When we're bathing and photographing the girl all at the same time, it gets kind of crowded.
Crowded Bathroom
What Jesus Wouldn’t Have Done
One of my favorite little sects out there is the Restored Church of God. It's leader, David Pack is The spokesman for god -- by his own humble admission, an apostle, with the same authority as the Apostle Paul. Yes, that Paul, of New Testament fame.
After Katrina hit the Gulf coast, he, like many other ministers, gave a sermon about what True Christians© should do to help.
True Christians© should, in short, continue preaching the gospel and warning the people -- synonymous in his group. The gospel -- the True Gospel© -- is simply that Germany is going to rise again and this time beat America, take it into captivity, and basically make the Nazis look like daycare playmates.
(Confused? It all goes back to ancient simmering hatreds. America, of course, comprises the real Israelites, along with the French, the Dutch, the British -- the Lost Ten Tribes. Germany is Assyria. History -- ancient or otherwise -- is not a strength of this group's theology. )
False Christians (the vast majority of the 2 billion Christians in the world world, who are deceived and actually worship Satan) give to relief organizations. True Christians© (David Pack's group -- representing at most 0.00005% of the world Christian population) don't.
His reasoning, though, is stunning biblical hermeneutics. I clipped the relevant portion from the sermon.
After Changing
After we change the girl's diaper, she's usually pretty happy. I guess I would be too, considering her movement patterns -- save it all up for one big explosion that leaves a mess so big that it creeps out the diaper here, there, and sometimes everywhere. It must be a relief finally to get changed.
We finally got some footage of the after-diaper fun.
“When are infants supposed to…?”
A developing child goes through so many “firsts” in that initial year that it’s easy to forget about some of them.
Take for example the first time L grabbed something other than a someone’s finger.
A parent’s finger is warm and I suppose somewhat inviting to be — conducive to being, at least — held. A plush toy? Not exactly soft, but warm I suppose. Perhaps this just means the end of a short era of preferring Tata’s finger to just about anything else?
Another big development is the ability to sit.
It’s a long way from sitting with supports to sitting alone. But like everything else has to this point, I expect the one to melt into the other unexpectedly.
Sunday Morning
The Girl slept fitfully last night. Friday night she drifted off at eleven at didn't wake up until five Saturday morning. That is a survivable schedule. Waking up every couple of hours is not.
Morning comes and I take care of the girl while K sleeps. After her 7:00 feeding and burping, L lies on the bed between us, looking up at the ceiling, smiling wildly at who knows what. She turns her head and looks at me and an even bigger smile breaks.
Later in the morning, in the guest room with babcia, she looks at the bright morning light coming in through the window. Calm.
A bit of motion and she looks my way. Of course I have the camera...
A change, some rocking, perhaps a nap -- then it's time to start over.
90+ Days
L's 90 day money back guarantee would have expired yesterday. But unlike the magazine subscription we recently purchased, various CDs we've bought, tons of clothes, pipes, pens, furniture, etc., we haven't said a word about taking her back.
It's not a question of depreciation -- far from it. She's far more dear to us now than when we brought her home from the hospital -- so dear, in fact, that we continue to invest regularly in various upgrades. And she attracts quite a crowd:
"[We think] we'll keep her."
Sick
The Girl has been sick-ish. Lots of saline nose drops and bulb syringe work as a result. Lots of crying. And least significantly: a beautiful weekend spent inside.
L is at the age now where she's starting to recognize things -- including bulb syringes. Which means she sometimes starts before the whole process starts. Then, the degree of difficulty increases significantly as she jerks her head from side to side, crying, snorting, and being generally miserable.
And so now that we're at the point of L's life we were all sort of looking forward to (the time when she's not so fragile as when she was first born), we're looking forward to when she's able to communicate her needs, and, more importantly, we're able to communicate with her.
"I know this hurts, but I need to do it so you'll be able to breathe better."
Souma yergon, sou nou yergon…
Throughout much of the world, March 8 is a day to celebrate "the economic, political and social achievements of women." It's International Women's Day, and though it was (according to Wikipedia) first celebrated in America, it's not widely known here. Perhaps the fact that the organization that initiated it was the Socialist Party of America. And most places that still celebrate it with any real vigor are (or were) communist or socialist. (In the minds of many Americans, those terms are equivocal, I know.)
Extra points for knowing the significance of the title without resorting to Google.
Poland is one such country. Though I lived there for seven years, Women's Day never worked its way into my unconscious cultural calendar. I took the cues from those around me and never really made an effort to remember it myself.
In retrospect, that was a very bad idea. That realization occurs most forcefully when you marry a Polish woman and then come home March 8 empty handed...
At the Tone
J (K’s mother) has a new Polish friend (call her “M”) here in town: a retired doctor who just moved to the area. They met the “Welcome to America” party we threw J a couple of weeks after her arrival. They hit it off, and exchanged telephone numbers, with the promise of getting together again soon.
J called M a few days later. She didn’t get in touch with M, but left a message. J waited a few days, and, after hearing nothing, called M again. And again, no answer. J left another message and, after a few more days, began getting concerned.
Eventually, M returned the call. M, however, didn’t know she was returning a call, for the first thing she asked J was “Why didn’t you call?”
“I did call,” J said, explaining the messages she left on the answering machine.
“There were no messages from you,” M said. She suggested they hang up and J try to call and leave a message again.
J hung up, waited a couple of seconds, and called. She left a message, then waited. M called back in about ten minutes, asking why she hadn’t called.
“But I did call,” J confusedly protested.
M asked to talk to K, and asked K to do the same. “Maybe she’s doing something wrong?” M suggested.
K dialed. She left the message. M called back shortly and confirmed receipt of the message.
Then K had an idea. She had her mom dial the number, and it was all clear.
Though she was calling from a cell phone, J didn’t know that she had to put the area code in as well. M, in fact, didn’t include it on the piece of paper she’d given J.
“But what about the voice I heard?” J asked.
And so K explained what “Message JG-23…” means.
Early Thanksgiving
K's mom obviously won't be here for Thanksgiving, but we still wanted to give her some idea of what it's like. So my mom did the obvious: cooked a small Thanksgiving dinner.
Turkey, dressing, potatoes, green beans, giblet gravy, rolls and a nice chardonnay. And of course for dessert, sweet potato pie.
The dressing and the pie were the big hits. Made from cornbread (itself a novelty), the dressing is doubly unlike anything in Polish cuisine. As for the pie, the notion of doing anything with a tuber other than boiling it and serving it with salt and pepper is fairly foreign to the village Polish way of cooking.
After dinner, it was time to pull out the thread collection and discuss one of those things that crosses most all western cultural boundaries: crafts.
Wiki wars
From Language Log, I recently learned about Conservapedia, which, as you might guess from the title, is a conservative Christian version of Wikipedia. (Language Log was interested in Conservapedia's erroneous entries on linguistics.)
Conservapedia's welcome message includes the following explanation: "Conservapedia is a much-needed alternative to Wikipedia, which is increasingly anti-Christian and anti-American."
Conservapedia's entry on Wikipedia begins,
Because anyone can edit it, and because of its system of governance, it does not have standards similar to those of printed encyclopedias. As with any wiki, the balance of the content in Wikipedia inevitably represents what its contributors find interesting to write about, rather than what encyclopedias traditionally contain. Thus, gossip and hundreds of thousands of entries about pop songs or celebrities are pervasive on Wikipedia. (Conservapedia)
And what does Wikipedia, in turn, say about Conservapedia? Until recently, nothing. Wikipedia redirected "Conservapedia" to "Eagle Forum," and the entry itself was in the "Articles for Deletion" bin. Most voting for deletion feel it's not notable, it's trivial, etc.
And then Language Log mentioned it, and over the weekend, it's reappeared...
Twenty-Second and Twenty-Third Firsts
L is almost eleven weeks old, which means she's entering that period where every day she does something new for the first time. A few of the recent firsts:
She's slowly discovering that those spindly things sticking out from her sides are arms -- her arms. This morning she tried to bring her hand to her mouth after holding it in front of her, studying it for a few seconds before slamming her hand directly into...her forehead.
L has added a new cry to her repertoire: the "I'm bored" cry. She likes to be toted around the apartment so she can see anything and everything.
Lastly, she's discovered her voice, and learned that it too is subject to her control. And so she's taken to making vowel sounds to show her interest and her joy. We've captured it twice on video.
Cartographic Roots
K is a cartographer. As such, she has an abiding interest in maps. As such, we have a very nice map of the region of Poland where she comes from (and where I lived for seven years) hanging in our forayer.
L is turning into a smiler. It's gone from "Honey, come quick! She's smiling!" to a many-times-a-day occurrence. In fact, she smiles on-cue now. Sort of.
Whenever we hold L so that she can see our forayer map, she smiles -- 99% of the time. We've caught it on video a couple of times.
The question is, what is so fascinating for her about that map? It has nothing but muted earth-tones; it is extremely low-contrast; it is very detailed -- all the things a baby L's age are not supposed to find particularly interesting. But she loves it -- she comes closest to laughing when looking at it.
Maybe she senses that mom's a cartographer. Maybe she senses that its a representation of her roots. Maybe she just gets off on low-contrast images...
Language Soup
We have several Polish friends in the area, and a surprising number are in mixed marriages: a Pole and a Bulgarian; a Pole and a Czech; a Pole and an American. We went to a house-warming party at the Pole/Czech couple's house, and as always happens at such parties, I got to thinking about the effects of the English language's relative isolation. Last night, the Czechs spoke Czech, the Poles spoke Polish, and everyone was mutually intelligible. And a Slovak couple been there, they could have spoken Slovakian as well and we'd all get along fine.
I try to imagine what it would be like to experience something similar: to hear someone speaking Dutch, for example, and understand enough of it to be communicative. Poles understand Slovaks; Urdu speakers understand a sizable portion of Hindi; someone fluent in Spanish would make a bit of sense out of Portuguese -- but there's no equivalent in English, that I know of. Sure, German has "gut," and there are a lot of English/French cognates thanks to 1066, but nothing approaching the level of intelligibility speakers of Slavic languages experience.
For me, it can be a bit of a nightmare. I understand a lot of Czech, but it's a stretch to get a real sense of what's being said.
Of course the real winners in such a situation are the children. Growing up speaking three languages -- what a gift to give your child. But I know of situation slightly more linguistically advantageous: a former Polish student of mine married a Spaniard. They live in Vienna and speak English to each other. Now if they could only get a, say, Chinese babysitter...
First Smile
It really began some weeks ago -- the first smile, K says, was when L was six weeks old. I didn't see it for some time, because L would smile once one day, give it a couple day's rest, then smile again -- usually when I wasn't home.
And then she began smiling often enough that I saw L with her eyes sparkling above a toothless grin.
But it took some time to be able to capture that on film memory card.
Now, we can cause her to smile -- if she's in the right mood. All we have to do is flash (and hold) an exaggerated smile and within seconds, she joins in.
The best time to get a smile out of her is after a bath. L absolutely loves being bathed, so much so that it is actually an effective calming mechanism.
And when she's calm and smiling, we're calm and smiling.
