« Kaisla has the right idea.... »

I'm having a Calgon[tm] week. I need a massage. I need two extra arms. I need one of those fancy console setups like you see in the movies. I need an email client that reads my mind and doesn't gloat over the bazillion email in my inbox. I need a good night's sleep. I need a mind control ray that explodes people through the power of teh intarweb. I need clowns. More clowns. I need a housekeeper like Alice from the Brady Bunch. I need a week alone. Or even a couple of hours. I need donuts. Real donuts. Maple glazed old fashioned donuts. I need more dark chocolate. And I need a better bag to wear over my head. Preferably one that behaves like a mini-faraday cage.

« Young lovers. :) »

I gave the teachers at Kaisla's daycare one of the Lomo actionsamplers for a few days for fun just to see what they might come up with. The film was a bit too slow as it needs 800ASA and I think I only had a roll of 400ASA in the fridge, but the pictures were fun and goofy, just like this one where Kaisla and another boy are leaning in for a kiss. Soon, she'll be dating.

Now that Kaisla has started talking, it has been a lot of fun figuring out what she is saying as it is a tiny glimpse into what she's thinking. I also get an opportunity to amuse myself as I did last night where she pointed at a tabloid in the grocery check-out line and exclaimed, "Daddy!" I giggled and told her that while Gil Grissom or Colin Firth would be far more my type than Brad Pitt, I think I would have remembered having spent enough time with Brad to have given her cause to call him Daddy. She then started doing the same routine to the young and reasonably attractive guy behind us in the line which made him shift his weight and look at his shoes. I smiled at her and said that it wasn't nice to accuse random men of being her father as it makes them uncomfortable while trying to quickly remember if they were too drunk at some point to have actually fathered a child. The guy looked up and smiled and Kaisla offered him some of her snack. I was entertained.

She has also become rather enamoured of the word "pizza" as they serve cheese pizza one day per week for lunch at her daycare. I need to dress her in a toga and offer her services to the ad agency that does the "pizza! pizza!" commercials. Of course, when she says it really loudly in the grocery, I start feeling sheepish like I'm an unfit mother who hasn't cooked a proper meal for her child and feed her only pizza. Then I stop in the middle of the aisle and wonder what in the fuck am I thinking, her next word will be "take-away" and I'll paste a few monkey stickers on the delivery menus, make them into a little book and start teaching her how to order Thai and Pho for dinner! LARB GAI! PAD THAI! A brilliant solution to the time and expense of grocery shopping, not to mention all the wasted food that gets lost between the need for variety and our limited capacity to consume it all in a short amount of time. No cooking. No dishes. No mess. Child fed. Problem solved.

One fascination I have about her furious pace of language acquisition is in wondering what algorithm she uses to select which words are preferred in English and which are preferred in Finnish. She still says "kiitos" instead of "thank you" and cookie is a funny mashup of "kakku (cake)" and "cookie". She knows her alphabet, but some letters she prefers to pronounce in the Finnish style which, when it comes to the vowels, can be very confusing since I never did get them straight because, for example, I sounds like E. She has special affection for the letter Y, the letter M and the number 9.

Is is unsurprising that many of the words relate directly to people and food because these are basic needs in every life, young or old. Language is so important to learn and to learn to use effectively as so many things depend on it. Having spent time in an environment where the language was completely unfamiliar I have, perhaps, an appreciation for what it feels like to be trying to acquire a language and the frustration and isolation that comes with failed attempts to communicate. She has the advantage of having a brain optimised for acquiring language. I don't speak down to her at all by altering my vocabulary and she appears to understand quite a lot even though she can only speak a small fraction of the language she already knows.

The more I observe her, the more I am convinced that we adults are merely toddlers with baggage in aging bodies. :)

« Kaisla selects a pumpkin from the pumpkin patch. »

Kaisla turned two years old on Wednesday much to my disbelief that so much time has passed since she was born and I became someone I had never imagined I would; a mother. The first year was a blur of sleep-deprived disorientation as nothing could have prepared me for the transition to such a drastically different identity. I kept wondering if or how I would survive the demands of such a small creature on the days where I would walk to the local Starbucks and the bookshop next door just to keep myself moving and awake. Two years.

Two years. So many things have happened in two solar years. I left Finland just before she was born. I don't know that I'll ever be able to plumb the depths of life in Finland, but I can offer that it was a life-changing experience both for better and for worse. I wrote things here whilst I was in Finland to keep my mind moving and to keep it from dwelling on things that would not help me escape my despair. Writing is both an outlet and a discipline which can help organise your thoughts and set them free in ways a pen and post-it notes pasted around your office cannot. I can scribble "Diapers" and remember to buy some the next time I'm shopping, but to attach "Reinvent yourself - Stat" to my console on a little yellow bit of paper doesn't really get the job done. I started a blog at work, but it's not really the place to wax philosophical about such personal things and this will be a bit abnormally personal and a bit more scattered than usual. On the upside, there will be a cookie recipe arriving soon.

One thing about parenthood that I've noticed is that it makes you think about your own childhood and your life in general. I remember dumb things, like the time I became very adamant at a tender age wanting to know just what "afternoon delight" meant in the goofy, faux-folksy song from the 70s by the same name and my father and sisters giggling made me even more determined to know. Years later, I would call my mother from a London Pub to inform her of my epiphany in finally figuring out what said delight was all about. I was supposedly a very gifted child but, clearly, not so gifted in deciphering such things as human relations. And I worry what tiny, insignificant detail my own child will remember and cherish as she grows older.

The holidays are always an especially difficult time for me as there was the wonderful cookie baking tradition in our family where we would bake about 40 different kinds of cookies for my mother's patients and just about anyone who would eat them. Food is love. Certain aromas and music posess the power to transport me back to those wonderful moments of making cookies with mom. But then there would be her dark moods. One year, that 5'8", 115 pound, mad German woman lifted the christmas tree - lights, ornaments, and base - all by herself and chucked it out the front door. I will always remember standing behind her, astonished and afraid. We would continue to have a rather tense relationship and I remain sad that we didn't have time to quite patch things up before she died as I was always in awe of her. As I've gotten older, and especially now that I've had a child, I understand some of her conflicts, her anger and her resentment towards my rather carefree joie de vivre, but she was a hard woman to love. I often worry that I am becoming too much like her.

My father, on the other hand, was impossible not to love. He was a soft-spoken, gregarious Englishman who was an electrical engineer with a love of radios. We would watch Mission Impossible together, build Heathkit radios together, play chess together and generally got along terribly well. I'll never forget his parental conflict at watching me detonate a homemade explosive with a radio-controlled detonator as he was proud of my accomplishment but freaked that mom might find out. We covered up the evidence and agreed never to talk about it. :) He died 11 years ago last week and I have never stopped missing him nor fully recovered from the loss. I often worry that I am not enough like him.

It's an interesting journey through the mind reflecting upon your life, both where you've been and where you think you'd like to go. I returned to the ranks of the working in August, something I considered rather carefully before deciding to jump back into the game, and I feel like I'm slowly coming back to life after so many years of being dormant and after making a few bad choices after leaving BBN. Few places could compare to the demands, expectations and the talent pool at BBN, but this comes reasonably close. It has been a struggle mustering the mental discipline to deal with a challenging job in the wake of so many years of letting myself go and the sleep-deprivation that only a young child could provide. Nothing makes a person dumber faster than an extreme lack of sleep. But I feel like I'm on the upside of the curve.

I'm struggling with figuring out how to be a mom and be a valuable contributor to an interesting project at the same time. It breaks my heart when the daycare calls me, as they did Friday, to tell me that my baby had been both bitten by another child (on the arse! WTF?!) and peed on the potty for the first time. I'm conflicted, but at the same time I think she's in the right place and so am I. She has been as independent as her mother since she was an infant and being a SAHM just wouldn't be enough for me. I stayed with her for almost two years and I often hope that I'm making the right choices. The vulnerability in motherhood can, at times, be overwhelming.

« The original HFB in younger days thinking very naughty thoughts at the behest of the photographer, hence the goofy smirk. »

I ran across this photo in my filing cabinet lurking between two folders. The shock of seeing myself staring back at me from 16 or so years was a jolt to my senses. I had to sit down as the memory was immediate and vivid along with the realisation of who I used to be and whom I have become. The girl in the picture is the original HappyFunBall (HFB), named so after friends found the SNL short to have amusing similarities to she of the spontaneous whim and unpredictible reaction. She would play melancholy jazz on the baby grand piano in her flat and drink whisky with the windows open on hot summer nights and draw a small crowd from the neighbourhood escaping the heat of their own flats on the lawn outside. She had a boyfriend who made her toes curl on the first kiss and whom she should have dumped long before she did but the mindblowingly delicious chemistry in bed forgave so much...until he got the 19-year old lab tech pregnant. She used to wear a bowler hat, ride horses, tend bar and harvest eyes for corneas for an organ bank. She got nailed doing 135mph in a Saab SPG, but managed to get off with a warning instead of going to prison. She....she did a lot of crazy, stupid and fun things. She is HFB. Her head would have exploded if you had told her she would be a mother someday.

But, she is a stranger to the present me. I am no longer deserving of the HFB title from so long ago. I'm trying to get back a few pieces of her like her passion, her vivacity which are, at present, mere embers compared to the roaring flames they once were. I keep thinking about what I'd like Kaisla to remember of me after she has grown and I hope that she thinks of my sense of humour, my affability and my child-like curiosity fondly as these are the things that have not changed and will likely remain even after I figure out who I want to be now that I'm over the hill.

Kaisla is two and I'm two plus forty so I have a bit of a head start on her in figuring out who and what I want to be when I grow up...I hope.

« Kaisla sleeps through her first meeting and photo with Santa, a cherished holiday tradition in the US. »

After what seemed like an eternity in limbo we finally moved into a house on Friday. It has been a long, stressful journey from packing and selling the house in Helsinki beginning in early September, my mother dying rather unexpectedly about the same time, living in a Residence Inn for two months, buying a car and driving in MA again, searching for a suitable home and buying one, not to mention being pregnant, giving birth and dealing with a newborn throughout the process. I think Jarkko and I have managed to squeeze in every major life event other than marriage and our own deaths into the past three months. Finding ourselves in a house filled with boxes of stuff that had been savaged by the US Customs/Homeland Security Department and the movers and a box springs too large to fit up the stairs was the crowning touch. I think I would be having a nervous breakdown presently if two of my sisters weren't coming to help us get settled in next week as it's nearly impossible to do anything with a baby who is frequently hungry and insists on being held by me most of the time.

And it is the holidays. People generally go bonkers around this time of year even without all the added extra stress. We had to go by the Home Depot hardware store yesterday for a few things and that was a shopping nightmare bar none given the crazed last minute holiday shoppers driving around in their SUVs.

All things considered though it has all gone remarkably well. The staff at the Residence Inn were so incredible to us that I find myself actually missing being there and my early morning coffee, newspaper and chat with the guy at the desk. Our real estate agent who, after we backed out of the first house we made an offer on, made sure we got the second one and has just been terrific all around. Friends here who saved our unprepared asses by lending us a few essentials for the baby since I went into the hospital the day we got the car and were planning on shopping for a few things for the yet-to-be-born Kaisla. And the neighbours who dropped by to welcome us to our new house and neighbourhood with chocolates, flowers and an adorable "Welcome to your new home" artwork from one of their toddlers. It's a bit overwhelming coming from Finland where many neighbours never said hello and avoided eye contact even after four years of living there. I don't know how to thank all these people enough. Even in the best situation, moving at this point was an insane proposition and I can't imagine how much more unpleasant it would have been without them.

Someday Kaisla may ask what it was like when she was born and we'll both probably glance at each other with a "where do we begin" look and show her the picture of her sleeping through her first visit with Santa. We took her to the mall to wait in line for an hour and I just kept looking at her in the pram sleeping so peacefully wishing for a less chaotic moment in our lives so we could really enjoy the fleeting time when she is so small. Hopefully things will quiet down now and life will return to some semblance of normal in a month or three.

Happy Holidays/Festivus/Christmas/Whatever and Happy New Year to each and all.