How to Apply Lip Gloss, by Vasco and Ella

Planets, Doggie-Counting and General "Where-Did-You-Learn-That!" Amazement

So, we're at the playground today, and Justine and Vasco are giggling while swinging on the swings (if I let them, I think they'll swing for hours!). "Bye bye mommy, we're going high up in the skyyyyy. We're going to save the planets!"
Me: "Bye bye! What planets are you going to?"
Vasco: "Mercury". (to the tune of the "Little Einsteins" episode) "Mercury is closest to the sun...."
Now don't tell me that some TV shows can't be educational!!! In fact, after seeing that episode, the little song they sing is my new method for keeping track of planetary ordering (which I review daily, of course, just in case someone asks!)
Justine was flying to Pluto. I didn't have the heart to tell her that only recently scientists demoted Pluto, and it is no longer a planet. I don't think I knew any of this stuff when I was their age!!!!

Further in the category of "I-can't-believe-they-know-these-concepts":
Justine, last week: "Hey, look at that sunset!"
Vasco, yesterday, upon coughing, "I'm OK, daddy. It just went down the wrong way."
Vasco and Justine, this past weekend: "Uno, dos, tres, cuatro, cinco" Okay, they now know how to count in Spanish??? And people try to tell me daycare is not stimulating??? Miss Celia taught them that.

And speaking of counting, nothing helps your addition and subtraction skills like counting three very energetic pugs running in and out of our friends' Rosie and Joe's house. Justine felt it was her personal responsibility to herd them from room to room and into the yard as a group. I swear she now knows that 2 pugs in the kitchen plus 1 pug on the sofa in the living room equals 3!

Happy Birthday, Kiddos!

Sometime during the most sleep-deprived nights, sometime during the 9th daily washing of 8 Dr. Brown bottles with all their useful but numerous contraptions, sometime during the stiring of the 2000th giant pot of formula, definitely during the 347th ear-piercing loose lead on the apnea monitors, we dared wonder what life would be like when the kids were the seeming astronomically far-away age of 3!


Here's a little pictorial voyage...


Vasco, a day old

Justine, day 2 or 3, on CPAP, too small to be touched without rubber gloves

Vasco, coming home! September 23, 2004




Justine, 1st hour home! October 9, 2004 (their original due date)





First Birthday, waiting for the cake :)




First birthday, with their preemie dolls (made to scale)




Second birthday, 2006, with preemie dolls




Second birthday party



And, at their third birthday:

Reflections from the Couch

Justine is sitting on the couch drinking milk before bedtime. She says, "I'm a big girl. I'm growing up. When I grow up, I drive a car!" Some spend mother-and-daughter time picking out clothes, or doing their nails. Justine and I will be spending mother-and-daughter time at the Ferrari dealer!

Look how happy she looks behind the wheel!

Long Post about Many Things

Potty training update: the good, the bad, and the ugly.... The good: Justine is practically potty trained! Hurrah! Clearly, when both kids were still diaper-clad, a clear interpretation of the failure to launch toilet use success would be that we are indeed clueless parents. Now that we have brought 1 of our 2 dear children to the wonderful world of toilet use, it is clear that we do at least half of something right, half of the time. Maybe. Yeah for the parents!!! The bad: Vasco has completely regressed and now just pees in his pants, 1 inch/2.5 cm away from the toilet. The ugly... well, that was just there as part of the expression, but for starters, ugly will describe the carpets in our house if this potty war continues much longer...

On fauna in our nation's capital: no, not rats, my friends (although that would have been an excellent guess, given the many sightings of such lovely creatures in this city). Justine and I were walking out of the front door when a tiny cute little baby deer jumped up from behind the little bed he had made for himself behind our bush, and started running around the house. He made one complete circle, attempted to settle back into his bed, realized that we were not going away, and decided to run across the street back into the park. Mike and I were crossing fingers/ squeezing thumbs, hoping that no cars would zoom through as the kids are happily watching little Bambi trot across the street. Here he is:

On genetics: aka "A Scientific Treatise Proving that All of the Bulgarian Genes Have Gone to Justine", or, in layman's terms, "The Battle of Peanut Butter and Jelly versus Sirene (Bulgarian Feta) and Kyufteta". After several contained expreriments we decided that the kids were not allergic to peanuts, and today THE FIRST PEANUT BUTTER AND JELLY sandwich was made for the kids by Mike. Result: Vasco devours the sandwich, which Justine wanted nothing to do with it. At a bare minimum, I am now not the ONLY person on earth that finds said sandwich unpalatable (I digress to note that in a perfect test case--stranded in the desert for a number of hours with just a boxed lunch with pb&j sandwich--I refused to eat it!). At dinnertime, as we grilled kyufteta accompanied with salad and potatoes copiously seasoned with the grated feta cheese, Justine had a plateful of both meat and cheese, which she could not stop eating. From Vasco's perspective, on the other hand, the feta cheese was a culinary adventure he did not want to take. And thus, it is proven: we had twins, because the Bulgarian genes could not be convinced to mingle with the US genes...

And, finally, a really cool action picture, just because...

Miami! (aka "Thank you, Grandma and Grandpa!")

A mere two weeks after my whirlwind trip to Chile, I was off to the 6th annual regional conference in Costa Rica (click here if you really really really want to see the kinds of things I do. Warning: discussion quickly turns to customs unions, equity markets and income distribution). The conference was really interesting to attend, and, except for the fact that I somehow managed to coordinate one of my outfits completely with the hotel's uniform of red and black and was, therefore, stopped a number of times by lost hotel guests, all went well. The conference ended, and I was off to Miami, where I was going to meet Mike for a whole Saturday of Miami-style rest and relaxation.
I made it to Miami without incident, and met up with Mike. Beautiful! Fast forward to 2:35 am. We are jolted from deep sleep by the most horrible sound you may want to imagine, complete with flashing lights. Fire alarm! We wobble out of the room with puffy eyes only to hear someone yelling in the hallway: it's a real fire! We wobble much faster with still puffy eyes and we're out of the exit, past the pool and into the courtyard where a frazzled security guard was propping up some door to let out what did indeed look like lots of smoke. No fire trucks. 10 min later the alarm stops. Diagnosis: someone had yanked out the fire extinguisher and upon dropping/throwing it, released whatever chemicals are in a fire extinguisher, and caused the fumes. Back to bed. 5am. You guessed it: the now familiar but still horrendously awful fire alarm goes off. Back outside. We are all even less amused this time. The guard mutters some explanation which we didn't understand, the gist being that there is no fire, just the awful noise...
Luckily, the next 4 hours were peaceful, and we rose to a beautiful if slightly scorching day. The rest was pretty much your regular Miami vacation: lounging by the pool next to some highly tattooed but very friendly gentlemen with a giant boom box, a R&B play list of 700 songs and what seemed to be a 5 liter bottle of vodka and copious amounts of cranberry juice and Red Bull. At 11:47 am, Mike asks me if I'm relaxed. "Yes", I nod. "Very". "Good", says Mike, "I guess now is a good time to tell you that the kitchen sink is stopped up..."
It's now dinner time. The weather service promises a severe thunderstorm, and then promptly delivers on its promise. The sky dumps what seems like millions of gallons of water onto Miami, and then stops. We, hungry, set out for Greek Taverna which promises food, and above all, table dancing, wading through ankle deep water. 3 hours later we have consumed massive amounts of really outstanding Greek food, have indeed witnessed said table dancing complete with napkins-turned-confetti, and finished off the night with some Ouzo. Ankle deep water has mysteriously disappeared. Fire alarms do not sound even once during the night and we count the Saturday a huge success!