New Skill

Lumi buttoned her own sweater today.

When It's Cold and Rainy Outside

Isä can find ways to entertain us.

Otso's 15th Month

Summary
He is a sweet kid but very opinionated. When he is happy he smiles and is quite charming.
He frustrates easily and then will get so mad that he won't do/eat/play whatever it was he originally wanted (and since he can't say much of anything yet, this makes it difficult to figure out what he actually wants).

Events
20.12 downtown day with Vaari
21.12 Lankinen family arrives; Christmas dinner with Vaari and Leena; drive to Nakkila
23.12 Lankinen family arrives in Nakkila
24.12 Finnish Christmas
25.12 Lankinen family leaves Nakkila
26.12 visit to Kari family and drive to Helsinki
27.12 fever at night
28.12 flight home to Stavanger
2.1 eating again!
11.1 Diego's birthday party
17.1 Stavanger Oilers hockey game
18.1-22.1 Kimmo gone on a work trip
18.1 playground and lunch with gemma and family, dinner upstairs
19.1 nurse appointment, MMR shot

Development
He is getting more confident with walking and simply standing. He has been practicing standing all by himself. When he does this he points his arms down and back like a ski jumper.
With the sickness over the New Year holiday, this was reduced again. He stopped standing by himself and stopped wanting to walk much.
This first week of January he is standing again and walking a few steps. But we haven't seen the ski jumper again!
Toward the end of the month he has been trying to use a spoon to feed himself. It worked reasonably well for rice pudding.

Language
He clearly understands a lot now. We can ask him things, yes/no questions, and he will nod his head or shake his head accordingly.
Example: Do you want a balloon? Head nods vigorously.

He says something like "more" when he wants more food.

Toys/Games
He is really enjoying his cousins.
In Nakkila he seems drawn to the Legos and toy cars. He also liked sauna when we tossed water on him.
At home he loves cars and stuff he can build with or throw with.

Eating
At Christmas he ate a lot. Not much meat but he loves the berries and all the carbs: pancakes, potatoes, Cheerios, various pastries. He is addicted to Marie cookies.
We are having a hard time with his eating at barnehage. He doesn't eat much there. He doesn't like what they serve and he isn't offered much else. We are going back and forth with them about this and they started offering him stuff like pasta.
9.1 he was really hungry and grumpy again after barnehage so we opened a can of corn and dumped it into a bowl. he sat on the kitchen floor and ate about half of it, then ate dinner with us. he was much happier after that.
14.1 We are delighted to see that he is back to eating cooked broccoli and cauliflower
17.1 still consuming incredible amounts of carbs. He isn't much for fruit but he is happily eating fruit purée via pouch again, which is a nice food to put his vitamin d drops in.

Sleeping
21.12 last night started night weaning again.
22.12 night was great. He slept in the crib all night until 5:30.
He has switched back to 2 naps per day (maybe the 15 month sleep regression?).
11.1 last night he slept in his crib from bedtime until 5:30!
12.1 last night we tried to keep him in his crib instead of bringing him into the guest bed with äiti. so he cried from 3:20 until 6:15.
13.1 last night slept from bedtime until almost 6!
14.1 last night he cried a lot around 3 something. But overall it seems better since we decided to keep him in the crib.

Health
27.12 developed a fever after going to bed.
28.12 still feverish, vomited each time we gave him medicine. Not eating.
29.12 still not feeling better and not eating. We took him to the doctor. His blood count was high but not astronomical. He has a bit of fluid in the ears and redness of the throat. Vomited in afternoon.
30.12 seems a bit more cheerful but still vomited in the afternoon
31.12 still miserable but we got a little reprieve with a paracetamol suppository. He vomited immediately afterwards, which was strange. But then he ate 2 pieces of macaroni.
1.1 more paracetamol suppositories.
2.1 after lumi offered him a bit of pancake at lunch, he started eating again! for the first time since last saturday! (he has been only breastfeeding only with a rare exception of some crumbs here or there) then he ate chicken and rice at dinner, and then started standing again on his own. and he ate his usual yogurt before bed.
19.1 MMR vaccine (Priorix) and health station appointment. They generally said everything seems to be fine, but we were instructed to start using a little bit of flouride toothpaste. She also asked how much we are nursing and I told her 3 times a day and she said that was fine but it shouldn't be more than that.

Stats
Clothes: size 86 (18 months) and 92

Teeth: 7
Weight: 10.96 kg on 19.1
Length: 80 cm on 19.1

Random
19.1 at barnehage he played outside and since he doesn't walk around when he's all bundled up he just sits in the sandbox. but it's below freezing and the sand is frozen so the teachers said he didn't have much fun.

Rice pudding / riisipuuro

Otso enjoyed his riisipuuro last night.

Shrimp chips

Everyone loves shrimp chips.

Lumi: 3 years and 11 months

Summary
The month has been strange. Christmas was fun but it was followed by a week of terrible tantrums. But she seems to be once again transitioning out of some babyish behavior.

Events
4.12 new "vinterdress" (translation: haalari or snowsuit) because she outgrew the old one
5.12 "nissefest" at barnehage
7.12 St. Nicholas celebration with the neighbors
12.12 Luciadagen at barnehage
13.12 Luciapäivä at suomikoulu
14.12 Baking cookies at Gemma's house
16.12 Stokka church with barnehage for a christmas service
17.12 downtown with barnehage for a christmas concert
19.12 flights to Finland
20.12 ice skating in downtown Helsinki with Vaari and ride on the kiddie carousel
21.12 Lankinen family arrives; Christmas dinner with Vaari and Leena; drive to Nakkila
23.12 Lankinen family arrives in Nakkila
24.12 Finnish Christmas, lots of sledding
25.12 stocking, Lankinens leave
26.12 visit to Kari family and drive to Helsinki
28.12 flight home to Norway

Language
Her Norwegian is in good shape and so are her home languages. When she is tired she flips back and forth a bit less quickly but overall it seems seamless.
2.1 we went out for lunch at Egon restaurant and Lumi easily found the words to politely ask for a balloon (and then got pissed when the guy just nodded at us parents to take one, and insisted that he stop and get her one himself).

Learning
She is getting to be increasingly careful with her coloring (staying inside the lines is a big deal at barnehage, it seems).
She learned a few Norwegian Christmas songs at barnehage. We don't understand them but we heard something about "Jesus" pronounced in the Nordic way. When we asked her if they talked about Jesus, she told us what they told her: Jesus was a queen. The mom was walking and saw a flying man. It was an angel! The angel told her that she had a baby in her belly.
There were other elements of the story but unfortunately we can't remember it all.

Social
5.12 was Nissefest at barnehage (roughly translates as "elf festival") and all the kids dress up sort of as Santa. We didn't know this (I thought it meant that Santa would be visiting, which also happened) so Lumi was the only kid not in red. By the end of the day the big story was a playground collision with "Signe's leg". It's a complicated story and difficult to understand what was happening when the collision occurred. But Lumi has a couple big scrapes across the face as a souvenir.
Christmas was fun. She really enjoyed playing with her cousin Veera. And when joulupukki came, she sang "Up On the House Top". She seemed more excited than scared. She stood close to Pukki, even in front of the cousins, and after singing asked boldly for the gifts.

Toys, Games, what have you
She still likes to assign family roles to whatever she is playing with. Often the dolls are the kids and she is the mother and Kimmo is the father and Angela is the grandmother.
13.12 The toys the kids fought over today: the uncooked potatoes.
She got a lot of Christmas gifts. She is enjoying stickers and the legos. She loves the game "Halli Klack" that äiti received for Christmas.

Food
She is still picky but eats reasonably well most days. It's not something we have been worrying about lately. And whenever we cook a meal that isn't particularly kid-friendly (e.g. spicy curry) we try to fill in with rahka and the kids eat that happily.
In Finland we got a lot of snow. Lumi has been eating it nearly constantly, much to the chagrin of her relatives.

Health
5.12 collision on the big slide with "Signe's leg" -- scrapes across face
9.12 fall on the little slide -- scrapes on the bottom of the chin
25.12 woke up feverish. She spent the day inside and went to bed early.
26.12 still coughing and sniffling

Stats
size: 104 (4T) in most clothes, 27 shoe
height: 99 cm
weight: 14.8 kg on 21.12

Random
Favorite part of Beauty and the Beast: "when the beast turns into a woman."