American in Spain

I’m sure the behavior displayed in this video is completely normal for a toddler, but it’s a good example of where Nora’s social and lingual skills are at the moment. She’s good at arguing. Since spending a week with her grandparents in Extremadura, she now interjects an exasperated ¡jolín! (a bowdlerized version of the Spanish F-bomb) “properly” into her arguments.
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This is one of the more curious Spanish expressions to me. I think it was first introduced to me by my Spanish friends in England when my future wife traveled alone to Spain for a wedding and I had to stay behind because the British immigration officers were getting uneasy with me going to and from Spain so much. Here’s a brief definition of the expression, followed by a longer explanation I’ve gathered from some internet research:

estar de Rodríguez: adj. the state of being left at home alone to work by one’s spouse (wife, typically) and children, while they go on vacation.

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The following is a document written by my father, Paul Rasmussen, about my parents’ March 2011 visit to my home in Colindres, Spain.

Betsy and I are old hands at traveling to Bilbao, Spain. When possible, as it was on March 19, we fly overnight from Charlotte to Germany (in this case, Munich), and then on to Bilbao after an hour or two lay-over. Betsy is always able to catch a few winks, and now that I have totally given up trying to sleep on these flights, I get by nicely watching movies and reading books. To my surprise, the Lufthansa flight from Charlotte to Munich allowed me to access the movie screen on the back of the seat in front of me from the moment we boarded the plane. I watched almost half of True Grit before we ever left the ground, but the pilot cut a few corners and caught back up to his schedule before we landed. There were no movies on the two hour flight from Munich to Bilbao, but I kept busy reading the book, A Course Called Ireland, I needed to finish so I could leave it with Erik.
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My parents are visiting this week. That means Nora is sleeping in our room for the first time in months. The first night they were here, Nora woke up at around midnight and cried and cried, demanding water, but then taking only a sip and pushing it away, and the immediately demanding more water when it was clear that I was going back to bed instead of giving her my undivided attention. After a half hour of trying various things, her mother mentioned that she needed to be quiet because Grandma and Grandpa were sleeping in the next room. Completely unexpectedly to us, Nora nodded and repeated “They’re sleeping. Don’t wake them,” lay down, and stopped crying. Two hours later when she started crying again, her mother said, “Be quiet. They’re sleeping,” and Nora obeyed, repeating the sentence to herself. It was really bizarre.
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Today is Kings Day, the traditional gift giving day in Catholic Spain. For people who prefer Christmas to be more about Baby Jesus than the North Pole, it makes more sense to give gifts on Epiphany, when tradition says that the Wise Men allegedly gave gifts to Jesus.

This morning, my mother-in-law articulated a concern I’ve been feeling but had yet to put into words:
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My grandmother, Joyce Rasmussen, has always been interested in arts and crafts. She has made baskets, pottery, needlework, crochet, knitting, paper-mâché, and origami. What she’s really been excelling at recently is making elaborate homemade greeting cards. Ever since getting a personal computer back in the late eighties, she has been fond of printing her own greeting cards, which involves choosing appropriate clipart and writing a nice message. I have always appreciated her cards more because I know that the sentiment comes directly from her, not Hallmark™.

At some point the idea occurred to her that if she cut a perfect circle of just the right radius in the front of the card with an X-Acto knife, then one of her origami chrysanthemums would fit there perfectly and be both held tightly in place and completely cover the hole. This discovery ushered in a Renaissance in Joyce-made greeting cards.
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The following is a document written by my father, Paul Rasmussen, about his granddaughter Nora’s, stay at his house in December 2010.

We had a very good visit with our Spanish family in October, so we were surprised when Erik floated the idea of bringing Marga and Nora for a visit in November, and even more surprised when he asked us how we would feel about taking care of Nora for five days while he and Marga visited San Francisco.
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On Thanksgiving morning, as is tradition in my family, we piled in the minivan and headed over the proverbial river and through the proverbial woods to Grandmother’s house. Nora was relatively well behaved during the 3.5 hour car journey, which included a stop at Bojangles for a “bo berry biscuit”, which was priced at $0.89 for one or $1.00 for two…and Europeans ask why Americans overeat so much. Before leaving Bojangles, Nora managed to dump her entire cup of water down the front of her dress, which was immediately removed, thus clearing the way for getting chocolate all over her onesie later in the car ride.
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When we visited last March, Nora’s favorite of my parents’ dogs was clearly Sam, the West Highland Terrier. The same is true this time, except that now that Nora can walk, she can hound him considerably more, following him around the house shouting “¡Hola!” at him.

Yesterday, when Nora was awaking from her stroll-by-the-river-induced afternoon slumber, I picked her up out of her pram, thinking she was fully away, and set her on the couch. She quickly dozed off, and slowly slouched over to her left, landing on top of the sleeping westie, creating one of the cutest scenes I’ve ever witnessed.
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Last weekend Nora got to see her second cousin, Chloe, again. Chloe is five months younger, and several kilos heavier, than Nora and has just begun walking. They were pretty cute together. Unlike Nora, Chloe is happy to be picked up by a relative stranger. I picked her up when I first saw her and she took an immediate liking to me after that, which is the exact opposite of what Nora would do.

I became a fan of Three Frames (sometimes NSFW) about a year ago. It’s an idea I’d never have thought of, to take just three frames from a movie and make an animated gif. The result can be quite comical. One side-effect is that, if the camera was moving at all, the resulting gif takes on a 3D effect. While it was not my intention when I was snapping photos like crazy of Nora and Chloe, when I later got them in my computer and was flipping between them, I just had to make a three-framed animated gif of three of the shots.
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