I gather it was fun

I have gotten very little out of Douwe about camp other than that it was fun, that he was happy the whole time, that he ate spaghetti for dinner, that the best part was going into the woods and there wasn't any worst part. So he had a good time.

He came home filthy -- I mean, scrub that grime off your ankles and knees with a brush, turn the bath water an indeterminate shade of brown filthy -- and exhausted so the forensic evidence lines up with the testimony.

Tomorrow the kids who went to camp start school at 10:30, to let them sleep in (ha! Ha! I say. Kid'll be up at 7 am with the birds, he always is). So this plan means that I get to go to school at 8:30 to drop Daan off, go home, go back to school to drop Douwe off at 10:30, go home, then go back to school at 12: 30 to pick them up.

Or...I think I forgot about that Very Important Appointment tomorrow morning. I have to get groceries so I think the Very Important Appointment will be over by 10:30. Ahem.

It's midnight in Holland

And I have not had a telephone call from the camp. So evidently Eldest is having a good time. Or at least is not having a nervous breakdown. (If you do not know what I am talking about, scroll down three posts. It's there.)

I would make fun of myself except that all of the moms on the playground with first graders thought exactly the same thing: their kids would never make it through the night.

Moms. Jesus.

Testing, testing

Here we go again. The last "top to bottom" testing of Eldest was done when he was 6 and he will be turning 8 in October of course. The tests are good for two years at this age I gather. So in the Fall he will get to be tested again.

Possibly we will get something useful out of it this time because he can now, after all, actually answer the questions. And way back when, when we started this oddyessey of testing, the neuropsych in Atlanta told me that there was no point in even trying until he was 8 or 9 years old. Well, not exactly, what she said was more like that no diagnosis could be considered anything but tentative until then.

I have located a person nearby here who works at a teaching hospital whose specialty appears to be (ready?) literacy and language acquisition in bilingual children with language and communication disorders. Where the heck was he five years ago I would like to know? (Okay, probably in the same place. But you know what I mean). So I just fired him off an email to see if he could do the testing for us. Maybe he'll have something more illuminating to say than "My, what an interesting problem".

Still, I am not holding my breath.

Just in case you wanted to come see us

Go here and hit "get directions". Then type atlanta GA in the "from" box and our city in the "to" box.

Look out for step 21, it's a doozy.

Nel's new birthday

Nel has decided that her birthday is now April 14, as this was the day she was operated on last year. So we had a big party for her first birthday and she got lots of presents like teething rings and so on. It was fun. We booked a party at a restaurant near the Biesbos which is a nature preserve nearby so we had food and then a tour on a pony cart and another tour on an electric boat which makes no noise to visit the swamp. Okay, they don't call it a swamp. But you tell me:



Here is Nel with two of her sisters and her brother (and the ponies):


Obligatory kid pictures:

Hello Mudduh, Hello Fadduh

The kids in first, second, and third grade are off to camp today. Camp is not a summer event here; it's something organized by the school and takes place during school. For these little guys, it's one overnight -- they left today and we pick them up from school tomorrow at the end of the day.

Here is the campground they are going to.

We were a bit worried about Douwe, he refused to talk about it for about ten days and said he wasn't going. However, all the parents of the first graders were worried so I figured we would see what happened. Over the weekend we packed his bag together and looked at pictures of the campground. And this morning he leapt out of bed singing, "I'm going to the country, I'm going to the country, Lalala..." and so on. He sang all the way to school. He ran into the van to take him to the place and then stuck his head back out and said "Oh, yeah, I'll miss you, mom" and then pulled his head back in. Like, to comfort me or something. Thanks, kid.

I have no idea what will happen tonight; Douwe has always preferred to stay in his own bed and have his own food and so on. He has solved this handily in the States by deciding that his beds at various houses there are his own bed also. So that's not sleeping over in his mind. But every time I have asked if he wanted to sleep over a friend's house, he says "All you do at night is sleep, what's the big deal?" I assume in the case of disaster they will call us to pick him up; but both his own teachers are going so I don't expect a problem. Also, Douwe has recently been adopted by a little girl in the third grade so I expect if there are problems then she will look after him.

But speaking of looking after, I was watching through the window in his class this morning and one of the boys was obviously having his own doubts and was fighting tears. Ultimately the tears won out adn he started to cry. And I watched Douwe go over to him, pout his arm around him, lead him to a chair in an empty corner of the room, sit him down and (I assume) tell him that it was going to be all right, really. Or something similar. It was very sweet.

Actually, looking after somebody else would indeed make it easier for Douwe not to be nervous himself, now that I think about it.

Daan alternates between being wildly jealous and being terrified that we will make him go, too. We have had at least one very dramatic episode of Daan weeping that he doesn't want to go. When I told him he could not go because only kids in first grade could go, he insisted indignantly that he was big enough to go. With the tears still in his eyes from the formerly mentioned bout of weeping at the thought. *sigh*. That's Daan, all over. He doesn't want to until you tell him he can't. Then he has to.

Easter pictures

Easter was faily low key; we had baskets of course and then an egg hunt here in the house and then we went to the local petting zoo for their easter event. Which involved yet more easter egg hunting, a pony ride with a cart, and a scavenger hunt. And sweet bread of course.

One big surprise was that someone has taught Douwe to play chess, and we don't know who it was. Or at least, someone has taught him the moves for the pieces. We found this out because at the petting zoo they had a big chess board set up and he immediately began telling Daan how to play:

Ask me about mung dal

Go on, I dare you. It appears that the ayurvedic spa agreed with our Nel. It agreed with her so well that she wants to try out the ayurvedic diet.

Okay, I'll back up the truck. Ayurveda is a system of, er, looking at life, the universe and everything and also a way of approaching medical problems, with its origins in India. Here's a website which sort of sets it all out. But in this instance we are talking about a way of eating mostly, as Nel has to take care of all the other stuff herself. So here's what Nel is supposed to eat.

So the idea is, there are three types of, er, energies and in each person one or two are usually dominant. Which type you are determines what you are and are not supposed to eat and so on. For the curious, here's a dosha quiz so you can play along at home.

Good thing I did that vegetarian thing when I was with Bob, eh? No, seriously, the things we do for men. I have actually cooked in a way similar to this before so it isn't entirely alien. Still and all, I must say, it took me a couple years to figure out how to cook "south of holland" style and now I get to scrap much of it and start figuring out how to cook ayurvedic of all things. From smashing up endive in mashed potatoes with cheese to cooking rice and lentils in clarified butter is a bit of a stretch. But I feel certain I can do it, after all, I suppose that really dumb people all over India manage it every day.

I suppose doing it for your mother in law is more noble in some way than doing it for some guy. On the other hand, doing it for your mother in law means you don't get flowers, jewelry, or even regular sex out of it so that's a downside. *

No, the kids have not been converted or anything. Though it's only been a week or so, give them time and they'll be sucking down the rice and lentils with the best of them. And Dearly Beloved has no plans to become vegetarian so I expect chops will remain on offer.
Anyway, 'scuse me guys, I gotta go make some ghee.

* Oh. Right. That's why it's noble. Got it.

So, what did you do today?

Today I scrubbed a goddamn boat with various toxic substances mostly derived from bleach. My sister will be most pleased to learn that I did not mix the toxic substances and therefore did not burn my lungs even once.* Many buckets of rinse water later, the outside of the boat is clean once more. We have not started on the inside yet; the outside took the better part of today. Well, I suppose technically the outside isn't done either as we did not clean the part at the water line. Okay, the deck and the cabin and so on are clean. 'kay? It's amazing where algae can find a place to grow, really it is. It was sort of like cleaning mildew in Atlanta only it was green.

Who needs a fitness club? Come on over here and I'll let you haul buckets of water all afternoon. Biceps, baby have I got biceps now. But my hands will never recover; when am I going to learn to use gloves when I should? Probably never. If the varnish poisoning incident didn't teach me I suppose nothing will. Really, I should give up all hobbies involving toxic chemicals. Or maybe I should just put Poison Control on my speed dial.

Thursday we went to Utrecht as the kids have been off all week. We went to Utrecht because every day this winter we have seen bus 400 to Utrecht leave the station, nine minutes before our bus leaves. And so Douwe became consumed with a desire to know where it was going. So we took bus 400 to Utrecht. It takes about an hour.

Here are the kids at the bus station:



D'you know, they have a Dockers store in Utrecht? I have imported God knows how many pairs of Dockers for my husband, as he loves them and they cannot be gotten here. Or I thought they couldn't be gotten; we got off the bus and there it was, a real live Dockers store. They haven't got one in Atlanta that I have been able to find but there is one in Utrecht.

Once we got there we had to do what all Americans do when they go to a foreign city:









And then after that we had to walk all over the world to find the tourist information place. My own elaborate plan in going to Utrecht was to, you know, walk around. I mean, Douwe is 7 and Daan is 5; they are not demanding in terms of entertainment. However, some of us want to actually Do Something when we travel so we hunted up the tourist information place. Thus ensued a really funny conversation as Oma tried to find out how to get to the Botanical Gardens from the nice lady while my kids hollered "We want to go to a museum! Where is the museum!" and Daan went to get a map so she could show us the museum.

I think that nice lady thinks my kids are very odd. She does not know that my kids think museum = dinosaur exhibit.


Anyway, we settled on the canal boat tour as Nel wanted to do something out of doors and the kids wanted....well, you know what they wanted.
Nel ended up getting her very own personal tour of the canals of Utrecht as we were the only people on the boat and I was occupied in keeping my kids from actually jumping out of the boat and answering many rapid fire questions like "are we there yet?".

We found out in Utrecht that Daan has grown 4 centimeters in just under a month which is a lot for him. He walked under one of those "measure your child" signs in a store and I realized he was in the wrong size range -- I had measured him just before Carnaval.

He was walking funny one day this week and I realized that his shoes were too small -- or actually, one shoe was too small. So I had to go get him new ones and there were many discussions about whether he will permanently have one foot bigger than the other. Happily, by the end of the week his other shoe was also too small, which was the only thing that got him to quit putting those shoes on -- he quite liked them.

*Long story. My sister will never let me live my experiments in Better Cleaning through Chemistry down. Who knew the all purpose cleaner had ammonia in it? It didn't smell like it.