Grasping the, er, Green Tassel

One of Eleanor's great desires before we leave France was to ride the carousel in the park. She finally got her wish. We usually don't indulge all our kids' carousel wishes, but we've learned that riding a carousel in another country often has unexpected surprises--there was the merry-go-round with real horses in Germany and the one that never stopped moving, even when kids were getting on and off in Holland.

This one was no exception.

For half of the ride, the carousel operator dangled a large green tassel over the young riders. All of them snatched at it, but Eleanor was the one who successfully grabbed it.

She was happy enough with the game, but then it turned out that catching the tassel meant she got a second ride. Free!

Bliss.

So I suppose the carousel at Jardin Lecoq in Clermont-Ferrand can now be added to Wikipedia's select list of fewer than twenty carousels that still have brass rings for snatching. Well, if they'll expand the definition of "brass ring" to include large green yarn tassels.

Ruth heard about our carousel adventures and sent us this great link to the best-ever carousel horse race.

Up a tree

I always loved climbing trees when I was little. (Actually, I still do.)

One of the great gifts of going almost every day to the park without an agenda, without a plan, is that Isaac and Eleanor, all on their own, discovered that they love climbing trees too.

Lots of scuffed knees and heart-stopping moments for Mom, but sheer delight for the kids.

Six!

She turned six today, and yesterday she learned to ride a bike!

David (who is good at stuff like this) bought her a cheap bike from the French version of Craig's List and she has been trying to ride it since Monday. Mostly David has run along with her, holding onto her bike seat, but today he was at the office, and she wanted to take her bike to the park.

I offered to hold on and run beside her, but she didn't want my help, so I sat on the lawn with my computer and worked on a manuscript I'm editing. Then I happened to glance up, and she was riding her bike past me.

Almost all the photos I snapped are of her back. She rushes by so fast. Kind of like where we are in life--I'll mostly be running along behind her from now on, admiring the fantastic places she's going and shouting encouragement, marveling at her competence and verve.

Happy birthday six year old!

The National Pastime?

There was a petanque tournament here last week. Petanque originated in southern France, so I guess if baseball is as American as apple pie, petanque must be as French as pain au chocolat.

As we neared the playing fields (is that what they call them?), Isaac said, "This looks like a sport for grandpas!" But such character-filled grandpas!

No grandpas around here (though Eleanor has been commenting often on David's silvering hair), but we're having fun with a minor league boule set in the hallway outside our room.

And we've worked out a system where we almost never hit students' doors with the balls anymore!

Riddle me

On a long car drive, Emma Lucy read aloud a book Aunt Joanne gave us for Christmas, Luka and the Fire of Life, by Salman Rushdie. It was delightful! Funny, inventive, absorbing.

The protagonist has to duel an adversary with riddles. The scene captured Isaac's imagination, and he has become fascinated by making up riddles. He stands with his legs a little apart, his hands behind his back, makes his voice as deep as possible, and tries to stump us all with his latest creation. We have heard many, many, many riddles recently. Here, winnowed from the torrent, are some of his best:

I'm graceful but fierce. Who am I? (Hint: directly inspired by the inhabitants of the local park, Jardin Lecoq.)

When it's light I'm dark. When it's darkest I'm gone. What am I?

The rest of us have gotten into the spirit of it, too. Here's David's best one:

It's best not to have me, but if you do have me, you'd better not lose me.

Image source

Answers: A swan, a shadow, temper.

Our summer home.

We are living in university dormitories.

When we planned this, I had visions of cinder block walls. But dormitory life here is nothing like what I remember from college.

 The lobby of our building. Miro and Kadinsky and Klee prints hang on the walls in the common areas and the rooms.

A glass elevator to get us to our room. (And we have worked out a system for pushing the buttons so nobody gets more than their fair share of pushes.)

Beautiful wood paneling in our room. The wall opposite the bed, in fact, is made up of sliding wood panels so we can see the view or block the light, as we prefer.

We eat on our room's balcony.

Tres chic, non?

hello goodbye hello goodbye hello goodbye

Image source

This week was full of lasts--our last walk home from school, last visit to the open produce market (and saying goodbye to a vendor friend there--sad times), last visit with this friend and that friend, last ice cream cone from Burek Forino, last walk up the hill to where we go to church.

I told Eleanor, on our last walk home from her school, that I remembered her oldest sister crying after her last day of kindergarten because she knew she would be starting at a new school the next year. "But it will be a really good school," I had reassured her.

"I know," she had told me, "but I'm still sad that I'm leaving these friends."

Eleanor listened to the story and said, "Yeah, it's sad. But I knew I wasn't going to be in Sarajevo forever. And besides, with my dad you never know how long you'll live anywhere!" Ah. Savvy beyond her years.

Ruth--who cried after the last day of kindergarten so many years ago--sent me last month an email titled "a poem about us." She's right. This poem perfectly summarizes all the brilliant flashes of wonder and beauty and all the tiny sadnesses that go with this kind of life.

Early Childhood Education
by Michael Blumenthal

Because i want to educate him early
in the ways of loss, I move my son
like a fugitive from country to country,
language to language, house to house.
Easily as wind, he flutters
over the world's landscapes,
kissing the surfaces, lifting
the splotched graffiti of his toys
from box to box like a traveling salesman.
Strange cities pass, countries
in various stages of transition, currencies
and economies packaged and sold like trips
to exotic places we can never visit. But my son
visits them all, traversing the world
to a postmodern music of cities and countries,
murmuring Budapest Haifa Quito Cambridge Austin
under his breath like a National Geographic,
time zone to time zone, vineyard to desert.
In the mere seventh year of his life,
he is already a wise man: He moves
through the world like a bodhisattva,
a Zen monk, a Hassid, a politician,
kissing the hands of widows and children,
endearing himself to everyone, waving
in a universal tongue as he leaves and arrives:
hello good-bye hello good-bye hello good-bye.

Ruks

Lately, rocks have become a big deal at our house. It's probably partly my fault for loving the rocks at the beach in Montenegro so much that I brought some home. But I like to think I'm discriminating in my rock love.

Eleanor and Isaac love every rock they meet equally. They bring many, many rocks home. Eleanor has taken to painting them on the balcony. We have bags of them on the living room floor. Piles of them in the bedroom.

I finally put down my foot and told Eleanor she had to choose one spot for rocks.

So she did.

Celebrating Easter

Our family has lots of Christmas traditions. It troubles me and David that we don’t have so many Easter traditions. And yet, Easter is arguably even more religiously significant that Christmas.

It’s tempting to say that we have fewer traditions for Easter because we’re trying to make it more holy, but the way it’s actually worked out is that Easter is just easier to forget than Christmas. So in the last few years we’ve been thinking harder about how we celebrate.

We spend our daily family scripture study during December re-memorizing and reciting the Biblical Christmas story from the gospel of Luke. About three years ago we started memorizing and reciting the Easter story from the gospel of John. This year, for the first time, it feels like a welcome, familiar tradition. I like the way the daily recitation gives shape to the season. It also prompts lots of conversation about tiny details of the story that deepen the significance of the season for me.

We’ve always colored Easter eggs. This year we did it in the traditionally Bosnian way, a tradition I’d like to keep, connecting up our family history to our religious history.

Another change this year that I think worked: we had an Easter meal the week before Easter. We’ll still have an Easter dinner on Easter Sunday, but why not extend the holiday? At Christmas there are lots of foods we eat throughout the month just because it’s Christmastime.

So last Sunday we had trout—fresh trout is plentiful, reasonably-priced, and delicious in Bosnia—and honeycomb that we had picked up at a honey fair (luckily we had a friend visiting who coached us on how to eat honeycomb—you spread it on warm toast). While we ate, we read the account of Christ’s eating fish and honeycomb after his resurrection and cooking fish on the beach to feed his disciples. 

“Next year let’s cook the fish over fire,” suggested Isaac. Just what I want to hear—my child suggesting an Easter tradition.

I’m curious about what Easter traditions work for your family.

I loved this article by one of David's former students about Easter at her house.  

Seventeen

The music is "Sretan Rođendan" for our newly-minted seventeen year old. This is the second time she's had a birthday in this country (her dad's the only other one of us who shares that honor) but last time she turned eight.

She's turning from a square to a prime, something that will only happen again when she turns 37 and 101 (and unique this year in our family, even though six of the eight of us are turning prime numbers).

It's a big year for her, and we hope all her plans and dreams turn out even better than she can imagine.

Sretan Rođendan!

Signs of spring: bugs

The first worm and beetle of the season, and the seven year old who has to pick them up.

Sretan Rođendan

Cubist cake by the talented Liz Pimentel, niece and pastry chef extraordinaire in Phoenix, Arizona.
Image used with her permission.

One of the great joys of parenting is watching our children become competent, interesting, good-hearted grown-ups. I feel lucky to count my grown-up children as my friends.

Happy birthday to our girl who legally becomes a grown-up today. (But you still need us to rent a car).

Welcome, Spring!

Duelling wands

Edward whittled two wands for Christmas. Nothing gets more use at our house.

In praise of boredom

Sometimes I try to think up things I could say for NPR's "This I Believe" program. One speech in my head begins, "I believe in boredom."

I usually love what emerges when I stop myself from rushing in to solve a child's boredom.

Sarajevo Cinderella

One of the wonderful things about living in a small European city like Sarajevo is that we are walking distance from the National Theater and excellent, affordable ballet and opera (drama, too, if we only understood Bosnian better). We love being able to take our kids to this beautifully-restored theater,

to lean over the orchestra pit and watch the musicians tune up,

to enjoy that expectant hush before the lights to go down, all for the price of a movie theater ticket in the US.

Last week we saw Pepeljuga, or Cinderella. It was a high-energy, funny, thoroughly delightful production.

Even Isaac came out of it dancing, which, for a boy who wasn't sure if he wanted to go in the first place, is saying a lot.

Image source  http://www.saph.ba/eng/predstave.php?arhiva=true 

Image source http://www.studentskioglasi.ba/cool-kultura/892-balet-j-strauss-pepeljuga-

Staying connected

It is not true that our extended family gets seriously ill whenever we're far away. But it is true that because we never manage to live close to them, we're always far away when they get sick.

So when my brother got very, very sick earlier this week, I found myself thinking a lot about the ways we stay connected to far-away family while we're here in Bosnia. Luckily, my husband figures all of this out for us, because I wouldn't have a clue. Here is my primer on wouldn't-live-without resources when we're far away:

1) Internet connection. Nine years ago, it was rare in Sarajevo to have internet connection in homes. We used to use David's office connection after-hours to send and read emails. Today, thankfully, home Internet connections are the standard.

2) Magic Jack. This snazzy little connector let us connect an actual telephone with a US phone number to our computer. When people called that US number, the telephone would ring in Bosnia. BUT...our computers are all laptops which we carry around from room to room, and this connector broke after only four months. (Takeaway lesson: these should be used with desktop computers, not laptops.)

3) Magic Talk. When our telephone connector broke, we switched to an online telephone program. Theoretically, any program would work. In practice, we can't get Skype to work part of the time (perhaps a problem with our connection?). GoogleTalk is not yet operational in Bosnia. And we had the Magic Jack phone number already. So people can still call our US number and our computer instead of our telephone rings. Which means we need...

4) Good headset. We tried using cheap headsets. It has been totally worth it to have a good headset when this is our only contact with family. We are using a Plantronics headset.  And...

5) Speaker. So that we can all hear the news at the same time. Our iLuv speaker has met our needs perfectly.

In the case of my brother all the news we're hearing now is good. Thank goodness his heart is behaving itself again since we sending our hearts is the one thing we can't do very well over the Internet. But we would if we could, Jim.

Volim te.

Eleanor's resourceful, creative teachers put together a Valentine's Day program for parents a few days after the holiday. This was a thinking-outside-the-box event because Valentine's Day is not a major holiday in Bosnia, especially not among children.

But her teachers crafted a great program for kids this age. They gave every family a copy of a book about ways to show love to your child, and they let us all write love notes to our children on huge hearts that are now displayed in the library.

The centerpiece of the program, as with every other Bosnian school program I've gone to, was recitations. There were group recitations, including one where each child held up a letter to spell out "Ljubav," or "love."

A few of the kids put on a charming skit (the boy was diagnosed as being in love).

And to our surprise and delight, Eleanor recited a poem on her own (well, her teacher helped her with the last two lines). We were too busy admiring her to take any photos of her reciting, but this is the poem:

Danas je ponedjeljak . Volim te. (Today is Monday. I love you.)
Danas je utorak . Volim te. (Today is Tuesday. I love you.)
Danas je srijeda . Volim te. (Today is Wednesday. I love you.)
Danas je cetvrtak . Volim te. (Today is Thursday. I love you.)
Danas je petak . Volim te. (Today is Friday. I love you.)
Danas je subota . Volim te. (Today is Saturday. I love you.)
Tata mi je rekao da ne mora da radi nedeljom. (Daddy told me not to work on Sundays.) 

A nedelju ja volim najvise. (And Sunday I love the most.)

Gibonni fans

David and Emma Lucy, along with many of David's colleagues and Emma Lucy's fellow-students, attended a Gibonni concert. Gibonni (pronounced as you would in Italian--Jee-bohn-ee) is a Croatian singer well-known and well-loved here.

Eleanor may only be five years old, but she's a fan too. After school, she hangs out with David in his office until I pick her up, and she usually suggests he put on a Gibonni CD.

For your listening pleasure.

Al-Tahrir and Us

Five years ago the kids and I were stuck for several weeks in Cairo waiting for visas to Sudan. We had our favorite kushari restaurant and ate mango ice cream every day from Al-Abd. On one surreal day we went to the post office to mail back some sewing patterns I had borrowed from my sister. We entered a huge institutional-looking government building that our guide book said held the post office. We wandered up and down corridors lined with small offices where men sat on chairs and smoked. One of them would occasionally stick his head out the door and point a direction for us to go. Eventually we mailed the patterns (I have never dared ask her if they arrived; I fear not). This picture is from the square in front of that building.

Ruth recognized the square when she saw it on the news. (Associated Press image) Al-Tahrir.