mane attraction

Photo by Amy FR

Jacob and Amy got their hairs cut yesterday. Jacob's hair is no longer in his eyes, and he still has his curls, but hopefully they will be out of his face.

Yes, he is, in fact, sitting on a monkey.

separation

Last week I moved to Ukraine. I'm excited to begin my Chernobyl project, but while I am working in logistics it is very hard to be so far from my family. I must confess: last night, I was missing them so much I got up at 2:30 am to look at photos of Jacob and Amy.

Now that I am an absentee dad, maybe I'll find time to post more recent photos of Jacob. But let me tell you, it's not the same as seeing the giggly sweet lion-roaring truck-rolling boy in person.

Mike

a moving experience

If you think 3 days and 1340 miles in a small car with a small child and a loud cat sounds like fun, we invite you to join us the next time we move. Despite tears and meows and far too many repetitions of the Sesame Street CD, we all survived our move to Maine. Actually, Jacob traveled quite well most of the time. Kanzhe is the one who threatened to drive us batty. He managed to meow for nearly 3 days straight, despite sedation.

Anyhow, we made it.

on the road again

Our blog has fallen silent this spring and summer as we have all been way too busy to reflect. Today, we leave Madison. It's been our home for the past 8 years, (at least for those of us who are older than that) and we're sad to be moving on.

Tomorrow we start our drive to Maine, where Amy and Jacob will spend the fall. Mike leaves in September for Ukraine, where he will be doing a photography project on Chernobyl. Amy and Jacob will join Mike this winter. Amy is writing her dissertation and applying for teaching jobs. Jacob is writing circles and lines and singing Sesame Street songs.

Our fall address (and ongoing US mailing address):
86 Three Mile Pond Rd
Vassalboro, ME 04989.

Email addresses stay the same.

Thanks Madison, for being a great place to live!

best friends

Photo by Maciek Smuga-Otto

Best friends Jacob Forster Rothbart and Eli Smuga-Otto ride the train at the Vilas Zoo in Madison. Jacob and Eli are in daycare together and have really bonded. They are very different but they play very well together (most of the time!) On Fridays they take turns visiting each other so 3 of the 4 parents can work. This Friday, Eli's dad Maciek took them to the zoo.

hair today

Jacob got his first haircut today, at Next Generation salon, a place that specializes in kids' haircuts. Jacob was very calm about it (and pleased to sit in the firetruck chair!) He is already 23 months old — we’ve been putting of getting his beautiful blond curls cut, even though strangers often mistake him for a girl. Today he just got hair trimmed, and the ringlets stayed.

The Times, they are a changin

Now that Jacob is 21 months old, he has started reading the New York Times. At 21 days old he was no bigger than the Sunday Times, and suddenly now he's sitting there reading it. Okay, okay: he only likes it for the pictures. A habit he'll surely someday deny when he picks up Playboy.

Seriously, though, Jacob is now interested in letters. For two months he's been pointing out his two favorites (B! O! he chants, sometimes getting them correct). This week he is able to identify seven (A, B, C, D, J, M, O) more often than not, though M, W, E and N all mean M as far as he is concerned and J is called “dub” (his word for Jacob). We've been playing repeated alphabet games and songs about our names – Jacob, mama, (formerly known as Amy), and dada. Today he was obsessed with his alphabet puzzles; he now seems to understand that letters have names and was parroting them back to us.

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.