These blankets are good for a couple of reasons. Firstly they’re natural muslin, so they’re very light and they breathe well. Having a summer baby, this was pretty important to me; I was nervous about the baby overheating when all wrapped up. Secondly, they’re nice and stretchy, allowing for a good, tight swaddle that the baby can still wriggle in. Thirdly, they’re quite large, which makes it much easier to wrap the blanket all the way around the baby and use her body weight to keep it in place. So overall, I would definitely recommend these blankets… except if you have a wriggly little escapee like we do, the baby can sometimes manage to wriggle her hands free, rendering the swaddle useless.

I couldn’t seem to keep Ella contained in the muslin swaddles, so I started to look around for alternatives. I read a lot of good things about the Woombie, which is a tight-fitting sleeping bag with a two-way zipper so that your baby is tightly contained inside, but you can unzip the bag from the bottom to change nappies without unwrapping the baby. This sounded like a great idea to me, so I ordered one in the newborn baby size. Unfortunately this option didn’t work for us. The newborn size turned out to be quite big and just wasn’t tight enough to stop Ella from flailing. I guess the idea of these is to give your baby room to move inside the bag, but not to flail the arms above the head. But for Ella, a little wriggle room was still too much. She would try to bring her hands up to her mouth, but would just get a face full of Woombie, frustrating her no end and making her wake up and cry. Perhaps in cold weather it would be a way to keep another swaddle layer in place inside, but it’s not a good idea for summer, and too much trouble for me.

Here is a picture of the various ways a Woombie could be used (from the Woombie website):

As you can see, it looks pretty tight, which is why I ordered one. However, at four weeks old it was still too big for Ella, and she’s average size for her age (and now at 8 weeks old, it’s still too loose for her). So I don’t know how old or how big the babies they designed this for are, but considering swaddling is most important for the first twelve weeks, this one was a bit of a dud as far as I’m concerned. However, lots of people posting reviews online seem to love them, so I guess they work for some babies.

Chris eventually developed a swaddling method with the muslin swaddles which we came to call “the burrito”. As he rolled her into the swaddle, he’d catch her arms in spare folds of the cloth so that her body weight kept them down at her sides, and kept them there until morning. Being a bit of a wuss when it comes to wrapping her tightly, I never managed to do this technique very well. I’ve managed a couple of times, but my swaddles are always too loose and eventually Ella wriggles her hands free and wakes herself up. I did experiment with a “double layer burrito” method I saw on YouTube, which worked, but once again I didn’t like having too much wrapping around the baby in warm weather.

Eventually, and somewhat by accident, I came across the Miracle Blanket. It is a swaddling blanket that is designed to do exactly what both Chris’s complicated burrito and the double layer method do. It has an extra piece of cloth sewn inside so that you can wrap your baby’s arms down before wrapping the rest of the blanket up. It also has a little leg pocket so that you can choose whether or not to have your baby fully swaddled, or let the legs be free. I have ordered one and am now waiting for its arrival. I’ll update this post with the results once I’ve given it a try.

In the meantime, we’re happily using the original muslin swaddling blankets. I do a light wrap for her daytime naps and then Chris does his burrito for night-time.

On an interesting side note, I was surprised at some of the reactions from Norwegians about my swaddling Ella, particularly from the older generation. One woman told me categorically that I should not wrap my baby so tight because it takes away her freedom. I politely told her that Ella likes being wrapped this tightly and sleeps very badly without it. She looked skeptical and raised her eyebrows at me, but seemed to accept it. Another woman, of about the same age, seemed pleasantly surprised that I was doing something “so old-fashioned” and said she hoped that it came back into fashion because it was such a sensible and effective thing to do. Strangely, I don’t think I’ve come across a single person here who thinks swaddling still exists in the modern world. Some of them had never even heard of it in the first place. But in my opinion, if your baby responds well to it (after you’ve learned to do it well and given it a proper try, not a half-assed try like we did at first) it is the best thing you can do for your baby’s sleep. If you need more proof, I can add that Ella was sleeping through the night at six weeks old, and had to be woken for her late-night feed because she was sleeping so well.

Coming from Australia, I expected to swaddle my baby and was very surprised to learn that it is not the done thing in Norway. It’s considered old-fashioned and some people believe it both restricts the baby’s freedom and hinders its development (both points are nonsense as far as I’m concerned).

Anyway, I had to order swaddling blankets from the UK (and I will post about the actual blankets later) because they are just not available here in Norway.

In the hospital I had nothing to swaddle Ella with, because the only blankets given to me were somewhat thick and bulky cotton cellular blankets which don’t lend themselves to tight swaddling. However, Ella seemed content to sleep with her arms above her head and didn’t seem to want to be wrapped tightly. So I figured I would just use the swaddles I had bought as light summer blankets, play mats, burp cloths etc.

However, as many mothers will be aware, everything changes when you get home from the hospital. Your baby starts growing and changing immediately, and suddenly doesn’t want to just fall asleep so easily. Ella was very good with going to sleep, she just couldn’t seem to stay asleep. Her little flailing arms wouldn’t stay down and every time she startled (which new babies do ALL the time) she’d wake herself up.

We tried swaddling her with the blankets I’d bought, and this worked for a day or two, but our lame attempts at proper swaddling had her little arms wiggling their way out within minutes. This is when I started looking around online for help. Not help with swaddling per se, but with getting a baby to stay asleep. This is when I started seeing references everywhere about a book called “The Happiest Baby on the Block”. It sounded a bit cheesy to me, but I saw it often enough (and the comments were overwhelmingly positive) that I thought I should check it out.

It turns out there is a book and a DVD with essentially the same information. We opted for the DVD, since I didn’t have time to sit down and read yet another baby book, and Chris just wasn’t interested in baby books anyway. Let me tell you, 6 weeks later and we have never looked back. I cannot recommend this DVD highly enough. Even though we have a very easy baby generally, I can only imagine how helpful this information would be to parents with a colicky baby.

Essentially, the book and DVD are about Dr Harvey Karp’s “5 S’s” and how to apply various combinations in soothing your crying baby. Note that these methods are only effective for the first 3 months. Dr Karp’s theory is based on the premise that human babies are born too early and need a “fourth trimester”. So for the first three months of their lives, it’s important to recreate the environment of the womb when your baby is unsettled. This involves:

• Swaddling
• Side- or stomach-lying position
• Shushing (making a shhh sound or playing white noise)
• Swinging or swaying; and
• Sucking (on a dummy/pacifier)

We already knew that the concept of swaddling is to keep the baby feeling secure, but after watching the DVD we realised we had been a bit wussy about it, and that to be effective a swaddle really needs to be quite tight. I was scared to do it, but seeing how quickly Ella responded in such a positive way, I was convinced immediately. It was also a relief to hear that babies initially fight the swaddle a little, but once in it they relax, which is exactly what happened.

I didn’t read the book, so can’t say one way or another whether it’s worth buying, but the DVD was excellent. You can actually see crying baby after crying baby just go completely calm as the “calming reflex” kicks in. We have never had to use all five S’s at once, since for us the swaddling, shushing and swaying are usually enough. Lately Ella has needed the sucking as well, but that is a whole other blog post that I will write soon.

The book and DVD are available from Amazon, Play.com and various other sources. You can also read more on the Happiest Baby website (link will open in a new window).

As I get time (ha ha) I will add blog entries about all the weird and wonderful things I have bought (and where I bought them, since it was usually online) or tired and let you know what worked or didn’t work, and why. Bear in mind that I am totally aware that every baby is different, and what works (or doesn’t) for us may be completely irrelevant for you and your baby. But it might amuse you to read about my adventures into motherhood anyway. In any case, there are a lot of products that I found after lots of research that I wished I had known about from the start, and I’d like to share these with you.

Watch this space!

For an organiser (read control freak) like me, this is DVD library heaven. It also allows us to take notes of who has borrowed our DVDs, and on what date. Considering we own over 300 titles (and that’s just counting by title, not by disks, episodes, individual titles within box sets etc), this can be VERY handy. I like to be able to share my movies with friends, especially since we do have quite a few fairly obscure titles, but it can be extremely difficult to remember who has what, and how long they’ve had it. No one likes to admit it, but it does get frustrating to lend out movies and have people not take the initiative to return them, resulting in regular conversations beginning with, “Did you guys borrow [insert DVD title here] a while back….?”

Apart from the serious sore back I had after spending several hours crouched amongst teetering towers of DVD cases while I put them all in order and added our personal details to each database entry, it was a great activity to divert my buzzing brain. Next stop, Book Collector and my bookcase!

In the meantime, you can check out another of Movie Collector’s features, which is the ability to export the entire database to html, ready for upload to the web: www.zoeselina.com/movies

Note: Collectorz.com also has databases for video games, CDs/MP3s, books and comic books – all of which have the same features as Movie Collector, and all compatible with a range of barcode scanners.

If one more person says any of the following unhelpful comments, I’m going to smack them:

• “First babies are always late”
• “Not long to go now, eh?”
• “Enjoy the quiet while you still can!”
• “You should get lots of sleep. You won’t get any for the next five years!”
• “Wow, you’re getting big!”

You get the idea. A little advice for anyone thinking of making any of these comments or similar variants to a 9-months-pregnant woman: Keep it to yourself. We don’t want to hear it! Seriously.This is a topic much discussed in the chatroom I visit, which is for women who are due this month, so I know I’m not alone in this. We all hate those smug comments from people who already have kids about what we’re supposedly in for. Let us enjoy the fantasy for the short time we have left!

And for those who don’t have kids, or have never been 9 months pregnant, imagine having a medicine ball strapped to your stomach which constantly pokes you in the ribs, pancreas, lungs, bladder or any other thing you don’t want to be poked in, plus all your joints hurting, none of your clothes fitting properly, taking several minutes to get up from sitting and facing one of the biggest life changes anyone ever goes through (not to mention the impending joy of labour). Now when you imagine all of that, think how unpleasant it is when some well-meaning person makes a thoughtless, throwaway comment about how much longer it’s going to last. Mmm, not fun.

Now that I have vented all that crankiness, I can talk about the fun parts of waiting for the big day. After the long search for a new apartment, and the moving in, unpacking, cleaning and tidying up, we finally have our little nest pretty much ready for its newest resident. The nursery is 99% finished, we (and by “we” I mean Chris) just need to put up some shelves and somehow fit the gigantic rocking chair that arrived today through the door. It is currently sitting in our back garden in a massive box because the delivery men couldn’t even fit it through the door to the building, and supposedly aren’t allowed to take it out of the box. So we have some extra muscle coming over this afternoon to see if it can be gotten in once out of the box. I sure hope so!

I was lucky enough to find some wall stickers of the original E. H. Shepard Winne the Pooh characters on Amazon, right around the time one of my friends from work was in the States and could bring them back over for me. I am SO happy with the way they look on the walls. Unless you lean right in, in the exact right kind of light, they look like they’ve been painted on. We decided to decorate mainly in white, just in case the ultrasound doctor made a mistake and the baby turns out to be a boy. But that went right out the window when Chris decided we should get a pink chest of drawers. So here’s hoping!

I’ve been doing as much reading as possible on both the birth/delivery and on what we need to do the first couple of weeks. The books that have been the most helpful are:

• Juju Sundin’s Birth Skills by Juju Sundin and Sarah Murdoch
• The New Contented Little Baby Book by Gina Ford
• Your Baby Week by Week by Simone Cave and Dr Caroline Fertleman

I’ll let you know if any of them worked in a practical sense later, but so far the theory all seems pretty sound.  Apparently the Gina Ford baby routines are quite controversial and are considered by some to be too rigid and some even say “cruel”. I did some research about whether the routines actually worked for real people and found some very vocal opinions on both sides. However, it seemed that most of the loudest detractors didn’t actually read the book, or started reading and didn’t finish. I admit that Gina could do herself a lot of favours if she adjusted the tone of the book, which comes across a bit like the stereotypical harsh British nanny. But if you can get past that and really read the content, this book is not about letting babies cry until they pass out, it’s about anticipating their needs so that they don’t get into a crying fit in the first place.

Someone in one forum I visited even claimed that because Gina Ford never had a child of her own, she worked out her routines on dogs. I had to laugh at that one. Personally, it doesn’t bother me if a child-rearing expert doesn’t have children. Not all oncologists have had cancer, not all midwives or ob/gyns have children of their own. As long as they have professional experience and evidence of success, that’s enough for me. And if we try these methods and they don’t work for us, we will either adjust them to suit us, or drop them altogether and try something else. No harm done.

Thankfully tomorrow is a public holiday, as is Monday, so I won’t be going insane on my own for much longer. With a little luck I won’t be too far into my 41st week before something happens.

Don’t be surprised if you don’t hear from me for a while after this post… I’m not the most consistent blogger at the best of times, and unless the wait stretches on for another week or more, I guess I’ll have my mind on other things for a while.

But I hope to at least get a spare moment to make an announcement and post some photos of the nursery and its new little resident. There has been considerable curiosity around the name we have chosen, since we have decided not to tell anyone until it has been given. So I’ll be posting that here too. Stay tuned!

After almost a year of searching, one loss to forkjøpsrett, one loss to indecisive, greedy sellers, price peak after price peak, we finally have a new apartment. And despite the frustration and tension we have been through, I can honestly say I think we have found our dream apartment. It was renovated just last year, and it needs nothing done at all. It’s just perfect and I absolutely love it.

The apartment is on the first floor of the building, which from the perspective of most Norwegians is a bad thing. However, it is a high first floor, with about ten steps up to the front door once you enter the main building. This means that we could move into the area we loved, without having to worry about climbing flight after flight of stairs with a baby and all the paraphernalia that goes with one (Torshov is lovely, but the buildings are quite old and elevators are rare).

The top floor consists of an amazing kitchen:

A large living and dining area:

and a toilet (or half-bathroom, as the Americans would call it):

Downstairs in the remodeled basement are two bedrooms:

a washroom (laundry; also a rarity in Oslo), and the most amazing bathroom I’ve ever seen:

And yes, that is in fact a TV on the wall on the left. It’s a “Tilevision” bathroom TV which is built into the wall behind mist-proof glass and it even has a waterproof remote control! On the other side of the room is a shower with no less than four different water settings; shower, hand-held shower, power jet and waterfall. I can’t wait to try it out… once I’m done with the whirlpool bath tub with built-in scented oil disperser.

When we went to the contract signing, the agent told us that after he put the ad for this apartment on the Internet, he was contacted by an interior design magazine asking if they could do a piece on it. So I guess I’m not the only one who thinks it’s beautiful. And unlike so many apartments that we’ve looked at in the last 9 or so months, it actually looks better in real life than it does in the pictures.

We pick up the keys on 6th April, and will be moving in the following weekend.

Now we have the grueling task of preparing Chris’s apartment for sale. We have a photographer coming Tuesday to take pictures, so while I sit here blogging away, I know I should be creating lovely clean surfaces for that minimalist look Norwegians so crave. Unfortunately as I am now in my third trimester, I’m finding it harder and harder to be useful around the house. However, I will do what I can…

If you have a WordPress site, I would strongly suggest you check it for signs of hacking and change your admin password.

Damn hackers.

And now here I am at about 24 weeks:

Please ignore the goofy expression. Chris had just told me to picture someone we know dancing, in an attempt to make me smile for the photo.

With only a couple of weeks left of my second trimester, I’m guessing there will be a lot of growth happening soon. I’m still not quite as bumpy as other friends who are at about the same stage.

Although I will promise not to make this into a pregnancy OR a baby blog, it stands to reason that there will be a mention of both here and there when I get around to posting in the coming months. After all, this is a blog of my life and this is the biggest thing going on in my life at the moment.

So I thought I would take this opportunity to tell the story of my pregnancy so far:

About two weeks after we got home from Turkey, I was starting to feel concerned that I was unusually “late”. I wasn’t very worried, but it  was enough that I casually mentioned it to a friend over dinner one weekend. Her response was to ask if I had taken a test yet, to which I pretty much just snorted and said no. But it got me thinking that it mightn’t be a bad idea, if only to put my mind at rest.

The chemists in Norway are, for the most part,  usually open between 9 and 5 on weekdays, so on Monday morning I stopped by on my way to work and just grabbed the first test I came to, without looking at the brand, price, function or anything. I felt pretty silly even buying it, to be honest.

When I arrived at work I did a bit of reading online about results and such, discovering that false negatives were possible early on, but that false positives were almost non-existent. With the test burning a hole in my thoughts, I drank a big glass of water and decided to get it over with so I could get back to my work day. This was at about 10am. Not clever.

I’m sure it would seem comical to me now if I could see my own reaction to the test result. It was a digital test, so I just had to wait a couple of minutes until it beeped and gave me my answer. In our office, the disabled toilet has been converted into a very nice “ladies room” and as such, is quite a large room as far as toilets go. Just enough room, in fact, so that when I read the word “gravid” (Norwegian for “pregnant”) on the test, I gasped and clamped my hand over my mouth in shock and staggered backwards several steps, almost losing my balance and falling into the toilet.

I don’t think I have ever been as shocked by anything in my entire life. Ever.

I don’t know how I managed to walk back down the hallway without fainting, but I made it to a female colleague’s office and in a very shaky voice managed to ask her if she had a moment for some “private girl talk” in the meeting room. The poor girl then had to deal with me very incoherently telling her all about how “ohmygodIjusttookapregnancytestandit’spositiveandohmygodChrisisgoingtofreakout…” and so on.

Luckily for me, this colleague is a very calm and rational person and managed to let me get the news off my chest without freaking me out more. But I still had the entire day to sit through at work before going home to break the news to Chris. To be honest, I don’t know how I did it, but I managed to stay the whole day and distract myself with work.

Without going into excruciating detail, Chris took the news much better than I thought, though we decided not to tell anyone until the 12 week mark so that we both had time to digest the idea ourselves. By the time week 12 rolled around, we were still both pretty freaked out about the whole thing. Neither of us had expected this little event, and we were incredibly unprepared to deal with it. I’m sure this is why the human gestation period is so long compared to other animals.

The next week I went to the US for work, which gave each of us some breathing and thinking room, and a couple of weeks after that I went to Sweden for our company Engineering Seminar. Thanks to my various illnesses over the previous couple of months, it didn’t take much to convince my work colleagues I couldn’t drink because my doctor was concerned about my immune system. It sounded like a pathetically thin story to me, but they bought it nonetheless. What trusting souls.

Unfortunately someone at the seminar had contracted swine flu, and managed to pass it on to about 20% of the 520 or so people who attended, me included. Then I brought it home and infected Chris with it. So our plan to roll out the news to family and friends was somewhat ruined by both of us being bedridden with “bacon sniffles” for two weeks.

Overall, I have been quite lucky in terms of pregnancy symptoms. Despite feeling horribly tired for the first couple of months, and a bit on the queasy side, I never really felt sick and only threw up once. That is, until I started taking tamiflu to treat the swine flu infection. Then it was barf-o-rama for about six or seven days. Not fun AT ALL.

Since then, things have eased up considerably. We’ve gotten much more used to the idea of being parents, and I have been once again free of the worst of the pregnancy woes that some women are hit with. The most I could complain about is a bit of heartburn and some back pain.

At about 17 weeks, we had our first ultrasound:

And since we weren’t able to get a very confident opinion on the gender, we had another one at around 21/22 weeks, at which we discovered it’s very likely that our little “Blob”, as we’d been calling it, is a girl. She is now affectionately known as “Blobette”.

According to the doctors, everything is normal and healthy, and both she and I are growing at a good, healthy rate.

That about brings us up to date now. And before you ask, yes, we have thought of a name, and no, we’re not telling.