isoglossia

Well, Adam,
This has been quite a month. For you it’s been a good one, play- and growing- and learning-wise. For your parents it’s been rather tough, but not because of you. Before we get into the all-about-you part of this post, let’s have a little context.

This month has seen a big job-hunt on the part of your papa, with mama doing some of the heavy lifting. We need to figure out where you’ll be spending the next few years, and how your parents will afford to keep you in Huggies^® (you’re up to #5s now! Pull-ups!) It seems to boil down to this: we stay in our comfortable place, in this job papa has gotten so used to, or we don’t. Robust rumors have it that my contract will be renewed for not one but three more years here, so option one seems viable. But in the flurry of job-hunting, that exhausting coil of searching, finding, writing, attaching, corresponding, imagining, hopingwaitingloathingetc, one gleaming possibility was unearthed, and if it pans out I guess we will be relocating. But we just don’t know yet, so as I write this report your immediate future is up in the air. I hope that by the time you’re 17 months old we’ll know where you’ll be celebrating your second birthday. All this uncertainty has made us feel a bit hemmed in and stressed out.

So the job hunting is finished for now, and it’s just about waiting, not entirely patiently, to know. But your poor old papa is so spent from struggling to fit the job hunt in between heavy loads at work and the morning & evening playtime demands of you, along with the stress brought on by looking for, finding, and hoping for a job that he really wants, that he’s basically going to phone this one in. Fortunately, your mama has been taking lots of pictures, and we’ll let them do most of the talking.

Up there at the top we can see you pointing at the moon. This was an especially cool event because two trophic waves of plasticity converged into one epiphanic stream: you learned that there’s a great glowing silver satellite in the sky, one, and you also finally figured out why mama and papa are always waving their index fingers around in the air. Guided by the light of the moon, you stopped staring at THE END OF THE FINGER, and looked at WHERE IT WAS POINTING. Eur-Malkovichin’-reka!

Now you love love love the moon and look for it at all hours of the day and night and regardless of cloud cover or the phase of said moon. It’s a little bit pathetic when you can’t find it, which, sorry to say, is about 99 times out of 100.

At some point since your last report, spring has more or less arrived here in Primorska. It’s still a little sketchy, with lots of moon-obscuring clouds and/or rain, not to mention hail, but it’s (grudging) progress. You are very interested in the plants that are popping up in our window-boxes and outdoors, particularly the edible ones, which to you means all of them. During this time the second anniversary of your conception has come and gone. No pictures of that.

There’s been increasing time spent outdoors when the spring weather manages to peep through, with walks and explorating of the playground down Cankarjeva ulica, where there are lots of delicious things on the ground, like gravel.

With spring has come daylight savings, but even with the sun an hour lower in the sky, you still wake up very early most mornings. Sometimes there’s time for a little story-reading before papa goes to work. We’re really happy about how interested you are in books, although it often drives your mama crazy when you pull out and strew about every single book you own before returning, predictably, to one of the three you keep in heavy rotation: The Very Hungry Caterpillar (now loved to tatters), The Little Engine That Could (you especially like the baby elephant riding in the coal tender), or Goodnight, Sweet Butterflies (a remarkably well-built book).

Some mornings you just play with your own shadow.

You’ve continued your training as a stuntbaby this month. The sofa-diving mentioned last month has now become an officially sanctioned daily event, since you’ve shown the good judgment of constructing a pillow-pit for safety before beginning the hurling of yourself into the air. The climbing up onto things, particularly in the high-bonking zones, we’re not so wild about.

But you also spend a fair amount of time creeping about closer to the floor, helping with the vacuuming, for example:

Or playing around under the desk:

You have been showing growing pains this month, with greater understanding of what the big people do, and you want to do exactly what they do (sit in chairs, for example, drink coffee, type at computer — hmm, seen through your eyes, our lives look painfully dull. Are you sure you want to grow up to be like us?) One of your favorite activities is to haul the kitchen chairs around like they are massive granite blocks and you are constructing the Great Pyramid of Khufu, then you climb up onto them and admire yourself in mama’s plucking mirror:

Sometimes we catch you kissing your reflection. Like we don’t do enough kissing around here.