American in Spain

Today is Nora’s five month birthday. Every birthday so far we’ve had cheeseburgers for lunch. We’ve stopped buying cake, though, ever since con of calories began to outweigh the pro of having cake. She slept through the burgers on her activity mat. It’s strange now to see tiny babies in the street and be the one saying, “I can barely remember when mine was that small,” but here we are. We have no envy for the parents of week-olds, though. Every day Nora’s getting more interesting to be around.
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One tough grammatical hurdle for English speakers learning Spanish, or vice versa, is the word “people”. In English it’s plural, and in Spanish it’s singular (la gente). I still find myself incorrectly conjugating verbs when “people” is the subject. e.g. La gente están contentos esta noche.
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The other day after bathtime, Nora discovered the funniest thing in the world: Mommy with the hiccups. This dovetails perfectly with the theory that, evolutionarily, humor originates from a shock-relief combination. What better shock-relief pattern than your protective mother suddenly convulsing and releasing a loud sound, followed by her immediate recovery and smile? The randomness of hiccups adds to the suspense, as you never know when the next one is coming.
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I recently tweeted that:

Daughter’s current mobility status: Can’t crawl, can’t sit up, but won’t necessarily be in the same place you left her 5 minutes ago.

Which prompted one wiseass comment asking if I was alluding to teleportation. The truth is that I don’t fully understand her current method of locomotion. It has to do with raising her feet, sometimes grabbing them, letting them fall to the side, and then rolling back over to her back. Somehow her finishing position is not the same as her starting position. When repeated multiple times, she can move quite a ways.
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I would love to have some video of my young grandparents playing with me as an infant. That’s one of the reasons why I’m putting so much energy into recording bits and pieces of Nora’s infancy. It’s more for her than for anyone else. We’ve already enjoyed looking back at the videos of Nora when she was days and weeks old.

The following video is of her grandparents dressing her one morning during their recent visit.
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The following is a document written by my father, Paul Rasmussen, about his recent trip to visit us while we were vacationing in Extremadura, Spain.

On one of the trips that Betsy and I had taken to visit our son, he told us that we would have to experience vacationing in Extremadura in order for us to really understand his life in Spain, so in December we traded all of our airline miles for two tickets to Madrid in August of 2009. After spending Wednesday night, August 5th, in Madrid, we grabbed a taxi to the bus station that serves the southern part of the country, and took a four hour bus ride to Don Benito. We arrived at 8:35 pm, and were promptly met by Erik and Marga, Marga’s parents Juan and Marce, and Nora, our four and a half months old granddaughter. I was surprised that they had all made the 45-minute trip from their home in Higuera de la Serena, but I really shouldn’t have been. To Spaniards, family is very important, and we were family.
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Last night, presumably after the excitement of her first day of daycare, Nora was not at all tired at bedtime. We tried to put her in her crib, but it was clear that she just wasn’t ready. So we brought her back downstairs and let her perform for us. This is what she had to say:
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The part of Spain we go to in the summer is very, very dry. In the summer, it can go for months at a time with zero precipitation. 2009 was my seventh year going there, and I think I’d seen it rain twice, never for more than an hour, in previous years. One day this year, August 13, it rained all morning long, bringing the temperature from 28° down to 22° for a few hours. By lunchtime, however, the ground was dry and the temperature was back up to its regular 33° or so.
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Nora started daycare today. She’s going to go for only two hours each day for the rest of August (two weeks), and then go for four hours every afternoon after that. The daycare people suggested a gradual introduction period of at least a week. As this was a big day for our family, Marga and I both walked her down to daycare to see her off. In the future, only Marga will take her on her way to work.
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Today I had a run-in with a concept that I’ve only ever used as a metaphor or a generic negative idea. For the first time in my 30+ years, a rotten egg broke in my hand. I was washing off the chicken dung that many of our eggs are coated with, and it just exploded. We get our eggs from my father-in-law’s chickens, you see, so they come from wherever they decide to lay them, which is often where they excrete other stuff. The improvement in taste over grocery store eggs is worth the extra scrubbing hassle.
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