A week alone for Dad and Anya

Lisa is away for a week on a research trip to Khabarovsk, and Anya and I are flying solo for the second time ever (Lisa took another short trip to Khabarovsk previously). While of course we both miss Lisa/Mommy, we are also enjoying spending some time together. For me it is a nice opportunity to catch up on some of the developments in Anya’s personality that I might otherwise have missed because I’m not with her during much of the day. I’m still not, by the way: she’s with her nanny Marina from 9am to 6pm while Lisa is gone.

But I do participate in all of the morning and evening routines that either Lisa or both of us would ordinarily do. I don’t usually feed her in the evening, for instance. I’m not saying it’s a pile of fun, but over the last few days it seems that Anya has been in particularly goofy moods while eating. It doesn’t do a lot for actually getting food into her chowhole with any frequency or speed, but she has a couple amusing habits. One of them is to look at a parent out of the very corner of her eye, then to catch you doing the same to her. Squeaks of pleasure usually follow. Another is pointing out various things going on with her feet under the tray – like socks falling off, or feet kicking, or toes poking out or hiding (“peekaboo!”).

Anya’s linguistic development has been particularly interesting lately. I just wrote about it to my Mom, and hopefully she’ll forgive me for repeating the gist of that email here:

Anya is now at that amazing and charming stage (other parents have told us about it) where she is starting to string words together. We went to the beach with a colleague on Monday, and she was busy pointing things out: “Daddy rock. Anya rock. Daddy Anya rock.” (We do, of course, rock, but that latter sentence was meant to indicate that I was giving her a rock.) Then she put it in a cup: “Anya rock cup.” The particular path of her development is interesting to me, in part because she’s doing it in two rather different languages.

(An aside: for some reason, the fact that Anya was learning Russian along with English very unexpectedly made me sad when I first started thinking about it. Why? I still don’t know, but I think there were two [equally foolish] thoughts. The first was that there is this side of Anya’s developing personality that I don’t really have access to. The second was that I felt sorry for her – for the confusion that comes from having to cope in two languages. Of course that is silly, because kids just pick this stuff up – it’s not a punishment or a struggle! But I just felt that way, that I was somehow letting her down. Anyway, I’m happy to report that I’m feeling better about it, particularly as I get to interact with her some in Russian and explore that part of her world.)

Back to the linguistics. I imagine that most kids must learn nouns first, and Anya is no exception. She has quite a meaty collection of them, and she is just now starting to figure out what I guess we’d call cases – i.e., subjects, objects, direct objects. Word order is still fluid, though, and she toys with it: "Daddy Anya kiss. Anya Daddy kiss." Both involved me kissing her. She likes to go through several iterations in one go. She still isn't really learning the little helper words, like prepositions, etc. But, more and more, verbs are entering the picture: “Anya baby PUT,” (accent very strongly on the last word!) when she puts her doll in her bed. And “Daddy SING” (more on that in a moment). And she is learning some phrases simply by imitation (“kiss it,” “lying down,” “socks on,” etc. – Lisa has reported on these), and she’s close to parsing the individual words.

What’s particularly interesting, though, is that she is going through this same process in Russian – which, despite its very distant shared roots with English in Indo-European, is a very different language. So (forgive the short linguistics primer), where English establishes what is acting upon what by word order (we know the subject, object, and verb in the sentence “I mail the letter” only by their location in the sentence), Russian does it primarily through grammatical inflection (like Latin and many other languages). That is, the nouns and verbs have special (morphemic) markers that denote what part of speech they are – and thus who is doing what to whom.

So, I'm interested to see if word order (English) or grammatical inflection (Russian) comes to Anya first. So far, the nod is slightly toward inflection. She appears to be learning the accusative case (“lyublyu papU” – Russian for “I love daddy,” with “daddy” in the accusative case and "love" conjugated in first person singular). (Yes, by the way, she really says that!) Unfortunately, I think she’s so far just mimicking Marina, and is not really thinking it through. I’m sure if she did, of course, she’d find it to be a very fine thing to say. Well, there's the language acquisition memo for the day...

As I put Anya asleep tonight, I was in for a nice surprise. She looked up at me and said, “Daddy. Sing.” Then she hummed a little song herself, and appeared to be saying the word “clouds.” It became clear to me that she was referring to a specific song that I actually sing to her frequently – Joni Mitchell’s “Both Sides Now” (although I sing her the Pete Seeger version, with the added last stanza beginning, “daughter, daughter, don’t you know, you’re not the one to feel just so…” ). As most of you know, the song begins,

Rows and floes of angel hair
And ice cream castles in the air
And feather canyons everywhere
I looked at clouds that way

(Although for some reason I sing it “cotton candy everywhere…”)

What was remarkable was that Anya had picked up the “cloud” reference. Beyond that, it was of course fun to be asked to sing, and also to hear her version of singing, which was kind of tuneful in a strange baby sort of way.

Otherwise, for those who might be worried about our welfare without Lisa, I assure you that we're surviving! Although Anya needs to lay off the booze.

On the Eve of R&R, Year 2

What we're saying:
'tatch = attached (as in "My hair's attached to my head!")
'syo = Vsyo, or "that's all" in Russian
No mo' = no more
bikk = book -- lots of books and pointing to what we know these days
Wah-nioh! = "oignon!" (repeated with Daddy many times in silly-exaggerated-French-voice as we were preparing French onion soup last week)
Tay-tay = Sanchez
Agga = Edgar


What words we're practicing in yoga class:

грудина = breastbone, sternum
подбородок = chin
(As in, "Это подбородок. Грудина вверх." / "That's your chin. Lift your breastbone.")
копчик = coccyx
втягивать = draw or pull in
(As in "втягивайте копчик.")
поясница = small of the back
крестец = sacrum
пах = groin
лобок = pubic bone
голень = shin
ягодицы = buttocks
талия = waist
грудиная клетка = thorax
сустав = joint
таз = pelvis
бёдро = thigh
тазобедренные суставы = hip joints
стопы = feet
мячик стопы = ball of the foot
плюсна = metatarsus
колено = knee
чашка колена = kneecap
позвоночник = spine
позвоночный столб = spinal column
вытягивать = extend, stretch
(As in "вытягивайте позвоночник.")
лопатка = shoulder blade
пятка = heel
локоть = elbow
плечо = shoulder (as in, "плечи назад и вниз" / "press your shoulders back and downward.")
ладонь = palm of hand
лодыжка = ankle
ступня = sole of foot

What we're listening to:
The Diggs, Commute (and waiting for their new album to drop in Vlad via dip pouch)
Vyacheslav Butusov, "Pesnia idushchego domoi" (one of the few things I hear on Russian radio that I like)
Kim Wilde, "Kids in America" (another pleasant surprise heard on Russian radio recently)

A Little Pre-South Africa Update

What we're listening to:

Can't get away from those Tiny Cities (I forgot to mention last time: this album holds a special place at least in my heart, since we played it constantly during the first couple of weeks after bringing Anya home from the hospital, when we were just figuring out that she was a pretty colicky baby. This was the music to which we did that legendary baby-soothing shuffle that folks from Marc Weissbluth to Harvey Karp love to talk about)

Pierre Akendengue, Espoire a Soweto (OK, so we won't be staying in Southwest Township exactly, but we are getting pretty amped up for our South Africa trip)

La Bamba: Sones Jarochos from Veracruz

Ravi Shankar, Three Ragas



What we're saying:

ball: "baw," "bah," "boe"

water: yes, "wa-wa" does appear to mean all things liquid, from milk (sometimes interchangeable with "nam-nam"), to water or juice, to coffee, tea, wine or beer (referring to when big people are drinking them), to water from the faucet or in the bathtub

diaper: "day-ba"



(OK, I hope you won't get grossed-out by a few bathroom-related words, but, hey, that's life with a toddler...)



ca-ca: I guess this one's universal. I can actually see where the word may naturally arise from, since Russians encourage babies to make a little grunting noise when trying to go to the bathroom, and it's really just a slight shift from there to "ka-ka"

pee-pee: "pay-pee" (easily confused with "bay-bee" but decicedly not the same thing)



Clearly our bathroom related vocabulary is growing, even if the connection made between relieving ourselves and actually hitting the pot is not yet really within our (OK, just Anya's, thankfully) grasp.



A: "ay" (Usually quickly followed by "Anya," in recognition of what most important function this letter often fulfills. [Yes, I think that a combination of the A-shaped Anya cookies and the talking Alphabet Pal toy my mom gave Anya for Christmas is surprisingly helping Anya really recognize the letter A, and say its name correctly. Pretty cool.])

cock-a-doodle-doo (which in Russian basically translates to "ku-ka-re-ku"): "kakaraga"

peek-a-boo: "pyka-paw" (rhymes with "Ty kuda," as in "where-ya-go, where-ya-go")

ice: "ais" (and the recent weather here, hovering around -12C, but going down to -20 last night, has given us plenty of opportunity to practice that one!)



What we're eating:

homemade sourdough bread, made from daughter-starter scooped from the jar of our neighbor, Noriko

(Anya especially likes sourdough grilled ham and cheese sandwiches)

Ginger chicken a la Madhur Jaffrey



What we're reading:

I am on an 18th century jag -- finished the masterly, truly inspiring New York Burning, and now am on to The Speckled Monster, but am reading it intermittently with The Oracle Bones.

And surely I will pick up something interesting in South Africa, too.

A New Year's Sampling

The New Year's season in Vladivostok has brought some renewed social activity and, especially during the long break from work that is now a pretty well ingrained tradition in Putin's Russia, some new wintry activities.

The interesting thing to me about a lot of these New Year's events is that, despite having spent a bunch of time in Russia before, I guess since that was without a kid and sometimes involved taking advantage of the holidays as a time to get away, I never got to see some of the things Russians associate very closely (and enthusiastically) with New Year's.

I should note that, thanks to the official atheism of Soviet times, Russian New Year's encompasses a lot of the kinds of celebration that Americans associate with both Christmas (and in fact also Thanksgiving, given that it comes so close to Christmas) and New Year's. You get the family-oriented time of Thanksgiving and Christmas, the gift-giving traditions of Christmas, and the dress-up, go-out-and-party ethos of New Year's all rolled into one holiday. And even though anyone who wants to is now free to celebrate Orthodox Christmas, it seems like this latter holiday is either more singularly a religious occasion, centered around the church and spiritual life, and/or an added chance for family-centered gift-exchanges, rather than supplanting the familiar New Year's traditions for which I can now fully see Russians have a great fondness.

Thanks to a friend from VladMama, Anya and I both experienced our first "Yolka," the traditional children's New Year's party that takes its name from the holiday fir tree that is its centerpiece. Kids apparently tend to go to more than one of these, or probably as many as their family can afford, and at the very least a morning New Year's party (utrennik) with all the same trappings we experienced is de rigueur for those who attend preschool in Russia. Perhaps the most unusual aspect of the utrennik for an American is the fact that all kids wear costumes to the party (as our nanny Marina confirmed for me, if we were to go to the party in just regular clothes or even party clothes, people would definitely think we were weird parents). So, after I first fretted over how to make time to go and buy a costume, and what might be the least amount of money I could get away with spending on it, Marina came to the rescue and reminded me that the Jack-o-lantern costume she'd seen tucked away in the closet would make a fine costume, and had none of the associations with Halloween here that might have caused a few raised American eyebrows were we to wear it anytime outside of October in the US.

So we set out to the VladMama-sponsored party as a "tykovka," a little pumpkin, together with our friends Nina (fellow VladMamochka) and her daughter, Vika (who was dressed as a princess). It was really quite a morning, especially since the smaller of our pair (well, heck, and the larger of us, too) is not all that used to interacting with very many others at one time, especially not a crowd of excited, screaming kids, running around in all directions in anticipation of Ded Moroz (Grandfather Frost, or the twentieth-century version of Santa Claus that is still very much a Russian cultural icon).

There are some videos of this on YouTube: two help you to imagine the jubilation that was on display even during the preparatory stages, prior even to Santa's warm-up act of a Rabbit and a Wolf with a very witty repartee, and probably a full half-hour before Moroz made his big appearance and had us hopping and touching our toes and guessing various things and dancing around the holiday tree. All with his usual sidekick, the beautiful young snow-bunny Snegurochka. The third video shows Anya off to the side, reveling in the miracle of the Velcro that was intended to hold her costume on, and ignoring the kids and moms dancing in a circle and awaiting the time of the party when Moroz would hand out the presents.

Imagine my surprise when it turned out that we had not really flown under the radar, but that "Tykovka" was actually one of a handful of guests at the party who were discussed and admired online on the VladMama forums. The general consensus was that Tykovka was a real cutie.

What other parts of Russian New Year's did we experience for the first time, with fresh eyes, or with a new twist? The work/professional New Year's party, now in its post-Soviet incarnation (we splurged for the VIBA [Vladivostok International Business Association] Christmas/New Year's party). We do not yet have photographic or video evidence, but Dan was an avid (if reluctant) participant in the silly reverie that is the adult version of the children's utrennik. (My armchair interpretation of why Russians are so extremely fond of New Year's is that not only do adults engage in some heavy nostalgia during this period, everyone gets to be a kid during the extended festivities -- and much more than we tend to in American Christmas or New Year's celebrations.)

[As you might have gleaned from this post, our closer look at post-Soviet New Year's has given me new interest in this as a cultural and historical phenomenon. If you're curious like me, here is one interesting (Russian) article I found exploring some of the roots of the familiar twentieth-century New Year's traditions that Russians continue to enjoy, and which themselves continue to evolve, today. And here is a blurb and photoessay tracing the New Year's Yolka from its 1936 reintroduction into Soviet life up to the (recent) present.]

We also -- again thanks to my friend Nina -- were able to see the latest cinema craze to hit Russia: a sequel to the very classic New Year's movie "The Irony of Fate (or, Happy Steaming!)" (that is obviously a rough translation: the parenthetical part of the title refers to the engine of all the mischief of the 1975 original, where vodka plus banya plus a trip to the airport plus the monotony of Soviet architecture and city planning equal mayhem on New Year's Eve). The annual viewing and the antics of the plot easily bring to mind a Soviet version of "It's a Wonderful Life." The 2007 version of the New Year's movie has a similar scenario of mistaken identity and mistaken location playing out among the adult children of the pair(s) who were central to the original movie. And in grand Russian capitalist style, it featured loads of annoying product placements. But it was fun -- so much so that I planned the following day, December 31, around the scheduled TV broadcast of the original.

Finally, what else? Well, probably that's it for New Year's and maybe I should leave it there, and promise to report on the more general outdoor winter sporting and recreational activities at a later date. You can see some scant pictures of this on our Flickr pages.

And now for an update in other categories...:

What We're Saying:

ah-choo!: "Aaah-TCHEEE!" (Cf. What We're Listening To)

water?!: "wa-wa" (so far almost exclusively, in the two days I've noticed it used, in reference to a cup or bottle of some liquid)

hi: "hai," "ha," and sometimes even an honest-to-goodness "hi"

Edgar (the cat): "Adda," "Agga"

Sanchez (the cat): "Didi," "Didji"

omelette: "omma" (Cf. What We're Eating)



Responses:
1. Question: What do ducks say?

Response: "Wock, wock!"



2. Word said: Bear (teddy or otherwise)

Response: [smile, close eyes, hold hands and arms to tummy] (= hug!)



3. Shape seen: "A" (Cf. What We're Eating: Anya cookies)

Response: "Aing!" (or even "Anya!")



Points to in response to the word:

Ears, eyes, mouth, teeth, nose.

Also much pointing to head and recent fascination with belly buttons (own and parents').



What We're Eating:

pan-seared duck breast with mushroom-red wine reduction sauce, with spinach salad

(fancy night! thanks to Dan)



omelettes

(Hot Feeding Tip from Anya Kronenfeld: If your toddler refuses to eat something, even something she ate with gusto just yesterday, or even this morning, just cut/mash/puree it and add it to scrambled egg and a little milk to make a pan-fried omelette. Fool's 'em every time!)



cassoulet

(mmm! but rich -- note to self: limit portion size next time)



Simple Things: non-instant oatmeal ("Gerkules" to Russians) with fruit (dried or fresh) and brown sugar almost every morning; chicken and rice/arroz con pollo with homegrown windowsill basil; roast vegetable and Molinari's pepperoni and salami pizza


"Anya cookies" (see below for recipe)



Recipe for Anya cookies (with apologies to Joy of Cooking):

Cream 1/2 c. white sugar with 1/2 c. unsalted President butter.

Beat in 1 tsp. vanilla from your belated honeymoon to Tahiti;

2 Ussuriisk eggs;

2 1/2 c. sifted all-purpose flour;

2 tsp. double-acting baking powder, Clabber Girl, brought from home;

1/2 tsp. salt.

Chill 3-4 hours (or 3-4 days) before rolling.

Preheat oven to 375 degrees F.

Roll on a lightly floured cutting board. The play rolling mat from your old toy baking set will do just fine.

Use your only cookie cutter (heart-shaped), or look for something in your shape-sorter toy (especially suitable is the "A" shape for "Anya) to use as substitute cutter.

Place cookies on greased cookie sheet. You may decorate them with sugar, or sugar and cinnamon. Makes several days' worth of extra-small not-too-sweet cookies that little girls named Anya love very much.



The Most Unlikely Toys From Around the House:

A ribbon

Your winter hat with the ear flaps

Measuring spoons and cups, preferably in a combination of plastic and metal

Tupperware

Bibs



What We're Listening To:

"Jim Gill sings the Sneezing Song and other Contagious Tunes" (especially good for laughs: The Sneezing Song; Cf. What We're Saying. also fun, esp. when mom pantomimes: Silly Dance Contest)


Sun Kil Moon, "Tiny Cities" (songs from Modest Mouse in a very different mood)

Shoe!

Ladies and Gentlemen, we have us a new word:


Shoe! (She's actually been saying this already for a few weeks, I admit, but she says it with a funny kind of intonation that had us laughingly repeating what sounded like half of "thank you" in Chinese: "xie-xie!") Earlier this week, though, despite the intonation, I noticed that it really was being used in situations that involved footwear -- presto, verbal communication!


What's additionally funny about this is that it actually seems like Marina, our nanny, taught her this word (which explains the funny accent). When I told her about it, she said, "oh, yeah, I talk about her felt boots [valenki] when we're getting dress to go outside, but I figure 'shuzy' [something like 'shoeses' across two languages] is closer to what you say." So the kid may end up with some interesting variations on English after our two years are up.


In other news, as you can see from the Flickr photos, we successfully traveled to Bangkok and back over Thanksgiving weekend, and we even managed to enjoy some of it. But it was definitely not easy with a 15-month-old: aside from the longish flights to get there, and the necessity of taking a red-eye back, which of course wasn't great for the adults, either, we had to confront the realization that there is some distance separating the ideal adult pace for touristing and the ideal toddler pace. And the fact that, when you are on vacation with a little kid, you're never really able to relax like you once could. I still need to take a little more time to digest all the other impressions from the trip before I print something here.


As for our updates:


What we're eating:

homemade deep-fried beer-battered scallops and squid

lemony fish and potato soup a la Bittman

ripped up pieces of grainy bread with butter (sometimes your morning oatmeal with baked apple just doesn't appeal)

homemade sourdough bread from our neighbor


What we're listening to:

a lot of Superchunk and Portastatic, for some reason (especially the newest, Be Still Please, and my favorites: "You Blanks" and "Song for a Clock" -- so much so that the unthinkable has happened, I am actually tired of this album; and Summer of the Shark/Autumn Was a Lark; and Indoor Living)

Strange Weirdos: Music From and Inspired By the Film 'Knocked Up' (you wouldn't necessarily expect something with that description to be good, but this is actually quite enjoyable music from Loudon Wainwright III -- better by far than the movie itself), liking especially "Grey in LA" and "Daughter"


What we're watching:

Prison Break, season 1 (purchased on Sukhumvit Rd., Bangkok, for about $20 [and don't tell us what happens!])

can't get away from that Beauty and the Geek


What we're saying:

baby ("bay-bee")

lyalya (Russian for baby; often said with a violent verbal tendency that has not yet been explained)

Anya ("Aaaaing")

hi ("ai!")

shoe ("shiew!")

not to mention of course, Appi, mama, papa, baba, gaga (?), and lots of babble

Mid-November Update

What we're watching:

(and listening to...) Springsteen's 2001 MSG concert DVD

(and squirming, and hiding, and finally unable to finish...) Borat

30 Rock

(and feeling some guilt...) Beauty and the Geek (hey, it follows 30 Rock on our satellite TV)



What we're listening to:

Dylan's greatest hits, vol. 2, disc 2

REM's Murmur and Out of Time

Modest Mouse's We Were Dead Before the Ship Even Sank



What we're reading:

Intoasia.com's guide to Bangkok

Lonely Planet Seoul (thanks to my mom for leaving it here)

The Beer Lover's Rating Guide (the smallest people have the most unexpected reading tastes...)



What we're eating:

Cheese grits squares

Squashed pinto beans and pasta shells

More leftover improvised Mexican pork stew



Where we have the potential to view cats this weekend:

At home

At the Vladivostok cat show

At the visiting circus show "Lynxes and Wild Boars"

Turning the November Leaves

We're back to regular old fall, after the snowmelt.



Last weekend we had a really great visit with our old friend Laura, from Berkeley grad school days, which included a little bit of exploring on the nearby peninsula "de Fries." This spit of land is a relatively prominent feature of the local map, but for whatever reason we hadn't driven there before. We were inspired in part by a meeting with a Washington State University historian who studies the cosmopolitan late nineteenth century Victorian world of Vladivostok, especially through the lens of letters written by a New Englander, Mrs. Eleonor Pray, who lived here with her family from 1894 until 1930. The Prays and the Smiths and apparently many other foreign traders and merchants in the city took their holidays on de Fries at a large complex that burned down in the early twentieth century. Our visit to the peninsula didn't really have a lot to do with the history, except that hearing about these old foreign families and seeing some old photographs led us to drive out there.



Now we're heading into a few weeks of work before heading to Thailand for Thansksgiving weekend! Hooray -- the vacation we have been waiting months for! We're meeting a friend from early DC days who is now stationed in Calcutta. Staying in Bangkok at the hotel this friend is fond of, and making at least one day trip to the beach. And hoping that all will go well with baby travel!



I'm going to try again to write more briefly and more often here -- we'll see how well I do. Maybe a little list of current likes and distractions will help in that...



what we're listening to

the latest Bruce, Magic

Tchaikovsky's The Nutcracker Suite (featuring fun cannon shots in our Deutsche Grammaphone version)

a homemade mix Dilon Djindji's mellow Afropop, c/o Sir Landau (some may recall that this featured as the recessional music at our wedding...)



what we're munching on (you guess which describes the big people's menu and which describes the small person's...)

a yummy Mexican chipotle pork and potatoes stew

dried cherry scones (although beware of Bittman's recipe in How to Cook Everything; we are still in search of a better one)

well-cooked pasta shells with mushed kidney beans and melted cheese

stiff mashed potatoes with bits of ham

bite-sized broccoli