Jesus comes across a group of people about to stone a woman to death for adultery and stops them, saying: Let whoever among you is without sin, cast the first stone.

There is silence, and people start dropping their stones and drifting away. Suddenly a rock comes flying out from somewhere behind Jesus and hits the woman on the head. After this, the crowd gleefully picks up their rocks again and go back to stoning the woman.

Jesus whirls around angrily, and shouts: "Ma! How many times do I have to ask you to quit following me around!"

Spoke too soon

I take it all back, Beasties are not in school. They are home with some kind of Evil Crud. I thought the onset of upper respiratory disease exactly 7 to 10 days after the start of school ended after Kindy? Guess not.

They are not dreadfully ill, but they both keep popping fevers in the afternoon to evening which prevents their going to school the next day. If I could send them to school just for the morning they would both probably do fine. Of course they would infect their classmates, but hey. Somebody's already infecting their classmates it seems to me.

Both sets of teachers (the teachers called to see how they were doing) advised me not to send them back too soon as there are apparently two different illnesses going around their classes -- a respiratory and a stomach flu thingie. Daan's teacher said it seemed to her a bad idea to send him back with a minor cough just to have to keep him out next week with the stomach flu.

Yesterday they both sat on the sofa and moaned most of the day. Today they at least got up now and again, so they are a bit better.

Back to school

Beasties are back in school and having a lovely time. I kept waiting and waiting for Douwe's teacher to call me in about some thing or another and she never did. Finally last week she asked if I wanted to make an appointment to talk about how the school day goes now that he is in the equivalent of first grade.

Uh huh, I thought. Here it comes.

So off I went all ready to give her some pointers in dealing with Mr. Difficult.

Turns out she just wanted to, um, tell me how the school day goes. She has had no issues, wanted no pointers. The only unusual thing she has noticed about Douwe is that he tosses in an occasional word in English now and again -- the funniest was when he was looking at his little reading workbook at the word "mier" which means "ant". He looked at the word and said "ant". She asked him again and he said (in Dutch) "you know, it's a bug, lives in the ground, digs holes, has a queen". (then in english) "you know, an ant". She said, "what is it in dutch?" He said (in dutch) "it's in the book, here, muh-ee-rr, that's what I said".

Uh huh.

Daan's teacher got a call from a woman in Israel who wanted to know about the school and how her kids would do given that they speak primarily english. The teacher was asking me what I thought and the other teacher said "you should have just put Daan on the line, he speaks better english than either of us, and he can translate, too,".

Which should be comforting to you all, he can at least speak english when he is in Holland. *ahem*.

Remember that bug bite?

I was bitten by a bug when visiting in Georgia this summer. The bite got bigger and horrible and green and very icky so I went to the doctor. He gave me some antibiotics and it all but went away. Just a little rosy mark which I paid no attention to, since as you all know I am so pale I am blue and those kinds of things can leave marks on me for months.

Last week it started getting darker. Then it started getting bigger. Now the stupid thing is about 4 inches in diameter and red. So I went to the doctor again.

He of course knows nothing about bug bites. This is Holland, even the bugs are civilized and do not bite. Well, he does know about ticks and Lyme disease but I was able to assure him that it was unlikely that I was bitten by a tick. In the end he concluded that, since it went away and then came back that it was likely a secondary infection (also given my long history of secondary infections that are worse than the original illness) and is tossing a fairly powerful broad spectrum antibiotic at it. If it does not go away entirely he has promised to send me to a specialist in tropical diseases or some such thing.

So now I am on doxycycline, which he assures me should knock out a staph infection (which is what I think it is) or any other garden variety (sorry) bacterial thingie. And I should stay out of the sun, because this antibiotic makes your skin sun sensitive.

Arg. Oh, well, at least he comes by once a week or so to check up on Nel and has said he will look at it again then.

I am so screwed

This article explains why I shall never be rich. It appears that tall people earn more because they are, in fact, smarter.

Because we all know that being smart = making money. Well, doesn't it?

Well, I suppose this could explain why the gender gap still exists in terms of pay. Men are both taller and therefore smarter.

In any event it is good to see this kind of hard nosed relevant analysis still going on in the halls of academe. Oh, and the authors of the paper? Are both 5'8", well above the average for American women. Just thought I'd mention it.

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.

Kid not Included

Here are the flowers my mother sent to my mother in law today. It was a good day for it, as Nel was feeling rather low and her response to getting them was as enthusiastic as she has been all day.

A body would think that somebody had gone out and gottten all Nel's favorite flowers and put them in a pot which will look just smashing in her bedroom when she gets home. Well done, mom.

Those two flowers are only leaning due to the interference of the, um, background character, they were standing up straight when they were delivered.

Well finally

Is Mercury retrograde? The phones are all screwy, I can only call to the US sometimes (and sometimes not), the outgoing message mysteriously disappeared from our telephone, and Blogger is acting funny these past couple of days. People tell me they have left comments which are not appearing and somtimes I just get a big white screen when I go to write a new entry.

'Kay, just because you are paranoid does not mean they are not out to get you.

Spring has arrived in Holland, my carnations and forget me nots and nasturtiums look great, one of my pumpkins is growing like mad already, the watermelon seeds have not poked above ground yet and I think the tomatoes drowned in there as they have not yet sprouted. Time to reseed I think. We ate all the lettuce so I think I will try them in the cold frame. It is not freezing at night but it is chilly after the sun leaves.

I don't even mind picking up the kids on the bike as the weather is nice again. So I guess I have a couple of months to get my driver's license before it turns cold again, hee hee.

I apologize to you all for being so scattered and so brief, I am quite literally running from wake up to coo-ee right now and while this is no doubt healthy it isn't doing anything for my ability to string together an intelligible sentence. We are now down to going to the hospital once a day and Paul goes back again in the evening by himself because the kids were not getting to bed until 10 and this does nothing (good) for their tempers.

I give up

The universe is conspiring to prevent my communicating with anyone.

To my brother, I wish a happy birthday and all great things.

And I have not been ignoring the music you sent me, really I haven't. Though it probably seems that way; it arrived shortly before we got hit by the tidal wave. I still think it's a good idea. But I am as you might have noticed sort of preoccupied at the moment.

I have actually been calling for several hours and have been unable to get a connection. Either all of you en masse changed your phone numbers and didn't tell me (which could happen I suppose but we are not, as a family, really gifted in the keeping of secrets) or something is screwy with this phone line.

So I will try again tomorrow and wish you a happy birthday one day late.

Orange

Nel has been wearing the nightgown chosen for her by her grandson. It is orange. It is really very orange, not a subtle color at all. She wore it for a walk down the hall yesterday. The name of the royal house of Holland is also Orange, and so the wearing of the color has led to many puns about the reigning queen of ward 25 -- the sheer volume of visitors Queen Nel gets has also not gone unnoticed at the hospital.

This morning she is once more chirping like a bird. The nose tube is still in though we are hoping it can come out again today and to that end a very close eye is being kept on the ins and outs of her drinking and feeding tube and so on. I do not imagine there has been this much attention paid to Nel's personal bodly functions since she was a very small child. Late this afternoon we are expecting to hear the results from the biopsy of the tumor, which was done after it was removed, and to receive what advice there may be from that. Otherwise, all appears to be well in Room 253.

More Expertise

Yesterday we had a meeting at the school to discuss the education plan for Douwe. We were there, Douwe's teacher was there, the, um, I guess we would call it a resource teacher was there and the coordinator from the speech school was there.

For most of the meeting unhappily I was not there. Douwe decided that the meeting was far too long and he furthermore objected strongly to everyone sitting around talking about him when he was not there and besides he was tired and wanted to go home. All of which added up to him being such a little pill that I would up leaving Paul to handle it and went outside with him and Daan.

Which was just as well since nothing really concrete came out of the meeting as far as I could tell. It lasted two hours, at least half of which evidently consisted of Paul and the coordinator from the speech school expressing their, um, differing opinions about whether it was a good idea to teach Douwe to read in English. So I am pleased that I was not there. Though I have no idea what I would have been able to say beyond pointing out that it is now too late, he can already read English.

I think this is fair to say. I mean, he isn't reading epic poetry or anything. He can read "Ten Apples Up on Top" and "The Berenstain Bears Go Up and Down" and so on with only a little help. The help he requires is to call his attention to the actual word he has to sound out, as he has a tendency to start making up the story when he hits a word or two he does not immediately know. So you do have to now and again put your finger under the difficult word and ask him what that word is. Then he sounds it out mostly, or guesses at it, depending on the mood he is in.

In any event, the conversation between Paul and the coordinator ended in Paul saying that we had no plans to stop him from either reading or speaking in English since half his family is American, and that was sort of the end of that. I have gone round and round this circle myself both in the states and here, so I am pleased to have missed it. Though as I say I am not sure I would have gone round and round again; I have worked out after many times around this maypole that the best response is to politely but firmly state that if one language is to be given up it will surely be Dutch -- since English is the only language every single member of this family can fluently speak -- and that they can surely agree with me that this would not be a good idea. People find it hard to argue with that.

No, of course we have no plans to quit speaking Dutch, are you mad? But it does put an end to a really fruitless conversation which serves mainly to reveal just how deep xenophobia does go. And yeah, I know I am a jerk, this is not news, lol.

In any event it was also a fruitless conversation because the school's position has always been that since the child is truly bilingual, the most sensible response to the occasional english word is to ask him if he knows the Dutch word for that, and to tell it to him if he does not and congratulate him if he does. Which is pretty much what we do at home. The school's only concern was whether we expected them to teach him in english and that was never a question -- I mean, it is a Dutch school in Holland, one rather expects the teaching to go on in English.

On of the interesting things about the process is that the problems the coordinator had written down to address are in large part entirely gone and irrelevant now because things are changing rather quickly. So she was all ready to talk about way to get Douwe to rhyme words and the teachers were like, "oh, no, he can rhyme all over the place, no need for that" and then going on with other things.

In any event, after all of that, the school is going to make a plan, rather like an IEP with goals and recommended strategies for dealing with them and so on and give it to us on Thursday. Then we will add and subtract whatever we think and give it back to them, it will be finalized and that will be that. But the actual plan is coming from the school itself, which is at this point quite helpful. If we get a bad teacher/student/parent combination in future this could become a problem, but there is no need to create such a problem now. At this moment, Douwe's teacher and I are entirely on the same page so it works out rather well.

There is some concern about next year, as learning becomes more structured and formal in group 3 (just as it does in the states with first grade) and no one is really sure what effect that will have on Douwe. I personally expect that it will make things much easier with him, he likes formal schooling and is good at it. However, there is no knowing for certain until we get there.

Would you believe

The second surgery is over, Nel is now in the recovery room. When they opened her up they found...nothing. No leak, nothing. She is healing nicely and the tube is not leaking. So they left it there and closed her back up.

It is now believed that a blockage in the feeding tube or something similar caused the feeding solution to appear where it should not have been.

On the one hand I am certain that it is a good thing that they did not wait and see, but instead moved to prevent an infection at the first opportunity. An infection in the abdominal cavity would be a complete disaster at this point.

And I am sure I will also think that, in about, oh, two hours or so. Just now, I confess, I think, "My God, all that for nothing? For nothing? What do you mean it was nothing? What the hell are you playing at over there?"

But even this is an improvement, what I thought five minutes ago probably is not suitable for broadcast to a mixed audience. *ahem*.

First setback

Until yesterday, Nel was being fed mostly through a feeding tube which went directly into her intestine. Yesterday evening, it was discovered that some of the food from that tube was coming out of the wound from the operation itself. This means that something has begun leaking somewhere, possibly from the tube itself. It may have happened during all the moving around yesterday or it could have happened earlier. What is certain is that the food from that tube should not be loose in her abdominal cavity.

So today, right now in fact, the doctors are going to open up the wound in her stomach and remove the feeding tube and wash out her abdominal cavity. At this time they are not planning to put a new feeding tube back in. Because she has been able to eat and digest food on her own, the feeding tube is not necessary any more.

In practical terms, the doctor has said that this will put her back about 4 days of healing time -- because the original incision has to be opened up again and will therefore have to heal again from the beginning.

This operation should itself take about an hour or so, and allowing time for anaesthesia and recovery, she should be out of her room for about two and a half hours. She will be coming back to her own room and they do not expect her to need to return to Intensive Care. So we expect her back around 1:30 or 2:00 our time this afternoon.

Nel is rather frightened by this development, as everything has been going so well. She felt very well this morning, so hearing this news was even more of an unpleasant surprise.

As we have developments we will certainly set them here. While anything is of course possible, I gather that the doctors do not expect any major setbacks or difficulties as a result of this second operation other than that the original wound will have to heal over again.

Paul is at the hospital and I have to go pick up the boys from school, then I expect we will go to the hospital this afternoon when she comes out of surgery.

Dad, I hope to send you an email for Thaxine tonight; it's been a bit of a buzz around here since this was discovered yesterday evening.

Second Easter Day

Today is second Easter Day. Didn't know there were two, did you? Silly you, you were thinking there was only, you know, the one. How many times can one person come out of a tomb, anyway?

In Holland I will have you know he can do it twice. Did anybody tell the pope about this? Eh, his holiness is German after all, maybe they have easter for a week.

There may be a very good reason for a second easter day, but I dont know what it is and it always strikes me as odd when I look at my calendar and there it is -- second easter, holiday.

Nel had her own rising today, she got out of bed for the first time. She was not allowed to walk, just sit up in a chair, but that was something. She still has tubes going onto her nose, which are a contant source of annoyance, but some part of the zillion tubes and so on have been removed which is nice, it lets her move around more.

Because it's a holiday, she had many visitors today so we didn't stay all that long today. She is cheery, if still easily tired. She has already begun devising ways to get around the obviously far too restrictive rules of the hospital (which were not intended to apply to her anyway obviously) so evidently the surgeon did not remove the "Stubborn" bone from her body.

My kids are still eager to go see her, they holler hooray and run for the door when it is suggested. Though Daan most carefully asks to be sure she is in her own room and not in ICU any more. He found ICU a bit creepy and was a Very Very Subdued Daan when she was there.

Daan is convinced that the nose tubes hurt and doesn't believe anybody who says otherwise. Douwe still thinks they are sort of cool, or at least interesting.

We also went to the garden center today to get flowers to put in the garden downstairs, with any luck it'll be in bloom in two weeks when Oma comes home.

Painting

The easter bunny also left some easter placemats to paint, and bring to Oma.  We are going to the hospital this afternoon and, since Nel is out of ICU today and in her room, Nel and I have arranged with the easter bunny to hide some eggs there as well..