American in Spain

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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When my parents last visited, I got to hear my mother sing songs to my daughter that I haven’t heard since I was a child and she was singing to me. One of them was this rhyme that Nora has come to call “July”, since she loves to emphasize the ultimate word. It goes like this:

I asked my mother for fifty cents
To see the elephant jump the fence.
He jumped so high,
He reached the sky,
And didn’t come down ’til the fourth of July

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Over the past two years, a song by an Australian group, Yolanda Be Cool, called We No Speak Americano (known colloquially as Papa Americano), has swept across Europe. Every so often a Spaniard who knows that I am both a United States citizen and a father, will think they are being clever and original by calling me “Papa Americano” and singing a bar or two of the hit song. I think it’s cute, and I enjoy the song, so I decided to make it my ringtone. Over the course of the last few months, my daughter has fallen in love with my ringtone, often reminding me out of the blue, “Poppy, your phone says papa americano!!”, adding, “Sometimes.”
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Today Nora’s daycare had a special Christmas party in which one of the activities is dressing like shepherds and making the 200 meter trek from daycare to the town church where they have an amazing nativity scene set up, called a belén, which also means Bethlehem and is the name of my sister-in-law. I finally understand the enormous banner they put outside the church every Christmas saying “¡Tu belén está aquí!” (Your Bethlehem is here!). It was amazing!
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We’ve taken a bit of a slide backwards in our nocturnal potty training efforts this month. There was one week when we had to change wet bed sheets every single night of the week. Plus, with my parents’ visit and the loss of a family member this month, we have gone back to having Nora wear diapers at night to avoid the hassle of midnight bed making. While disappointing, when one takes a step back and gains some perspective, this is really not that big of a deal. It took her seventeen months to walk (and longer to crawl), and her English was slow to develop at first, but is now staggeringly advanced. We’ve decided we’re in no huge rush with the nocturnal bladder control.
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You know how annoying it is when you take your modern digital point-and-shoot camera or mobile phone to take a photograph and the darn thing is in “video” mode? If you’re like me, you’ve taken countless one or two second videos when you thought you were taking a photograph. Well, it turns out that it’s also annoying when you are a two year old with your father’s mobile phone and you want to take a photograph of your father, the dinner he is preparing, and yourself.

I found the following video on my phone recently. I had no idea that she had shot it.
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