time passes

So, how about that weekly family blog, eh?

It's been 6 weeks since we returned to Madison and we've all been busy. We've been:

• unpacking boxes
• growing teeth
• restarting a photography business
• teaching 4 sections of an International Relations class
• starting pre-school
• starting a dissertation
• looking for part-time jobs
• starting to potty-train
• finishing a web site
• learning two syllable words ("allo? ba-all dow-oon wow")
• applying for a grant to go back to Ukraine
• staying up too late and getting up too early
• completing our 2006 taxes (we got a 6 month extension)
• wondering what in the world we're doing here
• pulling the cat's tail.

But maybe sometime soon we can add blogging regularly back on the list.

I rake for Jake

Our lawn is the best raked it has ever been. Jacob has loved leaves since he was 3 months old, so I guess it shouldn't surprise us that he has taken to raking, now that his leaves are falling.

The first time out, I gave Jacob an old broom because he was so insistent on helping. He pushed leaves up and down the sidewalk. When it was time to go in, he refused to part with the broom, and proceeded to carry it around the house, banging into walls and doorways with it.


The second time, Jacob insisted on using a real rake, not a broom. Our neighbor Amanda (who has a 2-year-old) saved the day by lending us a toy rake. We made the mistake of leaving the rakes outside the door and now Jacob wants to rake every single time we come outside. He even takes his rake to school with him!

In sad news, my second favorite Jacob, Ann Arbor street musician Shaky Jake, died last month at the age of 82. Shaky Jake had been playing on the streets of A2 since I was the age of our Jacob, and his enthusiastic but off-key guitar playing was legendary. That man could put a smile on anyone's face! (Read more here, see video here or listen to the NPR piece here.)

If anyone out there has an "I brake for Jake" bumper sticker, I want it.

traveling fools

That's it. We're leaving. Jacob's taking his ball and going home. His parents are coming too. The next 2 weeks, we'll be traveling, and one or more of us will be in: Kyiv, Chernobyl, Amsterdam, Frankfurt, Boston, Detroit, and Ann Arbor, before we finally land back in Madison in early September.

So don't expect to hear from us for awhile.

swing time

Jacob loves the swing. He can sit there for an hour at a time, watching the older kids on the playground as we push him back and forth.

Soon we will return to the U.S. It's been a fabulous 8 months, yet recently we've been thinking of things we will not be sad to leave behind (visa headaches, inexplicable bureaucracy, bad traffic, the national absence of bagels). Nevertheless, we will all miss having a playground just outside our door. We've promised Jacob that they do have playgrounds in America too.

As you may notice, we gave Jacob his first haircut recently. Just his bangs, which were falling into his eyes. He squirmed every time the scissors came near, and neither of us had cut hair before, so it is not, let us say, the straightest of cuts. Fortunately his curly hair hides it well. At first many Kazakhs assume Jacob is a girl. It is very rare here for a baby boy to have such long, gorgeous hair. Sometimes we correct the error, sometimes we just accept compliments on our "beautiful girl."

ice, ice, no baby

Last Sunday Amy gave me a lovely gift. She took Jacob for the day and sent me off to the mountains. I enjoy hiking with Jacob, but it was also fun to spend the day scrambling over loose scree and snowfields up above Talgar Pass.

This photo shows a small snowmelt pond on top of Bogdanovich glacier. Over the years so much loose rock has fallen on the lower part of the glacier that it isn't apparent you are actually walking on top of the glacier until you come to a section of bare ice such as this.

When I spend a day like this, I start to think that maybe I should give up photojournalism and be a nature photographer.

playground confessional

The best thing about our apartment, in Jacob’s opinion, is the playground, and the best thing about the playground is the sandbox. Amy bought Jacob a bucket and shovel set, and the boy has commenced to dig.

I have to confess: for me the sandbox is boring. There are only so many times I can fill the bucket up with sand and dump it out again before I go mad. The toy rake is not a lot of fun either. Things have gotten a bit better since we started bringing Jacob’s yellow ball with us. He can’t catch yet, of course, and doesn’t quite throw either, but some days, rolling the ball is not a terrible way to pass the time.

If I had someone to talk to, I’d be better off. The two-year-olds out there are not great conversationalists. The one-year-olds are worse. And their parents aren’t so great either. My Russian is good enough to fool people into thinking I understand them. We’ve now had all the conversations I know how to have. More than once. The weather. What we are doing here. Whether America is better or worse than Kazakhstan. How crazy the traffic and the rents are now. How old Jacob is and when he naps.

No, wait, there actually is one conversation I don’t think I’ve yet had with other parents on the playground: the fruits and vegetables I want to buy when I go to the bazaar. Maybe we can talk about that tomorrow.

There is one three-year-old, Denis, who likes to whine to me about what is wrong with his toys. I am pleased to say I understand most of his Russian. Jacob sits listening to him with wide eyes. Memorizing all those complaints to use later, I am sure. But like emptying the plastic bucket, there is only so long I can listen to Denis before I want to bury my head in the sand. Which happens to be conveniently located nearby.

And sure, I talk to Jacob. He understands, we think, at least 60 English words. And he responds with half a dozen of his own: ba[ll]. Ba[ll.] Bo[ttle]. Da. Mama? Uh. Ba[ll]. Remember that Far Side cartoon, What A Dog Hears? “Blah Ginger, blah blah blah. Blah blah blah blah, Ginger.” In this case, Jacob is like Ginger. He also barks, by the way.

Jacob completely disagrees with my assessment of the playground. Every day, he can’t wait to get out there. He has started to bring us his shoes when he thinks it must be time to go outside. Then he brings us our own shoes, to be sure to drive the point home.

And now that he can walk, the playground is an even more exciting place. He has been so delighted to walk his way from one part to another. He grins enormously with the thrill of voyaging from the park bench to the swing. He is still not very sure-footed; he grabs my hand for tricky moves like stepping from the sidewalk onto the grass.

Watching Jacob explore and enjoy himself is the sole redeeming facet of a morning on the playground. Every time we go out, he finds something new. This week, his favorite game has been picking up handfuls of gravel, studying them, and then passing them to me. Try as I might, though, I can’t find anything marvelous about them.

Sometimes I feel like a bad father because I often don’t enjoy playing with Jacob. Amy has been reading new-parent discussion lists like those at babycenter.com, and she assures me that there are plenty of stay-at-home moms out there, also going slowly mad in their own sandboxes.

backpacks!

Jacob loves being outdoors. Mike's parents bought us a baby backpack, which makes it much easier to haul him around. Earlier this month we spent a night at the GAISH Astronomical Observatory in the Zailiysky Alatau mountains near Almaty, then climbed the dirt road up to Big Almaty Peak. Behind Jacob and Amy is 4317-meter (14,163-ft) Peak Sovetov.

Jacob has a new word: backpack ("bah pah")! We were practicing our B words: ball, bird, banana, bath, boat, baby, bring, bye bye. Jacob may think that every important thing starts with the letter B. (Except mama, of course). Our beautiful bright bouncing baby boy brings back bluebirds before breakfast.

Then I tried some P words, and he was mimicking me but not quite getting the sound. So we introduced him to backpack and he took to it. Now he has been talking about backpacks all day. He definitely knows his backpack and he is glad to tell the world about it. It's a little scary how fast he learns.

Here there be dragons

During a Sunday afternoon picnic at Lake Issyk, in the Ili-Alatau National Park, Karolina Reno (age 3 1/2) decided she was a monster on rampage, ready to eat small boys like Jacob. After much growling, it all ended well, however: they later gave each other wildflowers.

Almaty has been hot this summer. Every weekend we try to get out of the city and into the mountains. Fortunately it isn't hard to do. Lake Issyk is about 35 miles (60 km) from Almaty, at 5,775 feet elevation (1760 m). It is fed by glaciers on nearby 16,332-foot Talgar Peak (4978 m); the water is a frigid 48 degrees F (9 Celsius). Despite the chilly water, I still went for a swim. It took me 15 minutes to get myself in, and 15 seconds to get back out!

See another photo here.

where's your mustache?

Jacob has discovered how much fun it is to play with markers. Sometimes he actually gets some ink on the paper. His favorite part is pulling the lids off the markers. We have learned to strip him down before he starts, to keep the ink off his clothes.

breakfast of champions

At fourteen months old, Jacob is often eager to feed himself. He grabs the spoon and won’t let go. This morning he did fairly well with the spoon at first, until he decided that palming the yogurt was more appealing.

Father's Day

Amy and Jacob and a mug for the camera.

Jacob and I spent our second father's day together today. We started the day by going back to sleep for a long morning nap. I didn't mean to nap with him, but he was so cosy and then I became so drowsy... he curled up on my belly and I just relaxed and closed my eyes until suddenly it was almost noon!

Then we went for a long afternoon walk around town, ending with a picnic dinner, joined by Amy and some new expat friends.

Pictured above with us are: Giada Ripa di Meana, an Italian photographer; Masha Rasner, a Ukrainian-American who works for Internews; Eugenia Benigni, an Italian who works for OSCE; Eva Binette, from Quebec, and Julien Garoste, from France, who are biking their way home across Asia from Vietnam!

Of course, we were thinking about John today, Amy's dad, Jacob's grandfather, my second father. Today was our first father's day since he died last August, and we didn't talk about him, but we were all missing him.

What a difference a year makes. Last father's day, our bouncy curly-haired boy was bald and tiny! For comparison, we’ve posted a photo from our first father’s day here.

greetings from Kazakhstan

Family self-portrait in the Koktobe playground.

After a three week hiatus, we're back in the modern world. We all landed safely in Almaty, and we now have an apartment, our phone finally works, our landlord installed cable TV and a clothes washer, and now we've gotten our DSL modem hooked up.

Until now, doing anything online felt like trying to fill a bathtub with an eyedropper. (Actually, I shouldn't complain: compared to the dial-up connection we used to have when we lived here in 1999-2000, the modem speed is not bad.) Really it's now more like filling a bathtub with two eyedroppers.

Next time we go abroad, we keep telling each other, we're moving to a country for more than 4 months at a time. Jacob has not minded the move, but he certainly does not make moving easy. (More on the moppet soon).

This afternoon, we took a family walk up to the top of Koktobe, a 1060 meter (3450 foot)-tall hill on the upper edge of Almaty. I should point out to our flatland Wisconsin readers that this is not as tall as it sounds, since the city below is at 870 m (2830 ft). Nevertheless, it is high enough to give a grand view over the plains below and up to the mountains above.

View from Koktobe. Almaty is nestled tight against the Zhungarskiy Alatau range, with peaks as tall as 5000 meters (16,000 ft) nearby.

There's a stunning wall of mountains just 10 km from downtown. Anywhere you go in the city you can see this vista. At least, you can see them whenever the smog and new high-rise apartment buildings don't obscure your view!


Of course, Jacob was much more interested in the playground at the top than the view. Amy recently read that babies Jacob's age (now 13 months) typically have an attention span of 3-5 minutes. Not Jacob. He played with these rings for 20 minutes and still wasn't ready to leave when we pulled him away.

a moving experience

Jacob plays with his nanny Larissa Onischuk during their last day together. Later, as Larissa was leaving, there was not a dry eye in the apartment — the adults because we were saying goodbye, and Jacob because we were not yet eating dinner.

This week we are uprooting ourselves as we move from Ukraine to Kazakhstan. It's hard to believe that half of our year abroad is over! Amy and Jacob flew to Almaty today, via Istanbul. I fly on Friday, after I try to tie up about 1 million loose ends here.

We will probably be out of touch for a week or two until we get an apartment and figure out internet access.

Thanks to all who recently helped us find a new home for our cat!

As I leave Ukraine, I feel I've just now started to understand the multitudinous problems surrounding Chernobyl. I am starting to look into grants so that we can get ourselves back here, possibly as soon as a year from now.

breaking news

Some recent surprises in our world:

• Sunday we discovered Jacob has a new, third tooth!
• Monday, Jacob took his first step!
• Today is May first and it is snowing in Kyiv.

Jacob has a new tooth (not pictured). Photo by Sarah Forster.

On Sunday, Amy and Jacob went to the zoo, where Jacob's favorite animals were the geese. (Mike was spending the day in Chernobyl.) Amy and Jacob stopped to eat a banana, and then went on to watch the monkeys, also eating bananas. In the middle of all this banana-eating is when Amy saw it, right there at the top of his gum: tooth #3. It looks like it's been there a few days, but we've been so preoccupied with Jacob's cough that we overlooked it.

On Monday, Jacob and Mike were running in circles around the living room. Jacob is now quite good at walking – as long as he holds on with both hands. He likes to run this way as well, although he stumbles a lot. We paused after our thousandth lap, and Jacob was leaning back very casually against the sofa, his elbows on the seat. Then he decided he wanted to come to Mike, so he pushed off, took one step on his own, then promptly lurched forward and grabbed Mike's knees just before falling on his face.

This morning, Mike got up with Jacob at 6:45 while Amy slept in. Then at 10 Amy took a shift while Mike went back to nap. When Mike arose again, and complained how cold it was, Amy announced: "it's snowing." Mike looked out the window and didn't believe it. "Those are apple blossoms blowing around," Mike said. He was wrong. It is snowing. Happy May day.

Let them eat cake!

Jacob and Samuel Bregard threw a party to celebrate their first birthdays. (Samuel turned one on April 9.) They invited babies from near and far, along with their parents and some other old folks. There was cake and candles and toys and diapers for all. Here, Jacob (and Amy) blow out Jacob's candle while Samuel and Max start to dig into Samuel's cake.

happy birthday!

Jacob is ONE YEAR OLD today. We'll post some photos from our little party. But really, who has time to keep a blog with a toddler running around? In the past month, Jacob has started to crawl, sprouted 2 teeth and stood on his own (without holding on) for 40 seconds. Wow!

Baby group

On Wednesday afternoons we usually go to the baby group run by the International Women’s Club of Kyiv. Jacob has a chance to play with (or ignore) other babies from around the world (including Canada, China, Finland, France, Russia, Sweden, Ukraine, the UK, and the US).


It's fun to compare how the babies are progressing. Compared to a statistically insignificant group of his peers, Jacob has been slower to get teeth and stand on his own, but faster at growing hair and learning to pick up and eat minute objects, such as grains of rice or individual cat hairs. Meanwhile Mike, normally the only dad to attend, hangs out with the mothers.

This week, Roman and Mikael bopped heads, Maia upchucked her fruit salad on her mother's shirt, Jacob gnawed on a plastic apple, Rose bawled, and generally a great time was had by all.

dresser for success

At 11 months old, Jacob has now learned to open the bottom drawer of the dresser and pull out toys and clothes, or better yet, try to climb in with them. Coming soon: installation of our first baby-proof latch. Also note Jacob's first two teeth, which emerged from his lower gum last week.

We're goin to the zoo, zoo, zoo

We went to the Kyiv zoo with our friends Andrea and Andrew. To be frank, out of all the exotic animals we saw, Jacob's favorites were the fish. The cockroaches were pretty cool too, he thought. The elephant was just a big stinky gray wall and the hippo was a pair of ears in a dirty pool of water. He liked the lions but I don't think he realized that they were big cats that were far away.

Feed Me!

If you won't feed me, says Jacob, I'll just eat the table. We were out at a cafe in downtown Kyiv. Jacob had borscht and liked it – maybe it's time to start feeding him a wider variety of dishes. His favorite foods remain bananas and yogurt. And tables.

Move over, Matisse

Jacob Forster Rothbart, 2006 -
Ink with food-coloring pigment on recycled office paper.

The artist at work: Jacob made his first artwork today with his new markers, which he mostly used to stab the paper.

tofu you

A lunchtime conversation. We were having a fine lunch of tofu goulash:

Take 1 rice cake.
Add tofu and frozen peas.
Pour boiling water over it.
Mash with fork.

Jacob happily let me feed him for awhile. Then suddenly, he'd had enough and pushed me away.

Ok, Jacob, I said. Do you want more? (I sign "more.") Or are you finished? (Sign "finished.")

Jacob screwed up his face as if I was suggesting torture not tofu. He shook his head and said, quite clearly, "No!"

I got out a jar of Gerber mixed fruit. Ok, I said. Do you want tofu or fruit? I asked, holding each one up in turn. He pointed to the fruit.

Parents are so slow to understand sometimes.

When he finished the fruit, I gave him some more tofu to smear across his tray and across his face. Sometimes he took a bite. But if I tried to feed him anymore, this is what happened:


Who needs speech to communicate? This is a boy with opinions!

Takes two to snooze

Jacob and Mike sleep together on the living room floor. Lately, Jacob has been refusing to sleep when put back in his crib in the middle of the night, and so often one of us ends up sleeping with him.

fun with mirrors

Here are a couple more photos taken with the MacBook Pro internal camera. The camera software includes a number of funhouse mirror special effects.



Jacob always enjoys playing in the mirror. He's been particularly fascinated by the computer camera, which also essentially looks like a mirror. When we had the warp effects turned on, he kept glancing over his shoulder to check whether Amy had changed how she looked in person or only on the screen.

three cheers

Jacob is slightly sick this week. He was acting fussy and cabin feverish this evening after two days inside, so we entertained him for awhile taking photos of ourselves with the built-in camera in my laptop. Not even ten months old and he is already quite a ham.

Stand in the place where you live

Jacob has been practicing standing, first with the help of stable objects and then with anything he can grab on to (including less stable things, like his father).

on the inside looking out

Jacob's favorite place in our new apartment is the living room window sill, where he likes to stand and watch people walk past. Fortunately, the sill is too high for him to reach (until he starts climbing!) so we spend a lot of time there, exclaiming about what we see and making sure he doesn't fall off.

the family belt

Jacob tries out the family belt while he sits on the bed in our new apartment. We only have one belt for the family, since Amy neglected to bring one with her and keeps borrowing mine on days she doesn’t want her pants falling down. She only needs a plain black belt, but all the belts she has found in the fancy downtown Globus mall sell for US$75 or more. That seems ridiculous, so for now we all share.

moving in: before and after

Before:


After:


We have a home! After a month of living out of backpacks and boxes, we are delighted to be domiciled. Our new 2 room apartment was our third choice, as the others didn’t work out – one landlord was out of town, and another was reluctant to rent to foreigners who might make expensive phone calls. Since we’re only here for 4 months we couldn’t afford to wait any longer.

Here is our new address: Tverskoi Tupik 6/8, apartment 136, Pecherskiy raion, Kyiv. Stop by if you’re in the neighborhood! It’s a ten minute walk from the Pecherskaya Metro station in a neighborhood of auto mechanics and students. The area around the metro is very posh, definitely ‘the high street’ as the Brits would say. New buildings, a fancy supermarket, a Moroccan restaurant and a 24/7 “coffee haus” with wi-fi. From there you go downhill, past the three banks, the well-worn Institute of Culture (a college), across a muddy field and down an alley to get to our new place. In the other direction, Amy’s office is a 15 minute walk down a steep hill past the auto shops.

Three great things about our apartment: it has a microwave, a dishwasher and two closets! Three unfortunate things: it’s on the ground floor next to the front door, which slams frequently; everything in the living room is brown; and unlike the two other places we tried to rent, it is not next to the botanical garden. No matter, it’s home and we’re here to stay. Briefly.

fun with realtors

Friends,

You’ve not heard much from us since we arrived in Kyiv. We are indeed here, we assure you. We’ve been sinking most of our time into our apartment search. Unfortunately, the realty agencies that market to foreigners are used to people with bigger budgets than a grad student research stipend. Most offer nothing for less than a grand. Plus an agency commission of one half a month’s rent. That thousand dollars will get you a “two room flat” – a bedroom and one other room. (Plus a bathroom and kitchen, which don’t count as rooms). We had heard Kyiv was more expensive than Madison, but this, we agreed, was ridiculous. We decided to dig a little deeper.

With tremendous help from some of Amy’s former colleagues (from ISAR), we searched online apartment ads such as Aviso (http://aviso.ua/ -- non-Russian speakers see http://aviso.ua/aviso/eng/). At first glance, it looks like there are tons of places available, starting at $600, downtown in the neighborhoods we want.

Don’t you believe it.

First discount all the old listings that have already rented, which we learn only after calling. Then discover that the bulk of these classified ads are actually posted by agencies. Which would be fine, commission aside, except for the bureaucratic way these agencies are organized: it seems every apartment is assigned to a single agent, who then must coordinate with the owner before they’ll set up a viewing. After a dozen calls back and forth, we might manage to see one apartment. If the agent shows up. And if that advertised location matches the actual location. This was not the case for one lovely apartment we found, largest we’ve seen, a good deal for six hundred, except that “ten minutes walk” from one Metro station proved to be out by the highway, fifteen minutes on the marshrutka (minibus) from a different station. Nice place though, too bad.

In two weeks we’ve managed to see only 5 apartments. We tried to rent two of them, and failed twice. We’ll try again tomorrow.

New city, (old) new year

Jacob and Mike pose in front of Maidan Nezalezhnosti, the central square in Kyiv, during our first trip downtown. The square is decked out to celebrate the new year, which started today, according to the Julian calendar used here until 1917.

live from Kyiv

Greetings!

Somehow or other we made it out of our house, out of the state and out of the country! We all arrived safely in Kyiv Thursday, as did most of our bags. (The last two showed up today). So far we’ve spent our time just getting our bearings, walking around the city, visiting the local markets, figuring out how to get online. Jacob has been going around with his eyes so wide they bulge. Wish I knew what he was thinking!

Tomorrow we’ll start hunting for an apartment. Once we get unpacked, I’ll post some photos.
MFR