SylkeWeb – Sylke’s mutterings to herself on an island not so far away

TMI warning: if you don't like to read about the female cycle, stop right here!

A while after I had given birth to Yannick I started getting really bad PMS, sometimes about five days before my period, being irritable like hell and becoming 'shouty mum' for the slightest of reasons. I didn't want to do this to my little man any more so I asked around if anybody had a tip. One of my mummy friends recommended to take Agnus Castus, a herbal medicine.

I read up on it and it sounded all right. A three month course of Agnus Castus is supposed to kick-start the female body into creating more progesterone, a female hormone, and thus help to do away with the hormonal imbalances that cause PMS. I also read somewhere that it might help with conception - this should have set my alarm bells off. (No, I am not pregnant!) However, there was no more mention of that at other places so I promptly forgot about this piece of information again.

I ordered my three month course and have just finished taking it. Now I am wondering, what have I done to myself?!

I think the mood swings mellowed out a little but I am not entirely sure that I have got rid of them completely. Circumstances while taking the drug don't help determining how much it changed me: we had Frank around for the whole of December which obviously took pressure of me, so how can I tell how much of the change is related to Frank and how much to the medicine?

What certainly happened is that it kick-started my hormones! The last three periods I could tell every single time when I was ovulating and I also got my periods at shorter intervals - definitely not a desired effect! I am sure if I would try for a baby now (I won't!) I would most certainly get pregnant quickly. And this at my age…!

I also noticed some other changes but I am not going to elaborate, let it suffice to say it has to do with libido. These were also unwelcome to me. (Ha ha, now you wonder…)

In any case, I am hoping now that my body will go back to some of its sluggish ways without too much of the PMS symptoms returning - I guess I can't have the cake and eat it.

Wintermärchen, originally uploaded by Sylke Krämer.

Goodness, I can't believe that one of my last posts here featured the Hanover town hall and only about a week ago I took another photo of it… However, this time in the snow.

Autumn, winter, Christmas, New Year, time flies… What have we been up to?

It seems that autumn just disappeared very quickly and all of a sudden it was time to go for our Christmas trip to Hanover. When we arrived at my mum's place it got very cold. One night it was down to -19C, apparently Hanover was one of the two coldest places in Germany that night (the other was the Zugspitze, a mountain). Strangely I didn't mind the cold at all!

Before going to Germany I kept saying I don't want to go, what if it gets as cold as that one time when my sinuses started to hurt from the cold air? Well, surprisingly nothing hurt this time. Maybe because I didn't have a cold. The freezing air was actually nice, it was very crisp and fresh. As long as you wore enough layers, being outside for a while was great. We also had snow, for almost the whole time - I haven't seen this much snow in years! It didn't snow on Christmas eve but that was ok as we needed to go by car to my sister's house and my mum doesn't like to drive in bad weather conditions.

Apart from snow and cold weather, I had my first Yannick free nights ever since he was born! Frank took him to Berlin for two nights in the hotel so that they could go and see Frank's mum before Christmas. Yannick got plenty of advance 'warning' and of course didn't want to go without me and I had to talk to him several times about this before he went. He was OK in the end, had made his peace with the idea of being without mummy for once. And guess what, I didn't get any tearful calls, nothing, it looks like they did really well! The only person who cried was I - after I had taken them to the train. It was another ice-cold day with trains being late. Their train was packed, they couldn't get to their booked seats at first and I could feel Frank's temper well up. I couldn't even say good-bye properly before the doors closed. It felt horrible and I had to have a good cry once I arrived at my sister's place.

My mum and I went to pick up Yannick from Berlin and see Frank's mum too. Another cold day with late trains but it went OK.

The next day we celebrated my mum's birthday and as almost every year had lunch at a Chinese restaurant.

Christmas eve we were at my sister's place and as to be expected Yannick just loved it. Funnily enough he was most impressed by a toy that he didn't get. His best friend in Germany, Felix (my sister's partner's son) who's eight, owns a Wall-e robot. Oh my goodness, he loved that thing… Wall-e watched him unpack his presents, slept next to his bed every night, you get the idea. However getting so many new things took Yannick's mind a bit of Wall-e which helped leaving him behind.

On Boxing day Frank came back from Berlin and we moved over to my sister's place. We also got to see some of our relatives over the following days which was nice.

Some pictures taken by Yannick:

On 31 December we had our flight back and it snowed like there's no tomorrow. The flights were still on luckily but we spent an hour in the plane while it was being de-iced and the runway being cleared over and over. Eventually we took off and everything was just fine.

I was happy to discover that it was quite cold in the UK as well as this means that I don't have to walk through muddy fields to get to pre-school: everything was frozen hard. Then it started to snow here too and pre-school was closed this Wednesday and Thursday even though conditions weren't too bad. Bummer! But today it was open again. I guess British people are finally coming round to the idea that you can continue life despite snow and ice.

Oh by the way, I've got some more photos over on Facebook and also a few on Flickr.

Got lost…, originally uploaded by Sylke Krämer.

I was collecting leaves with Yannick today and I was totally amazed by the diversity of colouring you can find on leaves of the same type. Check them out!

Staircase, originally uploaded by Sylke Krämer.

During our summer holiday in Hanover my sister suggested to go to the Rathaus (mayor's building) and go all the way up on the main tower to enjoy the views. Mainly because Yannick likes lifts so much.

The Rathaus has a very special lift that goes up a curve and it is entirely made of glass. So you cannot only look up and sideways at the walls while you are moving but also down below your feet. Not everybody is comfortable with that so it did help that the glass floor is already quite scratched. In any case none of my photos of the lift or the views are too interesting but I took some nice ones inside the building which I published on flickr today. This staircase is just one of them.

Just some things I wanted to take note of before I forget again.

Recently I've noticed that Yannick seems to use the German word 'jetzt' ('now') in English sentences. I'm trying to tell him the proper sentence every time this happens, so hopefully at some point 'now' will have made it into his memory.

Yannick is often saying in German 'ich meane' (as in English 'I mean'). Proper German would be 'ich meine'. So he maintains the right verb declination but uses the English word, quite funny.

Even though there are plenty of words in German and English that sound similar, Yannick is not confused at all by words that sound the same in both languages but actually mean something different. In a German book we came across an 'Igel' which means hedgehog. Then a little while later he learned the English word 'eagle' which is pronounced the same way. Even though he had heard the word 'hedgehog' before he was thinking for a short while we were talking about the German hedgehog but as soon as I explained that this was a bird called 'Adler' in German there was no more confusion.

He's also becoming a right little translator. Sometimes when I don't remember a word out of an area that he knows quite well (like farm words) I'm now taking to asking him to help me, and more often than not he can do that. It's quite intriguing. It seems he has a very good concept of the two languages being separate entities, rather than muddling everything up and trying another word in the same language of the word I asked him to translate.

Sometimes he doesn't seem to know certain words or phrases for his games in one language or maybe simply remembers something from playing in pre-school and switches to the other language there and then: 'Das Auto soll hier lang fahren. It's going over a big branch and it's breaking the gate. Brrrrm.' He'll stay with the other language for a little while until I or Frank say something again in German. Sometimes we go along speaking English for a while but usually I'm trying nowadays to switch back to German quite quickly so that we don't fall into bad habits and only speak English at home at some point. That would totally defeat the object of raising my child with two languages. The trouble with this is that both Frank and I sometimes don't even notice which language we are speaking as we switch just like Yannick when a phrase in one of our two languages seems more suitable for what we want to express. It must be quite weird to listen to the three of us at times!

I've been busy, I made quince jelly! I love that stuff as it is not as sweet as jam or even marmelade. Unfortunately I've got only about three and a half jars… One of them made me laugh as it set so quickly that the jelly got stuck to the lid:

We've finally also cut off all the red chillies which now will have to be dried. Here you can see Yannick's chubby fingers holding one for the camera:

The varieties are called 'Ring of fire' and 'Cherry bomb'. Have a guess which one is which. I am wondering whether the few remaining green chillies will also manage to become red or whether I should rather cut them off as well. Any advice?

As I've already mentioned on facebook, Yannick surprised me by suddenly wanting olives on bread. He must have overheard a conversation with my of my friends who is a vegan. I dug out some tapenade (with sundried tomatoes) and ever since that's what Yannick is having at least once a day, usually for breakfast. Until recently he actually wouldn't touch olives at all. Weird world.

Yesterday he surprised me again. At lunch time I was preparing rice with chicken breast in tomato sauce with peas. He usually has the meat and not much else nowadays. Yesterday he said he didn't want chicken and ate copious amounts of rice with tomato sauce and peas! He hadn't touched peas in months! After a while he also had a little chicken but this behaviour was definitely quite different! I wonder is he turning vegetarian? Maybe so, as he keeps asking me what is animal and what is plant: 'are courgettes animals?' 'Now, sweetie, what do you think, you've seen them grow in the garden!'

Our three week holiday was great - with our relatives really trying to think up things to do that interest Yannick! We did a lot of tram/underground spotting and riding, train and boat trips, going up and down lifts and elevators, playing with water features, building sand castles, going down a water slide, visiting a park with deer and hogs… Not bad at all. Thank you, Mama, Elke, and Karin!

At the same time Yannick has become really quite challenging, going wild at times, running around, still throwing tantrums, biting, pulling hair, pushing and chasing other children, trying to climb up on people. Is it pre-school that's to blame (I think he feels a lot more independent now)? Or simply the age?

Yannick's interests have widened too, he really wants to understand how life and things work. We had a long talk about what happens when people die. As I don't believe in any afterlife stories it was all about how our buried bodies become soil and plants can grow out of that. After initial unhappiness about the idea of dying one day, Yannick decided that he wanted to be an oak tree and was quite happy with that idea. He also thought hard about who he wanted to stay with if either mummy or daddy died (the other parent of course) and it was tough for him to voice his thoughts on that. In addition to this, he said to me that he will go and fly to grandma Gertrud the next time I shout at him. Equally if he shouts, I will have to do that too… This was another tough conversation, he kept starting to cry at the thought of leaving me. But it had to be talked about.

Oh, yes, while we were away, Frank built the rest of our new living room shelves/cupboards/tv unit. It's actually not as imposing as I thought it would be, so I'm quite happy. However, I'm surprised at how many of the little shelves are already blocked by Yannick's stuff…

On his second day of swimming (Tuesday), Yannick went in as if nothing had happened the day before. However, as soon as they were supposed to go into the water he wasn't happy any more and cried again. I felt really bad about leaving him down there but the teacher really looked after him so well that I thought Yannick simply has to get over this to learn to be less water shy. I believe that if things really would have been bad the teacher would have called me to collect him anyway. So Yannick was crying for 15 minutes - and then all of a sudden he started to enjoy himself! After swimming I bought him a pair of goggles and he was very happy.

On Wednesday he didn't want to wear the goggles. Argh. My child, typical! But he was happy so all was fine. The only thing he needed was a toilet break. Surprising as he went before we left the house and again before he went into the pool. I guess it was nerves.

On Thursday he finally took the goggles with him and the teacher showed him how to use them. It took a little getting used to. Again a toilet break but nothing else.

On Friday all was fine. The goggles went on and stayed on, no crying, no toilet break. Success!

I hope I can go swimming several times during term time with Yannick, he would definitely enjoy that and he said he would like that. I've heard that there is another Swiminis course during half term so I'll try to sign him up again - there's nothing better than proper tuition!