This week [12.11-18.11]

This week was a whirlwind. A tornado. I know I said something similar about the last one, but this one was just the continuation of the last. And the one before that, etc. So, there was not much going on other than juggling work, childcare, chores, … and a sick child again.

Still, a few things worth mentioning.

Running has not been easy to keep up with: with almost no working from home, long workdays, pickups from childcare, evening routines and sunset at 5pm, I haven’t been able to run during the week. Still, I try to during the weekend and toddler likes to run along too. Autumn is in full boast of its colours and it’s a pleasure to run through the woods, and almost forget the lack of motivation and the fatigue from the week.

When weeks get intense like this, we have learned (the hard way) to not overbook all the weekends. Last weekend, I spent some time batch cooking for the week, and it really helps having some leftovers in the fridge, especially for the busy first three days of the week.

Last weekend I made feijoada, a favourite in this house. Other batch foods we have on heavy rotation: lentil and vegetable bolognese, spinach and salmon lasagne, butternut squash and chickpea stew (based on this recipe). Sometimes, I find myself in a rut, so I’ve been looking for recipes to add to the list.

I have been trying to increase my reading time for years. It’s always been on the top of all my to-do lists in the last decade or so, and it’s the one I’ve most failed at. So much, it will probably be my sole goal for 2022, and I have already started. I downloaded an app and started registering my efforts with one of the books I have wanted to have read for almost a decade but failed miserably.

This week, Toddler threw a major tantrum in a store. One of those tantrums where you are the parent all the other parents secretly sigh with relief that they are not in that moment. One of those tantrums where toddlers throw themselves on the floor, punch it furiously and howl… all because you did not allow them to climb up a descending escalator. I used all the skills in my possession to deal with the situation, but the one who really saved it was a very kind and funny store employee, who distracted her with a few funny faces and a ball with a pikachu keyring inside it. It feels like the positive side of major toddler meltdowns is entering a secret society made of random acts of kindness from fellow parents who know exactly where you are. And for every judging or condescending look I’ve ever received, I have received countless more winks, shrugs or sympathetic smiles saying discretely “don’t worry, you’re not alone in this, keep strong!”

This week [5.11-11.11]

Wow. This was one hell of a week, with a LOT of work, some of it quite unexpected, and with some interesting events.

It started off nicely, though. The weekend was full of playdates: 3! The first one ended with this sunset on Lac Léman. The second one was in Portuguese, and we were stunned to see how quickly Toddler became at ease playing with the other girls, whilst in French she is usually quite shy. The third one was in France, with some friends that own the house of our dreams, and their kids own the Toddler’s dream playhouse. We had potatoes with melted Mont d’Or cheese and went for a small walk in the nearby mountains, with a slight peek to the Alps just in front, before being enveloped in the foggy and sharp November cold.

We held a second workshop for musicians. Although prepared at the very last minute, and maybe not as well as I would have liked, it was very good. Because of these workshops, I have been reading on topics that I hadn’t thought about for a long time, such as emotions, the underlying neuroscientific concepts… leading me to order a few books to add to my ever growing to-read pile, one of my main sources of frustration. Until the end of the year, I am determined to find a strategy to attack my pile, including some books that I have never gotten around to reading for over a decade!

The cold is here to stay, and we’ve had some very low temperatures. This means we’ve lit the fire every day for over a week, much to the Toddler’s and the cat’s delight. And mine, after some challenging work days.

Towards the end of the week, just as things were supposed to slow down a little and I expected to tie some loose ends and get to run a little, Toddler got the gastroenteritis bug. We braced ourselves, because gastro is highly contagious and last time I was sick too and we contaminated another whole family. Luckily, this time, it was just the Toddler. Here’s what to do when gastroenteritis hits your house.

During this week, I found myself in some situations, such as a general assembly with highly competent women, or interviews with some people with amazing careers and ideas. This led, of course, to a bit of a case of impostor syndrome. My response to this was to make lists and plans to improve my knowledge and performance and this is what I bring into the next week. Soldier on!

This week [29.10-04.11]

Winter is coming. With the end of summer time, night falls very quickly at the end of the day. This is the view from my new office window. It’s basically the same from my previous office, which is next door to the new one, but I spent a few hours this week organising my new space and I very much like it.

The end of last week brought us… Halloween! At first, I was reluctant to do anything, thinking my Toddler wasn’t much into fantasy, but after some hints from my friends, I decided do bring out my abandoned sewing machine and sew a witch hat. Toddler helped me sticking the little “spider web”. The crèche organised a themed day, and I was told the Toddler wore her hat all day. We went to a little Halloween party in the village we live in, and she was scared out of her wits by a Scary Movie mask that jumped in front of her and yelled boo!

Speaking of Toddler things, I read this Quiz: Is your child two years old? and a) it made me laugh, b) check #3, check a version of #6, #7 several times a week, #10 is my favourite and definitely #13, for which my phone has giving me solid proof with its photo throwbacks.

In trying to stick to a running plan for the sake of kicking myself out the door, I did one of my favourite workouts during the weekend, with a warm-up, some cadence drills, 6x800m speed drills at quite a challenging pace, and then a cool down. This oldie kept my pace up for the last drill on a slight uphill and it was perfect. Toddler loves cycling along while I’m running, and always asks to run a little. She found a little corn-treasure and ran home with it.

Still last week, we saw a demo for a dancing academy in the street, which grabbed her attention in a way I’d never seen before. She made some moves trying to imitate them. When we got home, I showed her my all-time favourite artistic gymnastics floor routine and, since then, every evening has been dancing and doing gym moves in our living room (with a nice message to the neighbours apologizing for the house trembling as if a herd of elephants was living with us). Also, we went to the local library for the first time and it was a huge success!

Most of last week is a lot about Toddler stories, since most of my non-work related time has been doing activities with her. But the thing is – observing a Toddler building her comprehension of the world really blows my mind and it’s really, really fun (and equally frustrating at times – not to just mention the good stuff – but that’s a whole other subject).

This week [22.10-28.10]

This week just flew by. I had a huge cold and felt very tired, sleepy, just bleh. For half of the week, I catsat for a friend who has a white, deaf cat named Darwin, who likes to drink water from a tap.

The grandparents were here for a few days and we let them have as much Toddler time as possible. We took them around a few classicToddler-friendly places, including Sauvabelin and Signal de Bougy. Toddler climbed all the stairs of Sauvabelin Tower on her own. Later that day she went to her first birthday party and discovered Smarties. The look on her face was priceless.

Symbolic play is definitely here to stay! With legos, dolls, tractors, beans, sand, water… she keeps busy all day, with her made up or imitated routines, sometimes in Portuguese, sometimes in French.

My mum brought me some quince from Portugal, where they were abundant this year, contrarily to here. I was beginning to worry that I wouldn’t be able to keep one of my favourite Autumn traditions. They did come, and so I made some quince cheese from almost 3kg of quince, which I am happily giving away to my favourite people here.

My head was all over the place this week, so there wasn’t much reading, watching or listening worth mentioning. However, I did manage to run a bit more, one of those runs a very yummy workout at the end of the day by the lake, which made me feel good. (The outdoors pictures in this post are from the end of that run).

I had lunch twice with people I didn’t know very well, and they were both unexpectedly surprising discoveries of interesting colleagues!

This week [30.09-07.10]

Very inspired by weekly roundups around the blogsphere (I’m sure this is a criteria for defining a millenial, hey Jo? – still believing the blogsphere is a thing?), especially Ana’s weeknotes, which I really love to read, I am going to start doing my own weekly roundup.

I have never assumed it, but I have been a journaller for many, many years. It’s been all over the place: blogs, notebooks, 1 second every day (which I still do, but haven’t published for two years, because since baby was born, they are mostly about her and I do not feel comfortable sharing that anymore), agendas, themed journals, online apps – you name it – I’ve probably been there. When I get frustrated with one tool, I move onto another one. The result is a jungle of an online and offline collection, documenting most of my adult life, which I really like to look back to in random moments.

So, this time, it’s the weekly roundup.

Last weekend we went to a farm with animals, way in the remote parts of the canton de Vaud. We were surprised to find some not very local species living there, but O. was amused by the wallaby, which she now knows comes from E.’s home land. One of her new favourite “gym” moves is imitating a wallaby moving.

We also went to the Grange aux courges, a farm that specialises in many varieties of pumpkins. We filled our pumpkin stash for the next weeks of Autumn and I have a few recipes in mind.

And speaking of Autumn and recipes, this week’s recipe was Deb’s mum’s apple cake (recipe in her book, tweaked by me) with delicious Boscoop Apples. Swiss apples are a thing and this is their season. They are delicious, very fragrant and there are many species to choose from, a stark contrast to the flavourless apples I used to buy at the supermarket back in Portugal. The recipe is for THE most comforting homemade apple cake ever, delicious enough to qualify as dessert, sturdy enough to stand an afternoon snack, with enough apples for you to have a less guilty second slice.

We have a lot of toys around the house, but it turns out that what our toddler really loves is to imitate our daily life: cooking, cleaning, putting clothes on the drying rack. Transferring beans was the big hit this week, she sits for large blocks of time at her table and invents all sorts of scripts which include the beans. Her favourite is to fill the little glasses with beans and serve us pretend coffee. Here are some ideas for transferring activities for toddlers.

My friend Jo offered me half a year’s subscription of the New Yorker last year. I still haven’t finished reading all the magazines and they stopped coming in June. I read them during breakfast, on the days that I manage to wake up long enough before The Toddler. This week I read this piece on how North Korea relies on cybercrime to finance the regime and I found it intriguing how such a closed system actually has some of the world’s most performing hackers.

I am also reading Amélie Nothomb’s Métaphysique des tubes, recommended by a work colleague, and enjoying it very much.

We bought an electric bike, so that we can cycle Toddler to the crèche and take turns to bike to work. It was a very welcome addition to this family and we look forward to making very good use of it in our crèche runs, commutes and activities on days off and weekends!

This week I also dug a lot into the material from my “previous life” (i.e., my PhD thesis) in order to prepare the first session of a workshop on mental training and dealing with anxiety for musicians at the local music university. I was surprised to look back at many things I wrote and actually feeling proud of them. And I was extremely happy to be back in a classroom with young people, fascinated with knowledge that I usually take for granted.

I started watching Maid just before the weekend and have just finished the last episode of the mini-series. It’s a punch in the gut in many moments, but I thoroughly enjoy this kind of drama depicting complex human emotions, especially when they are expressed in the subtleties of acting, music and the silent moments. I mostly watch Netflix while cooking, so I tend to choose things that don’t need my full attention, but with this one I really did not hurry chopping vegetables, cutting apples for the cake, or putting dishes in the dishwasher.