I once not-so-famously declared that “The monkey alarm doesn’t have a snooze button.” I was referring to there being no way to delay having to get up in the middle of the night to deal with a screaming baby. That is still the case, somewhat, as I have to get up on average about 1.5 times per night to spin Nora back around so she’s sleeping the proper direction in her bed or calm her after a nightmare or find her teddy bear which has been brushed off onto the floor. When it comes to getting up in the morning, however, I have devised a bit of a snooze button. Normally she will get up and open the door to the master bedroom where I am sleeping – her mother having left for work hours before – and say whatever is on her mind. It’s rarely “Good morning!” and is usually “Where is Mommy?” I greet her and give her two tasks, putting on her slippers (about 10% of the time she’s already done that before entering) and go take of her diaper, put it in the trash, and then empty the rest of her bladder contents into the toilet. This can take up to four or five minutes to do if she gets distracted doing other things, and I can lie back down and wake up more slowly.

Sometimes I become so impressed by Nora’s ability to reason through a problem or situation that I start attributing more intelligence to her than she really has. For example, she’s quite good at thinking through a dependency tree such as “What do we need to do to get ready to go to daycare?” She can list putting toys away, brushing her teeth, putting on her coat, and turning off the lights. But she, like most normal three-year-olds, does not yet have a well developed Theory of Mind, an understanding that other people have feelings and beliefs and intentions just like she does.

One day last week she was in a pouty mood when we took our daily trip to the grocery store. In the store, she refused to say buenos días to anybody. On the walk home, and later at home, our discussion about her behavior went like this:

Erik: Nora, you have to say buenos días to people.
Nora: Why?
Erik: Because people like that and then they like you and they are nice to you and might even give you things.
Nora: Okay.
Erik: So why do we say buenos días to people?
Nora: I don’t know.
Erik: I just told you. Would you like me to tell you again?
Nora: Yes.
Erik: We say buenos días to people because that’s the nice thing to do and they like it, which, in turn, makes them want to be nice to us. Do you understand?
Nora: Yes.
Erik: Okay, so why do we say buenos días to people?
Nora: I don’t know.

…repeat thirty times…

Erik: I’m going to tell you why, and then I’m going to ask you why, and all you have to do is say what I just said, okay?
Nora: Okay.
Erik: Because people like it and want to be nice to us. Okay, why?
Nora: People like it and are nice to us.
Erik: YES! Good girl!
Nora: [wiping a tear] Can I have a hug now?

Perhaps that was a bit cruel, but it was interesting to see the limits of her comprehension. Every day since, she has said buenos días to our friends at the supermarket without fail.

The only thing better than a chocolate bonbon is eating one with Mommy.

One of Nora’s new favorite games is to take some object, like a ball or a bracelet, and hide it somewhere on her person, usually underneath her, if she’s sitting, or behind her back or up her sleeve, and then ask “Where is [the object]??” What she wants is for her mark the other player to place great importance on finding said object and search around for it. Sometimes she will suggest that the search be moved to another room in the house. After the object can’t be found, she whips it out and proclaims, “I found it! I found it!” I normally only have the stamina for about four or five rounds of this before losing interest. The key to stopping the game, I’ve discovered, is give no reaction whatsoever to her miraculous discovery. If you seem surprised by her reveal, even if you have refused to search, the game iterates again.

The state of the offspring is strong!

The practice putting green. The course was near the seaside tourist town of San Vicente la Barquera.

With my new handicap of 12, I was in the 13th of 22 threesomes on Saturday, so my tee time was 10:40. Even though the temperature was only about 15° C (59° F), the course was just so hilly that I was down to short sleeves after the first hole. All the golf I had played this year in the States was the lazy American kind where you sit on a cushioned seat and zoom right up to your ball, but this was Man vs. Wilderness Cantabrian golf, and I had to catch my breath before each shot.

The first hole was a steep climb.

Very soon into the round the rain began. This meant donning an impermeable outer layer. I had specifically made a trip into Santander earlier in the week to buy some rain pants for this exact occurrence. It never really poured, but a mild drizzle was maintained for the rest of the round. My woolen felt golfing cap absorbed several pounds of water and had to be rung out several times. I had four spare gloves in a ziplock bag in my golf bag (I learned in Ireland that my golf bag is not water proof when my HD video camera stopped working and needed a $300 repair). It wasn’t until the eighteenth hole that I had any problems with grip slippage. The only casualty of the rain was my scorecard. It was a disintegrating lump of pulp when we finished the round, but the scores of the guy I was keeping score for were barely legible, so we transferred them to dry card and turned it in.

Since there were eight local golf clubs competing against each other, it was possible to form the threesomes such that no one was playing with a member of their own team. My two playing partners on Saturday were an amicable pair. One guy thought he was a lot funnier than he really was. He’s the kind of guy who, when we finished the round and the secretary took our scores, told us that they would send everyone an SMS to tell us our tee time the following day, and said, “Okay, give me your mobile,” obviously asking for his phone number, he said, “But if I give you my mobile [phone] how can you send me a message?” She had to ask three more times to nail the syntax of “Please tell me the number assigned to your mobile phone,” such that he couldn’t escape into jokester-land. Exhausting.

He did, however, tell me a lovely story about how he was invited to the inaugural day of the course we were playing, which was designed by none other than Cantabria’s golfing son, Severiano Ballesteros. During his round, he saw Seve playing another hole and went up to talk to him. He said that Seve was kind enough to stop and chat for a few minutes and have his picture taken. He was a great man. May 7, a week from the date of this post, will be the first anniversary of his death.

We were playing at Santa Marina Golf Club, which was built near this 19th century chapel, which curiously has a tree growing from its bell tower. You can’t build anything in Spain without it being near some stone relic from another time.

I was very happy with my play on Saturday, especially my back nine that started with a string of eight bogeys. The eighteenth hole might be the hardest hole of golf I’ve ever played. It’s a par 5, but I never managed less than 8 strokes.

The rules of the tournament were that only the six best rounds (gross, no handicaps) from each team would be counted. The team from Laredo had a final score on Saturday of 519, an average of 86.5, which included my 93. The next closest team on the leader board had 520, but that was with only five players (an average of 104), so it didn’t count. The actual second place team was 36 strokes behind us with a 555.

Sunday was gorgeous and sunny…but very, very muddy. There was what the golf rulebook calls “standing water” on every square centimeter of the course. I made a slop-slop-slop sound as I walked up and down the steep inclines. If you didn’t visually identify the square meter where your ball landed in the fairway, it was a lost ball, because they plugged down into the mud such that just a tiny square centimeter of the ball was visible. Every single player on our team scored worse the second sunny day than on the first rainy day. That should give an indication of just how difficult an already nearly-impossible course was playing. One guy playing in a pair of wellies looked ridiculous on the first tee, but like a genius on the eighteenth green.

On Sunday I witnessed an event that would definitely win the storytelling competition my golfing group has every year in February. My threesome had finished a hole and was walking to the next tee when we saw a heavy set gentleman from the group in front of us returning to the tee with his driver. His ball had missed the fairway by a couple meters and had plugged into the ground and been declared lost. He teed up his ball and sent it slicing off into the woods. He shouted some Spanish curses about defecating on the mother of the ball he just hit and flung his driver with all his might. His intent was probably to fling it straight down the hole towards the fairway, but he held on to it a split second too long and it went careening over our heads and up to the very tip top of a tree, where it lodged itself securely. We tried shaking the tree vigorously, but the driver wasn’t going anywhere. This was a pretty serious situation, since a driver costs easily $300, which is probably 300€ (400 USD), if golf clubs are priced like other consumer goods. One guy from our group had the idea to use his golf ball retriever, a telescoping tube used to pull golf balls out of water hazards. He extended it out about 6 meters (20 feet), but it was still way too short. I suggested we could throw some rocks, but really I was imagining it either staying there forever or having to hire a cherry picker to fetch it. Just then, the other guy from my group, who was in his late forties or early fifties, jumped up into the tree, which didn’t look at all conducive to climbing, and promptly climbed about 25 feet into the air with the agility of a chimpanzee and grabbed the club. And somehow he made it back down without breaking his neck. Just then it made sense how he could only take the club back until it was perpendicular to the ground and whip it through the ball and hit it further than I can with a full swing. Amazing.

Every time I golf in Spain, I am amused by the fact that there is some law that requires them to put life preservers near the big water hazards. It’s a practice that strattles the line between reasonableness and silliness. I wonder how many golfers drown every year in water hazards in the US. If it’s more than 0.3, I’d be surprised.

The starter (the guy who stands on the first tee and controls who begins when) told us a story of one member of the club that plays golf in shorts, even in the near-freezing winter temperatures. When asked why, he replies, “When I wear pants, my wife gets so mad at me for how dirty I’ve gotten them, that I’d rather play in shorts.”

When I showed my wife this photo, she reenacted the shorts-wearer’s story, telling me that I had ruined those trousers. Surprisingly, however, they came out of the washing machine looking like new.

I shot a 93 the first day and a 95 the second. The tournament officials didn’t bother to properly add up the scores before declaring Laredo the winner. It wasn’t even close.

The best part of the course was the clubhouse, an old wooden structure that, as is common for golf courses everywhere, used to be the house that the owners of the land lived in. The greens were in a pretty bad state of disrepair. Apparently the club is running out of money because there’s a lack of members. And I can understand why. Who would want to pay money to be abused like that every time you play? The course is just too hard. They’ve tried to make it easier by getting rid of all out-of-bounds and replacing the white stakes with red stakes, marking forests as “lateral water hazards”, but it’s not good enough. Santa Marina Golf Club seems to be in a downward spiral where the course is so hard that they are running out of members and money, which in turn makes the course even harder as it falls into disrepair. It’s a shame, because the location is visually spectacular, with views from the sea to the snowy Picos de Europa with rolling hills and luxury chalets in between.

Laredo Club de Golf, the best golfers in Cantabria who don’t have a home course. That’s a bronze Ballesteros behind us.

In the mornings, when we are goofing around reading books or playing with toys, sometimes I’ll wonder aloud about what time it is. When Nora hears this, she goes to find my iPhone wherever it is (sometimes it’s in her hands at the time), and she knows how to exit the active application, lock the phone, and then press the home button to show the lock screen which displays the time. She then holds it out so I can read it, often with a “Here’s the time, Poppy!”

Nora has started following the plot of television shows for the first time. She now responds when Dora asks a question, for example. She likes Dora The Explorer a lot, but her absolute favorite program is a Canadian cartoon called Caillou, about a little boy and his family and the adventures they get into. I had never heard of Caillou before, but Nora already has a Caillou doll that speaks Basque very loudly.

We have applied for Nora to start school in September. For obvious reasons, we requested the school that is literally 20 meters from our front door as our first choice. They choose applicants based on a points system, which ranks criteria in more or less like this, in descending order of importance:

• Does a sibling already attend?
• How close does the child live to the school?
• How close is the parents’ workplace from the school?
• …other criteria involving disabilities and household income.

So we score very highly on the proximity criterion, but there are only twenty slots available for the three-year-old class, and we’ve heard rumors that there is a mass exodus of kids that are wanting to switch from another school to the one we want, so there might be competition. We will hear who got in in May. Our fingers are crossed…

The state of the offspring is strong!

Once this month, rather than open my door and say, “Poppy, I want to go downstairs have have some juice,” as she usually initiates our waking days, I woke up on my own and heard a BRAAAACK sound, like velcro being ripped apart, from the bathroom. Then it happened again, BRAAACK. I guessed what it was, and peeked in to confirm. She had managed to take off her blue outer pajamas (used to keep her warm when she inevitably kicks off her blankets) all by herself, and was undoing her diaper (the sound I’d heard) by herself, and was already up on the potty relieving her bladder. I was so proud and showered her with praise. This was especially nice since it came after a series of mornings where she would wake up crying and demand that all operations I described above be done for her while she sobbed. She has done this several times this month.

Nora continues to grow at a pace that can only be detected by her shrinking clothes and ability to reach things she previously was unable to reach. She can now easily see over tables and counters and sinks that were previously at forehead level. She can’t quite reach the button for the elevator yet, although I make her try once a week.

One aspect of parenting that I suspect will only get more and more interesting over the coming years is noticing what my daughter’s peers think is important and how she expresses these concerns to me. For instance, she is all the time performing some physical action and then announcing proudly, “I know how to do this, but you don’t know how to do this!” Often these actions consist of some way of twisting her hands together or a bizarre walk or a facial expression. At her daycare she is now the senior class and she and her classmates possess a physical agility and strength that is orders of magnitude above the drooling babies they are around. I’m convinced that they spend a great deal of time inventing new movements and sounds and expressions to one-up both their peers and the underclassmen half their age. The funniest episode of this was when she flicked her long blond locks like the women in shampoo commercials do and declared that “Poppy doesn’t know how to do this!” She’s got me there.

One day this month, when her mother went to get Nora from daycare, they had the following conversation:

Mommy: Did you play with Rubén at daycare?
Nora: No, he wasn’t there.
Mommy: And Jimena?
Nora: No, she wasn’t there.
Mommy: And Mario? And [several other kids]?
Nora: No, no one was at daycare today.
Mommy: And [daycare worker] Maria? Or [daycare worker] Adela?
Nora: No, I was all by myself.
Mommy: So who prepared your merienda?
Nora: I made it and ate it all by myself.
Mommy: And what did you do all alone at daycare?
Nora: Nothing. Once, I crossed the street all by myself without holding anyone’s hand and went to the candy store all by myself to buy candy.

Such a vivid imagination! When I told the daycare workers, they laughed at her creativity.

The other day, Nora announced that she had to go do pee-pee, so she headed off towards the bathroom. I asked if she needed any help, and she said, “No,” and continued into the bathroom. She came out immediately, however, and walked over to me and said, “Thank you for asking!” before running back to do her business.

Today, when I was walking with Nora around town, we had to take a particularly narrow sidewalk beside a road where the cars go pretty fast, so I moved around to take her other hand so I would be the one on the side of the sidewalk adjacent to the road. Nora said the following:

Poppy, why did you move to that side? So Nora doesn’t fall down into the road and get hit by a car? If that happened, you would be very sad because you wouldn’t have Nora anymore, and then Mommy would come home from work and you would have to tell her that I went away. And you’d have to buy another Nora.

I told her she was right, but that it would be impossible to buy another Nora, and gave her a big hug.

The state of the offspring is strong!

Bowling is hard. Perhaps the rules should be revisited?

Her first innovation to the game of bowling was realizing that a straight perpendicular line is much easier to hit than a triangle of pins.

Her second innovation was to drastically reduce the length of the bowling lane.

Dresses! That thing that says “RANO” is a set of individual chocolate bars with the letters of her name.

Her birthday cake. Zorionak is “congratulations” in Basque.

I love cake photography. Even more than cake.

I had been coaching her all morning about how she’s going to have to blow out candles. The moment has arrived!

Huff and puff and…

Blow!

Yay!

A doll and crib.

Feasting with family.

Here’s your piece, dear blog reader! Enjoy!

Happy birthday, Nora! I love you more than I can put into words. It’s kind of hard to believe that you didn’t even exist just a few years ago. This last year has been my favorite year so far, and I feel as if I’m really getting to know you. I’m very much looking forward to continuing our lives together. Happy birthday, my love!

Two of the least unflattering candid photos Nora took.

Bloggers united! Don’t be a stranger, Tortuga!

Under my care, she has had a total of zero bladder or bowel control issues. I haven’t had to change a single wet pair of panties this month, with the solitary exception of the night when I forgot to put her nocturnal diapers on, and we had a little 4:00 AM wetness to deal with. I’d hate to jinx it, but if feels like we’ve crossed a milestone.

One day this month, I was tasked with every husband’s favorite chore: buying feminine sanitary towels from the local grocery store. Nora saw me take a packet off the shelf, and immediately asked, “Why does Mommy wear this diapers in her panties sometimes?” Jeez! I wasn’t expecting to have That Talk quite so soon. I irresponsibly blew her off with a “I dunno, ask your mother,” the old parental snooze button. This girl doesn’t know her numbers, colors or letters, but it’s like living with Sherlock Holmes, she’s so observant!

Several times this month, Nora has told me, “Poppy, you no can do this!”, and she flings her golden locks with her hand as if she’s in a shampoo commercial. It’s pretty cute.

One morning, she woke up and was a bit groggy. I asked if she was still asleep, and she responded that she wanted to sleep in her stroller. I explained that it was beds that were for sleeping. In less than a second, she came back with “Strollers, too!” Touché. I was expecting to get through the first three years before I started losing arguments.

Every day recently, Nora demands to be “read” – though no books are needed anymore – the story of Little Red Riding Hood. As soon as the storyteller finishes, she demands that it be told again. Her Spanish grandmother is very accommodating and will gladly tell it over and over to her. Of course, any time information is copied over and over again imperfectly, natural selection can occur. I’m amused that my mother-in-law’s telling of the classic Grimm Brothers’ tale includes a memetic mutation I introduced: that the grandmother in the story is sick because she went outside without a coat on. In general, Nora loves stories and books, and being read to is her favorite activity when at home with an adult.

One day we entered the local hardware store, and Nora immediately pointed to the wall full of power tools, like drills and jigsaws, and she said, “Those make a lot of noise. I don’t like that.” It’s true. Whenever she sees me go to our storage closet where I keep the drill, she says, “Poppy, don’t make a lot of noise!” Whenever I did have to use the drill this month to install some lights in our bathrooms, she insisted on being as far away as possible with all the doors closed in between us. She said, “I’m going to close the door so that I don’t cry.” Also in the hardware store, she saw a sewing machine and proudly proclaimed, “Abuela has one like that!” Her ability to generalize concepts and recognize new instances of objects in a similar category continues to amaze me.

The state of the offspring is strong!

Another time, I was downstairs working when I heard someone get up upstairs and go to the bathroom. Then I heard the person leave the bathroom and close a bedroom door. It had to be my wife. Two minutes later, the stairway light came on. I went to investigate and found Nora standing at the top of the stairs – blocked by the toddler gate, thankfully – peering down at me silently. I put her back to bed. Later the next morning, I mentioned to my wife that she’d woken up Nora the previous night, and she said she’d never gotten up. So perhaps Nora went to pee on her own? Who knows…

I have taken another step back from Nora’s regular bedtime routine, opting to sit on the floor out in the hall, rather than on the guest bed while Nora falls asleep. It’s a step in the right direction, and Nora seems to be taking to it well, although sometimes she will get up and come check on me and be ordered back to bed.

Our bedtime routine has also taken a turn for the adorable. When I tuck her in and give her a hug, she usually says, whether I have or not, “Poppy! You haven’t shaved today! Tomorrow you can shave, okay?” Then she demands to kiss my nose, each eye, each ear, and hair. These moments are so precious to me.

The magi brought Nora a cash register, complete with toy foodstuffs and money. She absolutely loves playing with it, saying often, “What do you want to buy?” When her playmate chooses an item, she says, “I have to scan it!”, and she presses the button on the toy bar code scanner, causing a loud BEEP sound. Then she declares, “You have to pay!”, but is more than willing to open up the cash drawer to give her playmate some money to pay for the item. Her business model is slightly flawed, but then she’s not in it for the money. Occasionally, the bar code scanner gets magically transformed into a telephone and she holds it to her ear and talks to Rubén, who, despite actually existing, has taken on a primary role in her cast of imaginary friends that she talks to around the house.

This month we had to bid a fond farewell to Nora’s favorite daycare worker, Nela. Nora and Nela have always had a special relationship. For instance, Nela was the first person to be allowed to braid Nora’s hair. She had decided to leave daycare work, for which she’s certified, and start a children’s clothing store in town. We will still see her around, and Nora would be “graduating” out of daycare this September anyway, but it’s sad to see her go. I took this photo of the two of them on Nela’s last day.

Several times this month, upon seeing me open the cabinet where we store Nora’s medicine, she has said, “Poppy, what are we going to do? [cough! cough!]” I suppose that, after having to deal with a sick child that refused medicine to the point where she had to be held down with almost all my weight, I’ve got to be in favor of pharmaceutical companies erring on the side of “too appetizing” for medicine, and pretend hypochondria is just a consequence we’ve got to accept.

This month I learned that two-year-olds still fall for the “Please close the door…no, from the other side” trick. Sometimes when she’s in my office picking items off my desk, asking inquisitively, “What is this? To do?” I have to ask her to leave so I can continue working, and this trick is working wonders at the moment.

I recall learning this song before I knew what the heck a submarine was, and I’m pretty sure that Nora still doesn’t even know what “yellow” means. It holds a special place in my marriage because of a special night in a bar in the Scottish highlands when we had a particularly fun time singing it in a large crowd. The fact that we can learn songs without having any clue about their meaning still amazes me.

Nora is definitely to the age where one must be careful of everything said around her, because it will be repeated without filter to anyone she has even a little confidence in. Her mother brought home about fifty 1, 2 and 5 euro-cent coins, totaling maybe 2€, from a jar she’d been throwing loose change into at work. Next thing we know, Nora is saying, “Mommy took a lot of money from work and gave it all to me!” to everyone in the local supermarket. Of course they know that Marga’s not an embezzler (or do they!?), but every single one of them remarked about how Nora’s phrasing didn’t make it sound very good.

How much longer is this post? A little bit, but not too much.

I recently had to following conversation with Nora…

Erik: Ow! Don’t hit me with that toy.
Nora: Why?
Erik: Because it hurts, and I don’t like things that hurt, do you?
Nora: A little bit. Sometimes. But not too much.

She’s not really a moderate masochist; this is her canned diplomatic response to any question requiring a yes/no or quantitative answer. e.g. Do you want some juice? How much do you love Poppy? Are you a Democrat? You have to admit that it’s a clever, if utterly meaningless, response you’d expect out of the most agile politician. She’s not yet three; no need to commit to any positions yet.

The state of the offspring is strong!

The house with the brick ground floor is the one that has burned down. I walk by it every day. I’ve shopped in the store to the left, but the building to the right has been abandoned with aging Banco Santander decals on it for the six years I’ve been living in Colindres.

Because of the weather today, the smoke is completely invisible from ground level.

But seen from above, you can clearly see just how much of it there is.

The house is totally gutted. No, I don’t know why there’s a bathtub on the neighbor’s balcony. It’s been there ever since we bought our house.

The neighborhood is filled with that thick acrid smell that triggers strong emotions in anyone that has ever experienced a house fire. My closest brush with a fire was when a dorm room at my boarding school burned down. No one was hurt, but it was a traumatic night, and the emotions are still vivid.

I hope everyone got out okay. Disasters are always sad, but it’s especially poignant when it happens on one of these days when Society expects us to be joyous.

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.