Breaking Silence

Well, I suppose if there is any time to break a long silence it would be with Carnaval. If Carnaval is anything, it is loud. The kidlets decided to "go do Carnaval" tonight after dinner, so everybody got dressed up and off we went. I think Paul thought he was going to get to have a lovely evening in a pub. However, we took two steps into the door and both kids clapped their hands over their ears and went back outside. Carnaval indoors means VERY LOUD OOMPAH MUSIC.


So they ran about in the darkness in their Carnaval costumes -- Eldest as a magician and Youngest as Batman -- and played tag in the church square with all the other kids who couldn't take the noise.


Yesterday was the grownup's parade, which I watched mostly from the upstairs window. Well, it does come right beside the house. The kids and Paul and Nel stayed outside long enough to use up most of the confetti we bought and then came in too.


Here it is:

Well, there is more of it of course, about 42 more floats to be exact. We have a very nice turnout every year for the Carnaval parade.

Here is one of the merry onlookers:

And we had a good turnout for the kids' school carnaval parade on Friday also:

Eldest missed the school parade and party as he was still recovering from a week long bout of first the flu and then an ear infection. By Sunday he was up and around again and today he is pretty much his usual self.

If I get up the nerve to take them to the traditional bonfire at midnight tomorrow night which officially ends Carnaval and is the signal to quit partying and get ready for Lent, I will let you know. I am not sure either of them can stay awake until midnight -- and am even less sure that I can, as I have had the flu the whole week also. But I might.

News from Atlanta

I was pleased to see on the news tonight that my former abode continues to make headlines. From Atlanta we learn today that elephants are self aware.

Although I think they are sort of overstating. It could as easily be the case that he elephant was not self-aware until that moment, which then triggered an existential crisis of, well, elephantine proporations. I mean, there was that poor elephant, munching on some hay, looking at that New Elephant while peacefully contemplating the Reimann Hypothesis (or possibly remembering dreamily the time she stomped that hapless keeper to death) and idly wondering what that thing was on its forehead, when the reality slowly dawned...why, that was, not another elephant. That was, hmmm, poke about with trunk a bit, Zeta(z) = SUMk, look, that other elephant is poking about also...=1 to infinity, hey, that itches, (1/kz) ohmygoodness, that's me! Trivially zero at the negative even integers, but where are all the other zeroes? And oh, dear, the other two elephants here are wearing the exact same thing as I am, The only other zeroes known all lie on the line in the complex plane with real part equal to 1/2. I could just sink into the floor. Maybe if I take it off nobody will notice....

I mean I suppose this is one up on "damn, it's cold out here" which was I think the conscious thought most of us had first, but still.

Or maybe this is simply the only self aware elephant in the world and they just lucked up on the first go. Right out of the box they got the Da Vinci of elephants. Wel, it could happen and it isn't reported whether this elephant had any unusual habits, like taking notes or bemoaning the absence of opposable thumbs.

Of course half the chimpanzees fail the self awareness test; I wonder how many people do?

Travel Plans

Okay, the tickets are bought, we are coming for Christmas. The bad news is, we are indeed going to be flying on Christmas Day itself and flying back the Friday before Daan's birthday. * Hopefully next year the holiday schedule works out better, what can I tell you.

This should be interesting.

Eh. what's so horrible about flying on Christmas Day?** Over the ocean and through passport control, to grandmother's house we go....

*Mom for god's sake don't fight with me, I promise you if there had been any other realistic option I would have taken it. Quickly.

** Don't answer that.

Party season has begun

As most of you know, party season starts around here in October with The First Birthday and ends in January with The Last Birthday. With St. Nicholas, Christmas, and one more birthday squeezed in between. This year we started one day early because the bowling alley doesn't do parties on Thursdays so it was either Wednesday or Friday.

So today was the Kid Party with the pals from school and tomorrow is the real birthday.

It was fun. When you sign up for a bowling party you think that an hour of bowling* is not very long. But in fact when it is Disco Magic Bowling, wherein the room is darkish and strobe lights and flicker lights and mirrored balls in the ceiling and black lights and glowing flourescent colored bowling pins and bowling balls give the only illumination; when some kind of smoke pours down from the ceiling every now and again (in time to the music no less) and there are animated dancing things on the screens which in the olden days only showed the actual game score, well, then an hour is about as much as they can handle.+

It's more than the fours can handle actually, we had our two four year olds and one of the young fives in tears at least once each for no reason other than the top blowing off their personal central nervous systems. Though each of them went right back to bowling after being gently removed to a quieter venue and petted for a few minutes.

Douwe demanded a "Mars Cake" for his birthday. A "Mars Cake" has nothing to do with the planet. A Mars Cake it turns out is a cake which is just like a Mars Bar. An American Mars cake no less. Well, he did not demand it; he requested it. Firmly. So I said that there was no such thing. He said there certainly was: you make a chocolate cake, then you put the white fluffy stuff on the bottom, caramel on top of that, then you put chocolate all over it and that's a Mars Cake. He then cut a Mars Bar in half with a knife to demonstrate the layers. (Like I have never seen a Mars Bar). Oh, and it has to be a rectangle.

Let no one say I do not play requests. One package of Duncan Hines Chocolate cake mix, one jar of Marshmallow Fluff**, one bag of caramels later, here is a Mars Cake:



Okay, and some whipped cream. It isn't a cake in Holland without whipped cream. It's a dairy country, they don't do frosting.

I was assured that no self respecting Dutch child would ever eat such a thing, which was greeted with horrible shudders all round by the rest of my family. So I also made the same cake I have made for Douwe every year since we got here, which is really a cheesecake but they call it something else:
















We invited eight kids and six came, which is pretty good for us. Since The First Birthday falls in a vacation period, we always lose a couple to travel and other vacation plans.

We had only one girl, who was in fact the first child I met at the Montessori School. She walked up to me and announced that she was going to marry my son. Quite seriously. So I congratulated her on her taste and said I was pleased to meet her. (Well, what was I supposed to say?) She went on to say that I should keep this nugget to myself as she had not told the groom yet. Oh, I said, well, you should probably mention it at some point. She said, "Oh, yes, but he can be so difficult, so I will tell him at the very last moment. Then he'll just go along".

Since I regularly use the same technique on him, I could find nothing to quarrel with about this and promised to say nothing and asked her what color dress I should wear. "oh, what you like" she said. "They will all be looking at me anyway".

Gotta like that kid. The boys were mostly the usual suspects, with a few new additions since the start of the new school year.






And after much bowling we moved on to the rest of the bacchanalia:






No of course that beer is not his. It wasn't that kind of party.

And may I just add that the horrible American Cake was entirely demolished, destroyed, right down to its last Fluffer Nutter soaked crumb. So There.

Well, okay, there are a couple pieces left, otherwise I would be baking another one right now. For the Second Installment tomorrow.

Stay tuned.


*followed by food, some kind of horrible punch thingie which the kids suck down as though they had recently been crawling on all fours across a desert, cake, ice cream, and then candy on top of that -- ooh, my kids' friends' parents are lovin' me right about now, as their offspring race around making crop circles in the carpet, screaming incoherently from the sugar rush. Like, say, this



Or maybe an impromptu conga line in the living room:















+ I know, in the real Olden Days they kept score on paper. With a pencil. Probably a grease pencil, the kind you pulled the string and unravelled it in strips. But I am not old enough to remember those.


** Real American! it says on the label. I never saw a jar of marshmallow fluff in my life before moving here but there you are.

Toys

I realize that I have far too much time to think about mundane things. Mostly on the bicycle, I think about mundane things. So now I am thinking about this: Why are boy toys so ugly? I mean seriously, at a certain age, the toys available just really do begin to lean strongly towards the grotesque. Why is that?

And at about the same age, it seems to me, girl toys become just nauseatingly pretty. I mean, it becomes all about pretty there for a while. And why is that, too?

I am thinking about this because Douwe's birthday is coming up, as you know. And everybody wants to know what he wants. In general: anything to do with dragons, anything to do with dinosaurs. Space. He has recently discovered Narnia. Anything to do with fast cars of course. He likes board games and card games. Model building kits. He has asked for a camera but I can't find a digital one (so he can see the picture of course) for anything like a reasonable price.

Due to some external pressure I made him a wish list at amazon.uk. Please understand, these are mere suggestions. Mostly you guys come up with really great stuff I never thought of.

I will see what I can do with dutch online stores but have had no luck so far in finding one that has a wish list feature.

Since I have all this free time

I have taken on two new things.

Seriously, I am beginning to get tired, y'all. I begin to think I will never get my driver's license because every time I pick up the book to figure out the difference between a bike path and a bike-and-moped path something happens.

But I also have to get out of the house, and I really think I am in danger of becoming a recluse if I don't do something. So I figured I would do whatever presented itself. Really, I just decided that I would look around and if anything came up I would just say yes and see what happened.

I expect that since Fall has appeared in earnest I will become more motivated on the driver's license front soon. Nel is very upset about my bicycling in the rain. I don't mind it very much but I think I shall mind bicycling in the cold rain (or the sleet and hail and snow) quite a lot. Fall really is here in earnest. I know this because the heaters came on at night. And this time it only took me two days of wheezing and coughing to remember that it isn't a cold or a return of the evil walking pneumonia, it's that I have an annual reaction to the heat coming on at night and to put out the humidifiers.

This is an improvement over the, what was it, two weeks? That it took me last year.

Anyway, I am now singing with a gospel choir. It's real gospel, not blues gospel, which I would prefer. But hey, they tour and compete and everything. Gospel is all the rage over here. I would link the website for the choir except it's all in Dutch. (Ever see an all white gospel choir? It seems very odd to me but there you are).

The director is eyeing me oddly as I sang the first time with the sopranos and the next time with the altos, but they have too many altos so I shifted over to the tenors. Nice to find out I still have my vocal range, anyway. Though my soprano voice is not what it once was, too much fast living I imagine. I am informed she is planning to give me a vocal test to figure out where I really ought to be, as the answer I wrote down (where do you need a voice?) was probably not what they had in mind.

I am also going tomorrow to give my first lesson in conversational english. I didn't mean to do this, which means (if my life thus far is any evidence) that I will soon be doing it a lot. Here's how it went: Douwe has started swimming lessons. Daan is on a wait list, for a new class of Absolute Beginners.

During swimming lessons the parents all go and sit in this glass front viewing area above the pool. (Of course it's an indoor pool, they don't have outdoor pools around here as far as I can make out). So there I was sitting like that and I struck up a conversation with one of the other moms. She is muslim (I had assumed as she was wearing a head scarf) and we got into cultural differences regarding religion with your spouse. Like me, she and her spouse are of the same faith but from different countries. She was born here in Holland I gather and her husband elsewhere.

You know me, always keeping the conversation on a safe subject, strictly small talk, you know.

Somewhere in there we got into the Immigrant Experience and the learning of languages. She is now studying English I gather but having trouble with the conversational part. Then she just up and asked me if I would teach her. So I told her I did not have the first teaching credential (credentials being a very big thing around here) but that I knew several people in the english club who did. Nope, she said, she already had teachers with credentials; she wanted somebody she was not afraid to talk to.

Well, I said, I promise to tell you a hum'rous anecdote about my own verbal screw ups in Dutch for every one you make in English and then we'll be even. I'll have some left over, never fear.

Hell, I had one this week. The kids' school had a "studiedag" listed on the calendar. This means "Study day" and I thought no more than "oh, good, about time they got some studying done". Really, if I thought about it at all, (which I did not) I would have thought that they were getting ready for the various regular tests the different classes do. Douwe's class has one coming up in the next couple of months.

I should have thought of it when I woke them up and Daan said "We don't have school today, I want to sleep". But Daan has some variant of that every single day. His nose itches, he's sick, his shoes are wet (liked that one), whatever, he never wants to get up. Gets it from his dad no doubt. Slugabed.

So off we went to school and as it happens it was pouring buckets that morning. Um, "studiedag" translates as "teacher workday". So off we went back home. Duh.

In any event. Tomorrow I will be across town setting up a course of lessons in English conversation. And if I can figure out what to charge her, that would be good too. She certainly is planning to pay me but she probably has a better idea than I have what it costs. Oh, well, I guess I'll call the english club ladies and ask them.

What Daan did today

Today, Daan broke his bicycle. Well, he went over a bump and the chain slipped its gears. So I wound up flipping it upside down and strapping it to the baby seat on my bike (Have I recently mentioned how much I really love bungee cords?) to get it home. I had planned to walk the bike home with Daan on my seat, but then Douwe decided he would just go home. On his bike. He knows the way after all. So he was off.

(Oh, for an extra bungee cord to tie the self-willed little monster up. But I digress).

So Daan sat on my seat and clung to me like a little monkey and I stood on the pedals and we raced after Douwe. Daan thought this great fun. So did Douwe, actually, though he was really scared when we got home, he knows better than to take off like that.

So. As Douwe and I were haveing a Serious Talk in the one room, Papa was fixing the bike in the other room. It appears a new bike needs to have its chain tightened from time to time, who knew? And when he fixed it, he took the training wheels off.

I pointed out that the child has just figured out how to cross the street with training wheels. Papa said, "Oh, ten minutes and he'll be fine".

So off they went. And here's how they came back:





And here is Daan's story about how it all happened.

Outtakes

Alphabet, um, with assistance

Douwe's dinosaur story

Coolness quotient

I was just looking at ebay for a new Mach 5 for Douwe. I can't get him the Expanding Mach 5, but I can get him a toy.

So which has a higher coolness quotient, a cast metal Mach 5, about a foot long or so (1:18 size if you have small boys) or a plastic one the same size that is a radio controlled car? If you are turning 7, that is.

Decisions, decisions.

What? More zoo?

Today Nel decided we should go to the Dutch equivalent of Lion Country Safari. Is there still a Lion Country Safari?

That is, it's a wildlife preserve where the animals wander abround and you drive through in your car. Except that there is also the option of going through by boat, bus, or on foot also. The "on foot" part takes a different route, and there the animals are behind fences, never fear.

It was also fun, and Eldest has now decided that this is where he wants to go for his birthday. He held out for Chuck E. Cheese for a long time, until we finally impressed on him that flying overseas with a few of his closest friends was Not An Option. So: Lion Country Safari. Er, Beekse Bergen, I mean.

We may actually do it, as he only wants to invite three kids for his birthday.


With the rhinos.
















Whaddaya mean, he looks just the same?

How do I love thee

Well. Because Christmas is a Monday this year, I have been looking at flights and all the options suck. Except one. We can fly non-stop both ways, it doesn't leave at an indecently early hour, availability is good, and it's cheap too.

With one small drawback.

It means we would be flying on Christmas Day.

I suppose I could make a tradition of it. Fly with silly Santa hats or something. Can you bake cookies at angels thirty?

We would be arriving early afternoon probably, around 2. Hey, I know, you guys could all come down to the airport en masse to pick us up and wear Santa hats, too.

This would require some logistical operations; I would certainly have to sent my Christmas presents ahead at a minimum.

Urg.

Photos, we got photos

So we went to the Antwerp Zoo on Saturday. It's a nice zoo. It is also right in the middle, I mean the very center, of Antwerp. So it has not entirely made the shift to the "new style" zoo, where the animals are sort of roaming about in little habitat-ettes. Being surrounded on all sides by, basically, Antwerp, they probably haven't got the room.

They still have the big cats in basically what I think of as bear pits (You remember, those spaces down lower than ground level so you stand and look down at the animals) and surrounded by moats. The medium sized cats are in cages, just like they used to have at the old Atlanta Zoo. It was actually sort of jarring, I had forgotten what a regular zoo used to be like to tell you the truth.

However, I have got pictures. Which is all you lot care about.




The fellas hanging out with the penguins.















This is Douwe with his new friend. He hung out with this turtle for a really long time. Actually, the reptile house was amoung the larger hits. That and the nocturnal house, which is entirely dark inside for the animals that are, well, nocturnal. He really liked the bats. ick.








Obligatory tourist shot. By the time I took this picture, Douwe had figured out that we were getting ready to leave and was trying to run away to go back into the zoo. So he's not in the shot.

Here's why

So today we were discussing the impending change to Papa John's Race Car. Those of you who do not know, Papa John's Race Car is about to change from red-on-black to blue-on-white. I need to prepare my children for this eventuality. I also need to buy Papa John some lovely slipcovers for those white seats so they will have a chance of staying white through our next trip.

Or maybe I should make some instead and let the kids decorate them with fabric markers. Out of sailcloth by preference.

So Eldest said: "Why does Papa John want the race car blue?"

And Youngest said, without missing a beat: "To match his house".

spending money

My children each got 10 euro about a month ago as a present from their great uncle and aunt. They put them in their wallets and left them there, as any amount of money over about a euro is really more than they know what to do with. But they think it's cool, in the way people think foreign money is cool.

Today, Eldest decided that we were going into town to go to the toy store because he wanted to buy the Expanding Mach 5. * I told him I had no money for toys so he said, I do. I have 10 euro and that's a lot. Well, it is a lot. And it's his money. Youngest was immediately on board of course so off we went to the toy store.

Eh, they needed new shoes anyway. Do little boys always need new shoes?

At the toy store we spent a lot of time discussing what could be bought for 10 euro and what could not (Like, say, the X-Box) and how much change you would get back and so on. It was actually pretty good fun, if hectic.

But then, well, Eldest spotted the Plug In Steering Wheel. It's one of those thingies you plug into the television and has various racing video games in it. ** So he brought it to me with shining eyes full of hope. Damn, I thought, I was going to get him that for his birthday.

But it's like 35 euro, so my birthday gift is safe. Then I flipped it over and realized that it was on sale for 20 euro. So I told Eldest that it was 20 euro so it was too expensive and put it back. Then I headed over to the cool toy cars display talking about the great stuff they had there to buffer his disappointment.

I was alone. One dark head, one light head, were conferring with great intensity over the Steering Wheel.

I went back prepared to pry them away from it. And they announced to me that ten and ten was twenty. I am, as you all know, a little slow on the uptake. So I agreed to this basic math fact and went on talking about toy cars. Whereupon Eldest said, "I have ten and he has ten. That's not too expensive then?".

Right. Once I recovered from this proposal I took Youngest aside to assure myself that he actually was in for this and had not had his arm twisted. + And off we went to buy the Steering Wheel.

We actually had a funny moment in line, as Eldest had a 10 euro bill and Youngest had two fives. So when the two fives came out, Eldest looked at them doubtfully and then started to go put the box back, because they didn't have enough money. So he is up to 10 + 10 is 20, but not quite up to 5+5+10 is 20. Daan knew nothing about it except that he had been told that these two pieces of paper were 10 euro, so he didn't sweat it a bit.

So now, what am I supposed to get him for his birthday?

*The Expanding Mach 5 is a race car which is regular Matchbox sized and then at the push of a button expands to real life size so you can sit in it and drive away. Eldest has now accepted that the fact that he can imagine that car does not mean that it exists. However, he says he is going to make one.

** It also has Space Invaders. Who remembers Space Invaders? Well, they don't call it Space Invaders but it is anyway. Youngest is now totally hooked, he wants to do nothing but play Space Invaders.

+I have an elder sib and I was an elder sib so I know all about this phenomenon.

Me too, me too

Let's see how this works

Or if.

Fingers crossed....

Moonlight serenade

As I mentioned, the kids have both got colds. This means they are sleeping lightly and it also means a certain increase in the amount of sleeptalking going on. They both talk in their sleep now and again. I hear that I do, too. Also an increase in the amount of waking up and crying, at least from Daan.

So last night at midnight, as I was lying in bed I heard a sound. Since I have been out of bed three or four times a night for two nights running, I listened to see: would this be a little fuss-and-go-back-to-sleep sound? Or a full blown panic fit? Waking in the middle of the night unable to breathe is after all not very much fun. Nothing for blowing out those sinuses like a full on primal scream after all.

Instead, I heard a little boy soprano drifting through the darkness:

Little bunny Foo-foo, hopping through the forest, scooping up the field mice and bopping them on the head....