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.

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.