Short Updates

Altogether, not really worth a whole discussion but worth noting anyway:

Douwe has stopped speech therapy until the start of school next year. Last December or so, his speech therapist had a car accident and turned most of her clients over to a new one she hired in for the purpose. She was a brand new one -- she got her official license a couple weeks after we had started with her -- but it seemed to be going well and I liked her. Then a few weeks ago she called to say that the former ST, her boss, was coming back.

We were already in the process of discussing with the school the option of having Douwe's ST done at school, which would require a new person since this one I gather doesn't do school calls. And in light of that it made zero sense to me to start back with the old ST -- which is sort of like having a teacher come back after an extended absence, you have to get used to each other again -- since there are, when you add them up, only a couple weeks left before summer vacation, during which he wouldn't be getting ST anyway as we will be in another country. Especially since his ST now is only a half hour a week.

And then the coordinator at the speech school said they worked with a different one in town pretty often. So I spoke to her on the phone and I quite like her ideas and Douwe will start with her again in the fall. In the mean time the coordinator from the speech school came out to the house to give us some guidance on things we can do with Douwe at home, and some computer games and so on. Mostly it amounts to "get him to tell stories" which is not difficult.

I will say that I am pleased that the new ST has some experience with bilingual kids; the coordinator is still most leery of the idea that speech activities in either language cross over to be useful in the other one. But they do, whether it makes sense or not.

I have been invited to join a gospel choir of all things. Well, no, to be precise, I have been instructed to be dressed and ready to be picked up on Monday for rehearsal and my protests have been firmly ignored. Ok, you are right, I didn't really have any protests. I'll sing for anybody who asks me, I don't mind. But I am informed that the fact that I cannot read music other than to sight read a melody line is immaterial and that they sing mostly in English, it being gospel and all.

It's more a soul gospel choir than a blues gospel choir (which is as most of you know my own preference). I am more about Mahalia Jackson than Aretha. But hey, maybe I'll teach them a couple of obscure spirituals while I am at it. But I expect it will be fun and it's closer to a social life than I have now.

Now I am going to bed as I have to make my own carrot cake for my birthday. Yes, I am making a carrot cake; they don't have it here and I would like one so that's that.

My kids went out with their father and bought me birthday presents today and I spent most of the day stopping them from telling me what they bought. They are just dying to tell me.

They made it

Everybody finished the four day. I think I should have gotten the clue that this was a much bigger event than I had realized when I went to the grocery store on Day 4 and they had special bouquets just for people who finished it. But you know what? Dutch guys, or at least the ones around here, buy flowers before they buy food, it's like a national mania.* So I didn't think much about it.

Well, on the fourth day, the last bit is not a walk. It's a parade through town complete with cheering throngs**. Then you go to the Big Park and collect your medal.



I gave the kids their medals but was firmly instructed that these are to be kept because when they get older there is some jockeying for position regarding who has the most Four Day Medals, and who started youngest and then they will want to have all of them. Who knew? So they are now safely in the cardboard box which is currently serving me as a jewelry box since the other one was destroyed in the move.

The flowers, which Oma came out to deliver+, are now in the kitchen window. Everyone walks in and immediately says "Oh, who did the Four Day?". I have no idea how they can tell, they look to me like just flowers.

After we were done we all went back to the house along with the people we had walked with and snarfed down the first watermelon of the year, several pots of coffee and tea, and all the baked goods in the house.



* Well, okay, it was once rather famously a national mania. But you know that was a couple centuries ago. If I ever work out a way to work the madness for flowers into my General Theory of Dutch Culture (which is, in short, that geography really is history and the reality of the Looming Sea can affect all kinds of things) I shall write it all up and have social historians peeling my grapes for ever.

** waving flowers of course. And the occasional air horn.

+ It appears that anyone who walked in the Four Day is not allowed to buy flowers for anyone who did, it is bad luck or something. Or possibly Nel just wanted to do it. Well, I think it's bad luck to cross a grandmother, don't you?

Four days

Today is the first day of the "four day", which is (to me) a completely incomprehensible event in which, for four days running, little kids walk either 3, 5, or 10 kilometers. At the end of it they get a medal.

Douwe says it has something to do with soldiers. I gather that it is in some way related to an event called The Four Day which takes place every July in another town called Nijmegen. That one did evidently start as a primarily military exercise, in 1909. How it got here (well on foot obviously) and why it is now in May (because July is hot?) and why it is here and now a children's event are not terribly clear.

That I do not understand it does not in any way prevent me from doing it.

Yes, in fact Daan managed to walk 3 kilometers (that's just under 2 miles) this evening. And he says he is doing it all four days, he wants his medal. No one has apparently told him that you get the medal just for giving it a shot at his age.

Around a mile and a half we started dropping behind -- a competitive little cuss is Daan, he hates that -- so I heard him talking to himself. He was saying, "You have to keep going. That's how you win. You just keep going". That was shortly before this picture was made, as you see we are nearly the last ones in to finish. But we did finish, which was the point.

We have been reading a version of the tortoise and the hare recently, apparently it made an impression.

Nel is home

She came home yesterday. She is officially off the special diet and certified cancer free, lol. She weighs exactly as much as I do, which is not good. She has actually been told to control her diabetes with more insulin if necessary but to get her weight back on as soon as is humanly possible. The feeding tube has been left in, and if she doesn't gain weight well she will have to be fed through that in addition to regular eating to get enough calories in her.

So I am instructed to fatten her up like a turkey in October. She is making a manful effort at it, I must say, it's like having a teenaged boy in the house. I don't know if it's that she just didn't like the food at the hospital -- and who would, bleah -- or that she really does not want to have to use that tube again, she did not like it then and isn't crazy about it now.

A practical nurse comes by the house once a day to change the dressing on her incision and make sure all is well with that and the drain.

Okay, Dad

What did you tell my kid?

Douwe has decided that he wants to build and drive a soap box racer and win a trophy. I told him that would be really fun but that you have to be impossibly old, like nine or ten.

He said, "Oh, Papa John will help me. And Daan can be the weight. You need weight in the back".

Daan cheerfully agreed if he could have a helmet, too.

Ahem. Are you guys sending secret emails of which I know nothing?

Carrying on

It is now a month since Nel was diagnosed; and I would guess about 3 weeks or so since the actual surgery. Though I suppose I should count from the day of the second surgery, since that one seems to have had a much greater effect on her healing than the first one -- even though all they did was, well, open her up and close her up again.

She is still in hospital, healing albeit slowly. She is plagued with assorted complications, all of which are minor in themselves but their continuance means that she will not be sent home until they are cleared up. It appears her blood sugar is not yet stable; her body is still draining too much lymphatic fluid from the wound; she has a sort of continuing low grade fever and she is anemic.

We have been visiting in the evening this week, mainly because the kids were out of school the whole week and so the morning and afternoon has been taken up with, well, keeping them busy. It's been a fun week, we planted not one, not two, but three sets of flowers -- mine upstairs, (which is ongoing as you know), Nel's downstairs, and we biked over and did Spring cleanup at Opa's grave. Yesterday we went to that playground/restaurant where we had Douwe's birthday last year -- they had a moon walk shaped like a mushroom this time, so the boys spent the entire time slamming each other into the walls. Well, that's what they do at home too but at least this time the walls were padded. And they played at a friend's house on Tuesday for the afternoon -- he is in Douwe's class but is friendly enough with Daan that Daan went to his house by himself a little whicle ago because Douwe was not in the mood. He is almost exactly between them in age, and their sharing him has worked out nicely so far.

Douwe has become intensely interested in earning pocket money. I won't pay him for regular cleaning up, this seems to me to go nowhere good. So he came up with the idea of putting the bicycle cart behind his bike and hauling groceries and so on. I considered charging him rent for the cart, but decided that the lesson about the cost of doing business could wait for later. He has twice hauled my groceries home behind his bike this week. Oh, and Daan also. That is, Daan wanted to ride his bike but I was not prepared to supervise him and Douwe on the first day with the cart -- it makes cornering a little tricky. So I told him he had to sit behind me in the kid seat. He did not like this idea so Douwe proposed that Daan ride in the cart. I figured he would change his tune after a trip or so, but no. They think it's great fun so Douwe is also hauling Daan all over town behind his bike.

Daan also insists on working for money, because Douwe is, he hasn't really got a clue and is still in the "more coins = more money" phase. But he very seriously carried the basket through the grocery store and put things in it when I told him to. Okay, he also added one or two small things, *ahem*. He refused to play "catch me" with Douwe in the store this week because "Douwe, can't you see I am working?".

I was going to get them savings banks for their new wages, but they tell me everybody keeps their money in a wallet. So I guess I had better find some kids' wallets.

Today we went sailing for the first time this year, the weather was lovely. We left at the crack of noon -- kidding, we left before that -- to get back in time for visiting. The kids wanted to bring Oma a battered-and-fried fish called a lekkerbekkie, of which she is inordinately fond but were convinced that the doctors woudl nto like it. (She is now on a special diet which involves restricting fats almost entirely, so I think fried fish is right out).

Anyway, here they are today:





The hat, for the curious, is because he is a famous race car driver. Obviously.