isoglossia

Question: how many photographs do you have to take of a two-year-old in order to obtain one usable passport picture?
Answer: how big is your SD card?

We are in the midst of bureaucracy hell. This is what happens when parents from two different countries procreate in a third one, and then have the temerity to want things like birth certificates, passports, insurance coverage, and a temporary residence permit for the gassy little whiner resulting from their union. We also thought this would be a good time to finally get around to securing Adam his second passport (his U.S. one is taken care of). So we are spending these recent (and upcoming) weeks dealing with the bone-grinding bureaucratic mechanisms of three nations simultaneously, as well as the challenges and attendant joys of producing decent passport photographs of the two little bastards. While few people I know claim to love dealing with bureaucracy, in my case there is something almost pathological about how much I hate it. I have had my fair share of unpleasant experiences, including the very real threat of deportation when I first arrived here thanks to my failure to follow proper visa procedures. Maybe this is why jumping through the endless flaming hoops of bureaucracy occasionally makes me feel physically ill, and nearly always makes me want (to borrow a phrase from a Rob Schneider film review) to smash a toilet.

Lies: pretty much everything I wrote in the boys’ monthly update post turns out to be false. If it was at all positive. Adam’s behavior lately has been deteriorating to the point where I wonder what keeps Magda from just devouring him like a hamster. It does appear to be jealousy-related, and maintaining the delicate balance required for minimal harmony in the house is becoming an ever more demanding chore. Oh, and the potty-training? Forget we said anything. Now I feel like an idiot for even bringing it up. The only thing I wrote in that post which still stands would be the reference to Alek’s gas problem, which has ballooned, so to speak, to the point where he is constantly grunting with effort in his attempts to entice from his bottom one elusive, melancholy fart. To the exclusion of all other activities. Like sleeping. Included in my lies would be the prevailing nickname for Alek: Adam’s limited phonetic inventory has had the final say, and the new baby’s name is Ike.

With Adam’s acting-out behavior, his bath time has become a less-than-festive affair. Last night I looked up from swabbing great gulfs of water from the floor just in time to see him take a dainty swig of Tigger shampoo. Figuring he’d get what he deserved, I brought a sippy-cup of water for him to rinse the “sow-ah” taste from his mouth. Many sips later I was holding him cradled in my arms, wrapped in his towel, when an explosive jet of bright Tigger-colored vomit erupted into his surprised lap. It was nearly the perfect boot: aside from a single drop on my T-shirt, nothing was touched except his towel and every inch of Adam’s naked skin from chin to knee. Back into the tub he went.

Cross-reference: Michael shows why our latest bureaucratic outing is a comparative picnic; this explosive-vomit thing seems to be going around.
The picture: Mafalda feeds her pet turtle, Burocracia. Missing are the first 39 frames of the strip. In the first one she calls, “Burocracia!” Then we wait 38 frames for the turtle to appear for his little lettuce leaf. Copyright Quino (Joaquín Salvador Lavado). See also the Wikipedia entry. Her little brother appeared here back in the early days.

Hello, boys —

As promised in the post just below, here is your first shared monthly report post. I hope you will be good sharers, because there’s going to be a lot of that for the next several years. Currently you are sharing a bedroom, an arrangement which works out a good deal better than we had dared hope. Though both of you have your age-appropriate squalling fits, you each seem immune to being woken or disturbed by the other’s. A nice little bit of symbiosis.

In fact, if anything, the cloying togetherness threatens to be a problem: Adam’s fits more and more these days are related to our jackbooted attempts to limit his kissing of Alek, something he generally wants to do only right as Alek is falling asleep.

So far, just a month into life, Aleksander seems to be a highly complacent baby. We try to recall Adam at this age, but all we can do is shudder. Alek, on the other hand, takes everything in stride and just rolls his eyes as his brother pitches a hissy about Little Bo Peep or something. Other than occluded gas, there doesn’t seem to be much that upsets the new one. Even washing is usually an entirely silent affair.

Once the initial thrill of having yet another baby around wears off, there’s not a whole lot to say. The low-maintenance thing is great for sleeping and general lack of stress, but it doesn’t have the traffic-generating draw that nightmare baby stories boast. With Adam, it took months before he learned to sleep. His first smile cracked his face at the three-month mark. Alek has done little else besides smile and sleep, and frequently shows off by doing both simultaneously. Basically, he starts off cute, finishes the same way. Nothing to see here, folks. Move along.

Adam’s last month, on the other hand, has been full of major landmarks. He has started to really help out in the kitchen, for one thing, and frequently demands his own cutting board and special knife.

Adam also got his first “trike” this month. Actually a tiny bike with training wheels, because if you promise a new vehicle to a two-year-old, you don’t come home empty-handed even if you do live in the live most trike-bereft city on earth. So Adam got his first-ever vehicle upgrade due to lack of availability.

Now for a development so major it requires no discussion:

Adam’s language hit critical mass this month, too, and has exploded. Some of the stuff he comes up with astonishes and entertains us, and if it also occasionally mortifies us, we just tell ourselves he’s spending an inordinate amount of time speaking with frustration and vehemence about frogs. Whole strings of words are now emerging joined more or less coherently together, and there are signs that he’s on the verge of discovering the function of the verb. He’s finding that language is a powerful tool for relocating people from furniture to floor, or even from one room to another. Typical:

Papa…peas…come…sikh…HEAH

Prepositions and articles still baffle him, which is interesting because his Polish and Slovene already show pretty advanced syntax (declension, e.g.), though he seems to favor English. He has learned to count to five reliably in English and Polish, and a new favorite game is to demand free jumps, in which he clambers and hacks his way to the highest point of his father and hurls himself off. Three times. In just the four days I was away last week I noticed significant growth in his speaking: when I left, he was obsessed with building Lego die-suss; by the time I returned, he was all about dyna-sauce. Free syllables, even.

His haircutting skills still need a little work, though.

Jeżyk getting ready to go out

Some lake somewhere

Since this site was founded, we’ve used it as a place for logging reports on Adam’s progress on a monthly basis, and last month’s was lamer than usual, due mainly to the welter of activity in the days just prior to Alek’s birth. I spent some time wondering about how to continue this tradition and record-keeping while accommodating the new arrival, and decided that since Adam was born on the 12^th, and Alek on the 14^th, a monthly joint report issued on the 13^th would be the answer.

This is not that report.

After a very busy first month with Alek and Adam vying for our attention, this week I am in balmy Switzerland and busier than ever. The first report will be forthcoming when I return to Slovenia and things have settled down a little. Isoglossia.com apologizes for the delay. Thank you, boys, for your patience.

They just have to be different,
those doughty Swiss

Finally sorting some pictures from last Wednesday’s trip to Venice:

Magda’s Venice 3×3
3×3 directory
Still sinking

Alek (Aleks, Jeżyk or Ježek, Jež, Lump, Blob, The Small One, &c.) first struck us with his amazing resemblance to Adam, but as the weeks have worn on we’ve noticed more the ways in which he differs from his brother. Thankfully.

When first bathed, Adam keened like one boiled alive. In the natural beneficence of the universe, records of such misery do not survive, as this site was not established until just before Adam reached the three-month mark (though later secondary sources claim authority).

Adam’s dry-twig popek hung around for ages, but Alek’s belly-button detritus was, like everything about this boy so far, extremely advanced and dropped away well before we were mentally prepared for the momentousness of the event. So washing with actual water could then proceed:

This photo clicks through to a Flickr slide show of first-bath pictures — for grandparents and hardcore internet aunties only