This week we have been mainly....tired

We're all so tired!

Poor Leila's teeth started troubling her a good few weeks ago as her four molars started coming through.  We were giving her calpol at night and then bongela and teething granules through the day as needed.  At times though the poor thing was still grabbing her mouth in pain :-( We're not sure if it was teeth-related but she hasn't been resettling in the mornings so well, and as we're already onto a single nap in the afternoon she has been struggling to get through the mornings till lunch. So she's been tired - and so have we!

But then this week we flew to the UK for a quick visit and on top of teeth trouble she has been super gringy and poorly.  There was one morning when she just would start crying for no reason at all every 5 minutes :-( we could not figure out what was up, so tried calpol and then baby neurofen as well to help her out.  At this point through she decided that she no longer wanted to take anything from the 'spilly spoon' we have for medicine, or the syringe.  We tried and tried, but she suddenly would not take anything. By the evening she had a fever and we tried everything to help her sleep when she woke up at 9pm, but ended up at midnight forcing calpol in.  A horrible night for us all.

Her fever is now down, but she's just snotty and tired (as usual when travelling she's struggling to get a decent nap during the day or sleep through in the morning)

Our tiredness?  Well as well as being up with her all night and on the go all day, our days and evening thoughts have been filled with job hunting.  Hopefully we'll all be able to rest easy soon.

Plastic box go-kart

We've recently bottle the final beer we'll be brewing in Cairo, and so have dismantles our brew room.  Inside our home-made cooler we had a large plastic box around which we packed insulation.  Tonight we took the plastic box out, gave it a wash, and realised it had wheels on the bottom...so we decided to turn it into an impromptu go-kart for Leila.

Unfortunately she's a bit heavy now and her weight on the wheels has led to the plastic buckling, so sadly no more go-kart for the time being :(

Pickle: The first trimester

I’m not sure who laughed first, but it wasn’t long before all three of us were just looking at each other and giggling.  Scotty was holding Leila on his hip and I was holding the test stick when we found out that we were going to have an addition to our little family.  It was a slightly nervous laugher, but a happy one :-)

I was nearly two months gone when we returned to Cairo and made the appointment to see Dr Cherif.  For the next two weeks I was definitely feeling more tired than usual and often had a general queasiness feeling about me.  I just made sure that I got my head down whenever I could during the day.  Despite the queasiness I found myself always feeling hungry. Maybe it was the combination of still breast feeding on top of the pregnancy (eating for three?!).  My cravings tended to be savoury and carb-based or dairy-based, but not for the piles of chocolate that we brought back from the UK with us!

I was just over two months when my body started to ‘change shape’.  It’s not that my jeans or tops were becoming tighter, but a feeling of filling out as I notice that my belly button has already flattened out ready for the bulge!

Naming the wedding photo

Reading Mog

Leila got this Mog The Cat board book for Christmas, and seems to have mastered the story...

This week we have mainly been.....teething

Poor little Leila is getting her bottom molars through and they are really troubling her L  Her top ones came through without us noticing (!) but her bottom gums have been really swollen for over a week now and she is even moaning and holding her hand to her mouth in the evenings!  We’ve been giving her Calpol as she goes to bed and bongela and teething granules through the day.  We’ve realized though that without a bongela dose when she wakes for her early morning feed (around 5am) she won’t go back to sleep – making it a really long morning for her before her afternoon nap. This morning I did give her bongela and she went back to sleep for another 2.5 hours – enough time for a shower and a quick check of email (actually, make that a ‘slow’ check of email….our dongle is only giving us dial-up speeds at the moment – ggrrrr)

Leila is also doing lots and lots of copying at the moment. She is copying sounds as we speak and actions too.  We had great fun the other evening when she was doing the dance for Looby Loo and Hockey Cokey with Daddy and then doing Round and Round the Garden on our palms.

Colouring and dancing

Ukulele case

This evening Leila realised that as well as using it as a step, she could pick up the ukulele case by its handle and walk around with it.  Unfortunately, however, she realised this about 5 minutes before bathtime...!

Looby Loo

The sound of silence

It's all been very quiet here recently as it's now been three weeks that we've not had internet in our apartment.  Rubbish!

It was annoying at first but now it's really frustrating.  We've called and called and it seems there is nothing more we can do as the issue is no longer even with our internet company.  Their engineer visited us after 3 days and diagnosed the problem as being with the phone line into the building and so referred the complaint to the phone company.  However, the phone company still haven't been, and there's no way to force them to.

The biggest upset with all of this is that we cannot video Skype with home. We do have a dongle to connect to the Internet for email,  but downloading or uploading anything means we have to pay a top up fee each day. We find that we just use the dongle for browsing for jobs(!) and then a quick email check (although not simultaneously as we only have the one dongle). You might think that this has generated loads of extra evening time for us as we're not losing hours to fickle surfing,  but actually it's had the opposite effect as everything seems to take much longer.

Who knows when it will be fixed and our lives back to normal?  Bukra, inshalla...

UPDATE

Scotty has set up a weird connection thing where we can share the dongle internet connection from his PC.  The dongle plugs in and connect, and the PC then shares this to our wireless router, which means we can have a WiFi connection so we can both be online at the same time.  It's not perfect, but it'll do for the time being.

We've also spent a fair whack of money on buying a few gigabytes of data allowance for the dongle.  We're going to try experimenting with video Skype in the next few days, once it's set up properly.  It may work, but we're going to have to be really careful about data usage.