My current method for nails is chucking her a normally forbidden object on one side and then going as fast as I can on the other before the novelty wears off, but it still involves baby wrestling (a tragically overlooked sport) and a lot of frustration. It helps that I’m a lot more confident now that I won’t hurt her with them as it was even more of a disaster in the past when I was certain one slip would chop off the tip of a finger
Everything is good here, she’s at a really lovely stage and so happy and determined to figure things out. She now understands certain things like ‘take off your socks’ and ‘Where’s the bunny’s nose?’, and along with Mama and Dada, we have banana which I only realised when I was doing my make up one day while she played on the floor and she suddenly said ‘Ba-NA-na’ - a normal set of sounds for her, until I saw she was holding the toy inflatable one
It turned out not to be a fluke although she sticks with ‘nana’ now when asked what it is.
Being back at work is also going really well. She has settled really well into the routine, loves being with the grandparents and it’s lifted any worries about needing to be there to be in control of everything
4 weeks before my return date she was still feeding every 3 hours with no end in sight, but I slowly tested dropping one after the other, and she now feeds only at bedtime and wake ups which also obviously makes whole days in the office no issue for me or her.
In hindsight I think I could’ve dropped sooner but was too worried that no milk = no nap and I wasn’t willing to take the gamble. I actually think she could go without the bedtime feed too, but I’m not ready for that just yet. Wake ups haven’t changed much unfortunately, we’re back to around 4-5 hourly ones which isn’t too bad but not great, obvs. Usually it’s 11 / 3 / 7:30 which is best case scenario, whereas I’m awake now as she woke at 5 which is rubbish as not much of a sleep window now before we get up at 7:30 (great that she goes back to sleep though of course, I know 5 is the start of some people’s days!).