travel crib notes (brussels, leuven la neuve)

Currently in Belgium; first Brussels, and now 30km SE from there in Leuven la Neuve. We're here because Daniel is working with another math researcher at the university here. I'm learning about new pedestrianism firsthand in the most walkable/stroller-friendly city I have ever been. So glad someone suggested I get a scooter for Declan on the trip; he's been more than happy to scoot everywhere on his own and talk about how fast he goes without demanding that I carry him everywhere like he did in Naples.

I'm also starting to pick up a coffee with croissant/pastry morning habit. So simple yet sophisticated i.e. non-parenthood-feeling. As I was sipping on a coffee to wash down a bite of Belgium waffles on our train ride to our current place, I even felt young and adventurous again...until Declan said, "I'm tired," and used my lap as his pillow to snore the rest of the ride.

Belgium's been an interesting country to figure out. I'm still unclear on what its official language(s), if any, is/are. (What is Flemish??) Leuven la Neuve is a city founded in late 1960s; its populace made a conscious split from Leuven due to linguistic differences, so it's a lot clearer what people prefer to speak here. (French. Except when I tried to speak more French besides bonjour and désolé...then they either immediately switch to English or look at me uncomprehendingly. Is my accent that bad? Yes, it probably  definitely is.)

Walking around this city makes me want to become formally trained in urban planning and go on to help in designing/re-designing public spaces. Kind of like my interest in home/interior design, but on a community-building, environmentally-friendly scale.

a quick passing thought

Something I noticed since Petra's first birthday party... I wasn't able to take much of any pictures during Petra's party, especially/including the Chinese coming-of-one-year-old ritual that Declan also enacted. This was because, unlike Declan's first birthday, I chose to cook a big meal for everyone, so the majority of the party time was spent prepping and cooking since I did not manage time very well the night before.

But that's not my main observation--which is that at various points, all the moms would come to the kitchen and ask if they could do anything/how they could help. I told them repeatedly to just relax, upon which one of the moms wrung her hands helplessly and said, "I don't know how." Another mom ended up making soup, after having rounded up all the objects for the Chinese ritual.

Cake from Shemo, my favorite Israeli bakery. I also cooked a gluten-free vegan lunch 

to accommodate several people who keep kosher, one person who's vegan, 

and one person who's gluten-intolerant 

Is it that certain personalities--take-charge, type-A personality, strong leadership--lend themselves to be impressive, "natural-born" mothers? Or did these women became that way as the intensity of motherhood, Marine Corps-like, broke them down and re-molded their character?

Since then, I've entertained and/or hosted meals for other people, and once again, the mothers did the bulk of the helping out (Daniel's mom would consistently, much to my Chinese-DIL chagrin, clean up after mealtimes), so there's definitely something about them....

Moms taking a rare break from training up civilized children :P

God bless mothers. And many thanks for surrounding me with so many great ones from whom to learn as a bumbling mom-apprentice (or so I still feel like a lot of times).

memories in present tense

Tonight, Daniel, Declan, Petra, and I tried out a faux pan-Asian restaurant that opened on Moriya Street to mark Petra's first birthday and the day that Declan became a big brother. Petra is currently under the haze of a low-grade fever (day two now) and ate 50% of the food I placed before her while chucking the other half to the restaurant floor. Declan was surprisingly receptive to the food, before being admonished by a waitstaff to stop abusing the bamboo displays.

Looking across Moriya Street from the window by our table, I saw the corner flower shop that I passed by almost every day when we first moved to Haifa. The outdoor flower displays lead to a side street upon which sits the small Supersal makolet that was our source of groceries for the first two months of our life in Israel. It turned out to be the most expensive place to shop for food, and I soon started relying on other places like the Talpiot shuk, the Mega by the Cinemathique, the larger Supersal near Gan HaEm, the yarkan at Paris Square, Nizat Haduvdevan, the pseudo-shuks at Romema and by the front entrance of Superpharm on Friday mornings, the home delivery system of an organic farm... and settling now, for the most part, on Eco Meshek, another organic farm which also does home deliveries--with greater freedom to select produce I would actually eat (no more fennel/anise, thanks).

I've seen Eco Meshek's label on goat milk yogurts at Nizat Haduvdevan (an organic produce/product store that I'd stared at unseeingly for a year, as I waited across the street at the Merkaz Ziv bus stop that served as my transfer point to the Technion...before I finally realized what the cherry sign was and got a membership). I didn't think to visit Eco Meshek's website--posted on all its dairy products--to understand its operations more fully; I'm glad I finally know about its produce side upon the recommendation of another mom. Thankfully she wasn't satisfied with the organic produce box I've been settling with, and kept looking until she tried out this farm.  I appreciated my old farm for several reasons, but this one is definitely even better.

Grocery shopping in Israel is such an exploration, with prices and quality that can vary spectacularly in range. After one and a half years, I finally feel somewhat satisfied with my degree of knowledge on the ins-and-outs of where to get the best price for the best quality of food items. And I also realized after perusing the receipt for this week's Eco Meshek delivery, that I could essentially read and understand the whole list written in Hebrew. What a psychological difference from when it used to take me 45 minutes of excruciating matching and careful notations to decipher every supermarket receipt in order to make sure all the charges were made correctly. It's kind of silly how accomplished I feel at so small an improvement.

Look, Ma -- No hands!

Then, while waiting at a stoplight on our walk home, a friend stuck his head out of his van as traffic flowed past us and yelled, "Hey!" We almost always bump into people we know when Daniel and I walk near our neighborhood with the kids nowadays. And I enjoyed seeing a common quality in Israel as we stopped by Gan Shmuel before returning all the way home--older kids taking great interest and delight in playing with Declan up and down the playground structures. They seemed very disappointed when I said we had to leave, and repeatedly waved goodbye to Declan who was equally sad to go.

All of these things, tonight, made me feel like this place is starting to be my home. These are the things I will remember with nostalgia when we must be uprooted and sent off to elsewhere again.

happy 2014

Daniel's mom and sister traveled from Chicago to visit the family a week ago. We drove south to Jerusalem and observed the crossing over from 2013 to 2014 there in an 800-year-old abode that was built shortly after the Crusaders left and is now a hostel, which I always accidentally type as "brothel" before I remember the two words signify establishments of completely different natures.

Like sleeping in a grotto

The visit to Jerusalem left me more confused than ever about religion and the role of faith, devotion, etc. All I can say with great conviction on the topic of this ancient, greatly contested-over city is: Pray for the peace of Jerusalem. Amen. My two favorite places to visit are still the Garden Tomb and Hezekial's Tunnel. I'd forgotten how painful the tunnel is to walk through via barefoot, and Daniel's mom jokingly said, mid-plod, "You owe me one, Amy!" Make that half-jokingly.

I felt really bad about the way the stairs bit deeply into her soles on the way in and out of the tunnel. Thankfully, it was all sensory pain and no physical damage. Daniel and I wore Declan and Petra respectively in their own Ergo carriers (The "Desert Bloom" Ergo organic I recently bought secondhand from another mother via the "Babywearing Israel" facebook group came in the mail a few days before our trip--yay!); Declan was initially frightened by the rushing spring at the beginning of the tunnel and cried to be let out, then settled quietly to looking around like during the aqueducts tour in Naples. Petra swiftly fell asleep for the entire duration of our time underground. (Her go-to coping mechanism?)

My thoughtful husband later bought two "I survived Hezekial's Tunnel" tshirts for his mom and sister. I hope they'll wear them often and always laugh a little when they're putting on the shirts.

One downside in staying at a place that is over 800 years old is that it's not exactly well-ventilated or well-heated. Now everybody is sick and coughing and Petra is back to newborn intensity in terms of need for attention and care.

Sigh. I guess it's a good thing to remember lest I start to forget how miserable being pregnant always was for me and becoming open to having child #3.

brr...!

Holy frigid winds in the Middle East! What is this craziness that is snow in Israel, Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon--even northern parts of Saudi Arabia? Apparently, what the Israeli prime minister calls "the storm of the century" responsible for this chaos is named Alexa. I wonder if anybody will take that for their new baby's namesake. Once again, my family has the dubious honor of experiencing a record-breaking winter in the ME, complete with the second consecutive year of our heating system not working. Petra is now sneezing and coughing and fighting with me about wiping her snot. When I went to comfort Declan as he cried in his bed last night, I touched his hands and it felt like ice. Today I dredged up the thickest child-sized comforter I could find in our furnished apartment and readied it for Declan's bedtime.

Concerns, prayers, and research into clothes donations for the Syrian refugees living out of tents all along the Syrian border. Twenty thousand homes in Israel have been without power, many for three days and still counting. Magen David Adom medics and volunteers have been working for literally days without relief replacements because no one else could get through. People are sharing food, baking and cooking for others in greater need. The Israeli Army has sent in armored tanks into Jerusalem; the last time that's happened was in 1967 during a war. Neighborhoods are conserving power through a concerted door-to-door effort through the sacrifice of people without babies to go without power so that families with infants could warm one room in their house and prevent more children from collapsing from hypothermia.

When I was in Germany, fighting with the kids to put on the layered clothing system with our puny Israeli-weather gears every single time we need to venture outdoors, I'd thought, "Can't wait to return to Israel and warmer weather!" The rain, wind, ice, COLD that hit us in the face when we staggered out of Ben Gurion Airport at 2:30am was a real shocker.

May God protect all those who are still in the thick of it. Even in the midst of all this, the war in Syria continues, Hamas just fired a couple of rockets from Gaza into Israel, shots resulting in one death were exchanged along the Lebanon-Israel border... In the midst of all the Christmas messages from my Christian friends, I really wonder: When will there truly be peace and goodwill towards men?

In Bielefeld, Germany, a few days before the University closed campus down due to a storm with winds up to 100km/hr. Still felt warmer than currently in Israel though, given the near-perfect insulation of German buildings and the complete lack of in buildings here.

crib notes #1

I have decided that, yes, I will start learning Italian in earnest. Italy is a worthy country in which to vacation, and would hopefully be the country of choice specifically for our family's vacationing purposes. I would still not want to live there as an ordinary resident. People there are too relaxed for me.

First time in Germany. It's like a future utopia/dreamland. I met some students studying from China at the Universtat Bielefeld, where I am right now. It must be like dying and going to heaven, living standard-wise. It's so difficult for me to wrap my mind around the fact that this beautiful country with such an impressive culture of environmental-loving, strong work ethics, excellence and efficiency in seemingly everything they do and have could have such a dark history in the not-so-distant past.

Also, Chomsky is wrong to say that anti-Semitism as we understood it no longer exists. Maybe not in the US, but several incidents during my current travels in Europe due simply to my connection to Israel have made me painfully aware of this.

Too busy taking care of the children every day to write more for now. Hopefully I'll be able to reflect more in writing later.

third b-day

I feel like I kind of failed today at celebrating Declan's third birthday. It's certainly a lot more low-key than his first birthday, which was a huge party in China with trivia games and the Chinese traditional task to determine Declan's aptitude. I made a slideshow with music and everything. Then, on his second birthday, I cooked for three hours to host a dinner party in the midst of rockets firing back and forth between Gaza and Israel. Our friends checked on the latest siren status in Tel Aviv while waiting for another friend who's scheduled to arrive by train from there, and the neighbors dropped by mid-dinner to give us our key to the bomb shelter.

Declan's third birthday consisted of his usual going into the Technion with Daniel. Being expats, we're a little out of the loop on the usual gan birthday traditions that I kind of enacted with Declan's Hebrew mommy-and-me group last year. Father and son came home an hour earlier than usual in order to catch an hour or so of playing with our friend Helen's four kids at their apartment. Then Declan chose a really crappy-tasting cake from a convenience store on the way home, and we shared it with our neighbors who also have a boy around Declan's age. I don't think anyone took pictures.

I did, earlier in the day, go to Merkaz Horev and bought a bunch of things that Declan might be interested in. I was on the fence about them being birthday presents or part of a travel kit for our flight to Europe, then purely out of feeling tired and angry about something and not through a logical process, decided that it's a travel kit. I've never been a very craft-y person, and so rarely got Declan anything much to play and make believe with outside of open-ended containers. Now that he's officially three years old, maybe I'll try harder to provide opportunities for making art. The travel kit could be a good start.

And Declan wasn't completely sans birthday present. Instead of an English-tiled Bananagrams I finally found, which would have cost 109 shekels i.e. three times the price Amazon charges, I got Declan and Joshua (Helen's youngest son, who'll be turning three also but next week) each a riding stick with horse head. They had fun galloping around indoors and then fighting over the dark-colored horse versus the caramel-colored one at parting time.

So, pretty uneventful third birthday for Declan. Lazy ima.

Right after I took this picture, Declan yelled, "No!" and ran away