So the other night...

...we had our friend David over for dinner. Later that night, I had a dream about him. In the dream, he was making me stand on this piece of paper whilst hundreds of creepy bugs were crawling on my feet. It was disgusting. Spiders, beetles, mini scorpions ... dreams are the best. I was starting to freak out a little, so I appealed to David and this is what he said:

"Okay. Now you're ready to learn the waltz."

A mind of her own

So the other day, I was busy digging in our fridge for something buried way at the bottom. I was focused on my task and only halfheartedly keeping Anna away from the fridge. (She LOVES to pull things out of the fridge and play with them. Her favorite is the lemon juice. She goes for that first and, if she gets it, she yells "Ju!" (for juice) and "oper" (for open). I feel kind of bad that I never let her have any...)

Anyway, after much digging, I noticed she had moved away from me and was strangely quiet. I turned around and saw that she had gotten an egg out of the fridge and was rubbing it on her cheek. Yes, that's right. Rubbing it on her cheek. I laughed and then held my hand out for the egg, and then she laughed and relinquished it calmly, as though she knew she could never get away with it. Precious.

A look at our apartment

Before we moved to Poland, all we knew about our apartment was that it had three rooms, some beds, a washing machine, and a balcony. While the house we were living in at the time had the best location, yard, and rent we will EVER have, a three-room apartment sounded like a palace. And it is. Sure #6 has its quirks (none of the cupboards really close all the way, for example), but we love the space and we love that we have next to nothing to store in so much space. So here's a look at each of the rooms. With the exception of our clothes drying rack and Anna's crib (thanks again Linda and Randy!), all of the furniture was already here, which was awesome for us.

Here's the entryway, decorated with our one Christmas decoration (thanks to Jen) besides our mini Christmas tree (as seen in a following photo). There is a lovely shelf and places to hang our coats to the left and the bathroom is off to the right. (Sorry, you're going to have to crane your necks to see some of these pictures. I still haven't figured out how to turn them right side up.)

Here's the only bathroom shot I have, but it's definitely the cutest our bathroom could look. I know the shower still looks like it has bacteria growing in the corners, but I gave it a good scrubdown so we should be safe... [duhn, duhn, duhn] Anna loves to play with her crocs (courtesy of Grandma Linda) in the bath because they shoot water out like mini sprinklers. And she just loves to try on shoes.

The next room to the left of the entryway is the living room/play room/Anna's bedroom. (Note: I didn't purposefully place Anna in these pictures, but she just couldn't imagine not being in them. Why else would I get the camera out?)

The next room on the left is our bedroom/TV room. This is the room without a door, which will be the focus of Trevor's film. Some of my favorite things about the room are the cool retro lamp/night stand/magazine rack (although you can't see it too well) and the big wardrobe behind me that you can't see either. Anna loves to move our clothes to the side and sit in it while she reads books.

To the right of the entryway, after the bathroom, is the kitchen. Please notice how shiny the countertops are. I don't think they've been so shiny since. I should mention that Anna also loves to sit in the cupboard under the sink while we're cooking or doing the dishes. We can't keep anything under there because that's her spot. One of my favorite things about the kitchen (and the bathroom, for that matter) is that the faucet will sometimes spit out some water of its own accord. It's probably just the excess water that was pumped up that was still in the faucet when we shut it off, but Trevor hates it and thinks the faucet is possessed and shooting poisonous liquid into our sinks. It's slightly unnerving and a little eerie when we hear water oozing out when we're in the other room. And every time it happens, Trevor rolls his eyes and groans in disgust, and it makes me laugh.

I don't have a picture of Trevor's office, but it has a lovely desk, single bed, and another closet/wardrobe and bookshelf. We have filled it up with many, many books and all of the camera equipment and computer stuff.

So there it is. Hope you enjoyed the tour.

A few complaints

So I'm learning Polish, little by little, and, while it has opened my eyes even more about language and the related brain processes, sometimes I just can't fathom ever really speaking well. I know we're only going to be here a few more months so it'll be hard to tackle it all before then, but still. The language is so very crazy* that I sometimes wonder if my poor brain can handle it. Sure, I can understand the grammar and I can come up with a sentence or two if you give me ten minutes, but there are so many differences between English and Polish that I'm just now realizing that I'm on, like, step 2 of 1,000. Therefore, I just wanted to vent a bit and give you all an idea about what I'm having to learn. And then I'll be done complaining.

*I realize that I am running the risk of sounding extremely ethnocentric and ignorant, all at the same time, so to be fair, I'm going to share some complaints about English as well.

I'm not looking for a pat on the back or commiseration so much as a way to express how learning about Polish has expanded my understanding of language in general.


Some quirks about Polish that make me grateful for English:

• I don't think I'll ever understand the purpose or need for nouns to have genders. Polish nouns are either masculine, feminine, or neuter, and every adjective has to be altered according to the gender of the noun it is modifying. Example: There's no "good book, good picture" similarity here. In Polish, it's "dobra ksiaka, dobry obraz" ("dobra" and "dobry" are the feminine and masculine versions, respectively, of the word "good"). So that basically means for every adjective I learn, I have to learn several versions of it so I know which one to put with each kind of noun.
• There's also no one way to make a word plural in Polish. Think how easy it is in English. Just slap an 's' on the end and you're there. . . usually. But in Polish, it could be anything. Sometimes you add an 'i,' sometimes you change an ending 'a' to a 'y.' Other times you change a few more letters, like with snake and snakes: waz and weze.
• I think the biggest difference between English and Polish, and the thing I have the most trouble with, is that Polish uses cases. There are seven different cases, so a word like "chicken" will have seven different forms, depending on how you use it in a sentence. (Not to mention seven OTHER forms if you're talking about chickens, plural.) Example: If it's the subject of the sentence, it's "kura." If you're talking about many chickens, it's "kury." If it's the indirect object, as in "I'll give the chicken some food," it's "kurze." If it's the direct object, as in "I love the chicken," it's "kure." If you're using it it in an instrumental way, as in "I got here by the means of a chicken," it's "kura." If you're talking about it with certain prepositions, as in "in/on/next to the chicken," it's "kurze." If you're directly calling to the chicken, it's "kuro." (On the upside, that last case is becoming more and more rare, so maybe I won't have to learn that one as thoroughly.)
• I just learned that for every past tense verb (walked, saw, etc.), you have to differentiate between the gender of who you're talking about. If you want to say "he had" or "she had," it's "on mial" and "ona miala."

Some quirks about English that make me grateful for other languages:

• What's up with our crazy alphabet and pronunciation? (Remember the endless lists of homophones: wear, ware, where?) One very wonderful thing about the Polish alphabet is that the letters ALWAYS make the same sound. So you can basically read anything, once you know the alphabet, with pretty good pronunciation. (I just looked at the word "thoroughly" that I typed earlier. That's a perfect example of English madness.)
  
• There are so many tenses in English. In Polish, there are basically three: past, present, and future. But English? Here are a couple examples: "We had kept them waiting all day" or "I will have been teaching for 5 years."
• You can say "I must" and "you must," but you can't say "I musted" or "you musted."
  

I know this was long, complicated, and rather boring, but boy do I feel better for having gotten it out. It is pretty interesting though, to see how it works in foreign brains and to have your eyes opened to see how crazy English seems to other people. Basically, I'm just glad I already speak it.

I'd also love to hear about crazy quirks in other languages, if you'd be so kind to share.

The charms of Anna Summertime

As all good parents do, I have been pondering what it is exactly that makes my daughter cooler than any other kid. No, I'm kidding. I won't go that far. But Anna does have many unique traits that make her a genius, completely adorable, and even hilarious — all at the tender age of 19 months. While this list is in no way exhaustive, here are just a few to bring a little "summer" sunshine to your day:

• She learned to say "happy" on Trevor's birthday, but it usually sounds like "ha-pay." Cute.
• She's so innately girly. I maintain that she did not learn this from me, as I don't think I'm hugely girly myself, and her love of all things feminine started at a very young age. The first time I gave her a ring for a quart jar to play with, she picked it up and instantly put it on her wrist like a bracelet. Even now, she wears a necklace all day and a bracelet if she can find one. Anna wore Trevor's film festival pass for weeks. She will also put anything around her neck that somewhat resembles a necklace, like the phone cord and a gigantic, heavy string of Christmas-tree beads. (True story. She cried when I took them off before she went to bed.) Whenever she puts on jewelry or points to my earrings, she says either "pretty," "nice," or "cute." She also loves to try on shoes, her own or ours. Lastly, she LOVES to carry a purse. She'll go from room to room, carrying a pink toiletry bag, and she couldn't be happier.
• For many months, Anna has loved honking noses. She started out honking everyone else's (squeezing it and making sure you emitted a beep of some kind), and then one day I told her it was her turn and she let out the cutest little "eep." And she still loves it.
  
• She loves to play hide and seek. This mostly started one day when I went to get her after her nap. I opened the door to her room and she quickly laid down and hid her face. I started looking around the room, under the table and behind the couch, calling "Anna... Anna... Where are you?" And then she giggled and I "found" her. This became a daily ritual, and sometimes she'd even do the calling of her name. Now when she hides her face behind anything (a book, her bib), she'll call out "Anna!" to let us know that we need to find her. It doesn't get more adorable than that.
• Like any toddler, she loves to say "no." But she doesn't just say it. Sometimes she whispers it, like when we ask if she has a poopey diaper. (That must be her feminine modesty kicking in.) Sometimes she says it sweetly with a little rise at the end if we're asking her silly questions. Other times, she scrunches up her nose and keeps it scrunched while she grunts "no" when she doesn't want to eat the food I'm trying to get her to eat.
• Many months ago, Anna learned how to blink on command. While it was adorable at the time, it later complicated things when we were teaching her to say "please." Because the two words sound so similar, she started to blink when we'd ask her to say "please." And then it just became funny. If she wanted a treat, she would blink. We thought how funny that would be as she got older, when others wouldn't know what to do with her supposed politeness, but a couples months ago she finally caught on. She now says "bee" with regularity, especially when she wants a bite of your food or when she wants you to read the Polish version of "Beauty and the Beast" 20 times a day.

Now I know we all have our biases, but doesn't she sound like an absolute delight? Mimi, our 16-year-old neighbor from New Jersey, said that if she lived with Anna she would stop hanging out with all her friends because Anna was enough fun to keep her completely entertained. I concur.

Happy Birthday T-party!

I know I'm a couple days late, but Trevor still deserves a nod for being born 26 years ago. (Thanks, Linda, for your part in that. I will be forever grateful. And you too, Randy.)

So we spent Friday (the 4th) exactly the way Trevor wanted: watching movies. We watched one during breakfast, another during lunch, and another over dinner. We ate some raspberry cream cheese cake (take note of my kindergartener cursive) and relished in our lovely laziness. It was a good day. Here are a few of my favorite recent Trevor pictures that the birthday Scrooge grudgingly allowed me to put up.

Our Polish Christmas (an addendum)

I forgot to mention a couple of things about Christmas in Poland. First, there are these huge, nest-like bundles in so many of the trees here, and Trevor kindly informed me that the bundles are actually a parasite more commonly known as mistletoe. Whoa!

Secondly, I just thought it was crazy that enormous fireworks (like the kind that I know are so illegal in Utah) have been on sale here for the past month, and people have been setting them off the entire month. What a way to celebrate Christmas. We feel like we live in a war zone with these huge explosions and rockets taking off right unexpectedly outside our window. The fireworks also played a major role in our New Year's Eve experience. At the stroke of midnight, I swear every citizen of Lodz decided to light some fireworks. It was so surreal. Imagine your living room standing in the middle of the Stadium of Fire...with a sleeping baby in the next room. Not only was it so insanely loud, but it was crazy to see a million huge, glittering fireworks shoot up right from our neighborhood. It was so weird to see them among apartment buildings and tall trees. We ran up to the top floor of our building to check out the scene below and it was amazing. The insane loudness continued for about an hour and then eventually tapered off. But the fireworks haven't stopped. Every now and again I'll here another gunshot-like explosion from some latecomer and I'll think to myself, "Ah yes. Happy New Year...even now that it's January 3rd."