Weeks 35 & 36/2022

There is no way around it. 16 weeks have passed by since my last weekly post and I don’t believe I will be able to catch up without sacrificing something more important (family albums! sending pictures to family! printing pictures for our house! journalling! making a family recipe book that will make every day life more simple). So many projects, and so little time.

Something huge happened during those 16 weeks: we welcomed Baby A. into our family!

She is a sweet little thing. An early term baby, she is smaller than my first baby, her big sister. The first few weeks with her were so different from our first time as parents, which threw us off guard. Despite some challenges during the first days, she quickly adapted to our hectic Summer rhythm with an almost three year old in tow. She has been to countless picnics by the lake (I will count them when I have time – or not, but surely not less than 15!), afternoons by the swimming pool, she has slept in a caravan, ridden on a train, metro, and even a boat… and she’s not even two months old!

Also: we are moving at the end of the month.

Because of our busy, busy life, I am becoming better and better at making doable to-do lists. I severely prioritise. I make them thinking “if the baby were to wake up now, what cannot simply wait till later?“. If I happen to have free hands, I choose to do first whatever really needs to be done with free hands, and later what can be done whilst wearing a baby. But, even though parents quickly become masters of juggling several tasks, babies also exist to show parents that sometimes you just need to stop and contemplate. Or you’ll miss it – this fleeting moment where your newborn is still a newborn with all those little newborn quirks that you very quickly forget when they grow. Very quickly.

Being able to take a step back from my professional life has had two effects: one is to get me thinking about what is really important, and which are my core interests and values that, in the long term, I don’t want to sacrifice. The other is that my brain wants to go places: I’ve felt little surges of creativity, I’ve missed writing, I’ve been itching to knit, I’ve been wanting to take pictures and it’s begging me to embark on some kind of challenge to myself. I’ve even written down a few possible challenges. But, as I am now a better master of my to-do lists, I’m not setting myself up for failure and I’m keeping it simple. One thing that I have decided that I would like to keep, amongst all the business of the few months, is this “weekly report”. And just because I really like to read back on what I wrote!

In these past 16 weeks, it has become more than clear that Toddler is no longer a toddler and has officially become a child. She turned three this week, and we have celebrated well.

We organised the first birthday party with children from the crèche. Then a party with friends with children who play often with O. And then a few evenings with other friends with whom we wanted to share this moment. And cake! Cake is very important.

Just a note on these weeks’ cakes:

• Chocolate cake: a no-brainer with this simple, but quite perfect recipe by Mary Berry. I doubled it for the first birthday party and made the simple version for crèche. For the filling I used peach jam (perfection!). I used double crème in the ganache, which is the closest version to the double cream the recipe calls for, but I found it quite fatty and way too rich, so I will try a different ganache recipe next time. The first cake was decorated with Smarties and Peppa Pig figurines.
• Coconut and raspberry cake: O. asked for cake with raspberries, so I went for the Versatile Coconut Cake from this book (definitely my favourite cake recipe book!) with raspberries in the batter and a raspberry curd, also from the book. The topping was a simple coconut glaze with gummy raspberries on top, which were a big success with all the kids (and some adults).

A few more things from these weeks:

We keenly followed the Ultra-Trail du Mont Blanc on social networks, and even though our weekly mileage consists mostly of climbing stairs to fetch nappies, clothes, toys and babies, or pushing prams around the park, both of us have been dreaming of runs on the trails. I listened to all the episodes in Mathieu Blanchard’s podcast.

I finished reading Hamnet and Anxious People and re-started Memorial do Convento. I takes me longer than ever to finish books, but I’m also more motivated than ever to stick to them if I am loving them, even if they are difficult to read, which is the case for Memorial do Convento. By difficult, I mean that they demand my concentration (which is worse than ever) and to digest certain sentences – thus, not of the page-turner variety.

Week 6/2022

One of the passages from Olive, Again that stuck with me was the admiration Olive shared with one of her friends for February light. That was on my mind last week, with the long sunsets still early in the evening, even though days are clearly getting longer.

The weather was beautiful this week, and there were plenty of occasions to go outdoors and play, much appreciated by all of us.

My pancake game is on! It was a very rare thing in our house until a few weeks ago, when I had a serious pancake craving. One of the reasons that seriously discouraged me from making pancakes was the time spent around the pan cooking them, and never getting the temperature quite right. But I suddenly remembered that we’d bought a crêpe machine when Toddler turned one – because crêpe parties are a thing here and we are definitely going to wear this appliance out in our near future as parents of a growing child. Anyway, that which makes crêpes also makes pancakes, and now I can actually think about making pancakes for breakfast without passing out from hunger and frustration in front of the stove!

We had our first fondue this season. It was a delicious mixture of 70% Vacherin Fribourgeois and 30% Gruyère, gifted to us by our neighbours. Toddler loved it; it was a delight to see how much she enjoyed eating it. I loved it too, but unfortunately I digested it very badly during the night and ended up quite sick the next day. I was especially disappointed because we’d planned another hike for that day.

We watched a film, though. The first one since Christmas! We watched Sangue do Meu Sangue, and I deeply enjoyed it, mostly because of the characters and how their lives were portrayed. The actual plot, and especially the twist at the end, felt just like a structure on which the character’s lives were supported so that they could show this slice of Portuguese society. We don’t live in it, but we can see it, imagine it, and in this film, they become quite real. Anyway, it was a good film to watch and I would like to watch more Portuguese cinema.

I picked up Stanley Tucci’s memoir Taste, which is easy for me to like because food memoirs are definitely my favourite genre and Tucci is quite funny. I’ve had less time to read because my commute has less public transport, now that I’m walking to work more. Choices…

Week 2/2022

I don’t have many pictures from last week, which for me is a sign of how much routine took over during the most part of the week. Toddler was especially challenging, but luckily whatever was causing all the meltdowns (fatigue? something hurting? growth spurt? a slight fever? emotions related to the state of being a toddler? sometimes it’s a wild, wild guess) subsided by the end of the week.

One of the week’s highlights was going to France to visit some friends whose backyard is the picture above. Can you imagine that? With 20cm of fluffy snow that had fallen during the weekend, there was nothing to do except for… playing in the snow! Sledding was fun, but soft snow is not the best condition for sledding. You have to pack the snow on the first runs down and when you get to the end of the slope, you invariably crash into a mound of fresh, fluffy snow. Needless to say, it was an emotional rollercoaster for Toddler, who laughed during the descent, but cried when receiving all that snow in her face!

At our friend’s house we ate raclette, and the cheese was just delicious, very unctuous, not excessively fat and not at all rubbery. I have been thinking about it ever since and my mouth waters each time it pops in my mind.

This week I also managed to get back to some books. I finished reading Os Vampiros, by Filipe Melo and Juan Cavia. I have also been making progress on Olive Kitteridge, which I’m enjoying more and more.

While I’m cooking, I like to watch series and movies that I don’t need my full attention, but this week I watched Little Women and The Lost Daughter and both of them grabbed more of my attention than what is usual. Luckily, I was peeling and chopping a lot of vegetables to make lentil and vegetable ragout for lasagne and to freeze. I also made lentil and barley hamburgers from this book. This is a lot of lentils, I know, but we are big fans of pulses and beans around here, so nobody was complaining.

On the subject of the Lost Daughter, I stumbled on this little piece about mother rage, which is an interesting subject to think about. And the first one that really comes into my mind is: why mother rage and not parent rage? Anyway, this can be a long discussion, and my toddler leaves me with more fatigue than rage, so I’m just going to chew on that for a little while more.

This week [3.12-9.12]

I have very little to say about last week, which was mostly spent back in normal routine and catching up with everything after almost a week off sick.

Most importantly, I had my booster shot in the beginning of the week. The virus is definitely not on a break around here and we are happy that we have the possibility of getting vaccinated.

I got Nigel Slater’s new book as a gift in our family Advent calendar. Growing up, we didn’t have this tradition at home, but I saw it in a family we’re friends with and since then thought we would do the same once we had children. The concept is to buy or make little symbolic gifts to open by one family member on each day of December up until Christmas day. Now, Nigel Slater’s book is not a good example of a symbolic gift, but I’m really not complaining. I’ve been reading it since I got it. The recipes are simple, to be made with good local produce and written about in a way that quite resonates with how I feel about food. Not to mention the photos, which are simply beautiful. It’s definitely one of my favourite cookbooks now.

Other than that, I spent most of my evenings making my gift for a Secret Santa exchange with friends, which has an only rule: the gifts have to be handmade. I made some wrist warmers in crochet and sewed a stuffed toy for Toddler to give to a younger baby.

During the weekend we saw some friends, who we’ve known since Z arrived in Switzerland. I babysat for their kids at the time, and now they are both grown adult men. Suffice to say, I felt a little old. Toddler even played with some books they brought up from the basement, which had a little handwritten note from me, from that time. She was mostly happy about feeding the rabbits and guinea pigs in the community garden.

Finally, it’s been really, really cold. It’s night very early, so we haven’t been spending as much time outdoors as I would like. We are now counting down the days to the holidays!

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).

Par les routes [Sylvain Prudhomme, 2019]

I haven’t been at all productive on the reading front, despite my to-read list that keeps growing. In the past few months, I have started some books which I couldn’t finish, mostly because I lost interest, so I fell into a reading rut.

Before the holidays, though, my boss-now-friend lent me a book that she’d just finished. A French book. In French. It is well written, it is fluid and the French is quite easy to understand and read through, she told me – which, I must admit, enters well into my criteria for starting a French book. Even though I am increasingly fluent in French, reading and writing are sometimes still challenging for me, and when I want to relax, it’s not reading in French that comes to mind first.

Anyway, Par les routes is a lovely book and it is lovely to read. I found the narrator’s voice easy to find and I was able to enter the story without worrying too much about vocabulary. It is about two friends: the narrator, a writer who moves away from Paris to the countryside to find some focus in his work, and the autostoppeur – a hitchhiker, who lives up to his title so seriously that it is actually the theme of his life.

Throughout the story, the characters come to terms with what is essential to them, as told by the narrator while he lives and dwells on the events that he faces. It is a story about distinct ways of living life, of bringing people together, of friendship and what it means to love.

In the hitchhiker’s trips, it was really curious to read about some funnily named places in France, which made me want to know this neighbouring country a little better.

It made me feel good to read this book, at this moment in life.

Bravey [Alexi Pappas, 2021]

I found a review of this book on a blog that I read and, as someone who likes to run, who likes memoirs and who is also curious about mental health and things humans struggle with, I thought it would be a good read.

Alexi Pappas is a young women with some important experiences to share: training to be an Olympian, growing up without a mother and facing clinical depression and serious mental health issues during a trying period of her life. In the book, she writes openly about all of these struggles and the lessons she learnt from them.

I believe that in sharing her difficulties and speaking openly about all of these issues encourages young women to not be afraid of having conversations about their struggles, while facing some of the challenges that come with being a teenager or young adult.

The thing is, as someone who is not at that stage of life anymore and who has very different dreams and aspirations than those of a young athlete, I did not quite relate to the inspirational messages that are inherent to the stories. I found that they lacked some depth, especially the one about achieving dreams and suggesting that most people don’t work hard enough to achieve their dreams. This, for me was the low point of the book.

What I did appreciate was how she spoke in detail of her downward spiral into depression and of her effort to get better. I found interest in her approach to pain as a sensation and not a threat. I also enjoyed how she spoke about recovery from fatigue, injury and depression as hard work, which I thought was a very healthy approach.

Despite finding myself thinking, more often than not, that this book would be more suited to a teenage girl, I enjoyed reading it and would definitely recommend it to a young girl.

Le Siècle d’Emma [Fanny Vaucher & Eric Burnand, 2019]

Even though a large part of my life is now in French, I have not read many books in French. This is for several reasons, which I might reflect upon some other time. A friend gave me this book on my birthday last year and, as it was a graphic novel, I was more motivated to read it.

It tells the story of Emma, a young girl born in the beginning of the 20th century, in Switzerland, and of a few members of her family. According to the generation to which they belong, they take part in historic events or are affected by currents, movements and lifestyles of that specific point in time. For instance, Emma is a young woman when her fiancé gets involved in the general strike and is killed. Emma is interested in social movements, is active and becomes a teacher, but she has no right to vote, and when she has children, she gives her career up in order to stay at home with the children. Her granddaughter, who is born in the 70s, grows up with a right to vote, lives in a squat, and becomes involved in activist movements which advocated for the end of nuclear energy production in Switzerland.

What I appreciated in the book was how it told the story of several key moments and movements which still impact Swiss life as I’ve come to know it in my life here for the past five years, and how this was woven in the characters’ lives.

The Fixed Stars [Molly Wizenberg, 2020]

I have been a fan of Molly Wizenberg’s writing for such a long time that my Gmail account is more recent than my following of her blog. Orangette remains one of my favourite blogs, even though it has sadly died down in the last few years.

What draws me to Molly’s writing is how she can craft words to talk about her everyday life, her memories, sometimes her intimate thoughts. Much like a diary, but in a simple, beautiful way, as if her writing was an analogue photograph of life instants. When I read her what she wrote, it felt comforting, reassuring, like putting on some slippers, drinking wine, scratching the cat’s head and knitting. Cliché? Probably. But the simple comforts of everyday life. Almost always, her stories were associated with a recipe, a formula that is very dear to my heart.

In the Fixed Stars, Molly’s writing is just like that, but it not about food. It is about her experience, shifting from a straight, married woman and mother, to someone who is in love with a non-binary person and the ensuing changes in her perception of herself, of what love means for her and of the structure of her life and family.

I felt that the whole book reflected this process. In the beginning, the story is more factual. Towards the middle and the end, it is more philosophical; more questions are raised and Molly writes about her own quest to come to terms with all these changes and to find her own answer to these questions.

The theme of queer sexuality and identity is something that I don’t usually pursue and I mostly read the book because, as I said before, I am a fan of Molly. Hence, I am not sure if the book is a good representation, in general, of what it means to be queer and I don’t really have any insights into how this story would be viewed by the queer community. I do wonder, though, how other experiences are portrayed. It also left me thinking about how little we read about other people’s experiences when they are not relatable to our own (this was something that stayed on my mind after the BLM events a few months ago).

In the end, I do appreciate honest, confessional stories about the human experience, whichever form it might take and, as usual, I felt that Molly excelled at that. It is a story about dealing with something that happens, that transforms life, how to come to terms with it and how to make something better of it.

Too Much and Never Enough : How My Family Created the World’s Most Dangerous Man [Mary L. Trump, 2020]

When I heard this book was coming out, I wasn’t exactly interested. I always have a feeling that this kind of tell-all book, launched in specific points in time, has several agendas besides the story and is never free of bias.

Then a work colleague told me about it, and I was curious. I read it, always aware that it is not free of political and social bias. It is also not free of emotional and personal bias. The author is a well established clinical psychologist and the claims around the book suggest that she uses her expertise to analyse her family history. I don’t think that was exactly the case, and I found that the stories and anecdotes were thrown in, sometimes without context, sometimes without reason and often without much of a point. For instance, she tells a story about receiving a golden shoe from Uncle Donald and Ivana for Christmas, but you never get the point about this story (I guess she didn’t either). For me, the storyline was a bit all over the place.

However. This book is about a dysfunctional family, and it sheds some light on the familial and social contexts in which Donald Trump grew up and which gave him the opportunities to be exactly where he is. It talks about his parents, his upbringing and the financial and social scaffolding that he was afforded to turn himself into the mogul that we have always heard about. However, it also tells a much more credible story about his path, which was not at all of the self-made man that he claims to be (shocking, I know). What was even more striking to me was how this story is not at all unfamiliar. There were patterns that I’ve seen in my own family, in the family next door, in the communities where I grew up. It is an inglorious illustration of how far lying, arrogance and cheating the system can take you.

Book-wise, it is not exactly a great book, a great memoir or even a great story. But in the context in which we live, I think it is an interesting exercise to reflect on how families and communities sometimes allow, and even promote, the ascension of corrupt, self-serving and mentally ill people to positions of power and leadership.