American in Spain

Nora’s feet are pretty cute. The other day on the changing table, as she was flexing and extending her legs faster than Neil Lance Armstrong, I attempted to take some photos of her feet. Thus the following slideshow.
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Nora’s expressions continue to fascinate me, but what most makes me grin lately is the look on Marga’s face when she’s watching an alert Nora make faces. So much happiness in the house these days. I even rather enjoy the times when diaper changing explodes in showers of earth tones. We complain about the sleepless nights, but the complaints are only superficial. Caring for a newborn has got to be one of Life’s best obstacle courses.
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This morning I had a great idea. I’d place Nora’s foot on my flatbed scanner and scan her little bare foot. Then I’d do her hand, and if things went well, I’d repeat every week. The theory was sound, geeky, and interesting.

For some reason the scanner set itself on super-high-resolution mode which required a pause between each two-centimeter step of the scan. This resulted in Nora being forced to remain vertical about ten seconds longer than she wanted to. And this resulted in…well. (more…)

Our friend, Juan Carlos, the hairdresser, was over to visit you the other day. The conversation went something like this:

JC: “This child is going to have her father’s hair.
Me: “I know! What’s so annoying is that her mother’s hair is so much better than mine.”
JC: “Tell me about it!”
Me: “Oh yeah, I forgot that was your area of expertise.”

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Last night I woke up because Nora was making some noise. She was in bed with me because she’d been feeling a little ill (or at least acting that way). I calmed her down. Then I realized I had to pee, so I got up, made sure she was securely in the middle of the bed, put the covers over her with her little head sticking out as I have several times before, and went to the bathroom.

Bladder comfortably empty, I returned to the bedroom and… SHE WAS GONE!
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I have never purposefully watched professional wrestling. If I have the remote, that’s not what’s on the television. But sometimes, at a friend’s house as a kid, or in a bar or dorm lounge somewhere, I’ve seen some of it. From what I have gathered, there’s a special flavor of it, called tag team, that allows a two-on-two fight, where most of the time, only one member from each team is in the ring at a time. But, occasionally, if a wrestler gets in trouble, pinned down by his opponent, he can “tag” his teammate outside the ring and the teammate can enter to smash something down on the opponent to let the defeated teammate exit the ring to recuperate. Also, sometimes there are special moves that require a two-on-one scenario, and for those the outside-ring guy can be tagged to come in and assist for a move or two before it returns to a one-on-one fight. Or something like that. I don’t really know the rules, this is just what they appear to be to me.

Anyway, caring for an infant is a lot like that. (more…)

Nora, two of your feeding sessions yesterday lasted over two hours long. Suck a little, doze a little, suck a little, doze a little, etc. We know that a little resting between gulps is normal, but you never seem satiated. Plus, you go from “OMG, feed me, feed me, FEED ME!” to completely asleep after one swallow. It’s like your brain is content that, if there’s a nipple in your mouth, the problem is solved, even if you’re not full yet. Eventually your mother gets bored and gives you food from a syringe (up to ten of them so far!) until you stop moving your head to grab the syringe. Then you sleep for two hours and ask to repeat the process.
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My sweet daughter, I’m afraid we had a little hiccup at the local town hall registry when I was putting your official name down on the books. You see, the lady there read a stray pen mark on the paper as part of your name, and your name came out as “Gnora” instead of “Nora”. I was furious, of course. But the lady insisted that now that it was in the computer, it couldn’t be changed. She informed that, according to Spanish law, you can request a name change when you are eighteen years old, and it costs like 1,000€. I haven’t told your mother yet, because she’s going to flip out. As the irrevocableness of the situation has begun to set in, the name Gnora has started to grow on me. Semi-educated English speakers will know about words that start with “gn”, and Spanish speakers will be confused and probably just ignore the “g” like they should. So your name still sounds the same. It’s just that on the official documents, it’s going to be Gnora. Hey, at least your last name didn’t officially end up as Fafmuffem! So that’s a plus.
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