radish times

Dear loved ones,

Happy new year!

It has been a great many moons since last I wrote – several suns too, I think.

It is impossible to get a grasp on time with so much going on.

Katya

Katya turned nine in May. What a transition she has seen this year! She grew from a little girl into a tween, with many glimpses of teen. She shot up several inches and thinned out.

She gave up gymnastics and art classes to throw herself headlong into karate. She started at the end of April, has her orange belt (the last beginner belt) and is taking seven or eight classes a week. She competes on the Park Slope Amerikick Demo Team and has won many a gold medal at competitions this summer and fall for forms, weapons, sparring and trix. She works like crazy on her acrobatics – trying to perform back walkovers, front walkovers, front handsprings and kip ups. She already can do a middle split and both side splits.

She continues to enjoy and do well in school, although this year had a rough start with her regular teacher on maternity leave for three months. She is deep into the Harry Potter series and reads it anytime she doesn’t have to carry those big books too far.

Somehow, she still saves time to work on her art projects and craft creations, often working on at least one thing, if not two, while watching sitcoms with her brothers. She spends a lot of time with Vanya practicing and arguing about karate and with Kostya taking care of and playing with him like the little mother that she is.

She has grown a lot in her friendships too. Where last year, gossip, rumors, and bullying really hurt her and took a lot of her energy, this year her skin is thicker, her self esteem greater, and she has developed a very practical balanced perspective on what other kids say and do. She is becoming more aware of the world around her and is simple and direct in her questions about what she sees and experiences.

She is a true and continuing delight to me.

Vanya

Vanya turned seven in June.

He is all about karate. His is finishing his third year, has his green belt (the last intermediate belt) and will be testing for his first advanced belt in the spring. Like Katya, Vanya is at karate five days a week. He is a weapons wiz. He practices weapons tricks all the time on any weapon he can get his hands on – sword, bo staff, nunchucks and kamas. He has the eery knack of being able to copy almost any move he sees, so he learns routines very quickly. He competes with the Park Slope Dragons Team and has also won many medals in competition this year, both team and individual. He LOVES to perform and rarely passes up an opportunity to do so. His latest accomplishment was to learn to do front handsprings. His way of practicing is quite different than his sister: he just practices when the spirit moves him, no schedule, no obligation, no pre-planning.

His second love is video games. Every Christmas and birthday he gets at least one new game for the Wii U, and, as he has always done since he was tiny, he watches people playing the new games on You Tube to learn all the tricks and strategies.

Vanya is doing well in school and likes to go. He likes math and science the best (as does Katya) and wants to be the scientist who invents time travel and teleportation.

As seven, he still has all the innocence of a child mixed with a strong self confidence and the edge of awareness of something greater. Vanya has the simple and firm expectation that we give money to anyone who asks, especially the “sock man,” an elderly man who sells socks on the corner by our karate school. He plays with all kids making no distinction between “cool’ and “not cool.” If he is interested in what they are doing, he will approach any kid or group, unselfconsciously, confidently, as he has done since he was small. He won the heart of one of the women who works at the karate studio by befriending and playing all summer with a boy with special needs who no one else was playing with.

To the world’s eyes, Vanya is calm and easygoing, so it can be quite a surprise when his intense inner drive breaks through the surface, as happens every now and then. As I sing to him each night, he is our sweet, smart, strong Vanya.

He is a continuing inspiration and joy.

Kostya

Kostya, Kostya! KOSTYA!! Kostya is three, and what a three year-old he is!

He is sunny, happy, decisive, insistent and imperious! He has none of the calm easy temperament of his brother. He knows at all times exactly what he wants and in that he can be quite rigid.

He does not like to wear new clothes (although he is pleased to talk about them and look at them). If he gets a new shirt, it often takes months to get him to wear it. But, once he has worn it once, he will wear it anytime. The same goes for new shoes, jackets, pants, and hats.

He adores repetition – of books, shows, paths, songs, games, food, you name it. At the park, if he finds a path he likes to walk, he will walk it once, twice, ten times, twenty times, thirty times. When he likes book he will ask for it over and over again. He can now “read” by himself books like “Don’t Let the Pigeon Drive the Bus.” any Sandra Boyton book you can think of, the Cat in the Hat, Pierre, Go Away Big Green Monster.

He loves Peppa Pig, a british cartoon about a pig family living on a big hill, and he has adopted a british accent for some of his words. He doesn’t eat tomatoes with us, he eats “to-mah-toes”. If he does something bad, which he often does, like throwing all the books off the shelf, and I say “Kostya, stop it! That isn’t funny!,” he will look up with big eyes and say cheerfully, “Well, it’s a bit funny” and smile.

He is becoming quite observant of all the changes among people and things in the household. When Peter came downstairs after shaving the other morning, Kostya said “Papa! Where is all your hair?” He asked his grandma why her Christmas tree had no ornaments, “because our tree upstairs has ornaments!”

Through a combination of siblings, You Tube, and the chance to play undirected on his own computer,
– He plays and wins solitaire by himself as well as a number of other card games on the computer
– He knows all his letters, shapes, colors, numbers. Just today we counted to 130 together. He says “1.” I say “2.” etc.
– He sings all kinds of songs, including Don’s McLean’s American Pie, Hey Jesse from the series “Jesse.” along with Donna Nobis Pacem and the ABC song.

To his siblings’ utter dismay, he just discovered the Wii U and LOVES to play. The problem is that he can’t really play yet but he can shut off the game, turn off the sound, turn off the TV, monopolize the main controller, kill his character over and over, and make it impossible for Katya or Vanya to play any game seriously.

It is quite a challenge to be so much smaller than anyone else in the house and still get as much attention as you want. Kostya manages pretty well. We are all waiting for him to shed the last vestiges of babyhood, but it is with mixed feeling that we watch our littlest one grow up.

While it is demanding, time consuming, and sometimes life-monopolizing to have three, we really wouldn’t have it any other way. As a babe in arms, in not the easiest conditions, Kostya shone with a sweet and generous nature. He has that still, continuously, ever renewing. Our baby. Our Konstantin.

Peter and Judy

Peter and I have been married for almost 16 years. Here on the shady side of forty, we still have a great time together. Here are some of the highlights of our year:

Peter amazingly heroically decided to lose weight and adopt a more active lifestyle. After six months, he has lost 60 pounds and continues to walk about 5 miles a day! He looks fantastic. Said he hasn’t slept better for years!

In February, I became a formal student of the Mountain and Rivers Order of the Zen Mountain Monastery. I had been working towards it for years and years and finally made it through all the of barrier gates to make my commitment.

We have become karate parents, spending about a quarter to a half of our free time at the karate studio, karate tournaments and karate performances. We get a lot of walking done that way since the studio is about a half mile away.

We both continue in our jobs. I am still at Options. I am Co-Director of the whole center and have been doing local, state and national policy work for the past year. It is something like having a brand new job – which makes it exciting, exhausting and, from time to time, scary. I am developing new skills and often just making stuff up as I go a long. Peter has been in his current job at Amazon for about two years. It is not the worst job but not always ideal either.

Grandma and Grandpa

We moved into the same house with my parents going on ten years ago. It has been such a blessing for us. We often eat and hang out together. They watch the kids when Peter and I are both at work and, often, other random times as well. We make decisions about the house together, share a car, and, in all reality, raise the kids together. Katya and Kostya often take advantage of their grandparents being downstairs when things are not going their way upstairs. They all go down to play or do special projects with their grandparents.

Besides taking care of and helping raise the kids, my parents still see friends, go for walks, do a lot of cooking, gardening, and taking care of the house and car. My mom volunteers at the kids school. There is rarely a time that mom or dad does not have a crossword puzzle, sudoku or free cell game in progress.

It is just as much of a wonder and inspiration to me to have my parents right here as it is to have the kids.

With that, I will sign off, wishing you all the best in 2016.

With much love,
Judy

From last April….

As I sit down to write this update, I have the strong sense of time flowing by, like a fast moving river all around me all the time. I started writing this update four months ago. The date, which I just changed, was December 31, 2009. And yet, life is so full I can’t even detect a small hole in the fabric that has brought us from that date to this one.

Katya is huge now. She is almost four years old. Several weeks ago she said to my mom “Mya mya, come here I have something to tell you.” The small serious confidential child waited until my mom arrived and then said, “Mya mya, less… is more.” After one visit to the local elementary school, Katya confidently refers to it as “my school, where I will go next year” (we have no idea if she will actually get in spot in their pre-k program or not). She has joined in the household planning with a fury. She will often say “Mommy, what is our plan?” or “Mommy, I have a plan, let’s….” and then produce a well thought through suggestion about how to proceed. “Mommy, I have a plan. Let’s go the grocery store before we go to Ray’s house so when our play date is over we can come straight home because I will be tired.” “Mommy, let’s save this ice cream for a special treat for tomorrow that we can have after supper.” One that surprised me a few weeks ago had to do with the curtains in Katya and Vanya’s bedroom. I was telling Katya one morning that Peter and I were going to a concert that night and her grandparents would put her to bed. She said “Well Mommy, grandma and grandpa don’t know about opening the curtains in our room at night. They don’t open them wide enough.” I asked, “Would you like me to tell them about it?” She said “No. Just open them up later when you go up to gather our pajamas for Myamya. Then when Myamya and Baba put us to bed they will already be open like they should be.”

Special treats are a big thing for Katya right now. On the way to bed she’ll say “but Mommy, I haven’t had a special treat yet today.” Special treats can range from being carried up the stairs to coming downstairs after lights out to have a bowl of Cheerios to having a special kind of desert after dinner. Sometimes Katya loses sight of the fact that “special” means “not every time” and then we have to talk about the difference between a treat and a special treat.

Vanya is likewise much changed since I last wrote. He now knows his name. For a long long time, he identified so strongly with Katya that if you asked him his name he would say “KaaaaYaaa.” But now, Kaya and Vaya are distinct from one another. In fact, Vanya is now very distinct from anyone else. His favorite words are “MINE” and “SELF” in capital letters, for they are never said without strong emphasis. He is not greedy however, and is very used to sharing, but he now understands and defends his territory. SELF underlies the fact that he wants to do everything himself and will do it himself even if he has to undo what you do and do it again. Like when he is struggling to get off a chair, if you lift him down (or even support his foot), he will climb back up just so he can climb down SELF. He is developing all kinds of personal preferences and expresses them by shaking his head and saying “like it.” So it goes SHAKE “like it,” SHAKE “like it” (meaning “I DON’T like it!” This can of course be very confusing if you are not looking at him because then you are convinced that he DOES like, when he doesn’t. I am working with him on including the word “don’t” (“Don’t like it”).

A couple months ago, I was in the kitchen cleaning. The kids were playing together in the living room. They were arguing a little, as is par for the course, when I heard a very clear directive voice say “NOT NICE.” I peeked into the living room and there was Vanya pointing at Katya repeatedly saying “NOT NICE. NOT NICE KAYA.” My strong investigative powers led me to determine that Katya had pushed Vanya off the trampoline. Now Katya has to be careful what she does because Vanya can tell on her just as easily as she can tell on him. Incidentally, he can also physically defend himself. So she needs to be careful not to get herself in situations where she gets worse than she gives.

About the same time, Vanya broke my heart in two with his newly found power of expression. We were going upstairs after visiting with my parents. Katya was ahead of him, as she always is. He started to yell “’ait, Kaya. ‘ait, ME, ‘AIT ME!” (Wait, Katya, wait for me”). It pierced my heart – because it was such a keen example of the growing personhood of this little boy – a personhood that will no doubt receive blows and setbacks in the process of seeing himself as a separate person. His great desire for the attention and love of his sister may be the first and most continuous pain he will have to grapple with. Yelling to the wind, “wait for me, wait for ME.”

It is very common in our house now to hear little voices screaming and yelling “ Ahhhhhhooooo.” You go in and say “What happened?… WHAT happened?…. What HAPPENED? (only repeating yourself three times is lucky!) Is that his? Did you take that from him? DID you take that from him? Give it back. GIVE it back. Give it back, right now. Do you hear me? Do you HEAR me? DO YOU HEAR ME?” On this very same theme, there are infinite variations. This is the “Did you take it?” theme. There is also the “Did you hit him?” theme, the “Did you push him?,” “Did you hit him over the head with that banana?,” Did you put that tiny shoe in his hair with a paper clip?” “WHO poured this paint over the cat food in the kitchen?,” etc., etc., etc. (I have never felt so justified in using “etc.”)

I tell you, an almost four-year-old and an almost two-year-old can really keep you on your toes and right here in this moment. If I had the time and the paper I could write much more about the crazy, wonderful, frustrating, inspiring, hectic, loving time we are having. But as the babe’s awake from their naps, it is time to plunge in again.

On a sad note, some of you may know that our oldest cat, Pippin, died in January. We are sad and still miss him much. When I found him, laying on the couch as if asleep, with that eery stillness of death, Bobo was laying with his head on Pippin’s side. Now, Bobo will often sleep in that very place on the couch.

Time is passing so fast. Katya and Vanya are growing in waves and bounds. It is quite amazing to be part of it.

At 16 months, Vanya has a driving determination to do everything his sister does regardless of the two year difference between them. Hence, he is climbing stairs by holding the hand rail and straightening one leg after the other. He is swinging on the big kid swings, climbing up ladders and sliding down any and every slide in the playground. He eats beautifully with a fork. He demands candy from the candy bag high up in the cupboard. He yells “mahhhmah, mahhhhmah” just like Katya. He likes to sit on big chairs and swing his legs. And now, he loves to brush his teeth (or tongue as it may be). If Katya get something he doesn’t or gets to do something he doesn’t, he forces his small little body into your face crying “me, me, me, me!”

Added to these things he is also developing a little repertoire of his own things. When it is time to go out, he often brings his shoes to someone to get help putting them on. When he is done with that, he brings the grown-ups their shoes so they can get ready. Today he brought his grandmother her sweater so she could get ready. When he has to go out of the room to get something (particularly at story reading time before bed) he holds up his pudgy little pointer finger, nods his head as if to say “you understand,” and says “min’t, min’t” (“be back in a minute”). Then he runs out of the room and back in again.

He is anxious to communicate with either signs or words and gets a thrill whenever anyone understands him. He routinely says “ta ga” (thank you) with a slow nod of his head if you give him something. A few days ago he asked me to change his shirt by doing the “change diaper” sign and tugging on his shirt. Tonight, he got me to push his chair in at the table by saying “puh me, mama, puh me.” Lately he has taken to muttering to himself “dubbahdubbahdubbahdubbah” over and over again and he gets a huge kick out of it if someone says it back to him. He has also developed the strange habit of liking to have his tongue cleaned. If he is eating something that he doesn’t quite finish swallowing, he’ll stick out his tongue until someone wipes it off with their finger.

Katya just started pre-school two days a week. The beginning was a little rough for all of us. Katya was fine the first day. Peter and I brought her to the classroom, stayed a few minutes and left. The second day, Katya cried and cried when I finally pulled myself out of the classroom. It was much harder to leave than I ever anticipated. The first several days that she was in school I involuntarily watched the clock wondering what they might be doing in school. Was it snack time? Was it roof time? Were they napping? When I would go pick her up or hear from my parents that all was well, all the anxiety and energy would drain from me and I would be left mostly useless for the rest of the day. It was hard. We didn’t know exactly what to do or what to say to Katya about why we were sending her to this place that was making her cry. I didn’t fully realize how difficult of a transition it was for Katya until her teacher commented on the fifth day she went to school, “today was the first time Katya ran around on the roof during play time, laughed and had a good time.” Oh, that was heart wrenching. But, after that things got better pretty fast. Now, instead of saying “Mama, I don’t want to go to school” every morning, Katya asks in the afternoons if she can go to school the next day. What a relief!

Peter and I are doing well, if a little tired. Peter has been preparing for a photo exhibit in Wels, Austria in a few weeks. Once that is over, he’ll attend another festival in Austria in December to take photos and then turn his attention to preparing for an exhibit in Oslo, Norway in January. I’ve been working on developing our training curriculum at OPTIONS and planning a whole string of grant-funded trainings around financial aid for college and working with immigrant students on the college process. Not a quiet moment most days.

Vanya is growing so fast, I thought I’d share a little about him.

April 30, 2009

Oh how time flies. Just a minute ago Vanya was tiny sweaty sticky baby searching for milk on everyone’s breast, arms and shoulders. Now he eats everything, talks and almost walks.

This week Vanya had chicken and rice, pasta and yogurt, slices of cheese and avocado. He routinely says “aaah dah,” (all done) when he is finished with his meal or even his “ga caca” (Graham Cracker). He tells us when he wants “duh!” (down) and is working on remembering “uh” (up). He knows “mama” and “papa” and has privately been practicing “baba,” (Katya’s name for her grandfather). “Katya” and “Mya Mya” (Katya’s name for her grandmother) cannot be far behind. Vanya shakes his head and says “ne ne ne” as he pulls the trash can over, plays with the electrical cords, and puts rocks in his mouth. He climbed two flights of stairs today with little assistance to get from his grandparents to his house for a nap. He pushes Katya around in a little red wagon and wrestles with her on the grass, the floor and mamapapa’s bed. He is always into something and requires constant care. Even Katya helps watch that he doesn’t eat anything he shouldn’t (dog food is his number 1 goal) or play with anything too small.

All this at ten months. What will he be up to when he is eleven months?!?

May 6, 2009

One week later and Vanya is saying “Kaka,” exactly what Katya called herself for the first two years of her life.

Today, I heard from a little bird that Vanya found one of Katya’s bubble blowing bottles, the non-spill kind in the little bottle with the bubble wand sticking out. He picked it up, pulled out the wand, and (I know what you are thinking, and he DIDN’T stick the wand in his mouth) he held it up to his mouth and went “whooo whooo.” He tried to blow bubbles!

I woke this morning at 5:40 am to do zazen (sitting zen) as I have been doing for the past couple of months. Recently, I have many times woken at 5:40 am only to find out that Vanya is also awake, making it somewhat impossible to sit zazen. So I have been trying different strategies to enable me to sneak down the stairs without waking anyone up. My very first effort was clever but a little too effective. I ordered a vibrating alarm wrist watch thinking it wouldn’t wake anyone else up. And it worked. No one woke up… including me. Then I tried closing the door to Katya and Vanya’s room when I got up to go downstairs. That ended yesterday in a storm of grunting and yelling. Vanya woke up and started grunting which woke up Katya who saw that the door was closed and started screaming “Why is the door closed? Why is the door closed?” So this morning, I woke up, sat up, turned off the alarm. I sat very quietly for some minutes hoping that everyone was sinking back into deep sleep. I stood up. I heard rustling from Vanya’s crib. I dropped silently to the floor in a split second decision to sit zazen right on the floor beside my bed so as not to make any noise at all. Silence. One minute. Rustle. Rustle. Two minutes. Ruuuustle. Silence. A small voice, “Aaa Dah. Ahhhhh Dahhhh.” Pause. “Mama.” Pause “Ahhhh Dahhh.”  No way to feel irritation. Just joy, amazement, bewilderment. Who is this small boy?

We have two big reasons to celebrate in our household:

Reason 1: KATYA IS POTTY-TRAINED!

Three weeks ago, we threw Katya a Potty Party. A Potty Party is an intense event. It involves teaching your child how to teach a doll how to use the potty, purchasing a doll that “pees,” explaining to your child why water is leaking out of the dolls armpits and hip joints, identifying a proper substance that looks like doll poop but doesn’t tempt you to eat it, and much much more. The purpose of a potty party is to make your child so excited about learning to use the potty that he/she will offer no resistance and be carried away on a wave of big kid peeing euphoria.

Our potty party turned out to be successful, but it didn’t live up to all that. A couple illustrations will suffice to demonstrate on what a lower level our potty party registered on the excitement scale (even though I tried my hardest to be the enthusiastic parent):

•After going with her doll to the bathroom to pee three or four times, Katya completely lost interest. I said “OH, EMMA (our doll’s name) NEEDS TO PEEEEE, KATYA.” You can imagine my voice twittering with excitement and anticipation. Katya said, “Oh?” “LET’S GO WITH HER TO THE BATHROOM” (at which point you are instructed to grab your child’s hand and rush off to the bathroom). I grabbed Katya’s hand attached to her totally sedentary body, and she looked up and said “No, mom, you go.” “You don’t want to go?” I say trying to sound unbelieving and still excited (instead of disappointed – not that she had also lost interest in this game but that she would not see and appreciate what a great poop I made out of prunes this time). “No, you go. I’m busy.”

•At the crucial point a little later, the point where Katya opened her gift of “big kid underpants,” and was supposed to jump for joy and beg to put them on, she looked calmly up at me and said “But where is my other present?” I was confused. “What other present?” She said “Another present. I don’t want this one.” PAUSE “Oh, but these are really exciting. They are your new big girl underpants, just like Emma’s. Let’s try them on.” NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO,” she wailed as she fled from me. For a moment it seemed as if this whole crazy farce was all for nothing. A deep breath. A reach down to center. I walked after her, clear that there was nothing else to do but quietly persist in my objective, which was to get her to put on some big girl underpants. As I put a pair of underpants on her, she wailed “NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO, NOOooooooo, NO, noooooo, nooo….” But as soon as they were on, she stopped, jumped off the couch and said “Let’s play babies.” And that was all there was to it.

•That afternoon, after she had used the potty successfully three times (another part of the potty party is inventing ways to get your child to drink 12 gallons of liquid) and been greatly celebrated with stickers, treats, hugs and kisses, she had to go again. As she sat down on the potty, she looked up and said with a slightly bored tone “I want no stickers, no treats, no hugs and no kisses, Mama.” And she proceeded to pee in the potty, get up, wash her hands and leave the bathroom.

Reason 2: VANYA CAN CRAWL!

Yes, you read it right. Vanya can finally crawl. He is very pleased with himself. His relations are less pleased… those relations, that is, who like to keep their electrical cords in one piece, their garbage in their garbage cans, their laundry in their laundry bags, the cat food in the cat food dish, and their legs without bite marks.

Oh, yes, did I mention, he also learned to chew (bite) on people? And, did I mention, it HURTS!!? He has four sharp !#%!!# teeth.

Unfortunately, the only thing funnier (to Vanya) than tipping over the garbage can is the word “no!” My parents insist that he even knows how to say this word and that when they say “NO!” he laughs and turns around and says “no” right back.

He is communicating up a storm. The second sign he picked up (after “milk”) was “all done.” He uses it constantly – whether to tell you he is all done with the apples or all done with the meal in general. If you try to ignore it, he gets really upset, arches his back and screams. In addition to this, he has just learned that he can pull his bib off. Even when it seems to be hurting him, he pulls, pulls, pulls, scrunches up his face and throws his head back, and POP! off it comes.

His nickname is trouble (double double toil and).

If you are interested in seeing the two sweet munchkins in action, you can look at these two videos they made to wish their grandmother a happy birthday:
Katya: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3wzKSLeVnFs
Vanya: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MJCEuC4lEe0

Sometimes Peter and I like to call Katya “pumpkin head” as an endearment. “Hello my little pumpkin head!” “It’s time to go to BED, pumpkin HEAD.” I am not sure why we started or where it came from, but the other night we were unwise enough as to have a prolonged conversation about it:

“Are you a pumpkin head?”
“Nooooo”
“Who is my little pumpkin head?”
No answer.
“Who is my little pumpkin head? Who is?” [Tickle Tickle]
“HAA HAA HAA HEE HEE HA”
“Are you my little pumpkin head?” [Tickle tickle tickle]
“HAA HAAA HEEE” [gasp for breath] “HAA HEE HAA YES HAA HE HE”
“Is mama a pumpkin head?”
“No.”
“Who is mama then?”
“Mama is a pickle head.”
“:( … is papa a pumpkin head?”
“No. Papa is a sausig head.” [sausig = sausage]

It is somewhat berserk having two little children. There are whole hours where not even an instant of quiet breaks through the noise. Katya has taken to talking non-stop and asking “why?” about every 20 seconds or so (this is particularly true when you are engaged in some kind of hard physical or mental labor). Vanya, having passed through his screeching at the top of his lungs phase, had entered the eternal noise and babbling stage. He just puts out a constant string of sounds, which occasionally are very cute “da da da’s” and more often are less amusing (i.e. extremely irritating) moans and groans.

Katya’s nose runs often in the winter time. We are not sure if it is the wintertime snuffles or allergies. But she often asks for a tissue. Just now, as I was writing this, she asked for a tissue. I took the opportunity to use the toilet and get her a piece of toilet paper for a tissue. As I handed it to her she asked,
“It that you pee one?” “WHAT?” “Is that you pee one?” “NO.”

Katya has become very directive of late. She has always known quite clearly what she wanted, but now she is able to articulate it. And, she does, non-stop.
•Upstairs: “Mama, I want seltzer with ice in a sippy cup, please.”
•On the way up the stairs: “Carry me, mama. Turn on the light. When we get upstairs, I want to play play dough in my playroom for a couple minutes. You turn on my light.”
•On the way down the stairs: “I want toast with black berry jam and a bowl of yogurt with honey and Mama’s cereal.”
•At the breakfast table, sitting backwards in her chair observing my mother, who makes us all breakfast: “I want a waffle, Mya Mya. I want a waffle, Mya Mya. Mya Mya I want a waffle. I want a waffle with syrup and egg and toast, Mya Mya. I want some water. Mya Mya I want some water… NO, not in that cup, in a sippy cup. I want some juice, Mama, I want some berry juice in a regular cup… NO, that doesn’t match, that doesn’t MATCH…”

Matching is a big thing. We mistakenly bought her a multicolor set of plates, spoons, forks, bowls and cups. Now it is one of the essentials of each meal that Katya’s food is all served on the same color table ware – so if you choose a blue plate, you must also be able to find the blue cup, the blue bowl, the blue fork and the blue spoon.

She has also been building lots of skills. She can do 12 piece puzzles all by herself. She is learning to play concentration with bear cards. She loves to help wash vegetables, make jello, pour pasta into water to cook and do art projects. She paints, glues, and scatters sequins and colorful cotton balls all over the place. She still loves to build towers with blocks or legos, play with her little wood and plastic people and her “babies.” She loves to migrate various items throughout the house. For example, this morning she had to take a plastic cabbage, apple slice and piece of corn down to her grandparent’s apartment.

Vanya is doing well. He is pretty big now, being seven months old and almost 20 pounds. He has recently learned to do lots o things, which put me in mind of writing his chronology before I completely forget when things happened for him:

Contractions started: Jun 10, 3 pm
Bought coconut water at store for consumption during labor in the hospital: Jun 10, 4 pm
Labor started in earnest: Jun 11, 2 am
Called doula to come: Jun 11, 4:30 am
Doula arrived: Jun 11, 5:30 am
Labor progressed with unusual speed: Jun 11, 7 am
Started feeling urge to push: Jun 11, 7:15 am
Fled to the hospital: Jun 11, 7:30 am
Arrived at hospital: Jun 11, 8 am
Born: Jun 11, 8:18 am
Longingly remembered the coconut water we abandoned as we fled to the hospital: Jun 11, 9 am, 9:30 am, 10 am, 10:30 am, 11 am….
Came home: Jun 14, 1 pm
Started breast feeding: Jun 15, 7 am
Started solid foods: Oct 11
Rolled over: Sometime in October or November
First tooth: bottom front, Nov 15
Second tooth: other bottom front, Nov 29
Sat up without help: early Dec
Stopped breast feeding: mid-Dec
Started sleeping through the night: Dec 24
Moved into a room with his sister: Dec 27
Did his first sign: Jan 1 (sign for milk)
Started babbling: early-Jan (a da da da da, a ma ma ma, a pa pa pa )
Started pulling himself to stand on his knees in his crib: early Jan
Started clapping: early Jan
Held his own bottle: mid-Jan
Shouted with anger when he was barred from entering his sister’s play space in his walker: Last week
Started finger foods: today
Third tooth: any day now
Started crawling: sometime soon or he will bust a gut
Mom completed healed from ballistic birth: before this calendar year is over?

Vanya’s defining characteristic is his calm bright cheerfulness. He can sit for ages quietly engaged in playing or contemplating life but when someone looks at him or talks to him, he positively lights up.

It has begun to become clear that Vanya is developing strong will power and sense of determination where his interests are concerned. He is not easily dissuaded from completing the tasks which he sets for himself. Downstairs at my parent’s house, they have had to rearrange the kids’ play space because of Vanya’s escapades in his walker. At first, he wasn’t really good at maneuvering around in it. But he slowly got better and better. Then he began to conduct a series of drive by’s of Katya’s table, often abducting little plastic people standing too close to the edge– and the only thing louder than Katya’s shriek of dismay is Vanya’s howl of rage at being barred from the area.

Unlike his sister at his age, Vanya likes to try to eat books, or at least chew them, and he loves to grab them and feel them. He is crazy to crawl. He tries and tries and tries – and falls, falls, falls…. and tries again and again and again. He can move around a very wide area just kind of scooting and half-crawling. He can also pick up tiny things off the floor – so we have to sweep all the time. He loves music. As soon as someone starts singing or playing music, Vanya invariably starts bobbing up and down and smiling and sometimes clapping. He definitely claps if the song is “if you’re happy and you know it, clap your hands.”

Two sweet sleeping babies lay upstairs. One tired gum-chewing tea-drinking mama sits downstairs in front of her computer zoning out.

Today was quite a day. Katya is getting her two-year molars. (She let me look in her mouth with a flash light!) She is crazily vacillating between playing cheerfully and whining intolerably. She even had about 30 minutes when she was just crying inconsolably. She asks for all kinds of snacks, but doesn’t eat them. She wants to sit up at the table for lunch and dinner but only to play with her food. She is contrary and has tried everyone’s patience by dripping cereal on the table and floor, mixing up Myamya’s embroidery threads, throwing toys on the floor, sticking leaves in her mouth, crying over everything, constantly demanding “new” water or juice or snack, and then sinking back into Myamya’s chair pale and tired saying “I don’t feel well, mama. Pick me up!.”

We took a walk to the park this morning. When we got there, she wanted to walk. So we helped her out of the stroller. She hadn’t gone five steps when her (new) pants started falling down. In the summer time when that happened, we just took off her pants. But today it was cold. So, we stood there racking our brains for something to use as a belt. I scavenged around through the diaper bad while Katya was standing there crying like she had lost her best friend. The only thing I could find was a plastic bag. So I tore it down the middle and wadded it up and bent down to loop it through the belt straps on Katya’s pants. She started shrieking “NO! I don’t want the bag. I don’t want the bag.” and crying hysterically. It took us more than 5 minutes and every ploy we could think of to get her to calm down and accept the bag as a belt for the time being. I think the winning ploy was that she could hold the bag of popcorn that we were taking to feed the ducks.

Needless to say, I am quite tired tonight.

Peter is in Austria. He has been there for 6 days and I miss him terribly – not just because of the relentlessness of being with two kids all day long. He is my relaxation. When he’s home, we relax in the evening together – whether we go see a concert (extraordinarily rare these days) or watch House, MD (very common) or just talk for a while and then go to bed early. He is my relaxation even when it stresses me out to be doing nothing instead of something. He will be home tomorrow.

Vanya is teething too. But his teething is regular “wah wah mrhhmmmm mrhhmmm mmmrahhrahh rah mrrr mrrr rahhhh” constantly all day long type of teething. You know, the Dab of Orajel, Drool Profusely, Fall Right Asleep kind of teething.

Otherwise, he is an extremely cheerful little guy. He loves to put stuff in his mouth: his toys, his hands, your hands, his clothes, his burp clothes, Katya’s toys, your toys, diapers, wipe-ees, papers, pencils, tubes of Desitin, plates, whatever he can get his pudgy little hands on. He also loves to keep rhythm. He has a little rocking chair and he knows just how to move his legs to keep it rocking for 10 minutes, 20 minutes, an hour. He can rock himself across the room. He is just learning the same thing with his new johnny jump up. He is beginning to bounce in rhythm, up and down, up and down, up and down, no higher, no lower, no higher, no lower, up and down, up and down. He is eating solids already. He eats cereal happily, squash less happily and pumpkin somewhere in the middle.

AND, he is learning to sleep through the night. He sleeps about 10 hours a night now, which is great! In fact, I am going from this e-mail to the shower and then to bed with the possibility of sleeping for seven hours straight. (I haven’t realized this possibility yet because Katya started to wake up at night just about the time that Vanya started sleeping through them, I think because of her teeth. But, even if I don’t realize it, going to bed with the potential for sleeping 7 hours straight is much better than going to bed without that potential).

Vanya is 2 1/2 months old. He is harder to write about than Katya. He is a sweet, good natured, patient baby. He doesn’t cry unless he is hungry or he wants to be burped – and even then he only cries if you ignore the vast number of squiggly grunting signs he gives that something is wrong. He hasn’t cried at night for at least 2 months now, which is just amazing.

Since he is so quiet, sometimes you almost forget he is there, sitting in his chair or laying in his bassinet. That doesn’t mean that occasionally he doesn’t demand a lot of attention. He does. There are days he seems to be hungry all the time or simply uncomfortable. And, he does like to be held and talked to. He completely lights up if someone bends down to pay attention to him. He smiles and laughs and coos.

He has developed a mesmerizing cooing repertoire. Accompanied, as it is, with laughing and smiling, he pulls you in so that it is almost impossible to turn away. He uses a great variety of sounds and tones, including some impossibly high ones. And he bats his eyes at you as if you were his whole dependence and delight.

For the last two nights he has been working at twisting me around his little finger by sleeping for 7 and 8 hours at a time. I am completely charmed. Although I have to relearn how to sleep for that many hours in a row. He sleeps soundly through. It is I who keeps waking up… to check on him, on how many hours he has been sleeping, on when I might need to pump, on whether I have to go to the bathroom, on how many hours might be left…

He is very healthy and growing right on schedule. At his 2-month visit, he was in the 50th percentile across the board for height, weight and head circumference. He now weighs more that 12 1/2 pounds. It still absolutely amazes me, as one of Vanya’s older cousins highlighted for me by continuously asking to see the milk, that though you never actually see the milk going from your breast into the baby, that the breast feeding thing really works.

HELLO!! I hope everything is good with you. It has been so long since I wrote an update that I have decided to split the main news into two e-mails – one about Katya and the other about new baby Vanya. I’ll try to write a more general one soon.

Katya is now 2 years and 4 months. She is talking up a storm these days, saying impossibly cute things like:

“Mama, pick you up.” (Mama, pick me up)

“Mama, pick you up Vanya.” (Mamy, pick Vanya up)

“Papa, I want water mama.” (The “mama” at the end of the sentence being a generic word she sometimes puts at the end of requests regardless of who she is addressing.)

“Hold you.” (Hold me)

“I wanna be like a baby” (This she says before sitting in Vanya’s chair.)

“Need more money. Money melted.” (This she said when riding on one of those little rides they have on the street outside of stores which require an endless stream of quarters.)

“Ha ha! Munny joke!” (Funny joke)

“One, two, blee, bore, bive”

“I have a little ploblem.”

“Not like dis. Not like dis!” ending on a rising note of panic. She says this when you are trying to help her rearrange something, dress her doll, build something with blocks, put food on her plate, sit in a chair in the kitchen… or any other time when her idea of the necessary position of any item does not correspond to your intention or action.

And once, after I farted when putting her to bed, “Mama pooped. Needs new diaper.”

Two very recent language developments include using the word “our,” as in our house, our car, our stroller, and the word “on,” as a universal preposition. For example, “I want to play on the baby on the room.”

Just listening to her talk when she gets in her groove is mind boggling. The other day I jotted down some of her dialogs with herself and with me. Here’s an example:

She was playing with two pails. She has just told me that one of them is her coffee and the other is my coffee. “That a lot. A lot of holes. Dat Mommy’s. Mommy’s coffee pouring out. My coffee gone. My coffee gone. Not dat coffee. It’s drippin out. I wanna see anoder cup.” A little later she came up to me and said, “My belly dirty.” I asked “Your belly is dirty?” She replied, “Dis water, not tea. Berry juice,” showing me a doll’s cup full of water. “I want that cup.. water on the belly. I did it. Not anymore. I want to drink dat water.” Then, looking up, she continued with hardly a breath, “Belka. Belka. Belka.” And then looking at me, “Call belka.” (meaning I am calling a belka). (Belka is the russian word for squirrel)

Just today at lunch, Katya was full of crazy things. The first thing she wanted was a pear. So I gave her one, a really good one that Peter had just picked up at a farmers market. A few minutes later I looked over and saw one whole finger of hers had disappeared into the pear. “What are you doing?” I asked. “Making holes,” she said, removing her finger and sticking it into another part of the pear, as she had clearly done several times previously. “Stop doing that. You’re making the pear disgusting,” I said. She looked at me, looked at the mutilated pear, and then held it out to me and said “Mama eat pear.”

Later she wanted a sandwich with mayonnaise, ham and cheese. So made her one. A minute later I looked over and saw that she had put the sandwich near my plate with one bite out of it and a chewed up piece of sandwich sitting neatly on top. “You don’t want your sandwich?” I asked. “I don’t like it,” she answered. A little later she said “I want bread.” Thinking I had found a very clever way of getting her to eat her sandwich I said, “Why don’t you have some of your sandwich?” She looked at me, then considered the sandwich for a moment. Finally she nodded and said “Take off cheese, take off ham, take off….” I interrupted, “OK. OK. Here’s a piece of bread.” I gave her a fresh piece of bread and finished eating her sandwich myself.

I just read through my last update which I wrote in December. The last line was “I hope to be in touch more often now that the worst (first trimester) is past.” Quite funny as I have rarely written so infrequently

We are all doing well. I am 8 months pregnant, a balloon already and getting bigger by the day. Katya just turned 2 on Saturday. She is doing really great – learning and growing all the time. She is just beginning to speak in sentences. She says things like

– “No eat grass
– “No myamya baba. New toys. Mama by.” (I don’t want to go downstairs for breakfast. I want to play with my new toys with Mama sitting next to me.)
– “KaKa poop. Need new diaper
– “No dirt. Play on grass
– “No Papa push” (when Peter tries to get her to walk a little faster)

She can walk about 1/2 mile or so without getting tired. She loves to play in the playground now – swinging, playing in the sandbox climbing and sliding. She loves to play with her little village people, her babies, play dough, water, and almost anything else she can get her hands on. She still loves to swim and take baths.

Peter is doing well. He has been sorting out and posting all his photos on-line in preparation for the rush of new baby photos.