American in Spain

As we quickly approach Nora’s third birthday later this month, her verbal skills continue to advance. She’s capable of recounting incidents from daycare, and often her stories check out, even if her telling of the story isn’t always coherent. The other day she insisted on telling me about how her jacket got wet. It seems that she was innocently (she’s such an angel!) drinking water from a cup, when a reckless lad by the name of Diego came careening into her causing her to spill her water. She was being rather cute about her explanation of what happened, so I decided to film her as if I were cross-examining a witness in the trial to determine Diego’s innocence or guilt.
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Recently my wife has discovered a blog by a Spanish housewife called Cocinando Entre Olivos (Cooking Among Olive Trees). I must say that I am extremely impressed with the quality of her posts, particularly the step-by-step photographs; you almost don’t need to be able to read the text. There really is a photo at every single step, often actually showing the addition of each ingredient. After several years of not adding any new recipes to our cooking repertoires, it’s quite refreshing to have some new things to cook. Recently my wife made some homemade chinese food, which consisted of cooking three recipes simultaneously (the recipes are in Spanish): Chinese Chicken with Almonds, Chinese Rice With Three Delights and Spring Rolls With Sweet-and-Sour Sauce.
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This month has been marked most prominently by Carnival, in which Nora dressed up at daycare as a dwarf (a la Snow White), and then later as an Andalusian lass. Overall she’s been much more of a pleasure to be around, listening to reason and telling interesting accounts of events.

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.
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I continue to be surprised at the small town hospitality that I enjoy in my adopted home of 8,000 inhabitants. It has been quite sunny this week, and every day I take my daughter out for a walk in the morning, she complains about the sun. Her blue eyes, like my green ones, don’t like bright lights, and we lost her sunglasses a few months ago. So we set off for the local optometrist.
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Today was the big Carnival parade, sort of a “Halloween meets Mardi Gras” thing that is very typical for children in Spanish culture. Apparently I did such a fine job last year that my presence was simply assumed as The Official Daycare Photographer. Perhaps in honor of that job, I was also given a leading role in this year’s costume theme. About a month ago, I was told by Adela, the daycare owner, that this year for Carnival the kids would be dressed up as dwarves, the daycare employees would all be dressed as Snow White, Adela herself would be the Evil Stepmother, and I, the only parent with a themed costume, would be dressed as none other than Prince Charming.
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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.
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I’ve been focusing lately on Nora’s English, as my readers are more likely to understand her, but I thought I’d post some videos showcasing her Spanish development. One of Nora’s favorite pastimes is talking on the phone with her abuela (Spanish grandmother). There are times when Nora is entertained with some other task and won’t even take the phone, but there are other times where they have spoken for more than an hour, once to the point where Nora got a little hoarse. It’s very much a stream of consciousness sort of conversation, with Nora at the helm, and her abuela interjecting comments here or there to keep up the flow, sticking around long after I would’ve bored of the conversation.
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In preparation for her entrance into the school system in September, we recently began teaching Nora that her name is longer than just “Nora”. A lot longer, in fact. I would be very, very surprised if there existed another person on the planet with Nora’s two surnames. In Spain, you see, people have two last names, the first from the father, and the second from the mother. Her first is Rasmussen, which is both difficult to spell and pronounce. Her second last name is Matamoros – a fairly rare surname in Spain – that probably originated from a myth about Saint James slaying moors.
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Nora was being particularly cute recently during her nightly routine of barging into my office to interrupt my work and inform me of the state of dinner as it is progressing in the kitchen. So I grabbed the video camera and shot her. The result is pretty representative of her English abilities. The phrasing is a little off, e.g. “You no can work” instead of “You cannot work”, but she has the general structure down. Sometimes it takes her a moment to figure out where her sentence is going. In general, I’d say her English skill is about 80% that of her Spanish.
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We have had our first month of nocturnal ambulation. The first incident occurred while I was asleep in Nora’s room. Often, if Nora cries at night, I will get up from my bed and go sleep in the guest bed in Nora’s room. This enables me to calm her down without getting up using just my voice, nipping a possible crying episode in the bud. In the time it takes her to crescendo up to a cry that I can hear from my room plus the time it takes me to get up and make it to her room, sometimes the emotions have snowballed into a bawl that’s harder to quash. On the night in question, I awoke at 3:00 AM to the sound of latex on latex; Nora was rubbing a deflated balloon over my ear. When I opened my eyes, I saw her big eyes there on the bed beside me staring intently. I told her that she had to go back to bed, and I put her there with little protest. It was only in the morning that I noticed that many of the objects, like her bedtime books had moved across the room to various places during the night.
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