Reality check

On the phone with my sister the other day, I complained self-righteously about how often I am asked if we are going to have another child. “I mean, I don’t think people realize just how much your life changes when you have two!” I said, conjuring fantasies of how cool our life is, how hip and urbane, compared with my concept of suburbia, which is two kids. A pause, and Ellen replied, “Um don’t you think your life has already changed?”

Good point Ee.

123 Swing!

We are trying to teach Caroline to be a walking sort of girl. Already she has rebelled against the constriction of stroller life. When we take her for a ride in her charek* (as she calls it), I spend half the walk bent over, holding our 90 cm heavy weight to just the right height for stroller pushing. At least that means we’re going forward.

Mostly I leave the stroller at home, and concentrate on forward ho walking strategies. Playing the swing game is a good one, and will work almost all of the time unless C’s tired, or there is a wind blowing, or a dog on the street, or...well, it works most of the time. Swing is in my current top ten parenting techniques for toddlers because it is fun, gets us from place to place and is educational to boot. What more could a working maminka ask for? Educational you may scoff, but yes - via Swing, C practices counting and learns something about time, or at least about anticipation. At her count of three we swing her between us, stomp ten or twenty steps and then she counts to three again. Swing!

If it’s just me and C, walking is a tougher proposal. We'll be motivating ahead, and suddenly she'll wheel round and grab my leg, then lift her arms and beg me to "carry you" (pronouns, a tricky endeavor). When I lean down to explain that if we can just get to the end of that block, I’ll pick her up and carry her, she grabs my neck and buries her face in my shoulder. Hard to resist. But distractions sometimes work, and as we keep walking, I get her to point out children, pigeons and dogs (all on their own feet).

We head out on a hike every day after I stop work, meeting Will halfway home so we can enjoy the gorgeous summer weather. It’s the only time I leave the flat most days, and I get a little dressed up (ie, change out of pyjamas), pull back my hair and try to look ready to meet the world. But after five blocks of Caroline, Will mostly comes upon us with my hair flying, shirt untucked and a wild look in my eye - C drumming her feet happily in my chest, yelling dada dada! Then it’s time for a refreshing game of Swing, and we all walk home, counting and swinging and feeling the summer air blow by.*charek is short for kočarek or stroller. Apparently the Czech word comes from the same root as the English word coach.

Yellow is not a color I put on normally (I was once described quite aptly as greenish yellow by an Italian friend of mine, and I get even more greenish when I add it externally). But to drive by fields full – canola flowers in May, sunflowers in July – makes me want to swallow whole the view, to get out of the car and lick up the colors with a paintbrush or a camera.

Caroline seems to feel the same way about grass. Whenever she sees lawn, she runs to it and flies in slow ellipses, arms flung wide and her smile dashing ahead. Tall grass turns her into a lion and she sits on her haunches, seed tips above her head, splendidly isolated by her nest of green. She so rarely sits quietly that I am always surprised by this transformation from swooping swift to still lion.

This weekend we drove to the mountains between Dresden and Prague and on the way I had my chance to drive through fields of sunflowers, and to see the hop vines that are nearly at their peak. Once arrived, Caroline ran amuck with her friend Viki, a nearly two herself who taught C how to hold a piece of grass to examine life in the wild, and how to stomp in mud puddles. Caroline obligingly demonstrated how to shake the fence in the children’s playground, and they took turns mimicking each other, fake coughing in echoes.

We took our time getting anywhere, with two twos, and the getting there was half the fun – parents chatting, children holding hands and careening about like taffy being pulled from one side of the path to another. Together they met multitudes of butterflies, a tiny frog and a slug that was slowly crossing the road. They hiked nearly to the top of a hill, and helped pick raspberries. Caroline lioned in the grass, and then the girls sat on a picnic blanket and lapped up yogurt and crackers and even some good for you cheese. They didn’t speak a language in common, but by the end of the trip they could say each other’s names and that was enough for them.

Insomnia

Friday and Will's back tonight. All went well this week, but I am feeling the effect of going to sleep at midnight and waking up at 5:30 with Caroline every day. I have that groggy, heavy headed feeling that I lived with for C's first year. Sleep deprivation - a mind numbing, time creeping form of drip torture. Hurrah for Will's return!!

(Yes yes I would go to sleep earlier than midnight if I could, really I would. But as soon as it gets dark - presto fizzo - I'm awake.)

Filed under: insomnia

C's longest sentence so far

Bah bah mooneh, c u enda monin!
(Bye bye moon, see you in the morning)

Will’s on a business trip to France right now. Ah Paris! Apparently he is living off bready products (pan chocolate and crepes) and cafes au lait. He may try for some escargot this evening to work in a little protein. As for us, I’m actually enjoying myself, this first day. For one thing I’ve already talked to Will by phone twice, something we never do in Prague where everything is sms and telegraph emails – home by six any food ideas stop. And I’ve had a lot of time to really focus on C too. We played ball in the hall, sorted cups and read books, then when she took her swim break (definitely Caroline’s favorite part of the day) I exercised – amusing her by jogging in place and doing sit ups and push ups on the bathroom floor, helped along by a cushy exercise mat.* It’s my new time saving concept and certainly beats trying to read while sitting next to a small, active and wet water wheel.

There’s something oddly liberating about having your time be your own, even with a two year old in tow. I could time dinner for 5:30, race against the clock to clean the dishes (8 minutes!), play games for twenty minutes, read books for ten, extend bath time to just before the finger wrinkle point. It reminded me of the first time I stayed in an apartment alone during summer break in college. I was so thrilled to be living somewhere all by myself, with no roommates, no classes or anything to go to, in fact no responsibilities at all for three days.

The first thing I did was to completely clean and organize the flat. I’m not usually that neat a person, but it tickled me to know that I could clean up once and have it still clean thirty minutes later. I did the same thing with time – picking an hour where I’d just work on Spanish, 30 minutes for reading a magazine, 2 hours for violin. Of course, I started to get a bit lonely after two days and by the third I was talking to strangers on the street, but I remember that head whirling freedom and my puzzlement over why having so much control over my time and space made me feel so free.

* Where ideas are born: one of the reasons for my long hiatus away from the blog was that I had food poisoning last week and only now have started feeling up to snuff again. During the worst bit I spent half the night on the bathroom floor (and the other half snuggled up against the toilet seat). Midway through that night I had a brainstorm and grabbed an exercise mat from our closet, and found out just how much more comfortable tile can be with an inch of industrial strength foam between it and you. It seemed such a good idea, and rather a shame to waste on one evening of activity, so I decided to try it out for C bathtimes too.

Last night I read a passage in Dan Brown’s Angels & Demons that defined terrorism’s goals:

Quite simply, the goal of terrorism is to create terror and fear. Fear undermines faith in the establishment. It weakens the enemy from within…causing unrest in the masses. Terrorism is not an expression of rage. Terrorism is a political weapon. Remove a government’s facade of infallibility, and you remove its people’s faith.

I thought, at the time, well it worked exactly in that way for Madrid, but what about 9/11? The Bush administration didn’t topple, it got stronger and Bush used the bombings as a rallying point to get us more deeply involved in the Middle East. Okay, Americans lost faith in our position in the rest of the world as favored citizens (though any Ami living in Western Europe would surely have already realized that we’d lost that position long ago). But what political end did Al-Quaeda achieve? And can we look at terrorism’s goals as really that coherent?

Today I was in a conference call when I read an email highlight coming in from a friend based in London. “There’s been a series of explosions, but I’m all right,” he wrote. I don't remember the rest of the conversation, and as soon as I could I got off the phone and started checking the news, switching between the BBC and The New York Times, waiting for their websites to reload with more information, and calling other friends in London to make sure they were okay too. But I also kept working and everyone else I talked to did too. The world didn’t stop today the way it did four years ago, when bombings in public places in western world countries seemed impossibilities, scenarios designed for Hollywood thrillers or Dan Brown novels.

Is this a good thing, our response today? Does it suggest that we are fighting terrorism’s affect the only way we can – by not letting it stop our lives, by not losing faith in a government or the people of a country, by rallying and getting back to the business of living. Or does it mean we have become like ants, dispassionately scurrying across our hill, ready to build again and again so long as life and order remain possibilities.

Caroline turned two on Wednesday and Will and I threw her the smallest of parties – just C, Will and me. Tuesday night we wrapped presents, baked chocolate cupcakes and put together some furniture for her and then Wednesday Will came home early, we sang happy birthday many times, ate Caroline’s favorite foods (scrambled eggs, red peppers and tomatoes) and presented her a tray with cupcakes and candles all alight. She very carefully blew out each candle, and then plucked the candy animals from the top of her cupcake, saying bye bye froggy bye bye. Perhaps the frog tasted funny, or she was sad it was gone, for some reason she wouldn’t eat her cake, only twirled it around and around her high chair tray like a lonely bumper car until Will took pity on the frogless thing and ate it. Then time to open presents and we got to enjoy her still delight and surprise at discovering again that gifts meant she could tear into beautiful paper (encouraged even) and find something just for her! She gasped in surprise when she unwrapped a plastic tea set and then clapped when I finally figured out how to extract the children’s radio from its remarkable concoction of wires and cardboard. She wouldn’t remove herself from the bench we built, lining all her doll friends up to play tea party. That night she went to sleep babbling happy birthday happy birthday instead of her usual chant of A B C B A B C. Like always after a birthday party, I felt a little sad that it was all over, and a little sad to think that we hadn’t had any of her friends by (high holiday season). But then I realized how nice it was to have been able to pay attention to C all night, no worries about missing out on the moment she blew out her candles or opened up her first present, and noticed the chocolate free nature of our carpets, the dentless trashcans and the crumbless floors, and was glad.

Gestures or manners are gestures

Tonight I offered to get Caroline more milk before our last song of the night. Thank ew, she said, as I headed to the kitchen. When she coughs she covers her mouth, and sometimes coughs so she can cover her mouth, both hands cupped over a big smile that meets her eyes wide open in glee. If you sneeze, burp or make any other random noise she’ll say “bess you” and she’s always got a please to hand out if she thinks it will persuade us. Yet I’ve never thought of her as an overly polite child. The three year olds in our play group are much more likely to generously share their toys (or their little brother’s toys) than is C. But she loves gestures and repetition and she is a mimic who remembers. Our babysitter has taught her to cover up a cough, take off her shoes when she walks in the door, wash her hands, say dekuji, na schledanou and ahoj. Caroline's a purist and when I try to make a joke and na zdravi clink our bananas together she gives me a bemused look, lifts her sippy cup instead and says na zdravi mommee, 'uv ew. She's about to be two and I can't believe how much I love her too.

Filed under: toddler_tales words gestures

Let's talk over the numbers

Today's chat while reading counting book

One kitty cat
mee-yow
(ahh, how cute)

Two socks
un tew
(hmm...those education programs on tv really work)

Three birthday gifts
fesents, babble babble, dada, TEA

What?!
(Mentally scan to remember if I have mentioned the birthday tea set we have hidden in the closet)
Tea, tea, tea

(Decide to deflect suspicions)
We’re going to have a tea party on Saturday, isn’t that fun?
Tea! Candle phoo. Fesents!

That about sums it up.

Filed under: toddler_tales words

Hot water free

Our hot water heater is on vacation. Not a long one we hope, but in the meantime our bathtime mix is two fully boiling kettles to 1 minute tap water.

To try to recall the heater to its sense of duty, I arranged for it to meet a repair person. I say this with a certain pride, because as matchmaker I discussed plumbing with three people who don’t speak English, and while my Czech vocabulary for fruits and vegetables is quite extensive (and just ask me animal and tree names) I really am limited when it comes to talking about mechanics.

Luckily everyone I spoke with seemed to understand what I meant by “tick tick tick whoosh kaput“, and by the third phone call I had picked up some quite useful terms to bandy about along with the sound impressions (kotel = kettle means hot water heater). I was really on a roll, describing the kotel and its personality to the company dispatcher, agreeing to a 5 hour window during which someone just might show up, even considering extending our chat to the weather, so I could keep imagining I was conversational in another language.

Then the dispatcher started to speak about a box that would be attending. And I was lost. I told her, “No I need box, already I fine with box, only have grimey tick tick.“ But it did no good, she kept insisting on the importance of this box. With visions of an extra heating unit cluttering our hallway, I began to get desperate until finally our babysitter intervened. In moments an agreement was reached - Mr. Box, the heating repair man, would appear tomorrow, sometime.

Filed under: Prague words plumber

Flying first

Have you ever wondered what flying business from Prague to Bratislava buys you? If yes, then I can pipe right in and tell you - it doesn’t buy much, besides the thrill of receiving an upgrade for a ticket I didn’t purchase in the first place and the added kick of holding for a few minutes a piece of paper that declares itself BUSINESS class. Did anyone (besides myself) notice? Most likely not, but I certainly felt at the time that the security guy and ticket collectors must suspect me of being something more than a lady in a wilting business suit (it was a hot day on the tarmac).

I applied this self-absorbed musing to myself, but did not bother to assume it for anyone else (hot day you know). My seat mate was a genial fellow - so genial he asked what I was studying in university - dressed casually in a hipster t-shirt and slacks. I thought he was a shy guy who had been upgraded, like me, by the luck of the draw. Then, half way through our flight, as I am holding forth on the beauties of Bratislava and babbling about the business opportunities there, my shy guy agrees and mentions that he headed up one of those very big companies that I’m talking about. I almost didn’t believe him, so apologetic was his manner, and so casual his dress, and it wasn’t until he pulled out his business card from a gorgeous leather card case tucked in its bigger sibling matching bag that I realized he wasn’t pulling my leg.

Together we went through the moistened washcloth ritual. Like most guys, he washed his entire face, hands and neck. I daubed at my hands and wondered just how long washclothes take for the microwave to cook them and how much bacteria the microwave can kill (grody man, really). Then it was time for lunch off plastic trays clinking with honest to goodness metal forks and spoons and porcelain plates. I actually preferred the sandwiches in normal class to the mystery mix on the open faced chlebicky, and the chocolate cookie tasted like stale lard, but by gum it was served on china and that counts for something! Which reminds me, can anyone explain why passengers are forbidden to bring on board their own cutlery when every seat holder in business class is well armed, at least for lunch?

Harmonica

I'm thrilled to report that Caroline has mastered her first off the chart skill. I mean something beyond the walking, the talking, and the building of block towers of at least 6 blocks high (do legos count for this?).

Please understand, I try hard to not be one of the braggy moms of the world, you know the type: Who write in to babycenter.com and talk about how their kid at 7 months old is obviously reciting Homer when she babbles in her crib at night, or that their 2 year old has mastered all his colors, shape names, and numbers to 100 and is currently applying to art school. In fact, when friends with same age kids ask what C is up to, I sometimes veer the other way and say what she’s not doing that I know their kid can do. It’s my attempt to be as non-competitive as possible, in at least one area of my life.

But this skill, well, since the APA (American Pediatric Association) would most likely never include it in their book of lists, I thought I’d mention it. I’ll just add that besides being funky, it tickles us because it shows off her southern roots, love of all things sound related, and above all, apparent nerves of steel and tastebuds to match.

Narratives thrive on people discovering their talent by chance, and luckily fate obliged my story line. We were at play group and C picked up a plastic harmonica to add to the shopping cart full of produce (plastic too) that she was pushing about. But somehow the harmonica stuck around after she’d unloaded all the bananas behind the bushes of our infinitely patient hostess. And C learned that if you blew sideways on that red plastic almost banana, noise came out. So when we got home I handed her the only harmonica of Will’s I could find, one I usually avoid because it jangles my teeth and makes my mouth taste like a metal yard but fine as a bang about toy. Then I went to work.

Minutes later I wandered out to the kitchen for a cup of coffee and a closer listen to our babysitter buzzing away in an apparent rendition of Pop goes the weasel. But the babysitter was washing dishes and it was Caroline who was playing what she calls the ’moneeah, looking like an old jazz musician - hands cradling its body, playing for all its worth, breathe in breathe out and jump those lips around!

Now when we want to get her into the high chair for lunch, or get changed to go out, the harmonica is her big treat. She’ll play and play and then, in all the cacaphony of sound, decide that she’s done and leap as high as you can go when you can’t actually jump with both feet yet, hurl the harmonica across the room, and take a bow.

Filed under: toddler_tales music

Why red lint may contribute to heart disease

Imagine a kitchen cabinet – drawer extended to allow maximum archeological exploration (a twist tie, amazing!!), drawer forgotten in chaos of morning. Imagine explorer turned into harbor seal zooming around circus course of kitchen, hallway, bedroom. Seal meets drawer, turns from barking pinniped to crying child.

Promises of ice assuage. Stated booboo location moves from nose to chin (both unbruised but kisses needed) . Mother assumes worst is over, prepares to close drawer, icebox, chapter and resume chaos reduction efforts. Then - red crevice appears - near the eye, on the temple of the explorer seal crying child, guilt overwhelms and heart stops in fabled location near top of esophagus.

Deep breath...and crevice turns to lint, blown away. With intro of oxygen, heart resumes work, assumes fierce dislike of red clothing. Head thinks, lucky lucky us. And we go back to our day.