isoglossia — pending reconstruction

Boys, boys, boys. BOYS! That’s better.

Now listen, pay no attention to that post just below this one, the Advice for new parents or whatever I ended up calling it. One day you’ll grow up and you will learn what ‘satire’ means. Or not, and you’ll both be humorless bastards wondering why your parents didn’t love you.

What can I tell you? This month, like all summer months everywhere, has gone flabbergastingly fast. Your time with us speeds by. It seems just yesterday that I was writing about newborn babies, and already you’re getting haircuts and fooling around with booze and motorcycles. Oh, and goats.

This month Alek got his first haircut. It was sort of an impromptu affair. Mama was over at Neli’s frizerija having a little work done herself, while I pushed the two of you around the block over and over again in the July heat like some sort of double-damned Sisyphus. Finally I popped in to the salon to see if your mama was finished (please be finished!), and we wondered if it maybe wasn’t getting to be time for Adam to have his first professional haircut. A summit was convened, and after several extensive sessions of negotiations an agreement was reached, the terms of which involved Kinder Surprises. Adam mounted to the chair and received a buzz worthy of bootcamp. By this time the fumes were making us woozy, so it took no great leap of the imagination to have the Turducken get a little trim, too. We like the clean summer shearing look on both counts. Even papa got an extra-short buzz this month.

We did not take you to the embassy’s fourth of July party at the Križanka as originally planned, but we did make a trip to Ljubljana a few days later to run some important errands and take in some culture. What began as a light-hearted trip to the capital ended in a grueling bloodbath we were lucky to survive. We went to:

THE ZOO.

But first: THE MINI-BAR!

See you shake that bubbly up real good, Adam.

Forget that part about satire. Dragging you two out to dinner just about finished us off. “We’ll push them around,” Magda said, “and they’ll fall asleep. Then we can drink wine.”

Yeah, good luck with that plan. By ten o’clock we were still wineless and ready to weep.

Adam set a personal record for not falling asleep. I think he put us to bed, in fact. Common sense would say that this would translate into sleeping later the next morning, but common sense and people with two children under three are mutually exclusive. Well before o-seven-hunnerd Adam was thrashing on the foldout couch screaming “COVERS NOT WORKIN’!” He had managed to sleep sideways on the Hotel Slon’s cinderblock pillows.

At breakfast Magda amused herself by looking for people “at least as screwed as we are”. This required careful assessing of the number, ages, and age-spreads of young couples’ children, cross-referenced with amount of rubbish-converted food on and under those children. The Schadenfreude in her voice on glimpsing a defeated-looking pair with kids about 18 months apart was ELECTRIC.

TO THE ZOO!

It was all we could do to come up a single decent photo of Adam at the zoo. (Turducken, you were asleep the whole time. Except for the part with the lemurs or whatever they were. Yeah, I didn’t know they screamed like that, either.) He acted about as interested as if we’d been in a fabric shop. Just as well, I suppose, given how cranky the parents got in the steel-smelting heat while pushing heavily-laden vozički up Namibian sand dunes. Memo to Ljubljana Zoo staff: the Wheel has been invented. Check it out.

Adam is famous for being non-cooperative when it comes to having his picture taken, but the zoo trip was a new gauntlet thrown down. In the petting zoo part he seemed determined to liberate all the goats, lambs, and Vietnamese pot-bellied pigs from their own private Guantánamo while refusing to sit still long enough for the canonical family goat picture to be taken. I did the best I could with what I had to work with, but I have to grudgingly admit that it’s to his credit that he fears and mistrusts goats.

One of the sacrifices mama made in moving to Slovenia was betraying her beloved Toruń Apators motorcycle speedway team, so she got a little crazy when we saw a speedway bike in Prešeren Square. She plopped Adam up onto it just before the speedway guys pushed it into a van and fled the crazy-lady with the howling monkey-children before they could compromise the machine by getting it all covered with crazy.

Let’s see, what else? Oh, we both got new eyeglasses this month, which I do realize seems irrelevant to your monthly report, but bear with me.

The day that we went glasses shopping with you two? Just recalling it exhausts me. That we both managed to obtain new glasses is a true testament to our stamina and fitness as parents. Lesser folk would have retreated, blinded by failure and tears of rage.

In our case it was just the second one.

Alek: don’t learn too much from him.