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!!!!!!