Rudolph and friends
trent.rockwood January 5th, 2010
The holiday season is over, and Alexa got both to celebrate Christmas and her birthday just two days later. There were so many presents she was overwhelmed for a few days and timidly went around not knowing which ones to play with. A few have become daily favorites, such as her doll house, candyland, and a rudolph nose, and the rest are already sitting on shelves collecting dust. You never can tell. The birthday cake to the left is a recreation of the severed feet of the wicked witch of the east, in case you couldn’t tell.
For the past few months she would dress as Dorothy from the wizard of oz, and make me re-enact the entire movie every night after I got home from work, with her ruby slippers and blue dress (the best part is when she says “there’s opus like home” three times and taps her shoes), but then at the family christmas gathering at Aunt Michelle’s she got a rudolph nose from Kari and has insisted on being Rudolph the red nosed reindeer every day. Now we re-enact that story (my favorite part is when she sings “I am not just a misfits, ahsi nama ba misfits!”), and then once it’s bedtime she has these bunny pajamas that she insists on wearing, no matter how dirty they are, and hops around eating carrots.
She gets so into her characters that the other day I found her in the bathroom after she had changed out of her pajamas just looking at the wall, and I asked her “what’s wrong?”, and she said “I’m just Alexa, It’s boring, I want to be a bunny again.” She is also now asking “why” to everything we tell her, and learned what “favorite means” - her favorites are; Color: pink, Food: snow, Animal: bunny, Drink: water, Friend: Tenny, Movie: Wizard of Oz. She also enjoys memorizing nursery rhymes and gets angry if you try to give her hints, even if she is way off.
Other activities over the holidays included playing in the snowstorm, building a heated rabbit box, making new shelves, drawing, decorating the house and tree for christmas, sleeping over at grandmas, building frosty the snowman, etc. We still don’t have a TV (it’s been 2.5 months!), so I think that is one reason she has been forced to be more creative.
Pascale is much more fun now that she can entertain herself. She can already walk holding onto the wall and ledges and probably will be walking on her own soon. She loves crawling around and pulling items out of cupboards and drawers, especially paper and onions. We put kleenex boxes in front of her and she takes them out one by one for about a half-hour, and then we stuff them in and she starts again. She is chattering and talking, can say mama and papa, and we think her first word was “toto”, but we’re not sure.
She also got a ball enclosure for christmas that’s like one of those ball rooms at the fair, and she loves to sit in it and hand us all of the balls one by one.
As far as the rest of the family, I started a new job a few weeks ago which is fun. The only problem is an increased commute, from 1/2 hour to over an hour each way. It’s out in Virginia. I may have to buy another car if it becomes too cumbersome. But I get to do a lot less and make a lot more, which seems to be the trend as you move up in the world. Maybe it’s not that I do less, I just do less busy day-to-day work and instead focus on more complex long-term projects. It turns out my MA in information management did help me in the end.
. Hopefully it’s just a phase. The heat and humidity here are oppressive, and the only escape is to either stay inside or soak in a swimming pool. So we’ve been doing both. Lots and lots of swimming. The DC public pools are great, and the MD and VA public pools are even better, so we’ve got a wide variety.
Because Vanessa spends so much time with Pascale, Alexa has come up with her own way of getting back, and that is by purposely annoying Vanessa in whatever way she can. Vanessa will say “quieres una alcachofa? (do you want an artichoke - her favorite treat)” and Alexa will say, “no, quiero una alcachofii!” and won’t accept it until Vanessa says it her way. She has this whole word thing where she says repeats things you say differently and then points at you with squinty eyes and laughs. It’s pure evil. Anything Vanessa tells her to do, she does the opposite, she’ll come right up to her and stomp on her foot or scratch her leg, and when Vanessa asks her why she did it, she’ll just bite her bottom lip and look up at her. But since I have time to spend with her, I’m the hero, and I’m the only one she allows to dress her, make her food, tell her stories, etc.
I got a baby bike seat on the back of my bike and Alexa likes going for rides, especially to the koi pool at the national arboretum where she pokes fish in the eye. Pascale, although only 6 months old, is eating like a pig! She has been grabbing food out of our mouths for a month or so, and now devours solid food with such veracity that we just pretty much feed her what we eat - in smaller pieces. The other day she somehow leaned over into a bowl of tabouli and grabbed two handfuls and stuffed them in her mouth. I think you’re supposed to wait until 7 or so months before solids, but when your kid is already eating bbq ribs and salads, it’s hard to satisfy them with rice cereal and baby food.
We bought some rabbits - pearl and chucky, but Alexa has kind of taken over their house. She likes little tight spaces, one of her favorite things is to squeeze into one of her clothes drawers and then has us close it. Then she just sits there quiet and enjoys the dark drawer. She’s definitely used to DC living space.
She is now at the stage where she likes to say “no” to everything and to do everything “solita” (by herself). Gone is the cute little girl that asks for things politely. She is now the little devil two year old that demands everything by screaming. And when she doesn’t get her way… well, anyone that’s had kids can empathize. She is really into Pinocchio and the Fox and the Hound but mostly likes the part where the scary whale eats pinoccio and his dad and sneezes them out. She also likes “fixing” things with Papa’s tools, especially the “hamaner” which she uses to fix the walls.
(read as a cheap crime novel) Friday evening, 4:00. Vanessa feels a pain in her gut, and knows that this February night ain’t going be like the rest. At 5:00, Trent gets a phone call on his cellular telephone and can feel the angst in her voice as she pleads, “come home now, tonight’s the night!” The books hit the floor, Trent grabs his coat and rolls out the door as fast as the ball bearings on a rolodex.
Trent left Vanessa in the birthing room, a hotel room by any other standard, and in the capable arms of the midwife while he took Alexa down the hall to the children’s play room. Not 10 minutes had passed if it was an hour, when Trent went back to check on Vanessa’s progress, and there he found his new daughter in the quaking arms of it’s mother. After he had left, faster than the cow ate the cabbage Pascale Rockwood had sprung from the loins of her mother while she was otherwise engaged at 7:37pm. All rejoined the mother for a happy reunion and were back at home for a late night supper at 11:30.
I start work at a new job on Tuesday, and though insurance will be nice, I am just as happy to keep working at my current job doing Greek translation - it makes more money and I can do it from home. But I need to get out into the real world eventually and do something that gets me good experience and looks better on my resume. I’ll be doing translation management and working with both Arabic and Greek.
The Christmas season brought many joys, most of all candy and sleep. Alexa’s favorite part of the season was seeing the live nativity scene at the temple which she wanted to visit every day. “juevos?”, and then “baby Jesus?” are the first two things she says every morning. She also likes 3 christmas songs and wants to sing them over and over again in the same order all day and night.
nd one other guy are the only people born in the US, the rest are from either Brazil, Russia, India, or China.
It’s been almost a month of having my family home again and it’s been wonderful. Alexa thinks I’m Mr. Fun and has a hard time wanting to go to sleep at night. We’ve been riding the metro for no particular reason, visiting the zoo, pet shops, and the local pound, malls, bookstores, etc, and then getting home and playing sleeping bag slide, horsey, couch tip, balance tricks, deer hunt, etc. until I’m as tired as she is by the time she goes to sleep (at around 1 or 2am).
I am back at work for a short while at my job doing research in Greek Newspapers at the Library of Congress for a law firm where I get to re-live the heady days of the cold war, with headlines such as “Russia condemns American shorts as ‘inappropriate’, lauds Italy’s Capri’s”, or see ads for the latest Elizabeth Taylor film, or learn about all of the cures for cancer that were discovered in the 50’s and 60’s, etc. What I’ve learned is that things haven’t changed much in the world in 50 years.There was just as much craziness then as there is now.
While Alexa frolics and gambols, I continue to sit here in DC and slave away finding a job. I’ve been to some great interviews over the past few weeks, and more than one company would love to have me, it’s just that the government takes a long time to do things, and they have to wait for approval from them to get things going. Two jobs in particular really look like they are going to come through, but again, it may be a few months before I actually step foot in the door. Until then I am trying to find temporary work that will get us by using my IT skills that I somehow always seem to fall back on. I have the goal of applying to five jobs a day, which equals about 3 interviews a week, which equals about 1 offer a month - I’m hoping. Recently I found a short-term job for one month using my Greek skills with a DC law firm that needs some translation done.
DC is nice and sunny and the minute I stepped off the plane my cough that I’d had ever since I got to Peru disappeared. The winter weather there is dank and damp all the time. After visiting the Reynolds and going to a fair in Waterford, VA, and then watching conference at Kari and Nathan’s I’ve dug my heels in and spent every minute in search of gainful employ. The stat’s after one week are as follows: