isoglossia

If all goes well with Wordpress’s slightly wonky post-from-the-future feature, you’ll be seeing this on New Year’s Eve and we’ll be wishing you a happy 2008. If not, nevermind.

We’re off to the north for what Adam fervently hopes will be a white Christmas. Whether Santa will put in an appearance is contingent upon a certain skinny elf’s airplane comportment. Just to be safe, we scattered some white around the place, produced our own Santa-like homunculus, and broke out the camera.

Jolly Old Saint Nick cooperated. For fifteen or so seconds.

Adam offers his consulting services during a glitch in the tethered shooting.

The erosion in cooperation did not go uncaptured.

Magda attempts to soothe Jolly Old Saint Nick’s frayed nerves.

Ultimately, Jolly Old Saint Nick felt he had to distance himself from the project.

If you haven’t received your Christmas card yet, blame the Slovenian/and/or your local postal service. And send us your new address. We can’t keep track of everything.

To all a good night!

The entire exhaustive Christmas photo-shoot set is viewable on Flickr.

We’ll be back in the new year, full of herring and vodka.

Tonight at midnight Slovenia will become a Schengen nation. This means we will not need our passports anymore to go grocery shopping. The event seems worthy of writing a proper post about, but I am a bit busy tying up loose ends before the Christmas holidays, so suffice it to say that being able to whiz into Italy without stopping to wave our passports at bored, contemptuous, and soon-to-be-redundant officials is likely to make us feel slightly askew.

Adam has this new thing where he says, “YEAH!” with a certain intonation that carries the sense of “ARE YOU A MORON? HOW COULD YOU NOT BE AWARE OF THIS?”

[Sunrise, in the front room]
Adam: Birds!
Me: Birds?
Adam: YEAH! Birds! Did you seen dem? [pointing out the window]
Me: Oh, yeah, now I see them.
Adam: YEAH! Dey are eating da roof!

According to my spell-checker, I am supposed to be married to someone called Magma Buckaroo. This does sound exciting, I have to admit, but overall I am pretty happy with the status quo.

Related: Huey Lewis’s mother’s name was Magda.

I may have previously mentioned that H.L. and I attended the same high school. BRUSH WITH FAME!
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The House Of Wigs is my new favorite old thing I should have known about several years ago (as usual, I blame Europe).

Wow, what a month this has been. What a year this has been. A year ago today, Adam, you really weren’t talking yet, just the occasional attempt at a word here and there. It was Christmas last year that shocked language into you, the electrifying realization that “SANKACAME!SANKACAME!SANKACAME!” And then would come a frenzied listing off of the presents Santa had brought, and a breathless discussion of the strangeness of having a tree in the house, which would bring you back to the presents under the tree, and this would remind you that “SANKACAME!SANKACAME!SANKACAME!” And this went on for several months, and by the time you recovered from the excitement, you found that you had learned to talk.

And you haven’t shut up since, in any language. That was a year ago.

You speak three languages beautifully, and are now becoming keenly interested in the differences. “Papa, please give me some BREAD,” you’ll say. “Papa say ‘bread’. Mama say ‘chlebek’. Auntie Rada say ‘kruh’. Papa AND ADAM say ‘BREAD’”.

Yeah, there’s still a little work to do on inflection.

You’ve learned the days of the week. “Ta-day is Fiday,” you exclaim. “On Fiday Papa come home and we eat PIZZA.” Now you are beginning to use language for abstractions, and show interest in time. “Papa will sit down on my bed for a minute,” you script each evening as I put you to bed. “How long is a minute?” You seem to think ‘later’ is strictly limited to mean ‘not today’, and sometimes you produce odd tautologies. “Ta-day is yesterday,” you will tell me. “Tomorrow is ta-DAY.”

Other conversations recently have been less cryptic but still surreal:

[Church bells ring in distance]
Me: Adam, Grandma Susan says that every time you hear a bell ring, she’s thinking of you.
Adam: Gamma Soozin livin’ at da AIRPORT now.

[Pondering some A/V entertainment]
Adam: Want to watch Bjork.
Me: Which one, honey?
Adam: Dancing one.
Me: “Big Time Sensuality”?
Adam: DANCING one.
Me: Aha, “It’s Oh So Quiet”.
Adam: Mama one.
[Bjork performs her magic]
Adam: Dat like Mama!

[In bed, 5:47 am]
Me: Zzzzzzz….
Adam: When Adam get bigger, Adam cook a lovely supper FOR YOU. Adam WILL drive Opel.
Me: Shhhhh, honey, your brother’s asleep.
Adam: I made a sandwich for you. In da FIDGE, HONEY.
Me: SHHHH!
Adam: Oh! Alek awake!

And once Alek awake, ain’t nobody sleeping no more. Your Tasmanian Devil tendencies, Ike, only intensify as you grow, and now your main obsession is with the biting. Before it’s even light out you’re thrashing around in the bed trying to find purchase for those flinty little teeth. Let the pre-dawn torture session commence! We pass you exhaustedly back and forth like a malevolent, sharp medicine ball until we can’t take it anymore. Later, after we’ve fled the bed, you’re crawling about on the living room floor, our sock-clad feet in grave danger as we obliviously seek solace in coffee. We’re sitting there sipping with our feet in a SHARK TANK. During Shark Week. With sharks.

Memo to myself: if a baby bites you grievously, biting it back is unlikely to produce a meaningful lesson. Just an ENORMOUS SOUND. Oh, and a mark that could involve some difficult explaining.

Other than the biting, the constant biting, the non-stop horrible little razor-sharp teeth of the biting, there is some big news on the Alek front:

Yeah, wonderful, Trebek. You weren’t getting into enough trouble as it was with the speed-crawling, you’ve got to go bipedal on us? I do suppose that this will see a downturn in the moon-shaped bite wounds on our feet, but I am not sure the alternative is actually all that reassuring. And this will only extend the reach of your hammering. The hammering is already quite enough on our lower parts, on the floor, the radiators, the windows. The hammering on our skulls with the sippy-cups. And the furniture-moving. What are you, Bam-Bam? And while we’re on your endearing obsessions of the month, stop playing in the bidet, for crying our loud. And the paper-eating. You are not a wasp. Stop chewing up all the paper and leaving your horrible damp wasp nests around the place.

These behaviors are roughly mitigated by the Zoidberg factor.

Both boys got haircuts, long-overdue, this month. Some boys did not like it so much:

For others it was nothing out of the ordinary:

A couple of other things, Adam: what is with this sudden obsession with ‘scary’ things? How is the Hausbrandt coffee mascot ‘scary’? Okay, fine, so it’s an oblique reference to self-cannibalism, but is that so scary?

I meant to make a collage of the many and various objects you’ve suddenly and spontaneously identified as ‘fary’ in the last month, but was too lazy. So there is no picture here of the Hausbrandt cannister, or the print of the giraffe in the hall, or your brother’s soft alphabet block, or any of the dozens of apparently completely random things you are loath to walk past. Where do you get this stuff?

Meanwhile, you’re taking a glow-in-the-dark dragon to bed.

But most of the time, you are too taken up with the tasks of growing and learning and loving your brother (and keeping him from destroying your precious Thomas the Tank Engine track layouts) to remember to be unnecessarily ‘fared’ of innocuous objects. It gives us great joy to watch you two play, fight, and grow together. Just quit it with the biting.

You guys seem genuinely fond of each other, and that pleases us deeply. Though one is certainly bossier than the other.

Ike, just because he’s a little bigger, don’t let Adam push you around.

Okay, maybe occasionally.

Happy Birthday, dear Adam!