American in Spain

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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Nora’s vocabulary continues to advance. She’s big into repeating whatever you say, particularly the last part, so if you say, “Do you want some yogurt?”, and she says, “Yogurt!”, that doesn’t necessarily qualify as an affirmative response. The problem is, however, that she’s not very good about open ended questions. “What do you want?” still isn’t likely to result in any meaningful communication, although if she’s been asking for something, she will repeat what she wants (hint: it’s usually a cookie).
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Recently I have been witnessing one of the things I was most looking forward to as a parent, the bilingual language acquisition of my daughter. You can say “Where’s the table?” or “¿Dónde está la mesa?“, and she’ll point right to the table. The same works for her anatomy and toys. In fact one of the best tricks I’ve discovered for keeping her occupied while I sit on the couch is to say, “Where is [object not currently in this room]?”, which prompts her to run off to verify that whatever is in its place. Every day I try to teach her a little more vocabulary. Yesterday was “elbow” and “knee”; today was “couch” and “TV”. But what really amazes me is when I ask her about stuff that I haven’t explicitly taught her, and she knows what I’m referring to. That’s what really blows my mind.
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One aspect I did not foresee of my child gaining her bipedal mobility, was that she was not the only object in our house that would no longer remain stationary. Scores of inanimate objects move about our house seemingly randomly on a daily basis. Conversations like, “Where’s the television remote?” “Have you checked the bidet?” have become commonplace. Just this morning I had to use Apple’s “Find My iPhone” service to locate my phone. The question is not if an electronic device will end up in the toilet, it’s a matter of which electronic device will get flushed.

A very recent behavior has emerged of hoarding certain objects. I can tell, whenever she’s marching from room to room with that determined look on her face, that some exodus of objects is taking place, be it coasters, pencils, toys, or clothes pins.
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One of the most frustrating parts of parenting for me is the distinct lack of right answers to questions of how to raise a child. Not every issue is as straightforward as “Should I let my child crawl on the ledge of my 7th story window?” (Answer: Only if you’ve double-checked the harnesses.) Like life in general, most issues come down to a judgement call with good arguments in both directions. One issue about which I often feel completely clueless is that of what to do when my child cries in the middle of the night. It seems that there are two opposing strategies.
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Nora is constantly eating. Upon waking in the morning, she complains nonstop while her breakfast formula bottle is prepared. After drinking 200 cc’s of the milk and cereal mix in her bottle, she can sometimes make it an entire hour before asking for a cookie. She does this by first shouting “YETA!“, which is how she says the Spanish word for cookie, galleta. Even though I know what she wants, I ignore her until she “switches to English” and shouts “DOH CHI!“, which is her approximation of the word “cookie”.
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Nora was exceedingly well behaved this morning. When she woke up at 6:47 AM with a mild cry, I got up and explained to her that, due to the slight tilt of the Earth’s rotational axis in relation to its orbital plane, we have a season, summer, in which the sun comes up very early and sets very late, and that just because the sun was already up and that Mommy had just left for work, it was, in fact, according to the definitions set forth in the household rulebook, still officially Night Time and that she should go back to sleep. She and I both went back to bed until 9:00 AM.

I carried her downstairs, put on her shoes – good traction is very important at this stage of her ambulatory development – and left her in the living room to play with some toys while I went to the kitchen to prepare her morning bottle and orange juice. Before the 45 seconds on the microwave were up, she had crawled into the kitchen with me. Soon I had her breakfast ready and we returned to the sofa for alimentary administration.
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Well, Nora, you keep getting more and more interesting to be around. You have no trouble whatsoever pulling yourself up to standing on almost anything, but you still lack the ability to stand up from a sitting position pushing off only the floor.

Sometimes you surprise me, like when your grocery store friend, Tona, recently asked you, “¿Dónde está la nariz?” and you pointed to your nose. I immediately asked you, “Where is your nose?” and you gestured correctly again. But you either forget things or choose not to do them. You’ve completely stopped saying your first word, Up. And your rhinolocation trick happens so rarely that seems an awful lot like chance.
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We continue to encourage Nora to play with her iPad. She definitely like the sounds it makes; her favorite is the oinking pig, which she likes to dance to. While she clearly understands that she needs to touch the screen, but she tends to be too quick in her pokes, and her actions either result in dragging the icons around or the icon she’s going for is simply not triggered because her touch is so fast. At the moment, the iPad remains a “noise box” to her, but I have little doubt she will learn to control it within the next year. And then it’s just a matter of time before the Pentagon gets hacked.
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Sometimes it seems like parenting is one big series decisions about trading comfort for safety. My child is tall and lanky, so it has taken her forever to reach the magical 9 kg threshold in which the car seat manufacturers say she can face forward in the vehicle. In her rear-facing seat, she looks, and is, horribly uncomfortable. As her tall and lanky father who takes a couple transatlantic flights a year, I sympathize. My daughter, her mother, and I have all been looking forward to when we can flip her around to face forwards.
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