I'm sorry for the title, it is late, and my brain in a daze. Since the toy appeal was such a success, and I've been getting increasingly annoyed that there are plenty of crafting for charity ideas and projects in the US (check out my current top of the blog reader's list www.craftivism.com), I'm still scratching my head as to how best to use the immense charitable generosity of knitters and other crafters.

Well, here's something for those feeling generous: I had a phone call from a small voluntary organisation who does lots of valuable projects for African refugees and asylum seekers living in Glasgow. They have just set up a new activity where they set up sewing classes for refugees who are dealing with mental health issues (considering what refugees go through before getting here and the impact of the wretched asylum system on them after they get here, this is quite a significant percentage of refugees). The sewing classes are all set up, including bales of enthusiasm and excitement. All they need is fabric.

So I'm looking for kind donations of fabric. Have you got old clothes lying about? The kind of stuff that even the charity shops would turn away? Do you have any fabric leftovers from your sewing that are gathering dust in your cupboard? You know you won't ever use them again. Just get them out, put them in a bag and leave a comment or contact me on fabric @ cartside.co.uk to arrange uplift.

Anything goes really and if you're a follower of this blog you will know how therapeutic making things is for people struggling with having been disempowered left right and centre. 

All is quiet in the Cartside home. A miracle of sorts. Listening in disbelief to the baby monitor, all I can hear is the deep breathing of sleep.

The disbelief was nurtured by the past two months or so. First there was illness, and weeks where her sleep was interrupted and unwieldy. She would end up in our bed as early as 11pm, to keep all three of us awake for most of the night. OK, that's an exaggeration. I'm an amazingly good sleeper and will go back to sleep after most disturbances, but disturbed my sleep was. There were feet in faces, head banging against head boards, fists and tosses, upside downs and biting of shoulders. I don't mind co-sleeping but I do mind getting my head kicked in.

Then, for some reason, bedtime became an impossibility. 8 o'clock? Not Cubling. One night it was as late as 10.30pm before she would finally succumb to sleep, only to wake up soon after. In the morning she was cranky and it took us almost as long to wake her as it took us to get her to sleep. On average, she would sleep at 9pm, and only after mummy sitting with her at the side of the bed for at least 45 minutes.

The magic of mummy milk had disappeared. Feeding to sleep? Those were the lucky days. Now it was time for temper tantrums at nap and bed time. I was ready to leave her to cry because I was at the end of my tether. I did so for about 5 minutes now and then. Result: projectile puke over bed, carpet and clothes, or the HOLDING OF THE BREATH. I don't know what's worse. Unfortunately, thanks to Cubling being ill, the no night time mummy milk rule had also gone right out of the window. 2 weeks hard work of night weaning for nothing.

We audaciously had bought tickets for a night out. We don't get many nights out as a couple. Babysitter was organised. As the week progressed, it was clear that Cubling was having none of it and in spite of starting bedtime at 7pm, she refused to sleep anywhere near the time we would have had to go out. Thankfully, childminder stepped in and Cubling went on a sleepover. Childminder kept sending messages to make sure we wouldn't  worry. I wasn't worried, I was delighted to have a night's break. And I don't feel guilty about it.

Decisions were made. I had planned to fully wean at 22 months anyway and a sleepover at the childminder seemed a good start and a good reason to have more than just one drink. So far it's been going ok. The evening - before bedtime - breastfeed has been successfully substituted by reading books. She still asks for milk, but she accepts a simple "no". She is happy to cuddle on the same chair and read books. She demands books more than she demands milk. I'm flabbergasted. Strangely, at the same time bedtime has improved. There were two naptimes and two bedtimes where I let her cry for a bit while being present, eventually stopped her cry by explaining why I couldn't stay with her, that I had things to do, that I needed to go to the loo, that she was a big girl now and could fall asleep by herself. That I would come back in a little while. She said "ahaa", nodded, and let me leave. The crying had stopped and she fell asleep. It was eye opening. All she needed was reassurance that I wasn't far away, some light before falling asleep, a soft toy to hold and to count ears on.

Three nights on and tonight we've reached the 8pm landmark with a mere instant of protest when putting her into her cot. Her waking has improved too and she's now in her cot until about 4.30am when she usually wakes (I don't count regular shark screams and one minute whinges as wakings) and still gets a breast feed to get back to sleep, in a slight break from my "no feeding before 5am" rule - 4.30 am is so much better compared to the weeks before when she would wake half hourly that I'm being generous that way. Next step will be final weaning and then the end of night time transfers. One small step at a time, simply because each change will mean energy and disruption during the night and that is difficult to bring up as working parents.

For now, I'll have to think of things to do in the evening. Let's hope it'll last.

(I wrote this post for the benefit of other parents who struggle with a toddler who still doesn't sleep through or doesn't settle easily in spite of following a strict bedtime routine. I know how disheartening it is to see other children the same age sleep a 12 hour night without a whimper. If you have experiences of a problematic sleeper, it would be great if you could share in the comments box or leave a link to a blog entry on your own blog about this issue)

This is a post I started ages ago, maybe something like 6 weeks or so. Then came both a break from blogging and Cubling's long awaited language explosion. However, to record a phase in the bilingual development of Cubling, it's still an interesting summary. So the start of this post and its list were done at 20 months two weeks. Her sudden increase of language happened at 21 months and lots of interesting things are happening linguistically right now, at 22 months. Admittedly I tend to get a bit freaked out by her cousin, who at only 12 weeks older can put the whole alphabet in order (and has been able for a while), count to 20, spell his name and picks up German words from Cubling at a speed which is surreal and makes me worry that within a month he'll speak more German than Cubling. Just at the weekend, he learned how to count to 5 in German. Just like that. Cubling can't even do that in either language and she has my input every day...

Cubling speaks mostly English. The 10 % or so words she uses which are German are these: (I refrain from making any interpretation at all plus I'm sure I missed a good few)

da (there)
Schlüssel (key)
heiss (hot)
nein (no) - although she usually says "no"
Bagger (digger)
Mann, Baby, Mami, Banane, Pippi, Baer, Hand, Schuh (ok these have the benefit of being the same in both languages)
Opa
Ei (egg, it's handily pronounces the same as "eye")
Mimi (babytalk for milk, not strictly speaking German)
wauwau (babytalk for dog, like woof woof)
dada (that is for "noch mal" - "again")
Haar (hair)
Dampf (steam)
Baum (tree)
hoch (up)
Tschues (bye)
Hallo (she used to say this when in Germany, once back, she went back to saying hiya)
Handschuh (glove)
Zug (train)

So, what's been happening since this list is that she has new words every single day. She still makes good use of every word. For instance, everything that has a handle and can be put into a hand and carried is called "hand". Every colour is "blue" and "blau". Every letter is either "a" or "b". She also uses lots of distinguishable and consistent utterances that sound like words but are neither English nor German. I'm sure she"s making up some sort of Cubling speak. This week, prepositions entered her mouth. It's all up, on and in. Verbs and adjectives are arriving as well, wash, jump, nass (wet), nice, draw. Her favourite new word is more (which she learned much later than I would have expected, probably because I ususally shove more food into her than she wants and she doesn't really have to ask for more). When we try to get her to say "more, please" she'll have to split it into two utterances, saying the please delayed, and with a lot of effort. So we're not at the two word stage. As far as I can tell she does not use German exclusively, nor exclusively German with me. The latter I can understand because I do speak English with her when other people are around and don't stick to a relentless "German only" rule. It surprises me though that she uses German words with other people, so she may not yet really distinguish between the two languages. At the same time there are words which she used with the childminder for a long time before using them with me.

She can now also complete the end of nursery rhyme verses, sometimes rather amusingly confusing which rhyme she is on (the cat and the fiddle, the cow jumped over the moon, the little dog laughed to see such fun and the dish ran away with the star). She can half count (she can usually get the next number up to 10 in both languages when I count but she doesn't count by herself - her own counting goes like this: two three, three two, five!). Her special words such as "doos" for "flower" are still there in spite of being able to say flower and Blume. Spider is lily (and crickets too), and yoghurt is loly. Those words I understand, then there are countless words that I don't understand. It took me weeks to get that di is "sky", mice is "knife" and sine is "swing". On the other hand she can say rather difficult words perfectly, like seahorse.

The other week her first proper plural made an appearance. She puts and -s onto any word, so to make a plural, she had to think up a new strategy. I was rather proud of it - she doubled the first letter of the word. Noses therefore are nonies. What she learns best at the moment are personal names. Ok, she may call any blond boy by the name of her cousin, but she delights in calling people by their name and still shouts a loud hiya to anyone she sees in the street, as if they are her best pal. This includes wooden ducks and dogs amongst others (hi wow wow, hi duck).

Other than that, she loves impersonating older children: her very convincing "wow!" was a great party trick for opening presents and really convinces anyone that she thinks she's just seen the best thing ever. And I'm sure she impersonates Upsy Daisy most of the day. The similarities are cunning.

This post is oh so overdue.

Before Christmas, when the Glasgow Campaign to Welcome Refugees launched their annual toy appeal, Cartside ventured into collecting toys for the Campaign, partly spurred by he own experience of the lack of toys in the homes of the mums of pre 5 she then worked with. Asylum seeking parents simply don't have the disposable income to buy toys.

The response to my very simple appeal on this blog and amongst the circle of southside mums who had babies around about the same time as me was overwhelming. There were countless (I mean it) bags of toys, clothes, chocolates and baby essentials that poured into my house and my office.  My forward thinking wasn't great as the appeal coincided partially with our office move so it all got a bit frantic towards the end.

I'm pleased to let you know that all new stuff plus some high quality expensive toys went for distribution to the Glasgow Campaign to Welcome Refugees, used toys/clothes went to the following groups: YMCA Glasgow in Petershill Drive (where newly arrived asylum seekers are housed as well as families whose claim is being assessed), the Kingsway Court Mums and Toddlers Group for refugee/asylum seeking mums which I ran at the time (clothes) and the Scottish Refugee Council (toys). I know all these organisations well and can assure donors that every single of their donations went to a very good home in Glasgow.

Big cheers to Jock Morris from the GCtWR for picking up twice with very short notice.

The biggest cheers though to all the donors who showed such incredible generosity!!! I never thought that I would get that kind of response with so little effort (effectively I wrote one blogpost and one email) and it warmed my heart to see how many people care. If you want to be added to the GCtWR mailing list, you can contact them on glacamref at hotmail.com.

Hello there. Anyone left reading this blog? Not sure. Thanks for your comments and emails, really appreciated them.

Funny thing after a longish absence is how to start again. I know some people are keen to find out what actually happened - well, my approach is if you want to know, leave a comment with your email address or email me and I'll tell you. I'm happy to share but not with strangers. While most people who read this blog are people I know, this is the internet and I'm not sharing publicly anything that could infringe the privacy of my family or friends. I know other bloggers do, but I'm just a tad paranoid that way, which is also a reason I won't post photos of faces of my dearest.

One thing I would like to say though is that mummy, daddy and Cubling are fine and though we were plagued with flu, ear infections, chest infections and snotty noses since before Christmas, we are all almost in coughfree country. I had the strange acquaintance pulled chest muscles, brought on by coughing I believe. I was sure I must have broken a good few ribs - the pain was agonising and even two weeks later it's still with me, but GP was adamant it is nothing serious. At least it gives me an excuse to tell Cubling that, no, she can't go "hoch", she'll have to walk for once.

I suppose I also have a lot of blogging catchup to run through but still find it hard to actually write anything of interest, or anything even remotely humourous. I mean, I"ve got a backlog of photos and stuff, but can't seem to find the inclination or ability to put it into blogposts. So posts may stay infrequent for a while yet.

This Christmas time has been filled with lots of emotions. There were also some happy moments, some happy surprises - and emotional as I am, I cried tears of joy when my friend T told me she was pregnant and a facebook update broke the news of N & S's marriage (what a way to tell the world!). And even the pregnancies of some of the writers of my favourite blogs have touched me so congrats to You'll take an Eye out and doubly so to The Trial of Labor. And on top of those Christmas period good news, another 3 friends told me about their pregnancies well before Christmas.

I've started my new job and it's all working rather well for my work/life balance. While I can no longer pedal to work, the car journey takes me past the childminder and past any possible rush hour traffic, ending up with spare child free time during the week. Wow. Luxury. I can go shopping. I can go and get a hair cut. I may even be able to go jogging once the weather picks up. It's quite enjoyable finding out about my new job as well, and there's plenty of time for learning and exploring, all with lovely colleagues. So counting blessings is definitely on my agenda. Hope it's on yours as well!

There's a hiatus on the Cartside blog. Something terrible has happened and my mind is preoccupied with it. I won't blog about it because it doesn't feel right. Blogging will be resumed at some point in the future. In the meantime, have a look at the archives/categories to keep you entertained.