American in Spain

There are few things that makes you feel quite as terrible as a parent as seemingly allowing a part of your child’s hygiene to deteriorate to the point of actually causing pain. We have known for some time that Nora has had some cavities in her molars, but it wasn’t until she started complaining about tooth pain that we sought out the local pediatric dentist for an appointment. Nora went to her first inspection and was very good, opening her mouth, like a hippo, for the dentist. The dentist told us that she has cavities that require fillings in all four corners of her mouth, but that her left lower molars are particularly rotten, requiring some drilling, killing the nerve, and then a cap to replace the missing bit of tooth.
(more…)

On Saturday we went to a birthday party at a friend’s house. Remember that, in Spain, it’s the birthday boy that hosts the party and/or buys the drinks. Nora was quite well behaved, although when the group of fifteen or so friends got too excited, laughing loudly, she cowered from the noise. Several of the men at the party did a “BOO!” trick to surprise Nora, which Nora absolutely despised, running terrified in the opposite direction. Since the host was one of the guilty booers, he gave her a model car to play with. She and I played with it for quite a bit, away from the other guests. Knowing that my iPhone’s camera was particularly good at short range close-ups, I took some photos of the gorgeous car before Nora dropped it and broke off a piece.
(more…)

The big news this month is that Nora got one of the 21 spots in the three-year-olds program at the local school that we were hoping she would get into. When I say local, I mean that I can take ten paces out of my apartment building and touch the school. Needless to say, this will save all kinds of time and headaches that would normally be the result of having to drive her to and from a school every day. Of course it’ll be a few years until she’s old enough to walk there (i.e. cross one street) on her own, but we might have the zip-line installed from our sixth story apartment window before then.
(more…)

Nora’s language ability has veered mildly towards Spanish lately. For a while now she would only converse with me in English, but now she will sometimes switch to Spanish if she doesn’t know how to say the phrase in English, or if she just forgets. I dutifully respond, “You mean, ‘blah blah blah’?” translating what she just said into English, and she repeats it and goes acquiring new English words like this.
(more…)

This month included the holiday of Easter, which is considerably more fun (and tooth-rotting) for American children than for Spanish children. In Spain, most people get a week off of work and go on vacation. Nora and her mother went down to the family’s house in Extremadura to spend a week lazing around with Nora’s aunt and Spanish grandparents. After a suggestion from my parents, I seized the opportunity to travel to the United States to show my face at the office where I am normally only present via the internet.
(more…)

It looks like Nora might finally be distinguishing wavelengths of light with her visual cortex. Several times this month, she has proclaimed that “That [object over there] is pink!” and been correct about it. And she spends a lot of time pointing at things and asking “What color is this?”, but beyond pink she seems unable or unwilling to acknowledge that a green ball and a green shirt have anything in common. Oh well.
(more…)

Nora turned three years old this weekend. We drove to her Spanish grandparents’ house in Mondragón and had a party at their Centro Extremeño, a cultural center and social club for emigrants from the Extremadura province of southern Spain. Nora was quite wowed by all the presents and attention. She gets a lot of presents and attention throughout the year, but this was definitely a more special day. She got many dresses, and a doll, a wooden bowling set, and a Hello Kitty™ digital camera, which is iPhone-shaped, so she calls it her “mobile”. The digital camera was her favorite gift, which I’m proud to say came from her loving parents (it was marked down from 70€ to 20€!!), but her second favorite gift, the bowling kit, was more fun to play with in the wide open space of the cultural center.
(more…)

Several weeks ago, when we were on our way to run some errands, Nora started singing something. It sounded like gibberish to me – and she does often sing and talk gibberish – but it was slightly more structured than her normal babble. Also, she repeated it verbatim a few times. I inquired as to what she was singing, and she told me that it was a song that her Tía Belén had taught her. At this point I realized it must be a song in Basque.
(more…)

When I lived in the US, I remember meat being something I picked up from the refrigerators of the supermarket, shrink-wrapped between plastic and styrofoam. Then, I started dating and eventually married a slaughterhouse veterinarian, and hung out with a group of Spanish slaughterhouse vets, none of which had even remotely considered the possibility of abstaining from meat, a practice relatively common in my homeland. Every American can name at least one vegetarian friend, and probably a vegan, too. These are, of course, luxuries that our rich country can afford us.

Contrary to life in the US, life in Spain consists of personally knowing your own butcher (mine is my neighbor, Bruno), seeing – and often choosing – the cut of meat that is fed into the meat grinder to produce the exact quantity of ground meat that you desire, or asking your butcher to slice the chicken breast actually off the chicken and then into fillets for you.
(more…)

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.
(more…)