This Time Next Week

I will be back in my home away from home, Boston, Mass., as of this Friday. Actually, until my parents set me up with an apartment there for whenever I get the urge to explore my American side, I will be staying at my Grandma Sheila's house in Hingham, which I understand is not too far from the beach, so there should be plenty of water there, too. I have also been told that the water temperatures there are only about 13 Centigrades in mid-summer and, since this is something I can't even fathom given my limited scope, I will have to at least test it with my toes to see what that's all about. I plan on adhering to non-bathtub protocol, however, and making my father get all the way in the water before I even get anywhere near it. I will also be indulging in a new diet, seeing new types of trees, going to new cafes and baby shops, etc., so there should be a lot of head-spinning in store for me. If other babies talk to me in English, it will probably also freak me out a bit at first. As I mentioned in another post, I know a bunch of words like shoes, watch, nose, ears, in English, but they will probably not want to talk about those things. What I am looking most forward to, though, is following my cousin Melaina around now that I can run pretty fast, although careen would perhaps be more accurate verbiage. Anyway, I am looking forward to adding a few more people who aren't my parents to my list of favorites so that I have more names to warble when I wake up in the morning or wander around my apartment aimlessly. I don't know too much about an eight-hour flight across the ocean and I don't even get my own seat, so other people will probably have less fun than they might have otherwise, but we'll see how it all goes. Lots of food, beverages and books to distract me will be in order, but I am going to keep my eyes on that Daddy of mine to make sure he doesn't slip a roofie into my juice. I'll try to write soon once I get there!

The duality of me: enjoying the shade... 

...and a little sun. 

Action photo of me in one of my parks. 

A family portrait of me and my toys. 

I float. 

I have come to master the functionality of the bidet. 

I am often invisible behind the magic curtain. 

Good times is where you make 'em. 

Things that Obsess Me

Like most babies, I am a balanced person; yet there are certain things that obsess me from day to day. Since these obsessions are bound to change or evolve over time, I thought I would record a few so that I may laugh at myself in the future:

- Earrings; whether people wear them or not and the never-satisfactorily-answered "but, why?" wears me out whenever the subject is broached. For the moment, "pendientes" and "earrings" form the nexus of my bilingual sense of being and, with no preamble necessary, I can pick out either word from the mire of unintelligiblity that harnesses my universe.
- Toothbrushes; I love them and usually start my day by requesting an audience with Mommy's and Daddy's so that I may flaunt standard conventions of safety by careening around the homestead with them protuding from my mouth and my unique gait presaging the imminent disaster of my headlong collison with an unforeseen (to me) bookcase.
- Water, water and more water; I love water and don't care who knows it. Whenever I seem to be off on any non sequitor babbling half-remembered names of my relatives, I like to punctuate it with a few nods to, what is for me, the one-and-only liquid form.
- Making hideously obnoxious sounds by scraping plastic toys or Scandinavian blocks designed for other purposes against the floor (this interests me only if my Mommy is within eye-contact distance so that I may gauge the degree of her displeasure and determine an appropriate escalation; i.e., my Palestinian moment).
- My Auntie Inma; great hair, pretty tolerant of me, nobody knows why.
- Pretending to eat coins in order to agitate my Mommy; pretty much the same as scraping stuff on the floor.
- Lights; are they on? are they off? I like to take note of how it always seems to be one or the other. I guess you call it "binary." They are also linked to whether or not I can put the music on the stereo, so I am always attuned to their status.
- Shoes; it's really, REALLY funny to me how sometimes my parents wear them and other times they don't. And I can always know where to locate everybody else's footwear in a pinch. It's good to have conversational touchstones with everybody and, when I find myself at a loss for words, I often resort to the topic of shoes. I know where your's are even if they're not in your feet, I like to choose my own, and I enjoy wearing other people's. Que mas da?

That's about it for now. I'm mostly in the pool these days. Saturday I fell in for a few, brief unattended seconds, but I can paddle like a puppy, so I didn't get too upset. I can practically stroll the boulevard hands-free, which should enable me to go for my August Horchata by my lonesome by the time I head off to the USA in August, which I guess will make it an Horchata Slurpee. Anyway, here are some picture from my recent travails.