etwas von den frechen maeusen

May

2010-05-10T01:33:00.001-04:00

One of my favorite songs!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rxs3mnfGhDI

N.O.I.

2009-06-13T13:48:00.001-04:00

This is my Notice of Intent to resume blogging . . . soon.

Bears

2008-08-02T09:09:00.001-04:00

Off to the Beach!

2008-08-02T08:47:00.005-04:00

We'll be packing all day and then off to Cape Cod for a week of camping by the beach! Here are some pictures for now:

A few weekends ago Pshko's high school friend and his family came to visit. This brought out Pshko's youthful vigor, as you can see below:

Early to Bed?

2008-07-17T01:09:00.006-04:00

Well, I did very well at my new plan to go early to bed and early to rise, for two days and nights that is. I generally feel much better, in control, ready to start the day, etc. (and ready to go to bed that night!) when I get up nice and early, before the kids. But I also happen to be quite a night owl. I generally avoid sleep, especially if I can exchange it for uninterrupted time! I guess 1:00 is still relatively early, but I don't think I'll be getting up at 5:15 tomorrow with Pshko, who finally got a date for his citizenship interview!!!

Here is a baby pumpkin from our garden! I don't know if they're already supposed to be farther along than this, because our sunflowers certainly don't look like the ones I see blooming everywhere, but it's one of the high points of my day to go out and see how much these babies have grown. In my novice gardening, I planted a teeny bed, which the pumpkins and cucumbers outgrew long ago, tendriling all over each other and the grass surrounding them.

We have very nice neighbors who don't seem to mind that our backyard is a meadow, currently with a maze of paths mowed into it, which the kids love to run around in. We recently set up the framework for a little teepee, and planted nasturtium at the base of the bamboo sticks, in the hopes of growing a little flowery (edible) hideaway. We shall see!

Digger Bees?

2008-07-14T02:31:00.003-04:00

We have bees in the ground buzzing in and out of a hole under a root in our front yard, right next to the swing:

Summer Lullabies

2008-07-12T01:10:00.003-04:00

Maybe there's something about this time of year that makes me learn new lullabies? Last year at the beginning of July, we went blueberry picking, and the same day I stumbled across the Highland Fairy Lullaby, and haven't been able to stop singing it since (much to the children's amusement and much to the husband's dismay...)
http://frechemaeuse.blogspot.com/2007/07/blueberries-and-cotton.html

Then yesterday, I started singing Summertime at bedtime (you know, and the living is easy...), decided the kids should hear Janice sing it, discovered it was a lullaby (I had no idea, but it makes sense, as long as she is not singing it) from Porgy and Bess and that its writing by Gershwin was inspired by a Ukrainian lullaby. I have no idea if this is the same lullaby, but we then found this Ukrainian lullaby, with a video, that is decidedly not Summertimey, snowy rather, but very soothing and pretty:
http://www.flixya.com/video/654973/Ukrainian_lullaby

Sleep tight!

Living in the Moment While Sitting at the Computer (?)

2008-07-10T19:15:00.005-04:00

Back from our German playgroup, the kids are in the bathtub chatting, I'm making "carrot pennies" and fried eggs (plus some smoked salmon for Kozhin). Pshko is outside digging a hole for the sandbox.

Now the kids have just had their cod liver oil, Kozhin is showing me which pages he wants to read tonight out of "100 Things You Should Know About Whales and Dolphins", Kazha is trying to use my boob as a spray bottle, now Kozhin is trying to write WALL-E on a piece of paper, Kazha is crying because I don't want to be a spray bottle anymore, Kozhin heard a sound behind the kitchen cabinet that sounded like a mouse, and thinks dormice are the cutest kinds of mice ever, Kozhin is showing Kazha how to cut out an airplane out of paper by cutting half of it out of a folded piece, Kazha is telling me I didn't change out of my tae kwon do shirt today.

Time to brush their teeth--they have been going to bed WAY too late lately!!

Happy Fourth of July!

2008-07-05T23:20:00.006-04:00

We had a festive Fourth of July, including a parade and picnic in a friend's neighborhood, a ballet class that was surprisingly not cancelled, and a barbeque and fireworks at my parents' house. The fireworks would be hard for me to describe, but oh yes, I can just use Kazha's words:

They look like a huge colony of cute, tiny worms! (Sie sehen aus, wie ein Colony von suessen kleinen Wuermern!)

And they did, actually.

Lots to write about since I last wrote, I'll probably upload a bunch of pictures one of these days to try to catch up...

Waldkindergarten

2008-04-14T17:28:00.002-04:00

Something a bit happier today!

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB120813155330311577.html?mod=todays_us_nonsub_page_one

Newroz II

2008-04-12T06:44:00.002-04:00

Meanwhile, in Turkey:

http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x4vdol_newroz-tragedy-2008-better-version_news

George and Scott

2008-04-03T01:06:00.003-04:00

Add to that: "Does milk evaporate?"

Kazha announced today: "Everybody in Georgia is named George, and only men live in Scotland and they are all named Scott." She had already gotten frustrated with me when I told a story about a Scottish woman I used to work with at a camp in West Virginia. The woman had said, "There's a beasty on my bum!" instead of "There's a bug on my butt!" But no, only men live in Scotland and they are all named Scott (my brother in law is named Scott). Later in the evening, Georgia came up when the kids asked what states I-95 goes through. She interrupted to announce the above rules about names, grinning.

I also grinned to myself when I noticed that I had just purchased "Small Curd Cottage Cheese" (if you know me you will know why this is funny).

I want someone to teach me how to play the zurna.

Book of Questions

2008-04-01T01:41:00.003-04:00

There's nothing like having kids and being with them all day to make you realize how little you know (i.e. how much there is left to find out!) about the most everyday things. Here is an excerpt from our "Book of Questions" where we try to write down questions that the kids ask that I am unable to answer and will research when we have the time (some have been answered by now, some haven't):

1. Who is Rowley from Anthony Rowley in "The Lovesick Frog"? (Heigho said Rowley) and what is the melody if any?

2. Are all things outside the Earth's atmosphere also made of molecules and atoms (in space, that is)?

3. Where does the water go in fish after it goes into the gills?

4. Why does a blue whale have a dorsal fin at all since it's so small in relation to the body?

5. Are there really no snakes in Ireland, and, if not, why not? (we read that somewhere)

6. What is Seeleopard in English and what does it look like?

7. How do snowflakes become snowflakes?

8. Do snakes really dance to flute music, and, if so, why?

9. How do/did people go to the bathroom during a battle?

10. How is it that salt makes food taste stronger?

11. Exactly where does an egg come out of a queen ant?

12. What does Nabel mean on its own (as in Nabelschnur, Bauchnabel)?

13. How does a zipper work?

14. How is plutonium made?

15. How is it that we breathe in oxygen and breathe out carbon dioxide?

16. Can peacocks fly?

17. Why do snakes have a forked tongue?

18. How does smelling work (exactly)?

19. Do birds breathe?

20. ???

Vague explanations won't do. :)

HAPPY NEWROZ!!!

2008-03-22T01:49:00.005-04:00

(Can you find Kozhin and Kazha?)

Kazha Has Synesthesia

2008-02-08T16:47:00.002-05:00

I've been having some trouble deciding who I'm addressing in this blog. I've found lately that even with people I know well and see on a regular basis, providing just a little information can cause great misinterpretation. On the other hand, I'll never be able to fully explain everything about what we do and why we do it, without having someone in my house and in my head and heart at the same time for years, so... I'm just going to write things I want to share, remember, and celebrate. I did unsubscribe myself from a few groups with blogs I enjoy reading, because as posts started to form, I kept thinking, well, people looking for Waldorf homeschooling blogs will cringe at our Bionicles, mothers looking for Charlotte Mason homeschooling blogs will grow faint at seeing my neo-Pagan book list, and those looking for unschooling blogs will wonder what the heck we are doing. I can just imagine someone clicking hopefully, expecting a description of how yet another family might approach a Book of Centuries, and being ambushed instead by a description of how I once peed in a cat box.

So...! I'll just write things as they come to mind. I'm still getting to some of those posts, but for now, I'll share why I think Kazha has synesthesia:

We have a flashlight that shines a square-shaped light. Kazha shone it at the ceiling, and said, "Look, it says "JA-GU-AH-ER" ("jaguar" but stretched into four syllables, pointing to one for each side of the square).

The other day, nursing, she said she had to switch sides to see what color the milk was now on the other side. She said the taste changes color all the time. Little did I know!

I'm joking about the synesthesia thing, but I do find it very interesting. More examples to come :)

Good-bye December!

2008-01-20T23:51:00.000-05:00

Is it too late to add to my list of new year's resolutions (which are going well, by the way!) to write in this blog on a more regular basis? To write posts more or less as they come to mind and not wait until they pile up...what happens to all those unposted posts in my head, anyway?? So, in the interest of raw and unpolished self-expression (not potentially perfect non-expression)...

Here is a farewell to the cozy festivities of December, mostly in photos:

We started off December with a two-day trip (all together!!) to Great Wolf Lodge in Williamsburg, for a homeschoolers special. This is the kind of cheezy vacation place I grew up very much not going to, but we had a great time and hope to go back next year:

I hosted our homeschool co-op, with the theme of joints...

and used leftover salt dough (from making joints) to make ornaments...

and used them to decorate our advent wreath...

Here is a selection of our Christmas books (we tried to read only one a day to spread them out like an advent calendar...

We spent all but one Sunday celebrating Advent at my parents' house. Here is my father building the fire. This was the Sunday after an evening of singing German carols, watching the annual Krippenspiel, eating Christmas cookies, and making ornaments at my mother's church...

It looks like they're singing, but they're really saying, "NOOOOZ" (more later...)

very cute...
They are totally posing...

We made gingerbread girls and boys and angels and babies...

It was amazing to see the patience, diligence, and care that Kozhin took decorating his cookies as compared to last year when he was still six...

Pshko very inconveniently had his birthday right before Christmas :)

This isn't the best picture of my parents...!

Finally, Christmas itself (on Christmas Eve, for us) was wonderful...

But Kazha came down with something Christmas Day (you can see her here smiling even though she's sick)...

Back at home the next day, we celebrated more of a late Solstice...

Noooooohz!!!

And Kazha was well enough to partake of our celebratory baked apples with vanilla sauce...

Then Kozhin came down with the same thing for 2 1/2 days, and when they were both recovered, it was a joy to watch their capacity to entertain themselves come back and they played together non-stop for days (this looks like a mess, but it's really an elaborate game) :)

One unseasonably warm day between Christmas and New Year's, we planted our Christmas tree in the backyard (it never made it inside! which is ok because we had a small one on a table and we celebrated Christmas Eve at my parents' house anyway), our first tree planted by our new house...

Another unseasonably warm day a few days later, we decorated it with pine cones rolled in peanut butter and birdseed (yes, Kazha is wearing a bathing suit outside in January!)...

Here is the same tree just a few days ago after our little snowstorm:

Things I want to write about soon: nursery rhymes, our daily/weekly rhythm these days, dolphins, what we've been reading, my mom, how great it is not having a tv, and FOOD. That should be enough for now. :)

Elf Video!

2007-12-22T21:20:00.000-05:00

http://www.elfyourself.com/?id=1706032545

Piano and Bulbs

2007-12-17T22:00:00.000-05:00

Hmm... What better time to finally update my blog than when I should be wrapping my husband's birthday presents?? :) Well, it's a rare night that he puts them to bed, and I'm truly awake and fresh when I sit down at the computer instead of half asleep, so I don't feel too bad typing a few lines.

So, in an effort not to spend too much time here, a few quick notes:

For my own birthday a few weeks ago, I received from my husband . . . a PIANO!!! This was a secret that Kozhin kept for over a month, not bad! I am SO happy. It makes the living room instantly cozy when you walk in. Its keys are also . . . drum roll . . . often more tempting than those of the computer, as a relaxing instant creative outlet, and the kids play while I'm playing piano instead of getting antsy like they do when I'm occasionally here on the computer while they're awake. I love having a piano instead of a TV in the living room to gather around. I'll have to start learning some new pieces (I've been playing the same pieces for years, since I only play when I'm at my parents' house). Here are Kazha's descriptions of the keys, from low, middle, to high: "These are 'rumble stones', these are 'all together medium stones', and these are 'trickle stones'". Rumble stones!!! That's exactly what the low notes sound like!

I planted bulbs on an unseasonably warm day last week. I've often noticed that songs with fitting lyrics will just pop into my head out of my subconscious during certain situations. That evening, I had to stop and chuckle when I noticed myself humming the tune to "It's now or neeeveeeer"!! It was December, after all.

OK, time to wrap presents (clearly not my favorite thing to do) (and clearly the presents aren't as big as a piano, since they have to be wrapped). He wanted a chain saw :) so he's getting: a gift certificate to Home Depot (I can't stay in there long enough to actually choose an item or I'll get a headache from all the fumes), a collection of office supplies to help organize receipts and stuff for quarterly taxes, a birdhouse Kozhin made in Tiger Scouts, a pair of funny boxers, and a homemade book-on-tape of Jamaica Inn. And cake, dinner and a movie. Finding time to record an entire book on tape has been difficult, so he may have to get the second half for Christmas!

I'll come back as a reward afterwards to post some holiday pictures and to try to describe our schedule, which I've meant to do for a while!

Thanksgiving

2007-11-27T02:27:00.000-05:00

What Is The Meaning Of This?

2007-11-21T22:36:00.000-05:00

Of all the serendipitous, happy coincidences that could have converged in our lives, why this? I SWEAR, in the last 2 days, we have read 3, maybe 4 (I hope I can find the others!) passages in books that describe vividly animals licking their chops, in very much the same ways (or should I say "way"?).

Listen to this (Tigger has just tried Roo's extract of malt):

Then Tigger looked up at the ceiling, and closed his eyes, and his tongue went round and round his chops, in case he had left any outside, and a peaceful smile came over his face as he said, "so that's what Tigger's like!" (The House at Pooh Corner, pages 33 and 34)

and this:

"Because those creatures, my dear ignorant boy, are the most brutal, vindictive, venemous, murderous beasts in the entire universe!" Here Mr. Wonka paused and ran the tip of a pink tongue all the way around his lips. "VERMICIOUS KNIDS!" he cried. "That's what they were!" (Charlie and the Great Glass Elevator, page 56).

Now, I can't risk waking the kids up by going and rummaging around upstairs looking for the others, but there was at least one, possibly two more. Enough to make us all pause the last time and look at each other with a raised eyebrow and a look of every-so-slight concern. I think the other one was a fox! I swear I'll find it tomorrow...

The King of the Compost

2007-11-19T10:58:00.000-05:00

I finally found a way for the kids not to be heartbroken by removing our jack-o-lantern from the front door. Here is THE KING OF THE COMPOST:

2007-09-27T02:29:00.000-04:00

Well, since I've been too busy to write, it's handy that there is this wonderful post for me to copy the link to here, since she seems to have written it for me!! Just imagine that I wrote it, and you will know how I feel (if you know what unschooling, radical unschooling, Charlotte Mason, and Waldorf are, that is)...

http://liltinghouse.clubmom.com/the_lilting_house/2007/06/radical-unschoo.html

(ok, so I'm too busy to write, not to read other people's posts, but in this case it turned out to be pretty efficient)

:)

Are Angels Naked?

2007-09-12T03:02:00.000-04:00

I haven't posted in forever! SO much has happened (mostly good), but since it's 3:00am, I think I'll just copy and paste the email I just sent to my sister, brother, and dad (mama's in Poland):

kozhin was in rare form (again) tonight. he asked me whether angels really wore clothes, and why, and what their bodies looked like under the clothes if they did wear them. we spent about 15 minutes talking about this in bed, he thought maybe the clothes were really holograms or illusions made of light, then, after a pregnant pause, he came out with, "it seems like the most important question here is: are angels naked?" we both were silent for a moment and then both burst out into a huge laughing attack (kazha was kind of oblivious). so, do you know (whether they're naked)?

original: "es scheint das die wichtistste frage ist: sind engel nackt?"

Blueberries and Cotton

2007-07-01T23:56:00.001-04:00

We read this today in anticipation of blueberry picking. It was a perfect day for picking, blue, blue sky, not too hot, a nice breeze, just beautiful.
Our copy has a picture of a wagon being pulled by mice, but I couldn't find that one online anywhere.

By chance, this morning I also found myself listening to this:
http://www.kistodreams.org/fairy_lullaby_g.asp
Fairies steal the baby while its mother is picking blaeberries. I think they're the same thing as blueberries, but still don't know for sure. This song was so beautiful that tears found themselves just oozing out of my head. It was a very visceral reaction that I sometimes have to music--my chest feels like the inside of it is being pulled upward and expanded by birds pulling on strings, my eyes narrow and tears start being squeezed out and I have very little choice in the matter. Clearly, I could never be a professional singer, not only because I'd have to cancel shows every few months due to migraines, but also because I'd start crying during my own songs. This goes for happy songs too. So, I sang and hummed and played the Highland Fairy Lullaby on the recorder all day long and drove several people crazy. I controlled myself and didn't play the recorder on the blueberry field (although it was tempting since had Kazha insisted on taking two dolls with her, and they were lying there, somewhat abandoned looking, a few times while Kazha went off picking blueberries . . . she always came and got them though).

The beginning of the song, in English, was beautiful enough, but when the Gaelic part started, which I couldn't understand of course, I almost passed out. I am very much about to get my period. :) I just love the few languages that have TH--I think any word with TH is just gorgeous, especially if the TH is in the middle or at the end of a word.

So there were the literary blueberries, from an old Swedish book about a boy gathering berries for his mother on her name day, the lyrical blaeberries from an old Gaelic song about a baby stolen by fairies, and then there were the real blueberries which we picked today at Butler's Orchard. After dropping some off with my mother, along with a basket of sour cherries, her childhood favorite, we came home and Pshko almost immediately started boiling some to make preserves.

Then . . . Kazha fell asleep without nursing! I still can't believe it! It's actually kind of hilarious: we went to bed, letting Kozhin stay up a little longer to finish building the Bionicle figure that was to protect us tonight--there's a different one with a different pose every night, a comforting, masked, armed silhouette on the train table. So Kazha nursed for a while, and I figured she'd fall to sleep quickly after a hard day's work of blueberry picking . . . she nursed, for a little bit, and then rolled away, annoyed, saying, "I can't nurse tonight! I just don't like the aftertaste!" Wow! Naturally, I wanted to know more. She said it wasn't sweet. I apologized, then offered that the cause of the aftertaste was most likely one of two things: either the cappuccino I had had today after weeks of almost no coffee, or the fact that I was about to get my period. This REALLY confused her. I should have realized that the connection between the coffee and the milk would be clear to her, whereas the menstrual connection would not. She looked at me like, 'WHAT?" I gave her a brief explanation about hormones. She asked me to hold her so that no one would steal her (read link to lyrics above if you haven't already), then she turned to face the other way and asked me to sing. I sang "Guten Abend, Gute Nacht" about 12 times before checking to see if she was sleeping. She was, indeed.

Kozhin then fell asleep in no time after his short Jamaica Inn fix. He was quite tired from his sleepover at his grandparents' house last night.

Three nights ago, he was up very late. Which is why I now know that highland fairy lullaby. It was bedtime, the lights were out, and I absently started singing, "Jump down, turn around, pick a bale of cotton . . . Oh Lordy, pick a bale of cotton..." Well, let's just say that didn't exactly have a tranquilizing effect on the kids. They were up in a second, asking me what it meant, and then jumping up and down on the bed, furiously reenacting the song. They finally settled down, and their questions led into a very long and interesting conversation about slavery. Oh, how I wish I had had a tape recorder! Maybe I'll try to recount the conversation one of these days. But anyway, that whole night and the next couple of days, I was trying desperately to remember a slave lullaby (don't know if that's the right term, but anyway...) that I had on the same tape as the pick a bale of cotton one. I still haven't remembered it, and it's driving me absolutely nuts! So I was googling, and somehow because of the word lullaby, I chanced upon the Highland Fairy Lullaby, the name caught my attention, and there you go. At first I could only find midi files, and when today I found the recording with singing it was very exciting.

Kazha is probably the girliest of girls I have ever known in my life. I can say that without resorting to stereotypes, because what I mean is that she so very much identifies with being a girl. If we are playing a game with cards or game pieces featuring girls, she will believe that she is entitled to have the ones with girls on them. She believes that pink is for girls and will not (literally) eat out of a bowl or spoon that isn't pink (or silver, for the spoon). I do have to say, though, that she also was able to identify the color pink weeks before she could identify any other color. When she was still guessing on some colors, she always got pink right. When pretending to be Bambi, she calls herself "Bamba" (pronounced like German), and when pretending to be Atreju from The Neverending Story, she calls herself "Atreja". She points out who are the girls in every picture, every book we look at.

She goes around pointing out who is "male" and who is "female". I told the kids those words but didn't make a big deal out of them, but they instantly became a major part of her vocabulary.

The other day when Kozhin and I were play fighting, Kazha put her arms around me and said, "I'll protect you Mommy! I'll protect you because we're both female!"

When she saw two roses on the table one morning, and I told her they were from Daddy, she said, "Oh, one is for you and one is for me, because we both are female!" The funny thing is, she was right. Poor Kozhin!

The other day she and Kozhin were building traps in their room out of all kinds of stuff. I have to duck when entering the room because half of it is taken over by a giant spider web ("the web of shadows") made of dental floss. Well, what do you know: I overheard Kazha telling Kozhin that it was OK, he could kill the "male" babies (dolls) as long as he didn't kill the "females". We had a little talk about that one.

We have some friends who have TONS of Little People in their basement (the toys), and Kazha roots through them, carefully taking out the girls and setting them up in their houses and castles and airplanes. When she comes to a boy, she just tosses it to the side. To her, there seems to be no wishy-washyness about gender; girls and boys are strictly two very different things. She also loves looking in the mirror, having her hair done beautifully, wearing dresses, trying on shoes, and putting on make-up. It's so funny, because it so clearly comes directly from her, since I can be the cause neither genetically nor by example, and Pshko isn't here enough to influence her to that extent. By the way, Kozhin's favorite color is ALSO pink, which Kazha, surprisingly, acknowledges.

So, I have had coffee only twice (medicinally, successfully, for headaches) for over a month now. Then today I had a very small coffee with lots of milk with breakfast, and a cappuccino after lunch, as a special treat because Pshko was off and it felt festive to be in an Italian restaurant on the way to pick blueberries. I wonder if there's any connection between that coffee and the fact that I'm up at 2:30am writing.

I left my baby lying there...

Some Moments In June

2007-06-25T19:47:00.000-04:00

Hello. I'm Kozhin. I don't usually look this Italian, but this is a pretty cute picture of me. I'm trying to squash a piece of gum in my cheek.

Hello. I'm Kazha.

Believe it or not, this is also me:

Kozhin and Kazha marvelling over part of Great Falls (MD):

Aaaaaaaaahk! Scary picture!

...in the creek with Amman after owl class:

Kazha LOVES sitting in water.

Field trip on mule drawn boat on the canal (those are the kids with the backpacks):

Shuduleygalikadaskrodilalagogodika

2007-06-21T20:36:00.000-04:00

Update on Suessisch ("cute-ish") from Kazha:
Koko--hi
Shisha--good-bye
Kuke--go away
Schokobear Siteki Shika is the name of her brown teddy bear
Shuduleygalikadaskrodilalagogodika means "I like you."
:)

Things have been good--we had a nice official start to summer yesterday at a great local water park, we have a friendly new neighbor from Ethiopia who has a 3-year-old son, we got together with two old friends from high school the other day, we've been having many days that are near perfect, unhurried, fun, with activity and rest flowing into each other harmoniously. There is a rhythm to our days lately that feels wonderful.

My only complaint is that while I'm able daily to cook healthy meals and engage in our daily activities revolving around the kids, the third necessity, keeping the house relatively clean and organized, has been not happening. It's driving me nuts!!! Contrary to what my family (parents and sister) may think, I actually enjoy living in a relatively clutter-free and organized home. I enjoy organizing things and yet can live happily with a reasonable amount of mess, which I think is healthy with someone with kids, especially in a small house. However, there is simply not enough time, without staying up all night and, for example, not blogging or answering any e-mails, or eating carry-out for every meal, to clean everything to a level at which I feel comfortable. If the kitchen is clean, which it usually is, the living room is a disaster. If the living room is clean, there are piles of laundry. I clean one area at the expense of another. I feel like asking all the other parents I know if they have cleaning help, I'm really so curious!! If not, how do they do it?? I guess most people have more space and can keep the mess in one room and close it off from the living room, which stays a sanctuary of toy minimalism, but that's not our case.

I am extremely grateful for everything that I have, and for a problem, this is not a terrible one. I can live with it. But I do feel very annoyed and frustrated in several rooms of our house right now and feel like just shoving or kicking things out of the way.

There.

Oh, Pshko and I are still sloooowly reading Jamaica Inn (Daphne DuMaurier) to each other--it takes almost as much will power not to read ahead as it does not to drink coffee and eat sugar!!--my oh my I need to read more novels! It is SO good!!!

HAPPY SUMMER SOLSTICE! (or winter, as the case may be)

Cutish

2007-06-11T13:06:00.001-04:00

Kazha just said this: "Mami, squirrels speak cutish, and in cutish you say cocoon like this: coocoon." (Mami, Eichhoernchen sprechen suessisch, und auf suessisch sagt man Kokon so: Kukun.)

:)

Friend Pools

2007-06-09T22:10:00.000-04:00

Wow, I just wore myself out writing in my new coffee blog, but I have to write this before I forget:

Kozhin was invited to two birthday parties today, and it occurred to me that if he were in school it would have been almost impossible for him to meet these people, much less become friends with them. Kozhin is 6 1/2, and one birthday boy was turning 4, the other 9. So Kozhin is right in the middle, and gets along great with both of them. I LOVE that. The four-year-old is in our German playgroup, where he continues to go even though he's "school age", and we all went together to that party and had a great time playing games, eating, and running around outside. Now he's at a pirate sleepover at the 9-year-old's house, and we know him and most of the other guests from tae kwon do, where we go during the day with other homeschoolers of various ages.

The small class sizes were one of the great things about Kozhin's school last year, but I've realized that the POOL of potential friends was just so limited! What if he just didn't click with any of these particular 14 kids? There sure wasn't much time left over to meet anyone else anywhere else, much less nurture any other relationships. Luckily, he had a very good friend from preschool just next door, and they got along great, but I often wonder what if she hadn't been there?

EEEEEK! I miss Kozhin! I hope he's OK with all those rowdy 9-year-olds (plus his six-year-old best friend)! Hope I don't eat my words tomorrow when he comes home with a black eye and asking me what spin the bottle means! Just kidding... But I do miss him!

New Blog

2007-06-07T17:01:00.000-04:00

I have an additional blog I thought I'd share, just started it today:

http://beyondcoffee.blogspot.com/

Hopefully I'll be updating this one more too, but made the decision to separate this new one.

:)

Oh What A Pleasant Day

2007-05-17T22:24:00.001-04:00

Well, I had to change the color of yesterday's post--oops!

What a generally all-around nice day today was. After breakfast with Pshko, the kids played until we got ready for tae kwon do. Kozhin's rock class is having a break, so after tae kwon do we went out for an extended ice cream with A and G, home to grab some stuff, then to M and D to babysit, which was so pleasant because I basically typed the whole time because the kids got along so nicely. The boys built with legos and the girls did their usual harmonious pretending to read and sing punctuated by little voyages with their dolls, making beds for them and carrying them around in baskets and various other containers. It really is quite amazing for barely 3-year-olds, at least in my experience, to truly play together that way for such an extended period of time. They say please and thank you, ask to borrow things, ask and explain things, offer and accept ideas of what to do... The problem came when it was time to go--Kazha threw a bit of a fit, but then Kozhin and I cheered her up in the car by saying the names of towns where our friends live--she thought the names were hilarious. We came home for dinner (leftover delivery pizza from Pshko from yesterday--blech! but at least Kazha ATE almost a whole piece!), I let them watch some TV while I did some much needed cleaning up of the living room, then up to bed to start Schnueffelchens Irrfahrt and off to dreamland...for the kids, that is. I have 15 pages left to type. One of the best things about the day was that we weren't in a RUSH at any time.

Time for some Paqlawe! (say it aloud and you'll know what I mean--I think in a previous post I spelled it Paqlewe, which is wrong!)

The Alleghenies and the Moors

2007-05-17T02:04:00.000-04:00

Well, my father insists that he's the one who gave me that picture book of horses, which makes the whole thing not nearly as poetic. I have to admit it makes more sense though, since the book is in English. Opa? Hallo? Well, it was nice thinking that for...18 years! I do know that my grandmother, and not my father, actually handed me the book.

I've been either sleeping at night or typing (freelance work) since we got back, thus the no posts. Oh, and last night I spent the wee hours of the morning organizing all my pictures from 2006 and putting them on CDs, so now I don't have to wake up in the middle of the night in a panic that all my pictures will suddenly be gone! I tried to put them on Flickr but couldn't figure out how to use the uploading tons of photos at once feature yet.

Soon I'll have some here of our very relaxing trip to Pennsylvania. Fairy Festival, then Canoe Creek State Park in PA where we found an affordable little cabin, hiking among black bears and hunters, grilled salmon, s'mores, tiny brown late hibernating bats in Indian Caverns, feeding trout, Raeuber Hotzenplotz and Petrosilius Zwackelmann, hanging out on the porch with bionicles and books and baskets of stuffed mice, riding around on bike and scooter, listening to the zillions of birds and bumblebees, little visit to see Penn State, playing games before bed, and the general glory of being all together for a week with no TV and no Internet.

And Pshko and I started reading to each other! My image of marital bliss has always been lying propped up in bed next to my beau, each of us immersed in whatever novel we are reading (I know, so romantic). Um, this has never once happened in my marriage, so I've (re)discovered the wonderful world of two adults reading aloud to each other! Such an underrated and underdone (?) activity. I started Jamaica Inn by Daphne DuMaurier one night on our trip. Then, the next night, with no TV around (ha!) and me reading a cookbook and unavailable, Pshko absently picked up Jamaica Inn and started it. Even at his snail's pace of reading English, he started to enjoy it, and now I'm reading it to him, which is torture because I have to wait, but worth it.

The funniest thing is that Kozhin, whose ears can be aimed in 20 directions at once, heard me reading in the car on the way home, and in bed that night started asking about it. Since then I've been asked every night after lights are out to pleeease "tell just a little more of Jamaica Inn". I leave out the horrible parts and keep the basic story and adventure and mood. 2 days ago Kozhin transformed our living room table and couch into something full of hanging green blankets and chicken bones (literally) and other stuff. He said it was THE MOORS. :)

Kazha spent what seemed like half the trip with an atlas on her lap explaining to us where we were and where we were going. She traced countless rivers and roads with her finger and was very serious about the whole thing.

What Do You Want To Dream About?

2007-05-04T01:15:00.001-04:00

Well, I started the evening before our little trip by telling the kids we could sit around and eat chocolate while I read them the rest of Charlie and the Great Glass Elevator (or is it Willy Wonka and the Great Glass Elevator?). Kind of like when I watched The Abyss while floating in an otherwise dark indoor pool and a little bit less like the time we played Candy Land with real candy. It was Swiss milk chocolate with lots of hazelnuts.

Well, it was very fun, and of course the kids were soon bouncing off the walls and when we went upstairs to bed, well, it took a while. However, it was worth it. The chocolate was delicious, and here are some highlights from the not-sleeping afterwards:

I usually ask the bahbies what they want to dream about before drifting off to sleep. We say "bis zur Sternenwiese!" (see you on the starry meadow!) and say we'll meet each other in each other's dreams. I like the idea of their creating their own images and places they want to go to before they go to sleep. Well, Kazha said she wanted to dream about "girls and berries" (part in quotes was in English). That made sense, since she likes both girls and berries. But then she leaned over me and asked Kozhin, "Do you want to dream about boysenberries?" :)

Kozhin commenced to state, out of the blue, that when we sleep we are vertical and when we get up we are horizontal. No no, dear boy, I started to explain, thinking he had gotten confused. "No, no, no, no, no, mother, I mean since the Earth is round and we're somewhere closer to the middle, not at the North or South poles, that when we're standing up we're sticking out sideways from the Earth so we're actually horizontal." :)

We're going to Pennsylvania for almost a week!!! We leave tomorrow first for the somewhat fluffy but very fun and aesthetically pleasing Fairy Festival in Glen Rock, PA, and then to a cabin in a state park I know nothing about. Aaaaah! (sigh, not scream). The kids and I went last year, and it was one of the first entries I wrote in this blog. Wow. That was at a crucial point in my brother's recovery, and I was also very seriously considering homeschooling, but Kozhin was still in school, so I remember it being very, very refreshing to be a few hours away in a very beautiful place. Tomorrow we're going together all four of us, my brother is securely in recovery and doing better every day (and just started taking tae kwon do with us, something Kozhin started in May last year), and we are well on our way on our homeschooling journey and it feels so wonderful to be creating our own life and living daily by our own priorities. Thanks to a hard-working Babaki! My mother's latest numbers were good and I feel so incredibly thankful for everything.

I wonder if Kazha is dreaming about girlsenberries :)

Festive Links

2007-05-01T00:50:00.000-04:00

I'm not Wiccan so I'll probably white out the pentagram, but the maze and picture are nice!
http://www.elsieandpooka.com/cbbeltainmaze.htm

Another festive picture:
http://www.sarudama.com/movies/images/maypole.gif

Back to work...

Chocolate, Nazis, Horses, Gypsies

2007-04-21T02:49:00.000-04:00

Hi. It's 2:49am and I'm sitting in front of the computer with a tub of Trader Joe's chocolate frosting left over from Kazha's birthday party and reading about tooth decay.

I also googled my grandfather's name and found someone with his name listed as one of the officers sentenced to 5 years imprisonment for working in a concentration camp, Stutthof near Gdansk (Danzig) to be specific. This would fit, since my grandfather was a Nazi (the same one who took me and my sister to the petting zoo every day, bought us ice cream, taught us countless rhymes and songs, counted how many kisses there were in our mouths, walked with us to the farmer where we picked up hen's rear ends and gathered fresh eggs, mesmerized us with poetry and fairy tales, and you could see the happiness in his eyes when he saw that I was sincerely interested in Plattdeutsch and all of his growing up on a farm stories... ah, life can be complicated...). Anyway, it would fit since he was a farmer in West Prussia in what is now Poland, was off "at war" when my mother was a toddler, and didn't come back until 8 years later, having been a prisoner of war. "Nobody in my family knows" exactly why he was a prisoner of war. Maybe this is not the same man--the spelling is slightly different in that there is an O with an umlaut instead of just OE like he spelled it--but it certainly would fit.

One of my long-lived passions, ironically, has been the Roma (Gypsies), whom, ironically, I discovered when I was 16 after inheriting a Picture Book of Horses from my grandfather in Germany the summer after his death. We shared a love of horses, so I guess my grandmother decided I should have it. I flipped through, stopped in my tracks on the last page where I saw 2 pictures of Roma horse traders, and I didn't stop reading about the Roma until...well, I haven't really stopped. I was, you know, 16, so I was a bit cheesy about the whole thing at the time, but sincerely interested. Cheesy as in writing in my college entrance essay that I wanted to "smear porcupine grease in my hair" and that if I "wasn't accepted into a Gypsy kumpania, I'd settle for becoming a cultural anthropologist."

I didn't know at the time I received that book that an estimated 500,000 Roma had been killed during the Holocaust. I'm going to go take a look at that picture book. I don't think it was an accident that my grandfather left it for me.

Party Preparations and a Walk with the River Rat

2007-04-13T02:56:00.001-04:00

Well, I just finished making a cheesecake, 2 dozen vanilla cupcakes with chocolate frosting and little watermelon gummies on top, a bunch of grass-fed meatballs (?? you know what I mean), rolled a zillion grape leaves (not salty or sour enough and I didn't have dill, but edible and made with chicken broth I made from scratch from a whole chicken) for Kazha's BIRTHDAY PARTY tomorrow!!! I sure hope everything works out--we're having it outside despite the iffy weather, but I think it will be fine as long as no one wears shorts or gets blown away--it's supposed to be mighty windy. We also had tae kwon do, nature class (rocks), Kozhin's friend came over all afternoon, we picked up our farm food, and Kazha went to her friend's house. What a day!

While Kozhin was in his nature class, Kazha and I went for a walk in the woods and it ended up being so especially pleasant. It warmed up a little and the sun came out, so we walked through the trees until we got to some benches and ate some cashews and raisins, then went on down the hill and sat on the bridge that goes over the creek for a while, letting our legs dangle over the edge of the bridge and just chatted about the little bugs we saw skimming over the water's surface, what direction the water was flowing, listened to the birds and the water over the rocks, noticed the roots hanging down at the edge of the water, switched to the other side of the bridge, and then things got really fun. Kazha "saw" Ratty from The Wind in the Willows, and he was just waking up and cleaning out his house. He saw us and started talking to us! We decided to help him find some perfect flowers for his kitchen table since he was doing his spring cleaning, so we walked with him along the path, examining yellow and purple flowers and moss along the way. Only he was allowed to pick the flowers because he lives in the forest. Then he came with us all the way back to the nature center, and hopped into my backpack because Kazha invited him to our house. We're hoping he can get back to his creek by way of Four Mile Run which is right by our house and which, incidentally, runs through what we call the Rat Forest. I just love Ratty.

I don't get much time alone with Kazha!

Ugh

2007-04-02T13:14:00.000-04:00

From Friday around noon to Saturday around noon I had a stomach bug. Then Kazha vomited, in her dainty way with lots of warning, last night. She's all better and sleeping now. Gee, I wonder where we got it--exactly a week before it hit, we went to a McDonald's--yes, we snuck in our own food--with friends to play in the play area. On the way in, we almost ran into a woman running out with her hand over her mouth, and a few minutes later we saw a boy throw up all over his table. It was kind of surreal, all the more so because the boy's father just sat there with his head cocked asking, "What happened? What happened?" So, it seems something must be going around.

Now I'm enjoying the return of my appetite and ability to drink coffee, and the LOVELY weather!!! Our little seeds have sprouted and we have more planted, and soon we'll be able to go plant and transplant some more in our garden along the bike trail.

Oh, Kazha's awake!

14 Years Till the Cicadas Come Back

2007-03-27T21:49:00.000-04:00

This is a few weeks ago, when she was still two (sniff! sniff!)

Kozhin is waiting patiently to show her something from Lord of the Rings while she makes beds for her dolls.

and tries to carry too many babies at once

playing with her friend

I found my camera yesterday--under the couch--right after the celebration. She's 3 now!

undi and the kids

she spots things that are pink from a mile away:

Eating and Homeschooling

2007-03-23T15:03:00.000-04:00

Something I wrote a few weeks ago:

One of the many hidden benefits of homeschooling that has become apparent to me lately is EATING. Kozhin is a slow eater, like I am. He was never able to finish eating all of his lunch in the allotted time, and I'm sure the eating environment didn't help either. Better than usual, since they were eating in the classroom at little tables and not in a huge, cold, echoing cafeteria, but he almost never finished his lunch. He also doesn't tend to like sandwiches and other foods that lend themselves to being sent along in a lunch box. He needs help with opening things like yogurt containers, and his favorite healthy foods are ones that are soupy and served hot, like beans and rice. Of course we go on lots of picnics with food packed ahead of time, but he can graze as little as he wants, with a little friendly prodding, help, and freshly assembledness. It also helps that he isn't anymore asking if he can have such-and-such kind of sparkly, neon snack because so-and-so has it. And he's eating with, um, his family, and feels relaxed. His appetite has increased 100 fold in the past few months.

HAPPY NEWROZ!!

2007-03-21T22:29:00.000-04:00

!نه ورۆزتان پیرۆز بێ

Happy Vernal Equinox!

Happy Spring!

Happy Newroz!

Happy Eastertime!

Happy almost Kazha's Birthday!

We Finished!

2007-03-20T23:06:00.000-04:00

We did it!! We finished Die Unendliche Geschichte. (The Neverending Story). All 486 pages of it aloud. Good thing it has the title it does--we're going to miss reading it. I'd thought we'd start alternating between German and English, but we may have to go right into Momo. Although Kazha might appreciate a break from the long books with almost no pictures.

Pshko just watched a movie (next to me) where the mother of two young sons had died and the younger son was able to see and talk to her for just 5 minutes before saying good-bye. Why did I have to see that? Why do people make movies with scenes like that? Now I can barely see the computer. I feel like watching Meet the Fockers.

I really should change the title of this blog. I initially thought I'd be writing it mainly to stay in touch with relatives in Germany, but that's not really what I'm doing so I might as well have an English title...

This is kind of embarrassing, but my kids love playing with menstrual pads. They frequently raid my supply and use them for all kinds of things: diapers for dolls, giant band-aids--you name it. I used to justify my letting them do this with entire boxes of band-aids by telling myself it was good for small motor skills. This must be good for something. Imaginary play? Yesterday we went over to my parents' house for my dad's birthday and Kozhin lifted his shirt to show a mentrual pad stuck to his chest. I told him he might be the only boy in the whole country, no, maybe the whole world, who currently had a menstrual pad stuck to his chest under his shirt. OK, so that's not the embarrassing part. The embarrassing part is that now that I have my period, there's not a pad in the house. I'm not a big fan of tampons, and so . . . you guessed it! I'm wearing a diaper. And it's not on my chest.

I hope this doesn't turn out like the time I told my ESL class (they were adults) that I had once peed in the cat's litter box in desperation because my roommate was taking forever in the bathroom. I thought they were going to find it as amusing (and relatively within the range of normal) as my friends did, but they didn't. They just gaped at me. At least I can't tell if anyone runs screaming from this blog!

Good night!

Headline (Miracle?): Child Cleans Living Room!

2007-03-17T12:25:00.000-04:00

If you have a child who goes limp, runs away, or simply doesn't hear you when you say the words "let's clean up", you will know how surreal it was for me when Thursday evening Kozhin suddenly started cleaning up the living room and didn't stop for an hour. And he actually cleaned it well. Our house is still recovering from our week's stay at my parents' house while they were on vacation--somehow it got messier while we were gone, and stayed that way because we've been so busy all week. Maybe it was all the stuff I brought in from the car and dumped on the floor. Anyway, I had a headache, so I was checking my e-mail and telling Kozhin we have to clean up soon. In a funny switching of roles, he said (in German):

"Mommy, get off the computer and start cleaning up!"

He said it in a very diplomatic and pragmatic voice, firm but kind. I said:

"You're right."

How could I not? I closed my computer and said let's get started. I was expecting the usual rigamarole, where I tell them to put a certain number of items in a certain place, sing "viele Haende, schnelles Ende" while I commence to do most of the actual work while they make various other messes which I then also clean up. Boy was I in for a surprise. I stared in awe and disbelief as Kozhin began to sort his Bionicle, Knight's Kingdom, and miscellaneous lego pieces into bins, announced, started and continued a pile of books on the table, sorted musical instruments, brought clothes to the stairs to be brought upstairs, etc. Kazha happily helped too, which was wonderful but not quite as surprising since she usually likes cleaning up but often joins Kozhin in playing instead. One of the other amazing things was that he did all this in such a good-natured, steady way, and took on a leadership role in the whole thing. I kept thinking this can't last, but it did! The world seemed to stand still and I heard angels singing. I observed out of the corner of my eye as I cleaned, grinning, and every once in a while snuck a full glance.

I've never given him a hard time about cleaning up--when we do it, I help him find ways to participate, but it's hard to make it attractive. It's not generally something he ever has taken any initiative in. Make that never. Sometimes the number thing helps, sometimes it doesn't, but generally his muscle tone takes a big drop and he suddenly becomes very "tired". I'm not sure what happened, maybe it was a developmental leap, maybe because his friends were coming over the next day, maybe he wanted the living room to be neat, maybe he enjoyed organizing things he cares about, maybe things have settled into their respective places long enough that he knows where they go, maybe I inadvertently put something in his oatmeal. Whatever it was, it's fun to see such a quantum leap happening with absolutely no prodding from me. Aha! Maybe that's the secret. Prodding certainly has always had the opposite of the desired effect on me.

By the way, it's one of Pshko's every other weekends off, and another miracle is occurring as I write. Pshko is reading to Kazha! It's not in Kurdish, but he's reading to her (Meet Diego). Kozhin's over building a battering ram/catapult out of K'nex. It's not all as simple as that though. She actually wanted to nurse, and he sort of offered to read to her at my request. She declined, and so he bribed her with an offer of baklava afterward. She jumped onto his lap with a giggle, enjoyed the book, and now she's getting ready to dig in. Hmmm . . .what I'll allow for a few minutes of uninterrupted daytime computer time!

As this really wasn't uninterrupted after all, I'm still online after about . . . 1000 interruptions . . . 1001 . . . so I need to say that yet another strange and happy thing has happened in the meantime. Kozhin finished building his catapult thing, and put together 2 other creatures out of Bionicle pieces, and now he's set them up for sale in a row, and he's making price tags. That means with a pencil and paper. Hallelujah. I have to go buy one.

In more predictable news, Pshko has fallen asleep on the couch. Blah.

Maryland Science Center

2007-03-13T10:17:00.000-04:00

This was a few weeks ago in Baltimore:

Ko and Ka relaxing on a bed of nails:

Carpal Tunnel

2007-03-13T02:26:00.000-04:00

Well, it's been a while! It's much easier updating the Daily Notes, seeing as they require neither correct grammar, complete sentences, or even thoughts. It's a good memory exercise if nothing else. Now my hands are aching from some work I'm doing at home typing and editing a manuscript, and it's making me realize how little I must be writing myself, because my hands don't normally hurt after a few hours at the computer!

We're back at home after a week at Undi and Papaw's with sister and brother housesitting, and with Flitz the kitten. How cozy!!! I can't believe we all live so near each other. We had several walks in the woods and romps in the backyard with the lovely weather, and even a fire in the fireplace on one of the cold days (we defied my father to build it, but he's not mad :)

Now the kids are enjoying rediscovering their home and I'm enjoying not having to chase them around in a big house full of precious and breakable things!

To remind myself: I want to start typing posts in colors corresponding to where I am in my menstrual cycle. I think that will be interesting. Red and blue for period and ovulation, respectively, and I'll figure out something for the waxing and waning. I'm thinking out loud. It's 2:30 in the morning. I'm fairly sure if I do that some interesting patterns will make themselves visible, if only to me. Too bad there's not a computer program that could do it for me automatically so the whole observer's bias thing doesn't come into play. It would just keep track of my writing and the phase of my cycle, and the moon, and what I ate that day, and the season, and various other factors, and then come back to me with a report listing the correspondences of these factors with the topics written about. I hypothesize that posts about food and God will be more frequent premenstrually.

Also: get these Girl Scout cookies away from me!!! I ordered some a few weeks ago and devoured several boxes, and apparently P ordered some more because he presented me with a whole arrangement of them on a plate while I was typing. There are not very many left.

In case you're wondering why I labeled this post "homeschooling", it's a joke. It's late and I just ate 10 do-si-dos.

Attention

2007-03-02T00:55:00.000-05:00

Kozhin is 6 and he fidgets. He moves around a lot. Doesn't sit still. Depending on my mood and tolerance level, I've been known to pester the poor guy about fidgeting while I read to him, telling him to sit still, though I'm pretty good about it most of the time. It makes me feel like he's not paying attention--probably like it does for most teachers--even though he almost always is. Now, I think I finally get it. Today we had just left for Tae Kwon Do class when I noticed my sister driving next to us, trying to get my attention. She had had a creepy run-in with an aggressive artist at work and thought she'd try to see if we were home to let off some steam. We pulled over, and she told me the creepy story through two open car windows and a sniffly veil of tears. Afterwards, I asked Kozhin and Kazha if they had understood what had happened to my sister. Every time I had looked back, Kozhin had been intently flipping through his Bionicle instructions and Kazha was taking things in and out of her little backpack. Kozhin's response? "Oh, yes, I was just multitasking. I understood everything. I was just counting the Bionicle pieces and listening at the same time..." and he went on to share that it was a good thing the guy's assistant had at least been a nice guy, and other details that demonstrated that he had, indeed, been paying close attention. (the quote was translated, except for "multitasking", which neither of us knows how to say in German) :)

We made a huge snowball during the last snow in Sunday, and Kozhin is sad that it's melting and almost gone. Twice since yesterday he has taken a little piece of what's left of it and run inside to put it in the freezer, because it's "the heart" of the snowball.

Thoughts on Reading

2007-02-24T23:33:00.000-05:00

After lots of good reading aloud over the holidays, especially during those magical liminal weeks right after Christmas, when we we played, played, played in our PJs for glorious day after day, listening to Mahalia Jackson and Handel's Messiah, the days flowing smoothly from leisurely breakfasts to building with k'nex and lego to playing chess to snuggling up for a chapter or two of Fantastic Mr. Fox to more food to playing to reading some more . . .

. . . I figured it was time for a longer book in German. Inspired by some of the Charlotte Mason advice I've been reading lately about not being afraid to challenge children with books that stretch their vocabularies and attention and comprehension and by Kozhin's increasing love of listening to longer books with mostly text, I decided to give Die Unendliche Geschichte (The Neverending Story--yes it's that movie, but that's NOT all there is to the book!!) a bash. Boy am I glad we did!!! Kozhin is devouring it. So am I--I last read it when I was about...12 maybe? I'll have to check, but it's been a while. It's an incredible story, thought-provoking and full of adventure, and I'm so excited that Kozhin is able to concentrate for long stretches of time (when Kazha allows :) and understand almost everything. There is only one pictures at the beginning of each chapter, the rest is text. The questions he asks as we're reading make it clear he's thinking deeply about what has happened in the story. He and Kazha act parts out, make up new ones as the characters, Kozhin memorized a rhyme about Ygramul die Viele without my realizing that he was trying (maybe he wasn't!) :), and, the most surprising of all, last week Kozhin suddenly went into a flurry of activity, asking for scissors, yellow paper, a pen, string, and glue, and when he emerged from his secret project, it was with an AURYN he had made, an amulet from the book with two snakes biting each other in the tail and forming an oval . . . he almost NEVER decides to make things out of paper, and the few times he's tried, his perfectionism has gotten in the way and made him tear things to pieces halfway through, but not this time, and with no help besides gathering materials! Very exciting . . . :)

Now, about this reading aloud business. I am always fascinated by assumptions. If you can figure out what people are saying while they're not saying it, read between the lines to find out what invisible backdrops people are working against, you can figure out a lot.

This happens in my family a lot. My father will tell my mother that he thinks I'd be offended if he asked about such-and-such and my mother tells me this, and of course whatever the such-and-such is is usually something either completely innocuous or else something I'm just itching to talk about but waiting for someone to ask me because I don't want to impose my favorite topics on everyone all the time. Well, I do want to, I just think maybe I shouldn't. These encounters leave me feeling misunderstood and confused as to how I could have given an impression that was so opposite from the way I really felt. Deciding how much to explain something to death vs. just leaving opinion-making to the survival of the fittest and realizing you can't precisely duplicate and transplant your version of reality into someone else's head accurately by incessant babbling is often difficult for me.

For a while now, my favorite topic has been homeschooling, from every angle and every reflection of it to every concrete tiny minutia of a detail to how it plays out in real families' daily lives. I could talk about it all the time but really hold back, even with my family. But I assume that they assume that I've thoroughly thought through most basic aspects of our decision to homeschool, and that if they have a question, they'll ask me why we do things the way we do. I would LOVE being questioned more about this, both because I think so much about it and thus have plenty to say about most questions, and because I'd love to have my beliefs challenged by people who care about my children as much as I do.

So I was a little surprised the other day when my dear, dear brother mentioned that he wanted to work on reading a little with Kozhin. He said he and my sister were talking about Kozhin the other day and came to the conclusion that it would be hard for him to learn things on his own without knowing how to read on his own. They also talked about that it's great that I read books aloud to him, BUT that that's not the same as reading on one's own.

I guess not too long ago the thought that anyone should consult with the parent before giving some friendly phonics instruction to someone's child would have seemed ridiculous, it probably wouldn't have registered in my mind as something to be questioned. Now I'm feeling so immersed in my own perspective that I'm finding it hard to express where I'm coming from in not being at all concerned about Kozhin's reading ability.

I was totally surprised! Not that he would bring this up--I was SO relieved that he brought it up because apparently they had been thinking and talking about it, but not with me! When I see a parent interacting or not interacting with their child in a certain way, the assumption I make is usually that they are acting that way based on ideas and beliefs they have thought through carefully, and that they are not just, say, forgetting to buy a playstation for their kids.

I'm not confused that they thought these things at all-- just that the whole issue wasn't first approached as a question to me--how do I approach the whole reading thing? do we do some reading lessons? what does he like? what can he do? what do other homeschoolers do? why, why not, how? etc. Did they think I'd be offended by such questions?

Now, I don't know why I'm feeling so daunted at the idea of responding to what my brother said. Partly, I reeeeeally don't want to sound defensive. But also, it's so dauntingly . . . SIMPLE! It's like it's become so clear to me that it's hard to put it into words. Let me try to sum it up here as concisely as I can:

First, he's 6, and six-year-olds should be spending lots and lots of time playing and being outside and not most of it in lessons of any sort (at least that's what I think)
If I were mostly concerning myself with teaching him to read himself in order to learn by reading to himself right now, the quality of what he would be reading would be so far beneath the levels at which he thinks, carries on conversations, and listens to books and stories
The reverse is also true, that by being read to, he is living through stories and adventures and ideas and words that are continually expanding and enriching his world.
Whether or not one believes it, the Waldorf approach to education states that children are not ready for academic work, including learning to read, until the "change of teeth" and Kozhin just lost his first tooth a few weeks ago.
Since I started joining online homeschooling groups, I have read probably close to 100 references to children who, left alone (in the positive sense, as in, not badgered all the time) to learn to read in an environment where they are read to and have access to plenty of reading materials, learned to read around the age of EIGHT, and many of these children are boys who tend to learn visually-spatially and spend lots of their time in 3-D kinds of pursuits like building and simply are not ready to read yet at the young age of 6.
Not stressing out about learning to read (and write) early frees up time to do other extremely important things with your hands like plant things, play music, build things, climb, cook, and feel good about yourself and do the things you're drawn to do
He is simply not interested in lots of formal reading lessons, and I refuse to make him dread learning to read or to make it feel like drudgery by doing it before he's ready

Ah, how I wish my brother and sister (everybody, actually!) could just somehow instantly already have read all the stuff I have about this, instead of just my little synopsis!

Maybe I'm wrong. Maybe Kozhin would be better off with lots and lots of reading instruction instead of lots of really good books. First, thanks to those who have already gone through this and seen their kids learn to read at age 7, 8, 9, 10, 11 and shared their experiences so the rest of us don't have to pull out their hair when all they had to do was wait a little, I don't think I'm wrong. And second, what is "better off"? I'd much rather have him happy and not reading YET than bored and stressed and thinking he's dumb. And missing out on playing. Oops, yikes, that did sound defensive--sorry!

What I am entirely open to is for Kozhin to spend some time with my brother working on reading, as long as it's enjoyable for both. It may be more fun simply because it's with his uncle, and not with me, which would be a great advantage! I recently asked my sister if she'd want to be Kozhin's real-mail pen pal for that reason. What I do want is for my brother and sister to understand very clearly where I'm coming from and why I'm doing or not doing this and that.

That said, there are a few things we've tried out in the last few weeks that have worked out really well. I used an idea I got from a Charlotte Mason web site (I'll find the link), which was to write a nursery rhyme on a card twice, cutting the second one up into the separate words. Write each word one at a time on a board and say what it says. The child then finds it ("hide and seek" in our case) in the card wherever it appears. After all the words (we just did most, not all) have been done that way, give the cut up words and read them and voila the child has read the rhyme! In our case, it totally worked, AND it was fun for all, AND this "kind of thing" usually doesn't work for him, in that there's no motivation to do it. He knows all the sounds of the letters, but just can't and/or isn't interested in putting them together fast enough to really read yet, which is fine. But his worked! We did it twice so far, once with Jack be nimble, Jack be quick, Jack jump over the candlestick, and once with Fuechslein Fuechslein ohne Schwanz verlor die Ehre voll und ganz from Kurdische Maerchen in German. He could put the words in order after mixing, and read the words at random too. FUN!

He never went back and looked at them though I kept them up and visible, but that's fine. As long as he enjoyed it, and it seemed to be at a good level for him, it's at the least fun, and at the best planting seeds that will bear fruit one day. Now that that worked so well, I'm so eager to try out some more ideas, and it's SO great to know that my brother is willing and took the initiative himself to offer his help too. So I thank him deeply and gladly accept his offer, I just really had to say all this other stuff too! :)

Danforth Memoirs #2: Sneeky Times

2007-02-23T00:57:00.000-05:00

Once, when babysitting the Grignolo girls—no, every time I babysat the Grignolo girls—I was ambushed and begged for hours to tell stories of “bad” things I had done. Lucky for them, and for their parents, these things may have been sneaky but not entirely out of the range of “wholesome”. I hope you will enjoy the stories as much as they did.

Having exhausted my possibilities for convincing friends here in Arlington to do sneaky things with me, I was happy to find companions in Germany for this as yet unexplored part of my identity. Eva Krahnen, on Onkel Werner’s street, was perfect. Tante Hannelore didn’t think I should play with her, and though I’m not totally sure of her reputation, I knew she was “wild” and soon we were off on our “erster Streich”.

I’m still not sure whether any of this was premeditated, but anyway, we were off on our bikes, as usual, pretending they were our horses, and found ourselves riding towards a nearby residential development that was still very much under construction. The Bauarbeiter were no longer there, or were taking a break. We snuck around, and finally found a way into a shell of a house by way of a basement window. We climbed all over the place, and decided to start collecting glass bottles. There were TONS of them. I think most of them were water bottles, but if I’m not mistaken some of them were beer bottles too. We collected and collected, and came up with a plan to smuggle them out and collect lots of Pfand for them. We rode home and convinced Tante Hannelore to take us to the store with two huge garbage bags full of empty glass bottles in the trunk. She did it! She seemed a little suspicious and confused, but I guess her hospitable impulse triumphed and she took us with a minimum of interrogation and just a few sideward glances.

At Rewe, our favorite neighborhood grocery store, usually accessible by bicycle through a labyrinth of paths and neighborhoods, we commenced to cash in and buy LOTS of candy and Apfel Strudel.

That summer, we also buried a stash of sugar cubes in the clump of trees in front of our favorite horses, Lucky and Pilot. We had been told by the owner not to give them sugar, but obviously that didn’t stop us.

I’ll save the teenage adventures for next time (trying to warm you up :)!

New Daily Notes Blog

2007-02-22T23:58:00.000-05:00

I finally decided to start a new blog simply for taking some quick notes every day (or close to every day) about what we do: http://imrro.blogspot.com/ (under links "Daily Notes").

In September I started taking notes on paper and in Word consistently every night, until the holidays came along (which is sad, because there was so much wonderful stuff going on! luckily I remember most of it...). The primary reason for the notes was in case we go the portfolio route once it comes time to show our progress at the end of the "school year", but of course it's wonderful to have as a journal too.

So, the daily notes blog will be a nice place to just jot things down at the end of the day, keeping this one for longer stories and my thoughts on things. It's probably mainly for me, but personally, I love reading the mundane details of people's daily homeschooling lives just as much as I do the highlighted stories, ideas and ramblings.

Imrro means "today" in Kurdish (the double R should actually be one R with a shallow U on top--forgot the name of those things), thus the name of the blog. FUN! I'm so excited--seems simple, but it's making keeping some notes SO much easier.

I got the idea from Here in the Bonny Glen which I've been enjoying lately.

A Chess Set and Four Fillings

2007-02-03T11:21:00.000-05:00

I wrote this first part yesterday and got interrupted...:

Just sneaking a little break to share that the kids are jumping on the bed (fully clothed) and chanting ... "the glowing vulva diamond". Their quite different 2-year-old and 6-year-old varieties of fascination with things reproductive are expressing themselves in interesting ways lately. Kozhin just learned "the facts of life" and somehow knows just how much to share (vocabulary) and not to share (the amazing secret) with his sister. "OK, you go through the ... and I'll go through the ... and I'll meet you in the bladder, OK?" is the kind of thing they plan lately when they get ready to crawl through their play tunnel.

Hope this post doesn't end up on any weird search results or make anyone hit a firewall. I thought about not writing it, but gosh darn it it's cute and interesting and healthy and I want to write about it for the same reason I want my brother to be able to wear short sleeved shirts in the summer (ask later).

OK, next to me on the floor is something SO sweet. It makes me feel guilty for "tricking" the kids into going to bed. Well, I didn't exactly trick them, but... Kazha was exhausted around 6:45 and actually asked to go to bed. This was a wish easily fulfilled. Then Kozhin and I enjoyed a brief break from my recent strictness about computer use and looked up Bionicles online. Also looked up opposable thumbs and different kinds of joints, but anyway... We learned that Lego agreed to change a bunch of names of Bionicle characters a few years ago because the Maori in New Zealand threatened legal action against Lego for their copyrighted use of a bunch of Maori words as names for their products! Makes me want to learn whether they used any Maori mythology in the storyline.

So! What's next to me that's so sweet? Well, right after we turned off the computer and started setting up a quick chess game before bed, noticing that some of the pieces were missing, Kazha woke up and I went up to nurse her back to sleep. Kozhin just had to come up and whisper (his "whispering" is really loud) to me proudly that he had found little objects to use as the missing chess pieces and that everything was ready. I invited him to lie down next to us until Kazha fell asleep. In the ensuing coziness, he quickly fell asleep himself. I admit, this was partly planned, and I'm glad in that he really needs the sleep. But now he's sleeping in his clothes, without brushing his teeth, without reading a chapter in Die Unendliche Geschichte, and he'll probably wake up confused and still talking about Bionicle and all ready to play chess.

So next to me on the floor is the chess set, all perfect and ready to go, each piece standing proud and poised to be played, and it will be waiting there until morning. He put a smurf king and three almost identical little black lego pieces as pawns, a tiny bead as a knight, and a short kaleidoscope with a triangle-shaped magnetix piece on top facing forward as a castle. It all looks so deliberate, I can just see him finding each piece and arranging everything, eager to run up and tell me it was ready. And all I did was put him to sleep! I promise, I'll play 20 chess games tomorrow if he wants!!

Part of the reason I may be so sentimental about this is that Kozhin had four fillings this morning. We went to the dentist expecting him to get a shot of novocaine, laughing gas that may or may not work, a mini root canal and three small fillings. I was a nervous wreck, but of course didn't show it. We got there...and it couldn't have been better! What a relief. No novocaine, just laughing gas, which did work, and only fillings, no root canal (another dentist had done the exam on Friday), and "almost no" pain! I was in there with him, and he barely flinched, holding his hamster puppet. The dentist was great (I have awful teeth, so I've seen him a lot), not talking his ear off but saying just enough to explain what was happening, including that he was going to "tickle" the tooth with a special drill. Considering it was a maybe-root-canal, the cavity was pretty big, so I'm sure it would have hurt without the laughing gas. Now, if someone had told me that contractions during labor were going to "tickle" a little bit, I would have been slightly offended, but I think in this case it was a good move. One of the four holes was not a cavity but a broken tooth, probably broken by nightly teeth grinding! Yikes. I've heard him grinding them at night for years.

Laughing gas, according to Kozhin, "feels like you're dreaming but you're awake". He also held up his hamster a few times during the procedure. I thought it was so the hamster could see what was happening, but apparently it was so that he could make sure it really was his hamster, since the laughing gas made the hamster's fur feel "prickly". Afterwards he was dizzy--Kozhin, not the hamster--but after a few minutes he was fine and ate a big breakfast and hasn't even had any Tylenol or anything. Ah, relief!! I'll be back there on Friday for some fillings myself, and Kazha has to go back soon...let's hope I have something equally positive to report.

Another Homonym

2007-01-30T01:03:00.000-05:00

Today we celebrated my sister's 32nd birthday. As I told the Bahbies while we prepared the cards and presents, we were "going to meet for lunch at the Fish Market, go to my parents' house for cake and presents, and then spend the afternoon enjoying a slide show." We did these things, and had a wonderful time! So why, on the way home, was Kazha a little disappointed and confused? "Warum haben wir nicht gerutscht?!" she asked. It took me a moment to figure out what she meant. She had asked me why we hadn't gone down any slides. :)

Oxygen and Nail Clippers

2007-01-08T01:33:00.000-05:00

Kozhin: "If gas [oxygen] weren't invisible, we would be able to see anything else!" Quite true. I guess that's what it's like for creatures who live in the soil, not quite being able to see what's coming until they're there.

Kazha continues to amaze me by knowing where everything is. A few days ago, I mumbled to my sister that we didn't have any more nail clippers in the house (a common crisis), and Kazha apparently heard me, because she immediately shouted excitedly, "Yes we do! There are two downstairs in the drawer where the dangerous stuff is! In the kitchen!" (Doch, Mami! Wir haben zwei unten in der Schublade, wo die gefaehrlichen Sachen drin sind! In der Kueche!"). Lo and behold, there they were, two nail clippers shining up at me from the "junk" drawer. I wonder not only why she remembered this, and noticed that there were TWO, but why she knew it in the first place since she's not allowed in there. In any case, she now has two well-groomed little hands.

We just watched (Pshko and I, not the kids) An Inconvenient Truth last night. Wow.

Danforth Memoirs #1: Hvar

2006-12-29T01:00:00.000-05:00

My sister, father and I have started a project where we commit to writing something every week--whether it's one page or twenty--and share it with each other. This week is our third entry, and decided to all write about our memories of our 1984 family trip to the former Yugoslavia. Here's what I sent today. If you don't read anything else, read the "jellyfish incidents":

When my friend Christa Larry and I had sleepovers, we read Seventeen magazine, made prank phone calls, talked about boys and did each other’s hair. When Yuri and I had sleepovers, we played Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn, created countless magazines, stories and characters, roamed the woods and creeks and backyards of Arlington, and (just when you were wondering what this has to do with Croatia…) engaged in contests to see who could make herself cry the fastest by thinking about and desperately missing her last summer vacation.

For me, the most effortless tears were produced by thinking about our Yugoslavia trip. Maybe it was because I sensed that some of the people and places we had come to love so much were to go through Hell before we saw them again, maybe it was because I was twelve and knew that this might be my last vacation as someone who didn’t have to worry about things like shaving and acting like I wanted to be grown up, maybe it was just because it was until then the most magical and adventurous time of my life—probably all of the above.

I’ll start with Hvar.

Because we lived there for ten days (seems much longer!), we could sort of pretend we lived there, coming and going as we pleased, navigating the labyrinth of stone passageways and steps and gates, feeling at home in the restaurants and beaches and squares. Exploring the town barefoot on hot stone, everything so old it looked like it was part of the landscape and belonged there, red roofs, foot-polished stone, steep steps leading up the hill from the harbor and passageways connecting them all horizontally like a spider web, a donkey here and there.

Memories that stand out, and that I can still see today as clearly as I could see the pebbles through the blue-green water of Palmizana:

The first day, when Caroline and I realized we could navigate the way between Daddy’s place and ours, coming and going as we pleased like locals for whom it was second nature, feeling very proud of ourselves.

The satisfied feeling of living in a place where an evenings entertainment for most people was as simple as going out for a stroll outside in the town square, on the harbor, in the fresh air, simply to eat and drink and be among other people, enjoying the sounds of dark water, warm lights, and festive, relaxed conversation. Sometimes the air even at 10pm was almost hot, but dry and healthy feeling, and I felt at home outside.

The frantic feeling when Colin, almost 4, ran off in a fury into the korzo because our restaurant didn’t serve Gusti Sok! It didn’t take long to find him, but it was a long few minutes…

The innocence of having absolutely NO idea that Visco was flirting with Mami, and denying it when she brought it up.

The daily ride on Visco’s boat to “our” island, Palmizana, meeting him at the stone harbor, his “hair swept fiercely skyward” and everyone’s hair flying in the wind on that fast motorboat until we got to the island, where the short trek to “our” beach waited, as did moussaka in a restaurant where you could go wearing nothing but a bathing suit, the clearest water I had ever seen, jellyfish at 2pm, endless fun with our inflatable boat and oars, and not so surreptitious sea voyages out to spy on the Moana, a boat full of FKK passengers—what a thrill!!

The “jellyfish incident” (need I say more?).

The “other jelly fish incident”.

OK, I’ll explain them both. BOTH were Caroline’s fault J. In the first, we decided to head out in our inflatable boat during the hours in the afternoon when the jellyfish always came in and everyone wisely took a break from swimming. Normally we took a break with everyone else, but that day we had the brilliant idea that we’d go out, protected by our boat, and collect some. Jellyfish, that is. To do this, we used our oars to scoop the little slimy looking pink creatures into our bucket. We were doing pretty well, and it was lots of fun! Pretty far out by this point, we had gathered almost a whole bucketful…when Caroline—oops!—tipped over the entire contents INTO our boat. Into the boat in which we were sitting. This means that our rear ends, lower backs, legs, feet, and crotches were all in very close contact with lots and lots of jellyfish. We were sitting in them, basically. If you think jellyfish can’t sting through bathing suits, I’m sorry but you’re wrong. What’s worse, the water surrounding us, our only potential quick escape, was also full of jellyfish. We frantically rowed back to shore, this took forever, to the closest place, which was next to a houseboat where a very amused family stood watching us and laughing! We scrambled out, itching and burning and embarrassed, and ran to Mama, who quickly provided us with some bee-product ointment which worked pretty well, but not before we had experienced large patches of red, itchy welts all around our pelvic areas. Good story, crappy experience. I only wish I had a video of the whole thing. Thanks Mami, thanks bees!

Oh, and jellyfish incident #2? That was a bit later, off of Hvar itself. We were in an area not so touristy as some, and chanced upon a posse of local boys about 12-15 years old climbing around on some rocks. I was fascinated (so was Caroline, I’m sure). We went off in our good old boat, which had been patched many times by then, for a little cruise. Well, the sight of us apparently was too tempting for the boys, because no sooner had we made it a little ways out to sea, than we were faced with a very wild bunch of wiry teenage boys trying to catch us!! They were swimming fast, shouting words we didn’t understand, laughing, and we were terrified. “SCHNELLER!!!!!!!” We screamed at each other and rowed for dear life. It was almost as thrilling as being chased by goats in Kleve, but just a little more scary, since we weren’t asking for it this time. They were gaining on us. Soon we could see the hot Adriatic mid-day sun reflecting off their white teeth, the reflections of their handsome but too-close faces in the moving water, their eyes full of fun. I was scared, but something about me wanted them to catch up to us. I was twelve, after all. But my heart was pounding and I also was wondering whether they might not know their limits and try to dunk us, nothing being more terrifying than that. Then they were upon us, in a chaos of splashing water and arms, the boat overturned, I think, and I’m not sure what happened over the next few minutes, except that Caroline suddenly announced that she had been stung by a jellyfish! Could things possibly get any scarier? She swam off quickly to shore to get help. Poor Caroline. I’m not sure how or when I got to shore, but when I did, unscathed, and asked Caroline how her jellyfish sting was, she replied, “What jellyfish sting?” Ahem. She had not been stung after all—it had been an excuse to leave me to my own devices with the boys. I guess she knew I could handle it J

The thanks I felt when, after having left my bag full of Dinars on a stone bench in a busy square hours before, I returned to find it still there, with people sitting on either side of it, and it was still full of money.

Eating Yugoslavian Nutella, half vanilla half hazelnut on freshly baked bread every morning on our terrace.

The day trip to the interior of the island, leaving the busy harbor town behind, into the lavender fields, the rocky fragrant fields where goats stood on hot piles of stone, sunny blue sky, with Jakob Dulcic, into his village, where we were as always warmly welcomed, squirted with fresh goat milk, offered a bowl of sweet and creamy fresh goat milk and goat cheese, sweet grapes growing everywhere, exploring the village with children—I don’t even know who they were!—and trying out the few Serbo-Croatian words we knew.

Buying Fix und Foxi comics at the Kiosk, drinking Gusti Sok, eating saucy scampi and spicy pizza and lamb on the spit at our favorite place where Colin made a little friend who said his name was “Bone, like ‘Bogs Bone’”! The same place where Caroline and I noticed that a racily dressed woman kept passing us again and again and Mami mentioned that she was probably a “woman of the night”—what the heck is that?—we didn’t know but we had to find out so we followed her to where she disappeared and tried for a long time to figure out where she had gone.

The hikes up to the warmly lit castle above the town, hermit crabs, strawberry juice in a Gusti Sok container, the church that wouldn’t let us in because we were wearing shorts, wearing sunglasses for the first time in my life, feeling just slightly embarrassed to be German in a place filled with German tourists, watching a German tourist lift up her boob to smear suntan lotion underneath, Coca-Cola in glass bottles, finding Gordana’s place and getting her attention by calling up to her window, “GORDAAAANAAAA!” and being warmly welcomed by a complete stranger who gave us ice cream on her roof and chatted with Mami.

Finally, here is an excerpt from my diary, starting with our departure by boat from Split. I didn’t write as much about Hvar as I thought I had, and it’s kind of a lot of details that I guess were important to me at the time, but here it is:

Heute morgen war es ziemlich hektisch—als alles gepackt war, gingen wir nach unten in den Lobby wo Zvonimir auf uns wartete. Er brachte uns zum Boot in der Stadt. Es war ein sehr grosses Boot und hiess Slavija I. In dem Restaurant drauf tranken wir was, aber die meiste Zeit spielten Kakau und ich Pfennig Basketball. Endlich sagte Dedi nach 2 Stunden dass wir gleich da waren. Alle gingen auf den Deck. Als wir den ersten Blick von Hvars Hauptstadt, auch Hvar, bekamen, war es sooo schoen—ich wusste dass es mir gefallen wuerde! Ich sah zuerst den Hafen mit so vielen verschiedenen Farben und Maesten. Dahinter war eine riesige Fussgaengerzone aus Steinen mit vielen Baenken und vielen Leuten! Und dann der Markt: ich liebe alle Maerkte und dieser war auch sehr schoen. Dahinter ging der Berg hoch und Alles was man sah waren alte Steinwaender und rote Daecher. Der ganze Blick war so froehlich! Als wir ausstiegen begruesste uns sofort eine froehliche Frau mit schwarzen Haaren und ein junger Mann, die ich beide nicht kannte. Die Frau musste gehen, aber der Mann nahm unsere Koffer und zeigte uns zu unserem Haus. Es waren schwere Koffer und ein langer Weg, aber der Mann lies Daddy die Koffer nicht tragen! Von ihrem Gespraech erfuehr ich, dass der junge Mann der Sohn der Frau war und letztes Jahr hatte Dedi auf Hvar eine Weile bei ihr gewohnt. Als wir ankamen war alles ein grosses Durcheinander. 2 alte Frauen begruessten uns und holten ein huebsches junges Maedchen, die Englisch sprechen konnte. Sie war ungefaehr 20. Andauernd redeten sie hin und her aber endlich erfuhren wir, dass wir 2 Naechte in einem Zimmer wohnen wuerden und danach ein ganzes Apartment. Wir sassen an einem Tisch auf einem grossen Balkon. Die eine aeltere Frau, der das erste Zimmer gehoerte, verabschiedete sich und die andere, der das kleine Apartment gehoerte, brachte uns selbstgemachten Traubensaft. Er war toll aber SEHR stark, und wir mussten es mit viel Wasser mischen. Dedi ging, um zu sehen, ob die Frau die uns abholte einen Platz fuer ihn hatte. Sie hies Maria und ihr Sohn Josko. Als er weg war, brachte die aeltere Frau uns selbst gemachte Suppe. Mmm—sie war gut! Alle sind hier so hilfsbereit und freundlich wenn man sie kennt! Dedi kam zurueck, ass von der Supper, und erzaehlte uns, dass er das Zimmer gekriegt hat. Dann gingen wir alle in sein Apartment. Mami sagte uns dann, dass wir zum Zimmer gehen konnten, unsere Badeanzuege anzuziehen.

Soon we had a somewhat tearful good-bye from Pa, to whom we waved as he climbed up the stairs to his boat, until we left Hvar ten days later on another boat, the Liburnija, to Dubrovnik where we met Pa again for another unforgettable leg of the journey farther south along the Adriatic highway.

Since Nobody Reads This I Can Brag :)

2006-12-23T01:49:00.000-05:00

Kazha is 2 1/2. Tonight at Border's she wanted me to buy her a Strawberry Shortcake book called "Meet Blueberry Muffin", so I did. When we got home, she asked me what the book was called. I said, "Meet Blueberry Muffin". She said, "Not MEET Blueberry Muffin!!!!!" (exasperated). I said, "No, no, not meat as in "Fleisch", meet as in "kennenlernen". She said, "Oh, also es ist ein Homonym!"

At Kozhin's Tae Kwon Do belt ceremony tonight, he ran to offer his rose to a boy he didn't know because he had noticed that boy's rose had been de-petaled.

Halloween?

2006-11-06T15:30:00.000-05:00

Well, I signed in to post something finally, and discovered this saved draft I'd forgotten about. So, here's Halloween!

"Quackula"

Now what was it I was going to write about...?

Interdisciplinary Fun

2006-11-04T15:10:00.000-05:00

Tried to post this last night but couldn't:

Let's see how fast I can type without waking up Kazha. They're both sleeping in the big bed behind me--we've been cleaning up the kids' bedroom in such a way that created more of a mess in the meantime, and so they're sleeping in here, to avoid tripping over countless toys on their usual mid-night journey over to join us.

Sometime in the past few weeks, we talked and read about both Greek mythology and electricity, but not in any connection with each other and not particularly recently. Kozhin today suddenly said (in German), "Now I get it--Zeus gathers a bunch of electrons and then just shoots them out of his fingertips to the Earth, and that's how he makes lightning!" (notice use of the present tense). Thus the title for this post. It's so exciting--I didn't have a clue how electricity worked before we read the Magic School Bus book about it. I wish they'd write one about how computers and the Internet work. I use lots of things of which I don't understand the workings (an example of when it's better not to use correct grammar...).

Criminy! I wanted to upload some Halloween photos but something's not working, so I'll have to actually write something. Let's see...we've been sick. Kozhin had a 24-hour fever--poor guy. He was MUCH better today, but we still spent two whole days at home, which was actually kind of refreshing. Getting in and out of the house is such a production that when we have a break from it we actually accomplish a lot. In this case, I was a domestic maniac: Yesterday while Kozhin was sick lying on the couch all day, watching lots of TV which is all he wanted (something we rarely do these days, except Monday and Friday nights--Power Rangers Mystic Force and Movie Night with Onkel Colin, respectively), I managed to make: french onion soup, fresh carrot juice mixed with bought orange and cherry juice, pumpkin pie from scratch, like, from a pumpkin that I had to steam first plus pastry crust that Kazha and I almost got carpal tunnel syndrome rubbing, prepared the seeds for roasting the next day, soaked a bunch of dried apricots for a Kurdish Cejin dish (a little late, I know...), pasta with tomato sauce, I know I'm missing something but anyway it was a lot, and apparently helped Kozhin feel better pretty fast. Oh, and countless cups of tea with sugar and lemon juice. Today I made--gasp!--tandoori chicken and fried (not roasted) the pumpkin seeds in oil and salt and garlic powder. Kazha loves them, which is fitting since we have been known to call her "Kazhita Pepita".

I have to balance out what I wrote the other day about Kozhin's public school experience. I really needed to get that stuff out. There were certain things that went along with school that really surprised and disappointed me, and that I wish were different. But I have to admit that there are lots of things he really liked, and I'm trying to see if he can share those with me so that we can use them as ideas for things we could continue to do together. Today he found an old koosh ball and told me they used them at Meeting and that he liked Meeting and would like to do Meeting when we homeschool. He said without my asking about school at all. We decided that of course we could do that, tossing the ball around and sharing things and solving problems and planning. Of course, it will be quite a bit different with mom and a toddler, but I'm looking forward to trying it out. Actually, we've been doing something similar with our little Circle, saying verses and lighting a candle and singing some songs and doing some fingerplays, but we've been skipping it lately. Either way, it will be a good thing to get in the habit of doing, and I'm looking forward to including Babaki when possible, since we so rarely have a chance to sit down in a focused way as a family. Usually we're running out the door whenever he's here because we want to DO something together. When I asked, "center time" is the other thing he said he liked, which is when they got to choose from various centers like art, listening... I'll have to figure out a way to do this without it seeming contrived, since part of the fun was probably choosing a center with a friend and working on something together--maybe we can invite someone over and have it be a weekly thing. Hope my "centers" aren't a flop! :) Or that Kazha doesn't try to put the materials in a cup of water, which she seems to want to do with everything these days!

Today, after yesterdays TV extravaganza, we're back to our good old long stretches of imaginary play, which seem to be absolutely necessary for both the kids' mental and emotional health, and probably development of their imagination. My goodness--those kids can play. I LOVE it. It reminds me a lot of my sister and me as kids--we spent most of our childhoods "being" other characters, and it eventually congealed into an entire system called "Froehliche Familie" which I'll have to explain someday. We still sometimes call each other "Susi" and "Karla" and celebrate the FFFFF. Basically it's a huge family of 100 people that operates a worldwide system of bus stops where any child who is lost or has mean parents can go and get picked up by the Froehliche Familie ("Happy Family", a name we took from a Chinese card game we got as a party favor), to be taken to their house, which is a hotel, and where something fun is always going on. More later...

Anyway, we also played Pick-up Sticks, Memory, das Verflixte Schildkroetenspiel, and Connect Four, made origami frogs out of our latest Click magazine (Kozhin really loves getting mail--I need to get him a pen pal--my little pretend notes from characters aren't cutting it anymore!), and read out of A Knight At Dawn (Magic Tree House series), and had movie night with Onkel Colin--dare I say it?: Revenge of the Sith, with the gory parts skipped over. He eats this stuff up, and Colin explains every detail when needed, which really helps. Good vs. Evil.

A Spindle Out Of Legos

2006-10-20T12:10:00.000-04:00

I love that Kozhin just built a spindle out of legos.

Reasons To Stay Up Late

2006-10-19T00:52:00.000-04:00

Tonight the kids were a little rowdy going to bed. This isn't anything out of the ordinary, but anyway, as we were lying there all cozy and I was trying to get them to settle down, Kozhin said, "Ich hab' Dich so viel lieb, bis in den Kern im Herz von Gott!" (I love you all the way into the seed in the heart of God!") . Worth staying up a little late for.

Halloween Cookies

2006-10-13T01:27:00.000-04:00

This evening we made cookies. Notice that Kazha's mouth is totally full of dough:

After I hid the dough, they got down to deco- rating...

You may be able to see that Kozhin entirely smothered his handmade bat cookie with a pile of little ghosts (he ate the whole thing):

They are dancing and chanting "We want sugar":

While the cookies were baking, they gathered stuff for our "nature table", which ended up being a massive pile of leaves, acorns, and little pumpkin gourds I had put outside. I said that it was wonderful, and that we could arrange it however we wanted later. Kozhin's reply (translated): "No, it's just right like this, because Nature is messy!" This is a child who complains when I clean up because "messy rooms are cozy". His sister tonight, on the other hand, in a not isolated maneuver, purposely "spilled" "just a little" water on the rug so that she could then shout, "oh!" and run to the kitchen, grab some paper towels, and clean up. As for the leaves, we might talk about the elaborate, intricate, and often quite un-messy nature of Nature, and then of course Chaos, and the way we humans might decide to arrange things on our little altar, and seeing as humans are members of the World that whatever little or grand arrangements may bring us comfort or fulfillment of artistic or spiritual expression or joy are also a rightful expression of Nature herself. Yes, I'm getting my period soon.

"How Is Homeschooling Going?"

2006-10-02T23:07:00.000-04:00

Well, it's high time I posted something about homeschooling. I've been thinking about writing about it and always seem to get caught up in something else. That often happens when there's something kind of all-consuming and important that I want to write about that's sort of the major focus and at the same time the backdrop for everything else. Well, I finally ended up writing my father a long, unplanned response by e-mail, about homeschooling, so why don't I just paste the thing here? My father really liked the slide show "Animal School" (see bottom of previous post), and wrote me back to say so, and also to say that he had asked Kozhin what we were going to study the next day, and that there hadn't been a clear response :) So that prompted this:

If you ask Kozhin what he's going to study one day or the next, he won't know. He doesn't think that far ahead, and we don't talk about what we're going to "study" from one day to the next either (I don't think he would have known that in "real" school either...), unless it's an event or something, then he'd know, and I don't think we've really used the word "study" either.

So far the days have been more than filled and fulfilled by reading books together and playing outside and having conversations and playing games while Kazha is taking her nap.
The few times when I've sat down and focused on something that would be considered academic [I'll explain more of what this actually is later] he's done it gladly (unlike in school).

Although as I told you I'm not as "unschooly" as some (who may for example not believe in bedtimes, food restrictions, or introducing much or setting limits for their children, which may work for them), I do very much believe that forcing someone to learn something is totally futile, feels wrong, and is unnecessary.

Considering that I think I sent him to school too early, I think he has some catching up to do with just playing. He needs LOTS of time to get lost in his imaginative games, and I'm letting him have it, which I think is perfectly healthy.

He is noticeably more relaxed and noticeably more at ease and respectful towards adults since school has faded into the past. He barely ever watches TV or even asks for it, whereas before it was his way of having to wind down after a long hectic day where he was told what to do all day long, and what to be interested in. He's nicer to me, doesn't have as many "meltdowns", and, ironically, he's more independent in many ways. He feels at ease to both wear a manly Power Ranger shirt and at the same time say he loves pink. At school he spent the first four months trying to convince the girls that boys can like pink too, and finally gave up around Christmas. He likes it again. He listens to music that he had decided was boring during the school year, he listens to books he had decided were boring during the school year. He dances unselfconsciously and says things like, "Ich fuehl mich einfach TOLL!" [I feel just GREAT!"], things that wouldn't have happened even at home during the school year.

As for learning, you shouldn't worry about "lessons"--between simply talking about things, reading about things, and being out and about, I believe he's doing fine. I don't think kids that age can help but learn unless they're locked away somewhere. I refuse to force him to read and write, but he gladly reads to me a few pages of Green Eggs and Ham every day or so, and eagerly deciphers postcards and letters that his favorite characters write to him, and writes them back. If it were a dry series of "learn to read" book he was required to read because it was "time to read" he would have been as stubborn as a mule and I could have forced him to read them to me--but why? Why should we?

We play spin the globe and go to whatever country our finger lands on by visiting his picture atlas, and then that usually ends up a fantasy game where we get up off the couch and "are" various people and fly to the country and then Kazha joins in and we spend the rest of the day in that country.

He counts all the time, we play numerous board games and card games that use math in one way or another, food provides zillions of opportunities for US to learn basic math concepts (why this morning was the Flinse, once folded into fourths, have four times as much honey per bite as right after i smeared the honey on the unfolded Flinse?), we play Mad Libs (parts of speech), today we spent the morning at the library, afternoon babysitting where he learned how to play baseball from his (gasp!) nine-year-old friend, tomorrow he has Tae Kwon Do and goes to work with Pshko while I go to music with Kazha, and in the afternoon we're meeting at a park with his (gasp!) just 5-year-old friend. In between, he will express his obsessions with Digimon, Pokemon, Star Wars, Lord of the Rings, etc. in various ways and build things with Legos and K'nex until the cows come home.

He will get moody every once in a while and whine and annoy Kazha, but I will be there to comfort him and talk about it, I will be there to tie his shoes "even though" he's six.

If he gets a stomachache I will believe him immediately and not say, "Oh, he was smiling so I thought he must not really have a stomach ache", which is what his teacher told me in the afternoon when apparently his stomachache got so bad he couldn't smile anymore while telling his teacher about it and she finally sent him to the clinic. If that's how much he had to pull himself together in school...

He also does NOT have to sit "criss cross applesauce" if he says it hurts his legs! And even if it doesn't hurt his legs, I don't give a hoot how he sits as long as he's comfortable and isn't hurting anyone else!

If he has something important and exciting to tell me, I will drop everything and listen attentively, not say oh, that's nice, now get back to your reading like his teacher did IN FRONT OF ME! I thought she could at least have pretended to be interested in his walk to school through the woods since I was there! Maybe she was trying to make a point.

And if someone asks him, "why are you so small, and why are you wearing that [overalls that apparently looked like they were meant for a toddler]?", then I will try to think of something to say that will make everyone feel good about themselves--when I asked the teacher at the first conference if his size had been an issue, she responded by telling me about this one incident and then laughed as though hinting that I should start dressing him in clothes that other children wouldn't be tempted to question. Unfortunately, it worked--I never dressed him in those overalls again. She also said it was just something he'd have to get used to--sure he'll have to get used to it, but is that ALL she had to say about the question? Where is her compassion?

I will not say NO unnecessarily. If there is a toy that means a lot to him, he may keep it with him at all times. I will not make him feel like it is less worthy of his and my attention than something else just because it is not a "piece of nature" and I will not grab it from him. Kozhin took his beloved Power Rangers Mystic Morpher--kind of like a little cell phone to the uninitiated--to school one day. I had said he could keep it in his pocket. Apparently it had fallen out of his pocket or he had dropped it at recess. After school, he told me had lost it and was quite upset. We stayed and played a while. After a while, the teacher approached us with the lost Mystic Morpher! We were so excited! I told him, "Look, Ms. ... found your Mystic Morpher!" We thought she was excited too. His eyes lit up and he reached for it and took it, but his eyes met those of his teacher, now squatting down to talk to us, sternly, about NOT bringing toys to school, and that it was a great distraction and kept coming out of his pocket. I piped in and said I didn't know they weren't allowed to bring toys to school. She said it was ok to bring a "piece of nature" for example for show and tell, but nothing else, especially not something from a TV character. Kozhin apparently wasn't listening attentively enough, as he was looking down at his Mystic Morpher as she talked--she grabbed it quite forcefully from his hands and got him to listen. He was close to tears. She was normally a pretty calm teacher, but was apparently really peeved at our nerve at bringing a toy to school. He told me afterward he had not even taken it out of his pocket in school (just at recess), and I believe him.

I will notice that he doesn't like puzzles, that he shrugs his shoulders a lot, that he has an incredible imagination (all things I brought up at the conference, and she didn't have much to say in terms of a response), and I will not act all surprised and wonder that he does way above average on his standardized phonemic awareness tests, and I will not say that although kids have all kinds of different learning styles the fact remains that only a few of them are really needed for school and those for better or worse are the ones that they'll have to spend most of their time learning to try to excel in.

OK, see? You tell me you like a simple video and I go on and on--hope that wasn't too much information :) I'm holding back. Anyway, I know you know Kozhin and maybe he just seems like the same old Kozhin, but believe me, I live with the guy, and I am SO glad he's with us instead of in school.

Whew! The brown parts I just added now. I guess I should go thank his teacher for speeding along my decision to take him out of school :) I should also mention that he was in a public school, but it was an alternative public school with mixed-age classrooms and relatively lots of time outside, lunch in the classroom, small class sizes, and awareness of children developing at different rates, and yet... that's probably part of my profound disappointment with our experience there. Worksheets all day like some Kindergartens? No, but lots of very, very unnecessary and potentially harmful stuff. I even heard a pre-school teacher there telling the kids to stay in line, that they were walking "like babies".

Kozhin's art teacher told him not to scribble. In Kindergarten. He brought home a huge painting, I told him I loved it, and he said, "My teacher doesn't like it." It was supposed to be a self portrait, and apparently he didn't follow the instructions. It was BEAUTIFUL.

Farewell, Summer!

2006-09-29T02:07:00.000-04:00

Our backyard lagoon on Kiawah (we're watching an alligator!):

most days looked like this...

Luray Caverns

Kozhin's actual 6th birthday at our place with family:

at Kozhin's oldest friend's birthday party (as in, they've been friends the longest):

And this (click on "Animal School" in the middle of the screen):
http://www.raisingsmallsouls.com/

Don't Watch This At Work

2006-09-25T03:58:00.000-04:00

http://www.thesuperficial.com/2006/01/26/david_hasselhoff_is_hooked_on.html

Bye For Now

2006-08-24T19:20:00.000-04:00

We're off to the VA Homeschoolers Conference in Richmond tomorrow and then to Kiawah Island, SC for a week with my sister!! I don't know if I'll have access to the Internet there. We've had a busy day starting with my dentist appointment at 8:30 this morning, which turned out to be just a filling and not a root canal--YES!--wow do I love good, kind, communicative, competent dentists--cleaned out the van--quite a feat--vacuumed it, did a bunch of laundry, bought snacks for the trip, started packing, and just came back from Kozhin's first Tae Kwon Do test, after which he is now a white-with-yellow-stripe belt--he did GREAT!! The teacher, who is wonderful, was a little less effusive with his praise than I would have been, but then again, he's not his mother. He definitely did great. Dinnertime, packing time, snuggling time, find-my-passport-since-I-lost-my-drivers-license time, not necessarily in that order.

Perhaps I'll find a way to post on the trip.

Oh, and I have to get these pictures on the computer anyway to make room for the new ones!

They're having the beginning Kurdish class again so I'm looking into drumming classes until January!!! (sis has said Tuesday evenings are MINE! a good thing for everybody)

Cakes and Namesakes

2006-08-22T00:04:00.000-04:00

We just celebrated KOZHIN'S 6th BIRTHDAY!!! Yippee!!!!! I'll see if I can post some pictures tomorrow, but for right now, he and we had a great time, and here is something very interesting that made my chin almost drop off my face when I stumbled across it a few months ago:

http://www.samanomer.com/biography.htm

His kids have almost the same names as my kids!!! I still haven't listened to any of his music. I just e-mailed him :) OK, so I admit, I didn't stumble across this information (that really would have been strange)--I was actually googling their names and found this. Incidentally, whenever I google Kozhin's name most of what I get is Russian. Maybe Kazha's too, I can't quite remember. Anyway, I'm really curious if this musician will write me back! He was even born in 1972, like Pshko and me!

OK, one thing about Kozhin's birthday: after he had opened all his presents and we had all stuffed ourselves with strawberry-raspberry cheesecake (mine, requested by birthday boy), heavenly pear cake (Undi), and plum cake (Undi), Kozhin went around thanking everyone. He got to my father but paused, went back to my mother and asked, "Undi, is everything from you also from Papaw?" She said yes (she is the one who does the birthday shopping), and his response: "Oh, so I don't have to thank him then too, right?" We all laughed, and fortunately the little lad wasn't offended. He promptly went and thanked Papaw :)

An afterthought, but really in the forefront of my thoughts now that Kozhin is asleep:

I really should have found out what happens with Gollum before endearing him even more to Kozhin by "being" him. I didn't know when I wrote about it a few days ago. How crushing that was. Really, I felt like an idiot for letting him watch that part. He acted like he was glad, which surprised me and breaks my heart now. That evening, yesterday evening, when he was getting into bed, his lip started quivering and he asked me if Gollum was thrown into Mount Doom (he knew he had been). He said he had pretended to be happy when he watched that part because he didn't want me to know he was sad about it. I told him, for what it's worth, that he could always tell me how he felt, even if it was something sad. I'm amazed at how he apparently pulled himself together while he watched. How to deal with it? Feel guilty for having watched it? Too late. I think it was an overall good thing we watched it, I just don't want this to be the one pivotal image he remembers. All the fighting (we did cover his eyes and ears during a few parts, some at his request, some at ours, like the Smeagol strangling his fishing partner part for example) was no problem, but Gollum had somehow won his heart, and we had both hoped out loud that he would by the end be redeemed and become fully Smeagol himself again, boy were we wrong. So we talked about it, I reminded him it was only a movie, and not real though it seemed real, and that since stories can be continued, and there was a theme of characters being thought dead when they really weren't, that we'd continue with that theme by saying that Gollum had actually survived the lava by using a fire-shield and had escaped by yet another secret tunnel and was, as we spoke, climbing and sneaking back down the mountain. I continued to be Gollum telling him about this, at his request. I also reminded him that the person who played Gollum was really an actor, who looked just like Smeagol, and that he of course was alive and kicking (gee, I hope he is) and that we could see him talking about all this in the "making of" DVDs, reinforcing again that this is, in the end, only a story, life going on all around it and after it ends. But stories are powerful. I really want to write another book where Gollum survives and becomes good again, even if it's just a short little thing, for Kozhin. He said, "But part of him was still Smeagol, part of him was still good!" Oh, I'm going to tear myself apart if I keep thinking about this. Oh, and the finger! No, but he didn't mean to bite it off, he couldn't even see it, he just sensed the ring was there--that's all he cares about! I have it: maybe I will write a continuation, maybe with Kozhin, but also, I think we should read the books. It will be slower, potent in a different way, with time to digest and relive the scenes and understand things better. OK, hopefully a few solutions.

Biscuits, Beans, and Jazz

2006-08-20T16:24:00.000-04:00

Faced with almost nothing "real" to eat in the house, I ended up making black bean salad for the first time, and was amazed that this simple version took literally less than five minutes (less refers to time, not minutes)! It's just a can of black beans, a fresh tomato chopped, an onion chopped finely, some kind of beer vinegar (all we had), olive oil, garlic powder (I was lazy), salt and pepper. Yum! Kozhin just ate a bunch too.

This morning I baked biscuits--I think I'll get one in a moment with some coffee! Kazha's sleeping, Kozhin's playing on the Game Boy Scott gave him last week.

We just watched the last half of the last Lord of the Rings movie with my brother, who came over. Before that we spent the morning eating biscuits with Trader Joe's "nutella" and lingonberry jam--guess where that was from--and watching Max and Ruby and Maggie and the Ferocious Beast. Then we played some indoor soccer and wrestled and cleaned up.

Yes we're having a lazy, loungy day. Not so yesterday. We left at 8:30am to go to a lake in the foothills of Maryland with friends and didn't get back until 9:30pm after a good-bye party for a family who's moving back to Germany--they're in our German playgroup. We drove back, giddy from the fun day and evening, with the windows open, letting in the warm summer evening wind and blasting hot jazz as we watched the posh Georgetown revelers and crossed the darkly glittering Potomac. Kazha noticed jazz for the first time two nights ago at the Arlington County Fair, where my sister danced to it with her, and apparently my sister pointed out the saxophone, because in the car during the hot jazz, Kazha asked me if I could please put some saxophone into the song! Mami, kannst Du bitte ein Saxophone in dieses Lied machen?

Gollum and German Syntax

2006-08-18T00:11:00.000-04:00

I've spent much of the past few days "being" Gollum and Smeagol (whom the children have befriended). Kozhin started out by saying that he wanted to tease Gollum, swing him in circles over his head by one arm and throw him against the wall! As awful as this sounds, I admit that Gollum has the same effect on me. Actually, whoever is reading this is probably more appalled that I let my almost-6-year-old watch Lord of the Rings. He loves it (so do I, all the more so because of my brother's endless patience in explaining parts that can be enhanced by explaining), and we've been watching it in smaller stretches. Anyway, after saying these mean things about Gollum for a few minutes, he started having a change of heart, and decided Gollum was his friend. So half the time I have to talk in voice like Gollum's (which in my case sounds like a hoarse Phillipina Grover) and creep around with arthritic-looking fingers.

Since we've thus been spending more time speaking English (although Gollum, we've found out, does speak a little German--they're not as flexible with all characters), I've had more of a chance to hear Kazha speaking English, which, I now know, has almost all German syntax when she speaks it. Listen to these, from today:

--Look it on, Mommy!
--What doing you? (I've heard her say "What are you doing?" quite a few times, though)
--Oh, shoot, I typed this as a draft and now I still can't remember the sentence, but believe me, it was a long, complicated sentence with perfect--German--syntax).

Notes

2006-08-15T01:38:00.000-04:00

Kazha was suddenly gone this evening, and I found her at the top of the stairs, with one of the horse's-head-on-a-stick toys and its bridle over her head like she was riding the horse. "Hallo, Mami! Ich bin hier! Ich bin nur in meinem Land!"

This morning a friend of ours gave me two Kurdish picture dictionaries she's ordered online!! How I love her! One is a board book and the other a larger, longer version. Each word is written in English, Kurmanci, and Sorani! Anyway, tonight Kazha wanted me to read them to her. She brought them over and said, "Kannst Du mir bitte diese vorlesen, Mami? Ich kann nicht Kurdisch reden! Kannst Du mir bitte es lehren?"

Kozhin is into "homonyms". At dinner, I used the word "was", meaning "something" (it's actually "irgendwas" but you can say just "was" too). He said, "Hey, you just said a homonym!" I was a little confused until he explained that sometimes "was" is the beginning to a question, but I was using it in a different way, to mean, "something".

I finally sat down and read some John Holt tonight--can you tell by the little anecdotes above?? :) It's really good. Since I've started reading more online with clicking and graphics and all, I think I was really put off by all the text, but once you start it's really clearly written, and so interesting and with such warmth and insight. I can't wait to read more.

This weekend we had Colin's birthday, really something to celebrate, and allowing Kozhin to be given a GameBoy, wondering if it was the right choice, and a wonderful long walk in our woods, throwing rocks in the stream, reading Nils Holgersson on the field, Kazha having and getting over a fit at a child having the gall to sit in *her* airplane at the playground, Kozhin entering his own world of power moves and magic and moving out of self consciousness and time entirely, snow cones on the way back, grape and pineapple with condensed milk, stopping here and there to throw dust.

Good night!

Kazha's First Joke

2006-07-30T21:22:00.000-04:00

Lying in bed last week, lights already out, we said good night, Kazha paused, giggled, and said, "Ich hab' einen Witz! ...GUTE NACHTIGALL!" and continued giggling while I tried to get over my shock and laugh. Fortunately, her joke is translateable: "I have a joke! ...GOOD NIGHTINGALE!" Not bad, not bad... Today she made another one, also announced: "Dr. Swordman instead of Dr. Bordman" (her doctor's name is Dr. Bordman). :)

We've been busy with playdates, birthday parties, swimming, Tae Kwon Do, guests (hi Donna, who doesn't read blogs! :), and relaxing. It's still hot. The one thing we haven't gotten around to lately is our garden. Luckily it rained a bit yesterday. Lots of nice big chunks of time spent outdoors instead of running from one thing to another and changing car seats all the time. So, we're busy and tired when we get home, but it feels like a good and not so hectic kind of busy.

Earlier, upstairs, I told Kazha that some girls don't nurse anymore. Just to let her know, in a matter-of-fact sort of way. Her response: "I'm a baby dragon!" and proceded to nurse...

Kozhin has been more relaxed, happy, friendly, caring, and has a better memory than I remember experiencing him in the last year or so, that is, since he started Kindergarten. It's so hard for me not to proselytize (is that the right word, but secularized?), about this, since I guess it really isn't for everybody, but the evidence is so clear to me, at least short term--more about that later.

OK, time to change Kazha's diaper, show her her poop, and go to bed. She's telling me that it's going to be both brown and green. I wish I could portray her intonation here!

BAD

2006-07-18T23:47:00.000-04:00

There's a reason I was obsessed with the song Bad by U2 when I was in high school. I couldn't comprehend what it was really about, though I had read it, but if anyone knows what it's about they'll know what I mean. I would listen to it over and over again and sob. My father grounded me a few times, including taking away my beloved stereo, but I would sneak and listen to that song on my walkman with the doors closed. Nobody could possibly try to talk to me while it was playing; I wouldn't have answered. My friend and I went to listen to a U2 concert at RFK stadium without tickets outside the stadium, and they started to play Bad. I threw my head in my friend's lap and cried for the whole song. And I mean cried. I just downloaded the song and forced myself to listen to it for the first time in years, for the first time since I know why it probably meant so much to me. The first note sent my deepest emotions into convulsions, and it felt great. It felt great to know that my brother is alive and healing.

100 Degrees

2006-07-17T22:45:00.000-04:00

It is HOT.

When I was 9 months pregnant with Kozhin in August six years ago, in Knoxville, Tennessee with no AC, I still "loved hot, humid, 100 degree weather". I still liked it for a while after he was born, though a little less than before . . . and then I went through my first trimester with Kazha. It was August of 2000. I don't think I have EVER been more ecstatic at the coming of Fall. 24-hours-a-day nausea in DC in August is not fun. At least we had AC at that point, but I think that did it. That and nursing. Nursing is cozy when it's cold out, and of course it's also cozy all the time, but you have to admit it's a bit more comfortable not to touch ANYTHING, much less anything with body heat. Kozhin seems to have inherited Pshko's sensitivity to hot weather. We tried going to a Mongolian festival yesterday, did last about an hour, but with plenty of whining, even though I was dumping water over his head. I guess it's not Pshko's excess body hair that is to blame. And no, Iraqi Kurdistan is not "in the desert", so it's not what he's used to.

I haven't been writing much lately, because I've been falling asleep putting the kids to bed, and I suspect it has something to do with the heat, but also with the fact that we're in week three of both kids with me all day--7 days a week, mind you, since Pshko is never here and when he's here he's on the phone or in the shower--and I'm just bushed by the end of the day. Kazha's also resisting her nap, probably partly because she senses that Kozhin's around, so it's a double whammy. We are having lots of fun though, I must say. I look forward to observing, participating in, and documenting changes as we move away from school and into life without it.

Today, OK, a break from prose:

-Breakfast (toast with butter and jam, frozen berries blended with cottage cheese, or cereal? All three! that was Kozhin, Kazha was barely awake when we left)
-Kazha to Undi & Papaw
-Kozhin to swimming lesson (he put his head under for the first time, twice!!!)
-To my parents to pick up Kazha, say hi to my brother, and get some yogurt-jello popsicles
-Home for a lunch of quesadillas, nectarines, and pears
-A bit of drawing together in Kazha's clever little drawing book (more on that later)
-A game of Hiss (Kazha made her own rules)
-Kozhin watched Berenstain Bears while I put Kazha down for her nap (she slept!)
-A game of Candy Land with Kozhin (we added real candy to the game!)
-A game of Silly Sentences (all of Kozhin's sentences were about a mouse)
-Kozhin got to play his Super Robot Monkey Team Hyperforce Go computer game for about 15 minutes
-Picked up sleeping Kazha to go to Tae Kwon Do
-Car wouldn't start
-Mama picked us up (she and Colin were coming today to watch for the first time--good timing!) -Mama and Colin joined us for Tae Kwon Do and Kozhin gave us quite a show--he did GREAT!!!
-Couldn't go to Chuck E. Cheese for dinner as planned because of car
-Deflected request for more computer games by chasing kids upstairs and reading Vasilisa the Brave (Baba Yaga!) on Kazha's bed
-Cooked dinner while kids pretended they were Power Rangers in anticipation of the Monday night ritual of watching Power Rangers Mystic Force
-Pshko came home (!) (he's gone again)
-Show ended up being a 1 1/2 hour special (instead of half an hour), so we had dinner in front of the tube (storebought ravioli with homemade alfredo sauce with lots of garlic, I also made batter for crepe for tomorrow and we were so hungry everything in Vasilisa the Brave sounded SO good, and now I'm craving Russian food! I think that's why I made the batter, maybe I'll make blini instead, aren't those Russian?)
-The usual long, extended bedtime but we only read the Berenstain Bears Strangers book instead of the 4-5 we've been reading lately, then lots of giggling and jumping and chatting and "What do you want to dream?" before they, especially Kazha, drifted off... Kozhin wants to dream that he has the new Mystic Force "spell code" and that he's going to tell Blue Ranger--her power is water--that he went under water at the pool!

And here I am! I've felt a little guilty today about Kazha--Kozhin demands quite a bit of attention, and she's used to having more from me while he's in school. It's great that they're together, I think I just need to find ways to balance things a little better. Many days are scheduled around his swimming classes and Tae Kwon Do, and she doesn't really have any special time alone one-on-one with me lately like she used to all the time, and no music and gym during the summer. I could tell she was needing some more attention this evening, and she deserves it. At the same time, I'm happy Kozhin is finally with us almost constantly, not gone all the time with us just getting the poor moody, tired, grumpy, drained boy in the afternoon!!

We have a disgusting carpet that has been peed and spilled on countless times, and we rent and our apartment management won't let us take it out. It also is a dust and cockroach magnet. I was fantasizing upstairs just now about just going ahead and cutting it out. I think I will, at least downstairs. YES!!!!! Whatever money we'll have to pay will be worth it. We're looking for a house, but it will still be a while, and in the meantime, this is our HOME!!!

Speaking of bugs, last night we wanted to go to Chuck E. Cheese (mostly because Kozhin's friend Conrad has a new Pikachu stuffed animal and for some reason Kozhin is convinced they'll have them there, I think because his friend said you can only "win" them). He didn't want to invite any other kids, just "Onkel Colin", so we did, and he came. But the kids fell asleep in the car! So basically it ended up being a nice long ride and opportunity to talk with my dear brother uncensored! We drove there, the kids were still sleeping, so we drove back. It was a great talk. He is doing great (sorry for overuse of the word, but it's true). Anyway, to cheer Kozhin up when he woke up very confused, we went to Target for pizza instead and played with lots of toys before finally buying a little "Extreme Bug Listener", a bug house with a magnifying glass lid and an amplifier hooked up to headphones. We needed to look no farther than our own kitchen to find a cockroach and listen. It was slightly disappointing because there wasn't much to hear (today we briefly held a firefly), but still fun. We let it go this morning. Kozhin wrote a big note to Pshko on the board telling him not to open the bug house. It had eaten lots of a merangue when we freed it this morning. The cockroach, not the bug house. It's very nice because Kozhin has noticed and shared that often when he chooses to buy a "figure" (lately, Power Rangers figures or dragons), it quickly "gets old". I'm glad he noticed that and chose something else this time. It was cheaper, and there's more you can do with it. Nothing against the figures, but he seems more apt to use his imagination by pretending to be something or someone else himself, instead of playing with figures a lot, so far. The figures that stick are the "cute" ones, like Pikachu, that he just wants to take everywhere and hug!

As for the dragons thing, the last three nights in a row we read, among other things, Merlin and the Dragons.

He also really loves vampires, which fits nicely with his long-lasting love for bats. We got a book about them at the library, and looked for vampire teeth at the party store, but they don't have them until Halloween!!! Grrrr...

I am more and more not minding the Power Rangers thing. More on that later.

One quote, and then I'll go: Saturday we spent the day at a lake with friends, I think I said this before. Well, as we left in a torrential downpour, Kazha said, "Ich bin froh! Ich bin froh, dass es regnet! . . . Regen, hast Du ein Gesicht??" GOD!!!!!!!!! I am NOT making this up! Here's a translation: "I'm glad! I'm glad that it's raining! . . . Rain, do you have a face??"

Good night!

July

2006-07-16T04:03:00.000-04:00

Beautifully innocent quotes about people's appearances:

Kozhin last summer to my aunt, who is 80, gently tracing and inspecting the wrinkles on her cheek (he was 4):
Tante Ilse, was is dieses Muster auf Deinem Gesicht?
Aunt Ilse, what is this pattern on your face?

Kazha to me a few months ago, looking at my dandruff-filled eyebrows (she was almost 2):
Guck, Mami! Haferflocken!
Look, Mommy! Oats!

Kazha to me a few days ago, looking at my forehead as I apparently was wrinkling it (she's 2):
Mami, ist das ein Maze?
Mommy, is that a maze?

I almost lost it when I realized what she was asking me on that last one. HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!!!!!!!!

We've been having fun in our nice long sandwiched summertime between our beach trip and the other one coming up at the end of August. We had a week of soccer the week before last, which was EXCELLENT (UK Elite Soccer), Kazha's well on the road to freedom from diapers, Kozhin has swimming lessons--outside! at Undi & Papaw's pool, that is, my old pool where I'm no longer a member--last week and next. The rest of the time is ours, we've been playing card games (Erstes Quartet), Kozhin is suddenly very into dragons, as often set off by a new toy he chose with his allowance, then we spent a nice evening at the library a few days ago and got a pile of dragon books among others, his favorite is Merlin and the Dragons. German playgroup, Tae Kwon Do . . .

Luckily Arlington has two playgrounds that have water areas where water is sprayed and dumped and kids can play outside in the middle of the hot day. Today we spent the day at a friend's neighborhood human-made lake which has a little beach and picnic tables. It was so fun, and we swam a while after the rain started, but fled when it got heavy!

We got a bunch of beads and I never thought how many things you can do with beads. Of course we made necklaces, that's what I bought them for, but Kozhin made up a game of lining them up and trying to roll another bead and hit various colors for different points. Then we put them on a book about dragons, and the beads by the dragons mouth were worth the most, etc. Then we used them as tokens for card games. Kazha made a "purse" out of play doh and put three beads in it ("Guck, Mami, wie eine Tasche!"), and in the bathtub we put three pink translucent beads in a baby bottle of water and watched them spin and float around. Fun!

Kazha's trying to give up her nap, which is probably why I've been falling asleep at night putting them to bed and not writing! Today she slept at the lake a little, with all those distractions. She does need it, I'm sure, because she gets delirious and cranky when she doesn't sleep.

We're on our fourth day of little or no TV, very nice.

Our cockroaches are out of control. I finally broke down and bought Raid, but I haven't used it yet. One of the books we got from the library is about cockroaches. If we live with them, we'd might as well know something about them.

Good night!

Outer Banks of North Carolina

2006-07-05T15:17:00.000-04:00

Bahbies on the Atlantic, a sandy apple and sun . . . this was one of the sunny days, we had lots of stormy nights too and a few overcast days, which was quite nice, see kids below entertaining themselves under a table...

Here's Pshko with Kozhin on the ferry back from Ocracoke.

Hee hee hee! I love this picture. I giggled as we entered this ice cream shop where the seats were school desks.

An evening at the beach. We were going to build a fire for s'mores, but five minutes after this picture, a storm blew in and we ran for our lives back to the house in a torrential downpour! It was kind of scary wondering whether lightning would strike at any moment, and running in the sand with a pudgy toddler and a beach bag is not easy!

We watched windsurfers on this beach on the way back from ice cream, and while Kozhin collected seashells and wondered at the way the wind sandblasted his shins, Kazha collected seaweed and filled it with little shells to make an "Easter egg nest". :) :) :)

One of all the kids' favorite things were the "caw birds" (seagulls), whom they fed on the deck of the house and whose sounds they imitated. Here is Kazha saying, "Ca-aw! Ca-aw!" in imitation of the seagull in the background.

Here Kozhin and I are getting some cold drinks on Ocracoke. This was our favorite place to hang out when we camped there in the summer of 2003. Kozhin got a banana, milk, and honey smoothie, and I got a massive iced milky way coffee drink for me and Pshko to share.

This was kind of luxurious trip to the beach this year, the last three having been camping trips, twice on Cape Cod and once on Ocracoke, with no shade. We have to go camping soon!

Getting Ready For The Beach

2006-06-23T18:12:00.000-04:00

. . . thus the short post (the date on the photo is wrong--this was a few days ago):

Dripping Nose and Frozen Triple Berry Berry Soup

2006-06-21T17:04:00.000-04:00

The itch in my throat has turned into a constant nasal drip, which I can handle. I'm also sneezing a lot. If I put tissue up my nose, it would be saturated within minutes and fall out. I'm actually letting my nose drip directly onto my shirt because my shirt is already dirty. :) I promised Kozhin a smoothie, so this is going to be quick--I just want to post a few more pictures. These are all in the last month...

Here's Kozhin at Potomac Overlook Park a few Sundays ago watching the clouds:

Kozhin likes toddlers! Here he is a few Sundays ago (a different Sunday) with our friend Alexander at the Claude Moore Colonial Farm Market Faire, where we spent wonderful 7 hours!!

Uh, I think this was on a Sunday too. This is at Kozhin's friend Ethan's birthday party at Burke Lake Park. We were getting ready to ride the train. Note Chiro in Kozhin's hand. We're going to the beach with Ethan's family for a week on Saturday:

Here's Kazha at one of the split rail fences during another visit to Claude Moore Colonial Farm with Tante Baba:

Also at CMCF:

Well, the smoothie turned out to be "frozen triple berry berry soup"--frozen berries blended with a little plain yogurt and kefir, but mostly cottage cheese and a little sugar, very thick and to be eaten with a spoon. YUM!!!

Zwickmuehle

2006-06-21T01:49:00.000-04:00

Wow--Kazha's sleep schedule is changing--she seems to be trying to give up her mid-day nap. This means I don't get a break all day, which makes me more likely to fall asleep at night while putting the kids to bed! It's a vicious cycle, but I'd better get used to it. Only three more days of school for Kozhin, who doesn't take a nap and who makes it harder to put Kazha down for one, and Kazha's not getting any younger, so she'll only be needing less sleep anyway...

So what does this mean for me? More coffee? Oh, that we can add to the above equation! At least as long as she's nursing--hey, maybe that's part of the problem: she sleeps less, I need more coffee, she nurses, sleeps even less from the caffeine...

Normally if I fall asleep putting the kids to bed I just stay put for the night. Tonight I woke up, and I think it's partly because Pshko isn't home yet and partly because I feel like I might be getting a sore throat. I homemade myself some ginger tea with lemon--we're going on vacation Saturday and I DON'T want to be sick there!!! I'm also wondering--today we were playing in my parents' backyard--my mother filled up the little turtle sandbox with water and we were splashing around, which was great except the mosquitoes. My sister was there too, and she kind of went nuts with the bug repellant. She was trying to spray mosquitoes whenever she saw them flying around. I asked if I could have a sip of her drink. I took a sip in my mouth but spit it out because it tasted awful. It turns out it was the taste of DEET!!! I'm so glad I didn't swallow it--I spit like 20 times, but I'm wondering if that's why my throat feels weird. YUCK. I'm not going to try to find out online because I'll just freak myself out. I'm a person who likes bugs better than chemicals. I would much rather put up with our cockroaches than bomb the house, for example. Oh, but I love steam cleaners...!

On a more pleasant note, I'll write about our day. We had an entirely untypical Tuesday for us. Normally Tuesdays we take Kozhin to school, then Kazha and I have music class, a high point of the week, play on the playground outside of the community center where we have class, go home for lunch, Kazha has a nap, pick up Kozhin, play or do whatever until my sister comes over so I can go to Kurdish class. I generally love Tuesdays.

Today, though, I spent a nice efficient hour in the morning getting my thyroid checked. I don't have the results yet--it was just a blood test I asked to get. I've had a test before, years ago, but I'm SO convinced I have a not entirely normal thyroid funcion. My mother has taken synthroid for years, and my paternal grandmother had thyroid issues. I was told by a midwife that my thyroid felt big, I have extremely dry skin and feel a lump in my throat most of the time. I'm not overweight or tired, but you have to wonder when your not-yet-two-year-old looks up at your eyebrows and says, "Oh! Rolled oats!" (Oh! Haferflocken!)! Anyway, I'm glad my doctor gave me a referral and I'm curious to hear the results. Luckily Pshko had done his paperwork the night before so he could stay with Kazha and she could actually hear some Kurdish for a change...

Then Kazha and I took a quick trip to Border's to get a book of mazes for Kozhin and a big frozen mocha drink.

Mazes? That's a whole story in and of itself: the last few days have been really relatively whine-free as far as the TV is concerned. I don't remember if I wrote that we finally made some rules, which makes it so much easier (than the constant, "one more show?"): two half-hour shows a day or less, which may be substituted for by a computer game, ideally they choose a show together that they both like, but if they disagree they can each choose one. It's been working pretty well. Today we didn't watch any, which was wonderful.

ANYWAY, what I wanted to say was that Sunday I spent all morning preparing food and wrapping presents to take to my parents' house for Father's Day. The kids were entertaining themselves wonderfully in the living room. We had until 3:00pm. It was weird: after they had been playing for a good few hours with almost no intervention from me, like maybe around 1:00 or so, I started feeling like: oh, maybe I should just offer to turn on the tv to give them a little break since I still have lots of stuff to do. The more I thought about it, the more I realized that I was tempted to do that to avoid their asking me to turn it on. Like I could just feel the question coming and I wanted to intercept it.

Well, it turns out they never asked, which is amazing in our little living room where the tv is obnoxiously there. Instead, Kozhin, who does NOT tend to voluntarily do anything 2-D, just picked up an dinosaur activity book he had gotten at a birthday party last month . . . and started doing mazes. MAZES! He has done over 25 mazes in the last few days. He sat down and did tons that day and has kept going since. He did all the ones in that book, yesterday I made some for him on puzzlemaker.com and printed them out, and today like I said Kazha and I went to get him a book of them at Borders.

To some people who know a five-year-old, this might not seem like a big deal. I'll get into it some other time, but for, this is not a child who, given free time and pencils, crayons, paper, coloring books, would ever choose to pick them up and use them, at least not in the ways they are intended. Since he could pick them up, he has used crayons as wheels, arrows, he has broken scores of them, thrown them, rolled them, but when Kazha was born we had a pile of like-new coloring books that had never been used. He's quite good for his age at writing in terms of figuring out how to put down the right symbols for the right sounds on paper, I can almost always figure out what he's trying to write, but he seems exhausted by the small motor work necessary to write, and doesn't often decide to write on his own (which may be partly because of school, but that's another story too). So, it's not that suprising that he likes mazes, considering that he likes maps and mazes probably appeal to his visual-spatial sense. What's surprising to me is that he picked it up by himself and has continued doing them. It's great!

I LOVE the book we got--I was looking for a cheap magazine type thing with quantity, not quality, but found this book: The Everything Kids' Mazes Book. Every maze is beautiful--help the ant navigate its tunnels to bring a seed to a pile, help the sap get from a root to the bud on the twig of a tree, follow the paths between the spots of a giraffe, help a knight through a maze to a castle... He can do them alone but I can help with the tough ones and we can read the interesting information together.

OK, so then Kazha and I drove to a park in Fairfax for a playground day of Northern Virginia unschoolers that meets there every Tuesday. It was a new park for us, a nice one, and the group was easy to find. It was very exciting to meet people in real life instead of just online as we try to make this decision! I liked the people we met--it's funny, one woman I recognized from the post office, and remember wondering about her--she had two daughters 5 and 2 and sure enough it was the same woman! We could only stay half an hour because we had to get Kozhin, but I'm really glad we went.

Off to get Kozhin, where Pshko had surprised us by being there too. We stayed about 10 minutes while they played, then said good-bye to Pshko and drove to Ma & Pa's house to splash around in said mini-pool and eat cookies. The kids were naked outside doing forward rolls on the grass and trying to jump backwards up the hill. We had a nice talk with Colin too, which I'm very glad about.

Back home for a dinner of leftover birinc u bayncan, cherries, bread and cheese Kurdish style on the floor, that is, on a tablecloth on the floor. Homemade yogurt-jello popsicles and playing, bedtime... What did we read? Der Glueckliche Loewe, Huehnersuppe mit Reis and Goodnight Moon.

Pshko's home now by the way and watching a thing about the 70's--they're showing images of the Iranian hostage crisis and playing popular 70's music and flashing all these horrifying images. It's kind of discombobulating.

Good night!

Is The Earth Made Of Ice Cream Or Is It An Eyeball?

2006-06-17T23:37:00.000-04:00

A few days ago I wrote that I like hearing children's explanations for things like natural phenomena. Well, Kozhin knows quite a lot about space and the planets and the our relationship to the sun and moon and how the seasons and days and months work and so on, but tonight he still decided to tell me that actually the Earth is a giant ball of ice cream, with a cone underneath, and someone huge is trying to lick it and we have to save the Earth before it all gets licked away. The center of the Earth is cotton candy and vanilla.

Then he had a laughing attack, and when he calmed down he shared this: What if the Earth were really a giant eyeball, and it's looking around in space? (Stell' Dir vor, wenn der Earth wirklich ein riesen EYEBALL waer', und es guckt in Space herum!!). I asked whose eyeball it would be, waiting for something profound . . . his answer: "PISSER!" That's my boy.

Today we had a playdate at the playground at school with a family whose son is in Kozhin's class. They apparently play together, but we hadn't gotten together until today. They also have a daughter almost exactly Kazha's age, and the parents are a Moroccan-American couple, but the woman is the Moroccan one. The kids were funny--they said they had a great time, but they mostly played side-by-side, with the two-year-old sister following Kozhin around. He didn't mind at all. He told me afterwards that he had given her a dandelion to blow and make a wish with. She did, and he asked her what she wanted. She said she wished for a flower, so he gave her another one. :) It seems from talking with the parents that both our boys, who get along great at school, are similar in that they are perfectly happy amusing themselves most of the time, that is, they have active imaginations and are in their own worlds a lot of the time. They also both are fascinated with weather. When the boy threw some sand and said, "I'm the ancient god of the sandstorms!" I thought, no wonder they get along! I'm curious to see if and how their friendship will develop. I definitely like the parents.

Then to the bank (always fun with kids!), home for a bit, where Kazha forsaked (forsook? Is it even the right word?) her nap again (gee, why am I surprised? here I am at 1:16 am when I could be sleeping!), then to THE MALL (ugh! no wonder I haven't been in over a year! it was Tysons...) for Father's Day presents, and smoothies, and a six-pack of Cinnabons, and a frozen mocha thing...

We picked up Pshko and stopped by Safeway for some baking stuff for tomorrow, plus lots of extra stuff as usual, got Kozhin a super-cheap and super-entertaining parachute toy, which we played with outside at home for a while, made a Father's Day "book" for my dad out of printed out coloring pages of Pikachu looking sad, mad, glad, and playing with his friend, got ready for bed, had a marathon of jumping on the bed for about 45 minutes playing who-knows-what but having tons of fun apparently (I was printing out Kurdish art for a card for Pshko for tomorrow--hey, that's funny, I just realized that this was after Kazha requested "No More Monkeys Jumping on the Bed" three times in a row--gee, I guess the message got across!).

Uh, now what should I write about?

I'm really excited because I started a yahoo group for my junior year abroad in Salzburg, Austria, and people are starting to join!! It's really making me go down memory lane.

Also, I told my friend, one of my best friends here, Kozhin's best friend at school's mom, that we were thinking about homeschooling. That was a big deal, because I hadn't even mentioned it to her this whole time. I guess I thought she might be upset, and then it kept getting harder to tell her. I'm so glad I finally did! More on that later.

We have cockroaches.

Kazha figured out today how to do a forward roll without me by sitting on the potty and then rolling forward. She does it perfectly. Kozhin also joined in the fun.

I'll post some more pictures tomorrow!

I Miss May!

2006-06-15T02:11:00.000-04:00

I just ODed on Ethiopian food. I always feel great when I do that. Pshko surprised me with it. Oh, the power of the cooks of the food that I don't know how to make myself! That goes for Thai too.

Should I rummage through some more pictures?

Kozhin recently started taking Tae Kwon Do lessons. He immediately loved it. Here he is with Kazha after coming back from his first lesson:

Here are the kids peeling eggs very seriously at our favorite playground in the woods. This was one magical Sunday afternoon/evening a few weeks ago, still in May:

Suess!!!

I love this playground on Spring and Summer evenings... (I love that we can walk there from home). Kozhin can't wait until the Mimosas start blooming...

Kozhin was Red Ranger the whole time (courtesy of the Easter Bunny):

More Pictures

2006-06-12T12:56:00.000-04:00

Wait! I have another question. This one probably has a simple answer, I just don't know it. Why is all the stuff about God creating the World mostly about the Earth? When did He create the rest of the World? You know, all those stars and planets and asteroids and "dark matter"? Is the story that He created the World, or the Earth? Or is the Earth supposed to be the main thing, with the Heavens a kind of extra background kind of stuff? This is also not a rhetorical question.

OK, and here are some pictures of lately goings on:

Tante Baba and Undi (my sister and mother) came over last Tuesday for my last Kurdish class until Fall. They brought some goodies, which included bubbles that last a long time and are very prolific. Here's Baba in our courtyard blowing bubbles with the Bahbies. This picture really makes our neighborhood look urban (funny):

She'll love this one . . . :)

Here's Kazha the same day at a little picnic we had after school (she's wearing R's sunglasses):

This is at our community garden last weekend. We rent it with our friend from the German playgroup and her husband and two kids. That's Kozhin with his friend:

Oh, about what I wrote earlier about housework, the same goes for parents following their own passions and hobbies and interests--I think it's good for kids to see their parents doing those things as well as engaging and helping them with theirs.

While I was waiting for the pictures to upload, I prepared a CHOCOLATE CUSTARD!!! It's in the oven right now baking for an hour, so it should be ready to take out and cool right when it's time to get Kozhin. So it will be cool when we get back from picking him up, and we can have some together before going to Tae Kwon Do. YUM! I already know it will be good because the rest that wouldn't fit in the baking dish ;( I cooked on the stovetop and am eating with thick Iranian yogurt :) Good thing the laundry's so patient :)

One more thing and then I'm just going to sit and eat this stuff. This Saturday was so fun. We had J and C over for lunch, then we drove to Reston Zoo, where the kids fed baby sheep and goats from baby bottles of milk and little pellets from their hands, Kozhin fell in love with the swans and geese, who had fluffy babies following them around, each had a pony ride, watched some monkeys doing their acrobatics, and topped it off with ice cream, before leaving for an outdoor picnic and concert at Lubber Run Amphitheatre (in the woods) to meet L's and R's families. Who did we see? Steve Songs, and it was INCREDIBLE!! We had so much fun, and Kozhin, who loves music but is often shy about it in public was entranced and participatory, not only that but last night he started spouting ALL the words to the song that ended up being his favorite: The Square Dancing Mice. In case you didn't know, he really loves mice. He knew all the words! It must have made a big impression. It was a benefit concert for Kozhin's old--and Kazha's future?--co-op preschool. It was great and I want to go see him again.

Sunday--yesterday--we had any easygoing day. A leisurely morning and breakfast, until we went to pick up JoJo who stayed and played with the kids for 2 hours so I could have have the long-awaited meeting about my brother, at my sister's house. The meeting was so so good. My parents, sister and I all spoke and listened respectfully and came to consensus about what rules and consequences we are going to propose to my brother. I typed them up in a way I thought he would be responsive to, and I'm waiting for feedback from the rest of them before my sister and I actually meet with my brother. When I got back, Kazha took a nap and Kozhin and I read some more out of our new beloved "Kurdish Fairy Tales", which is in German, and he played a few video games (Power Rangers and SRMTHFG). Then in the evening before dinner, the kids played outside with Charles for the first time in a long time. We got out Kozhin's new scooter and Kazha's new tricycle and the frisbee, and then . . . even our other neighbors, a girl and a boy with whom they've never played or probably even said hi (!!) came out and they all played together! It was a nice surprise. Plus water guns. Then inside for dinner and feet and hand washing, read Hexe Lilli und die Dinos in bed, heard Kozhin sing the words to that mouse song over and over, heard a drunk driver crash into 6 cars in a row, prayed because I didn't know that was what had happened, went out and found out, by then Kozhin was asleep and there you are.

Who Has The Answers?

2006-06-12T11:55:00.001-04:00

Why does music affect people the ways it does? How can a simple melody make me feel like I have to dance or I'll explode, another one make me instantly cry and another make me feel like I'm soaring over sun-drenched mountaintops and the world is laughing all around me?

These are not rhetorical questions--I really want to know. How come music in a minor key sounds creepy or melancholy to just about everyone compared to music in a minor key? And where do all the natural patterns behind music theory come from? WHERE? Why aren't notes and rhythms just arbitrary things that affect us in random kinds of ways? WHY?

WHO CAN TELL ME?

It is constantly amazing to me to think about how we are born knowing almost nothing. How much of our lives is spent finding things out, cushioned and incubated in the experience and hard-won knowledge of our predecessors and then looking for more. Both for survival and out of simple curiosity.

It's amazing how little we people would know if we were just born naked in the world with no one to tell us or show us things. Well, we are born naked, but you know what I mean. Sure, we have some instincts, but we certainly wouldn't have a clue that the world was round and our imaginations would run wild contemplating what those stars might be, and animals? How babies are made? How trees and plants and flowers grow? How deep might the earth beneath our feet go? Storms? Blood? What's inside our bodies? By the way, "we" have been to the moon, but nobody's come close to seeing the middle of the inside of our own planet!

That's one reason I love myths so much. And to hear children offer their own explanations for phenomena before (or despite!) having heard the scientific ones.

Why aren't we just born knowing everything?

I think there must be a spiritual aspect to the quest for knowledge and understanding. To me one major solace about even very sad or terrible things is that they are still interesting. I try to understand things that I like and things that I don't or that annoy me.

That's probably why whenever I think a lot about religion, spirituality, whatever you want to call it (some people make a big distinction, I tend not to except maybe that one is more organized than the other), it usually boils down to MYSTERY. I LOVE that we don't know everything. But I really, really, really want to find out!!!

I remember one day when I was younger (20? 21?) I went into some spinning thoughts about how can I see the world from my perspective and from an ant's perspective at the same time? at the same time? and a tree and an amoeba and a seed and a lion as it stalks its prey? Oh, that would be God. By the way, I go back and forth between thinking of You with the word God and Goddess, which sometimes bothers me (because it makes it hard to talk about with others who expect consistency about this sort of thing) but now is one of those times where it deosn't bother me. Sometimes I think of the word God but with the feeling of a Goddess, sometimes just Goddess with her hair in the stars and holding us all and the place where everyone goes to and comes from, sometimes Allah...

Also, I'd like to get more practice and get into the habit of finding things out in less cerebral ways, such as meditation and getting in touch with my intuition. But I have to admit that I'm also very wary of "believing" everything that's found out that way. Because I'm not sure what to trust and what not to trust. It scares me when people for example judge people based on their first impressions because they got a certain "vibe". I make a point not to do that because I don't think it's fair to people or whatever I would be judging by that method. That said, I still think it would be good to regularly sit (or walk) and LISTEN. Not to people, I do that plenty, but to the world(s) around me. I generally think people are too active these days, around here. Not active enough in some ways (sitting at the computer, sitting in front of the tv), but too active in other ways that keep their minds off of LISTENING and feeling things we'd rather avoid.

Lately I've had an almost complete turnaround in how I feel about doing housework around the kids. I used to think it was bad, like I was ignoring the kids or something. Probably a lot of that is because I had to be away from them so much until a year ago, working full-time instead of being with them when that's where I wanted to be. Probably after that I felt every minute had to be "quality time", quality time being something solely focused on the kids, for the kids, all else could wait. This is a topic for another day, but I know believe strongly that if kids are supposed to be learning by example, they need someone who does these real life things, plus they enjoy watching and helping, especially Kazha, but that's probably because I started doing them with her. Plus, and this is a big one, they need to learn it!!! There are a lot of things--nothing against my parents--that need to be done in everyday, mundane and practical life that I don't feel I learned as a child because I was supposed to be doing schoolwork or whatever other "enriching" activities. It would have been wonderful to have learned to garden, to cook, to knit . . . as a child, all things my mother is an expert at. I guess I'm also really tired of having to learn things from scratch alone from books. I want to be an apprentice!!! To like 50 people!!! The reason I mentioned this whole thing it is that I also think that kind of housework (washing the dishes, doing the laundry, basic picking up and scrubbing things) is emotionally healthy in that, besides the fact that it just needs to be done (which is reason enough in itself), it's also a state of mind that comes from doing something physical during which thoughts can come and go and be processed. By the way, I did finish the dishes before I sat down to write! Laundry's waiting patiently next to me though...

By the way, I am not ON anything. Yesterday was a full moon and I got my period, so expect something like this about a month from now! :) My period usually amplifies whatever thoughts and feelings and reactions I have to what's going on.

Maybe later I'll write about why I'm a compulsive finder and reader of religious conversion stories (I said that before, didn't I?). Oh, and a compulsive Googler, too.

By the way, those questions I had about music, I've had those for a long time, but I remembered them because before putting Kazha to bed just now I had been singing and doing the dishes while she ate little pieces of tomato (she LOVES tomato) and then came to watch me. Mostly I was singing German Springtime folksongs. There are PLENTY of those. I was feeling quite happy. Then I started to sing another sad one about "if I were a bird I'd fly to you but that can't be..." and stopped after 5 seconds because I got a big lump in my throat and tears welled up in my eyes! I don't have to be having my period for this to happen, either. If I sing a song like that the saddest thing I can think of going on at the time just bobs up to the surface and in this case it was my brother (he's recovering from heroin addiction, and the song made me feel how "far away" I've been from him lately and staying distant after an intense period of working on helping him). It wasn't just the words though, it was the melody, which is like eating something sweet that you know you've had before but can't pinpoint it and know it must be somewhere deep deep inside, as in back long before you had memories that were thoughts, when you were still ensconced in the world your loving parents created for you surrounded by songs and love and bright smiles and nothing bad.

And then you started the lifelong process of finding out about the world and becoming stronger.

One more thing: with a five-year-old, and to an extent with a two-year-old too, the fact that many things are essential for life and at the same time life-threateningly dangerous has been coming up a lot too (fire, water).

And, er, washing machines...

Playgroup Pictures

2006-06-08T00:33:00.000-04:00

We finally got another cord so I can do things with pictures!! But I just got back from a "date" (no way!) and it's late, so for now, here are a couple of pictures from our Wednesday mornings German playgroup. These aren't from today, they're from a few weeks ago, but they might as well have been today. Except the pregnant woman has had her adorable baby. Here we are singing at the end of the playgroup. Kazha's in the green front waiting for me to hurry up and take the picture:

And here below are Kazha and three friends on the swing. The three on the right all have Middle-Eastern dads!! (Persian and us Kurdish, plus the fifth person--little boy--above next to his pregnant mommy has an Egyptian dad--what is it with German women??)

More soon...!

Seems Like More Than Five Days

2006-06-06T22:48:00.000-04:00

If I had spent more time trying to sneak out of my parents' house when I was younger, maybe I would be more graceful at sneaking out of Kazha's bed when she falls asleep. The antics I have to go through! Today I almost snorted imagining that anyone could have seen me intentionally and very, very sloooooowly rolling (yes, rolling) off the side of the bed and hopping silently to my feet to tiptoe out of the room. Of course, this was, and generally is, only after 2-3 extractions of the boob (it almost never works the first time), the frozen, held-breath pose while I wait for her to breathe a few more times before I remove her finger from my navel and do the aforementioned roll. I guess this is one of the rigamaroles people have to do when they co-sleep but don't want to go to bed at 8:00 every night!

So, the Bahbies were sick for what seemed like an eternity, I had a migraine somewhere in there, and then we had no Internet for about 3 days. Thus the no posts. I had a list in my head somewhere of things building up I wanted to write about, some fully composed! But where are they now?

Update: People have started asking me about why I started eating MEAT! It's funny how that happened after I wrote complaining that, or at least wondering why, people were shocked but apparently too shy, or not interested enough, to ask for a real explanation. Four people have asked me in the past few days, and I had some long, but not long enough, conversations about it. But... I'm not going to get into it now! Nope. Not enough time (I promised Pshko I'd get offline in 5 minutes . . . arrrrgh . . .). That's the thing: with stuff like this, I feel like there's so many angles and details involved that I don't want to bother unless I have someone's undivided attention for long enough, because I'd rather not say anything than tell just part of the story.

Hmmm . . . now Pshko just turned on Food Network. How many thousands of times to these people have to put a forkful of food in their mouths, pause, and make a telling face and YUM sound? It must get challenging to do it differently each time.

OK, I'm going to watch Good Eats with Pshko. Soon, updates about what we've been doing, latest homeschooling thoughts, and why I'm a compulsive reader of religious conversion stories, in the most positive way possible, at least I think so.

Tonight, Tante Baba and Undi came over to play with the Bahbies while I went to my last Kurdish class of the season. They brought apples, a book about Fairies, 2 Ueberraschungseier (yes, they found some real ones!), a weird sqwishy ball nestled inside a net and if you squeeze the ball big bulbous parts of it come squeezing and oozing out between the netting, and some soap bubbles that don't pop. Fun for all!!

When Mops Expels This Bug

2006-06-01T19:04:00.000-04:00

I Love You!!!
http://www.makingbooks.com/

(Yes, Kozhin has it now, much worse than Kazha, and I had a headache today--don't feel like typing the M******* word--which means that I must be feeling much better if I'm sitting at the computer and looking up book making with kids! Still an hour or two to go though before I'm hopping around. Poor Kazha's had to fend for herself most of the day...)

Poop to Poop

2006-05-29T23:56:00.000-04:00

Kazha's all better. At least, she hasn't really pooped all day, which was good since we were at the pool, and in a great mood despite no nap.

Pshko is watching one of the two movies I've fallen asleep during: Hunt For Red October (the other one was one of the thousand Batman movies, whichever one came out while I was in high school and was marketed to death).

Oh, good. He changed it to Kama Sutra, (one word? two?), embarrassingly cheesy but aesthetically more than pleasing and with very good music. If I don't write anymore it means I started watching it...

We had a nice three-day weekend. Without the rush to get ready for school, the day flows so gracefully into itself . . . I usually wake up a little before they do, and then at some point between 7 and 7:30 or so I hear Kozhin and Kazha wake each other up and start to play upstairs . . . they are SO nice to each other when they first wake up! They're mostly very nice to each other, but in the morning they just seem so glad to see each other and look at each other and grin and say each other's names and good morning and plot to sneak up on me and things like that. Then they just keep on playing, which generally involves lots of laughing and running around in the living room and crawling through the tunnel we have there and role-playing something or other ("Du bist Green Ranger, und ich bin Digimon, OK?!! Geh'n wir zum Surface World???") until breakfast is ready, by which time they're usually more than ready to sit down and eat calmly (as opposed to the weekday forcing of things...).

I started a little routine of sitting in a circle by the bookshelf next to the dining room table and doing a little reading or something and a morning hug after the playing and before the eating. I think that's plenty of structure and it feels right, instead of running to the table in the middle of a game, and it's a nice way to greet the morning. Maybe I'll start recording what kinds of songs, poems, prayers, etc. we do (and any reactions to them...). I'm looking forward to finding little ways like this to add a minimal amount of ritual and routine into the day when school is out.

I am looking forward to tomorrow though because we've started walking to school. It's 45-50 minutes through the woods and it's wonderful. I hesitated for a long time simply because it was still dark during the Winter and maybe early Spring (we have to leave around 7am), and then because I wondered if it was safe that time of day. We finally did it because our van was in the shop, and it worked out beautifully. We take the path we usually take when we go through the Rattenwald (the Rat Forest, which we so named because of the rats, our friends, who "live there") to "our playground", but instead of going to the playground, we veer off at a little crossroads of paths and go through the woods, emerging right next door to Kozhin's school! It's actually much closer than the roads.

Guess what else is so great about it! We just started renting a community garden with some friends of ours, a family from the German playgroup with boys Kozhin's and Kazha's ages, and the garden is right along the bike path! So we can visit briefly on the way to school, and then Kazha and I can stop by and water or whatever needs to be done on the way home. As I am in great need of more aerobic exercise, and don't like to just "exercise", it's the perfect way to do that.

So, this weekend, before, despite, and after Kazha's diarrhea (and 2 times vomiting a little), we managed to go to the Falls Church Farmer's Market and the nearby playground on Saturday morning, Kozhin ground some corn there with an old machine in an old barn, Tante Baba and Undi surprised us there. Kazha continued her tradition of pooping in playground "houses" (it's SO funny!! she's started doing it every time--I guess it's the privacy). We only bought milk and a scone and a drink since we had tons of veggies and fruit at home already, but it was nice to walk around.

To Home Depot, the place that always gives me a headache, to buy some marigolds, watermelon, and lavender with Tante Baba (no headache, but annoyance, sadness, and dismay at the amount of chemicals in the garden section). Pshko got off early and we went to Target for a bunch of little things, including garden tools, then to Undi and Papaw's for an evening of freshly baked "cowboy cookies" and chatting with Papaw while Colin played with Kazha and Kozhin frolicked with Undi.

Sunday we mostly stayed home due to poop issues, which we wanted to confine to our own carpet, except a brief trip to the garden to bring the plants, and to Toys R Us for outside toys: Kozhin got a scooter, bike helmet, swimming board, and Power Rangers swimsuit with floaty things sewed in, and Kazha got a tricycle with basket on the back and a swim vest to go over her suit. Fun! Came home and made chilled triple berry soup with orzo.

Today was devoted to making yaprax (Kurdish stuffed grape leaves) for our Memorial Day afternoon at the pool with Lily's and Retta's families (Kozhin's best friends). Oh, and the huge production of my first annual Shave--ugh... More on that later. We had a great time at the pool, after Kozhin's initial sulking. He has most certainly inherited from his Dad a long thawing time when it comes to places he needs to get used to. He felt uncomfortable at first with the throngs of noisy kids and their parents (as did Pshko, but that's a whole other story that I don't want to raise my blood pressure by writing about right now...) (that's throngs, not thongs), but ended up having a great time. Kazha exuded glee the entire afternoon and it was hard to get her out of the pool. Retta had fun being interested in my armpit hair :) We ended up staying there and having pizza, so we had plenty of yaprax and berry soup left when we got home!

Lots of running into friends and acquaintances here and there all weekend, which imparts a cozy feeling to the area.

In between all this were countless wonderful details of the kids just playing and reading and making stuff up at home, but it's all a beautiful fuzzy haze right now, as much as I'd like to remember all of it. Let's see, we played lots of "Winter Warlock" (a game we made up based on the Christmas Special Santa Claus is Comin' to Town), Kazha kept saying to him in a taunting but friendly smiling voice, "Winter Warlock! Is it a Summer Day!" and then Kozhin chimed in and Winter Warlock would say no no and not want it to be warm weather, and we made origami tables and chairs for the "Skeleton King" to come and eat, watched Digimon: The Movie, which we rented, several times, Kozhin LOVES it and played Digimon type pretend games tons all weekend, oh and we started a pretend pen pal thing which had him reading faster than he ever has! Tai from the movie wrote him an "e-mail" and Kozhin answered, etc. etc. The sentence that shocked me the most was when Kozhin read, "I found out how you can go to the Digital World!" He read it straight through in a few seconds! It just goes to show how motivation is everything. We read Follow that Bird and The Story of the Root Children and probably a few other books.

OK, Kazha pooped, very loudly, time to go!

Friendly Bug Quotes

2006-05-28T03:18:00.000-04:00

It's 3:17. I'm awake because Kazha has some kind of bug and threw up on the bed about an hour ago (she also threw up on the floor right before bedtime last night). After I washed her off she didn't want to sleep, she said she wanted to go downstairs and play. It's so funny -- every time she's sick she gets in an incredibly good mood: especially talkative, friendly, and charming. Even when she has a fever, or now, when she must be nauseous, which makes me not want to do anything or talk to anyone. Now that I'm on the computer she's not content to play anymore but wants to watch the little paper clip on the computer screen. I'm on the rocking chair and she's sitting next to me on the arm of the sofa, which she calls her "nest". I took out a big plastic bowl for her to try to aim into next time, but she told me that bowls are for eating. Now I just asked her what they're for again, and she said: fuer kotzen (for vomiting).

Now she's trying to hold part of a toy stethoscope between her toes, and when it almost fell, she exclaimed, Whoa, das war knapp! (Whoa, that was a close call!).

Now she said: Mami, ich mach' einen Witz: Er schlaft wieder, Mami [sheepish grin]. (Mommy, I'm gonna make a joke: He's sleeping again, Mommy). (he wasn't sleeping, the cartoon paper clip, that was the joke :)

Kazha On Easter Morning

2006-05-26T21:47:00.000-04:00

Pumpkins and Pork

2006-05-22T13:56:00.000-04:00

One of my pet peeves is doing things that are not seasonal, like listening to Christmas music in July, or putting on Halloween costumes when it's NOT Halloween. However, as I type, I'm finishing up a mouthful of something very Fally: "pumpkin pudding", even with the spices. It's very disorienting for me, especially since it's also windy outside, a cool, clear day with no humidity, and green leaves that could be left over from late summer. But they aren't! And it's May! (and what a beautiful one...)

Yesterday I ate bought and homemade foods of a wide variety. In fact, "variety" might be the best way to describe my changing diet lately . . . since I have just started eating MEAT for the first time in EIGHTEEN (18) years. Not just any meat either. Pork sausages. I started with organic, free range chicken, moved to organic chicken sausage (with "pork casing" -- no mention of organic for that ingredient), then a pre-packaged birthday party hot dog, grilled lamb, and, finally, pork sausage. That was probably over the course of a couple of weeks.

Everyone to whom I mention this acts very surprised, but then doesn't ask me ANY questions about it. That's also disorienting. I think if I found out someone I knew hadn't eaten meat in 18 years and suddenly started eating pork sausage, I'd be interrogating them for days (and trying to decide if I too should be eating pork sausage). I can only assume that it's because they're trying to be sensitive--I'm always surprised at how sensitive people think I am, because I'm actually extremely hard to offend. In fact, I'm usually more offended by silence than the lack of it, no matter what the silence happens to be filled with. As long as the person also listens, because otherwise it's just boring (a word I use with great care). In a way, it's kind of nice that no one asks me about it, because I haven't explained it to anyone, and the prospect of doing so feels overwhelming. I want to do it, but not in the contexts I'm usually in (kids running around, lots of interruptions, people I haven't known for that long and who may not quite understand why I didn't eat meat, and at times eggs and dairy, in the first place).

I'll probably end up explaining it here, when I have more than . . . 20 minutes! before I have to go. One of the funniest things is that, because I have NO idea how to cook meat (I stopped eating it before I started cooking by myself), I'm dependent on buying it pre-cooked or ready-to-eat, especially since I'm not used to having to be so careful about what touched what while it was still raw.

Anyway, yesterday when we got home I also made soup with CHICKEN STOCK and carrots and broken up spaghetti, simple yummy popsicles I learned how to make from my Kurdish friend Jiyan from milk, sugar and rose water, and I turned the extra liquid into pudding by adding cornstarch, cardamom, and an egg. Kozhin is going to be surprised by one of the popsicles after school today, and then he has his 2nd trial Tae Kwon Do lesson!! There's a little pumpkin pudding left for him too.

I'll be back tonight with the promised stories from age 12 via yesterday, and the "significant thing" from last week, Ishallah.

Memory Ulica

2006-05-21T22:09:00.000-04:00

My family (parents, sister, brother, me, and, indirectly, Pshko) have been under considerable stress lately due to my brother's addiction to heroin. Things are looking up, but here's an e-mail I just sent to the abovementioned family members. It's amazing when you take a moment to try how many truly beautiful images one can draw on from one's past (or, lacking that, one's hope and imagination) to bask in for a while and relax in all the smells and sounds and tastes of another time and place. When I was twelve, my family took an unforgettable trip to the Dalmatian Coast of Croatia, in what was then Yugoslavia. My mother, sister, brother (then 3) and I spent two weeks of that on the island of Hvar while my father traveled around doing research for an article. I haven't thought about Hvar for a while, but suddenly decided to Google it tonight, and that's what inspired this (the lack of articles is in no way meant to ridicule, I just like it):

Here's a "make your own meditation" (just look at the attached picture and then choose from the choices in parentheses):

take nice deep breath, close your eyes, feel [sunshine, water, hermit crabs, jellyfish, wind on fast motorboat, smooth hot cobblestone under bare feet], taste [fish, lamb, scampi, pizza, croatian faux nutella, plump chilled grapes, gusti sok], smell [roasting lamb, fresh goat cheese, crushed lavender wind, bavanda, german sunscreen on german tourists, cigarettes that somehow don't offend], and hear [indistinguishable sounds of distant korzo while alone climbing towards stars against sillhouette of castle, squeaky clarinet notes on wind, echoing of heels on ancient sun-baked stone, quiet splash of small boats in black water at night]...

feel better? :)

Tomorrow I'll tell the story of how my sister and I got attacked by jellyfish near a nudist colony off the coast of Hvar...

And how my 3-year-old brother ran off into the crowd by the harbor at night because the restaurant didn't have the kind of juice he wanted and my sister and I frantically looked for him for what seemed like forever until we found him...

And how we drove into the interior of the island one day, the interior of the island covered with sunny, dry, rocky lavender fields with goats, to a small village for my first taste of fresh goat milk, first squirted straight into my mouth and then from a bowl of it, frothy and warm and sweet, and running barefoot along the narrow streets and courtyards and stairways with boys and girls whose language I didn't speak, and they didn't speak mine, but we had so much fun...

And how my sister pretended to have been stung by a jellyfish to escape while I wrestled and secretly enjoyed wrestling local boys attacking our inflatable boat in the Adriatic Sea...

WHOOOOOOOSH!!

Back to today, or, er, 1771, where we pretended we were all day today at Claude Moore Colonial Farm's Market Faire. But I'll have to write about that tomorrow. Oh, and the pork sausage I ate there...

A Visitor

2006-05-18T23:11:00.000-04:00

Considering my last post, it's kind of hilarious that we were a bit caught off guard tonight when Pshko found a SNAKE slithering around in our living room. We were enjoying a rare dinner together when Pshko got up very quickly but quietly and whispered: Don't be scared, but there's a . . . LINE on the floor!

A line? It took me more than a moment to figure out that that was his way of trying to tell me there was a snake without scaring the kids. As it was, it wasn't very scary, just small and brown, but I have no idea what kind of snake it was and I also have no idea how it got in here. It's somewhat comforting that they can't climb walls (stairs??).

While the kids stared squatting on their chairs, Pshko stopped it with a swiffer while I got a glass bowl and confined it. Then Pshko put a flattened cereal box under it and a thin hardback book under than and carried the whole thing across the street to the bushes.

At first we had thought, out loud, about killing it, and after that when we started to think of a way to take it outside instead, Kozhin piped in saying that there was another way: to kill it. We could, he said, take a knife and "knock" him on the head with it. I said we could try to take it outside because, if it was possible without hurting anyone, that would be better, and he agreed. We wanted to look online to try to find out what kind of snake it was, but we didn't have time because he had to do his homework and then it was time for bed--how ironic.

Well, off for the fourth try putting Kazha to bed...

Something More Important

2006-05-14T23:32:00.000-04:00

Sorry, I'll be reading THIS tonight!! :) :) :)

Lebneh With Sweetened Condensed Milk

2006-05-13T22:25:00.000-04:00

I'm eating a bowl of lebneh with sweetened condensed milk swirled in. YUM. Thanks to an almost empty fridge for the forced creativity. I think I'll be having this again...

When putting the kids to bed tonight, I had to try hard not to laugh when I heard, within seconds of each other, each of them say things in their sleep that made me wonder very much what they might have been dreaming about.

Kozhin started with, "Termites."

Kazha: "De nada! De nada! De nada!"

Actually, I'm pretty sure Kazha's comes from Dora the Explorer, so I guess she was dreaming about a TV show. Kozhin's may very well have been about the termite invasion we experienced at the beginning of Spring.

More Grammar Miracles from Kazha:

"[chuckling] ...Ich hab' Spiel-latz gesagt, anstatt Spielplatz!" ("I said play-round instead of playground!")

When I asked her what a playground was: "...Du weisst, was ein Spielplatz ist: ein Ding, und man kann rutschen! Du weisst, was das ist!" ("You know what a playground is: a thing, and you can slide! You know what that is!")

So, what have we been up to?

It took me a few minutes to remember ANYTHING about yesterday, which is a little scary, but here you go:

the hectic schoolday morning routine, culminating in the ritual kiss blown down the hall from the corner to Kozhin from me and Kazha

the storytime Kazha and I tried out at Imagination Station children's bookstore for the first time, which was nice but she preferred that I read to her in the aisles

the shock and disbelief I felt when I walked out, couldn't find my car keys, and then saw them obnoxiously hanging in clear view in the ignition

the combination of annoyance and amazement and awe I felt when Pshko turned out to have been having a break and saved me and Kazha within 10 minutes by prying open a crack in the car window with a screwdriver, bending a wire with plyers, maneuvering it into the cracked window and around the lock-thing, and finally resorting to flipping it up with the flat head of another screwdriver

the quick lunch at Lebanese Taverna Market, followed by hazelnut Manner Schnitten in the car

Kazha's short nap, during which I probably cleaned or surfed the web and snacked

the pick-up from school, during which something significant happened, which I'll discuss below

the quick foray into our fridge and the tv

the drive down the road to the Schrebergarten (rentable community garden plot) that the Laumanns just got and are going to share with us!! to take a look and pull weeds, after which Kozhin was in an exceptionally excellent mood (and said we should call the garden The Gates of Darkness...)

the visit to Borders (to buy a robotic dinosaur kit and a Curious George sticker book) and the adjacent La Madeleine (for carry-out tomato-basil soup and bread)

the wait at home for Colin to arrive for "movie night" while Kozhin and Kazha went berserk for Tante Baba, Kazha by running in circles and Kozhin by shout-chanting, literally about 100 times: PREHISTORIC POOP! PREHISTORIC POOP! I LIKE COPROLYTE DINO-DUNG!!!!!"

the movie, the often seen but always funny Overboard

the confusion of having fallen asleep putting Kazha to bed and having Caroline wake me up for a moment to say good-bye

Is that too many details? Then don't read it!!

Today a leisurely breakfast, a trip to an open house at a Tae Kwon Do place in Alexandria, where Kozhin at first felt shy but left beaming with a new uniform and a piece of wood he'd just split in two during his sample lesson! We got some snacks at the German store, where Kozhin had a slight and understandable fit when we found out Ueberraschungseier have been BANNED because they're a choking hazard. He made a wish by the well though, so... we'll have to wait and see. During Kazha's nap, Kozhin watched part of a Disney movie (which??), and then together we made some Mother's Day things for Undi: a flower made of two paper plates glued together with popcorn kernels inside and a happy flower face and petals of yellow tissue paper, and Kozhin wrote on the back: "Olwas kep yor hd ap" :) (my message, his spelling). He also wrote I LOVE YOU in different colored glitter glue--that was his idea :) We made origami hopping frogs (actually rectangular paper), ate gummi frogs from the German store, and I acted like a "frog dog" and chased him :) When Kazha woke up, we took a picnic lunch and the stroller and walked out through the Rattenwald to the Waldspielplatz, where we played, had a picnic on a beach towel on the grass, and I boldly told a young adult guy to please take care of himself (he was talking loudly on his cell phone about his ex-fiance's 150-dollar-a-day Oxycontin habit and how he was thinking about doing something...). We got home just as it was getting dark, after a really wonderful walk, and watched Power Rangers Generation, read part of the new robotic dinosaur companion book, bedtime, and here we are.

I'm torn between writing carefully selected snippets of our life that I think would actually be interesting and useful to others vs. including every detail because that's how I process things and those are details we'll love to read later. For now I'm obviously leaning towards the latter!

As for the "significant thing" that happened after school yesterday, I'll save that for tomorrow, because I really want to do it justice and I'm falling asleep!!

Pictures soon: we took a bunch, but I can't find the cord that connects it to the computer!

Rearranging the Living Room and Baba Yaga

2006-05-11T22:32:00.001-04:00

I think I mentioned somewhere before that I've been rearranging the living room. We rent a tiny townhouse, so we've had the sofas arranged at a right angle to create a sort of cozy living room within the living room, and "halls" behind them leading to the stairs and to the dining area. It was cozy for a while, but recently Spring, the simple passage of time, and other influences have made me want to rearrange things as well as have more space (preventing the kids from falling over the back of a sofa--and the stress of wondering whether a child is going to fall over the back of a sofa--is an added advantage...). And, of the little Feng Shui I know, this is supposed to be better because no more back to the front door! You walk right into a big open space: wonderful.

Kozhin was against it at first, as I thought he would be, but I said we could try the new way out and then he could decide after he gave it a chance. We're still trying it out but I think he likes it (he's said so once). One of the things we're doing is trying to remove the dominance of the television. Pshko thinks it's not as cozy, but I suspect that's because there's no longer any place to sit down that puts you directly in front of the TV. I talked to the kids about making little "centers"--that may sound a little cheezy and schooly, but I think it's fun (so there!), and the kids got really excited about it! I say "kids" because even Kazha chimed in and said, "...und auch ein PLANET CENTER!!!" Hmmm...that's actually a good idea! The ideas so far are mostly ones that we already had, but now they're more...I don't know...obvious and we're trying to make them nooky.

We have: the Cooking (the little toy oven/stove with a bunch of wooden food and pots, pans, and utensils, supplemented often with real stuff from the real kitchen), Music (with all our instruments and music books, including the big drums and the rediscovered electronic keyboard from when I was a teenager), various reading corners around the house (we're still working on where some of them will be, since there are currently homeless books strewn all across the living room floor), Play Dough, 2-D Art drawer and easel (not often used, at least compared to most kids I know!), Dinosaurs, and Treasures/PCM (Prime Choking Material, two plastic bins filled with stuff they both LOVE to play with and which used to be mostly off limits unless closely supervised, because it's all tiny parts of things, but they're just endlessly fascinating). And to be created: science, crafty stuff, space, anything that strikes our fancy.

By the way, in German we're calling them "Ecken" (corners), which I like better.

We've also finally discovered that outside our front door, the "ugly" almost grassless courtyard is a wonderful and also fascinating place. I have to say, it offends my increasingly sensitive aesthetic sensibilities a little, since it's not rare to see confetti, empty chip bags, even broken glass lying around, and it's mostly dirt, plus there are stairs a child could fall down and a parking lot a child could run into, and of course we can't plant anything or build a treehouse or hang a swing, but for someone a child's size, there's certainly plenty to discover! Ant hills galore, ant "highways", the incredible and very kind tree directly in front of all our front windows and our door (the branches and leaves of which are right now hanging heavy with Spring rain in front of our doorway so that you'd have to duck to go in and out) which changes so dramatically with every season, azaleas, fireflies...

Upstairs in the kids room it's basically a play room too, with blocks of all kinds, trains and tracks, a castle with dolls, tool kits, collections of pieces from Ueberraschungseier, dolls, stuffed animals, puzzles, legos, a growing assortment of dress-up clothes, trucks, and of course books... That room is almost always clean and neat, because among the things I love organizing and cleaning up are toys (can you tell from this post???)! Plus everything has it's place, there's no food up there, and even the kids know where everything goes!

Oh, and as Kozhin keeps happily pointing out, there's the "TV corner" and the "computer corner". :)

I really love the idea of using a small space really efficiently and cozily and making the best of it. I've never wanted a huge house, but I REEEEALLY do want a yard.

Yesterday we skipped the German playgroup for the first time in a looong time because our friends we usually take were sick. So we decided to be "lazy" and play at home, which was nice. Then we picked up some lunch from La Madeleine (the ever popular tomato basil soup and bread) and Kozhin and headed to Sarah J.'s parents' house for a picnic with her and her new baby, the previously mentioned "Baby Morgan" who is very adorable. Played and watched TV and ate at home, then the very well-received and never-before-read and relatively-long-for-a-bedtime-story Russian fairy tale Fenist the Falcon (this picture is the cover of the exact edition we have, which was given to one of us by Colin's godfather Tom Hamburger a long time ago). Oh, I love that story! I love every story that mentions Baba Yaga, basically any story that mentions or hints at a house in the middle of a deep forest.

I found these "story eggs" online--the first egg in the second row from the top is Fenist the Falcon, and then bumbled my way over to this online toystore, Purciful's Magical Toys, where you can make your own story eggs: the outermost egg is the beginning of the story, you open it and the next nested egg is the continuation, and so on. I'd like to read more about it and see if it's an old tradition, and maybe make some! I very much want to read more about Baba Yaga too.

Today it rained almost all day, and Kazha and I acted accordingly after taking Kozhin to school by playing quietly all morning. This was after I listened to kids read in Kozhin's classroom, which I do most Thursday mornings and really enjoy, thanks to Mindee who watches Kazha outside with Nikota (in the sprinkling rain, today, but there was a plastic house to take shelter in). After her early nap, we left to get a photo printer for Undi for mother's day when Pshko called saying he was off for the rest of the day. So we met at Panera Bread, Kazha and I stayed there while he went to pick up Kozhin, a rare treat for all involved, and stayed a while for dessert together. At home, Kozhin watched most of Alice in Wonderland while Pshko slept and I sifted through papers, wishing Pshko were awake to play with the kids since he was finally home. When he did wake up, he actually (at my bidding) read them three Kurdish books!!!!! I think this is the first time in months, many months! And they sat with him! It was great. It made my paper-sifting all the more enjoyable. And our dining room table is now fully a dining room table again.

A few video games (Lazytown, which has nice games where you get up and do dance moves along with it) and then bedtime, with Jens und Michel im Zirkus, Time for Bed Little Tiger, and the requested first two pages of Fenist the Falcon again.

Well, this has been fun for me, but I sure am glad no one's paying me to write this stuff. I'd feel just a bit "self indulgent" (to quote my dad from many times).

Oops, that reminded me :) I have some quotes:

Kozhin was having some trouble falling asleep, and I told him that sometimes trying to imagine what God looks like can help (??). He said he already knew: like the Sandman, with a long blue nightgown and a long blue pointed cap, all covered with stars. Sounds nice!

Kazha and I this evening were hiding under a towel and pretending it was a cave, taking turns going outside and back in and saying "Boo!" to each other. First she took my face in her hands and told me I was cute and gave me a hug ("Du bist suess, Mami!"), and then proceeded to say this:

"Mami, ich hab' Dich erschrocken, als Du in der Hoehle warst!"

This means: "Mommy, I scared you when you were in the cave!" which is pretty complicated, but in German it's even more complicated because of the changing forms of the verbs and pronouns. Reminder: she turned 2 at the end of March! Mashallah. I love it just as much when she says, "Waaaah!" but I just have to record this stuff!

Tomorrow after school we're meeting Tante Baba and Onkel Colin at Borders for a while and then coming over here for movie night!!

Cool

2006-05-11T12:07:00.000-04:00

I have a (bad?) habit of hopping in the rocking chair with my laptop as soon as Kazha is asleep. Cleaning and cooking wait and wait, and nobody's making me do them! At least I go through phases with this, but right now I'm in a reeeeal long one. I think part of it is that I don't really have a break from the kids except when she's sleeping. Not that I need a break from them, well, maybe I do sometimes, but I definitely need things like this to feel like myself: reflecting and processing things. I guess I could do that while doing the dishes...but then nobody else could read about it! Pshko leaves before we get up, and comes back after we're asleep, weekends especially. Waaaaaah!! My one break is Kurdish class, but that's two hours a week plus commute. I'm not complaining, really, just justifying this "Faulenzerei"!!

Actually, what I wanted to write about before maybe sifting through some of the papers over there is this word: COOL.

I HATE it! I've been thinking about it a lot lately, since it, along with it's evil twin, "NOT COOL", has entered Kozhin's five-year-old vocabulary with a vengeance, and I've been trying to figure out why it bothers me so much. I think it's this: if you say something or someone is "cool", it implies that there is some objective measure of the "coolness" of things. Not that YOU think it's cool, or that someone else might think it's cool, but that it just IS cool. Have you ever heard anyone say, "It's really cool for me"? Maybe "I think it's cool", but even then it sounds like an argument for something's coolness. Why can't something just be interesting or enjoyable or even acceptable to someone as an individual? Why does something have to be labeled for whatever qualities apparently exude peer pressure acceptability at the least, sheep- or zealotlike followability at the best?

~~~~~~

Kozhin says, "Jetix" is cool. When he first started school, pink was his favorite color, he went nuts if you said the word. He spent the first few months of school trying to convince his classmates that it was OK for boys to like pink. Most of the kids he was trying to convince were girls, by the way. He loved playing dress-up with his friends' pink ballet tights and tutus and tank tops. Soon after Winter Break, he stopped liking pink, liking Power Rangers, and telling his best friend, a girl, that playing ballet with her wasn't cool and that "Jetix" was cool. I guess he doesn't understand yet that sometimes some things are "cool" for girls and other things are "cool" for boys. Granted, Power Rangers is probably something he would have ended up liking given some exposure anyway (he's always liked a nice, for me, range of stuff, gender stereotype-wise), but it's the coolness that bothers me. I haven't made a big deal about it, but have tried to talk to him about what the word "cool" really means and what he may think it means and that he does have some choice in whether he likes things that are deemed "cool" by others or, just as powerfully, marketed as such.

~~~~~

I'll have to ask him what he has to say about it and share it here. Kids have so much to figure out!!

~~~~~

I guess it's socially useful to have a feel for what's cool at the time, as long as you're lucid about what it means and free in what you like and do. It's the same reason I shudder when I read the title of the magazine "Hip Mama". Why do I need to be hip to be a good mother? I can list a bunch of decisions about the way I parent that could identify me one way or another, and make it easier to find kindred spirits, but why would the parenting style I aspire to be "hip"? Maybe I just don't get it.

~~~~~

It's also why in my eternal search for a religious/spiritual niche to settle on, I'm put off by the "coolness" of lots of Neo-Pagan stuff, even though I'm very attracted to many parts of Paganism. There's also the fluff and cheese, but an undertone, maybe more among younger people, of it being something cool, as opposed to Christianity for example. Can't religion be free from this crap? It is, I'm sure. It's just an idiosyncracy of our species to see some things through that particular lens. I suspect lemurs and grasshoppers don't give a hoot whether their cool. Attractive, sociable, hard-working, cuddly, graceful, strong, good-at-finding-food maybe, but almost certainly not cool.

~~~~~

Just like anything, as long as you're aware of it and not ruled by it, it's probably OK. Just another interesting human phenomenon to be explored...!

Ouch! Aua! Aiiiiiii!!!!

2006-05-10T00:02:00.000-04:00

OUCH!! I just got back from my weekly Kurdish class at the Washington Kurdish Institute, which is always great, especially because my sister comes over and plays with the kids and puts them to bed, and all I can think about as I start to write this is what Kozhin said right before I left, and he's said it once before (last week):

"Mami, die einzigen Dinge, die ich mag sind Video Games und TV gucken!!"

Translation: "Mommy, the only things I like are video games and watching TV!!" Wow. Ouch Ouch Ouch Ouch Ouch!! This is from someone who a year ago didn't have cable and had never played a video game. Maybe he's making up for lost time? The thing is, I know he very much enjoys doing tons of other things, of course, but when he does say that, he really means it at the time. I also know that he never said things like that before he started going to school, and it's only on no-school days--when there is MORE free time--that he often doesn't even ask for TV all day. Hmmm... And it's after a long day at school that it almost always feels like the winding down/vegging out of TV is just what he needs, legitimately.

I'm not going to get into a big discussion of TV now, because I don't see it as a black-and-white issue and could go on and on about it, but I should say that I am not against TV. I definitely appreciate what it can offer, and I suspect it's various effects of school plus the fact that we have a tiny home with a TV in the middle of the living room (I'm trying to work on rearranging the room) that's part of the TV's growing prominence. But it's still hard to hear words like that come out of his mouth.

So, to make myself feel better, here are some pictures of books we've especially enjoyed reading together lately (with Kazha, of course!):

This book was always very magical to me when I was growing up. So I was very excited when Kozhin got around the age where I thought he might like it (the few pictures are beautiful, but most of the book is text). We read a chapter a night for a while this Winter, and then Undi bought a record player with an audio cassette recorder attached, so I recorded our old record onto a tape. We listened to it on the way to the Fairie Festival on Saturday, and it was great! I can't wait to record all our old records--what a gold mine!! (Biene Maja, Der Verkehrsteufel, Bruederchen und Schwesterchen, Hui Buh!). Anyway, Kozhin really liked the story, and said he was sad when it ended. It was nice to finally meet "Das Sandmaennchen" and "Die Sternenwiese", where we always say we'll meet while we sleep. I love the Naturkraefte (the Nature Powers) invited to the Nachtfee's (the Night Fairy) Kaffeeklatsch: die Blitzhexe (the Lightning Witch), der Regenfritz (Rain Fritz), die Wolkenfrau (Cloud Woman), der Wassermann (Water Man) ...and die Sternenwiese (the Meadow of Stars) ...they always evoked such mysterious and enchanting images, of course all now remembered through the silvery veil of childhood!

OK, and here's Lady and the Tramp, the exact Little Golden Book that we have, which we recently re-discovered, and now Kozhin says he wants a Siamese Cat. I read the whole thing in an English accent, and at first he hated it, but then I said the story took place in London and was supposed to be in an English accent and he accepted it. :)

This one was a little easier to read with Kazha, although she kept nursing for a split second, then looking at the picture, then nursing for a split second, etc. etc. etc.

OK, now this whole thing has got me thinking that I didn't even mention what it is that Kozhin is so keen on watching and playing.

He is OBSESSED with Power Rangers (mostly Mystic Force, but a little of all the others). It's late, so more about that later, MUCH more, but for now: there is definitely a bias against this kind of stuff. It sure took me a while to accept it. At the library, Kozhin asked for a book about Power Rangers, we did a search: nothing. He asked why and I couldn't explain! OK, so I looked on Amazon and there ARE books about Power Rangers, I think they might be comic books, but he's enjoyed me reading Fix und Foxi to him! Maybe I'll order one like this and give it a try. Yesterday he bought a mystic morpher with his allowance. I wish I had a video of him pretending to be in the TV show with it and "helping"! He was so excited.

Speaking of yesterday, we took Kozhin to school, came home for a bite to eat, went to Kazha's Tumbling for Two's (gym) class, came home for lunch, Sarah J. and her new ADORABLE 5 1/2- week-old baby Morgan came over for several hours, stayed with sleeping Kazha while I got Kozhin. Kozhin and Kazha really hit it off with Sarah (she's a Kindergarten teacher), who is a natural with kids. We talked about nursing and birth and my brother and played with Kozhin. She brought out a good mood in him. The baby slept in my arms most of the time! Then we swooped into Toys R Us for the mystic morpher, then to swimming class at Washington Lee pool--Kozhin did great while I chatted with Susanne and chased Kazha, but he was freezing a blue-lipped at the end of class, and his whole body was chattering! We turned on the heat in the car. Then a quick dinner at home, Power Rangers Mystic Force, and bedtime. Mondays are always allowance/swimming/mystic force days, which are all good things to offset the beginning of the school week :)

Today was Music Together with Kazha (she hid her fingers during "10 Little Fingers"!), playground, shopping at Trader Joe's, nap, pick up Kozhin, play outside with R and N for 2 1/2 hours, pick up Tante Baba at work, play at home and eat dinner together, Kurdish class, GOOD chat with Colin and Tante Baba, and home. Kazha was cranky--I hope it's her teeth coming in! Maybe some allergies too--I forgot to mention that Kozhin also had two fits while Tante Baba was with us, about VERY minor things, which makes me suspect it was something making him not feel very well. She's always good at cheering him up though, and they were both sound asleep when I got home. Can't believe they're still that way! :)

Fairies

2006-05-07T00:54:00.000-04:00

Today (well, yesterday now!) we went to the 15th annual May Day Fairie Festival at Spoutwood Farm in Glen Rock, Pennsylvania! What a wonderful time we had.

I hadn't charged the camera, but luckily there are lots of nice pictures at the festival web site, so here you are. You just won't find any of the Bahbies.

We even missed this maypole dance, but we'll be going to one tomorrow at the Potomac Overlook Regional Park festival that we go to in May every year. However, we did sit by the wrapped maypole, eating and dripping ice cream (mint chip and orange sorbet) and listening to good music.

What else did we do there?

We spent a good amount of time in the field of bubbles, where a windmill type of machine blew huge breezes of bubbles in all directions. Nearby was an area with secret passageways, wooden gates, tire tunnels, and a fairy gazebo.

Kozhin and Kazha were both taken by the bagpipes, and Kozhin said it was his favorite between bagpipes, drum circle (my favorite!), and some electronic music that I won't try to name.

Kozhin really wanted a fairy costume (though he didn't want his face painted, something he always wants Undi and Tante Baba to do lately, a la Chiro from Super Robot Monkey Team Hyperforce Go!), so we walked all over looking for one, and ended up settling very happily on a pair of dragon wings! There were two pair left at the stand, a big and a small pair, and Kazha immediately wanted to have the small pair too, so we got both. They looked so sweet walking down the path holding hands with their matching dragon wings! And got lots of smiles...

The drive was about 2 hours, with a break at Panera Bread off the highway outside Baltimore for a quick lunch. Kazha was very excited every time we saw horses on the way, and kept asking, "Mami, kannst Du mehr Pferde suchen? Kannst Du mir gleich mehr Pferde zeigen??"

We had wanted to go yesterday, Kozhin didn't even go to school because of it, but it turned out Kazha got a rash all over her body (some kind of virus), so we stayed home. It was worth the wait though!

It was a much appreciated break from the craziness of the last month (more, probably), which finally seems to be taking a positive turn. Maybe next year lieber Colin would like to come with us! It would probably be a bit too cheezy for him, and I admit, it was awash with cheeze and fluff, but I still enjoyed every minute. How refreshing just to be in a totally different environment. I think it was good for the kids too--they definitely said they liked it.

Thinking about "elemental" things and having a 5-year-old sure make you question and think about the most basic aspects of existence and life in our Universe in totally fresh ways, especially having to explain them. This is especially so with our place in the Universe and the fact that we are spinning around and revolving around the sun, a fact that sometimes seems like it should be so mind-boggling that it would prevent us from being able to do even the most basic mundane chores. So, I was driving home, the kids both fell asleep on the way back (after listening to Finding Nemo on tape, and Peterchens Mondfahrt on the way there), when on 495 I had a really hard time seeing the road because of the setting sun. When it occurred to me that I was speeding along at a pace much faster than a cheetah, in a machine made from metal dug (?) from the Earth, rubber from trees from God-knows-where, propelled by sparks of fire, and suddenly was irritated at not being able to see. Why? Because a massive ball of fire was in the way, on the horizon, because I was about to go over it, billions of miles away. Hmmm... And then I took another sip of frozen frappuchino.

It has also recently occurred to me several times that "up" is actually "away from the Earth".

OK, OK, back to the ground. The kids and Pshko are sleeping upstairs, and I must get to bed too, though I'm sure I'll spend a few minutes surfing first. It was nice that Kozhin slipped seamlessly into our day from Power Rangers obsession and back again (though Digimon is becoming a favorite...I'll have to watch it with him...).

Oh, one more thing: Kazha used, "Du weisst!" today in the exasperated sense ("Oh, you know!!") for the first time. I offered her a spoon for her oatmeal tonight, and she said she wanted something else, but clearly couldn't remember the name. She said, "Du weisst!!" and I held her up and she grabbed the "Honig Tunker" (those things for dipping in honey). Then I asked her what was on her pull-up (she knew I already knew: Dragon Tales), and she again said, "Du weisst!!" and didn't answer! hee hee hee...

Kozhin, during an add for a set of romantic music CDs, told me on his way up to the bathroom, "Mami, Du kannst dies bestellen mit deiner Kredit Karte--dann kriegst Du $10 off!!" (and I think he doesn't pay attention...).

Reminder: Kozhin is 5 and Kazha just turned 2!

Ein Typischer Mittwoch

2006-05-03T23:49:00.000-04:00

Hier sind die Maeuse! Wer meinen anderen blog gesehen hat auf Yahoo hat die Fotos schon gesehen--sie sind von vor 1 Monat zu Kazhas 2. Geburtstag! Irgendwann mal werde ich mich entgueltig entscheiden, wo ich am liebsten regelmaessig schreiben werde; bis dann bitte ich um Geduld :) auch mit dem hin-und-her mit den Sprachen--das muss wohl sein. Aber die Fotos kann hoffentlich jeder geniessen!

Heute war ich vormittags mit Kazha wie jeden Mittwoch in der deutschen Spielgruppe, was im Pfarrhaus der deutschen Kirche hier stattfindet, ist aber unabhaengig von der Kirche. Kozhins Schule faengt schon um 8:00 an, also fahren wir meistens erst ein Bisschen nach Hause, Kazha isst was (vor 8 hat sie kaum Hunger, weil sie ja nachts noch ziemlich oft stillt) und wir spielen ein Bisschen, bereiten ein Paar Snacks fuer die Spielgruppe vor. Kurz vor 10 fahren wir los, holen Freundin und ihre Tochter ab, und fahren zur Spielgruppe (das Pfarrhaus ist ganz in der Naehe von Mami und Daddys Haus). Wenn es schoen ist, wie heute, spielen wir draussen, heute war auch eine Baby Shower fuer eine hochschwangere Mama, und wir spielten von 10-12 draussen im Sand und auf den Schaukeln, sangen dann noch ein Paar Lieder, und schon war es Zeit Kozhin abzuholen. Mittwochs hat er "early release" und ist um 12:30 schon fertig--das ist meistens ziemlich knapp mit dem abholen.

An allen anderen Tagen spielen wir noch meistens nach der Schule ein Bisschen draussen mit Kozhins bester Freundin und ihrem Bruder (deren Mutter ist seit dem Schulanfang eine meiner besten Freundinnen geworden), aber Mittwochs fahren wir sofort nach Hause, da Kazha noch kein Nickerch en gehabt hat. So fuhren wir auch heute heim, Kazha schlief ein, Kozhin guckte "The Magic School Bus", und ich machte ein Bisschen Waesche und versuchte das kleine Wohnzimmer ein Bisschen weiter umzuraeumen (noch nicht fertig!). Pshkos Freund und Mitarbeiter und seine Cousine sind auch kurz vorbeigekommen. Mittwoch ist offiziel Pshkos freier Tag, aber das ist selten in Wirklichkeit so. Es ist fast immer Papierkram und anderes zu tun.

Um 4:00 nachmittags weckten wir Kazha auf und fuhren zum babysitten/spielen.

Schnell nach Hause, kurz auf Pshko warten, tschuess und ich fuhr los zum monatlichen Treffen meiner "Women's Spirituality Group". Darueber schreibe ich ein anderes Mal--es war und ist immer sehr schoen! Als ich nach Hause kam, waren die Kinder tatsaechlich im Bett, aber alle Teile von allen unseren Spielen lagen ueberall auf dem Boden. grrrr....

So, ausser der Frauengruppe war das so ein typischer Mittwoch fuer uns.

Macht's gut!!