Nous sommes ici

No photos yet, but we're here. The kids survived the flights relatively intact; a lot of sleeping, only one relatively mild episode of vomiting (Esti), only one 10-second tantrum (Henry). The "grand taxi" that met our flight (thanks to our friends Alex and Amy) definitely helped: taking the train from Casablanca to Rabat, sleep-deprived and dragging luggage and children, would have been a big downer. We arrived on Tuesday around 1pm; by now (1am on the night of Fri-Sat) we have:

• moved out of Alex&Amy's place and into a furnished apartment, which Ken describes as "kind of like a conference hotel" in its superficial spiffiness and underlying flimsiness. The decor is pretty generic and there is a layer of dust on everything; the concierge who served as intermediary (simsar) assured me, unprompted (which should make you suspicious), that it was "never rented to Gulfis, only to Europeans." But it will do! The couch has 14 green-and-yellow cushions for building forts, there are three bedrooms (see below) and two bathrooms, and best of all it is 3 blocks from Alex and Amy, who have two adorable English-speaking sons aged 3 and 7.
• welcomed our friends Paul and Rachel, who arrived the day after we did. Normally they live in Oregon, so it's fun to be able to spend time together. Thanks to the third bedroom, they can stay with us.
• eaten pizza three times. First night at the Goethe Institute, whose Wiemar restaurant also serves beer (not that we were in any state to have any) and is a safe family- and foreigner-friendly space for a slow introduction to Rabat; second day at a pretentious Italian restaurant in Agdal, the posh neighborhood where we're renting (again, the concern was about safety and known quantities); and again tonight at Max's seventh birthday party.
• tried out the electric orange juicer that comes with our apartment -- yum!
• discovered that of all the driving-safety-related rules that could be enforced, the one that actually is is the one forbidding more than three passengers from riding in a city taxi. Yes, that includes infants, and yes, they're serious. Do these taxis have seat belts? Do they necessarily stop at traffic lights? Never mind.
• fed Esti a ridiculous amount of French bread, leaving a trail of baguette crumbs all over our clothes and everything else in Agdal;
• eaten a tagine of mussels and black olives (yesterday) and a Friday couscous of vegetables and lamb (today) at a neighborhood restaurant called Nino's, whose decor features 50s movie posters and whose soundtrack alternates between two early Beatles albums. Both were delicious! Henry sampled the tagine, and Esti enjoyed quite a bit of the couscous before going back to her baguette.
• visited the Chellah, a site of Roman and Marinid ruins on the edge of the city, where Henry finally got to run around and see plants and trees and climb on things and try to count the storks (impossible -- too many) and watch fertility-challenged women feed hard-boiled egg whites to a couple of eels in a pool for good luck (the yolks went to the mangy feral cats hovering nearby). Photos to come, don't worry.
• seen Esti learn to cruise along various surfaces, chiefly the terrifying glass-topped cast-iron coffee table in Alex and Amy's apartment. She can now walk if you hold both her hands; I'm sure she'll learn to walk for real before we leave here.
• spoken a fair amount of French (to landlords etc.) and a little Arabic (works fine except I can't understand the Moroccan people speak in response, which is nearly a separate language).
• been amused or kept awake by Elton John, BB King, Santana, and finally now some Moroccan music at a festival called Mawazine going on around the city this week, with stages in various venues... it's the sort of thing that sounds great until you realize there's no particular performance you care about enough to drag the kids to see it.
• gotten names of several potential housekeeper-cook-nanny figures and one potential American babysitter.
• enjoyed several delicious coffees, one of which (at a pretentious Paris-based chain cafe called La Pause Gourmande) Esti spilled all over the table and a little on herself, to the great dismay of her easily mortified father and her still somewhat naive ("Oh, let's just sit here and have a little coffee, won't it be nice?") mother. Well, that's okay. We don't need to go back there anyway. Much better coffee to be had at dozens of less fancy places.
• gotten over our jet lag. Sort of. The kids went to bed today around 10:30 or 11 (so much fun at Alex and Amy's house, we couldn't bear to leave). And now that it's getting on toward 2am I had better do the same, aforementioned coffees notwithstanding. Long day tomorrow: we're going to see my high school friend Heather and her family in Marrakech, a four-hour train ride away. Heather's blog is here; Alex and Amy's (updated a month ago) is here. That should give you something to look at till we come up with some pictures of our own.

Email from day care: Henry's pre-Morocco interview

Henry’s Story
May 19, 2010

Deb: Tell me about Morocco.
Henry: I think people are gonna say, “Hey, I think you should get into a muslim.”
D: What does that mean?
H: It’s when somebody disturbs your theory and wants you to get into their theory.
D: Why do you think somebody’s going to do that when you go to Morocco?
H: Because my daddy gave me that suggestion because it happened to him in Morocco.
D: What would you do if someone said that to you?
H: I don’t know.
D: Tell me about the airplane ride.
H: We’re going to go over the Atlantic Ocean. I have some movies to watch on my mommy’s computer on the airplane.
D: Is there anything you’re going to miss about home?
H: I’m going to miss daycare.
D: This sounds like a really exciting trip. Is there anything you’re looking forward to when you go to Morocco?
H: Yes. Having different guacamole!

Somehow, with Henry, foreign travel is always about the guacamole.

Parallel play

We really haven't seen them playing together before.

They were at it for maybe half an hour this morning.

I think she really wanted to participate.

Fortunately, that didn't take the form (as I'm sure it soon will) of knocking down whatever he built.

A highly responsible big brother

 

Goofing around

Mother's Day brunch

Ken's homemade raisin cinnamon bread, Henry's homemade lassi.

The 3 Rs

I wrote this on the white board. (Sorry about the glare from the flash -- I'm a teacher, not a photographer.) Henry asked me to tell him what it said. I helped him sound out the two words. He responded: "But they're NOT parallel. Those two arrows are too close together."

He was right. What to do? I taught him how to spell "I-C-U-P."

Dumptruck!

These pics are from a few weeks ago -- she can sit up unsupported now.

The smile is still current, though.

Growing

Lots of progress on the infancy front, meanwhile. She has one tooth on top, and possibly by now another one down below. (Henry didn't get his first till 13 months; I didn't either.)

She can use a sofa or your leg to push herself up to standing from a sitting position. And Nirmala says she can crawl.

She can sort of wave "bye-bye" in a funny twitchy way. She can indicate that she wants food by grunting pointedly -- even in that limited context it's great to be doing real communication, not just yowling.

We are observing her a lot less carefully than we did Henry, so who knows what else she can do by now.

Henry's new bike

More pics from Andover. This was last weekend, I think. It all kind of blurs together at this point.

Without parental help there is absolutely no way we would have gotten through this semester. Did I mention that Ann drove in from Wisconsin just to help watch Henry during his daycare's (most unwelcome) April vacation?

Ken and I are still getting the hang of this thing people like to call "work-life balance."

As for Esti, this is what she doesn't do enough of at night.

Balancing act

While Ken was furiously grading papers last weekend, the kids and I shipped out to my parents' house. Henry played with Russian letter cubes and managed to devise this rather improbable construction.

Why wouldn't it fall down?

Are the cubes slightly crooked or something?

Close-up pics by Henry

Given how Ken and I spend our days, is there any reasonable way to expect that Henry won't be fascinated with computers?

"Restaurant" at Deb's house

The latest "curriculum" at Deb's house was on restaurants, and culminated with a little restaurant role-play for parents at drop-off time. They had menus, cashiers, fake money, real food,... the works.

He didn't drop it!

Children's seder

From Passover at the house of my colleague Irit.

Her adorable 16-month-old daughter Beatrice was quite taken with Esti.

Henry took the opportunity to show off, of course.

The little one seemed to take it in stride.

Balloonhead

Semester's almost over; grades are due in the next couple of days. Time to catch up on a month or more of unblogged children.

This is Henry, at my mom's suggestion, exloring static electricity.

Ha!