American in Spain

Today Ian turns one month old. It’s been both a long and a quick month. He’s grown quite a bit. While he weighed less than his sister at birth, she was only 3.6 kg at the one month mark, and he’s already up to 4 kg. His size difference is already noticeable, as he’s much larger, especially his head, than he was at birth. Probably because he never stops eating. All the parenting pamphlets say that newborns need to eat roughly every three hours, but apparently Ian can’t read the pamphlets, because he’s hungry pretty much every hour.
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Well, we finally had our first incidence of one of my children making the other cry with pain. To be honest, I was surprised that it was the little guy that initiated what every prognosticator of sibling relationships assures me will be at least a dozen year conflict. Let the record forever show that “He started it!” Although it wouldn’t take much of a baby lawyer to throw charges of premeditation into doubt. He was only 16 days old.

My infant son was looking so adorable on his changing mat, which his sister got plenty of use out of, and I had the idea of having her lie down with her head next to his, for a cute sibling photo shoot. I only got one good photo before things turned ugly.
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Several months ago, amongst random meandering thoughts, I realized that there would be a day this year that would match three consecutive numbers on the Fibonacci sequence. For those of you who can’t remember your math teacher’s face, the Fibonacci sequence is the sequence of numbers that starts with 0 and 1, and creates each number in the sequence by summing the previous two. So it goes: 0, 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34, 55, 89… You may notice that three of those numbers are 5, 8, and 13, which are today’s date. In the United States and nowhere else. Anyway, this sequence is important throughout mathematics, including the awesomeness of the Golden Ratio and its surprising, but not so surprising when you think about it, occurrence in Nature.
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Recently I was contacted by InterNations, an organization I registered my expat status with several years ago and have since been diligently ignoring all their newsletters about meet ups in Madrid. They asked if I’d like to do an interview with them and to be featured on their site. I agreed, but then life got complicated, and they ended up having to nag me several times, but we finally did the interview and they published it. They’ve given me permission to re-post it here for your enjoyment. Some of my regular readers might not know my answers to some of these basic questions.
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Today we had some wonderful weather, and I grabbed my camera as we were leaving for our usual afternoon walk around town. In May, seven o’clock in the afternoon is well before Golden Hour, but the visibility was good and I managed to capture a few good shutter clicks. A few of them just begged to be tilt-shifted, to highlight the subject of the photo. When Photoshop beckons, I go running…
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The other day, during my bidaily visit to the local grocer, my grocer and friend, Andrés, said, “Hey, Erik, come here for a second. I have something to give you.” From its hiding place behind some yogurt in the display fridge, he pulled out three strange fruit pods. He explained that they are called tamarinds, and that they are native to Africa and are sort of a cross between a peanut and a date. I had never heard of such a thing, but he instructed me on how to peel and eat them, warning that the seeds are very hard and to be careful.
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As expected, we had some pretty enormous change in the state of the offspring this month. They’ve doubled in number!! Our son, Ian, was born as healthy and robust as I’ve ever seen a newborn. He doesn’t seem too pleased, however, to be outside, and very much prefers to be pressed up against his mother as he is accustomed. The little bugger has an absolutely voracious appetite, often draining both his mother’s breasts and still wanting more, which we supplement with formula.
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Somewhere around her second trimester, my wife calculated that if she could hold out until her due date of April 25th, then her maternity leave would butt right up against a five day weekend in August, created by a national holiday and a local holiday and a puente. We had a minor scare a fortnight early, but she made it…right up to midnight on April 25th, when her labor began. She let me sleep an hour from 12:30 to 1:30 before waking me and telling me to go downstairs and clean up some dishes and crumbs from dinner the night before to make the house tidy for our guest who we were about to call.
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This past weekend, I found myself thinking about two very different kinds of knights, one that seems very old from thirty years ago, and some others from several centuries ago. Both coincided with a visit from my cousin Jeanie and her husband Kit. It’s rare that two anecdotes I have to share align with a common word, but in this case, I’ve got two stories of knights to tell you, and both have to do with quirks of Spanish history.
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We had a lovely visit this weekend from my second cousin, once removed, and her husband. My parents and I visited their house, in Cupertino, California, once twenty years ago, and the last time I saw them was about twelve years ago at a family reunion at my grandparents’ house in Ann Arbor, Michigan. But for all intents and purposes, they were strangers to me. So much so that when we visited San Francisco 2.5 years ago, they never occurred to me when thinking of people I knew in the Bay Area to visit. Although we share some genes (and a Jean, as her namesake and Aunt Jean was my maternal grandmother), what they really were to me were internet friends. I got to know Jeanie after she friended me on Facebook shortly after we dissed her on our San Francisco trip, and we’ve grown to quite like each other over the past couple of years. Their visit was going to be another data point my “meeting people you only know over the internet” experiment…
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