American in Spain » Family

Mitten Puppets

erik — Fri, 03 Feb 2012 19:59:19 +0000

My grandmother, Joyce, knitted some mitten puppets for her great-granddaughter, Nora, for Christmas 2011. As often happens with presents not made in Chinese plastic molds, they got a little passed over on Christmas morning, but we’ve found them and the weather has finally gotten cold enough to necessitate insulating hand gear, so we put them on her yesterday. It turns out to be extremely difficult to actually get her thumb and pinky into their requisite holes, but she does enjoy the faces on them.

Thank you very much to my grandmother, Joyce, of crafts and off-roading fame, for these wonderful mittens. The photos that follow are for you…

…and for any catalog modeling scouts that may stop by.

Hands up! This is a robbery!

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We’re Getting Wet!

erik — Thu, 08 Dec 2011 15:08:20 +0000

I was going through some old photos and videos and discovered this gem that my mother-in-law recorded last Easter when she and my wife took Nora down to Extremadura and left me de Rodriguez. It was a great example of her Spanish language skills at 25 months old. Now, however, after the death of her great-grandfather, it’s a poignant video of them playing together in at his house in Extremadura. They had a really great time playing together that week.

I’m not going to subtitle it, since it’s very repetitive. She’s primarily saying “Está lloviendo” and “¡Que nos mojamos!“, which are “It’s raining” and “We’re getting wet!” respectively. Apparently there was a light drizzle at the time.

The way she says “que no’ mojamo’ ” in an Extremaduran accent, in which the S’s are dropped from the end of words, is particularly cute.

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Putting Up The Christmas Tree – 2011

erik — Thu, 08 Dec 2011 13:32:10 +0000

In the United States, the existence of the Thanksgiving holiday does a pretty good job of preventing the Christmas celebration and capitalism from encroaching too far into November like it can do in other countries. Of course, like any pent up desire, when it’s released, it’s extreme, resulting in the consumerism orgy that is Black Friday. Aside from shopping, the weekend after Thanksgiving is when many Americans put up their Christmas tree and other yuletide decor. Since my parents were visiting, I decided to partake in this tradition as well and put up our tree on Black Friday.

In Spain, most people do their decorations this week, taking advantage of the double holidays. Of course, in Spain, the tree must remain up until at least January 6th, the traditional gift giving day of the season, because if you take the star down from the top of the tree, how else will the wise men find you to give you your gifts? In the US, they never last that long. The folks that have had real firs dying in their houses since Black Friday usually have them out by the end of the year.

Another difference between the two cultures is that Spaniards don’t put presents under the tree. The presents are all saved, hidden, until either Epiphany on January 6, or Christmas Day for families that have been influenced by foreign cultures. Personally, I think one of the best parts of Christmas is the anticipation and mystery involved in having to look at your gift for weeks before you get to open it. If that’s not the whole point of wrapping paper, I don’t know what is.

My two-year-old daughter, Nora, doesn’t quite understand Christmas yet. The idea of waiting to receive and open presents, and certainly any threats of them being dependent on behavior don’t sink in. But she did enjoy the novelty of setting up a plastic tree in the living room and decorating it with ornaments.

Every tree needs a good base. Wow, that’s profound.

Separating every sprig is the secret to making an artificial tree appear full.

My apprentice observed my work very closely.

Every year I’m surprised at just how tall our tree is. I always remember it as being tiny.

First the lights!

All this tree preparation is exhausting!

My little tree decorator.

It occurred to me the other day that families with toddlers who don’t yet understand the lust of consumerism should just pair up and exchange toys between households rather than buy new plastic crap. In the face of novel toys, the kids probably won’t even notice some of the old toys are missing.

May your solstice celebrations be jolly.

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Ramón Hidalgo Caballero, 1920 – 2011

erik — Fri, 02 Dec 2011 17:00:46 +0000

My third and final living grandfather passed away today. He wasn’t my grandfather by blood, but by marriage and an immense amount of mutual respect and love.

A month ago, he lost strength on one side of his body. It sounded like a stroke, but the doctors claimed it wasn’t, yet didn’t really know what had happened. He spent a few weeks in the hospital and was finally feeling well enough to go home. In an amazing demonstration of strength and spirit, he chose to make the 90 minute trip to our house last Saturday to see my parents who were visiting. He seemed sad and weak, but very appreciative of the gifts my parents gave him, including a lovely portrait of my daughter, Nora.

On Monday morning, he didn’t wake up. They took him to the hospital and he was said to be in a coma, although he was breathing on his own. My wife, Marga, drove to see him and whisper her goodbyes to her sleeping grandfather. On Tuesday, he briefly gained consciousness, and on Wednesday he was awake and lucid. Not only was he now conscious, but he had been semi-conscious for much of the time he was in the coma, able to recall who had visited him and what they had told him.

This is the last photo taken of Nora with her bisabuelo (great-grandfather). It really makes my heart ache that Nora will most likely not remember him at all. Hopefully the constant exposure to my photos will help.

Te quiero muchísimo, Abuelo. Soy mejor por haberte conocido. Nunca jamás te olvidaré.

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Tweetsie Railroad

erik — Wed, 20 Jul 2011 19:43:24 +0000

On July 4, 2011, my country’s 235th birthday, my family and I visited Tweetsie Railroad, in Blowing Rock, North Carolina. I would be the first to agree that the name sounds like some sort of social networking app (and they might do well to unload tweetsie.com before the bubble bursts), but Tweetsie Railroad is actually a “Wild West theme park”, from back in ye olde days when theme parks actually had themes. The primary attraction since its opening in 1957 has been an old coal-burnin’, steam-tootin’ train engine that takes visitors around a three mile track.

When we told people around my home town that we had gone to Tweetsie Railroad, the first question everyone asked was, “Do the Indians still board the train?” To spice up the original train ride, actors perform a staged train robbery, where the cowboys have to victoriously fight off the savage gold-robbin’ Indians. The answer is, “No, the Indians don’t board the train anymore, but the overweight actors pretending to be cowboys do fight off some other white actors in face paint and wigs pretending to be Native Americans.” It’s not remotely politically correct, and I assume that it will continue to change, especially since the kids born in the Obama administration don’t watch nearly as many Wild West shows on television as the kids born in the Eisenhower administration.

My favorite parts of Tweetsie Railroad when visiting it this time were the same as when I visited it as a child: the petting zoo, the chair lift, and the train ride…in that order. Despite being a little below the target age of the theme park, Nora had an absolutely spectacular time. If we hadn’t pulled her away, she would’ve loved to just ride the carousel all day. The look of awe and wonder as we did each new activity was so refreshing to see. One of the best joys of parenting is to vicariously rediscover the world through your child’s eyes.

Approaching Tweetsie.

She loved riding these plastic horses. And Nora did, too.

On the train. My father had visited TripAdvisor and learned that the best place to be was on the right side of car #3. We quickly took our seats, and then watched as everyone else also knew where to go, piling into the right side of the cars, and particularly in car #3. Just before we left, some stragglers came in and saw no one on the left side of the aisle and figured they should’ve come earlier. Sure enough, all the action to see was on the right side of the train, centered around the middle car, #3.

Nora enjoyed the train ride a lot. Since it’s a real coal burning train, the conductor warned us before leaving the station that we had to be careful that falling embers and ash might enter the train, and to wear sunglasses if we had ‘em. Sure enough, ash did blow a bit into the train, but it was nothing a little brush of the shoulder couldn’t remedy.

Very, very amateur cowboy actors did a bit of a George and Lennie routine. The general plot was that the moron outlaws, with intentions of robbing the train, got caught by the moderately competent law enforcement, but they had to be released temporarily to band together in their whiteness to fight the attacking Indians.

Nora hated the guns. They were really, really authentically loud. It seems to me like they could make the show just as entertaining without being such an aural assault.

Oh no! A white guy with his face painted red, white and blue on July 4th! A brutal savage or a member of the Tea Party?

Look out, cowboy!

[Insert comic book action onomatopoeias here]

The engine is a beautiful machine, I must admit.

Nora loved the carousel.

This made me chuckle. To take the chair lift up to the upper part of the park, we had to leave our stroller down below.

Feeding the deer.

And even better: Baby goats!!

Nora couldn’t quite get up the courage to let one eat from her hand, but she enjoyed petting them for 0.5 seconds at a time. I kid you not.

Not quite a Galapagos cruise, but there were some pretty bizarre animals you don’t see every day.

When we were eating some hotdogs and pulled pork sandwiches, a thunderstorm arrived very quickly, so we got to ride down the chair lift in the somewhat-sideways rain, accompanied by not-so-distant thunder. I really enjoyed the chair lift. I would’ve enjoyed just riding it up and down a few more times.

My parents liked it, too.

All in all, I think we had a wonderful time and can’t wait to go back in the coming years when Nora is a little bit older. She fell asleep just as soon as we got the car in gear and slept all the way back down the mountain to my parents’ house.

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Mermaid Girl

erik — Tue, 19 Jul 2011 14:35:54 +0000

In North Carolina in the summer, it gets very hot. Like in southern Spain, there are several hours every day when you simply can’t be outside unless you’re actively cooling yourself with water. Marga and Nora spent a lot of time in swimming pools. First, they went to the municipal pool at the Morganton Recreational Center, which has a nice kids pool where Nora can touch the bottom. It’s in a nice location because they can walk there from my parents new house they bought a year ago. Later in the week, they decided to go to the swimming pool at my parents old, yet unsold, house, a pool my mother has spent hundreds, if not thousands, of hours cleaning in the twenty years they lived there. That was a lot of fun too. At first, Nora was a little skeptical of the water, but eventually she made it to the point where she was throwing herself into the pool from the steps.

In the public pool.

Fun! Nothing like spending a dollar to get into the municipal pool to keep the budget low on your cheap family holidays abroad, eh?

With Grandma in the private pool.

Is that Grandpa or an albino porpoise?

The first day, she refused to do anything but sit on the steps and claim to be “swimming”. But by the end, she’d kick around, though always in contact with someone.

One day we took a picnic lunch.

She loved her water wings. As with most things, it took some convincing to get them on her the first time, and then some arguing to get them off her when it was time to go home.

Nothing says summer like a cold watermelon.

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Picking Blueberries

erik — Wed, 29 Jun 2011 12:53:40 +0000

On Monday, Nora went with her mother, grandmother and our friend Amy to pick blueberries at a local farm. I was working, so I couldn’t go, but they brought back a lot of blueberries. Nora’s white dress was suitably stained when she returned home. It looks like they had a wonderful time, and I’ve been enjoying roughly a one-to-one flake-to-blueberry ratio on my breakfast cereal all week.

Berry picker in her natural habitat.

Want one?

It’s unclear what percentage of the berries Nora picked went into the bucket, but I suspect it was pretty low.

A successful harvest!

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Dog Bite

erik — Tue, 28 Jun 2011 15:58:44 +0000

My parents have three dogs: Buster, Sam and Blue. I learned almost a decade ago that Buster was the most likely to actually bite someone when I got a little too rough playing with him and I got a tooth to the bridge of my nose. It didn’t break the skin, but it was sufficiently scary to give me a sense of cautious respect when dealing with Buster. We knew from our very first visit with Nora that Buster should never really be in the same room with Nora. Buster is the alpha dog of the house and is pretty much completely deaf, as old springers often are.

Sam is the #2 dog on the house totem. With humans, he’s the sweetest, most friendly of the three. With other dogs, he’s the enforcer that keeps other dogs in line. Sam is the dog that we are least worried about biting Nora. Once, on a previous visit, he did give her a “Stop bothering me!” bark that freaked her out for a couple hours, but that’s all he’s ever done. However, he’s still a dog that is not used to having children around, so we keep an eye on him.

Blue is a border collie, bred to herd sheep with a solid work ethic and desire for control of his surroundings. Blue is, for lack of a better word, autistic. His social skills with other dogs and especially with people are very lacking. There are very, very few people, with the exception of my parents, that can touch Blue. He shies away from any human contact. Generally this makes him docile and the furthest thing from a threat, but sometimes those shepherd authoritarian neurons fire and he can be aggressive and controlling. One time Marga and I were walking around my parents’ yard and Blue decided he needed to herd us, which involved circling us very aggressively and nipping at us with snarls. It was quite scary.

For this visit to my parents’ house, it was decided that Buster should stay at a kennel because we learned during our last visit that he’s a howler when locked up in his crate in the garage. It was decided that Blue can be let out of his garage crate every so often, but mostly only when Nora was sleeping or away from home. On the first full day of our visit, however, there was a miscommunication and Nora followed her grandmother to the garage, unaware that she was going there to release Blue. Blue and Nora both came around a corner at the same time, in opposite directions, and had an encounter. I didn’t see what happened, but he gave her what is technically referred to as a “tooth bump”, which is sort of like a bite, but without the full flesh-ripping force that could be applied.

Needless to say, Nora freaked the hell out and cried for a good while. Blue was immediately put in the car and taken to the kennel for the remainder of our stay. Nora was scared of Sam for the rest of the day, but luckily seems to have gone back to being his friend since then. I was concerned that such an incident might introduce a general lifelong fear of dogs, but it looks like it hasn’t. Her bruise clearly shows the teeth marks from the bite.

Nora’s dog bite.

Poor thing. At least she’ll heal.

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Pregnancy: Terminated

erik — Sat, 11 Jun 2011 13:30:53 +0000

On June 2, 2011, we went into Santander to visit a private obstetrician, the same guy we visited with the first pregnancy. His professionalism and caring way of treating us impressed us both times we’ve seen him. About halfway through the sonogram, he said, “I’m afraid I don’t have good news for you.” He took the time to carefully explain all the developmental deformations the fetus had, listed the many possible causes, and described the sum of deformations with a phrase I will never forget: “incompatible with life”.

With our thinking not bogged down by religious dogma, the decision was clear: the pregnancy should be terminated. How lucky we are to live in a time when such technology can foresee a painful infant death and to live in a country with the sophisticated system of ethics to allow such a pregnancy termination.

Needless to say, it has been a rough week for us. I can say, however, with total certainty that losing a fetus that you’ve never met cannot be compared with the loss of a child. It is disappointing to have the happy future you have been planning for months be ripped away from you, but I have no doubt that we’ll be just fine.

The termination took place this afternoon. It would have been a boy.

Rather than feel sorry for us, I ask that those of you that do have fully formed children, give them an extra hug today and appreciate your good fortune. Our two year old, Nora, has been a beacon of happiness for us in this storm.

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Happy Birthday, Grandpa!

erik — Thu, 19 May 2011 14:27:50 +0000

I spent a good part of my morning today trying to get my daughter to say “Happy birthday, Grandpa”. For the longest time, when I told her to say “happy”, she would shake her head and say “No!” It was appropriate, then, that my eventual success came by way of using behavior modification techniques my father taught me. I told her that if she wouldn’t say “happy”, then I would walk away and ignore her. I did this once, coming back a minute later to ask if she’d like to say “happy” and make me stay. She did, and I heaped praise on her. To add the second word, I had to temporarily abandon her once more in punishment. When I came back, she was happy to say the entire phrase to keep me in the room. I assume this is how Steven Spielberg directs his films, too.

Happy birthday, Dad. I hope you like the video.