole different turn when she "picked up" Snow White's poisonous apple and quickly took a bite. I have been using the word "poisonous" to mark things she must never-ever put in her mouth so I "put back" the poisonous apple and conversationally told her she shouldn't eat it because it's poisoned, but I caught it in time and she'll be okay. Suddenly she looked so grim. She sat there completely serious and contemplative for nearly a minute and then burst out crying and sobbing as if she had just committed the worst crime possible (whatever that might be). It took a long time and a lot of effort to convince her that no harm was done, I'm not upset with her actions, and she'll be okay.

Me and Erkki took the most of my not-too-pregnant-yet second trimester and went to Prague (Czech Republic) with Siiri and Erkki's parents. The trip was nice but only the parts that depended on us. No significant disagreements among us, Siiri loves traveling and barely even made a sound on the plane, nothing got stolen, and Prague was such a great choice for it's wonderful buildings and statues. However, overall it was the least lucky travel experience I've ever had. The weather was atrocious. It had been 20 C during the week before we arrived and 20 C during the week after we left, but when we were there, it was constantly near 10-12 degrees and dropped as low as 4 degrees one morning. Not really the weather for walking around town and sightseeing.

On top of that Siiri got ill during the second night. She had 38.6 C with laryngitis. I had never seen it myself. It mostly affects small children and can easily become life-threatening within one night. It's basically throat swelling which obstructs breathing. We didn't diagnose the symptoms at night but we went to the hospital emergency room with Siiri first thing in the morning. Siiri got proper medical care and was well enough for travelling back 3 days later. Quite a scary experience to be honest. If that last-era place had had a proper internet connection in the hotel rooms, I would have easily found out about laryngitis and I would have called the ambulance in stead of waiting until the morning. Siiri was already wheezing in each breath when we started going to the hospital. It could have gone much worse but all went well in the end. Due to the medicine that was prescribed, we also found out that Siiri probably has some allergies we didn't know about. She reacts to antihistamines as if it's opiates we're giving her. From whiny and mean to happy and mellow in minutes.

As for the rest of my life, the one that doesn't revolve around Rabbits and dinosaurs, that has become quite routine aside from a couple of refreshing parties. I don't go out often enough and I still haven't taken up exercising again. Now I'm almost pregnant enough to join one of those creepy pregnancy yoga classes that discuss natural childbirth, details of labor and benefits of eating placenta. Or perhaps I can postpone it a little longer...

BTW, I'm about 20 weeks pregnant and I could hide a watermelon in my totally huge tummy. It's really big, even though I don't think it's got anything to do with food. I can barely and rarely feel any movement. I think he/she simply has too much room. Tomorrow's the moment of truth - is it a boy or a girl, or too shy to tell the difference.