"Shaken from whitewash buckets down the sky..."

Eleanor has expressed unshakable faith that we will have snow for Christmas (why else, asks a Florida girl, would we come here?).

After a few hiccuppy episodes last month of flakes floating around but not sticking, we started trying to lower her expectations.

But she was right! Snow!

The boys are here!

Our college kids have started arriving! Ed and Sam narrowly escaped being stranded in Chicago in the Midwest's horrific storm yesterday. Exhausted and hungry, they arrived seven hours late without any luggage. We couldn't be happier!

Ask Someone to Do You a Favor

It poured rain the other day as I walked Isaac to school. When we were about a block from the school, we caught up with a girl from his class whose grandmother was trying to hold an umbrella over her head while she slogged through the puddles.

"Dobar dan!" I said to them.

The grandma looked up and saw me and Isaac and her face lit up. She started talking really fast in Bosnian. I couldn't understand everything but I heard her say the words for "to go" and "with." After a second of incomprehension, I realized that she wanted me to take her granddaughter to school with us so she could turn around and go home. Yes! Yes! Yes!

It made me happy all afternoon to think about how she thought I was enough of a friend (or at least enough of a known quantity!)to take her sweet little girl to school for her.

I love Gretchen Rubin's blog, "The Happiness Project," and a post there makes exactly the same point: if you want to make a friend, ask someone to do something for you. Life lesson for me: if I want to make a new immigrant/an expatriate/a new move-in feel welcome, ask them to help me.

[Image from here. I only wish I could take photos like that.]

Tortillas

You can buy Mexican food in Sarajevo! This is new. So new that they had to hire someone to dress up and stand next to the shelves so people would know what it was,

Of course, you have to go to the big fancy grocery store to get this high-priced Mexican food. The big fancy grocery store is way too far away or us to walk.  And we are definitely not going to spend a large portion of our food budget on Mexican food that may not even taste that great. So we haven't had Mexican food in three months.

But yesterday I had a big batch of cooked pinto beans in my fridge and I decided it would be perfect for refried beans. So I made some salsa--not such a stretch since I've done that before.

I also found a great recipe for flour tortillas--something I've never before made.

They were really good and turned out to be simple to make. Maybe next time I'll even make them half whole wheat.

Shield your child's eyes

Sarajevo is predominantly Muslim. It's an unusual experience for us, as Christians, to be the minority. It's tough to find Christmas decorations, for example. But one of the bigger stores is trying to expand their market by targeting those of us who celebrate Christmas. They need some help with their store decorations, however.

Conjugation Machines

Why machines? Because conjugation is a mechanical process in any language.

Isaac's machine is Lego. He continued to improve it over several days, but even the earliest prototype showed a sophisticated understanding of conjugation.

The first of these four levers shows whether the subject is singular or plural. The other three represent first person, second person, and third person.

Eleanor's machine wasn't as sophisticated.

You say the word you want to conjugate into the cone and then it gives you a piece of paper with the correct conjugation written on it (remarkably, in Eleanor’s handwriting!). 

We played lots of games with these conjugation machines. Most recently, I gave them complete sentences in English and asked them to give me the Bosnian translation. Isaac had already broken apart his machine to use on other Lego projects, so he did it like a worksheet. Perfectly. He doesn’t need his conjugation machine anymore.

Eleanor, though, pulled her machine out and opened her Conjugation Store. She even made a sign for the store (note that the "sh" sound is represented by the Bosnian letter that makes that sound--š).

As the customer, I gave her each of the sentences and she laboriously cranked out the translation. Once, she translated the sentence perfectly except that she left the Bosnian verb in the infinitive form. I asked, pointing to the verb, “Is this the way you say it?”

Eleanor looked at it and then took it back from me. “Oh,” she said ruefully, “a plug must have come undone. Let me fix it.” She worked on her machine for a while, rewrote the sentence, and handed it to me. “These machines are hard to keep working,” she told me.

I still don’t hear Isaac and Eleanor initiating conversation much. But Eleanor answered a direct question from the store clerk yesterday when we were shopping, and every meal now we all have to say at least one sentence with a conjugated verb.

It’s a start.

Conjugation with Scissors and Tape

Once they had those verb endings running around in their heads, I showed them, using a card with the infinitive form of a verb written on it and a pair of scissors, how you take off the infinitive ending

and put in its place one of the endings we had been singing. We spent a day doing a lot of cutting and pasting, or rather cutting and taping.

But, of course, cutting up a card isn’t the same as producing a conjugated verb in conversation.

Tomorrow is the final conjugation post.

Conjugation: Singing grammar

I don’t want Bosnian to be boring, but we do, in fact, need to learn by rote verb endings if we ever want to conjugate verbs. So I made up a song with a singsong melody--better to annoy them than to bore them!. The song consists wholly of pronouns and their matching verb endings. Here are the (witty! sparkling! unforgettable!) lyrics:

Ja -im

Ti -iš

On/ona -i

Mi -imo

Vi -ite

Oni/one -e

Then I started to sing it. All the time. Walking to school. Setting the table. Playing with Lego. Washing their hair.  When they started begging me to quit, I told them I would if they’d sing it to me once without any help. Isaac did it perfectly the first time he tried. (And then I had a hard time quitting, it was such a habit.)

Conjugation: Bosnian as a Second Language

Isaac and Eleanor are slowly learning Bosnian as they listen to it every day at school, but we decided they need more instruction to make quicker progress. Unfortunately, the school don't offer the equivalent of English as a Second Language program, and we haven't found any Bosnian teachers with experience teaching children.

       
So I decided that I need to create my own Bosnian as a Second Language support program for them. This is a bit tricky since, ahem, I don’t speak Bosnian. (Well, not much better than Isaac and Eleanor, anyway.)

       
Isaac and Eleanor know lots of nouns in Bosnian, but they haven’t taken the leap into speaking in sentences. So focusing on verb conjugations is a high yield endeavor: with just a bit of effort, they’d dramatically increase their ability to speak as well as their ability to understand. But how do you teach a five year old and a seven year old to conjugate verbs?

This turned into a l-o-o-o-o-o-ng post (who knew I had so much to say about conjugation?), so I’ve split it into three parts. I'd love, though, to hear any other suggestions for effective strategies to teach a new language to small children.

Happy Sinterklaas!

One of the reasons we're glad we got to live in Holland!

Thanksgiving, late

We had Thanksgiving dinner with American friends who had gotten a Butterball through the embassy, but we also wanted to cook a turkey for ourselves. What's Thanksgiving without leftovers?

I tried to pick it up two days before Thanksgiving, but my Bosnian utterly failed me, and I came away empty-handed. The next week, though, we went back, and arranged anew for them to order us a turkey.

It was big--7.7 kg. It had never been frozen or brined. It had no little shot thing to pop up when the turkey was done. And it appeared to have no fat at all on it. I was pretty nervous about cooking it.

I looked at lots of websites about how to cook heirloom turkeys and figured out a strategy. One which included herbed butter (so much for fat-free meat!).

I forgot to photograph it when I took it out of the oven, but it was beautiful and probably the best-flavored turkey I've ever tasted. My family thinks that may be because all food tastes better in Bosnia, but I suspect the turkey has something to do with it.

Nuts, dried beans, and...

There are lots of narrow little almond stores in Sarajevo. I knew they sold almonds, of course, and I've seen displays with red lentils and other dried beans in their windows. But I had no idea until David took us into one this weekend that while one half of the store looks like a health food store with bins of dried beans and every variety of lentils you can think of and different colors of sesame seeds and stuff like that, the other side of the store is Willy Wonka's showroom.

So, of course, we bought dried garbanzos and candy.

We thought the candy would be peppermint. The green ones taste kind of like toothpaste. The other ones, as the store clerk warned us, are just sweet. No added flavor. But they're really pretty and make us think of Christmas.

Lego Christmas Joy

Last year on Christmas we opened a Lego advent calendar from my brother-in-law's family. We were excited then and didn't even know that we'd be here and hungry for both toys and Christmas decorations. The most perfect Christmas gift possible for us for this year!

It's even inspired Isaac to make his own Lego creation (not involving weapons!): a sledder.

I was delighted by this bit of real-world Lego building on the great Swiss Miss design blog.

Nativity

We didn't bring any Christmas decorations with us, but you can't very well have Christmas without a nativity. So we made one with salt dough clay. Maybe we'll paint it. Maybe we'll add more figures. Maybe we'll leave it just like it is.

Library privileges

The headmaster of the local international school, QSI, offered to let us use their library to borrow books. Books in English!

Isaac read The Indian in the Cupboard in twenty-four hours, and now he's back to being completely absorbed in Harry Potter.



Eleanor is plowing through their early readers.



I do love libraries.