American in Spain

The biggest event this month was Nora going off to camp for three days and two nights. Her preschool has been doing this for seventeen years, and the kids love it. Nora was pretty excited about packing her suitcase, with her stuffed animals and flashlight and bathing suit, and myriad other items on a list we were given. In the weeks leading up to the trip, she kept commenting on how she was really going to miss us, and especially Ian. She also never tired of saying that she was going to pasarlo pipa, a Spanish expression meaning to “have a great time”.
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Well, we finally had our first incidence of one of my children making the other cry with pain. To be honest, I was surprised that it was the little guy that initiated what every prognosticator of sibling relationships assures me will be at least a dozen year conflict. Let the record forever show that “He started it!” Although it wouldn’t take much of a baby lawyer to throw charges of premeditation into doubt. He was only 16 days old.

My infant son was looking so adorable on his changing mat, which his sister got plenty of use out of, and I had the idea of having her lie down with her head next to his, for a cute sibling photo shoot. I only got one good photo before things turned ugly.
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As expected, we had some pretty enormous change in the state of the offspring this month. They’ve doubled in number!! Our son, Ian, was born as healthy and robust as I’ve ever seen a newborn. He doesn’t seem too pleased, however, to be outside, and very much prefers to be pressed up against his mother as he is accustomed. The little bugger has an absolutely voracious appetite, often draining both his mother’s breasts and still wanting more, which we supplement with formula.
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As I write this, I am a week or two away from the birth of my second child. Until about a week ago, I wasn’t really nervous or excited, but then we started sorting through the baby clothes and preparing the newborn stroller attachments, and I started to get pretty excited. Yesterday I pulled the crib down from the attic and somehow managed to remember where all the screws and joints go to put it back together. It’s really starting to sink in now.
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Looking back, there haven’t been that many new developments this month. Nora did turn four years old, which was important. Her writing has improved to the point where she can write her name every time without problems. My parents have been visiting for a week now and the forced use of English is good for Nora, although it certainly doesn’t seem to be causing her any extra stress or difficulty. She’s off from school now for eleven days of Spring Break.
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One of the most enjoyable parts about parenting for me is being surprised by my child; expecting her to react one way or favor one thing, and seeing her preference clearly buck my expectations. Take, for example, toys. She’s got dolls and stuffed animals and cars and computers and costumes, some of which are very elaborate. But, contrary to what I would’ve expected, none of them are her most favorite possessions. She really loves playing with small pieces of plastic, items that she can hold firmly in her fist and carry in her pocket, like a tube of Chapstick™ or a piece of plastic shrapnel that broke off her mother’s hairbrush.
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Nora has always had a bit of anxiety associated with bedtime. When she was sleeping in her crib and could speak enough to request it, she demanded that I hold her hand, through the crib bars, as she fell asleep. Trying to escape from someone’s grasp and sneak out of the pitch black room as they slowly lose consciousness is an interesting game. I would’ve preferred to do more parental negotiating in this area, my wife’s schedule means that she has to get up very early in the morning, so I often had to do whatever kept her quiet. I did, however, manage over the course of months to only promise to sit down outside her door as she fell asleep, allowing for smoother getaways.
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The biggest offspring event this month was Kings Day, the day the traditional Three Wise Men break into the homes of Spanish children and leave presents. This Christmas was the first one where Nora really got into the spirit of anticipation and consumerist lust. The item she most wanted was a maletín de médico, a doctor’s bag. Even after multiple interrogation sessions, I’ve still been unable to find out where she got that idea from. Luckily I was able to find one in the local toy store.
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We’ve reached a very rebellious stage lately. There are some days where it feels like every single thing we tell Nora to do, she says, “I don’t want to!” Depending on how much time or patience we have available at the moment she needs to, say, wash her hands, I vary from giving a lecture about germ theory to the “sometimes we have to do things that was don’t want to do” to the parental cop-out of “it doesn’t matter whether you want to or not” to actually physically grabbing her by the arm and dragging her into the bathroom to wash her hands. I really hate doing the last two, but sometimes there’s just no time available for negotiations…and sometimes it’s the ten thousandth time she’s refused a perfectly reasonable request that day.
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Our most exciting event this month was traveling to the United States for two weeks to visit my parents and grandmother for Thanksgiving. Nora was very excited about the trip and behaved admirably. We got up at 4:00 AM on a Saturday, flew to Frankfurt, and then all the way to Charlotte. The second flight was 9.5 hours long, and Nora slept for only one hour. She quickly learned how to operate her in-flight touch screen entertainment system and watched the same episode of Baby Looney Tunes about a hundred times. After another hour-long drive from the Charlotte airport, we reached my parents’ house. Nora has been video conferencing over FaceTime with my parents for at least a half hour every day, and she took no time at all to acclimatize to them. At 8:00 PM North Carolina time, twenty-two hours after she had woken up that morning, I had to insist that she stop playing with her Grandma and go to bed. It took her less than thirty seconds to fall asleep.
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