EYES!

Well, I had a fantastic time in the USA and I now feel like a more legitimate citizen than I was just a month ago. I really enjoyed my stay at my Grandma Sheila's house in Boston and felt right at home once I got over my jet lag, which took a few days since I only slept about one hour on the entire trip over and made my mother sorely regret her nonchalant refusal of an unsolicited Benedril offer on the Barcelona-Paris leg. (When she did invest in some for the return journey, however, I made her pay even more dearly for second-guessing herself, as it turns out that I am in one of those several standard-deviations from the norm group of babies who enjoy a crystal meth-like boost from ingesting that seemingly benign cherry-flavored concoction). It turns out that I am not quite a dyed-in-the-wool city girl just yet, and I found that I quite like relaxing on a patio, throwing things down the sewer grate, going for Starbucks coffee and surveying the world from a comfortably elevated car seat during the countless short rides one must make everyday in order to satisfy the demands of such a lifestyle. We spent most of our time disconnecting from quotidian stress by lounging around the town of Hingham and some of its surrounding environs along the coast, although we did undertake a couple of reconnaissance missions into Boston, the most exciting of which involved riding on a commuter boat that, as you can imagine, was surrounded everywhere by AGUA! - still my favorite thing in the world. Anyway, you can get a good idea of my daily commitments by checking out all of the pictures.

The other fun thing - other than getting up at 6-7am every day to make sure that I really got my money's worth - was the language. They say that timing is everything and, at the outset of my vacation, I was just coming into my own in terms of realizing that people communicate with one another in ways not limited to smiling, shrieking, laughing, yelling and crying, and that I might be able to improve my interactive abilities by being more attuned to the nuances of the sounds they make at one another, what reactions they elicit and what it could all mean. In other words, I was starting to pick up a couple of words here and there in Barcelona and all of a sudden, just as I got my language epiphany, I was in another country with different words! Needless to say, I made haste in acquiring a bunch of new vocabulary, which included a few staple favorites: eyes, nose, mouth, tongue, foot, ear, hair, knee, on, off, all gone, all done. I found that you don't need much more than that to get by, and I developed a particular attachment to "eyes," which I found to also be a very effective greeting. Like if you walk up to somebody and point at their face and loudly proclaim, EYESSSSSS! "On" and "Off" are great for reminding everybody that you are completely aware if a specific light is on or not, and "all gone" and "all done," despite their subtle differences, are both useful for people light on attention span, like me.

Anyway, I think I fit right in there and I will be invited back often in the future, so I am already looking forward to all the fun things I might see and learn on my next visit, catching up with my Grandma Sheila, Aunt Valerie and Cousin Melaina again, and being able to go up and down all those stairs and step right outside into nature whenever I feel like it. In the meantime, I have more massive personal changes to report now that I have started spending a few hours every day in nursery school, so I will be posting again soon to update everybody on how we are all faring with that undertaking.