The bickering

The other day I read an article: 'Before I forget, what nobody remembers about new motherhood'. It was one of the most honest accounts of what happens right after you have a baby:

"...the post-partum experience (...) is immensely, bizarrely complicated. It is, at various times and for various people, grueling and joyful and frightening and beautiful and disorienting and moving and horrible. (...) It's hard to remember how distressing sleep-deprivation is when we're not actually experiencing it. It's hard to explain how upsetting it is when your baby cries.  You may find yourself a little weepy at the end of a cold, gray day in which you accomplished nothing but half a load of laundry, now moldering in the washer since the baby's surprisingly early awakening from her morning nap. You may find yourself unreasonably irritable when your partner calls to say that he or she is going to be home from work thirty minutes late."

I had read all kinds of books to try and prepare for what was going to happen. I read about childbirth, I read about breastfeeding, I read about French parenting strategies and about child development. But for some reason it didn't occur to me to read about how lack of sleep, tiredness and hormones would affect my mood, about the "biochemical forces moving within my body and beyond my control". 

I am not proud of this, but those first days were particularly hard because I got grumpy, I often snapped at the husband, at my mom, at anyone, really. I felt like I constantly had to prove whatever it is I was trying to say or else people wouldn't listen to me, wouldn't take me seriously. Mark and I had never really fought before. At the most, during simple discussions we would both go hang out to our own little corners of stubbornness for a couple of hours and then made up because being angry at each other was worse and less important than whatever it was we were arguing about.

It gets difficult when you have a child, a child whom you both love strongly and fiercely wish to protect, and then you don't really agree on how to do A or B or C. Simple stuff like "does she need an extra blanket?" or "well, I'll keep my sign there because I hate it when people touch her hands or face if I don't know they are clean" can turn into arguments.

It is something we are navigating together, something we are working on and getting better at with every day that passes. But I wish somehow, somewhere there had been a book, an article, someone that could have alerted me this was about to happen. That my mood was going to be dramatically affected, that my views on certain things were going to suddenly be very strong. All I can say now is that kindness, tolerance and being able to communicate are vital.Oh, and remembering that we are a team, that we are in this together, not against each other on a competition to see who is right. Of course we knew this, but we had not really had to live it.

Has this happened to you or am I crazy?

Little free library, Minibieb, Kinderzwerfboek.

 The other day Mark came home for work and told me he had seen something from the window of his car while driving around and he wanted us to go explore it further. He said it was a little box filled with books outside of a house he passed and that it seemed that it was open to the public.

And indeed it was. Did you know about the 'Little Free Library' initiative? I didn't, but I am beyond excited. The concept, as it name says, is having small bookshelves with free access to books all over the world, on a "take one, leave one" premise. The movement started in the USA but it has soon spread everywhere. I am so excited to go on an urban search looking for more of these! Zarawitta and NLE I am looking at you and daring you too: there are two in Mexico, one in Mexico city and a second one in Guadalajara. 

In The Netherlands there is a similar initiative called 'Minibieb' (Mini bibliotheek), you will find a bunch of these in children petting farms (kinderboerderijen). And there is even more. On one of our walks I found a book laying on top of a bench, forgotten, apparently. The boy hates it when I pick up, or even observe, dirty 'junk' that lays in the world. But I saw a children's book that had a sticker on it that read: "Neem me mee, lees me... en laat me weer zwerven" (Take me, read me and let me roam again). And so I took it. This time the idea of "sending your books on a trip and following their adventures", or Kinderzwerfboek, comes from the National Fund for Children (Nationaal fonds kinderhulp).

 This makes me so, so happy. I've ranted before on how it makes me sad that over here access to so-called public libraries is no longer free for everyone (only for those under 18) because of lack of subsidies.



This kind of social, independent reactions to the system is what really makes the world a different, friendlier place for everyone.  Have you found any of this boxes of magic in your area?

The beach, parks, summer...

I spend a lot of time taking long walks with baby Y. on the stroller, because lately it's one of the only ways in which I manage to make her sleep. I don't mind though, because the weather has been glorious and I love going on city hikes.

Last Friday I decided to head towards the beach. I had ice-cream, I people-watched, I smothered the kid in sunblock and absolutely enjoyed every ray of sunlight. It was almost too warm, because after spending the first half of the day at the park and the second one near the sea I was exhausted. I also felt guilty because it felt so much like a holiday but the boy was stuck at work. And I wanted more. So, even-though rain had been announced we decided to take our chances and went again on Saturday. The sun came out again, we had tea and sandwiches at the terrace of the Kurhaus of Scheveningen.  We had plans to go to the Aquarium, but alas it got late and we had to go back for an appointment. (It got even later because just before we took the bus back home I went to get us ice-cream and we didn't finish it on time). We are going to have to plan that outing soon. Y. can look at the reflections in a bottle of water for entertainment and she always seems so mesmerized by light that I am sure she will enjoy looking at the little fish swimming around.

I always thought I would baby-wear a lot more than I am doing it. But even-though we have a structured carrier, and a couple of baby wraps, I am never confident enough to use the baby carriers outside of the house and I am always kind of jealous of moms who've mastered the art. I do baby-wear her at home, mostly to sleep her, and she loved being carried at the airport, and on short trips to get errands. Yet, I don't know what I'm afraid of. I guess it's because she did not immediately like being worn. She fought so hard against it those first months. I had to train her to accept it... it's just not as smooth as going out with the stroller (though getting ready to go out with it and everything that we need is our own moving circus). I'm thinking I should just try and go for a walk with it to see what happens. If you have a kid are you more of a stroller-person or more of a baby-wearer? What are your secrets to the latter?

So, I'm back...

Finally babywearing! It's been a struggle... Y. used to refuse being held, though I've always dreamt of being a kangaroo-mom

It has been quiet around here because we went back home to Mexico for a full month. I was kind of unplugged from the internet. To be honest, the real reason for the disconnected-ness was that we brought so much stuff that my laptop just did not fit in our hand luggage.I say kind of because I was reading and checking in on the usual social media, but I was not as active as I usually am.

The finished goodie-bags for our fellow airplane travelers. Y. behaved, engines are magic.

It is always invigorating to go back home, to spend time with family and close friends, to eat familiar food, to stay in the house I grew up in, to take walks in the center and stop for ice-cream or treats at places where I used to hang out as a teenager.

Then, it's always difficult to come back to Europe. Packing, saying goodbye just before going through immigration, getting on the airplane... it always makes me cry. And yet, our life is now here, our home, our new routines.

We did so much, and it was so different, going there with baby Y. We were so enveloped by love and care from so. many. people.It was humbling.  We organized her Baptism, we went to the Baptism of a close friends' baby boy, we visited Mark's dad, we went on short day-trips to places Mark hadn't been to yet. I spent my birthday in Mexico for the first time in 9 years, that is, since I turned 25. Time literally flew away and now we are back... without knowing when we'll go back again. And yet, just last weekend was nice and busy. We finally met some of the couples from our childbirth's class for a picnic at the park and on Sunday we went to a baby-shower and then watched the soccer game with another Mexican-Dutch family.

I am still processing everything that happened, getting over jet-lag, unpacking, organizing and getting used to our days again. Yu changed so much in a month. She wants to sit all the time, she laughs, she is interactive, she can hold her own hands, she grabs objects, she's started teething, she's learning how to sleep by herself and we are starting to move her to her "big baby" crib in her own room at night.

Luckily, we've come to long, warm, summer days and so the transition is not as difficult as coming home in the middle of the winter. What have you been up to?

Groovy and colourful doodle cake

For the longest time I had been wanting to make one of those cakes in which you get an unexpected splash of colour when you cut the cake, so when my best friend got me a box of Duff Goldman's tie-dye cake mix I jumped at the opportunity at the first birthday that came up.

Goethe's color wheel from his 1810 Theory of Colours

It was so much fun to make. I think it is a great idea to make this with kids, you could use the chance to teach them all about color theory.

I really had a blast, and it was a piece of cake to make (haha). All the ingredients needed were the flour/sugar mix, 3 tablespoons of oil, 3 egg whites and some water. I guess if you make it at home you could make a basic Angel food cake.

Once you have the dough nice and fluffy (by beating the egg whites with the oil and dry ingredients) it is just a matter of dividing the dough in six parts, painting it by adding drops of magenta, cyan and yellow food color, and arranging it in a greased and floured cake pan using your imagination, preferably following the rainbow: red, then orange, then yellow, then green, then blue, then purple.

I filled the cake with freshly homemade lemon curd, strawberries and cheese-cream frosting (200 gr. butter, 200 gr. cheese-cream and 400 gr. powdered sugar beat together). Afterwards I covered it in a thin layer of fondant (I love Satin Ice) and then everyone went crazy doodling messages, flowers, bees, dragonflies on top of the cake.

I do not normally like artificially prepared cake boxes, as I prefer to get the freshest ingredients and just do everything from scratch, but this cake came out really good and everyone thought it was a really fun idea.

Seen in Amsterdam

The other day we went for one of our walks in Amsterdam, the sun was shining bright and it was just perfect. We had soft ice-cream, a merveilleux, and avocado sandwich and a stop for mint-tea and hummus on bread at one of my favorite places, Café de Jaren (Nieuwe Doelenstraat 20-22). I love it so much because it is central, the food is good, though not overpriced, you can get international press free to read while you are there, if you are lucky you get to sit in a terrace by the water, and everybody mingles there: old, young, families with kids, businessmen, groups of girlfriends catching up...

We were able to sneak a peek inside the renovated Rijksmuseum and I was impressed. It looks like one of the big museums, it could have been the Louvre or the British Museum. There is a sort of tunnel in the middle of the building where it's possible to bike or walk through. It was the first time I saw it, as it had been closed to the public for so long.

We walked and walked and walked, we did some small shops, and we serendipitously found a good friend of mine and her boyfriend during our stroll and stopped for a chat.

Do you have any cities that  you love because no matter how many times you visit there is always something new?