Some Christmas pictures

Alex in front of the tree

Alex opening his recycling truck

Real tree, real candles, good thing Alex has his new fire truck ready to spray

Christian with Heidi


The COOLEST! PRESENT! EVER! from the Grandparents

Pictures!

How cute is Christian?


Oh Fisher Price Aquarium Cradle Swing how I love you!


Reto was very interested in the outcome of the elections to the Bundesrat (Federal Council of Switzerland). Long story short the controversial conservative Christoph Blocher was voted out of the government and his party, the SVP (Swiss People's Party), threw its remaining two members of the Bundesrat out of the party and went into the opposition. This is unprecedented in Switzerland, but Alex was clearly bored by it all.

This post is full of garbage

I know, I know. You want stuff about the baby and I'm giving you garbage. Yes, literally, garbage. You see, my 2008 Abfallkalendar (trash calendar) arrived in the mail today. I love the trash calendar. How much do I love the trash calendar? This essay I wrote for the Spring 2006 issue of Hello Bern shows just how much I love the Abfallkalendar.

The Swiss take their trash pretty seriously. Anybody who sends a 16-page pamphlet about trash and recycling procedures to every household in the city, and who also makes copies available in English, French, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Serbian, and Turkish, takes their trash and recylcing pretty seriously. We received our 2006 Abfallkalender (literally, trash calender) in mid-December 2005. In it are the dates for trash pickup, paper recycling pickups, Gartenabfälle (garden waste, dead plants and leaves, etc), and old metal for the entire year. It also contains the the location of glass recycling depots throughout the city, the location and opening hours of the Tierkörpersammelstelle (what to do with animals who have passed to the Great Beyond), and describes how to properly dispose of batteries, car batteries, printer cartrages and toner, CDs, old electric cabels, skis and snowboards and more. I know when the ÖkoInfoMobil truck will be in my neighborhood. I know what types of paper and cartons can be recycled (newspapers, magazines, egg cartons) and what types of paper and cartons cannot be recyled (Tetrapacks, laundry detergent boxes). Like I said, the Swiss take their trash pretty seriously. The Swiss also recycle 91% of household aluminum and about 80% of PET plastics, so they must be doing something right. You may laugh at the Abfallkalender, but Switzerland is a recycling powerhouse.

I have a confession to make. I do not laugh at the Abfallkalender. Quite the opposite. I love the Abfallkalender. It appeals to the Swiss-wannabe in me, to my sense of order. I love the very idea of a city government putting together a calendar for all trash-related items for a whole year. A year! I mean, I can tell you right now that on Monday, November 27, 2006, there will be no trash pickup for Trash Sector C. I love that the city is divided into sectors for trash pickup. I love that I can turn to my handy street index at the back of the calender and find out what parts of the city fall into Trash Sector C. I love that this calender is available in eight languages, that it is delivered to every address in the city, that it can be found on-line. After we received ours, I punched a little hole in the upper left corner, ran a string through it, and hung it prominently from the shelving in our utility room where we store the recyclables. Yes, I am in love with my Abfallkalender.

Now I may love the Abfallkalender, I may love how seriously the Swiss take recycling, but I will say this: doing trash right the Swiss way takes a little bit of planning, a little bit of coordination, a little bit of extra space, and, even with the assistance of a detailed Abfallkalender, a good memory.

In my neighborhood (that’s Trash Sector A4, by the way, and can I tell you how much I love that Sector A is subdivided? Subdivided!) household trash is picked up at the kerb twice a week. Recyclable paper and carton is picked up twice a month, also at the kerb. Gartenabfälle is collected twice a month except January, when there were no pickups, and February, when there was one pickup at the end of the month. Woe to you if your large houseplant up and died on January 3rd! We need to bring glass, PET and aluminum to one of the neighborhood depots ourselves. The ÖkoInfoMobil truck, which will accept more difficult to dispose of items such as batteries, autobatteries, CD,and toner cartridges, is in my neighborhood on Friday afternoons for 15 minutes; there is a designated stop for this truck and I have to bring the items to the truck and cannot leave them behind if I miss it.

Keeping track of all these dates is, if not easy, at least possible, thanks to the calendar. Finding the space to sort and store recyclables is something else again. We’re fortunate to have a little utility closet in our apartment where the washer and dryer are (and, yes, we’re fortunate to have those in the unit, too). In this little room we have set up our very own mini-recycling center. A large cardboard box for paper and cartons; another box for plastics; a bag that we hang out of range of our young son for aluminium, including cleaned out aluminium cans, flattened, with the label removed. Glass bottles and jars we set on a high shelf. It’s an acceptable little recycling center until we go too long without taking the PET to the grocery store, until we miss a paper recycling day. Then the recyclables threaten to bury the washer/dryer.

Still, when the recycling backs up we just have to let it back up until the next pick up date rolls around. We’re not going to throw it out, not at 70 Rappen for a little 17-liter bag, 1.40 for a 35-liter bag. In my opinion, trash stickers (Gebührenmarke) are the real reason the Swiss take their trash so seriously. When you have to pay for each bag of trash that you set at the kerb, you’re going to think twice about putting that cardboard egg carton in the garbage instead of the recycling pile. Personally, I think this is a great system, so long as you pay attention to when you are running out of trash stickers and go buy more on time! It encourages recycling and puts more of the burden of the cost of trash collection on the people who generate the most trash. We recycle as much as possible – toilet paper rolls, egg cartons, envelops without the plastic windows in them (because it says in the Abfallkalender that these windows are unacceptable), cereal and pasta boxes – and I know it’s because of the Gebührenmarke. But remember to flatten those boxes, because if your recycling bundle contains an unflattened box, they won’t pick it up. This will of course happen on a day with rain or snow, and then you will have to take this wet bundle back into your apartment – because you can’t just leave it out there, after all – and hold onto it for another two weeks. Not that this has ever happened to me…um, right then. Where was I?

Ah, yes, the Abfallkalender. My little 16-page pamphlet answering every question I could possibly have about disposing of household trash, old skis, apple cores and Tetrapacks. I know it sounds crazy, but I love the Abfallkalender. Really. Truly. Deeply.

***

Since this article was published, Bern has traded in the trash stickers for special blue garbage bags. We pay 1 franc 40 for each 35 liter garbage bag - we average a 35 liter bag a week even with the new load of diapers - and don't have to keep track of trash stickers anymore. But if you don't use that blue bag with the City of Bern symbol on it, they're not picking up your trash.

Brothers

One of the pictures below is Alex as a newborn. One is Christian. I guess they're brothers or something.

Pictures!

Just born.

In the hospital.


Heading home. Yes, we dressed him in a cow outfit.


Meeting big brother.

Whew! That went well.

Bonus picture because Melissa kept asking for one

One of the very very few pictures of me pregnant . I'm actually in the early stages of labor...

My water broke - and oh! that's it's own story - about an hour after this was taken.

Christian Bryce is here

Christian Bryce was born Monday 19 November at 00.27 am.

He's three weeks early, but healthy. (Those 27 minutes past midnight got us to the 37th week of the pregnancy, meaning he is technically a full-term baby; this means there are a few tests that he didn't have to have that they would have done if he'd been born one hour earlier. Crazy, huh?)

He weighed in at 3390 grams (about 7.5 pounds) and 49 cm (about 19 inches). If you include his hair, he'd be about 52cm/20 inches. Seriously. The boy needs a haircut already.

Pictures soon.

The name game

Although I wore this shirt to my last OB appointment, I didn't actually ask the question. I'm almost 37 weeks (Alex was born at 38w2d), so at this late date it's pretty pointless to ask about the baby's sex. I'm amazed I resisted the temptation, frankly, especially when it became clear that choosing a name for a boy was going to be a lot harder this time around than last - and it was hard enough last time. A girl's name was easy - basically I told Reto what I wanted and he recognized the futility of resistance - but boys? I don't know why it was so hard, but when I was pregnant with Alex we just put off thinking about a boy's name. Then at 34 weeks I almost went into labor and realized we have no name if it's a boy. After a few days in the hospital my doctor sent me home and I insisted that we come up with a boy name ASAP.

We made lists. Reto made an excel worksheet with our choices, where we overlapped, how we each ranked the name, and the meaning (because he's a computer geek like that). In the end we had ten boys' names to choose from. We picked a first and middle name (and may I say we chose a fabulous combination) and good thing, seeing as how he turned out to be a boy and all.

Fast forward to this pregnancy and once again we have the girl's name (the same one) and are struggling with the boy. I found the lists we made when trying to name Alex, the one with the eight other names that we in theory liked and agreed on and of the eight? Yeah, I don't like them anymore. Which makes sense as my heart knows they are names I turned down once. So we're back to the drawing board picking boy names. We're making some headway, but I don't know why we have such trouble with male names.

I think most parents put a lot of thought and energy into choosing names; it's a big deal after all. And it's hard to come to terms: your favorite name reminds him of the guy who stole his milk money every day in the forth grade, his favorite name is your brother's name, your sister gives birth and uses the name you picked out (the hazards of keeping these things secret). You just don't like it, he just thinks it's funny. You want to name her after your grandmother, he wants to name her after his. The first name has to work with the last name; if there are older children the names should sound nice together. There's a lot of negotiating.

On top of the standard naming issues, Reto and I have an additional consideration: the name has to work in English and German pronunciations and in US and Swiss cultures at a bare minimum. (It's bad enough that Reto's last name uses an umlaut, which the US social security administration cannot accommodate - as a result Alex’s last name is spelled differently on his US passport and his Swiss passport). Although our current plans and Reto's career trajectory see us living in Switzerland well into Alex’s school years, and probably this baby’s as well, we've never ruled out moving if the conditions were right; moving to the US or moving to an interesting third country. So names that translate, names that are at least recognizable in multiple cultures, names that don't change genders when you cross borders (Jan, anyone? Jean?) are important to us. This leaves us with some really nice classic names, but it also rules out a lot.

For example, one of my favorite Swiss names for a boy is Beat - and all of you not familiar with Switzerland who just rhymed that with "feet" in their heads have demonstrated why that name won't work for somebody who will be living half of his life in English. It's pronounced "Bay-aht" in Switzerland. Reto and I happen to know a Beat who, as luck would have it, is married to an American woman, and he pretty much spends his life correcting the mispronunciation of his name. For an adult it's an annoyance (for that matter, Reto’s name, though seemingly simple, trips a lot of people up) but can you imagine if we move to the US just in time for a son of ours named Beat to enter, say, the fifth grade? Fun times on the playground for sure.

Then there are the names that just sound funny when pronounced in German or are too Swiss - see above, Beat - for the US. Or too American for Switzerland. And then there is the nick-name issue. The Swiss, they loooove the nicknames. If your name is Jane, the Swiss will find a way to give you a diminuative. Jacob becomes Kobi; Sebastian becomes Sebu; Christian becomes Chrigu; Konrad becomes Konu; Thomas becomes Thomu. As an adult it's possible to get people to use your full name, but you couldn't get a Swiss teacher to call a seven year old boy "Sebastian" for love or money. He would be a Sebu. I like some of the nicknames - personally, I like Chrigu well enough - and dislike others. I love the name Sebastian - Sebu, not so much. Konrad, yes; Konu, eh. Every time I think of a boy's name, I ask Reto for the nick-name (and there is always a nick-name). And half the time it leads to scratching another name off the list. If there had been one reason to find out the baby's sex, it would have been on the off chance we'd get to avoid the whole boy name issue. It's taking up rather a lot of mental energy that I don't really have to spare.

All that having been said, however, if I gave birth to a boy tonight we could name the baby. It's quite a relief.

Baby furniture

Look at the cute drawers and toy chest Reto just found at - of all places - Carrefour!






How to describe Carrefour if you don't know Switzerland? It's mostly a grocery store but then they sell all sorts of random stuff too, like cheap clothes and housewares and, apparantly, baby furniture (who knew?). I don't even know what a US equivalent would be. But trust me, it's the last place on earth I expected to be buying things for the baby's room.

Hey, the Swiss Army reads my blog!

Somebody in the Swiss Army must be reading my blog; Reto just got word that his December military service has been cancelled!

Comments

Apparantly my comments were set in a way that only people with Blogger accounts could comment; I've changed that so that one can comment without being registered with Blogger.

Just in case anybody's been dying to comment

Shop 'til you drop

One year ago

We were in Ketchum/Sun Valley, Idaho.

According to Alex's travel journal we went swimming in the heated circular pool, walked along Trail Creek

to the Hemingway Memorial (look at that blond boy! his hair has darkened since then),

ate dinner at the Pioneer (it's not in the book but there is no doubt Reto and I both had the Prime Rib), and met a doggy named Token.

The Swiss Army clearly has it in for me

When I was pregnant with Alex, Reto had military service at the very end of my pregnancy. (Alex’s due date was February 9; Reto was in the military January 24th to February 4.) For the average Swiss, "in the military" means at a site someplace in Switzerland (you're expected to remain there overnight during the week but are generally allowed to go home over the weekends) so this is not, in the grand scheme of things, a giant tragedy. It's not as if he had been off in Iraq while I was giving birth to a child he wouldn't see for months. I'm well aware of that. It's annoying at worst. Nevertheless, it is annoying to be home alone in your 39th week. We were still living in Grafenried back then, and although we have a car and a good train connection to Bern, it can feel fairly isolated when you're speeding towards your due date and know you’ll be spending your nights alone. I arranged for our friend Robin to stay over for a few nights while Reto was away; of course it snowed about 10 inches that week and Robin, California girl that she is, has never driven in the snow in her life. We quickly decided that if I did go into labor Robin would provide moral support and company but Reto’s parents or a cab company would provide the transportation. Reto came home over the weekend and since he wasn't scheduled for military service in the week of my actual due date, I figured we were pretty well covered.

Do I even need to say that Alex arrived early? At least he had the great good sense to jump start my labor on the middle Sunday of Reto’s service, meaning he was at home with me when my water broke in the middle of the night. Alex was born Sunday night, and Reto was graciously granted leave on Monday, but Tuesday he had to go back into service. He was stationed about 2 hours away and was allowed to leave overnight for the remainder of the week, so he drove two hours home in the evenings, saw us in the hospital at night and then early the next morning before the two hour drive back. It wasn't ideal, but it worked out okay since I stayed in the hospital all that week anyway. If we'd been in the States, where they send you home after a day or two, it would have been awful to go home to an empty house with a newborn. As it was, I stayed in the hospital my standard five days and we all went home together on the following Saturday. The one thing that went awry was that we didn't have enough baby clothes at home. At some point we stopped shopping because Alex – known in utero as “The Blob” - was starting to look a bit huge and the size 50's (for 50 cm long) were starting to seem a wee bit small. We figured we'd wait until the baby was born, see how big it was, and then Reto could finish shopping while I was still in the hospital. Since as it turned out Reto was in the military while I was in the hospital that didn't happen and he had to buy some panic onesies on Saturday afternoon. They were overpriced, but remain among the cuter onesies Alex ever had.

Some of you can probably see where this little trip down memory lane is headed. This baby is due December 10 and Reto has military service – wait for it – December 3 through December 7. Isn’t that great!? (Robin, I can hear you laughing.) And during weeks 36 and 37 he'll be attending courses in Zurich where he will, in all likelihood, stay overnight during the week. Okay, Zurich is only an hour or so away, but still. That's an awful lot of away time in the final four weeks. Given that Alex was early, and most second babies arrive before their due date, I’m thinking we have a small window of opportunity – week 38 – to have a panic-free onset of labor. Needless to say the plan is to have all of our rubber duckies in a row before that Zurich course begins. And the cab company's phone number on speed dial.

And if all else fails, the hospital is only a 15 minute walk from our apartment.

Gruess Gott!

In Switzerland, you greet people. It's what you do; it's an important part of the unwritten social script. When you enter a shop, you greet the salesperson. When you go to the bakery to buy a loaf of bread, you greet whoever is behind the counter before placing your order. At a restaurant you greet your waiter, and if the table next to your is occupied you probably greet the people sitting next to you. You might even wish them "en Guete!" (Guten Appetite, or enjoy your meal) when their food is served. If you're in a small village and somebody walks past you on the street, you greet them (you don't have to do this in the city); you greet people on Wanderwegs (hiking trails) and when you enter an elevator that's already occupied. Here in Bern we say "Gruesseuch;" in Zurich it's "Gruezi." Swiss people can figure out where you come from by how you pronounce your greeting. Reto, who worked in Zurich for five years, switches to whatever is local; I'm a hopeless "Gruesseuch-er." (It's a wonder I'm speaking German at all, don't ask me to change those things I labored over!)

I thought the Swiss were big greeters, but Reto and I just returned from a long weekend at a wellness hotel and spa in Austria (more on this in a post of its own), and I'm here to tell you: the Austrians will greet you to death. I've never been greeted so many times a day in my life. (I suppose it helped that we were in a five star hotel and the staff was unfailingly correct, but still.) In Austria the traditional greeting is "Gruess Gott!" (literally, greetings to God) and I could not for the life of me adjust to it. I have a hard enough time saying Gruezi in Zurich - Gruess Gott was a cultural step too far. I alternated between my Bernese Gruesseuch - which was just fine because about half the people in our hotel were Swiss, and half of them were Bernese - and a German inflected "Hallo!" I can Gruesseuch with the best of them, but the Austrians really raise it to a whole new level.

Reto and I had a great weekend spa-ing, sauna-ing, and wellness-ing (details and a few pictures coming in a day or two). Alex stayed with his grandparents at the farm and had a great time too; he did get homesick for us at bed-time but otherwise did well on his first long weekend without us. It'll be awhile before Reto and I can sneak away just the two of us, so we wanted to sneak in this trip before December. We had two days of beautiful weather and one day of steady rain, which when you're staying at a wellness hotel is a great excuse for hanging out in the spa all day. We had a great time, but really missed Alex, so it's not so bad coming back to real life.

And I'm glad to back in the land of the Gruesseuch.

A few pictures of the garden

It's not much by American standards (67 sq. meters), but it's a bit of private green space in the middle of an urban neighborhood. You're not going to find much better in the middle of the city.

The bumble-bee moment of a bilingual baby, or how Alex started to talk

Alex was a bit slow to start talking. Not so slow that we thought we had an issue on our hands, but slow enough that we brought it up with our pediatrician at the 18-month well-baby appointment. (And certainly slow enough that we were growing weary of his fall-back position of just pointing at the thing he wanted and yelling.) Our pediatrician (who is Norwegian, of all things, and wonderful) asked us if Alex used "Mama" and "Papa" (the Swiss say Papa or Papi but we actually use Dada) properly and if he can follow basic directions; if children are doing that before their second birthday he's not concerned but makes a note to follow up at the two-year well-baby appointment. And yes, at 18 months Alex was calling us Mama and Dada and he had a small handful of other words as well; not many, granted, but he was in command of a fistful of simple random nouns - water, ball, music, star, bus, moon. (It's no accident that all of those words are cognates - words that are the same [or remarkably similar] in English and German: water/Wasser, ball/Ball, music/Musik, star/Stern, bus/Bus, moon/Mond.)

A lot of parents of bilingual children will tell you that their children didn’t start talking until the end of their second year, but I’ve seen some literature that suggests that the delay for bilingual children relative to monolingual children is actually closer to the delay for boys relative to girls; that is, about four to six weeks rather than the much longer delay assumed by conventional wisdom. I can’t explain this discrepancy, and I tend to trust parents’ assessments of their own children, so when my friends with bilingual children tell me their children didn’t start speaking until quite late – compared to where they "should be" on a developmental assessment chart, anyway – I tend to believe them. And in light of the linguistic chaos Alex negotiates on any given day, we really tried to cut him some slack in the Onset of Speech Department.

Reto and I are raising Alex bi-lingually. We take a a one-parent/one-language approach - each parent speaks one and only one language with the child - and we're pretty strict about it. I speak English with Alex in private and in public, in mixed-language groups and when we're together with Reto's parents who do not understand English. Some of you have experienced speaking English with Reto only to have him turn his head and rattle off something incomprehensibly Swiss to Alex. It sounds straightforward, and for the most part it is, but consider the full language environment in which Alex operates: although I speak only English with Alex, I often speak German (not Swiss) in front of him - with my in-laws, in a store or restaurant, when we visit the Mütterberaterin, with some of the mothers in play group. He hears me switching back and forth, and that must be confusing on some level. It must be even more confusing when he watches Reto switch from Swiss with him to English with me, unless we’re at his parents’ in which case he speaks Swiss with Alex and German with me, unless his parents aren’t in the room and then he might address me in English or German, depending on mood and context and topic; but if the two of them are visiting his parents without me Reto stays in Swiss the whole time. I get confused just writing all of that so I can only imagine what Alex's mental map of the world must look like.

Whatever the professional literature says, I can honestly say that in Alex's case it was well past his second birthday when he hit that moment all the baby books refer to as the "word-a-day" stage. It was late April (so Alex was almost 27 months old) and Alex and I were taking a walk through a little triangular park between our apartment and the university. We were looking at the flowers and a big fat bumble-bee staggered, pollen-drunk, from one tulip to the next.

"Alex! Look!" I said. "A bumble-bee!"

"Bum-bum bee!" Alex said. "Bum-bum bee!"

And he's never looked back. The words piled on top of one another, one two three a day. There were ants! and ladybugs! and bees! and worms! Leaves! Dogs! Birdies! And not just words in English. Wa-wa became Wasser. He chose Baum over tree, Blumen over flowers, Auto over car, Zug over train. Nouns, nouns, nouns to name his world. He went from two word sentences to four word sentences like a colt tripping down hill. He's into double digits and I've stopped counting and can hardly remember those days when his method of asking for something to eat was to slap the palm of his hand against the refrigerator door. In fact, in the four months since our bumble-bee moment not only has Alex become a chatterbox, he has become a chatterbox with a clear langugage preference.

Are you ready for this?

Alex prefers speaking Swiss. He understands everything I say to him in English, but very clearly prefers to speak Swiss. I'll confess that this scenario never really occurred to me. I've always held in the back of my mind the very real possibility - the likelihood, really - that once he started attending school he wouldn't want to speak English in front of his friends, wouldn't want to stand out as different like that, but I always assumed that up until that point he'd show a preference for English. I'm a stay at home mother and I'm a motor-mouth, ergo Alex will have a bias for English, right? But Alex, Alex prefers Swiss. One of the many ways he reminds me every day how very much his own person he is. From the minute that boy was born he had personality pouring off him, he had his own ideas.

And for now he's expressing those ideas in Swiss.

Post-move chaos

Well, all of our stuff is in the new place. It's all still in boxes and I have no idea how long it's going to take me to get it out of the boxes, but we have been moved. Alex's room is completely unpacked and organized so when he comes home from the grandparents' tomorrow at least his room will be ready and familiar. As to what comes next, other than making sure Reto and I have a bed to sleep in, I have no idea. It's rather overwhelming figuring out where to start. The kitchen, I guess.

It'll be good here, once we've settled. Small though it is, the garden will make a nice change. I hope Alex likes the new place. We'll see tomorrow.

Where we live

This is my favorite building in my Quartier (neighborhood).


It sits on a busy corner where there is plenty of car and foot traffic and a bus line. The upper floors are residential, but the ground floor is occupied by two local businesses - a cafe/bar and an Italian grocery. On weekends there might be a flower stand in front of the grocery, or sometimes fresh fruits and vegetables.


I think that this building is aesthetically pleasing, lovely really; but I think the reason I am so attached to it is because it has become iconic to me. The architecture of this building, the columns, the statue tucked away in its roof alcove, the colors and especially the two small businesses on the ground floor are a perfect image of what I always imagined life in a European city to look like. I even like that when I look at the building from across the streets the cables for the bus line - so very European - slice across my field of vision. Once upon a time I would mutter at those tram and bus cables for "ruining" my pictures; but they are the essence of European city living and I am learning to incorporate them into my pictures. To use them. To appreciate them. Their presence makes my life on foot, my life lived in close contact with the street, possible.


Much of my neighborhood is mixed-use; businesses on the ground floor and apartments above. I'm a big proponent of mixed-use zoning. As Jane Jacobs illustrated long ago, mixed-use neighborhood are lively and interesting; they have varied foot traffic at most hours of the day and night (thus providing not only interest but safety); and they're convenient for the residents. I live within a ten minute walk of a bakery, a grocery store, an organic food store, a butcher (mostly organic), two wine shops, multiple restaurants and cafes, an ATM, a post office, a papeterie (stationary and card store), two bookstores, two florists, two apotheks (drug stores), a branch library, a park, a playground, the bus stop, and the main train station. Alex and I live our lives on foot, out on the streets of our neighborhood, strolling here, popping into this store and that, recognizing faces on the streets, contributing to this lively neighborhood. Our neighborhood is designed to be lived in, not merely inhabited.

I love the buildings, the businesses, the streets of my city.

We're moving

More like changing apartments, really, since we're staying in the same building. One of the two ground floor units that's big enough for us became available and we jumped at the chance to get one of the apartments with a little yard in the back. Emphasis on little - we're in the middle of the city after all - but a yard is a yard, and it will be nice for Alex to be able to run outside and burn off some energy* during that half hour before dinner or bedtime when there isn't time to go to the playground. Reto's looking forward to buying a grill and I'm looking forward to eating what he grills for me. We're moving at the end of the month, so hopefully Setptember and early October will be nice enough for us to be able to enjoy our new outside space.

I'm not looking forward to the move itself - who does? - but I'm really looking forward to the new space.

* Ever seen a Jack Russel Terrier? That would be Alex.

This one is especially for Robin

Keeping touch via the internets

My friend Sarah recently started a blog (but, um, Sarah you haven't been posting!!) as a quick way to keep her far-flung friends up-to-date with what's going on. Not a bad idea, I thought - and then dropped the ball on the project for a good month or so. (Actually it's more like Alex ripped the ball out of my hands and threw it out the window, but "dropped the ball" is so much shorter. I'm all about the short.) But at the moment I'm home alone with a minute to myself and the Tour de France on in the background (individual time trial, Fabian Cancellara crashed hard) so I thought I'd try to get something started.

The exciting news of the day (if you're Alex, especially) is that we finally bought Alex a Like-a-Bike. We've been meaning to all summer (summer? what summer?) and finally got around to it this morning, along with his helmet (a Giro, of course, like his Mama), and he won't be parted from it; he even had to have the helmet in bed with him when he took his nap this afternoon, with the Like-a-Bike on the floor nearby. (Yeah, that was a short nap.) He's sort of getting the hang of it, but in the short run taking him places on the Like-a-Bike is going to be soooooo much slower than the old bicycle on a stick. It's threatening to rain (yes, again) so Reto and Alex are out with the Like-a-Bike getting in some practice runs while they can (hence my moment alone) before the rain rain rain comes down down down.

I don't know how often I'll update this; I'll try to throw up something once a week, assuming we have something interesting to report once a week. Otherwise I can always just put up pictures of Alex who is, if I may say so, way cute. To wit:


and

(Anybody taking bets on whether Alex will ever deign to get on that bicycle on a stick ever again now that he has a Like!A!Bike!?)

Over time I hope to make the template more interesting and add some links and widgets, but that's pretty low priority around here. I'm hoping to just get a post up every now and then.

Tschuss for now!

UPDATED with pictures on the Like-a-Bike: