my words

Today was the girl's forth birthday.  She's big now, and she knows it.  For dinner, she refused the booster seat that lifts her head above the surface of the table.  Without it, she remained half hidden, but she enjoyed her new status as one of the big ones.  Teaching her useful chores should now be on my list.

The birthday was jam-packed with presents, activities and merriment.  It started early when the boy decided the night was over and demanded his milk.  The girl was the only one left sleeping, but she got up soon enough to discover song's sung in her honor and a living-room floor full of boxes wrapped in pink paper.  She had her own milk and then tore through the paper with delight.

Flucha had prepared and organized everything.  Not every detail but all aspects of the day – from the food over the activities and the presents to the cake.  She had also planned the party that will gather four of the girl's friends with their siblings and parents and the extended family of a neighbor in our backyard.  To say that my contribution had been humble is a bit of an understatement.  I had brought two little presents when I visited my mom the other day and assigned another one to my dad.  And yet I expected the day to follow a pattern I'm familiar with.

Here's what I remember about birthdays from when I was young:  I couldn't sleep the night before and got up early to discover the presents.  They were humble back then but made me happy.  I would leave them on the small sideboard where they had been waiting for me and come back periodically – and certainly the next few mornings – to make sure they were still there.

At breakfast there was always a cake with candles.  We didn't sing.  I blew the candles and we ate the first pieces of the cake before finishing the rest off in the afternoon with grandma.  I don't remember any big activities or trips taken on the occasion of my birthdays.  They were largely normal days.

Things are different now, more opulent, with countless elements coming together to build a beautiful whole.  Beholding these changes – driven by time and culture and abetted by my passivity – I suffer pangs of loss and disappointment and cannot always be as elated as I should be about my daughter's birthday.  This frustrates Flucha and me in almost equal measure.

There are a few obvious answers to questioning the elements of my daughter's birthday.  I had never realized this with such clarity up until now, sitting in the quiet of a half-empty living room, the entire family asleep with complete exhaustion.  It's really not difficult and the key to happiness in other aspects of my life as well.

Flucha organized everything, prepared everything, took charge and took care.  Without saying much, I judged her as overdoing it and absolved myself of involvement – trying to compensate for her high energy with apathy.  We didn't discuss the day except in the broadest terms.  Most presents were as much a surprise to me as they were to the girl.

There's a better way, and it's really quite simple:  We need to talk about what we do together.  We do too little of that, and it's mostly because of me.  I'm not much of a communicator, especially of things I don't like or consider unwise.  I hold back too long and often burst out aggressively or negatively.  How Flucha and I have remained together for more than ten years is a mystery.

I don't take the time for considered and constructive discussions, but that's really what is needed.  I need to speak about my wishes and tastes, not with an eye on imposing my will or rejecting Flucha's ideas but with the aim to understand her reasons for preferring one thing or another and make her understand mine.

The boy's second birthday is coming up in just about four weeks.  I've got something to work on until then.

the new situation

We've got the flat.  Everything went smoothly.  A week after applying, we got the yes.  I'm still not convinced it's the right flat for us, but it's ok, we're going to survive, and the school's really close to it, a short walk away.

Getting rid of the old flat was painless.  In Switzerland, leases are taken seriously.  You rent because you want to live somewhere.  You can make long-term plans based on this, as can the landlord.  When I lived in London, one month's notice sufficed.  Here you can move out only twice a year.  Choose any date beside the end of March and the end of September, and you're liable to pay for the remaining months.

We didn't want to wait until September.  Kindergarten starts in August, and it would be good to get the move done before we fly off on vacation in July.  We gave notice for the end of June, leaving us with three months' rent to be paid for nothing.

The way around wasting all this money is finding someone to take over the lease.  Given the tight rental market, which we experienced ourselves over the last year or two, this should be easy.  I had mostly been searching on homegate.ch, and I figured I'd advertise there as well.  This idea seemed less sensible when I found about the listing fees.  At around 180 Francs, I didn't even bother to find out how many photos were included.  There had to be a better way.

tutti.ch offers online classifieds that let you find anything but not search very specifically.  Size of the apartment, price tag and number of rooms, that's for you to glean from a long list of hits matching your town of interest.  The large majority of ads are probably obsolete, as are the two I put on (one in English, another in German), but after I'd listed them I got a call the same night and a viewing the next evening.  There was only ever this one call.  It was enough for a family very similar to ours to secure a flat for July.

We have since registered the girl for kindergarten and identified daycare options for the boy.  An after-school program for the girl is a bit more of a challenge.  Baden doesn't combine this with kindergarten, for whatever bizarre reason.  There's a central daycare for all children with working parents, in the old town, close to but not right next to some of the kindergartens.  Children will be walked between daycare and kindergarten, at least at the beginning.  But how much will they be taken care of?  When we visited the place today, it looked slightly abandoned, with most children out and about, out on their own, it seemed.

The apartment situation might be sorted out, but daycare is a bit unsettling.  I'm far from freaking out, though.  Other parents are facing similar challenges, and many more will have gone through and survived this situation over the years.  There will be an obvious way, and we will find out.

kindergarten

Hard to believe that the girl is getting ready to go to kindergarten.  Hard to believe because it wasn't all that long that she was a tiny screaming bundle of a few pounds that we didn't have the faintest idea what to do with.  All that long?  It's actually been more than three and a half years.

In Switzerland, school is mandatory from age four.  This sounds harsher than it is.  What would a four-year-old do in a school?  Turns out kindergarten is part of the school system, and its attendance is mandatory from age four.  This is something I can deal with.  To help me prepare for the rest, I attended an information event organized by the municipal school system last night.

Before a slide highlighted students from 76 nations (across all grades) who speak 32 languages, the audience was warned of potentially distracting noises because of simultaneous translation of everything that was being said.  On the walls of the hall were big banners for all languages with translators present: Serbo-croat, Portuguese, Albanian, Tamil, Italian and Turkish.  Native speakers of these languages were invited to gather underneath their banners to get information in their language.  Throughout the presentations, there was a constant polyphonous whispering at the periphery, but it was really only noticeable when one was really listening for it.

This level of diversity could be a big benefit for children.  Languages and cultures of a round-the-world trip without having to leave the classroom.  The drawback is that not all immigrants came for high-paying jobs.  Some are refugees, some are just scraping by.  Those who only speak their native language face additional challenges.  Our town has one of the highest ratio of welfare recipients in the canton.  A tinderbox of dissatisfaction and anger?  Maybe it's just another aspect of diversity that we in our privileged lives should be thankful for.

We're definitely thankful that we won't have to pay for childcare anymore, at least for the girl.  Kindergarten is free.  But it's not all golden.  Kindergarten only covers the mornings.  What to do with the afternoons?  Both of us work.  Turns out select kindergartens, among them the one closest to our home, offer after-school programs.  They aren't free, but they feed the kids and keep them entertained.

Like any school, kindergarten has school holidays, an ungodly amount to a working parent.  Good thing the after-school activities are extended to optional full-day activities during holidays.  I don't know how prices are adjusted, but at least we don't need to take 12 weeks off work every year.  Only two weeks in summer remain when everything is closed.  This is exactly as it is now, and largely compatible with our routine of jetting off to Argentina for a few weeks on Christmas.

One speaker mentioned a few of the things children should know when they enter kindergarten.  Go to the toilet, brush teeth, use scissors, dress and undress.  These are not challenges for the girl.  All would be good were it not for an overambitious dead.  By the time she'll set foot inside kindergarten for the first time, the girl better know how to read and write.  Seven months to go!

hands or feet

This afternoon I sent my daughter off into a dilemma unwittingly.  We were having tea out in the garden, one of the last days of summer if the forecast was to be believed.  The winds were already howling fall.

As a treat on a Sunday, the girl got a chocolate egg, a Kinder Surprise.  The surprise was less the egg itself than who had bought it.  I don't normally do this.  For decadence such as sweets and cartoons, I rely on Flucha.  Normally.

This time, I had bought the eggs.  A generous pack of four advertised a guaranteed two collectible figurines, two out of a total of ten urbanized smurfs (or is it smurves?) going about their business in town.  My days of collecting are long over (and weren't overly long to begin with), but one of the smurfs on the picture did X-rays, and I wanted this for my desk.

The girl unwrapped her egg eagerly and started eating the chocolate halves. "Open, please", she said, handing me the yellow ovoid container previously hidden inside.  I shook it.  It rattled.  Not a smurf.

Except it was.  It was a smurf in three parts, to be assembled like a sofa from IKEA and with similarly dubious resilience.  Back in the days, all Kinder figurines were monolithic and from much heavier material.  Plastic, sure, but solid.  People used to collect them because they were cute and exuded durability.  What I unpacked was utterly worthless.

The girl wasn't interested in it either.  She had finished her chocolate and took off to wash her hands.  "Shoes off before you go inside", I hollered after her.  Her head appeared from around the corner, then her body.  She pointed at her sandals, then held her hands up in the air.  What to do?

Her thinking was flawless.  To go inside, she had to take off her sandals, but to take off her sandals, she needed clean hands.  To wash her hands, she needed to go inside, and thus she was stuck – until, seconds later, I rescued her.

I undid her sandals and sent her in, mighty proud that she had seen the dilemma and acted accordingly.  That almost called for another egg.

Swiss day

Switzerland is an easy country to dream about.  Beautiful mountains, economic prosperity, low crime, and a benign climate.  And don't forget the chocolate.  Who wouldn't want to live there?

The dream of Switzerland simmered inside me for years.  It didn't exactly burn hot because I always like where I lived, be it Salt Lake City, Grenoble or London, but Switzerland was always there as an option.  Something that would be great if it worked out.

Switzerland is a hard country to get used to.  It's so quiet it's almost boring, even the big cities are villages, the rules can feel stifling, and the cost of living is absurd.  Former farming villages understand urban design as ladling up concrete until there's nothing else left.  Why would anyone choose to live there?

I've been here for three years and a half.  The observations above still ring true, both the positive and the negative ones.  But I notice that the positive aspects are slowly gaining the upper hand.

To what I mentioned in the first paragraph I can now add a few more upsides.  Public transport is nationally coordinated down to the last bus up a lonely mountain road and always on time.  Water is potable unless the opposite is indicated, including lakes and rivers.  Prices look ridiculous only when converted into other currencies.

Today is Swiss National Day, which celebrates the founding of the Confederation.  In 1291, representatives from three adjoining areas got together by Lake Lucerne to swear they would be there for each other and kick any invaders' dirty butts.  The oath has not only held but also attracted a couple dozen surrounding territories to join, making the Swiss Confederation what it is today.

We went to Zurich today, not to participate in any festivities but to escape the heat.  Summer has been scorching for a few weeks now, with temperatures in the 90s and no rain to speak of.  Going to the city might not seem the smartest escape, but Zurich's got the lake.

Lake Zurich connects the city with the mountains, creates a steady breeze and offers limitless diversions.  There are parks, playgrounds, cafés, bars and ice cream stands, but they all pale relative the to the main attraction.  In summer, people come to the lake to jump in and swim.

We went to a lido a bit up the eastern shore.  The grass was green and soft, our spot in the shade, and the city all around us.  The water was warm and clear, though I didn't drink it, and the slide provided what felt like hours of entertainment for the girl.  Even the boy slid down a few times.  When everyone was exhausted, we took a boat back to the station for the train ride home.  Switzerland is a good country to live in.

spilled milk

Shortly before my alarm went off at 6:30 this morning, Tapas puked on our bed.  She had just finished her morning milk and chucked everything back out in a gush.  At a time when, in a previous life, I wouldn't even have opened an eye, I rolled out of bed, grabbed the mop from the bathroom and cleaned the mess off the floor.

As always, I had it easy.  Flucha kept sitting in bed, petrified.  She was covered in all the puke that hadn't made it to the floor for me to clean.  The ratio was about 50:50, and it wasn't a pretty sight.  Tapas also had some splashes of white on her body and face.  What a way to start the day.

It was in fact the way the day before had ended.  Tapas had had her evening milk and we were fooling around a bit.  I held her on my shoulder when I heard something that my mind couldn't interpret but my subconscious was fast enough to react to.  The ominous retching sound, my pushing my daughter back by just enough, and the spill of warm milk happened almost at the same time.  When I turned, there was a white puddle on the chair.  My t-shirt was unharmed.

A couple of months ago I had got a call from an insurance agent.  The guy had sold us renters' insurance and now wanted to know if we'd like to augment coverage for our belongings.  We had opted for the basic package.  In light of our growing family, this seemed a bit modest to him.  "You must have bought quite a bit since we last spoke," he said.

I almost laughed in his face.  "No worries," I told him.  "We're fine with what we have."  We might have bought a bit, but with a toddler and a baby, we had stayed away from anything precious and picked our furniture to be essentially disposable.  Stains, chips and cracks don't scare us.  There's nothing of value that might break.

That's why I wasn't concerned about the chair.  If it were ruined, I'd simply get a new one, and maybe a few more to fill the space around our dining table in its extended configuration.  We were running embarrassingly short during a recent family visit.

The chair wasn't ruined, though.  We took it out to the garden, hosed it off, and let it dry overnight.  Not something to do with fancy furniture, but good enough for us.  The chair is back in use now, looking good as new.  With the bed, the story was similar.

Tapas took it easy today.  When I left the house to ride to work, she was huddled up with mommy, clearly shaken from what had happened, weak and a bit frightened.  As the day progressed like any other, with no further disturbances, she let go of the sour memory.  She started eating, playing, running.  By the end of the day, she had fully recovered and was happy to finish a big bottle of milk before going to bed.

kids like

The boy likes

• to walk.  He isn't very good at it.  In fact, he can't keep himself on his little legs.  When he manages to pull himself up to a low-lying sofa or his sister's Bobby car, he stands shakily, unsure of himself but mighty proud, and falls over before too long.  He has banged his head a few times this way.  But when mom or dad hold his hands, his feet make little steps in the general direction indicated by his guide.  There's a grin on his face as if he were on the finishing stretch of a successful marathon.  Dad knows this grin.
• pebbles.  Sit him down among them and he'll take a handful and swallow them one by one unless stopped by a responsible adult.  He has learned that sand is not tasty but pebbles haven't registered yet as something to be left alone.
• throwing things to the ground.  He's very good at it.  Sitting on his high chair, he can turn dinner in front of him into a mess on the floor in seconds.  Maybe that's revenge for the floor hurting his head when he falls over after pulling himself up to the sofa.  Sitting on his high chair outside mealtimes, he throws toys to the ground almost as soon as they are placed in front of him.  Then he cries because he has no toys.
• eating bread.  He east almost anything, including pebbles, but bread is his favorite. It tastes so good that he sometimes forgets to throw it to the ground.  The other day he discovered sweet corn and fell in love with it.  It had the shape and vague appearance of the pebbles outside but he was allowed to put it in his mouth.  What a blast!
• to laugh.  As a baby, his sister was grumpy like a caricature.  He laughs at anything, and sometimes cracks up as if watching an Adam Sandler movie for the first time.  His laughter is contagious, and he cheers up the family, even when they're busy cleaning the floor around his high chair.
• his sister.  He often stares at her with something between admiration and adoration.  Whatever she does, he likes to join.  Whatever she builds, from Duplos or wooden blocks, he likes to dismantle.  The girl doesn't like that.

The girl likes

• to read books.  At less then three years, she cannot yet read.  She recognizes a few letters and, on a good day, her name, but it's not enough for literature.  She has dad read picture books to her, and no day's a good day without a book read to her.  When she wants something really bad that it's not exactly the time for, offering to read a book always solves the impasse.
• to climb up things.  This can be contraptions on the playground or trees and rocks in the woods.  She's very good about not climbing up furniture and has fallen hard on the playground only once.
• animals.  It doesn't matter whether it's a snail outside the window or a wolf in the animal park.  They're all fascinating.  Stories about animals are her favorite read.  When she's big, she wants to be a veterinarian.
• to be a mom.  She takes her baby doll and changes the diaper, wiping the plastic butt clean and all.  She gives the baby doll the bottle and sometimes her non-existing breast, just as she has seen mom do it with her brother.  She puts baby doll asleep on a little pram, pulling a blanket over it to keep out the light.  Dad is worried about gender imprinting, but she just doesn't get the same kick out of Duplos or her wooden-track railroad.  Maybe she wants to become a midwife.
• it outside.  She's nimble on her push cycle and likes to walk through town to the grocery store.  All hikes into the hills have been successes so far.
• her brother.  She feeds him pieces of sweet corn or bread and pushes him around on her Bobby car, mom running alongside with her hands spread to soften the inevitable fall.  She also yanks her toys from him when he plays with them and wants to play with his.  The boy doesn't like this.

The boy and the girl are the best friends in the world.

one German last name

A few months ago I watched a hilarious Spanish movie called Ocho apellidos vascos, which centered on the concept of Basqueness.  To count as Basque, one needs to have the eight Basque last names of the movie's title in the family, i.e. all eight of one's great-grandparents need to have been Basque.  To have any sort of future with his Basque obsession, the Andalucian protagonist needs to come up with a list of eight Basque names and use them consistently.  Otherwise, grumpy dad will kick his ass back south.

As lighthearted at the movie was, there's quite a bit of darkness in the degree of racial purity claimed to be required for acceptance into Basque society.  It's a brutal system, hostile and exclusive.  Even the Nazis weren't quite that strict.  To count as Aryan, none of one's grandparents must have been Jewish, but no one asked what the great-grandparents had been up to.

The Swiss establish belonging differently.  Here, everyone has a place of origin.  This is not where the person was born, grew up or currently lives.  For most Swiss, it is the town where their family originates, frequently a hamlet up in the mountains and possibly a place they have never seen.  The place of origin is required on many official forms and might come up in conversations when people try to appraise each other.

When I first heard about the concept of origin, I naively thought it would provide an easy way of nationalistically separating the wheat from the chaff.  No matter how many rules you follow and how much on time you are, you can't be truly Swiss if your place of origin is Pristina, I thought, but it turns out that naturalized immigrants don't have their foreign birthplace as their origin.

This is explained by the curious three-tired nature of Swiss citizenship.  In Switzerland, you're first and foremost a citizen of your place of origin.  This must be an ancient tradition.  Your first loyalty was with your village.  This local citizenship gives you the right to further citizenship of canton and Confederation.

For the Swiss, this is how it's always been and not worth a second though.  For foreigners wanting to become Swiss, there are some interesting consequences.  First, you don't submit your application to a federal agency.  Your current hometown, the place where you've spent the last few years, handles the process.  Second, it's not only formal criteria that qualify you for citizenship but also the consideration of your future fellow citizens.  They will be asked to come forth and voice any objections they might have.  Third, the issuing town will become your place of origin if you're application is successful.

When we went to the local registrar's office the other day, questions of citizenship and place of origin where not on our minds.  Instead, to come back to the beginning of this post, it was the last name of our son.  Despite our best efforts at torpedoing the system, the Swiss administration had done things right.  Not being married, the mother is the only point of reference.  Our son carried Flucha's last name.

This put him at odds with his sister and presented us with a wrong in need of correction.  It wasn't difficult.  A pile of documents from three countries and an hour at the registrar's office sufficed to establish my paternity and gave our son a German last name, at least as far as the Swiss were concerned.

At the German consulate, where we had gone this week to claim citizenship and apply for the best passport for traveling, a different story emerged.  The Swiss might have done things properly and filed all documents in the right place, but no one else cares.  I save you some of the rather absurd details but over the course of an hour, our son went back to carrying his original last name, only to revert to the right one a few minutes later.  He's not even two months old, but he's had four official identities already.  And – fingers crossed that it stays that way – he has one German last name.

growing up

They say you grow up, from one moment to the next, when your first baby arrives.  I don't know if that was true for me.  In my mind at least, I haven't changed a bit.  There's a now child to take care of and a family to support, but I can see myself blasting the foothills behind campus in Salt Lake, riding up the cols around Grenoble or floating around London on each day's new whim.  I don't do these things because I don't have time for them but they're still there.  You might say other things have become more important, and if that's what's growing up is, then maybe I've grown up after all.  But this post is not about me.

This post is about the growing up, from one moment to the next, someone else had to do when my second baby arrived.  Our son was born on Friday, and on the face of it, it should have been routine, at least for me.  Things went pretty much as with the first one, except for my cluelessness.  Five days later, mother and child are home and we're the same happy family, just bigger.

Two things took me by surprise, though, and they're related.  The first is the size of the baby.  He's tiny, despite weighing in at a good 800 g more than his sister when she was born.  But I've got so used to holding my first baby that holding the second one was positively shocking.  He seemed to weigh nothing by comparison.

The second surprise is the other side of the same coin.  All of a sudden, my daughter has grown in one big leap.  She used to be the fragile little creature who I held, all puzzled and full of doubt, in the hospital only minutes after she was born.  She cried and I had no idea what to do.  Over the next two years, she grew and developed and started performing all kinds of tricks, but she remained our baby.

By comparison with her little brother, she's suddenly big, her body heavy and her legs strong.  It's four years until she goes to school, but how much more will she mature?  She's a real kid already.  Despite looking exactly the same as one week ago, she's changed beyond recognition – grown up if you will.

In the next few days we'll see how she handles the situation.  For us it's easy.  We saw it coming and see, however vaguely, where it's going, but she has no clue and no control.  All she knows is that there's a fourth member to the family and she's not the undisputed number one anymore.  Mommy is dividing her attention and will frequently have to say no.

So far Tapas is handling it well, but one can tell that she's struggling.  At home, she kisses her brother gently and behaves in a rather grown-up way, but all her emotions escalate dramatically.  When I pick her up from childcare, she clings to me neck in desperate need of love – never mind that she bounces there in the mornings as if to join the town's biggest party.  Growing up isn't easy.

two years

With my daughter nearing her second birthday, I want to take the opportunity to contemplate her development and take some notes.  Things happen so quickly, there's amazing progress, unbelievable and beautiful, and a few weeks later all these first steps have been taken a hundred times, become routine and don't merit a second thought.

Tapas started walking when she was thirteen months old.  This was unsurprising.  Three months earlier, on one of our many trips to IKEA, she had grabbed a little plastic stool and, pushing it around, started exploring the store.  The joy in her eyes that betrayed excitement about being able to move around by herself was quite a sight, not something I would have expected of a child that wasn't even one year old.

Physically, Tapas is where she belongs.  She slides the slides without fear, climbs stairs up and down, swings on the swing despite a recent fall that can be blamed almost entirely on her dad, takes little jumps, steers a tricycle with skill despite not being able to pedal because her legs are too short, and runs every which way with little high-frequency steps.  This is what I might have thought a toddler would be like, had I ever bothered to think about this.

What would have never come to my mind is the mental skills toddlers develop early on.  Tapas is bilingual at least.  I speak to her in German, while Flucha does Spanish.  We talk to each other in English but try not to address Tapas in this language.  There's enough confusion already, especially since childcare adds another dimension in being a Swiss-German environment. Tapas called food "fein" the other day.  This is not a word I use.  It's German, but it came straight from childcare.

So the child is challenged.  Books in the library and scientific studies tell me that this challenge will eventually be overcome and the experience leave a positive mark in terms of heightened cognitive skills later in life, but early in life it's a burden likely to cause a delayed development a linguistic skills.  Whether this delay is outside normal child-to-child variations is another question.

If Tapas is delayed, it's not in a way that would cause me any worry.  In contrast, I'm frequently stunned and left speechless by what she has already figured out.  She has figured out, for example, that there are two languages, and that mommy and daddy speak differently.  Most of the time, as long as she knows the word, she will address either of us in the correct language.  She can also do translations.  Ask her in Spanish what the German word for hat is, and she will tell you.  This is nearly automatic for the translations she's done before.  If she encounters a new word, she tilts her head sideways and stares blankly in the distance.  After a bit of a think – for this is what she's having – she often comes up with the right translation, without having to consult a dictionary.

This thinking is something I still find astonishing.  Toddlers aren't supposed to be thinkers.  But when you ask her to find a particular animal in a picture book, she will scan the tiny page very carefully and then purposefully point out the requested critter.  After she's done this a few times, she knows where all the animals are and points almost without looking.

Her memory shines in other ways, too.  After she's practiced a few times, she doesn't solve puzzles where wooden shapes (e.g. animals) fit into cutouts by matching the shape to the cutout but by remembering where each animal goes.  Before picking up a shape, she will point at all the cutouts and identify the animal that goes there.  I sit there baffled, watching in surprise, asking myself, how does she know.

Childcare is a source of great joy to Tapas.  She loves to go there.  Are we bad parents?  Is it horrible at home?  I don't think so.  But she's thrilled about childcare and tells us every night before going to bed what she will do there the next day.  The most unexpected part to me is that what gets her going most are two children there.  When she thinks of them and says their names, her eyes light up.  She likes playing with them.  They have developed a bond – and yet they're not even two years old.  There's no way they'll remember when they're older.

In studies and books I've read that children cannot distinguish between reality and fiction or simulation.  This is utter nonsense.  Tapas got a wooden kitchen for Christmas.  This appeared in the living room of our flat when we got back from Argentina.  In Argentina, it was summer and, touching the exposed surfaces of playground toys, she had learned to concept and (thanks maybe to an overprotective father) German word for hot.  Hot was the first adjective she learned, the first property of things and the first abstract idea whose implications she grasped.

On the play-kitchen are two buttons to light red diods underneath the hot plates, making them look like ceramic cooking surfaces.  She describes them as hot when they're clearly not.  When playing with her kitchen, she associates hot not with temperature but with the cooking surface, even if it's not a real one, and she will point out to us the dangers of touching it.

Or take her baby doll.  Over time, this acquired one of her diapers, and now from time to time the baby makes kaka.  When it has, Flucha or I take the baby's clothes off.  Tapas then takes the diaper off and cleans it and the baby's ass with her hand.  Then she goes to the bathroom to pull one (!) sheet from the roll of toilet paper and cleans her hand, throwing the paper in the toilet when she's done.  The complexity!  The mixing of the imagined and the real!  I could watch for hours.

I could also write for hours about this, and yet I sit down all too infrequently.  And so most little details will fade into oblivion in a process called aging, which starts the day we are born.

world traveller

Unless you have the time to take the steamer across the Atlantic, going to Argentina involves a 14-hour plane ride – and unless you can afford business class, this promises to be painful.  In my first year at Dectris, I’ve done a few long flights – 12 hours to San Francisco and 12 hours to Hong Kong – to little detriment, and I felt ready for the challenge this year's Christmas vacation presented, but this story isn't about me.  I would be traveling with Flucha and our daughter, and keeping a six-month-old content over that time isn't easy even at home with room to play, a city to take a walk, and a comfy bed to sleep.  The prospect filled me with considerable trepidation.

To make this 24-hour-long story – the flight was supplemented with a trip to the airport, a hop to London, a short layover and a drive from the airport into the city – short, I needn’t have worried.  The little one turned out to be a natural traveler, not only accepting everything that was thrown at her throughout the journey, but also quite visibly enjoying it.  She slept a lot on the plane – with fewer interruptions than at home – and when she didn’t, she played, checked out fellow passengers and her surroundings, and destroyed with great pleasure every inflight magazine in reach.

We hadn’t made it easy for her.  Lufthansa serves the only direct direction connection between Frankfurt and Buenos Aires, and initially we had booked our tickets with them.  It could have been simple and comfortable, but Lufthansa is far from what it used to be.  The recurring pilot strikes and walkouts by cabin staff over the last few years are a reflection of a deeper malaise.  I'm in no position to diagnose problems, but I can see the symptoms.  Customer service and with it the customer experience has deteriorated dramatically and made the airline almost unrecognizable.

The first time I noticed this was when I left London last February.  I had organized my move in the tightest way possible, shipping a minimum of boxes, giving a way lots, and carrying the bare essentials.  These essentials were stowed in two large suitcases, and I had to pay dearly for having Lufthansa carry the second one.  Hard as it is to believe, I would have paid less, had I checked luggage with Ryanair.

Flucha and I booked our flights separately but at the same time.  Minutes later we called Lufthansa to reserve the special seats set aside for those traveling with infants.  These seats exist, the minion on the phone reassured us, but they can only be booked closer to the departure date and are only available for the person traveling with the infant.  Tapas was on Flucha's ticket.  I would have to pay to sit somewhere close, but there was no guarantee.  By the time we could book the family seat, all surrounding seats might already have been picked up by other travelers.

I was getting increasingly frustrated with the process that dragged out much longer than the previous paragraph indicates and was entirely futile.  When Flucha's booking was rejected because she didn't authorize the payment quickly enough, we took this as a sign.  We dumped Lufthansa and booked on British Airways instead.  Even with the cancelation fee added to it, the new ticket was cheaper than the original.  The drawback was the layover in London, which would increase travel time by a good four hours and complicate things quite a bit.  On the upside, Flucha was immediately assigned a seat with a baby bassinet and I was put right next to her.

Months passed and finally, this afternoon, we made our way to the airport.  We traveled with loads of luggage and retrospectively, this turned out to be the biggest problem.  But once everything was checked, our vacation started – even if it was restricted to a couple of comfortable chairs in the departure area at first.  We had got to the airport a good three hours early.

At the security circus we got treated to a Christmas special for no extra charge.  In Europe, liquids in carry-on luggage are allowed only in volumes of up to 100 ml, and you're only allowed to take up to five containers.  In Frankfurt, we got on the plane with a 1.5 liter bottle that didn't raise concerns.  "It's for the baby", we said, and all was good.

This didn't fly at Heathrow.  "Baby bottles only", the elderly lady at the security check said firmly.  We had plenty of them, but they were all empty.  "Can I just pour the water in, and we're good?" I asked.  "You didn't hear it from me", she responded, and a few minutes later we took the same amount of the same water through security and onto the plane.  It's evidently the now-empty plastic bottle that was the problem.  Thanks for making air travel safe.

The flights were uneventful.  Tapas was happy in the bassinet.  When she didn't sleep, she amused those around us with her good spirits.  At some point a flight attendant stopped by with a 'Future pilot' sticker, and I almost believed her.  Arrived in Buenos Aires, liberated from the jacket and trousers that winter cruelly forces on her, Tapas kicked her legs in the hot air in evident joy.  We knew then that she would enjoy the stay in Argentina even more than the flight there.  Merry Christmas.

overdue

The heat has subsided, the sun is low in the sky.  A gentle breeze is waving in from the balcony.  I turn off the stereo, put the book aside, close the AirBook, then measure the length of the silent room with pointless steps.  The room hasn't changed much.  The in-laws are sitting downstairs, staying in contact with home while nothing is happening here.  Flucha's in a car somewhere, driving to the store for groceries and drinks, three days overdue.  My beer is getting warm.

The months leading up to this weekend were eventful at work and quiet otherwise.  Biology took its course without drama or complications, shaping up a belly where there was none before and rounding it into a fine sphere of just the right size.  Periodic poking from inside gives evidence of new life – which does not want to materialize.

I've lived on the edge these last few weeks, a bag with all necessities with me at all times, always ready to leave at a phone call or text.  There was little rest, but the weekly journeys home and rare work-related travels occurred at a level of peace I had not known before.  I tend to get pangs of alarm when the train starts moving or I hop onto a bus.  Do I have my ticket, my wallet, passport, keys?  With everything in place in the bag, traveling was relaxed and joyful.

Last Friday, I returned to Heidelberg with the tranquility of the seasoned traveler.  There was no rush, no phone call to precipitate panic, not even the need to leave work early, and my travel wallet held all the necessary documents.  I leaned back on the train, had a beer and a soup, and read a few sections of an abandoned newspaper until the journey was over.  I arrived as always, and everything was as always.

The weekend that followed, a.k.a. due date and day plus one, we spent hiking the Odenwald – as much as that's possible with a party that includes two retirees and a woman ready to pop.  An hour on the Philosophers' Way and a hike down from Königstuhl are more than what old wives will tell you brings about labor, but Flucha, her belly bopping sideways, enjoyed the action and didn't slow down once.

The doctor didn't have anything helpful to say this morning.  Things are going all right, but they're not going anywhere, or at least not anywhere soon.  We were given a grace period of a week before more drastic action is considered.  I'm wondering what to do now.  I could go back to work to save my vacation days, at the cost of fretting so much that I couldn't work and risking a mad dash back to Heidelberg, possibly missing the delivery.  Or I stay here and fret without work to distract me until the inevitable happens.  Whenever it happens.

neighbors

The other day in the stairwell, the neighbor approached me with turmoil in her eyes.  "Is your girlfriend pregnant?" she asked.  "Yes", I said, climbing the stairs past her.  What a weird question, I thought.  It's only two weeks to go and there's no way to hide it.  But the neighbor wasn't done.  "Please keep it quiet in the evenings", she said.  "I need to get up early.  I work a lot."

What an odd request.  It's not like we're throwing a party.  But the neighbor is one for odd requests.  Sometime I think she's got mental issues, and if she doesn't take her pills, all sorts of weirdness spill out of her.  She's rung our bell and knocked the door in the middle of the night as if the house were on fire, while we were one floor higher, quietly watching TV.  When I answered the door, she'd repaired to her flat.  She gets worked up about flushed toilets and the extractor fan in our bathroom.  We try to keep things to a minimum to avoid unnecessarily bothering her, but some things need to be done.  Loud crying, for example, needs to be done when you're a baby.

I turned around and looked the neighbor in the eyes.  "Have you made plans yet?" I asked.  "It's going to be a nightmare, unbearable, World War III."  This last one quoted her from an earlier discussion.  "Your peace is gone, I'm afraid.  The screaming will pierce your ears.  You can forget about sleep for months."  Her look turned frantic; she gaped at me.  "I'm lucky I don't live here", I continued.  "You'd better find someplace else too."

The conversation could have transpired just like this.  She's the kind of person that kills all pity and empathy in me.  But she's also an entirely different kind of person.

The other day, when Flucha was ankle-deep in disaster after the washing machine flooded the basement with black suds, she came down with rags and a bucket to help, on her own volition, concerned and friendly like the perfect neighbor.  The baby wasn't mentioned.

race

Among the many expenses that I would have considered absurd half a year ago but which have now started to take chunks out of my monthly budget, a car would be by far the biggest.  It hasn't happened yet.  I consider privately owned cars a bit of an anachronism, something like a relic from the last century.  It is hard to see how they contribute to efficient or even pleasant travel these days.  I have a bicycle to get to work, buses around town, a car rented by the hour for quick dashes, longer rentals for road trips, the train for middle distances, and the plane to see the world.  This list is too long already; where would my own car fit into this?

The reason I'm considering the purchase at all is the same that drives all the other unexpected purchases.  The reason doesn't yet exist in this world, but its or rather her, to let the cat out of the bag, imminent arrival is getting Flucha and me into shopping like never before.  The need for clothes, furniture, tools and care products has taken me to websites whose existence I didn't know of this time last year.  And what's up with pink?

The car is not exactly a need, but because I work in Switzerland and Flucha lives and works in Germany, there will be a moment in the next three months when I'll want to be in Heidelberg double-quick.  I could take the train, which I do every weekend, but last weekend's experience had made me reconsider my smugness about cars.

On Friday, my train to Basel ground to a halt in a village of no import.  The announcement of a passenger incident promised no good.  The local train out of the adjacent platform had been canceled.  Another train pulled into the station ten minutes later, but it only took us to the next town, Rheinfelden, famous for its brewery, and then stopped.  Railway traffic had been suspended between Rheinfelden and Basel.

Outside the station, yellow buses were waiting to take us to Basel, but that was not an option for me.  The journey would have taken too long for me to make my connection.  Luckily, I overheard a woman in the same predicament, on her way to Germany like me.  She had the same idea that had come to me – go to the other Basel station and gain ten minutes in the process.  We shared a taxi whose morose driver promised nothing but drove like a champion, insisting throughout that we wouldn't make it.  A good many Swiss Francs later, I stood on the platform a few seconds before the train rolled in.

This being Switzerland, such a disturbance must be a rare exception, I thought.  But when I arrived in Basel on my way back from Heidelberg on Sunday, I found that the train to Baden was canceled, with no reason given.  A rail replacement bus was advertised, but it didn't go all the way.  "What's wrong with this country?", I wanted to ask the man in the information kiosk, but he was just doing his job and I settled for "How can I get to Baden or Brugg?" instead.

We spent precious time discussing whether I needed to go to Baden or to Brugg before he put my final destination, a village halfway between the two, into his computer and printed an alternative connection for me.  With a "Good luck!" that was as full of encouragement as it was of doubt, he sent me off to the ticket machine and on the race to the platform.  When the train left the station three minutes later, I was on it.  Nevertheless, to the question of how I'll get to the hospital when new life emerges, I must now also add whether I'd like to avoid weekly travel dramas.  Could a car be the answer?

I haven't thought about cars in years.  But, and this is the main motivation for this post, when I flew to Hannover last week to show my new employer’s logo at a conference in Göttingen, a rental car was waiting for me at the airport to take me there.  The car was brand-new, with only 10 kilometers on the clock.  Another only was the number of cylinders.  There were only three.

Three-cylinder vehicles have become popular in Europe as a way to achieve legally mandated fuel economy goals.  It’s a valid strategy; the fuel consumption numbers that emerge from standardized tests are impressive.  Still, these cars achieve the uneconomically high speeds that are only permitted in Germany.  On motorways, the consumer feels no downside.  In cities, however, the story is quite different.

Off the stoplight, the three cylinders propelled our Citroën C3 forward with the desperate intensity and high-pitch noise of a Formula 1-homologated lawn mower.  More than once, we inadvertently caused terminal panic in people crossing the street far ahead of us.  Surveying the situation from the safety of the other side, their look changed to one of utter incomprehension when failing to square the vicious noise with our speed, which was perfectly compatible with safe conduct in a pedestrianized urban environment.

It was fun to drive that car, but only in a momentary way.  Later I will come to realize that having a car sit around in the driveway while I cycle to work is rather wasteful.  I will also come to realize that I don’t want to have to drive for three hours at the end of an exhausting week at work.  The train is so much nicer, no matter what.  And when Flucha does the Kate halfway through June, I just have to cross my fingers and hope I’ll make it on time to see the head of the heir appear.