Children's Table

At lunch we sat at one table with Alex and Amy and let the kids sit at their own table. They had a great time, ate most of their food, didn't break anything. A relaxing alternative to sitting with them and inevitably micromanaging their meals.

Salé

Well, not Sale itself, but rather a sort of shopping mall for artisanal products, including on-site pottery studios. The complex includes a playground, which would not be anything exceptional in the States (apart from having the sort of playground equipment that has been deemed too dangerous for children since my childhood) but is still a rarity in Morocco.

We got here by tagging along with Alex and Amy, who lived here while I was here eight years ago. Now they too have children and are also on the lookout for playgrounds. They borrowed a friend's 80's model Mercedes and we went to Sale.

Henry and Max played on the see-saw. They weigh about the same and could balance. Zane tried to assist but could usually only participate with an adult's assistance.

They played happily for three hours before we came back to Rabat and finished the rest of our leftovers just in time for Nezha to come tomorrow and cook us a new tajine (sardine).

On the new Corniche--Venezia Ice

There are a lot of new projects in Rabat: a new tram which will open in November, a new tunnel that will allow for a pedestrian zone between the Medina and the Oudaias, a new National Library (very nice and the largest in Africa), a new bridge over the Bou Regreg river between Rabat and Sale, a new marina in the Bou Regreg, and a new Corniche along the Bou Regreg.


We strolled along the new corniche and stopped off for ice cream at Venezia Ice. There is a branch also in Agdal where we live. Most of the folks strolling up and down the Corniche cannot afford to have ice cream here--but some can. Morocco has a two-tired population. Some have first-world incomes and expenditures and others get by on a couple of hundred dollars a month.

Esti had her first ice cream and experienced what Henry calls "brain freeze" (as Elana, a teacher at Deb's house, calls it).

Oudaias...

Esti was content to spend most of the outing in the Ergo.

Henry ran around in the garden, fleeing any time I pointed the camera his way.

The gate of the Oudaias from inside - this space used to be a prison and is now used for art installations.

A street in the Oudaias.

Oudaias...

One of the features of the Oudaias I didn't take much advantage of before is the Andalusi Garden. A garden to run around in becomes much more desirable now that we are back with children. This is our second visit to the garden. The other historic/green place we have taken Henry is the Chellah, as seen in a previous post.

Here we are looking at the goldfish and tadpoles that live in the pool in front of the Museum of the Oudaias, whose collection consists mainly of jewelry from different parts of Morocco. They were filling the pool with a hose whose water pressure made it move from one side of the pool to the other. Henry ran back and forth from one side of the bridge to the other following the hose.

The Oudaias

On Saturday we visited the Oudaias where I (Ken) lived eight years ago.

The Casbah des Oudaias is a small walled part of the city separate from the rest of the medieval city (Medina). The houses are small and mostly painted blue at the base and white above. The gate, seen here, is considered the finest example of they style of gate built by the Almohad dynasty, which ruled Morocco and Muslim Spain in the 12th and 13th centuries. A historian named Stacy, whom we visited here, told us that the steps were built by the French in the early 20th century over the objection of one official who thought they made the Oudaias look too much like a church. (She also said this gate used to be invisible, all built over with houses and shops; the French took them down in an effort to create a more scenic and authentically "Moroccan" space.)

Henry poses on top of an old Portuguese cannon inside the lower gate of the Oudaias.

More from graduation party

A supernice lady named Miriam, through whom our friend Amy heard about this American daycare for Henry. She held Esti through most of the party, very sweetly, so that stranger-skittish Esti didn't mind at all. She attended the Rabat American School and is now an assistant teacher there, studying to complete her teacher certification. Her husband (who seems to speak mostly French) is sitting next to her; their son Yannis is one of maybe three or four Moroccan kids at the preschool.

Henry's diploma! The parents were making jokes about how they were going to frame these and put them on the wall, but I bet many of them will. Some are diplomats for whom this preschool was a natural choice. But there are those for whom it is a real investment: the doorway to 17 or so years of American-style education that will bring their kids progressively deeper into the English-speaking globalized elite (and further from their Francophone parents).

Ellie, the other native English speaker. She's British, very articulate, seems shy at first but has a very sweet sense of humo(u)r. She has taken a shine to Henry - we're going over her house for a playdate (multiple cups of tea for the moms, splashing in the backyard pool for the kids) tomorrow afternoon. Henry and I went over there once before. Her dad works for the British Embassy: lovely house with garden, playroom with posters imported from England ("L is for Lolly"), large set of Brio trains.

Ellie in motion.

Henry's graduation party

Last Friday was the end-of-year party at the preschool that Henry joined for just the last few weeks of the year. The kids were encouraged to come in costume; Henry was excited to go to school in his pajamas. The preschool is designed to prepare kids for the Rabat American School. The kids range in age from 2 (little Elias with the pacifier there) to 4. Henry is one of only two native English speakers. Most of the kids feel more comfortable in French.

The teachers are Lili, an American lady who's lived in Rabat for years (her husband is Moroccan) and her assistant Cecile, who's from the Central African Republic via Paris. Lili is full of praise for Henry: his vocabulary, his good behavior and ability to follow instructions (ha!), even his sense of rhythm.

At the party the kids sang a song called "Down By the Bay" for the parents. Here's Henry clapping to the beat...

... and singing his "solo": "Have you ever seen a PIG wearing a WIG?"

Sharing

Esti is developing by leaps and bounds. (Still bald though. "Sha'r, walu," said the babysitter: "Hair? None.")

One milestone around this time is supposed to be empathy. And indeed, Esti has started sharing her food and her pacifier with us. Here she's munching on a whole apricot she grabbed from the fruit bowl.

Have some! Please!

Max and Zane and Henry

Goofing around in our apartment.

Max is 7, Zane 3 1/2. They have a really nice dynamic with Henry.

Legos. Henry can hold his own...

...but it's always Max who is really directing the operation.

Esti at nine months

Yesterday I got an email from Babycenter.com called "Your 9-month-old, week 1" that said:

Because of separation anxiety, this can be a tough time to be away from your baby for any length of time. But it may also be hard to travel with your baby right now. He's become used to his surroundings and familiar faces, and he likes predictability. So being on the road can disrupt his sense of security and routine, especially when visiting a new place or meeting lots of strangers.
At this age he doesn't grasp the concept of travel, but he'll realize he's in an unfamiliar place. Be ready for some cranky, clingy behavior and prepare plenty of distractions — picture books, noise-making toys, nesting blocks, hand puppets, and definitely his lovey, if he has one. Schedule plenty of downtime away from all the strangers to let him decompress.

It made me smile. I WISH we'd had the foresight to addict her to a lovey. Esti has been reliving her early infancy for the past 2-3 weeks: she nurses constantly and is unputdownable (and it's harder now that instead of 8 pounds she weighs closer to 20); she clings to me; she literally starts yelling whenever I leave the room (she even prefers me to Ken). For many naps and after the first 5-hour shift at bedtime she refuses to sleep in her portable crib but insists on sleeping with me, nursing through the night; and now I've been up for the past few hours (it's 5:30 am here) because tonight she refused to sleep even there, so now I'm typing in the dark with her asleep on the couch beside me.
It's true she is terrified of strangers -- which means, of course, everyone. But Moroccan women, perhaps because they are speaking an unfamiliar language and using unfamiliar voice tones seem to cause her particular anxiety. The default baby-soothing strategy seems to be handclapping and loud distraction efforts rather than quiet talk and rocking: the opposite of Nirmala. Add to this the fact that in Moroccan culture children seem to be public property: everyone (all ages, both genders, any level of education) feels comfortable coming up to my kids on the street or in the stairwell, literally kissing them, asking (in the case of Henry) for a "bisou" back. Esti and even Henry are never sure how to react to this. Who are these people? What do they want? Being blond doesn't help, but it's not just a foreigner thing; I think Moroccan kids get this kind of attention too.
Meanwhile Esti is growing very quickly, crawls with astonishing speed (disconcerting when she's following you around the house, e.g., to the bathroom), likes to "talk" back and forth in nonsense syllables, shows signs of understanding what I say, likes to "meep" my nose, is visibly getting more enchanted with Henry (fortunately he reciprocates), and so forth. She's beautiful. Though perhaps -- it is getting light now -- I might be ready to make another attempt to put her down in her pack-n-play?

Crossing the mindbridge

I still need to buy camera batteries. Besides, our life here is really not that picturesque. But I'll try to get some pix up when I can. Maybe this weekend?
Last weekend was spent hanging out in Rabat, seeing friends who had come to visit from Cairo, eating a ginormous fish Ken bought and cooked (the Moroccan word for fish is l'hout, literally whale, which was appropriate in this case), visiting the Oudaias and walking through the medina which yes, is picturesque, but you have seen it already. Well, not the Andalusi garden. Okay, we'll have to get those batteries.
Meanwhile. The striking (and lovely, and exasperating) thing about our time here is how much we've been seeing of our kids. Only now got something like full-time daycare ironed out. Till now, been spending a lot of time together. Some things Henry has said:
1)
H: ...
M: Oh, why did that cross your mind right now?
H (a few hours later): Daddy, when I think of something, it's like it crossed a mindbridge into my mind, and now I'm thinking about it.

2) We had borrowed some Arabian Nights stories, in a children's version but still fairly close to Galland's original, from Max and Zane.
M: Tell me a story.
H: Once upon a time I went fishing. And I caught a fish.
M: Oh! Was it a magic fish?
H: Yes. (But the story seems to be lagging.)
M: And did it tell you that if you didn't eat it but let it live, it would give you three wishes?
H: It did! And so I took it out, and I put it into my fish tank with my other fish that I wasn't going to eat, and one day when I was lifting the cover of the fishtank to give them food, the fish said, "I know what my first wish is." And I said, "What?" And the fish said, "I want to go visit my grandmother in the pond." So I took it to visit its grandmother.
M: And what happened then?
H: And then it said, okay. My second wish is to go back to your fishtank.
M (because interest in the story seems to be flagging again): And did it have a third wish?
H: Yes, one day I was lifting the cover to give it food again, because while it was out visiting its grandmother the other fish in the tank had eaten all its food, and it said, "My third wish is to stay here in your tank for the rest of my life."
M: Why did it need to wish that? Wasn't it in the tank already?
H: Well, usually I take fish out of my tank after a certain period of time. And it knew that.

Getting better all the time

Henry's actual birthday cake (a brownie from the Majestic bakery downtown), postponed due to illness but finally served on June 4. Perhaps it was too much rich food (cake at snacktime) and excitement, or the extended day at school, or the heat; whatever the reason, he felt too sick for cake on his birthday and threw up a couple of times that night. Slept in that morning and was fine.

Saturday, we went to the "American Club" in the Hassan neighborhood with Alex and Amy and fam; here are Henry and Zane cavorting in the playground. Max with soccer ball is visible in the background. The grownups sat under a sort of tent thing and ate cheeseburgers. Yes. Totally surreal. My normal snob self would look down on people who seek out places like this abroad, impoverished versions of their lives back home. With kids one's perspective changes, and safe green spaces (with, e.g., no cigarette butts in the sandbox) start to outweigh cultural exchange. Sad but true. Alex says the same.
Alex: So Morocco is pretty cool, huh?
Max (7): Yeah! It is.
Zane (3): Well maybe you can stay here, and I'll go back to Brooklyn with Mommy and Daddy.

My response has been to wonder why we came at all, but that may be overblown. Slowly we're finding things that make it worth it.
My ham-fisted attempt to get Henry a birthday present. Ken did better -- see the quasi-legos in the background. They have absolutely no toys here (no American consumerist glut of hand-me-downs) so it's fun to spoil them a bit.

Henry is four!

Before school today Henry got a birthday pain au chocolat. Which he ate, appropriately enough, in his birthday suit....

A playground!

Yes, it's in the middle of a traffic circle, and no, you can't walk on the grass, but at least there is a park and playground within easy walking distance of our apartment.

Another space where Henry can relax and do stuff he's good at, while I park myself transgressively in the sandbox or appropriately on a bench with the mommies and nannies.

It will probably be a good place for me to practice my darija; I've signed up for eight hours of lessons at the CCCL, the first one this afternoon. Also I expect it to be a good place to pick up a nanny for Esti, if our friends' recommendations don't lead to one.