Jamie Chew's Web Log: Vol. 1 No. 7

2005-11-22 23:00 (Kristen) Jamie had one of his "let's walk for an hour before I have a sleep" nights, so it wasn't until 11:45 PM that he was asleep. John and I went to sleep an hour (or two, in John's case) later, but were awakened by the phone at 4:00 AM. We went back to sleep until our 6:20 wakeup call, and Jamie stayed asleep until it was time to get into the stroller and find our taxi, around 7:00. He woke up as he was put into the stroller, of course, but enjoyed the ride in the taxi all the way to Waterloo Station.

He liked the station, and was very pleased to watch trains from the window of the Eurostar train that we took from London to Paris. He played with his own trains, went with me to the club car to get coffee and Orangina, read books, and watched videos. He was very good, with only one or two incidents of "outdoor voice." He disliked the bathrooms, because they are noisy and for some reason the sway of the train is more pronounced, and insisted on being carried anywhere he wanted to go in the train after that.

We arrived at Gare du Nord around 12:00 Paris time, and Jamie fell asleep for close to two hours soon afterwards. We made it through the RER work to rule campaign on the way to the hotel (buying tickets from the Metro booth because the RER one was closed, and waiting for a nice young man to pick open the gate lock for us at a very stroller-unfriendly exit), and finally met up with Mom and Rod. We have a lovely little room that overlooks Blvd. Saint Michel, which is very economical in its use of space. We suited up and went to the Jardin de Luxembourg, where there is a playground that John has wanted to take his kids to before he ever had any. Jamie enjoyed it but it was very (unseasonably) cold, and I ended up going back to the hotel for an extra layer for him (a twenty-minute round trip). The wind was sharp, and Jamie ended up being carried by me or John through the gardens with his fleecy blanket wrapped around him to warm him up. Finally, we bought chestnuts from a street vendor, and he was very happy with those (he calls them "cookie.")

We walked down the Blvd. Saint Michel until we reached the square by the Seine, and looked around for somewhere to eat. We settled on La Fontaine Saint-Michel, across from one of the many Gibert Jeune bookstores in the Place Saint-Michel. The waiter was hilarious, giving John a hard time about wanting his cafe Liegois served at the same time as his oysters ("terrible! catastrophique! I'll never eat at your house!"). He ended up serving it to us anyway, after a long lecture on the proper order of courses in a real French meal, a little smile on his face. John didn't end up eating much of the Liegois after Jamie got a look at how much whipped cream there was on it. He ate some of my salade Landaise (salad with smoked duck breast), most of the cafe Liegois, and some of John's salade Nicoise. We walked around the Left Bank for a half hour or so before John pumpkined and we headed back to the hotel. Jamie also pumpkined, and fell asleep on the way back, around 5:30. I was desolate, and John said that he was going to bed anyway, and that he figured Jamie would sleep until the morning as he was quite sleep deprived. We'll see who is right tomorrow, but I'm not going to bed yet, as I anticipate Jamie will wake up in a few hours, and need entertaining until 2:00. Before that, I will go out with Mom and Rod for an herbal infusion, and enjoy a little of Paris before we leave tomorrow, very early, for Nancy and Tubingen.

2005-11-23 23:30 (John) Jamie woke up for a few hours last evening, but we all slept fairly well until Jamie woke us up at 6:00, only 15 minutes earlier than we'd planned to get up. We packed, and with some help from Larain and Rod carried our bags downstairs and into a cab to the outskirts of the TGV-Est construction area outside Gare de l'Est.

Jamie enjoyed the train ride to Nancy, but we were all getting quite tired by the time we arrived at 11:15. A nice, polite, helpful Frenchman, of whom there are in any situation generally none, helped us off the train with our bags, and turned out to be our friend Didier Remoussenard, whom we were meeting for lunch. He helped us across the street to the Flo, where Jamie fell asleep before eating a bite.

We enjoyed our meal with Didier and his wife Patricia for a while, then woke up Jamie after he'd been asleep for an hour, and managed to get a little fish soup into him before he melted down from fatigue. Kristen walked him back to the station, I packed her food to go, and we caught up with each other a few minutes before train time.

Curiously, Jamie was even quieter on the next leg of our trip, from Nancy to Plochingen via Strasbourg, Karlsruhe, Baden-Baden and Stuttgart. Or maybe we were just too tired to notice. I believe he watched his copy of Lilo and Stitch. We managed to make the three-minute change at Plochingen without major injury (my shoulder popped right back into join), and Carl Rasmussen met us at Tübingen with his car.

I think Agnes and Carl were extremely hospitable to us, it was certainly nice to see them again after a few years, and it's such a relief to be visiting with people with small children (Miro, 4, and Ezra, 1.5). I don't actually remember much of this evening though, despite it being only midnight, as I think I am about to fall asleep.

2005-11-24 20:45 (John) We all woke up at about 8:30 in the morning, reasonably refreshed. Jamie watched Rubbadubbers in bed for a little while, then I coaxed him downstairs to play with Ezra. They had a good time interacting the way two kids their age in a room full of toys do, which is to say playing separately with toys, apparently unaware of each other's activities until the other lets go of a favoured toy for a split second.

I thought that we were going to spend the rest of the day there, as tempting Jamie with the prospect of food downstairs wasn't getting us anywhere. When I finally told him that Ezra and Miro kept their big toy chest full of Brio track downstairs, he practically leapt down the stairs, and I should have thought of that sooner.

I fed him muesli while he played, and Kristen and I looked after Ezra and Jamie and finished getting lunch ready while Agnes went to fetch Miro from kindergarten. We all had lunch together, then around 14:00 I took Jamie out for a walk in the brisk November weather, where it took him all of ten minutes to fall asleep.

He stayed asleep through the first hour or so of our rambling walk with Agnes and Ezra down into town and all around shopping, and woke up after two hours' sleep in a toy store full of German wooden toys. A mere half hour (and one 30-piece puzzle and a few Brio track pieces) later, we managed to get him to a drugstore that sold fruit/muesli bars, which fueled him through the rest of the walk and made him mostly uninterested in dinner.

We had a quiet evening in, and got Jamie to bed by about 22:30 without excessive fuss, so I'm optimistic that he'll stay on schedule until we return home.

2005-11-25 17:57 (Kristen) Jamie woke up around 5 AM this morning, and was utterly inconsolable as we tried to get him to go back sleep. I think that he had a nightmare, or a frustration dream at the very least: as he started thrashing, I distinctly heard him say "no buttons!" which means no coat. I think that it took about half an hour of shushing and calming before he went back to sleep, and let us sleep in (with a little nursing bribe) until 8:40.

Today, we took Jamie (while awake) down to the old city for a walk and some lunch. John got him to go, rather than play with trains, by telling him that a toy store would be visited. Then we couldn't go out of the door fast enough. We took the bus, because we were a little sore from yesterday's exertions (Tuebingen is all one big hill) (John: one big hill would be too easy, Tübingen is several big hills, and no two points of interest are on the same one), and because the town was completely covered in snow. Maybe half an inch or so of fluffy white stuff covered the streets, which are pretty hilly, and so we put Jamie in a snowsuit borrowed from Agnes and Carl, and covered his feet with rubber boots and two layers of socks. We took his sneakers for any significant time inside. The boots and socks worked well, and his feet weren't cold at any point.

(John) Jamie was a little freaked out ("Oh no! Snow!") until I demonstrated to him that snow was composed of ice crystals, and like ice, quite tasty.

(Kristen) We looked around the old city for a bit and did some grocery shopping at the market in the main town square, where there is a 500-year-old city hall, and similarly dated, almost stereotypically German houses all around. Four days a week, there are food merchants and other people selling items in the square, which must be the way things have been for hundreds and hundreds of years. One of the vegetable sellers gave Jamie an apple, which was clean and crisp, and sweet. Then we went off to have lunch at a restaurant ("Die Kelter" - the wine cellar, housed in a renovated winery) suggested by Agnes, which had a number of other children in it and was roomy enough for Jamie to run around without causing too much trouble. He liked John's gnocchi, and also liked my "green cabbage" and potato puree with a poached egg on top. I have no idea how to translate the word that means "green cabbage" properly from German. Don't ask me the word in German either; ask John ("kale", according to Agnes; "green Kohl" according to Google or Babelfish (!)). He drank some nice dark apple juice, and ate the foam off my cafe macchiatto. He is very interested in my coffee, but I'm not willing to have him drink any yet. The foam, however, has no caffeine and is therefore acceptable. We had been playing tea party earlier in the day, and he may have wanted to have a live-action version of the game.

(John) Jamie vomited up a little of his plum tart at the end of lunch, but we suspect this is because he had too much in his mouth and while trying to extract it with his fingers reached too far down his throat.

After lunch, Jamie was a little punchy, and so we decided to take him to the toy shop without delay. He liked it, but was a little past his best before date when we got there, and so was a little too wound up for proper enjoyment. We did leave with another puzzle for him, which he can add to his rapidly-growing collection. He went back into the stroller, and was asleep when John and I went to see the late 15th-century church in town, and climbed a very steep hill to see the Schloss HohenTübingen at the highest point in town. It was high enough that we could see the next snowstorm coming in over the mountains, and we headed for home.

Jamie had fallen asleep late in the day (around 2:45), and he slept like a rock in the cool dark of the front hall until 5:30, when we woke him up from his long nap. It is now 6:25, and we'll be eating dinner in a few minutes before anticipating a rare quiet evening in.

It is funny to see Ezra and Jamie interact. Jamie is finally at the point where he can spend a good deal of time building things, and Ezra is at the age where he enjoys knocking things down or "undoing" things that others are doing. Jamie is finding this a little traumatic, but they're coping. John has been spending most of his time as referee, and I think is a little tired as I write.

2005-11-26 23:30 (John) Jamie woke up at 6:00 again this morning, but we were ready for him this time, and before he got too insistent about nursing, we read out the available menu to him, and he calmed back down with a water bottle. He spent the morning playing with Ezra and Miro, doing jigsaw puzzles, and playing with Brio trains and a Mighty Machines race car set.

We set out a little before noon in a minivan rented from Agnes and Carl’s car sharing pool with an eventual destination of Burg Hohenzollern, with a few stops antiquing along the way. Agnes and Miro were in the back, Kristen in the middle between Ezra and Jamie, Carl drove and I navigated. The kids took turns falling asleep, Agnes and Kristen did a good job of keeping order, and Carl and I didn't get too badly lost, so it was all in all a successful trip.

From Jamie's point of view, the most exciting part of it was probably watching some firemen erect a 30-foot Christmas tree at one stop. For us it was definitely the visit to the Burg. We wisely took the shuttle bus up from the last parking lot: it was a cold and blustery day, and the steep road was covered in snow and slush, not ideal conditions for the travel stroller.

When we got to the top, after working our way through the impressive series of defensive fortifications through to the gift shop, we spent an hour or so at the Christmas market until all of our toes were cold and we decided it was time to go home. Jamie slept through the entire visit to the Burg, until we transferred him back from the stroller to the minivan.

For dinner, we went to the Wurstküche, a restaurant specializing in local (Swabian) cuisine, with a trilingual menu (Swabian, German, English), good food and as with every place we've been to in Tübingen so far, an impressively child-friendly attitude. It's not unusual for shops in this town to have play areas for children, even if they don't sell children's merchandise. The Wurstküche a range of booster seats, colouring sheets, pencil crayons, a children's menu (each selection is only EUR 2.00), and when you order from it they bring the kids' food right away before the grown-ups'. Amazing.

Jamie is enjoying his stay here, following Miro around everywhere and doing whatever Miro does, checking every now and then to make sure that Ezra is doing the same to him and stopping to let Ezra catch up as necessary. He knows that Ezra and Miro speak German, and will say "Danke" to them instead of "Thank you".

2005-11-27 22:45 (Kristen) Jamie woke up again around 7, for a short argument about whether or not he could nurse... fortunately it was close to sunrise, and we didn't have to argue for long. John and Jamie went downstairs around 8:30 to leave me a little time to rest before it was time for Sunday breakfast. Jamie was very happy with his chocolate milk, but too full of energy to eat much more than a bit of cereal and a bit of egg. He spent the rest of the morning playing with trains, tracks for marbles, and puzzles.

John made lunch, and Jamie enjoyed the familiar meal of salmon, miso soup with rice, and vegetables. He wolfed back his zucchini and spinach for the first time in a while, proving yet again that he will tire of food but come back to it later. After lunch, we got into the car and went to visit Agnes's sister Ruth, and her family, who live in a beautiful house that they built in Öschelbronn, an hour's drive north of Tuebingen. There were more trains and more puzzles at Ruth's house, which Jamie enjoyed immensely. He also enjoyed the afternoon tea of cake and cookies, washed down with more chocolate milk. When we called him for dinner later, he came rushing over, crying out "Cake? Cake?", obviously on the lookout for more, knowing that this was a Good Place. He had only slept for an hour on the trip to Ruth's, and we all had high hopes that our children would sleep in the car on the way back in the peaceful, warm dark.

Not a chance. Each child stayed awake in his own way, making it not quite the restful trip we'd planned and hoped for. Now all the children are in bed; Ezra and Miro are asleep, and Jamie is with John, watching Thomas the Tank Engine and waiting for me to arrive upstairs. At least we had them in their pajamas already, cutting down on the amount of work we needed to do on this end to get them ready for bed. Clever parents, us.

Jamie has spent a great deal of time doing puzzles on this trip, and is showing a definite love of them. Of course, he has also spent a good deal of time playing with trains. He has watched very little television, and I have noticed that all the children we have spent time with (statistical sample: 2 families) have had no televisions, and lots of toys, puzzles, and books. German toystores (again, statistical sample=2 toystores in Tuebingen) are full of wonderful wooden toys that are interesting to play with and seem to have lots of scope for the imagination. I would like Jamie to have more of them.

Also, Jamie has spent much more time with me and John, and is more demanding on our time. This is both good and more stressful, in that I wanted very much to spend more time with Jamie on this trip, and in that I'm not used to being called to supervise his play quite so often and it makes it harder to accomplish things. However, spending so much time in his company has been wonderful.

(John) If Jamie says "thank you" to one of his German friends, we remind him it's "danke", which often results in his saying "Thank you, danke!" We're becoming a bit linguistically confused, shouting out "No! Nein!" to cover both bases when trying to preempt disaster. I've also learned useful non-phrasebook phrases like "stop pulling his hair" and "don't break that".

2005-11-28 15:50 (John) We left Jamie on his own in our attic bed last night for a few hours, listening in on the baby monitor as we stayed up to socialize with Agnes and Carl. Agnes has been quietly and nostalgically amused at how much attention we pay to Jamie, and I am warned that if/when we have a second child we will no longer be able to maintain our current alternating roles of parent on duty and parent off duty. I've been impressed with how independent and well-behaved Miro and Ezra are, and how little trouble they seem to be for Agnes. Last night though, Jamie would have been fine with no parent at all, as he didn't move at all for the first few hours of the night.

We spent the morning in town with Agnes and Ezra shopping for our remaining gifts for friends and family back home. I think Kristen's favourite part was going to Ostiander, not for its three anagrams (two are SOWPODS only), but because of the bookstore chain's understated "Seit (since) 1597". Jamie tried to buy a book bag there, dragging it to the cash and putting it on the counter, even getting the clerk to ring it up for him, asking "Pay?" but discovered to his chagrin that he had no cash.

We had salmon chazuke* for lunch, then I finished packing our purchases and took a nap while Jamie and Kristen went back downtown for a walk/nap. We'll have an early night tonight before taking a cab to the airport for our flight home in the morning.

* For the benefit of Scrabble players, words that are not in the Scrabble dictionary are marked with an asterisk.

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