LMS
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Weekend in the Mountains
Posted by gls on 16 Jun 2008 | Tagged as: LMS, Travel
Saturday evening, as the sun was setting and the fog was settling in, this is what K and I saw:
Sunset in Madison County
Getting to that moment was just as enjoyable as the moment itself, though.
We set off Saturday morning — after my Praxis test — on a trip to the mountains: Asheville. Hippy-ville, land of the sky, where the patchouli flows like water.
Our first stop was actually a good bit north of Asheville, in Hot Springs, at the annual Bluff Mountain Festival. Bluegrass, old-time music, clogging — a fine festival.
K and L danced and twirled
Dancing at the Bluff Mountain Festival
Dancing at the Bluff Mountain Festival
L made a new friend,
New friend
only to discover that the new friend was not wild about hugs.
New friend, who doesn’t like hugs
After the rain finally chased us away, we went to stay with friends in Madison county — friends who live on the top of a mountain and keep bees:
Hives
We spent the evening as all evenings should be spent: on the deck, surrounded by nature and friends, without a mosquito to be found.
I took the time to talk with someone knowledgeable about bees about what’s going on with the bee population in the States. It’s fairly frightening. One word: monoculture:
Many worry that what’s shaping up to be a honeybee catastrophe will disrupt the food supply. While staple crops like wheat and corn are pollinated by wind, some 90 cultivated flowering crops - from almonds and apples to cranberries and watermelons - rely heavily on honeybees trucked in for pollinization. [...]
For many entomologists, the bee crisis is a wake-up call. By relying on a single species for pollination, US agriculture has put itself in a precarious position, they say. A resilient agricultural system requires diverse pollinators. This speaks to a larger conservation issue. Some evidence indicates a decline in the estimated 4,500 potential alternate pollinators - native species of butterflies, wasps. and other bees. The blame for that sits squarely on human activity - habitat loss, pesticide use, and imported disease - but much of this could be offset by different land-use practices.
Moving away from monoculture, say scientists, and having something always flowering within bee-distance, would help natural pollinators. This would make crops less dependent on trucked-in bees, which have proved to be vulnerable to die-offs. (Christian Science Monitor)
Once the ladies came out to the porch, though, we changed to less depressing topics, but not for long: “Who knows when the Girl will wake us” we said, trotting off to bed around eleven.
L woke us up at her usual hour, which meant we got to see a mountain sunrise:
Sunrise in Madison County
L played with the dogs for a while. Our friends have four dogs, but only three of them were interested in L.
She got a face-full of tail a couple of times but took it like a trooper and insisted on staying with the dogs.
It was wonderful seeing how the dogs sensed L’s fragility and were so gentle with her. They didn’t attempt to jump on her and would gently approach to lick her in the face — which she loved and showed the baby sign for “more” again and again.
After breakfast, we drove back down to Asheville, to visit other friends, who also have a dog.
We were pleasantly surprised at how patient all the dogs were with L. She’s so obsessed with hugging animals that she’s got an arm-full of scratch marks from where she shares the love with our cat a little too forcefully.
Finally, we met still more friends at the NC Arboretum for walk.
NC Arboretum
14
It was a busy weekend, undoubtedly a foretaste of what’s our trip to Polska is going to be like — a trip that is rapidly approaching.
Too rapidly, in some respects.
We leave in two weeks.
Boy, [you'll have to] carry that weight…
Posted by gls on 12 Jun 2008 | Tagged as: LMS, Polska
18
One of the things we’re hoping to do in Polska is a lot of walking — hiking, sightseeing, general wandering. And the Girl gets heavy toting her. And she can’t yet walk very long distances. And we really didn’t want to carry our bulky backpack-carrier with us. So — we bought an Ergo Baby Carrier.
We gave it a test-walk yesterday. Other than L being very close to my back, it was relatively comfortable. The hugginess will only be a problem here, in the super-humid South Carolina.
I have visions of walking with her in places like Chocholowska Valley or the market square in Krakow…
Only eighteen more days.
Swimming
Posted by gls on 08 Jun 2008 | Tagged as: LMS
We bought a small “pool” to put on the back deck for the Girl. She took to it hesitantly at first.
And it’s really not that she took to it–she likes splashing at the edges, but that’s about it right now.
And she likes building towers:
In Thought
Posted by gls on 03 Jun 2008 | Tagged as: LMS, Parenthood
The Girl looks more and more like a young lady and less and less like a baby every day.
Words
Posted by gls on 24 May 2008 | Tagged as: LMS, Parenthood
L has begun talking. Single words, mixing Polish and English, but words all the time.
“More” is “ma,” often with the accompanying baby sign.
“Shoes” is “shas.” We discovered only yesterday that she’d learned that word when she was walking about with one of her shoes in her hand, trying to get one of us to put it back on.
“Ba” or “baba” can be a number of things. First it was banana. Then it became her name for our cat. It’s become so ubiquitous that, when in doubt, we refer to something as “ba.”
Of course, “dac” has been around for some time now.
Most of the words she speaks are English, but she understands both English and Polish. The dominance of English is an obvious function of living in the States, but I could help the matter by speaking more Polish at home.
Co Powie Tata?
Posted by gls on 06 May 2008 | Tagged as: LMS
L loves music. One of her favorite albums is a CD of Natalia Kukulska’s childhood songs. When I listen to them, I feel like I’m at a Polish wedding, for the music has that ’80’s, canned-music sound in which wedding bands tend to specialize. I’m not to crazy about it, but L loves it — and that’s all that matters.
One of the songs on the album is “Co Powie Tata?” — “What Will Daddy Say?”. (The English version of the song translates it “Please Tell Me, Daddy,” but that’s really only to make it fit the melody — literary license and all that.) It’s a song about all the questions a little girl has about ladybugs and whether it’s possible to love a snail. Cute lyrics, like all most children’s songs.
K tells me that today, when they got home, L was listening to that and recognized one word: “tata.” She looked at K, asked quizzically “Tata?”, then began the search. She looked in the bathroom, peeked in the shower, and generally wandered about the house looking for me.
Before we know it, she’s going to be demanding to know where I was when she finally sees me after such a search…
(As an aside, this is what Natalia’s up to these days.)
Communication
Posted by gls on 18 Apr 2008 | Tagged as: First words, LMS, Parenthood
The Girl of late has been doing a lot to shake up my notions of what it means to communicate and all the different ways it’s possible to share a thought with another person.
The biggest preconception she’s radically challenged is the age at which an individual can create novel ways of communicating. We’ve been using baby signing with L, and she’s picked up on several signs that she uses regularly now: eat, more, and bath are among them. She understands a lot more — sleep, drink, potty/diaper change — but that’s not terribly impressive in that she already understands a great deal of spoken language. What shocked me recently about the signing was that L created her own sign for a word that she understands: swing. She waves her right arm back and forth at about shoulder level when she wants to go swing — which is pretty much constantly.
Another preconception: the ability to speak develops much later in children raised in a multilingual environment than it does in a monolingual home. L has a few words that she uses to great effect.
- dac (”give”, pronounced “dach”)
- tam (”there”, pronounced more or less as it appears)
- down
She’s got a few more that she almost says, and at least one L-ism: “baaa” is bannana.
But her understanding of both Polish and English is amazing. We ask her many things in both Polish and English and she understands them both unhesitatingly.
All this culminates in the last unexpected change: an increase in crying. She knows what is possible with communication now — in a word, everything — but she lacks the skills to tell us everything she wants or needs. And the resulting frustration manifests itself in crying/screaming fits more often than we’d like.
The developments of the last few weeks, though, promise a quick end to these fits. In other words, the problem is the solution.
