Halfway down the Danube

Second summer in Tajikistan, with tortoises

Still in Dushanbe, Tajikistan.

Claudia and the kids are in Germany for the summer, because it's cool and green there, and the kids have friends and the grandparents are there.  I have to work, so I stay.  

This is the second summer in Tajikistan, and that's interesting right there because it's been a while since I've had two summers in one place.  Summer 2011 was Moldova, summer 2012 was Germany, 2013 was Kosovo, 2014 was Germany again.  Put another way: we've moved five times in five years:  to Moldova, back to Germany, to Kosovo, back to Germany, and to Tajikistan last year. 

Anyway.  I'm alone in the house, except for the tortoises.  These are two Russian tortoises:  Jebediah, who is large and lives in the garden, and Franklin, who is small and lives in a box in the kitchen.  (Because we worry about crows or cats. So Franklin will stay in the box until he grows a bit bigger.)

Jebediah was David's 12th birthday present.  (David is a kid who has yearned for a pet for a long time, so he was pretty happy.)  I literally got him from a guy who knew a guy, and he was handed to me in a brown paper bag.  He's not very social.  Pretty cool to watch when he decides to patrol around the garden, though.  Little Franklin was inherited from a little boy who left Tajikistan; formally he belongs to everyone, but only David and Jacob give him much attention.

 

Franklin needs exercise and sunshine, poor little guy. So every day or so, I take him out and let him run around in the garden for a while. Okay, walk very slowly around in the garden for a while.  Slight complicating factor: a small Russian tortoise can disappear like a goddamn ninja. Seriously.  He's mostly brown with some black, some gray and some green -- precisely the color of his environment -- and for a thing with a tiny brain, he's incredibly competent at slipping around behind a tree or into the hollow at the base of a tuft of grass or something, and then going utterly motionless and just blending.  So I can't just put him down and come back a while later. If I want to walk him, I actually have to sit there (okay, with a book or a laptop) and keep one eye on him.  The boys would lie in the hammock, but I sit in a chair, occasionally moving it around to keep a close eye.

 

-- So the garden.  The house is very large, six bedrooms, and it's half wrapped around a small garden.  Very typical Tajik design, and it makes sense given the climate -- summers are long and hot.  There are roses, some small trees (several apricots and a persimmon), and a grape vine.  We brought the trampoline and the hammock, and there's just barely room for both of them.  On the minus side, the soil here is not good -- once bare, it turns to hard-packed clay, and then it's damnably hard to get anything ever to grow again.  (If I were sure we'd be here for another year, I'd put some sod down.)  We had a rabbit for a while -- another inheritance -- but he was eating the garden bare, and I didn't want the kids getting too attached (moving six people around the world is hard enough), so after they left for the summer I passed him along to another expat, an Embassy employee with a bigger garden.   

The kids didn't get attached; they don't ask about the rabbit.  They check in on the tortoises, though.

 

Otherwise... it's quiet.  Most days are very hot, 95 or 100 or more, and sunny and dry and a bit dusty.  I more or less live weekend to weekend.  I'm reading a lot more books.  Wednesday nights are Pub Quiz.  Saturday afternoon is the Hash.  I try to water the garden at least once a day.

 

It's summer in Central Asia, and I'm alone in the house.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Summer in Fladungen

Done with Kosovo, back in Germany. 

Actually, we've been back for a while now.  We had a complicated summer that included a trip to the US and a two day drive back from Kosovo.  The US trip included a trip to Nashville, Tennessee (my sister lives there now).  We all ran in a 5K race there, and the kids all won medals.  Okay, it was the Gay 5K.  So there weren't a lot of kids.  Still: they'd been running regularly for weeks beforehand, up and down Germia Park outside of Pristina, and I submit that 5K in 41 minutes is pretty good for a five year old girl.  Anyway, we were all pretty pleased.

So now we're back in Germany.  July was pleasantly warm, but August is cool and rainy; it's been like that for most of the last few years.  People say, maybe climate change?  Anyway, we have a fire in the wood-burning stove tonight.  Which makes me sigh a little, but that's life in the upper Rhoen.

It's a quiet summer.  We go on bicycle rides -- last weekend we all biked to Ostheim, then took the steam train back.  (11 kilometers, or seven miles.  The steam train goes on weekends in summer.)  Every two or three days we run a few kilometers.  I practice my German a bit with Duolingo.  I'm tutoring Alan in French -- his Kosovo school didn't have it, but the German school here started it last year.  We're still struggling with the move from Kosovo... it's like trying to fit a house and a half worth of stuff into a single house. Friday night is pizza and movies, as always. 

Yes, this is a bit of a placeholder post.  More in a bit, I hope.

A weekend in the Holy Land

Let's get the parrot out of the way first.

We spent most of today -- Saturday the 9th -- in Jericho.  Jericho is arguably the oldest city in the world; humans have been living there in some sort of urban setting, town or city or whatever, for something over ten thousand years.  We spent much of the day there.  We took the cable car to the top of the Mountain of Temptation, we walked through the ruins of an Ummayad palace, we saw what's left (very little) of the walls of Jericho mentioned in the Old Testament, we saw the tree that (allegedly) Zaccheus the publican climbed to see Jesus.  The children liked this well enough.

But then there was the parrot.

It was a grey parrot that was sitting on a railing outside the control cabin of the cable car.  When we went up (and a very interesting ride it was -- the scariest and most interesting cable car ride I've been on in years), the parrot was nonchalantly eating a sunflower seed.  The boys liked it very much.  But then, after we went to the top and walked where Jesus (presumably) walked, and was tempted three times by Satan -- you know, turn these stones into bread, leap from the pinnacle of the Temple, bow down and worship me! -- and explored the Greek monastery a bit, and stood on a cliff top with the Dead Sea in the distance and watched falcons flying a hundred feet below us, still hundreds of feet above the ground, and had coffee and ice cream, and chatted with a Filipino guy from Hawaii who had come down from Tel Aviv for the day and was horrified to find that Jericho was in Palestinian territory -- after all that, we got to the bottom again, and then David discovered that he had lost his hat!  The new cap we had bought just yesterday, in Jerusalem, with Power Rangers Mystic Force on it!  So we went back and talked to the very nice lady behind the counter, and she called up to the top, and sure enough they had found it!  But we had to wait for ten minutes for it to come down the mountain in the cable car.  So we went upstairs to wait, to the boarding platform where the cable cars loaded up...

...and the parrot was still there...

...and it was drinking a can of Fanta.  Like, by itself.  The can was almost as big as the parrot, but it was handling it without much difficulty.  It tipped up the can and drank delicately, for long minutes, while the boys -- okay, the boys and I -- watched in utter, slack-jawed fascination.

Eventually David's cap arrived, and the parrot finished its drink and dropped the can on the ground, and we left.  But sitting in the bus going home, when we asked the boys what they remembered from the day's adventures -- the ruined palace?  The cable car ride?  The mountaintop? -- the unhesitating answer was, "We had ice cream twice.  And that parrot was awesome."

So.  Here follow some scattershot impressions of the last two days.

 

In Ramallah

So we're in Ramallah, Palestine -- the West Bank.

"We" here means me, Claudia, and all four children.  I have an assignment here that will last for five weeks.  That's good in terms of, hey, five weeks of work.  Somewhat less good in terms of leaving Claude and the kids alone for over a month.  So after some discussion, we decided to bring everyone along. 

Given our current state of economic uncertainty -- I'm between long-term assignments, and am likely to be so for the rest of the year, which means we'll be living from one short-term piece of work to the next -- this may strike some as a rather reckless decision.  That's because it is, in fact, a rather reckless decision.  Going through life constantly being reckless would be pretty stupid.  But going through life never being reckless would be pretty boring.  And you don't get that many opportunities to take your kids along for a month in the Holy Land.

So: here we are in Ramallah, the temporary capital of the Palestinian not-quite-state.  We found a nice corporate apartment (three bedrooms, kitchen, swimming pool!) with a reasonable monthly rate; it's a bit farther out in the suburbs than we might have liked (yes, Ramallah has suburbs) but the kids seem happy enough.  We got here three days ago; this weekend, we go explore Jerusalem.

So, if anyone's still reading this blog -- what do you want to know about Palestine?

Larks and Lice

Hey ho, the blog's still here.  I took 40 days offline for Lent.  -- Well mostly offline.  Could still read, of course!  Ha ha, imagine trying to live without reading the Internet.  No.  But I couldn't write anything, from Ash Wednesday to Easter.

Okay, Easter was a while ago.  What's new?

Here's the big picture: I'm once again between long-term assignments.  That means we are once again back in Fladungen.  This by itself is just fine -- we like Fladungen.  But it's complicated by the fact that I don't know when (or, really whether) I will have another long-term assignment.  Moldova was great for ten months, but it ended, and my employer did not win the follow-on project.  I'm likely to be bid on something in the next little while, but nothing that gets bid in May or June will be awarded until September at the earliest.  So it's likely that we'll be in Fladungen through at least September. 

This is somewhat worrisome because if we're here that long, we should be putting the two older boys into the German school system.  Germany doesn't allow home schooling, you see.  It looks like the system is willing to not-notice kids at home for a month, two months, maybe three months... but six months or more is probably pushing it.  And we're not enthusiastic about putting the boys into school here.  (That probably deserves a post of its own.  In a bit, perhaps.)

An additional wrinkle is that I'm also not getting a lot of short-term work just now.  Not none, but not as much as I'd like.  I survived tolerably well for three years as a self-employed consultant doing short-term stuff here, there and everywhere -- that's why all those posts from Congo and Zambia and the West Bank.  But (to make a long story short) about half my work was doing CLIR assessments, and for various reasons there aren't likely to be many CLIR assessments for the next year and a bit.  So I'm having to scramble a bit.

No, we're not starving -- there's food on the table, we're paying the mortgage, all that.  It's just not where we were hoping to be right now.

Anyway.  That's the big picture; what's happening right now?

Lice!

America again

We're back in the USA.  Yah, all of us.

We plan be around for about six weeks -- basically spending the month of February working, then the first two weeks of March driving around seeing family and friends.

The day before we left, Claudia's parents took all four kids and we spent a day cleaning the house.  (Conclusion: we should do this once per month regardless.)  As we got in the car, Claudia pointed out that this is our first plane trip in almost ten years without a stroller.  Yeahh. -- It's definitely helping that the kids are getting older.  Leah can walk everywhere and we don't need to drag a diaper bag around; Alan and David are old enough to pull suitcases, and can sit quietly and read books (though of course they'd rather play Nintendo or something explosive on the iPad.) 

The trip over was, as these things go, pretty straightforward.  The plane was almost empty, which let us spread out a bit.  We flew over Greenland, which was pretty cool.  (Okay, cool for Claudia and me.  Bunch of mountains sticking up through an ice cap.  Boys were mildly interested for a minute or two.) Then we were through US immigration in about five minutes, which was totally a record.  There was a lot of traffic on the DC beltway -- it took over an hour to reach our apartment -- but otherwise, smooth enough.  Kids fell asleep in the van, woke up, went back to sleep (with a lot of jet-lag addled whimpering and complaining), woke up a few hours later FULL OF ENERGY.  It's now a quarter to six and they've spent the last couple of hours playing Angry Birds and watching Phineas and Ferb.

So, America.  Howdy.

 

 

 

 

 

Last Naked Day, 2011

Naked Season ended today. 

I went outside and mowed the lawn and emptied out the plastic swimming pool.  It's been too cool for swimming for a couple of weeks now, and the swimming pool was filling up with leaves and getting gunky.

Our yard here is small -- maybe a fifth the size of our yard in Germany.  But it's pleasant enough; grass, lots of trees.  And there are high walls around it.  I brought out the hose for cleaning the pool, and before long the kids got their hands on it and started spraying each other.  It was a sunny day, and warm for mid-September, so in very little time they were running around naked.

They do this a lot, in summer.  In Germany nobody cares.  (Well, we do have to remind the two little ones that they're not supposed to run out into the front yard or the sidewalk.  But it's not like anyone is going to call the cops if the five-year-old is drawing with chalk on the front driveway while au naturel.)  Moldova's a lot more conservative in some ways, but our yard has a high wall all the way around.  So, lots of spraying! and splashing! and yelling!  for an hour or two on a sunny Saturday afternoon, while Claudia was out shopping and I was taking apart the pool and doing random bits of minor yard work.

Naked Season ended around 3 pm in the afternoon of Saturday, September 17, with shivering little boys wrapped in towels.  After Claude came home we had a late lunch, then some television, then books, then dinner.  The days are getting shorter quickly as the year tumbles down towards the equinox, and it's not likely there'll be another afternoon quite so sunny and warm.

Next year, if we're in Germany, we'll break out the hose and sprinkler sometime in May.  If we're somewhere else... well, we may be someplace where local mores don't allow little kids to run around with no clothes on.  Or we may just not have a yard.  We really don't know.

Meanwhile, though, they had an afternoon of spraying each other with hoses.  Which is always good.

 

 

 

Jacob is five

I was away on his actual birthday.  Got back from the Congo a day later.

But the next day we went to a toy store together -- he chose a toy backhoe; he loves construction machinery -- and then I took him in the afternoon to the Wasserkuppe.

The Wasserkuppe is a small mountain about half an hour away from here.  It's famous for sailplaning, and also for a Cold War era radome on the summit that's now a museum.  But it also has a small amusement park near the top, which includes a couple of... I don't know what they're called, exactly.  Summer sleds?  The toboggan things that go on wheels down a track.  The tracks are a couple of km long, so you can build up some pretty good speed going down the mountainside.

It was a cloudy, foggy day but (as it turned out) the top of the Wasserkuppe just poked above most of the clouds, so it was half-sunny, cool but nice.  The amusement park was open, but not busy at all -- we could go on all the rides without waiting in line more than a few moments.

As it turns out, Jacob is the kind of kid who likes going on rides, but doesn't care to go on them twice.  (I did not know this.  I have learned something new about my son.)  So in an hour or so, we'd been on every ride -- there aren't that many.  We rode on all three (slow, fast, and whoa) that go down the mountainside and back.  We went on the "witches broomstick", which is a roller-coastery sort of a thing, and on the slow-turning kiddie swing.  (Think of a metal T-bar with playground swings hanging from the crossbars.  Now rotate it slowly.)  We ate french fries with ketchup and then, on the way out, an ice cream cone.

Jacob was... not exactly wiggling with delight.  More like, very content.  He spends a lot of time in the shadow of his two older brothers, and I think he was enjoying being away from them and alone as much as he was liking the rides and all.

-- One thing that struck me.  Germans are so!  much!  less! concerned about safety issues than litigation-happy Americans.  For instance, several of the rides had /no operators/.  The kiddie swing?  Just a big button with a sign saying "stops automatically".  Granted, it wasn't exactly a life-threatening blur of speed and raw metal.  But still.  And the witches broomstick, which is a real, no-kidding amusement park ride, was coin-operated.  Sit down, close the safety bar, put two euros in the slot, and off you go.  The playground had a huge, fast slide; at the base of the ladder was a box of sacks you could bring up, to sit on and go even faster.  It was awesome -- there was a constant stream of kids going up and down -- but the American part of my brain was all "shouldn't someone be on duty there?  what if one of those kids is careless and gets hurt?"

But nobody did get hurt (at least, not while we were watching) and we both had a really good time.  Happy birthday, little boy.

And then the first day of school

Third grade for Alan, second for David.

David is still crossing the street.  Alan is now riding the bus to Nordheim, 7 km away.  This morning everyone was up early!  Alan had a big ceremonial breakfast of eggs and bacon.  Alan went out the door, David went out the door...

I went back to bed.

As of Day One, Alan likes his new school.  It has a beehive!  And lots of stuffed birds!  And an aquarium, with those shiny little blue guys!  And his teacher is nice!  And he made a new friend, who says he has all the Bakugans!

It's a dismal damp grey day, so once they did their homework we settled down for an episode of Mythbusters.  (We're on a big Mythbusters kick right now.)  We're watching Season One, most of which we saw when they first came out, six years ago, in Romania.

In other news... there is no other news.  Still waiting to hear on jobs.  I'm traveling to the Democratic Republic of the Congo on Friday.  (Kinshasa again, then the provincial town of Bandundu.)

Anyway.  Schoolboys!

Reading the Hobbit

Back from Uganda! 

Okay, actually I've been back for two weeks.  Just haven't felt like blogging.  And it's been mostly uneventful: hot summer weather (well, hot for Germany), boys in school (German school goes to the end of July).

One thing of interest: I spent about ten days reading The Hobbit to the boys, mostly as a bedtime story.

They loved it.  Totally utterly loved it.  Gollum was almost too scary, but the goblins, the spiders, the dragon, clever resourceful little Bilbo -- pure gold.  I had tried to read it before, a year or two back, and they hadn't liked it.  But now Alan is eight and David is just-turned-seven, and it just clicked.

Some things.  One, the Hobbit doesn't read like a first novel.  Carlos pointed out that's because Tolkein rewrote it about eight times before publication and a couple more times after, which make sense.  Still, it's not just about the quality of the writing.  The plotting and story structure is very... assured.

Boys, early 21st century

Some recent vignettes from the life of Alan (age 8) and David (age 6):

1)  As a prize for reading to his littlest brother (Jacob, age 4), Alan got to watch this clip from an old movie.  (Relevance: we were just reading some Greek myths, and did the Perseus and Medusa story.)  I say "old movie", but I remember when this came out -- I was a senior in high school.

Anyway. Alan has a vivid imagination, so this was right on the edge of Too Scary.  But what kept it on this side was... the monster.  About two minutes in, Alan said, "Medusa looks like special effects."  This was, I think, partly defensive -- it's a scary scene, Medusa is scary, so reassure your eight-year-old self that it's just a movie.  But it was also an effective defensive tactic, because -- I'm really sorry, Ray Harryhausen -- an eight-year-old in 2010 has seen special effects so breathtakingly realistic that a stop-motion monster, no matter how scary-looking, is just not going to wholly convince.

(Oddly enough, this wasn't an issue with the entirely-stop-motion Fantastic Mr. Fox movie.  They didn't like Mr. Fox, more's the pity, but it wasn't because of the animation.)

2)  We have an old CD player/tape recorder in their room.  Mostly they've been playing CDs, but last week Claudia picked up a couple of tapes at the library.

When the tape ran out, Alan was completely nonplussed.  "You have to take it out, turn it over -- see? -- and put it in again."  "You do it, Daddy."

Laufrad

I don't know what this is called in English.  It's just a small bicycle with no pedals.  Push-bike?

It's for kids who aren't big enough for a real bike.  Back in December, Jacob went to Cyprus with his Oma, my mother-in-law.  They went to visit Claudia's brother, who lives there with his family.  Jacob got to see his two cousins, ages three and one.  And the older cousin had a laufrad.  Jacob utterly loved it, so we got one for him for Christmas.

He didn't get much use out of it for a while, but in the last few weeks he's been riding it to school most mornings.  Now, you can't pedal a laufrad, so it's no use at all going up hills.  But on the flats you can get up a decent head of speed (for a four year old) by pushing with your feet.  And going downhill, you can go just as fast as any bike.

Jacob's kindergarten is downhill all the way from our house.

Fireworks, firewood, and whale

Shot off some fireworks on New Year's Eve.

There's a little balcony outside the boys' room.  We don't use it for much except to hang the satellite dish.  It's only one story up, but I know my boys.  If it wasn't strictly forbidden, sooner or later someone would be trying to rappel off it.

But for this special night, we wrapped them up in coats and jackets and they got to stand and watch while I set off rockets and Roman candles and cherry bombs in the back yard below them.  The entire array cost 9 euros at the local supermarket and lasted almost half an hour.

Two high points.  One, I couldn't figure out what the Roman candles were.  (Don't think I'd ever seen one up close.)  So, I decided they must be horizontally launched rockets.  This was, in retrospect, pretty dumb, but I was short on sleep and shooting off fireworks for the first time in, I can't even think.  Twenty years?  More.  So I set up a launch ramp.  Which happened to be pointing straight back across the porch through the open door...

Schwimmbad

Went to the Schwimmbad yesterday, down in Bad Neustadt.

It's two pools indoor and two out, plus one of those long slides, a kiddie pool, a whirlpool, and a sauna.  It's nice.  Alan is becoming a strong little swimmer.  David, much less so -- David overthinks stuff, and ties himself up -- but it will come.  Jacob and Leah just love splashing around.

What really struck me, though, is how warm Bad Neustadt is.  It's just 35 km south of us (20 miles) but it feels more like 200.  There was almost no snow on the ground there.  In Fladungen, nasty, crusty, re-frozen snow covers everything.  It's easily 8 or 10 degrees Fahrenheit (4 or 5 Celsius) colder here.  Part of that is altitude -- we're about 100 meters higher up -- but mostly it's our weird microclimate, shivering under the chilly shadow of the Hochrhoen.

Anyway.  One other thing: we are right now near, I think -- I hope -- the point of maximum logistical difficulty in doing this sort of thing.  Alan and David can change by themselves, but can't be relied on to do it neatly and not forget anything.  Jacob can't change himself. (Or, more precisely, can but won't.) Leah is still in diapers.  We have to carry bathing suits and towels and swim toys and flippers in a huge bag, because the boys are not at the point yet where we can give each his own backpack.  (Though maybe soon.)  And once in the pool, one parent has to stay in the kiddy pool at all times.

It's one of those parenting paradoxes: half the time you're looking at them and thinking, you are so adorable right now, must you change?  I can't stand it!  And the other half you're thinking, grow up grow up grow up damn it hurry up grow up!

Actually, I can think both of those more or less at the same time.

Anyway, Schwimmbad.  Winter fun!

They still believe

It's probably the last year that all our children believe in Santa. 

Alan is seven and a half, David six.  By next year one or both of them will be a hardened little skeptic. 

But this year, they got the full treatment.  Much discussion of how Santa pulls it off.  (There are mysteries -- how does he get down our tiny chimney? -- but hey, Santa must not be showing all his cards.)  Milk and cookies left for him; empty glass and a couple of crumbs on the plate, come morning.  You know the drill.

Claudia pulled off a particular masterstroke.  The boys have been listening to Christmas music, and "Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer" has been a particular favorite.  One of the boys came up with the idea of asking for Rudolph's autograph.  Reindeers don't sign autographs!  But they can do hoofprints.  Claude spent several minutes making a stamp out of a potato...

Anyway.  It was a good Christmas.

Lego Space Police

A break from things Congo-related.

Today was the boys' last day of school, and the baby's last of child care.  Two weeks vacation for everyone!  Yay!  Well, we got through it last year.  So we know it can be done.

One thing I've wanted to do: get back to serious story telling.  I'm starting with the Lego Space Police.

Lego has a policy of not giving too much backstory to its little plastic characters.  Which makes sense.  The Space Police are kind of an extreme example, though.  There are bad guys (the Skull Twins, the guy with the squid head) and good guys (the Space Police) and they both fly around in cool-looking vehicles that a seven-year-old can build in an hour or so.  And that's about it.

But that's fine.  So far, the Skull Twins have used their mind control powers to steal a massive energy crystal (it's really a Bakugon, and if you don't know what a Bakugon is... well, some other time) from an auction house where Buzz Lightyear and a variety of McDonalds Happy Meal characters were bidding on it.  Then they went to Villains World, an unpleasant volcanic planet orbiting a black hole.  (The magma pools keep the atmosphere warm, but the constant eruptions and dust storms keep nosy neighbors away.)  After various contretemps with the other villains, the Space Police show up.  (Alan built a very neat little unmanned probe which tracked their ship.)  Big fight scene, many villains captured but some escape, big chase scene which ended with the bad guys activating their hyperdrive right on the planet's surface!  Did they survive?  We'll find out... tomorrow!

Well, we're going to have to fill the next two weeks somehow.  And serial stories do keep them interested, and can sometimes even be used for behavior modification.  Sometimes.

Because it's going to snow tomorrow

... a memory of happy summer days at Lewes Beach, DE.  Also, for the husband, because the Congo seems to be quite depressing.

Sick, sick, sick

Claudia has been flat on her back the last couple of days -- sore throat, aches and pains, general misery.  (But no fever.  Claude doesn't get fevers.  It's very strange.)

Yesterday afternoon Alan turned up with the same thing -- very sore throat, general misery, fever.  Also vomiting, probably brought on by coughing too much.  (If you don't have a little kid in your life: little kids can do this.  Unfortunately.)  We moved him into our bed for the night, and I slept in his.  Alan and David share a bunk bed, so I climbed up into the top bunk, read a few pages about premodern Central Asia, and fell asleep.

Come the morning, David came creeping downstairs, face pale: "Mommy!  There's a big something in Alan's bed!"

Anyway.  David turned up with the same cough, so he and Alan are home from school today.  Tea, chicken, soup, cartoons.  When you have a lot of kids, this just happens sometimes.

The baby burns her hand

On our wood-burning stove.

This was probably inevitable.  The stove has a door with a big glass window, so you can see the flames... laughing, dancing, beckoning.  The baby is still quite young (14 months this week) and not smart about fire.  The stove stood cold and empty for six months, while she learned to sit up, roll over, and then crawl; now, when the weather has turned cold and we've started using it again, she's very quick and active. 

So, probably inevitable.  And it could have been much worse.  After the stove has been burning for a few hours, the surface of the glass gets alarmingly hot -- like, surface of a hot stove hot.  In this case, the fire was new, so it wasn't that bad.  And she only managed to get one hand on it.

That said... It was pretty unpleasant.  She screamed and screamed.  Her hand sprouted half a dozen large white blisters, including a truly enormous one across her palm.  She clawed off the first couple of bandages.  Eventually we mummy-wrapped her entire hand into a mitten of gauze and bandages.  A day later it's grimy, but still intact.  I suppose we'll have to change and dress it again later today.

She's been, all things considered, pretty good about it.  Calmed down after a while.  A day later, she till whimpers now and then, but is mostly back to her normal self.

She can't put any weight on that hand when she crawls, though.  But she's still not interested in walking.  So she crawls on three limbs, like a crippled dog, holding her bandaged hand out before her.

Long-time readers of this blog will know that we're no stranger to childhood injuries.  Alan was almost exactly this age when he took a header down the front steps of our house in Belgrade. 

Still.

Superhero cartoons

We love us some superhero cartoons.

Best ever: the Justice League and Justice League Unlimited, of course, especially the middle two seasons.  Classics to be revisited again and again.  The animation, the voice acting, the characterization, the plots -- just perfect.

Runner up: the 1990s Batman, of course.  Both were in the same universe and used many of the same animators and voice actors, but the "Timiverse" Batman had its own distinctive, gloomy aesthetic.  Edged out only because the wide-screen Justice League was just so darn fun.

Honorable mention: Teen Titans Go.  Pitched to a slightly younger audience, but that's fine.  Got a bit repetitive over time, since the five personalities never evolved or changed much.  On the other hand, some eps -- especially in the last two seasons -- were really astonishingly good.  Still gets plenty of DVD time here in the house.

(The discerning, comics-aware critic will have noticed these are all DC cartoons.  That's because the Marvel cartoons have just not been as good.  Don't know why, but there it is.)

Summer vacation, Friday morning

The baby ate a bee.

It’s vacation time here, so mornings are pretty relaxed.  We allow about an hour of TV in the morning and another hour in the evening.  (Okay, sometimes it’s more.  But those are our goals.)  The morning hour is usually pretty early, often before breakfast… the boys consider watching Teen Titans or Pokemon a higher priority than eating.  Possibly this is a little too relaxed?  But it’s summer vacation… 

In our defense, without the lash of school, everyone wakes up at different times.   So it’s simpler to wait until everyone is up, and do breakfast then. As a pre-breakfast stop-gap, to keep blood sugar from crashing and kids from getting cranky, I’ll offer some small healthy snack.  Apple slices are popular, or at least acceptable.  (We bought an apple corer from IKEA a year ago.  It cores the apple and splits it into half a dozen convenient, child-friendly slices.  Best four euros we ever spent.) 

So anyway: pre-breakfast.  The boys were watching Robin, Cyborg and Starfire fight the Hive.  Claudia was sitting on the couch.  I was at the kitchen table reading e-mail and checking my news and blogs.  (I guess this is the modern equivalent of having the newspaper up in front of me.)  The baby had had her bottle – that’s a priority – and was rolling around on the floor. 

What happened: one of the boys dropped part of an apple slice.  A bee just happened to wander in and land on it: mm! sweet!  Meanwhile, the baby had the same thought; after all any piece of food that lands on the floor legitimately belongs to her…

Claudia saw it, though a moment too late to stop it. 

The baby screamed… and then SCREAMED and SCREAMED and SCREAMED.  A bee sting on your tongue is no fun for anyone, but if you’re not quite a year old it must be a particularly horrible surprise.  Poor thing!

They die after they sting, you know?  In fact, they die almost instantly – the dead bee was on her onesie, all curled up and pathetic.  “Get it off her!” yelled Claudia.  “It’s dead,” I said stupidly.  “GET  IT OFF HER!”

We ran for the tweezers, then Claudia held her while I probed.  (I can’t recommend this.  Squirmy, slimy, swollen, and every touch causes more screaming.)  Eventually we got it out: little black stinger, with poison sack and bee guts still attached.   We gave her a little Motrin.  The screaming eventually subsided to sobs.  We watched her closely for a reaction to the sting, but she was fine.  Half an hour later she was taking her morning nap.

Ragnarok, the Daddy version

Norse mythology for bedtime the last few days.

We're reading out of D'Aulaires Book of Norse Myths, which is fine, because D'Aulaire's is the awesome.  However, when it comes to Ragnarok, they have to skimp just a little, because they want to stay true to the source material.  And while Ragnarok is well attested, none of the sources are big on the details.  Which has always struck me as a bit of a pity.

So:

Americans are brown and have names like Diego and Tico

Speaking of kids' TV: here in Germany, Dora the Explorer is dubbed into German, but used to teach kids English. 

If you've somehow managed to miss Dora -- theoretically possible, if you have no small children in your life, and also live on Mars -- it's a kids show aimed at older preschoolers, ages 4-6 or so.  Dora, the heroine, is a little brown girl who is bilingual in English and Spanish; 90% of the show is in English, but several times per episode she'll switch into Spanish for a word or a phrase.  "Can you count with me?   Uno... dos... tres..."  "Oh, thank you!  Graaaaciiias!"  Dora's ethnicity is a bit blurred, but she's clearly not broadcasting from Idaho; her family lives in an adobe-looking bungalow painted in bright pastel colors, and the surrounding forest is full of palm trees, brilliant flowers, and the occasional jaguar.

The language thing aside, Dora is a decent-to-good cartoon for little kids.  Outside of your local FurryCon, you're not going to find a lot of adults who actively enjoy stuff that's aimed at five year olds, but you can sit through an ep of Dora without clawing your eyes out.  Also, bits of it are probably embedded in pop culture now.  (Like, every child under the age of twelve knows the phrase "Swiper -- No Swiping!")

Anyway.  Here in Germany?  Dora is exactly the same, except dubbed, and also whenever there's Spanish in the original they speak English instead.  "Canst du mit mir sprechen?  One... two... three..."  "Ach, danke schoen!  Thank yoouuuu!"

I find this charming, but also slightly disorienting.  "Well, most Americans... don't live near jaguars."

Avatar: The Final Stretch

The boys and I are about to enter the final stretch on Avatar. 

They've been getting an episode a night, conditioned on good behavior and nothing else going on.  Around 7:30 we sit down in front of the computer.  David is usually on my lap.  Some episodes are better than others; the boys love action and fighting scenes, and tend to cover their ears or run out of the room when things get mushy.  But they look forward to it all day.

Season Two and the middle part of Season Three?  Possibly the best mass-market animated series in this age range, ever.  It's up there with Season One Justice League Unlimited and the better Samurai Jacks.  These are the cartoons I really wanted to watch when I was a kid!  Instead we got Scrappy Doo.  Tchah.

Like Samurai Jack, you can sometimes see them straining against the Standards.  One major character dies, albeit offstage.  There are a couple of eps where they go in a very dark direction for 20 minutes, only to bring it back from the brink in the last 2.

Anyway.  We just finished the "recap of the first 2 and 3/4 seasons before the final climactic four-episode story arc" episode.  (Recap eps, apparently, are a well-established and much beloved / hated anime trope.)  This had the characters attending a play about their own, now somewhat-legendary adventures.  Since the characters are currently on the lam in Bad Guy Land, various amusing distortions ensue, with much foreshadowing and lampshade-hanging.  It's good stuff. 

Makes me wonder about the Flynn Effect.  No, I don't think watching Avatar will make anyone smarter.  But young kids today are regularly exposed to narrative complexities that my generation had to wait until high school or college for.  Avatar is copying, in an age-appropriate way, narrative techniques used by The Sopranos and other mega-series. How will stories be told in 2030?

I don't want to overstate the importance of good kids' TV. For one thing, there's still not that much of it!  For every Avatar or Samurai Jack, there are a dozen of Ben Ten Alien Force or [shudder] W.I.T.C.H. 

Still... it's a small but real pleasure of modern parenting.

The Hamster Steals The Show

Took the boys to see Bolt on Saturday.  It was okay.  Starts as The Truman Show, turns into The Incredible Journey.  It felt like Disney's first serious attempt to make a Pixar movie, and it ended up being... well, sort of in-betweeny.  It doesn't quite have that Pixar edge somehow.

Alan understood the plot (the dog thinks he has superpowers, but he doesn't, he's just on a TV show), I don't think David did, Jacob... just took it all in.

I felt I should have liked this movie more.  Not sure what was missing.  The hamster is awesome, so there is that.  One doesn't see the "very overweight totally delusional fanboy" trope worked that hard in a Disney movie, usually.

Movies are a treat here.  Pricey, and we have to drive all the way to Bad Neustadt, but that makes it extra special.  We go once every couple of months, when there's something worth seeing.  (We saw Kung Fu Panda twice.)  It's a small four-screen theater.  We park in the city lot, walk along the bike trail, cross over a bridge, stand in line.  I get the boys set up inside -- jackets, hats, gloves all neatly piled on a free chair -- then go fetch popcorn and apple juice while the previews are showing.  Everything's in German, so I usually look up the plot in advance.  (Yeah, I totally ruined the ending of Madagascar 2 for myself.)  After the movie, if there's still daylight, we walk back down the bike trail and run around in the park for a few minutes.  This time of year we skip that and go straight to McDonalds.  Yeah, yeah.  The boys get McDonalds maybe once a month and it is a huge deal.  Especially when the Happy Meal toys match the movie, which has happened twice now! 

Anyway, that was Saturday.  This is a working week, sort of -- getting ready for my next trip, which is this Saturday, to Manila.  Of which more anon.

Heufurt and back

Today we walked to Heufurt and back.

"We" is Alan, David and me.  "Heufurt" is the next town down the main road.  There's a nice bike path that takes you there across the fields.  The town itself is nothing special -- about half the size of Fladungen, and everything closed for Sunday -- but there's a nice church sitting up on a hillside above the town; a few minutes climb up some stairs gives you a view all up and down the valley of the Streu.

"And back" was about 5 km or 3 miles.  Which is not too bad for a five year old and a six year old.

Lovely day, warm enough to melt half the snow, the sun ducking in and out of clouds, ditches full of meltwater.  The boys complained a little and then got into it.  Afterwards they were both very pleased with themselves.

And that was pretty much Sunday.

A quiet moment

Up at 6:00 this morning, a bit earlier than usual.  Checked e-mail, canoodled on the web for fifteen minutes.  Brewed a pot of coffee, started  a fire in the wood stove.  Woke Alan, got him set up with breakfast and such.  Went outside and shoveled some snow.

After Alan went off to school (in the dark now), I sat down in the comfortable chair in front of the fire.

Jacob came down.  Understand that Jacob has inherited two copies of the "slow wake up" gene.  (David, none.  David wakes up quickly easily every morning.  Lack of sleep makes him manic and wacky but doesn't keep him longer in bed.  Go figure.)  So Jacob was sort of stumbling around, which is normal for him at this point in the morning.  But the comfortable chair is comfortable, so I put out my arms and he staggered into them and curled up on my lap.

Three years old is a funny age.  You can talk to them, but they're still toddlers.  A younger child might have cried or demanded Mommy.  An older one would have been more wiggly.  Jacob just lay there, occasionally sighing a little, waking up a tiny bit at a time.  We both watched the fire.  Four minutes passed, then five, then six.  Outside the world was covered with snow, and very slowly turning from darkness to grey.

I'm very underemployed right now.  Still formally employed, and (thank goodness) keeping my benefits, but I'm only working part-time: a couple of weeks in Jordan, a couple of weeks in Burundi, and like that.

That worries me sometimes.  Okay, it worries me a lot of the time.  I'm on one bid for a long-term project, and working to get on others, and there's been a steady trickle of short-term stuff, but... these are not comfortable times to be a de facto freelancer.  So, while it hasn't come up much on this blog, job anxiety is part of our lives these days, like a steady background hum. 

That said... if I were working, I wouldn't have moments like these.  I'd be dressing, thinking about my work, running out the door.  I wouldn't be able to sit for long minutes in front of the fire with my little boy on my lap, looking at the flames and thinking about nothing in particular.

And that's all.

The same neural circuits, once trained, can be adapted to multiple uses

Teenager: oh-so-slowly drape arm over back of couch or movie theater chair, then inch it along date's shoulders.

Twentysomething: oh-so-slowly remove arm from under body of sleeping lover in order to go to bathroom / make breakfast / rummage in her handbag for a driver's license to check name / escape.

Parent: oh-so-slowly remove arm from under sleeping baby while so-carefully transferring baby from arms to crib.

I wonder what the elderly person variant of this move is.  Or maybe it's just everything, life in general?  Old folks seem to do a lot of things very slowly and carefully.

Justification (beta)

"David, don't -- stop, I said don't -- do not throw that snowball at the chickens!"

"Why not?"

"Because... chickens are harmless.  They're not bothering you."

"They are bothering me!"

"How are they bothering you?"

"They're looking at me!"

Smile on

She's smiling.

She was smiling beore.  But not much, and they were those sort of wandering random baby smiles. Then suddenly today, like a switch turned on: smiles! And smiles at us.  And more vocalization, too -- she was sort of quiet before.  Now we're getting lots of those "aaah"s and trilling sounds.

Rushed to finish the yard work today, because snow is expected the day after tomorrow.  Finished painting the new wall in the morning; the oven guy came in the afternoon and hooked up the wood-burning oven.  I'm looking at it right now.  We won't discuss how much it cost.  It's nice.  It's the last major change to the house for the next little while.  (There are a lot of things we might do with this house, if we keep it.  And if I get a job that lets us start putting money away again.)

Claudia ordered the winter tires for the car.  Clear and cold tonight. 

Bedtime stories

Sometimes a book or a comic book, sometimes a "tell-story".  For the latter, I turn the lights off and lie on the ground beside the bunk bed.

Last night was the story of the Phoenix lander.  You remember the Phoenix lander, right?  Parachuted down to the north pole of Mars a few months ago, did some soil testing, discovered ice, saw snow falling.  Then gradually ran out of power.  Martian winter -> long nights -> less energy from solar panels, plus cold forcing it to run internal heaters longer, plus dust storms; the Martian high arctic is not so friendly.

Well, a few weeks ago some bright person at NASA gave the probe a Twitter feed.  "Phoenix" was brave and spunky, fearless in the face of certain death, and prone to saying things like "Still hoping to get a bit of strength back & maybe do more science" and |In case we don't get this chance again, thank you all so much for the questions, comments & good wishes over the mission. It's been awesome."  This may sound idiotic, but it turned into one of those internet things , with tens of thousands of people logged on to get "Phoenix's" messages on their cell phones or whatever, and an outpouring of grief when the probe finally succumbed to the cold and "died".

Avatar, the Goonies

Need a "kid stuff" category.  (I said that was enough politics for now.)

Avatar: The Last Airbender is a pretty good kid's cartoon.  Oh, it's not the solid wall of awesome of, say, Justice League Unlimited or Samurai Jack.  But it's consistently good in a way I respect: good art, decent stories, well-choreographed action scenes.  Also, it bucks the current trend of gender differentiation in kids' cartoons (which just bugs the hell out of me),  While it's more of a Boy's Adventure kind of thing, there are female characters who are important and get to Do Stuff, and it spends a fair amount of time on character development and relationships.  A boy between 5 and 12 will probably like this; a girl of the same age might not, but then again she might.

Avatar is from Nick, which is a bit of a surprise since Nick's animated works tend to, um, suck.  Even the better ones -- Danny Phantom, Hey Arnold!, and of course SpongeBob  -- are pretty formulaic and limited.  But Avatar is telling a big epic story that's designed to extend across a certain number of seasons (five, I think) and end up being a more or less coherent whole.  And it's doing a pretty good job of it.  It's a kids' cartoon, but it feels like good YA fantasy.

Quiet Friday

No wacky links this week.

I leave for Africa tomorrow, so I wanted to spend some time with the boys.  We had a nice long walk around town in the late morning.  Alan rode his bike part of the way -- he's getting pretty good on it -- and we went to the shoe store and then the train station, where we played around the trains for an hour.

(We saw a tiny little lizard on the gravel of the train tracks!  That's my first lizard in Germany.)

In the afternoon we went to the local swimming pool.  This turned out to be a mistake, as the water was still icy.  It's been a very cool August by my standards, although the locals seem to think it's just fine.  "August" to me means days that regularly get over 30 (86 F).  Not in Fladungen.  30 here would be an extraordinarily hot day, like 37 or 38 (98 or 100 F) in New York.  Today was 23, 24 -- about 75 F -- and it was the warmest day in a week.

Anyway.  The boys enjoyed the swimming pool until their teeth started to chatter, then we all went home and they had a play date with a friend.  In the evening I read the last chapters of Charlotte's Web to them, which they enjoyed a lot despite the lack of explosions or fighting.

Is this even worth a blog entry?  Well, I guess it is to me.  And as long as I'm going on about my family, here's a bunch of pictures of us.

Next up... Belgium.

Leah Marie

All of two hours old...

Baby on board

So, new baby.

Her name is Leah Marie: blue eyes, a lot of brown hair, 3.2 kilos and 50 cm long.  She's (part of) the reason we haven't been blogging much lately.

Mother and child are still in the hospital, but they'll be back soon.  We might post some pictures then.

Memo to file

ISSUE: how to keep chewing gum overnight.

POSSIBLE SOLUTIONS: Remove gum from mouth and store someplace safe.

POSSIBLE ISSUES: Parental prohibitions; contamination of gum; possible poaching of stored gum by younger brother.  Also, may forget about gum if not stored someplace nearby and obvious.

CHOSEN SOLUTION: Place gum on forehead.  Press firmly.  Go to bed.

OUTCOMES:  Not positive.  Gum became entangled in hair.  Parental intervention followed.

SAMPLE DATA:  "Jesus Christ!  What did you do there?"

"Scissors, scissors... okay, here we go."

"Now hold still... I said hold still!"

"Well, it's going to hurt a lot more if you keep wiggling like that!"

"No, stay right here!  I'm almost finished!"

"Okay, uhhh... well, maybe if we comb it over it won't be so obvious."

CONCLUSION:  Further research required.

Kettcar

You know what I hate? 

Assembling stuff.  Like, IKEA and such.  Hate it hate it hate hate hate.  It sits at the intersection of three or four cognitive deficits -- "weak spatial intelligence", "poorly coordinated", "short attention span".  For larger projects we can add "not very organized" (wait, where's that screwdriver now?) and "not a natural team player".

This is in sharp contrast to my wife, who is really good at it.  Given a moderately complex piece to put together -- an IKEA wardrobe, let's say -- she'll do it in about a third the time I will, and with much less cursing and general tsuris.

But I can't offload all the assembly work to her, because (1) we're in a new house, so there is a lot of stuff to be put together, (2) she's really very quite pregnant now, and (3) yes, I have some faint flicker of male pride.

So I'm kind of stupidly pleased with myself today, because I put the Kettcar together.  By myself!  Okay, almost.

What is a Kettcar, you ask?

Home again

A complete conversation between Alan and David, yesterday afternoon:

David:  Aaaahhh!

Alan:  I just wanted to see if it was breakable.

David:  AAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHH!

The Next Generation

  So today after dinner, while the boys were upstairs playing, I noodled around the Interwebs and somehow decided to watch Obama's famous "Yes, we can" speech in New Hampshire.  The YouTube video I watched was about 13 minutes long, and not one minute into it, Alan came into the living room and snuggled up to me.  I am sure he was just waiting for the opportunity to ask for a Transformers video, and was going to begin squirming around soon enough.

But something strange happened.   Alan watched the speech with me, attentive, and seemingly mesmerized. After a little while he said, "This guy is good, who is he?"  I suppressed my laughter and said to him, "Well, Daddy and I hope that he is going to be the next president of the United States." Alan nodded, and continued to watch with me.  Mind you, this is the kid who has ADHD and doesn't like to sit still even for a Transformers movie.  Sitting still and paying attention doesn't come easily to him.

After some minutes, he started asking questions, and answering the political questions of a child of six is really hard.  I carefully explained about the current president, and about the war, and about how America is so divided and people are afraid.  It was, of course, a very simplified version of what we think, and fear, and I tried to make it all as non-threatening as possible.  I wanted him to get the positive message much more than the grim reality of the current political situation. 

Alan listened to my answers, and then listened to the part in the speech about schools, and then he said, "I sure wish he was mayor of Fladungen, then he could make the school here also better!" (The school here, according to Alan, isn't wonderful because he has to wait for September to start first grade - patience also doesn't come easily to him.)

After the speech was over, I decided to take it one step further and showed him the DipDive video (which has, on YouTube, close to 8 million views, btw).  And towards the end, I heard my son quietly whisper with the chorus, "Yes, we can, yes, we can..."

I told him not to forget Obama's name, because Obama has already changed America, even if he doesn't get elected as president.  Alan nodded gravely.

And then he asked for a Transformer video.

Politics 101.  The change has already begun.

Swimming Pool

And yesterday was Swimming Pool Day.

Fladungen has a large public Schwimmbad, and an all-season family pass is only 36 Euros. (Which is more than $50 at the moment, thanks to the weak US dollar, but that's still pretty cheap.) It opened this week. So, Friday after school, Alan and David and I went swimming. Jacob was over at Oma's house -- those two have an intense love affair -- and Claudia got to rest for an hour.

And it was fun.  What's to say about a public swimming pool?  It was a warm sunny Friday afternoon, so pretty crowded.  Alan can swim just fine with floaties.  My sinister plan is to, day by day, inflate the floaties less and less until he's swimming without them.  This is in marked contrast to how I learned to swim (viz., being pushed into the deep end).  No accident!  But anyway, he's very comfortable in the water. 

Bicycle Day

Today was Bicycle Day.

While the boys were in school, Claudia and I went to the bicycle store.  American readers may have an image of a small shopfront with a few dozen bikes, run by a guy with a beard.  No.  In Germany, a bicycle store is warehouse-sized, with hundreds and hundreds of bikes, and every imaginable sort of appurtenance and accessory, from pumps and shoes to maps and energy candy.

The technology has clearly moved on.  Bike pumps?  No longer the cylinder-with-footrest and a little hose.  Now they fit in your back pocket and weigh nothing.  Of course, it's hard for me to sort out what's new and what's just Germany.  Well, I took a bike out for a test ride up and down the street and had people staring at me for not wearing a helmet.  That part was Germany.

Mother's Day

  This poster is sort of an idealized representation of my family.   Disregarding the fact that our little girl isn't born yet (August), and that our boys are blond and never ever that clean-faced, or that well-dressed (nor do I look that young and purty), I also sometimes stop and look around and ask myself - who are these people?  Wasn't I single and lonely just yesterday? What is going on?

Good things, mostly. We are all healthy, the garden is in full bloom and the boys spend hours frolicking between wild flowers, playing noisy Power Ranger games and eating watermelon by the pound.  Life doesn't suck.

Happy Mother's Day! (To those few mothers who read this blog.)

Movie and McDonalds

Man, do the boys love McDonalds.

This goes back to our Romanian days.  Alan learned to recognize the double arches well before his third birthday.  In Bucharest we used to go to the train station on weekend mornings, watch the trains coming and going for a while, then have french fries and hot chocolate.  There was no McDonalds in Armenia, but the memory stayed alive!

For a few days I've been promising them a movie and McDonalds... if they were good.  This worked, mostly.  They love going to movies, too!

So the movie: The Dragon Hunters.  This was a TV cartoon series, which appeared briefly in the US but was much more popular in Europe.  The movie version is French, and doesn't seem to have come out in the US yet.

Dinner conversation at the Muirs

David, in the middle of a discussion of astronomy: "And where do people come from?"  Answering himself, "Oh, I know!  They come from God!"
Alan: "No, they come from monkeys!"
David: "Oh, that's right!  Because we are mammals! That's right!"

A little later.
David: "You remember, Mommy, you said that Pluto was no longer a planet." [That was back when Pluto got demoted.]
Doug, surprised: "That's right!  Good memory, David! And do you know why some people say that Pluto is not a planet?"
David and Alan, loudly and in unison: "Because it's too small!"

Also, David wants to be a scientist who does lots of experiments when he grows up.  Alan wants to be an inventor who does experiments, and goes to Mars, and creates Pokemons.  Veering off on the topic of Mars, Doug later told the boys about the Mars robots, and idly asked what they might be powered with. Alan said, "Electricity," and David said, "Sunlight!".

Together, they will rule the world.

Breaking

I have mild ADHD, Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder.  So does Alan.  In his case, it's not yet clear if the adjective "mild" is warranted... his ADHD isn't horrible, but on a bad day it can make all of us pretty crazy.

ADHD is one of those modern disorders: complex, still incompletely understood, and forced to go through a long trial period as a "syndrome".  As recently as ten or fifteen years ago, there was a large minority of specialists claiming that there was no such thing as ADHD.  As it turns out, not only is it a real condition, but it's something that can be seen without a microscope these days.  Scan the brain of a kid with ADHD, and he (it's usually a he) will have, on average, a smaller frontal cortex, especially in the right lobe.  The difference is structural and gross.  And people who have damage to this area of the brain -- injuries or lesions -- may suddenly develop symptoms of ADHD.

But what's it like?

Snow, cartoons and leftovers

First real snowy day today. 

Armenia has a dry-ish climate, but you wouldn't have known it today.  It was early winter snow -- fat soft flakes falling through damp air just above freezing.  It quickly turned to half-slush, falling off the trees with those little snow-sighs. 

I slept late, until about 9:30 -- we take turns on the weekends, so Claudia gets it tomorrow.  The boys ran around outside for a while but most of the day was indoors.  Cartoons in the morning, Legos a bit later.  Claudia made turkey soup and a really good chocolate chip coffee cake.  At 2:00 in the afternoon Alan watched Power Rangers Mystic Force, which he watches religiously at that time every Saturday.  We killed an hour or so fooling around with these puzzles on the computer (warning: starts with stuff a bright five year old can enjoy, but moves on to stuff that will have his parents cursing in frustration).

I played some Civilization IV on my laptop in the living room.  Jacob took a nap in the afternoon, and Claudia went upstairs for an hour of quiet time.  Alan drew pictures.  David played with magnets.  Uno and Zingo were considered but vetoed by Alan, who is going through a phase of not liking games.  Jacob woke up grumpy but got better after having a snack.  ("Eat it and smile" could be Jacob's coat of arms.)  There was some poop-related stuff that I won't burden you with.  David and  I practiced the "jump-hug", whereby the child runs at you, jumps up, you lift him and hug, and he grabs you with all four limbs.  When done smoothly, this produces a sort of "whump" that is deeply satisfying to all concerned.

In the evening we watched three episodes of Justice League.  (Man, the DC Animated Universe was so much better than the Marvel cartoons.  There's no comparison.)  David kept putting the magnets in his mouth, which is strictly forbidden, so I took them away.  The ensuing crying jag went on for twenty minutes, and he was still asking for them back an hour later.  David is nothing if not tenacious.

Bedtime was late.  David got the "On Top of Spaghetti" song.  Alan got a short story about Batman.  (How a bat flying in the window gave Bruce Wayne an idea.  I got to say "criminals are a cowardly and superstitious lot".)

As usual, I'm the last one up.  But not much longer.

Stymied

  Isn't that a nice word?  Stymied. It sounds so greek mythology, it could be the name of a lesser god, or or one of Zeus' involuntary girlfriends. I also found out that I mispronounced the word all my life, thought it meant something totally different than it really means, and that it  comes from golfing language.  Another linguistic favorite smothered. (Also a nice word.)

All this pointless babbling because I needed to express my feelings about my youngest son's language development. So I'll use an easy word -  I'm baffled. 

See, children are supposed to pick up language gradually, going from unintelligible babbling to clearly pronounced single words like "Mommy", "Daddy", "car" and "milk".  They usually have hickups with pronunciation, like they can't pronounce "s" or "th" but on the whole, you can work out what they mean.  They go from one syllable to two syllables, from one word sentences during the second year of life to two word sentences at age two and three word sentences at age three.  Those are very fuzzy milestones, of course.  Some kids are faster, some are slower. But the majority of kids does stick with the general sequence of easy-more challenging-really mind-boggling (big words from little kids' mouths are such fun!).

Alan and David were both late talkers.  They grew up with three languages and while studies deny that multilingual children are speech-delayed, it seemed to be true for us.  Alan didn't really talk until he was two and then he took off with a vengeance.  He's very good at switching from English to German and vice versa, and both he and David have a very good grasp of grammar.  They do build nice sentences, and complicated ones.  They reflect the way Doug and I talk with each other and with them and we don't do baby talk much and we like big words. 

Jacob, though, decided to do it all differently.

2!

How did he become so big?  When did this happen?  Last night?

Enigma

   Jacob displayed first signs of sickness in February.  It started with mouth ulcers, and then came diarrhea.  Not just any kind of diarrhea - it was a diarrhea that never stopped.  It would be bad, really really bad, for a day or two.  Then he would have very soft stools for a couple of days.  Then he would get very bad again.  Sometimes, there were days with no stool at all, then there would be 10 exploding diapers the next day.  He never had any diarrhea at night but he would wake up and immediately have an extremely watery poop.  If I wasn't there to catch him when he woke up, I would find him soiled, wet, and very stinky.  He had lots of undigested food in his stool.  He lost weight, then regained it.  On bad days, he would simply sway and fall over, out of a stand.  He was weak, he was grumpy, he changed.

It was scary.

Desperately seeking

  You may - or may not - know that our almost-two-year-old has been having medical issues for quite a while.  A detailed description will take hours to write down, and will bore everyone but the most dedicated medical student to tears.  Suffice it to say that he has chronic diarrhea (since February!), accompanied by a host of other strange symptoms that range from tongue ulcers to gross motor control issues to extreme irritability.  Throw in very dry skin and skin eczema, loss of appetite, gradual delay in language development...

We've been testing for celiac disease, amoeba, giardia - the usual suspects.  All negative. Since he's adorable and wonderful, it's hard to believe he's sick just by looking at him.  Which is ultimately what the doctors did in the German hospital when we were evacuated this summer.  All the tests were negative, EEG normal, neurophysical exam normal, stool normal, blood normal.... all but a diagnosis of anemia remained normal. They labeled me hysterical and sent me home.

And things did not get better.  Now we are at the point where we are ready to point guns at doctors if they would just keep at it and find a REASON.

Truth be told, in the summer when we were in the German hospital, Jacob did show relatively few symptoms, and he did not exhibit those tongue ulcers that squick me so.  But he did yesterday (as he did last week, and the week before, and the week before that...).  So genius struck my husband and we took a picture, sent it to our health insurance - and it really is true that a picture says more than a thousand words.  We got an answer within the hour, and now we have the task of finding a "competent pediatric gastroenterologist in an academic setting with experience in developing countries". 

That's easier said than done.  Any ideas?

You may look at the picture of the ulcers under the fold, if you are not squeamish and think you can help us identify the cause of all the misery.  Or if you are not squeamish and just curious.

Ruled out are: Celiac disease, giardia, amoebiasis, various food allergies including nuts, soy, wheat, egg, and milk.

UPDATE: We actually solved the puzzle only a few days later in September 2007.  On my own blog I have a sidebar with links to valuable articles about Chronic Diarrhea of Childhood (which is what this is called).  

Also, the tongue "ulcers" are no ulcers and the syndrome is indeed called "geographic tongue" like so many helpful commenters have suggested.  Thank you all for your continuing interest and support. 

These days (2010), Jacob is a big hulking kid who has the occasional loose stool but has been toilet trained successfully almost a year ago.  He's never had any accidents, no matter how bad the diarrhea was on any given day.  He still has the funny tongue and very dry skin, but other than that, all is well.  It surely isn't something I would want to revisit and the stress and the fear from those days are still with me.  We still read all the comments, so if you have questions, write on.  You can also leave a comment over at Expatria at the post entitled "Enigma" which is a re-post of the first link I mentioned.  Best wishes to all parents who are going through the same as we did.