Friday, 13 September 2013
Saturday, 7 September 2013
Wednesday, 4 September 2013
WereBear peek-a-boo
Soon after getting back to Cairo, Leila discovered that the WereBears have a hidden face and became obsessed with switching between them. The first clip is from the first day she noticed it, the second is a week later.
Monday, 2 September 2013
What goes up, must come down.... and vice versa!
As Leila is getting more and more confident with her walking she is falling down more often. It sounds like it should be the opposite really, but what is happening is that she just wants to walk and walk, so is walking all day long. Most falls are onto her bottom, but there have been a few unhappy face-plants :-( I am happy to say that we have not used any of our extensive bubble-wrap collection on the solid wood furniture here, and thankfully she has only been adding to her bruise collection gradually.
So from falling down what does she then do? Get back up of course. Leila's preferred way of getting up is alays a helping hand from mum or dad, but she can do it herself from furniture well too. Her new trick though is that she can now push herself up from the floor independently! It's amazing that she has figured out (and got the strength to!) Whast she does is go onto her knees and then lean forward onto her hands infront of her. From here she straightens her legs and forms an arch, then pushes back onto her legs again to stand, The first few times we didn't witness it, but figured she must be doing it herself as she was getting from sitting to standing without any othe objects around. Since witnessing this though, she has now become a pro and can do it so quickly! Amazing!
So from falling down what does she then do? Get back up of course. Leila's preferred way of getting up is alays a helping hand from mum or dad, but she can do it herself from furniture well too. Her new trick though is that she can now push herself up from the floor independently! It's amazing that she has figured out (and got the strength to!) Whast she does is go onto her knees and then lean forward onto her hands infront of her. From here she straightens her legs and forms an arch, then pushes back onto her legs again to stand, The first few times we didn't witness it, but figured she must be doing it herself as she was getting from sitting to standing without any othe objects around. Since witnessing this though, she has now become a pro and can do it so quickly! Amazing!
Wednesday, 28 August 2013
Sleep (back in Cairo)
Leila was so wired towards the end of our flight back to Cairo that she did not want to go to sleep. Poor thing. It was an hour passed her bedtime by the time we landed and she was insisting on being wide-eyed in the sling! Even as we collected the luggage there was no sign of sleep in her red-rimmed eyes :-(
She did fall fast asleep in the car seat once we got started on our drive home (with a little cuddle from Chimp). The drive through the curfew was thankfully uneventful and she stayed asleep as we transferred her into her cot.
After this though, it was Scott and I who struggled to get to sleep until the wee hours. The first problem was that the AC in our room wasn't working (which Scott blogged about here), and the second was getting used to listening to Leila on the monitor again. After two months of sleeping in the same room I thought it was her that would struggle being on her own again, not me!
So night #1 back in Cairo was good for Leila (in the end), but not so for us.
Night #2 and it was Leila struggling this time. We think we can see her second front tooth coming through on top and she was whinging during the day abit about it. We gave her bongela as she went to bed, but she was up just before midnight for a feed and then was struggling to re-settle herself. She wasn't crying out, but was just moaning every 10 mins or so. It sounded like she wanted to sleep, but just couldn't. So at 1am we both got up and gave her some calpol and then another feed. She did go down in the end and then woke at 4.30am for another feed. When she woke at 6.15am I wondered if this would be it and she wanted to get up for the day, but she still seemed tired and wanting to sleep so I let her go back down after the feed. She didn't wake up then until 8.30am. What a lie-in!
Night #3 and we are nearly getting there with feeds / waking. She got up at 7.30am this morning which is a bit more on track with things and allowed her to take an hour-long morning nap as well as her afternoon nap (the day before because she had got up so late her first nap was lunchtime really and so she missed her afternoon nap).
What will night #4 bring?
She is very happy to be put down 'sleepy, but not asleep', but has been gringy all afternoon with tooth ache and a bit of bottle-strike. Fingers (and toes) crossed.
She did fall fast asleep in the car seat once we got started on our drive home (with a little cuddle from Chimp). The drive through the curfew was thankfully uneventful and she stayed asleep as we transferred her into her cot.
After this though, it was Scott and I who struggled to get to sleep until the wee hours. The first problem was that the AC in our room wasn't working (which Scott blogged about here), and the second was getting used to listening to Leila on the monitor again. After two months of sleeping in the same room I thought it was her that would struggle being on her own again, not me!
So night #1 back in Cairo was good for Leila (in the end), but not so for us.
Night #2 and it was Leila struggling this time. We think we can see her second front tooth coming through on top and she was whinging during the day abit about it. We gave her bongela as she went to bed, but she was up just before midnight for a feed and then was struggling to re-settle herself. She wasn't crying out, but was just moaning every 10 mins or so. It sounded like she wanted to sleep, but just couldn't. So at 1am we both got up and gave her some calpol and then another feed. She did go down in the end and then woke at 4.30am for another feed. When she woke at 6.15am I wondered if this would be it and she wanted to get up for the day, but she still seemed tired and wanting to sleep so I let her go back down after the feed. She didn't wake up then until 8.30am. What a lie-in!
Night #3 and we are nearly getting there with feeds / waking. She got up at 7.30am this morning which is a bit more on track with things and allowed her to take an hour-long morning nap as well as her afternoon nap (the day before because she had got up so late her first nap was lunchtime really and so she missed her afternoon nap).
What will night #4 bring?
She is very happy to be put down 'sleepy, but not asleep', but has been gringy all afternoon with tooth ache and a bit of bottle-strike. Fingers (and toes) crossed.
Balls
I'm writing this post for no other reason than to post this photo.
Yep, that was one our suitcases containing a collapsible play pen, a slow cooker, some other small bits and bobs...and roughly 250 plastic balls to make a ball pit. There were another 50 in a second suitcase!
Yep, that was one our suitcases containing a collapsible play pen, a slow cooker, some other small bits and bobs...and roughly 250 plastic balls to make a ball pit. There were another 50 in a second suitcase!
Part of me really wanted us to be stopped by security.
“What is in the bag, sir?”
“Balls, officer.”
But that didn’t happen – Nabil met us, whisked us through passport control, and got us onto a school bus through the curfew quicker than you can say, “military intervention”.
As for the balls, we've now got them in the playpen. And although they took up a huge amount of space and led to us needing to repack two cases, I think it was worth it. Yesterday we spent some time with Leila getting her used to going in the ‘ballpit’, and now she independently wanders down to it and crawls inside to play.
Tuesday, 27 August 2013
DIY - again!
It's become tradition for us to dedicate the first few days back in Cairo to DIY. Sometimes this is out of choice, sometimes necessity. This year it was both.
We got back to the apartment at the not-too-terrible time of 10.15pm and, after sorting Leila's room while she thankfully stayed asleep in the car seat, we put her to bed. Feeling that strange buzz you get after a flight, we then spent an hour or so unpacking our suitcases and generally 'sorting' things. Sometime just before midnight we decided enough was enough and started to get ready for bed, but Alice was struggling to flick the mains electricity switch for the air conditioner in our bedroom.
"Just give it some force and flick it," I said, rather unhelpfully. But it wouldn't budge.
So then I had a go. It wouldn't budge. I tried more force. It still wouldn't budge.
As is becoming tradition with this apartment, I took the faceplate off the switch to see what the problem was. There was nothing obvious at first glance, and I didn't want to go prodding around inside while it was still live. In a previous post we boasted about how we had labelled the different areas of the apartment on the main fuse box when we first moved in, and that this made it much easier for us when looking at the mains electrics. That's all well and good, but it turns out we hadn't located the switch for the air conditioner in our room. There were, however, a number of switches that didn't seem to do anything and, after going through them again in the early hours of Monday morning, it turned out that one of them was the master bedroom AC.
Having isolated the power, and by now feeling very frustrated and tired, I figured that if the switch in the room wasn't flicking properly then it would need replacing anyway. I therefore set about whacking it with a hammer. It finally moved to the 'on' position. However, putting the power on and turning the air conditioner on with the remote control only resulted in a small flame burning inside the switch. I turned it off again.
We therefore decamped to the spare room where we spent three hours failing to get to sleep. Eventually we went back into our room without the air conditioner and managed to get a couple of hours' sleep before Leila got up.
The next morning, after breakfast and some playtime, I disassembled the air con switch and headed up to Road 233. The guy in the electrics store had exactly the right replacement and so a couple of minutes later I was back home. Leila was napping by this point and so Alice gave me a hand as we fitted the new switch. Bingo. We now have air con back in our room and, as I'm writing this the next day, I can assure you it resulted in a very good night's sleep.
The other DIY we've had on our mind related to baby-proofing the apartment. Before leaving in July we had bought and set up a play fence to cordon off a large area part of the living room that we would keep 'Leila friendly'. However, over the summer she's become very good and keen at walking and generally moving about, so we want to open up a bit more of the apartment to her. Unfortunately, though, she insists on walking into the kitchen which is the once room we'd prefer to keep her out of since it's quite small and frankly not the safest room in the house.
We'd looked into buying safety gates in the various shops around Cairo, and they're very difficult to come by. When somebody does sell them they cost a fortune. We considered bringing some out with us from the UK, but they're heavy and bulky and we were already bringing 4 suitcases and the buggy. I've also had a cursory look at building them. There's a few carpenters around who would be able to do it, but based on the price of custom wood things we've bought already I estimate somewhere around 400LE per gate. That's pretty cheap for something custom built, but considering we bought the plastic fence panels for just over 500LE for four, the fence panels are much more economical and just as safe (if not safer).
The question was therefore how to fix them to the places we need gates. The fence panels are designed to fit together in a square and so you need a bit of a bodge-it mentality to do anything other than that. In the living room we've used an intricate arrangement of industrial strength cable-ties to secure the fence panels to a heavy table at one end and a large chair at the other. But to go across doorways we needed something else.
Yesterday we found that the end for the 'peg' on the fence will fit into a large steel hook/eyelet screwed into the wall, and Alice had the brilliant idea of using the same type of screw-in hook at the other end (where there is a hole in the fence to receive the peg) and feeding a broom handle through the holes to secure the other end.
So this morning daddy and daughter had an adventure to the 'other end' of Road 233, where the shops get more local and where there's a hardware store. The shopkeeper didn't have any closed-loop screw-in things but did have screw-in hooks, a large set of pliers, and incredibly strong forearms with which he closed the loop for me. 5LE for 6 didn't strike me as a bad deal at all. I also bought a tube of silicone bathroom sealant, which I'm going to try putting on the base of some of Leila's plastic bowls to make them non-slip.
When we got home Leila was ready for bed, so while Alice took her for her nap I set about using the new screw hooks to fix a fence panel in front of the kitchen door. Fortunately the door frame for the guest toilet is close enough to allow me to screw both sets into wood, rather than needing to drill into the concrete walls. On the left in the photo below you can see the pegs moulded into the gate fitting into the screw-in loop. On the right there's a white plastic broom handle going through the holes in the fence and then through the other set of screw-in loops to secure it.
The gate was put to the test as soon as Leila woke up, and I'm delighted to report that it works perfectly! Now to work out where else we need gates, and get them fitted!
We got back to the apartment at the not-too-terrible time of 10.15pm and, after sorting Leila's room while she thankfully stayed asleep in the car seat, we put her to bed. Feeling that strange buzz you get after a flight, we then spent an hour or so unpacking our suitcases and generally 'sorting' things. Sometime just before midnight we decided enough was enough and started to get ready for bed, but Alice was struggling to flick the mains electricity switch for the air conditioner in our bedroom.
"Just give it some force and flick it," I said, rather unhelpfully. But it wouldn't budge.
So then I had a go. It wouldn't budge. I tried more force. It still wouldn't budge.
As is becoming tradition with this apartment, I took the faceplate off the switch to see what the problem was. There was nothing obvious at first glance, and I didn't want to go prodding around inside while it was still live. In a previous post we boasted about how we had labelled the different areas of the apartment on the main fuse box when we first moved in, and that this made it much easier for us when looking at the mains electrics. That's all well and good, but it turns out we hadn't located the switch for the air conditioner in our room. There were, however, a number of switches that didn't seem to do anything and, after going through them again in the early hours of Monday morning, it turned out that one of them was the master bedroom AC.
Having isolated the power, and by now feeling very frustrated and tired, I figured that if the switch in the room wasn't flicking properly then it would need replacing anyway. I therefore set about whacking it with a hammer. It finally moved to the 'on' position. However, putting the power on and turning the air conditioner on with the remote control only resulted in a small flame burning inside the switch. I turned it off again.
We therefore decamped to the spare room where we spent three hours failing to get to sleep. Eventually we went back into our room without the air conditioner and managed to get a couple of hours' sleep before Leila got up.
The next morning, after breakfast and some playtime, I disassembled the air con switch and headed up to Road 233. The guy in the electrics store had exactly the right replacement and so a couple of minutes later I was back home. Leila was napping by this point and so Alice gave me a hand as we fitted the new switch. Bingo. We now have air con back in our room and, as I'm writing this the next day, I can assure you it resulted in a very good night's sleep.
The other DIY we've had on our mind related to baby-proofing the apartment. Before leaving in July we had bought and set up a play fence to cordon off a large area part of the living room that we would keep 'Leila friendly'. However, over the summer she's become very good and keen at walking and generally moving about, so we want to open up a bit more of the apartment to her. Unfortunately, though, she insists on walking into the kitchen which is the once room we'd prefer to keep her out of since it's quite small and frankly not the safest room in the house.
We'd looked into buying safety gates in the various shops around Cairo, and they're very difficult to come by. When somebody does sell them they cost a fortune. We considered bringing some out with us from the UK, but they're heavy and bulky and we were already bringing 4 suitcases and the buggy. I've also had a cursory look at building them. There's a few carpenters around who would be able to do it, but based on the price of custom wood things we've bought already I estimate somewhere around 400LE per gate. That's pretty cheap for something custom built, but considering we bought the plastic fence panels for just over 500LE for four, the fence panels are much more economical and just as safe (if not safer).
The question was therefore how to fix them to the places we need gates. The fence panels are designed to fit together in a square and so you need a bit of a bodge-it mentality to do anything other than that. In the living room we've used an intricate arrangement of industrial strength cable-ties to secure the fence panels to a heavy table at one end and a large chair at the other. But to go across doorways we needed something else.
Yesterday we found that the end for the 'peg' on the fence will fit into a large steel hook/eyelet screwed into the wall, and Alice had the brilliant idea of using the same type of screw-in hook at the other end (where there is a hole in the fence to receive the peg) and feeding a broom handle through the holes to secure the other end.
So this morning daddy and daughter had an adventure to the 'other end' of Road 233, where the shops get more local and where there's a hardware store. The shopkeeper didn't have any closed-loop screw-in things but did have screw-in hooks, a large set of pliers, and incredibly strong forearms with which he closed the loop for me. 5LE for 6 didn't strike me as a bad deal at all. I also bought a tube of silicone bathroom sealant, which I'm going to try putting on the base of some of Leila's plastic bowls to make them non-slip.
When we got home Leila was ready for bed, so while Alice took her for her nap I set about using the new screw hooks to fix a fence panel in front of the kitchen door. Fortunately the door frame for the guest toilet is close enough to allow me to screw both sets into wood, rather than needing to drill into the concrete walls. On the left in the photo below you can see the pegs moulded into the gate fitting into the screw-in loop. On the right there's a white plastic broom handle going through the holes in the fence and then through the other set of screw-in loops to secure it.
The gate was put to the test as soon as Leila woke up, and I'm delighted to report that it works perfectly! Now to work out where else we need gates, and get them fitted!
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