Kim/Bob

새해 복 많이 받으세요

2012-01-23T13:44:00.000-08:00

Wishing you all much luck in the new year.

Auntie Did saves Christmas!

2011-12-04T13:04:00.001-08:00

Auntie Did has just become a 'European Liaison', or something. Anyway, she's being paid to schmooze in the Old World. So what do you do with a weekend off in Brussels? Why, it's just six hours from the charming hypermarchés of central France!

Our poor Dickensian heroes were debating how seriously to tackle Christmas this year. They were even wondering whether to bother investing in a Christmas tree. Suddenly, with a glissando of chimes, Auntie Did swooshes in from magical Belgium and, with additional financial support from the Fairy Grandmother, furnishes them with a wondrous, marvellous, miraculous Christmas tree!

No, no, the other Christmas tree!!

Aww... With Tinkerbull, the tiresomely enthusiastic seasonal bovine.

So rather than take Did in our new car through the picturesque mountains of the Auvergne, we took her to two -- yes two -- hypermarchés in the fantastical heavy commercial districts of Lempdes and Le Brezet.

We'd been past the Marché St. Pierre in the old town with Jinu in the morning, but the dreary anorexic excuses for festivity that Mother Nature was offering us left us unispired. By comparison, the artificial conifers of the Retail Kingdom of Polymers were plump and voluptuous, right down to the imitation pine cones. And what variety! We were touched by the beauty of the simulated frosts. We were enthralled by the neo-industrial Orwellian anthracite grey tree, which would have been quite the statement decorated in silver tinsel and blanching neon lights. But of course, in the end, we went classic.

Man triumphs over Nature, with easy-to-follow assembly.

Having adorned the dwelling, Auntie Did was not to stop there. The Clermont-Ferrand Christmas lights were fired up on Saturday evening, and Auntie Did took us there in her magical #9 bus. Sure it was cold and blowing a gale, with intermittent showers, but did that stop Auntie Did from taking us up in the Ferris Wheel? Rhetorical question, fool!!

I'm missing photographic evidence, though. You'll have to imagine us dangling fifteen storeys up in the gondola, with Jinu's pushbike and three screaming eleven-year olds on board, cross-winds spraying us in the face with a fine mist of drizzle, Jinu as still and silent as an undertaker. Image-wise all you get are mood-telling shots from Auntie Did's Blackberry down below.

The other big thing, of course, was for Auntie Did and Ian to meet. He was her youngest nephew to date -- she didn't meet Jinu till he was seven months. He smiled his coy smile at her, and was magically ungrizzly while supine in her presence for about half an hour. That's about twenty-five minutes more ungrizzliness than he can typically muster. Then he demanded pickles.

Hooray for Auntie Did!!

Grands

2011-11-19T22:37:00.000-08:00

Cheese in a hotel.

The Grandparents arrived in Clermont just as their marriage odometer was clicking over to 40 years. It was a low-key celebration but the goon and coon were superb, and the company obviously without peer.

Champers in a nearby apartment.

Their arrival coincided with start of semester, which is to say my debut as a French lecturer. Thus, I could fret comfortably about my grammar without worrying about dinner.

Incidentally.. My French? Just precisely good enough. For instance, it was three weeks before I realised I didn't know the French verbs for 'add' and 'subtract'. That this is even possible is testimony to how little we use them in mathematics, I guess. But I had few moments of complete incoherence, so long as I stuck to my familiar abstract territory and didn't wander into the neighbouring minefields of pendulums, shock-absorbers, geological formations, or philosophy.

Jinu, meanwhile, was being a metro train.

A #419 metro train, to be precise. Actually, this was a little out of character, since usually we were all buses. He referred to all of us by our route numbers only for weeks. Gran was particularly amazed at his dedication when Ian cried in bed and Jinu ran in urgently yelling, "the number 5 bus is crying!!" I think the paediatric OT in her was trying to suggest the gentle end of some kind of spectrum. Grandpa helped put this in context.

There was considerable discussion about the proper order of the colours. The only canonical solution, of course, was to follow the optical spectrum, with higher energies towards the top. For the record, Jinu was in bed through all of this.

Ian has his enthusiasms too.

Like Jinu he seems to be a big fan of Gutenberg technology. But he has also continued his early sincere interest in face-staring. Much more so that I remember with Jinu.

His other thing is a constant demand to be involved. His gaze from his pad on the floor follows us across the room, until he cries when we step out the door. It's impossible to eat dinner without him.

Cute!

Wearing thin.

It was pretty darn nice to have dinner served for us every evening. I slowly regained the art of adult conversation in the evenings, between reports of Jinu's idiosyncrasies of the day.

Actually, in looking back through the photos around the house, I started to notice a pattern.

Interesting that they reflect exactly the pairings of HJ and me with the lads. I'd always assumed that our separation into teams was just a matter of practical necessity -- HJ being the one with the boobs, and Jinu being glued to what's left. But now I'm starting to wonder if there's something deeper at work. Could it be that I just don't find babies as engrossing?

But I digress. Apart from adult conversation, one of the other perks of grandparents was that I drank more wine in September than during my entire time in France to that point. And that despite my resolution on arrival in wine-land to sink more plonk at home. HJ took the wind out of that resolution by getting pregnant. Grandpa, on the other hand, was incorrigible.

Gran whole-heartedly took over Jinu's lunch-time school pick-up, enjoying watching the dynamics of the clusters of French nannies and American Michelin brides who gather outside the school gates at 11:25. Then, when the teachers went on strike, she joined the army of French grandmothers which is dispatched on such occasions, filling the parks and the playgrounds of France.

Actually, the Grands did pretty well for French clichés, getting a teachers' strike, a public servants' strike, and a week-and-a-half public transport strike in their one month here. Plus, they got plenty of rude and disinterested service in the shops, which kept them happy.

Jinu, meanwhile, was introducing Gran and Grandpa to the sights of Clermont-Ferrand.

Occasionally, Gran and Grandpa would sneak off to a nearby town alone for a slightly different viewpoint.

Grandpa investigates the spa-town suburb of Royat.

And then before you know it, it's over, and they're gone. Jinu, forewarned that we'd be seeing off Gran and Grandpa's train at 8:00am the next morning, woke up at 3:00 screaming in fear that we'd missed them. Or that we'd missed the train. It can be hard to ascertain his priorities.

But it was great, eh? Ian turned three months two days later, and the really hard part was over.

Some random unexplained photos to finish off.

Grand Paris

2011-11-11T04:29:00.000-08:00

Two months since my last post? Really?? I'd better start with a chart, then.

Figure 1: Number of locally situated family members, as a function of time.

Right. Let's begin at the peak.

A grand occasion requires a grand location, and we organised for the grand parental baton to be handed over in the Hall of Mirrors of the Palace of Versailles. I carried an 18kg sack of beef in ritual tribute.

Halmeoni maybe left our apartment six times during her two months them, and that includes trips to the supermarket. So her flight out of Paris was a crucial sightseeing opportunity. HJ selected Versailles as the archetype of European opulence. Not a bad choice for representing the continent to a first-timer.

Jinu checks the map.

Gran and Grandpa specifically arranged their flights to get to see her for the first time since the wedding. It was an amusing confusing trilingual day, with grandparents running in all directions. Jinu got no sleep and nearly beserkered multiple times, until the shoulder-coma in the grand hall at closing time. But they had a train.

Some random photos, none of really capture the imperial insanity of those gardens:

Now I'm curious too. Prolly something motorized.

Big hedge!


Jinu and Halmeoni find chestnuts in a crazy anarchistic modernist addendum of the gradens (post-Louis). Those trees are not aligned! Still, I doubt they're really allowed on that grass.

Oop, a touch of imperial insanity!

No photos of Ian or HJ who, tired enough already, stayed at the hotel.

We five had rolled up from Clermont one day before the Aussies. Ian loves hotels and Jinu loves TVs, so it was a reasonable first night.

The next day was like a rerun of Operation Groce! only in a more expensive location. We had to move to a new hotel three doors up the street to meet Gran and Grandpa at 11:00am. Thus, the first Paris sight Halmeoni saw was at 7:30pm.

When you've got two days to see all of Paris, and you're hauling 25kg of children, you need transportation. It was a coin-flip between the bus and the boat, and we landed on the boat because I like saying Bateaux Mouches. Paris' photo opportunities are conveniently laid out along the Seine, so it works.

Not so many photos of Gran and Grandpa, because they were usually on the other side of the camera.

And that's really all we saw of Paris. It's too bad we didn't get to walk to the Eiffel Tower. I have been there numerous times now, and every time I'm gobsmacked by its incredible size as you stand underneath. From even just a few blocks away its immensity is lost in its meccano-like appearance.

Still, she was happy. Gran and Grandpa too, who mainly wanted to see the grandkids at this stage. And Jinu would be happy going to the dentist in Paris:

Then finally, there was the goodbye at Charles de Gaulle airport, and the rush of family was starting to dissipate.

See you in a year or two...

Watching her plane take-off.

I lied about which one was hers.

Some words on poo

2011-08-29T04:31:00.000-07:00

Jinu's stomach bug has developed. Not in the medical sense, but in the literary sense.

Jinu: [Sitting on potty, gesturing at his own belly.] The Stomach Bug is pushing out, and pushing out. It makes a hole, and it flies out, bzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz... [Pinched thumb and index finger trace out a zigzagging flight.] ...bzzzzzzzzz, and it flies over my head. "Whaaaah! A Stomach Bug!!" [Ducks in fear.]
And then it buzzes onto your head.
Dad, say, "Shoo! go away!"

Me: [Sincerely] Shoo, Stomach Bug! Go away!!

Jinu: Bzzzzzzzz... And then the Stomach Bug flies up into the tree, and it makes honey.

Ah, sweet nectar of the bowel.

Actually, I'm jealous that I didn't think of this story-line myself. HJ deserves some credit for translating `stomach bug' into Korean literally, but it was Jinu who took it and ran with it.

I'm pleased he likes talking about poo. I don't trust people who don't like talking about poo -- it strikes me as duplicitous. Surely everyone likes talking about poo. Otherwise, you would have stopped reading by now, right? (You weren't eating, were you? If so, you might want to come back later.)

Yes, some of Jinu's best creative work is done at the potty. Every sacirfice to the Porcelain Gods is honoured with dutiful admiration, and often praise: "Waaow, it looks just like a --

snake!
fig baguette!
tiiiiny lizard!
ramp in an underground carpark!"

Or, on a really good day, in reverent tones: "A Crikey Poo!!"

We're still working on getting him to go there in the first place. Rampant procrastinator, he is. But when he finally goes, he does good work.

Back to life

2011-08-28T22:12:00.000-07:00

France is waking up. Expect eight weeks annual leave in France; many of our professional friends get twelve. And August is universal slack-time.

In fact, it's mandatory. The university closes from late July to late August, and I am officially banned from my office. I can apply for special permission to enter on pre-specified days, but they warn you not to use the elevator -- if it breaks down you will starve to death. Also, bring your own toilet paper.

Thus, we are the only couple we know who were not at least three weeks away from Clermont this summer. And it's worth pointing out that, while in the Anglo world vacation typically means tourism, in France it means nothing but unwinding. Every French family from the upper middle class on owns a summer house in the countryside, and those that don't will rent a gîte. Somewhere where there's nothing to do, no internet, just good food and pleasant surrounds. It's admirable.

(We visited a friend's summer house in the Périgord for a weekend last year, at a time when I was to busy to blog about it. It was glorious. We ate fois gras and drank superb wine until 11:00 every night under the stars, while the kids explored the endless ramshackle garden. Maybe now's the time to finally publish some photos of that fabulous trip, to give a taste of the French summer life. So see below.)

Anyway, the fully-laden minivans have been rolling back into the city this week. The government offices are back to full hours, the local café's reopened, and our family doctor's working again.

I went back to the office a few days. It was hard for HJ, despite her mum being still in the house. Presumably things will get easier once Jinu's back at school, and a sort of natural circadian rhythm will set into the household, but the first week or so are going to be tough work even with the Aussie grandfolks in town.

Meanwhile, now that Ian has significantly defragilified, we're going in the opposite direction, trying to squeeze as much French summer as we can into Halmeoni's remaining days in France. We started slow, with a day-trip to Lac Chambon, nestled amongst the Puys.

Château de Murol in the background.

Halmeoni in the foreground.
(About to pick blackberries in the midground.)

Jinu happy to be at the beach.

Ian happy to be outside.

At work.

Baywatch shot.

Korean barbecue to finish the day.

Tomorrow's trip to Le Mont-Dore might be postponed a couple of days due to Jinu's stomach bug. The plan was for some cable-car and power-looking action atop the Puy de Sancy, followed by a douche nasale gazeuse at the établissement thermal. Maybe later in the week. Then we head to Gai Paris next week for the handing on of the grantparental baton. Three grand-parents in the same room? Lucky we got them a second grandkid!

____________________________________

And now, last summer...

Jinu, always first awake, and me, just this side of hung-over.

HJ up third.
The others, including the kids,
had better mastered French summer life.

So already starting to flag by the time Nina woke.

Exploring the neighbourhood.

Picnic with the gang at the local Chateau.

Jinu with Cat-Cat, our generous host.

Then cool off with a dip.

The dinner table at Cat-Cat's house.

It was the beginning of the end for our Canon PowerShot,
which lent the trip a slightly hallucinogenic feel.

We also visited the nearby Grotte de Font-de-Gaume on this trip, to gander at some 25,000-year-old bison. It's one of the few caves still accessible to the public, though it's very strictly regulated, and obviously no photos. It makes the ubiquitous Roman ruins seem like just a bunch of run-down shacks from the 1960s. It really throws the human condition into sobering perspective.

Operation Groce!

2011-08-18T13:34:00.000-07:00

Objective: Buy groceries.

Launch: 10:25am, Thurs 18-08-2011
(Our fourth wedding anniversary. Go team!)

Operatives: Full équipe (Halmeoni, HJ, Bob, Jinu, Ian)

Report
-------------------------

10h24: Leave apartment fully equipped. Drop off mounds of accumulated rubbish & recycling. Jinu leads way enthusiastically to parking garage.

10h45: Southbound on Cours Sablon, Ian screams. (Hungry.) Pull into parking spot for quick feed. Leave on climate control. Make small-talk with Halmeoni.

11h03: Car won't start. (Dead battery.)

11h06-11h42: Unsuccessfully try to convince Frenchmen at traffic lights to jump-start car. Also, discover that most cars are no longer equipped with jumper cables.

11h43: Unnamed Frenchmen in utility van has pique of conscience. Returns to say that, actually, he does have cables. Jump-starts car.

11h59: Start drive to recharge battery. Needing a decent whack of kilometres, end up quickly on motorway out of town. On a whim, end up at Château de La Batisse, a mid-range castle and sincere B-grade tourist attraction.

12h22: Contemplating casual visit, step out of idling car to ask random car owner if he has jumper cables, just in case.

12h23: Language-haggle with a Dutchman*.

[*This is the process whereby two foreigners meet in a mutually foreign language, usually each presuming the other is local. The result is a ping-ponging through all spoken languages until optimal comfort zone is established.]

12h24: After indicating Pythonesque knight in nearby wooden shack, Dutchman explains imminent "mediaeval theatrics" in the Château gardens.

Seriously consider going to see mediaeval theatrics. Force myself to focus. Focus! Groceries! Groceries! Slap myself twice. Step back into still-idling car.

12h56: Arrive in the dizzying world of heavy commercial and hypermarchés. Confused and disoriented, accidentally drive in to KFC for lunch.

13h04: Sit down to eat. Realize that I am eating artificially generated poultry literally running with cooking grease. Can barely choke it down, but continue out of a sense of obligation. Apologize to Halmeoni for this, her first meal out in France.

Incredibly, even Jinu refuses to eat the chicken, taking only the french fries, which I notice he is now dipping in mayonnaise. Only Ian is satisfied with his lunch.

Swear to myself to never ever return to KFC ever again.

13h29: Jinu plays gleefully in the KFC kid's play area for 25 minutes. May return to KFC again.

Dimly hear laughter behind me. Turn around and see for the first time that the Colonel looks exactly like Satan.

13h58: Board car. Leave KFC car park for hypermarché, located directly opposite across six-lane road with traffic island.

14h21: Arrive in hypermarché car park.

14h26: Commence grocing!

14h28: Almost crushed to death in back-to-school aisle.

14h56: Jinu demands potty. This takes a very long time, since getting to the toilets requires walking past the outdoor play sets, the Cars 2 cross-merchandising, and the ride-on mowers.

16h50: Check-out counter. Pay more for groceries than we ever have in our lives. (Don't know when we'll next have a car.) This doesn't include the fruit & veg, to be bought at the fruit & veg market next.

16h54: Collapse in hypermarché café with a bowl of strawberry ice-cream, two sirops, a Perrier, and a pair of boobs.

17h23: Take Jinu to toilets while Ian continues his hard work pulling whatever he can out of those boobs. Stop by hypermarché bookshop on the way back, where Jinu plays with digger toys while I completely fail to find any interesting books to buy for him, despite my psychologically exhausted impulse-buying mentality.

17h59: Pack up boobs, bottles, head back to car.

18h07: Drive to Rouge et Vert (meat and veg market) before closing time of 19h00.

18h18: Get in door. Power through. Jinu still in good mood despite no nap and now a perpetual state of disciplining.

Change Ian in front seat of car. (Back seat now unusable due to baby seats at both access points. HJ has been climbing through from the driver's seat.) Ian looks pretty cute propped up in the fake leather upholstery.

19h20: Back home! Unload winnings at front door, flashers on.

19h32: Jinu leads enthusiastically to take car back to parking garage. Halmeoni cooks clams and Ian gets back on the teat.

19h44: Home again from parking garage! Unpack groceries. (The Rouge et Vert -- the only place to sell East Asian rice in Clermont -- sells it only by the kilo, not by the 10k, so unpacking is like sandbagging for a flood. We took 18kg, leaving 3kg on the shelf out of consideration for future customers.)

20h24: Finished unpacking.

Eat clam soup. Is good.

20h36: Napless Jinu starts to lose mind, says nothing but "moo" for five minutes (camera only made it out for last half a minute).

Yes it is, Jinu. Yes it is.

------------------------
Post-script.

Next day was Operation Flat-Pack: Collect furniture from local Ikea clone. We took Halmeoni to a great restaurant. Ian screamed, and Jinu smashed crockery.

Galactagogues

2011-08-16T02:48:00.000-07:00

For a crucial biological process, lactation is delicate and unpredictable beyond any sense of logic.

Psychology is clearly a major factor*. The best lactation moments have all been preceded by visits by friends, a great sleep, or even a particularly tasty cantaloupe. But the other big thing is the galactogogues.

Galactogogue.

As she was with Jinu, HJ's been prescribed domperidone, though it's not clear if it's making much difference. Fenugreek, on the other hand, is apparently indispensible. HJ forgot to drink her tisane for a whole day and she practically dried up. Too many variables to draw firm conclusions from that, but I do remember getting onto the tea late in the process with Jinu, and getting a noticeable boost.

(In France lactation teas are mainstream -- every pharmacy sells a brand-name tisane of fenugreek, anise, caraway, fennel and verbena. In Canada I had to scoop dried herbs into a paper bag in a crystal-filled apothecary, which was kind of fun, but harder than necessary.)

So is this what it comes down to? In order feed their children, a percentage of human women need to strain herbs through their bodies?

I recall hearing a sociobiological historian (or something) interviewed on the CBC's Spark, pushing the theory that technological innovation was not a by-product of human evolution, but rather an essential enabler of our evolution. He cited, in particular, the early invention of the baby sling which made us effectively prosthetic marsupials, allowing us to push out our huge-brained children still half-baked. (Incidentally, evolution should carry this further: The State might have to pay an extra seven months of maternity leave, but I know at least one woman who would have loved to have pushed out one of these:

)

Anyway, the point is that this compulsory fenugreek thing seems to be taking that idea a little far. Who ever said breast-feeding is natural?

Whatever the case, we're still clinging onto this partial breast-feeding game by the skin of our desperate, needy, disappointed infant gums. I've been pretty sick the last few days, putting more pressure on HJ and effectively pushing down production. Focussing on the me for a second, it puts a huge guilt on me, knowing that every hour of daytime sleep is measurable in millilitres of my son's essential nutrition.

Moreover, the current situation is clearly not sustainable far into the future. In September, I go back to work, and our full-time cook and bottle-washer goes back to Korea. We'd hoped the supply would stabilize by then, but it's barely holding level now. It'll just be a case of suck it and see.

___________________________________

[*Noodling around after my recent post on booby dogma, I found this quote from a medical book review on the psychology of breast-feeding from 1941: "It clearly emerges that the nurse is the dominating figure in the successful establishment of lactation. Too stern a technique, too rigid a programme, and a lack of sympathetic understanding of the emotional background of the nursing couple--mother and baby--spell failure." I guess some of them never got the memo.]

Lullaby to a Nursing Mother

2011-08-15T13:34:00.000-07:00

Hush-a-bye,
Hush-a-bye,
Lul-ly lul-lay, lul-ly lul-lye.
The hundred thousandth lullaby
Caresses him to sleep, serene
Adrift on brother's trampoline.
And as th'angelic face rebounds
A-slumber 'midst the crash of sounds
I sing my air to you on grounds
Of ne'er a single note composed
To soothe the one that surely needs
It most.

Hush-a-bye,
Hush-a-bye,
Lul-ly lul-lay, lul-ly lul-lye.
Heed not his sniff, his gentle sigh,
his cozy moan, his placid growl,
the rutch of poorly mastered bowel.
His blanket's straight enough, my dear,
so close your eye and close your ear,
and know that he's forever near.
He needs you not, and rest assured
That when he does he will not go
Ignored

Hush-a-bye,
Hush-a-bye,
Lul-ly lul-lay, lul-ly lul-lye.
His perfect mouth has sucked you dry,
And fully laden, set adrift.
For though, when still aboard your ship
He accomp'nied you through every dream,
He now must go on private steam.
Fret not---you meet again downstream.
Your love for him has been expressed.
Now lay your weary bosom down,
And rest.

Hush-a-bye,
Hush-a-bye,
Lul-ly lul-lay, lul-ly lul-lye.

One month

2011-08-12T12:52:00.000-07:00

Today is his month birthday. For Jinu, that came with a stream of baby photos. For Ian, it came with a terrible father flu. Fortunately, I seem to be the only one to get it hard [touch wood], but it ruled out the baby photos. In fact, I need to crawl into bed right now. But I thought I would at least show some respect to the man by putting up some more photos.

Side note: He's burgeoning. Official birth height: 51cm. One month: 58cm.

Could that be true? We suspect now the birth measurement was off by a centimetre or two (we reconfirmed the current one).

Outside

Inside

FORECAST on the triple-triple, C on the DLS -- 196 points.
(Ian's doing well, too.)

Ian and Halmeoni.

Healthy.

Is this how favorites are formed?

2011-08-08T12:25:00.000-07:00

Here's the story all HJ's girl-friends told us. Right up to the birth of Secondo, they could not imagine any baby being as precious to them as gorgeous baby Primo. But then Secondo comes out so adorable and secretly, guiltily, they have a new treasure.

Question: Is this a woman's story? Between feeding and personal survival, HJ hasn't the time to discuss helicopters and build automatic train-washes with Jinu, let alone take him to the library (to get books about helicopters and train-washes). So while Ian is literally attached to HJ, Jinu is metaphorically suckered on to me.

It's a little draining, to unintentionally continue the metaphor, especially as Jinu is in his three-year old repetitious phase. I can recite stilted English translations of L'Aeroport and Voyage en Train by heart now. And Jinu goes everywhere with me -- furniture stores, banks, pharmacies, goverment bureaucracies -- hanging on my shoulder, massive, emotional, demanding entertainment, and thus in every way the antithesis of my iPod touch.

I thank him for this. Three years ago, in similar circumstances, it was difficult a times to maintain a grip on reality. Everything pivoted around feeding and pumping schedules. Once every few days I would make it outside, staring blinkingly into the sunlight, buy a tin of baby formula and some bananas, and then burrow back into the emergency response bunker. Three year old Jinu is a fantastic grounding influence.

Will your life be full of flowery pants
and heart-encrusted sheep?

Outside

2011-08-02T14:28:00.000-07:00

Three weeks is the traditional sentence of solitary confinement for a Korean newborn. That ended Tuesday. We took Ian to the Prefecture, to hang out in a waiting room with the other immigrants.

After an appropriate French bureaucratic wait, we got HJ's new residence permit, and it was off to the photo shop to get passport photos for Jinu and Ian's citizenship application. The French don't hand out citizenship to new-borns like the Canadians do, so Ian is a citizen of nowhere at the moment. That makes it necessary to register him as Aussie. Jinu will get aussified in the process.

I must confess, I'm kind of disappointed by that. I'm tickled by the idea of a family of nationals from mutually distinct continents, a feat that would become increasingly difficult to sustain. ("I name my sixth son, Namor.") And multinationalism fits with my present vague antipathy towards the whole philosophy of nationality. But I guess it was inevitable.

But I digress. All I really wanted to say was that it was nice to be out all together, and that adding a second son really makes me feel the family man. I've mentioned before that living with Jinu rarely made me feel patriarchal. One kid feels like it could be an experimental thing. Two is a lifestyle choice.

My property

The dangers of booby dogma

2011-08-01T18:17:00.001-07:00

It was this point, three weeks in, that was the lowest point in a pit of despair with baby Jinu. Watching things unfold this time, I can better understand what brought us there. This may not be terribly interesting, but here it is.

Breastfeeding is clearly the best for your child. Judging by the didactic pounding we received in Canada, this fact is poorly understood by many women, although frankly I find this hard to believe in the 21st century. Maybe it's a question of socio-economic circle, but I've never met a woman who believes otherwise.

Now, it doesn't always work smoothly. But the problems can almost always be sorted out with a few basic tips and tricks, so it's important not to be discouraged and seek advice. Thus the mantra that "any woman can breastfeed".

The problem is that the professional breastfeeding community has taken this mantra as dogma. Only after seven weeks of smashing ourselves against this slogan did some of the professionals reluctantly admit that, actually, physiologically, that's not exactly true. (An unusually undogmatic paediatrician later quoted us a figure of 7% of women with insufficient supply, though in fact I find that surprisingly high. It's not clear whether he includes border-line cases for whom some of the standard tips and tricks could potentially push them over the line. In any case it's at least a few in a hundred.)

Meanwhile, under the unremitting guilt of well-meaning falsehoods, HJ was pushing herself to exhaustion. The same thing could have happened here too. The French paediatrician was actively pushing HJ to restrain from complementing Ian with bottle, despite having carefully confirmed that she was delivering about one sixth of the necessary breastmilk in a feed. The midwives counseled insane pumping regimes which made no logical sense:

Midwife: After feeding, pump for extra stimulation. Then use that expressed milk to complement after the next feed.
Me: But she doesn't have enough supply to even complete a feed.
Midwife: Yes, so you complement with the milk expressed after the previous feed.
Me: ...??

I forget how I finally pushed her off her exasperating "understimulation" script, but the point is I could confidently do it only because we'd been through it before. Eventually she caved and said just give him bottle so that he's not starving and hopefully it'll all work out.

Which is exactly what we did (and would have done anyway). Their doomsday scenarios of HJ drying up or Ian rejecting the breast have not -- touch wood -- eventuated. In fact, quite the opposite. HJ, in flatly rejecting the industrial grade milking machine, is scraping by with the just-barely-enough sleep that a regular new mum would get, with the consequence that her supply is low but stable. Ian is thus content to suck -- and suck hard -- and he's now enjoying the 90% benefits of 50% breast-milk. The biggest problem is that he hates the bottle. ("Hungry, but want real booby.")

The lactation crowd need to be cautious of the dangers of singlemindedness. If you tell a new mother that this is the best thing for your child, she will do it, even if the most cursory reflection reveals it can only lead to chronic sleep-deprivation and destruction.

______________________________________________

Just in case anyone stumbles across this page who is going through the same thing, here is my completely non-professional advice to anyone worried about severe under-supply:

Measure. (A before-and-after-feed weighing will confirm whether your supply is borderline, so might benefit from a little extra stimulation, or really chronically low.)
If really low, accept that the bottle will be part of life and don't let the dogma drag you down. Your baby will be happier well-fed, and judging by Ian's example, will always love the taste of real booby.
Get sleep. (In our experience, sleep = milk)

(There are other things that help of course -- latching techniques, teas, drugs, pumping if you are getting enough sleep. I leave them out because they're well discussed elsewhere, and in particular by the standard medical channels.)

Meanwhile...

2011-07-20T13:38:00.001-07:00

Jinu and Halmeoni at Parc Montjuzet
on Bastille Day

Jealousy? Pride? I wouldn't know. What's clear is that the miracle of birth is much less a miracle to a three-year old than it is to an information-age adult.

No, he's much more interested in the present. Specifically: "There's an egg coming out of my bum." (He's holding one of many brightly coloured balls at his arse.) "This is my nest and I have all different sorts of eggs and an eagle egg and a pelican eggs and a sea turtle egg and a dinosaur egg and a emu egg and I throw it and it goes *crack* and a emu comes out and now I'm boiling it up *whooosh* [sound of stove igniting] and I have all sorts of different frying pans and this is a frying pan, and this is a frying pan, and this is a frying pan, and this is a frying pan..."

In any case, he was well briefed on things would play out, and he didn't even blink.

Ian has been seemlessly woven in to his endless three-year-old stories. On a couple of rare occasions he has requested a cuddle.

But that lasts about 15 seconds before he got bored. Or annoyed by the paparazzi. Most of the "together" shots are clearly staged.

The exception is bottle-feeding time, because it involves devices, and devices need exploration.

He's certainly as tired as the rest of us. His daily routine went out the window for a week or so. The day Ian came home, Jinu put himself to bed for maybe the third time in his life.

He was already a little weary from moving house, which seems to be a much more psychologically stressful experience for a toddler than merely the appearance of a new actor in the drama -- and one who doesn't even get a speaking role.

Watching Porco Rosso on a particularly tired day.

The chaos and dislocation have clearly taken their emotional toll. For a while there, he was more devoted than ever to the fastidious alignment of his toy cars, perhaps in a desperate attempt to salvage some order.

Jinu gets his ducks in a row.
(Accompanied by a zombie-like rendition of
John Linnell's "Montana" for anaesthetizing Ian)

Also, he's gotten precious few outings. That's why Bastille Day was so great. Two days after Ian's birth, I took Jinu and Halmeoni for a picnic excursion up to Parc Montjuzet. Parc Montjuzet is where the Bastille Day fireworks are lauched in Clermont, although due to the extreme nature of the timezone in western continental Europe, daylight savings prevents them from starting until 11:00pm.

On the other hand, Montjuzet is a fantastic sprawling park with a terrific view, and one of the desperately few parks with unbowdlerized play equipment. It's hard to help even a three-year old experience a thrill of danger these days.

Not indicative of general danger level.

On Bastille Day, the danger was greatly enhanced, to Jinu's gleeful delight, by severe overpopulation. It was nigh impossible to tear him away from the hordes of rampaging "big kids" to eat his picnic dinner. Then, as the rest of the world was lugging their picnic rugs up the hill, Jinu's stroller was dragging us back down to our apartment right at the foot. We bathed and noodled around until the fireworks burst over the hill, right outside our living room window.

Clearly staged.

Ian External

2011-07-17T08:15:00.000-07:00

There's something about the modern birth that reminds me of international air travel. Dozens of hours of discomfort and disorientation in characterless buildings staffed by over-polite uniformed officials, culminating in a glorious reunion of family and a desperate need for sleep. Doing it all in three languages has perhaps exacerbated the feeling.

All tired from the trip.

Ian came home Monday, and we've all been getting to know him better. For first impressions, he's calmer than Jinu, although that might not be due to character as much as to us preempting the breastfeeding problems, which have sadly repeated. I have quite a lot to say on that, too, but not right now.

The only real comment on his personality, then, is that he's a really dedicated face-starer. I don't remember being scrutinized quite so intently by Jinu.

As for the physical, he can look exactly like a whitey Jinu with his eyes shut and his bonnet on. But he's defied Jon P's apocalyptic and reproachful remarks on the eventual extinction of redheadedness in homo sapiens.

Let's see if he can maintain it. The eyes also have the blue tinge of any western baby. And he has the long, veinous, brainiac forehead of an Elms in place of Jinu's great round boulder of an Uncle Pete head.

The stats: 3.8kg, 51cm long, 36cm of cranial circumference. Compare Jinu at 4.1kg, 53cm, 37cm. I guess that makes Ian skinnier. Elmsier.

More generally, in so many ways, we have repeatedly had the impression that Jinu was born a three-month-old. Ian seems more fragile and extraterrestrial, like a newby should.

Given how the disembarkation went with Jinu, we were expecting the worst with Ian. For this, we decided to splash out for some extra comfort and get HJ into a private clinic this time. Ian then slipped out with relatively little agonizing pain, but there were no regrets. Sleep is not an easy thing for HJ at the best of times, and a maternity ward is never the best of times.

On the other hand, private clinics are clearly not designed with poor folk like us in mind. Who catches public transport to a private hospital, for instance? No one, that's who, at least according to the bus schedules. Right up to her nine-month monitorings, HJ was lugging her enormous belly half a kilometre up the hill from the bus stop in Beaumont.

Thus, on the day, I spent a good hundred euro on taxis, ferrying family members old and new back and forth to the richer part of town. After that it was bike and bus until mercifully Yu-gwon and Yae-gwon's dad lent us his car for the week. Wow, godsend. Also, I could take Halmeoni out to the excellent fresh market in the Partdieu commercial district, which is where our family's financial priorities really lie.

Introducing Ian

2011-07-13T13:48:00.000-07:00

Ian Elms, to be precise. Pushed out at 9:13 yesterday morning.

All are doing well. The birth was an order of magnitude quicker than Jinu's, which means that Hyun Jeong just felt like a tired and sore Hyun Jeong afterward, not like a broken, hollow, lifeless shell.

His timing was spot on. The previous fortnight was insane: move house; drive back and forth to IKEA Saint Etienne to buy an entire flat's worth of furniture; drive all over Clermont to buy more furniture; train to Paris to pick up Halmeoni (Gran); spend night in airport hotel waiting for train back the next day.

It's still crazy here. Much flat-pack furniture yet to be arrive, no thanks to the villainously incompetent delivery men. Side-note: the first four words Jinu learned to spell were Jinu, Mum, Dad, and Ikea. I'm still slotting daily visits by repairmen and delivery men in between hospital runs. Also, a continuing skin irritation led this morning to Jinu, with no warning, having his foreskin professionally sliced, so you can add bouts of sobbing from pain and betrayal throughout the day and night.

But we have the essentials in place -- a stove, a fridge, a table, a mattress on the floor. HJ is happily installed in her private hopsital room until the weekend. Jinu's being a trooper, hanging out really well with Halmeoni when the family requires it of him. And Ian is cute, which is how a one-day-old should earn his meals.

Much more to recount, but I need to sleep.

PS: Now they're launching fireworks in his honour, with many more slated for tomorrow.

Augurs well

2011-06-07T12:22:00.001-07:00

He climbed up in the cupboard and pulled down my Scrabble set a few days ago. He's been all over it since.

He was looking for a second 'J' too. I had to give him the bad news.

House-hunting anecdote

2011-05-30T17:57:00.000-07:00

Rightio, here's today's story.

Granting a rubber-stamping by the University bureaucracy (touch wood) I'll be offered a permanent lectureship in Clermont in the coming days. That's not the story.

New baby comes out mid-July. Jinu already sleeps in what should be the salon in our present charming-but-compact 17th century apartment. That leaves a one-month window to up sticks to a bigger flat, if we can do it.

Question 1 is, are we completely insane to move apartments two weeks before the due date? The answer might be irrelevant, cos we might do it anyway.

In any case, today we visited a unit in a large apartment complex, guided by a 20-year old student and part-time rental agent whose heart clearly wasn't in it. Not to say he was unpleasant or unprofessional, just, well, resigned to it.

Jinu was running around like a mad thing as usual. This apartment was great for it, being on an internal corner with a large balcony linking all the rooms. We were all on that balcony, in fact, when Jinu slid the kitchen door shut and there was an audible "click".

What idiot makes a balcony with self-locking doors!?!

I laughed with embarrassment. The agent's heart sank. Time to get to know each other better.

He started calling out to neighbours. He got the attention of someone in the building across the courtyard and was preparing to pitch the keys out to him over three storeys of gently terraced balconies. I, meanwhile, had deployed my gangliness to wangle an arm through the divider to the adjacent balcony and rap on their window. A frumpy woman poked her head out. We decided to go with her instead.

In fact, her flat was in a different wing of the complex, so she was going to need to get herself decent enough to go out into the courtyard and around. This took longer than expected. But eventually we heard keys in the locks and looked through the kitchen to the entrance-way. That's the moment when we saw that Jinu had also gone to the trouble of shutting the deadbolt and flipping the security latch on the inside of the front door.

Oh sh*t.

-------------------------------------------

Here are the options in this situation, as I see it.

Option 1 is to smash in one of the balcony doors. Option 2 is to call the fire department and get them to smash in the front door with an axe. Option 3 is to climb over the railing to the next apartment. That option wouldn't have been quite as dangerous as you might think, since the last foot of the barrier wall was surmounted by just a foot or so of perspex. Plus, thanks to the terracing, the worst case scenario would be a one-storey fall.

On the other hand, we'd all have to go out that way. I was toying with whether it's responsible to ask a 7-month pregnant wifey to climb over a balcony divider (answer:no), when rental agent pushed one more time on the bedroom door. Mercy be, it wasn't latched properly and slid gloriously open.

He didn't even smile.

Unprecedented calm

2011-05-29T11:31:00.000-07:00

As the paltry May blog archive to the right will attest, it's been a crazy month. And while I have plenty of important things to talk about -- jobs, birthdays, school stress, behavioral problems, debilitating neck pain, an imminent birth and a just slightly more imminent mother-in-law -- and while, moreover, the title of this post could be equally well applied to most of these, I'm going to start with something of little or no consequence.

Jinu went to bed before 7:00pm tonight. By "went to bed" I actually mean "was sent to bed in shame" where, surprisingly, he fell instantly asleep. But the effect is roughly the same.

I think I can honestly say that this is the first free time I've had in, well, since Christmas holidays I guess. I'm not talking about the time I spend noodling around after his usual 9:00pm bedtime, which I consider "borrowed" rather than "free" because I know that every ten extra minutes of awake is ten minutes of biologically necessary sleep which I am depriving myself of. This time, my leisure is unencumbered by guilt.

(Except for the small amount I'm now developing from celebrating the banishment of my son, but let's tread carefully around that to preserve my lightness of spirit.)

For instance, HJ and I actually had the chance to talk about baby names this evening. 'Jinu' was hard, but it's clearly going to be even harder this time. And France won't give us the luxury of the month of nameless getting-acquainted-time that those west-coast Canadian slackers allowed us.

Anyway, after half an hour of unsuccessful ideating, Jinu woke up crying with the weight of his guilt. I went in and talked to him until the weight of guilt was again less than the weight of his eyelids. But during that time, HJ had hit the Korean soap operas, so I was left aloft, faced with infinite possibilities and no direction. I ate a left-over Lindor Ball. I took a cool shower. And now here I am, pyjama-clad, wondering what book I'll start on when the next paragraph is finished.

So yes, it's been a disorienting and altogether pleasant evening. I hope that in the morning, Jinu neither feels too bad nor wakes up at 5:30. And any suggestions for baby names will be happily received (and then promptly ignored). All the interwebs has taught me tonight is that you shouldn't name your kid 'Bumsuk'.

Sole pain. Diagnosis: Pun

2011-04-14T12:24:00.000-07:00

Several times in the last couple of months, Jinu has gone to bed complaining of sore feet. Then, two hours later he wakes up screaming, inconsolably.

He demands foot-rub. We rub foot for twenty minutes, him crying without pause. Finally, at the first sign of abatement, you can try to distract him with a story about the three fire engines, or the wombat who falls through a hole in the Paris sidewalk to find himself lying in the Metro tunnel. You keep rubbing and ad-libbing until he drifts off.

Repeat every two hours until 3am. The problem then vanishes without a trace.

The second time this happened, I was so impressed with the specificity of the problem, that I figured this can't be a freak event. So I asked Google.

When you google "toddler foot pain night," you don't get information, you get forums. Ahh, forums...

"OMG! I remember seeing something about these symptoms in a child on the TLC channel on TV. I don't think it was about cramps though. I'm pretty sure that the child didn't get very good nutritional foods everyday. I think that you are right to go to another doctor. You might even want to consider getting a whole different pediatrician all together. This condition could actually be VERY serious. Good luck though. I'll definitely have you daughter in my prayers."

I asked his Dr. about the foot pain and he seemed to think it was "growing pains" I don't buy that. Still, I have found nothing more that I think would be a strong possibility when doing my own internet research.

little children can have arthritis. I'm surprised the doctor didn't do a blood test for that. It's called Juvenile Arthritis.

Here is another idea for you -- Fabry's Disease. I think this is unlikely with just foot pain at night, more likely if he also has GI complaints, angiokeratomas (red spot rashes), or decreased sweating.

My daughter has had this pain for 2 years, once to twice a month. 1 1/2 years ago they did an x-ray, did not find anything but decided it could be a toddler fracture and put her in a cast. She kept having the pain. She is now 4. She had her inflammation checked -- SED rate, and it was high. She also has anemia and is not growing much. They did an MRI just last month and it showed inflammation. We went to rheumatologist yesterday. They do not think it is arthritis because it happens in the night not upon waking But she does have inflammation so they are not sure. Other things they tested were Lyme’s disease, Kholers, Leukemia. They other test they are discussing is a bone scan. This is all being done with Children’s Hospital in Boston and still no idea. It is frustrating. Please let me know if nay of you find out anything and I will keep you posted too.

This pain is really awesome; how many are they (children) in the world having this night abnormality? Any data? Is it possible to start gathering these kids for study? for the better.
GOD helps us all !!!

OMG! Jinu does have decreased sweating!

I added the links to some of the more exotic diseases for your edification. I was particularly impressed with kohlersdisease.net.

It made me wish we still had shamans. You go to the shaman, and he tells you that your child's feet hurt because the spirits don't like the colour of his underpants. Then later, as you rub the mixture of powdered goat testicles and warm tapioca into his ankles, you can be confident that you are doing the best for your child. How good is that!?

Yeah, science has a lot to answer for, in retrospect. If you look up "growing pains," all you find out is that they are unexplained pains in the legs and feet, definitely not associated with growth spurts, but often related to emotional stress.

THAT'S NOT SCIENCE!! That's frickin' GRANDMOTHERLY WISDOM!! What is this, the 18th century? Give me a Named Syndrome now or I'll go find someone else who will!

Carnaval

2011-04-02T12:21:00.000-07:00

They did Carnaval at Jinu's school on Thursday. That means dress-ups.

Neither HJ nor I are natural dresser-uppers, so there was some anxiety in figuring out a costume. It came down to pirate or spider, but landed on spider, for three main reasons.

1. Jinu's totally into The Old Lady Who Swallowed A Fly at the moment. He won't let her die:

"She swallowed the mouse to catch the pidgeon,
She swallowed the pidgeon to catch the dolphin,
She swallowed the dolphin to catch the bus,
She swallowed the bus to catch the castle..."

2. It's doable.

3. Spider hat.

Of course, having decided, HJ outdid herself putting it together. I was envisaging old pantyhose stuffed with newspaper stapled to a t-shirt, but HJ and her comrade Se-Eun (another crafty type) went to the fabric store and came home armed.'

(We have no idea who the girl is, except that she was stuck to Jinu all day. Jinu doesn't mind.)

Of course, like any self-respecting two-year-old, Jinu refused point-blank to wear the costume in the morning. After five minutes of tanty at home, we had to bail to get him to school on time. Then HJ bribed him with a bicky.

After the hours she put it, HJ would have broken down if she failed.

They let the parents back in for a parade before lunch.

Jinu is out front because he's irrepressible. He and his cowboy mate next in line were running off together all morning. Here they are being told off again by teacher, while all the pretty little French girls wait in orderly lines.

(When I drop Jinu off in the morning, the girls are all sitting primly along the bench waiting for class to start, looking straight out of Madeline. Jinu belts for the toy chest.)

He's not allowed up there. Still, HJ had to snap the photo before she told him off.

After being let out at lunch, Jinu declared he wanted to visit me at work. HJ didn't complain 'cause she knew I hadn't seen him dressed up in the morning. Also, she knew that the moment he gets home would be the last moment she would ever see him dressed up in that spider suit.

HJ spent the next few hours kicking herself for not packing the spare camera battery. At campus, Jinu ran free. The lawn is wide and green and filled with lazing uni students, and Jinu loves it there. It was the first sunny day of spring. His supplementary legs flailed in a most lifelike fashion as he zoomed around the trees.

We bought lunch at the Crousti Pain down the road, and ate in the park together. They caught the no. 13 bus home. It was a great day on all fronts.

Cousine cousin

2011-04-01T14:02:00.000-07:00

For those interested, more recent photos of Jinu's cousins: Seo-yeon and Jihu.

Second first day of school

2011-04-01T12:12:00.000-07:00

As you may recall, back in January, Jinu was expelled on day two of school for peepee violations. He's been practising.

With mixed success. He still finds the whole thing a bit too much responsibility, poor blighter. He never wears nappies now, except in bed, but he still leaks typically before letting us know it's time. We'd been treading the fine line between encouragement and stress in the hope that he could get back to school -- which he loved -- after the mid-semester break.

So all that made for a lot of pressure on his urethral sphincter that second first day back. Back in January, after dropping Jinu off the first day, I distinctly remember the eerily serene tranquil feeling as HJ and I walked quietly back to the tram-stop, hand-in-hand, alone together for maybe the fifth time since birth. This time, however, we felt nothing but anxiety.

Place Delille.

He passed. One infraction, for which the teacher forgave him. The next day, dry, or close enough. So he's in.

It's kind of strange, actually. Suddenly, there's this whole part of Jinu's life that we don't know much about.

We get sound-bytes of what happens each day. "... and the teacher said, `You're a grumpy boy!'" Sometimes it's like confessional. He'll tell us he pushed a girl off a chair and then break down crying. Other bits are nigh incomprehensible.

Qu'est-ce que c'est, indeed!

Bus Furor Cheerful

2011-03-06T12:42:00.000-08:00

Man, what a great day..

After a pancake start, we went to the Sunday morning flea market in the carpark of the quartier des Salins.

Flea markets are awesome. Jinu knew this already. His book of the moment is Bamu and Gero's day at the market (right), Japanese kid's lit at it's finest.

Tram to the market.

So much to see at a flea market. We bought:

claw hammer, €2
aeroplane, €1
4 plastic buses, €1
junior Meccano, €3

All winners. Jinu couldn't keep his hands off any of them, including the claw hammer, although despite my enthusiasm, HJ ruled it off limits. I had been deeply affected by an event on the macadamia tour at the Big Pineapple last year. (Yes, we went to the Big Pineapple! -- must put pictures up.) There were two 10-year olds on the tour with us. When it came time to taste the nuts, the guide handed them the smashing hammer, and they waved it around like a fly-swat. "C'mon, people, teach yer kids howter use a hammer!" he jibed, clearly well practiced in this little stunt.

Maybe that was in the back of my mind when we passed the Meccano set. Jinu and HJ had already moved on, which was convenient because you cannot get a good price on toys if you are restraining a kid from grabbing it. The Meccano turned out to be the find of the day, although we didn't get to it till this evening.

Katsu don and tinned corn for lunch.
Yeah!

Then, cheap Asian imported plastics:

This is how Jinu plays with all new cars:

The tail snapped of the aeroplane in under five minutes.

Nap-time ended abruptly, when Jinu suddenly remembered his bus depot and leaped out of bed. HJ and I couldn't drain the sleep chemicals out of our brains for 15 minutes, so we just lay about grunting supporively at his endless bus stories. He wanted the meccano, but I took him for a bike-ride instead.

Buying a child-seat for the bike was the best thing ever. It's basically the only way I can get real exercise with him around. But the winter has gotten me out of shape and Jinu an enhanced shape, so I couldn't make it up Montjuzet today. Had to walk the final hill.

I guess I never mentioned Montjuzet before either, another highpoint of Clermont. It's a big hill, topped with an endless variety of playgrounds. Down a back slope are a couple of huge slides. I didn't have a camera today, so here are some shots from the day we discovered the slides last summer...

He ran himself to exhaustion that day.

Today was the first time back for the year. There were Big Kids there. Big Kids are the best. Especially, Big Kids that actually play with you. They had a football and a frisbee and it was non-stop hilarity. He had to be carried back up the hill to the bike.

The second we got home, he demanded the Meccano. The box was all beaten up, but to my surprise it was unopened inside. I was expecting pieces missing and would have just been happy to have a screw-driver and a couple of nuts and bolts. But we spent half an hour, Jinu silent and enrapt, building a digger together.

It's even got an electric screwdriver, although I think I'll leave it six months before I put the batteries in. That way it becomes a whole new toy again. For now he's happy just to thump it on the wall and yell "Drill!! vzzzzshht!"

Dong-seng has been kicking my hand in between paragraphs here.

Jinu's asleep. I should go join him.

A French one

2011-02-26T22:01:00.000-08:00

Here we go. We're expecting a second son in mid-July. Since Jinu is just coming out of his nappies now, I feel like I'm about to clock some incredibly intense Game&Watch.

As for the pregnancy so far, I would summarize first-trimester HJ as grateful, stressed, physically fine. The morning sickness was difficult, but not nearly so brutal as last time, when she basically found herself in bed all day with a dish of coffee grounds under her nose to ward off my cooking smells. Having said that, there was a bad moment at the peak of it when she smashed a full bottle of Korean soy sauce -- the really stinky kind -- in the pantry. Despite repeated bleaching, there was no purging it. The wooden doors, the grout in the tiles reeked of soup stock for a fortnight.

Anyway, she's into the strong second trimester now, and feeling much more comfortable about everything. We got a good look at him at the big end-of-trimester ultrasound, so suddenly the abstract has become tangible.

HJ is apparently an excellent willy-spotter. She saw it well before the OB -- in a previous ultrasound, actually. It's definitely, definitely a boy. Moreover, he's every bit as wriggly as Jinu. HJ felt him kicking clearly at 16 weeks, and he's booting her constantly already. HJ was kinda hoping for a girl this time, not to balance the sexes, but just for some peace. No dice.

Still, Jangmo-nim (HJ's mum) reckons it'll be good for Jinu to have a brother to play with. Jinu has been very considerate of Dong-saeng (`little sibling') so far, ceding his mum-carrying rights obligingly. I'll be interested to see how he copes with him on the outside.

Movies

2011-02-22T12:39:00.000-08:00

Jinu got an Amazon gift certificate for Christmas, so we've spent the last few of Saturday nights eating fried chicken and watching Pixar movies.

Let me pause to remark that HJ makes freakin' sensational fried chicken.

As you can see, we don't have a TV. This is not out of moral decree, although the joys of telelessness are manifold, even besides the sanctimonious glow. No, it's merely out of a dearth of physical space. Our landlord even offered us a spare set, and we had to decline.

Anyway, the intertubes are essentially doing the same job now. HJ pipes Korean panel shows direct to her bed each night. Jinu watches his fair share of sneezing pandas, train-spotting videos, classic Sesame Street* and Pororo (mandatory for Korean toddlers).

Up until the Pixar package arrived, Jinu had three stand-out favorite videos. One was The General, a 1926 Buster Keaton film which I highly recommend to anyone with a train fascinated sprog. Or to anyone at all, for that matter. It's an awesome and extravagant piece. Moreover, it's 10% plot and 90% period train stunts, so you'll only have rare moments of dialogue in which to distract the ankle-biter.

Secondly, there was Porco Rosso, which I now associate with ill Jinu. Numb with fever in Victoria, he would forget the pain by spacing out on the sofa watching the endless circling of his beloved sea-planes.

The final fave was the five minute promotional video for the Miniatur Wunderland, "the largest model railway in the world and one of the most popular tourist attractions in Germany." Man, how many times have I watched that? There were times when Jinu could recite large chunks of the text from heart, right down to the jagged tutonic intonation. "Very strong famous children," he would intone. "Secret UndergroundBazes."

But now he's been irreversibly marked by Pixar. He already owned a Fillmore and a Flash McQueen (we're in France), which he'd been given for his birthday. When he saw the "red car" onscreen in the plane to Brisbane last year, he couldn't believe his eyes. It was as if he'd suddenly found out his best friend is a moovie star!

That was at 2 years 2 months. Maybe training helps, but it seems that age is about the turning point for movie watching. At that age he was not interested in more than three minutes of dialogue at a time. But on the return flight, at 2 years 3 months, he would sit open-mouthed for hours. Needless to say, this development made international travel instantly change from psychological torment to really quite bearable.

Now we own a fair library of Pixar and Studio Ghibli. All have been instantly embraced, and the characters woven seamlessly into his perpetual narratives. Interestingly, he personally took on the role of Dory, so he seems to have self-identified as comic relief. Ah well, speaking from experience, it's not such a bad way to go through life.

[*Watch closely for the homosexual love tryst in the last verse. Those subversive PBS hippies... ]

Musical interlude 2

2011-02-13T04:49:00.000-08:00

Guitar:

Play

2011-02-12T22:13:00.001-08:00

I guess after two years of looking after a small mammal, I wasn't really unprepared for him to start generating ideas.

Play is pretty fun now. Kids have an eye for detail which makes me laugh.

Fishing

But to him, it's just his job. You give him a cardboard tube for a baguette, and he immediately searches out some paper to wrap it in, cos that's what bakers do. To me, that's hilarious, but to him it's business.

I remember, though, that when Jinu was a pre-toddler we were always complaining about how high-need a child he was (this post, for instance). He's still super energetic, but since the story-telling abilities kicked in about six months ago, he's at last completely happy playing alone. It's really beautiful to hear the neverending dramatic monologue drifting through from his room, peppered with occasional song like a Broadway musical.

Sales are up.

The supermarket, which Jinu got from his imo (HJ's sister), has been a favorite scene setting for a while. (I remember Rachael saying that she'd precipitated a war amongst her four lads by bringing home a toy supermarket.) But just as often these days it's box boats, cooking pancakes on the sofa, or just choofing along the floor from Kitchen Table Station to the Gare du Lit and back. Plus, there's the hours of melodrama with his boy-dolls, the toy cars.

That's this morning's courier truck. He loaded up a couple more boxes, ordered HJ to ride shotgun, and then drove his route. Delivery stops at Sophia's, Su-wan's, Yu-gwon and Ye-gwon's, Leah's, and sonsaengnim's (teacher). Let me know if you want a box of toy cars -- he'll be glad to lug another box to the sofa for you.

This parenting thing gets more fun.

새해복 많이 받으세요

2011-02-12T12:59:00.000-08:00

A message from Jinu:

We're already more than a week into the Year of the Rabbit, so this is a little late, but we wanted offer you our best wishes.

_______________________________

Jinu's Saturday Korean school had a little party last Saturday night. To make it theatrical for the Frenchies, the teacher got us all to don hanboks, although no-one would bother in Korea. Still, it's a chance to wear pink again...

All Koreans pay respect to their parents on New Year's day with a 세배 -- the deep bow that Jinu is approximating in the video. This display of humility is incentivized with money. I scored tens of thousands of won from HJ's parents when I was in Busan for new year.

At the party, the teacher trained all the kids in the bow. We parents were then seated along the wall and furnished with bags of chocolate coins. Then all the kids except Jinu lined up and dutifully greeted their parents. Jinu ran helter-skelter round the room, laughing manically. I gets no respect!

(In his defense he was the youngest kid there, over-tired and doped up on juice. He offered me a bow a little later, and earned his pay-off.)

A Farter's Lament

2011-01-30T17:34:00.001-08:00

No man is as an island, so he says.
What balderdash, what utter poppycock.
My atmosphere of rich volcanic haze
confirms that I'm a solitary rock.
And, all that tawdry talk of love that binds,
uniting souls, conjoining hearts and minds--
a breath of wind and all that faff unwinds.

For what compares as spiritual salve,
amongst our many anatomic joys,
with equalizing pressure 'cross the valve?
Yet kith and kin recoil at the noise.
So hear my gripe, sincere and from the gut,
That Fluffy is a sycophantic mutt!
He pleases master well, and no one but.

First day of school, last day of school

2011-01-25T19:56:00.000-08:00

Monday, Jinu shows up to his new private catholic school. Tuesday he's suspended. It was like an episode of Educating Marmalade.

The French are pretty hard-core about school. Kids start at 3 years by right, but 2 1/2 is common if you can find a place. The general attitude here is that becoming a parent should not be a life-swamping affair, and starting school early is part of that philosophy.

Even more amazing to me are the Halte Garderies. These are municipally run child-care units. Once registered and familiarized, you can leave your baby by the hour for about the same cost as public parking (€1.20/hr) while you do the shopping, get you hair cut, whatever.

We booked Jinu into the Toute petite section at the local school, starting January. This runs three hours each morning, with Wednesdays off as per local custom. We figured it was a nice way to have him learn some French and some social skills.

But the problem with sending 2.5-year-olds into school is that they need to be propre. "Clean." This is a harsh deadline for the parents. We'd been experimenting with potties for months with moderate success. Jinu would chat away volubly to the Cars stickers on the bathroom wall while the sphincters relaxed. Finally, he showed exceptional ability in the last week before school. We decided he was ready.

We took him to their dunnies as soon as we arrived. He peed dutifully, and we did high-fives all round.

Then to the classroom. He was over the moon. He raced ecstatically around the shelves of puzzles and games while the other new kids clung tearfully to their contrite parents. We said goodbye and he didn't look back.

HJ returned three hours later to receive a plastic bag full of wet clothes and a dressing-down. She apologized. She said it's probably the new environment and the excitement, and we'll give it one more try.

The next day, the teacher looked exasperated. This time, two other parents were waiting outside for a dressing-down too. I wasn't there, but I imagine them all line up outside like miscreants by the principal's office. The other two parents left with shopping bags as well, but when the teacher came for HJ she had carrying two. Worse, both were Number 2 infractions. Perhaps in a couple of weeks, we were told. HJ left, red-faced.

That was a couple of weeks ago. Jinu's pretty good now. He wears undies everywhere he goes. We carry a plastic water bottle for emergencies. (Boys are so easy.) We'll probably go back to school later this week. But you'd have to be nervous. A schoolroom full of delights could so easily overload Jinu's bio-informatic systems.

Social dimorphism 2: Shared parenting

2011-01-24T13:04:00.000-08:00

After my last rambling post on the subject, Andrew pointed out this nice article on shared parenting by Lisa Belkin in NYTimes Magazine. I'd originally read this back in 2008, just after Jinu was born, and it had a big effect on me. I remember I had a lot to say about it even then, although according to my post at the time, "somehow I can't summon the logorrhea right now." But now Andrew's brought it back, and I've got so much logorrhea built up, I think I'm going to have to spray it out in two spurts.

[Historical note: The NYTimes article was so popular that it spawned a parenting blog. Belkin named the blog "Motherlode," leading one of the parents from the original article to immediately chastise her for the name. I guess it's hard to let your ideals get in the way of a good pun.]

The article centres on the quest by several couples to achieve "shared parenting." By this, they mean strict equality -- jobs, kids and chores all split down the middle. The couples all succeed, at least for a time.

Let me leave the moral and cultural questions aside for the moment, and focus on another interesting question: what does it take to make shared parenting a reality? Certain commonalities between the couples are immediately noticeable.

The first is education. I talked about that last time. It stands to reason, since they are cutting across the cultural grain.

The second is money. It's not really brought out in the article, but it's a recurring subplot if you read carefully. Bill and Alexandra concede that "this is an option available only to those who can make ends meet in the first place." Then later, "as far as the chores go... we outsource a lot.” In fact, money was what killed the dream for Jo and Tim, the one couple who failed to maintain it after the birth of their second child: "She calculated that her take-home salary... would barely pay for child care."

A third point is The Clan. Bill again: "The children spend a lot of time with their grandparents." The families all use child-care, obviously. Shared parenting doesn't seem possible without enlisting The Clan to help, even if it's Rent-A-Clan.

All this is not to kill the buzz of shared parenting, but merely to put it in context. It's a decision that requires resources, which may go someway to explain it's rarity. The New York Times has a certain readership demographic which typically has these resources, but they're far from universal. Is it fair to hold all couples up to this as a moral standard?

(Looking back on the web now, I see that Belkin commented on this issue in a later post.)

Finally, apart from resources, a crucial ingredient was most succinctly observed by one of the lesbians. “You need a rabid N.G.P. — nongestational parent. The N.G.P. has to push if you are going to get an equal relationship.” She was talking about not being brushed aside by the maternal bond, but it's clearly true on so many levels. All the N.G.P's in the article have taken on shared parenting as a personal quest.

Where do they find this desire? Why is it such an abnormality that it is actually newsworthy? Ah, but now we're getting back to the hot issues of my previous post. Let us leave that for another day...

Musical interlude

2011-01-15T20:53:00.000-08:00

Six months ago:

Two weeks ago:

Oh, Grandma!

2011-01-15T20:46:00.000-08:00

A game Jinu invented at the Christmas Cottage.

(He's starting to get the car-sleepies by the end.)

It started on his own with his new Red Car Truck. ("Oh, Grandma! What a big trailer you have! ... All the better to put the red car in, my dear!") Now he demands suggestions from us.

Incidentally, this is evidence of a recent turning point: He's started contributing ideas.

Social dimorphism ?

2011-01-15T20:01:00.000-08:00

I have a friend here who just separated from his wife and 5-year-old daughter. Their marriage had been degenerating for years, it's true. But by his own account there was nothing specific he could blame his wife for. In the end, it came down to "I just wasn't meant to live like this." He misses his daughter acutely painfully, and actually he doesn't really want to lose all ties with his wife, either. But otherwise, he is completely reinvigorated by the freedom.

Is this reasonable behaviour for a male human? Is it moral?

Note that these are different questions.

Of course, these questions are pretty much unanswerable. Plus, I am ignorant of sociology and anthropology, not to mention feminist theory, so I risk setting off my own BS meter in even discussing this. But the situation has obviously caused me some reflection, so I might as well wade in for fun. Better informed readers can set me straight on any misconceptions..

To start with, I confess I don't even know what's expected of a modern male. My vague impression is that the modern West believes that father and mother should share the load equally. You could interpret that strictly as meaning an equality of both domestic duties and career, or you could try to somehow equate the earning responsibilities of one parent with the home-making duties of the other. But either way, it seems a 50% division of labour is the generally accepted gold standard.

Where does this come from? Let's not pretend it's a self-evident truth. Before I wade into the question of cultures, let me just observe that there are plenty of species where the load is far from evenly divided. If a lion was suddenly granted self-awareness, would he be immoral?

Alright, before I get too metaphysical, let's start by just looking around. Does a 50% division of labour in humans actually happen?

Well, yes. There are certainly plenty of families that do an admirable job of labour division. And happily. On the other hand, the situation is far from universal. Leaving western culture aside, the only culture which I can speak about with any degree of confidence is Korea. Ignoring the recent westernizing trend, Korean husbands typically do not lift a finger in the home.

The reverse situation seems rare. Men are socially empowered in almost every culture ever studied (evidence for true matriarchies is rare and contentious, while unequivocal patriarchies abound). Patriarchy doesn't automatically imply less work for the men, but it seems to me that the dominos are consistently falling one way.

Is this tendency "natural"? Are men inherently lazier and more self-serving? Could it be that the female human just got the raw deal in the evolutionary card-game?

If one were to approach this purely biologically, one might summarize as follows. In mammals, sexual dimorphism usually implies larger males. The degree of dimorphism correlates well with paternal investment. Us men are a little bit bigger than you girlies, to a degree which would put us somewhere between monogamy and polygamy. So it appears that we're a little less into our families than you are.

Having said that, the one thing I learned from reading Our Inner Ape, by Frans De Waal, is that trying to make behavioural arguments from genetics in the great apes is a mug's game.
(I read this book shortly after Jinu was born, as a nerd's alternative to reading parenting guides.)
One of the hallmarks of our species in particular is the ability to alter our behaviour through culture. You could go further: Since the dawn of homo sapiens, cultural drift has been far more important in our (intra-species) competitive selection than genetic drift. So looking for "normal behaviour" in our genetics is really chasing rainbows.
Instead you could try is to examine a cross section of human cultures, looking for patterns. I know that you're not supposed to conflate contemporary non-industrial societies with early humans, but I couldn't help browsing round the Hunter-Gatherer Wiki to try to educate myself a little on the traditional roles of the sexes.

Sexual division of labour seems the norm for humans. (This is apparently unusual for a mammal). The myths of Man the Hunter and Woman the Gatherer are easily exploded by examples, but from the case studies there seem to be tendencies. Hunting large game or fishing in the open sea is typically done by men. Both men and women gather, but the increase of hunting tends to reduce male involvement in gathering.

Also, interestingly, tool use seems to correlate with sexual division of labour. To be clear, this is not for some facile reason like men being the tool-makers. Rather, it seems that technology encourages specialization, and that sexual division of labour is as good a method of determining this specialization as any. So, for instance, men might use tools in hunting and fishing, while women use them in sewing and preserving.

Still, the question I secretly want to ask is, are men more lazy than women? None of these studies get to this titillating issue.

Fair enough, it's hard to evaluate their chores. For a start, pre-agricultural work and play are not so rigidly demarcated. But also, the nature of their work is vastly different from ours. For instance, I suspect that child-rearing would be less energy-consuming, thanks to extended families and the lack of tee-ball leagues. Hunting and gathering labour would be more physically demanding than my typical day poring over reference books. And domestic chores would be social and convivial; contrast that with housework today, which is often thankless and isolating. (So even if you personally believe that women have landed the household chores through some kind of sociobiological heritage, that's still not an argument for fairness.)

Now let's get to our culture, with some quick facts from this survey.

Women do much more housework than men.
Marriage leads to an increase of domestic duties for women, and a decrease for men.
In households where both spouses are comparably employed, the women still average significantly more housework.
Moreover, the men tend to pick up the more "pleasant" tasks, like cooking and playing with kids.

Overall, it's a harsh indictment of male behaviour. (One point which stands aside from this is that domestic equality correlates with level of education.) Which brings me back to the question: are we seeing men abusing their self-constructed patriarchy, or is it a biological predisposition?

Let me pause briefly here to take a different tack, one that I have rarely seen discussed. Our societies are now so large and complex that they have become engaged in their own battle of natural selection. So, just as we multi-cellular organisms are evolving with scant regard to our component cells, so the nation-states are competing without necessarily maintaining the best interests of their citizens.

From this point of view, I could certainly imagine the possibility that strong patriarchies hold competitive advantages over more egalitarian societies. Cultural evolution would then favour societies that establish patriarchal social structures, regardless of the stresses on individuals. In this framework, morality is completely abstracted away, since it's just the endocrine system of the culture.

But that leaves no-one to blame, which is no fun.

Back to us. Let's just focus on the child-rearing for a second. No matter how you slice it, parental investment seems almost universally dominated by the mothers. This makes a lot of biological sense. It's well-observed in our cousins, the chimps (patriarchal) and bonobos (matriarchal). Reversing this situation seems to require a certain amount of cultural abstraction. Stay-at-home dads are, in my experience, almost always better educated than chimpanzees.

Can this be generalized to other household duties? The cultural climate makes me ashamed to admit it, but I am tempted to think that way, to say that men are generally less interested in domestic chores, at least to some degree. But even if true, would that observation have any practical implications? Should HJ and I split our duties 60-40 to take account of my natural disinclination? Should I demand more pity or more sexual favours in compensation?

I'm left with no answers. And now that I've abstracted away morality I have no authorities to appeal to, either. In the end, I just have to fly with it.

And what of my comrade? He once said to me that the problem with modern women is that "they want to have children, but they don't want to raise them." This struck me like a sexist slap in the face at first, but as I thought about it I realized his point: on the balance, he doesn't want to have children.

I asked him about this again more recently, and his response was that he loves his daughter and could not dream of banishing her to non-existence, so questions of time-machines are not to be considered. But the evidence seems clear. For whatever mix of reasons--genetic, cultural, upbringing--domestic life is really not his bag.

Is there anything to be learned in considering his awkward situation? Anything to be gained in trying to callibrate the breadth of the human spectrum?

I don't know. Frankly, I don't believe that the dissolution of our pair-bonds is a sociobiological aberration of our time. The fact that western women have become recently empowered to escape from oppressive partnerships strikes me as probably a drift back towards the norm (maybe with a slight overshoot, but I hesitate to speculate). The side-effect that the less invested males will drift off too seems no more unusual. In fact, if you want my opinion, the most significant recent shift in our culture is the dissolution of the clan, which otherwise might stabilize many of these matrimonial idiosyncrasies.

Boys and their toys

2011-01-02T18:52:00.000-08:00

Here's a rough list of the toys Jinu owns:

Train set (~5m of track, standard Brio gauge)
Model cars (~25)
Parking garage
Supermarket set
Duplo (~0.3 cuft)
Magnetic construction set
Farm-house w/ animals
Gardening set & random water-play toys
Jigsaw puzzles
Magnetic fishing

Those are the things in high-rotation. That's already pushing the limits of space and convenience for our transient lifestyle.

We went to a two-girl house for New Year's Eve. Jinu went nuts. They had a fully equipped kitchen set with oven and functioning microwave and a big chest full of ingredients and utensils. No Brio train-set. No model cars.

Jinu has probably racked up several hours worth of baking and dish-washing with the display set in the local toy shop (HJ loitering unashamedly). At home he takes our fry-pans, wooden spoons and fish-slice and simmers his magnetic fish over the stool in his bedroom. But Nina's house was a gastronomic paradise.

Do Nina and Lucile play with the trains at their male friends' houses? I'm curious. I'll get back to you on that.

In any case, I don't see a huge difference in the way they play. The supermarket at our place has been a massive hit, and it supplies important supplementary ingredients for the fish soups. The cars are effectively boy-dolls, chatting about going to the beach or the train station together, or driving around their multi-story boy-doll-house. The farm animals likewise, obviously.

The one thing that strikes me as particularly boyish is that he can spend hours with a truck on a level surface, head down flat, intensely examining how the wheels turn as he rolls it gently back and forward. But do girls do that kind of scrutiny? I couldn't tell you.

Christmas III: Les Chirouzes

2010-12-26T13:01:00.000-08:00

Been a while, eh? Busy year. But let me start with a tale of now and work outwards in both directions as the mood takes me. So, Chrissy.

Again unable to make it back to Oz, the tradition continues in which gran and grampa set us up in a nearby nook for some Christmas r&r. So while our friends, the "Michelin wives", took their kids to London, Korea, or on Mediterranean cruises, we three set ourselves up in a cluster of snowbound farmhouses about 50km from home.

The theory was this: For a start, I didn't want to feel any compulsion to do anything, so let's not kid ourselves by going somewhere Culturally Important. Secondly, I wouldn't be able to tell the difference between a cluster of farmhouses in the Auvergne and a cluster of farm-houses in Andalusia, so why spend the extra money?

It worked out just great. Doing nothing is only a slight exaggeration. The little town of Besse, about 9km away from our spot, is a charming little Renaissance town. And it has a supermarket. Another 7km gets you to SuperBesse, one the bigger ski resorts of the Massif Central.

Besse

Superbesse

But we were definitely ensconced in SubBesse, a.k.a. Les Chirouzes, which is aught but a handful of snow-covered farm-houses. No shop, no church, not even an internet connection. It was like rehab.

We were just barely above the snowline, so the vast expanses of nothing were white except for the larger tussocks of grass. The weather could reasonably be described as awful: a mix of sleet, snow and rain, with intermittent fog and high winds. If we'd gone for the snowfields we'd have been sadly, sadly disappointed. But we went only for the wood fire and the Christmas roast, so of course it was perfect.

What did we do? We did go sledding at SuperBesse one afternoon, which was obviously huge fun and requires no further explanation. Jinu passed out from exhaustion the second we got back into the warm car. To prolong the nap, I attempted a scenic drive to Lac Pavin, which Wikipedia describes as "a meromictic crater lake located in the Puy-de-Dôme department of France". They might have added "pretty", but Wikipedia is not one to take sides on such delicate subjective issues. In any case, we'll never know, because we had to bail on the attempt after getting repeatedly stuck in snowdrifts.

Oh, baby!!

When we got back to the cottage, Jinu woke up, bawled, and then proceeded to spend the evening puking his guts out. Still, he was happy enough the next morning, telling us over and again about how he "did a lot of sick whleeeeck!!" so it didn't really dampen the mood, and in fact only encouraged us to be more housebound, which was fine by me. We burned through every last scrap of the woodpile.

Christmas itself was marvelously wholesome. We ate a lovely coq et vin (ie, served separately) and an apple tart. Thus fortified, sitting with HJ on a blanket in front of the wood stove as Jinu played with his new Mack truck, I felt for the first time like we were an actual family. I don't know whether my experience is universal, but to me, "my family" continues to mean mum 'n' dad and the sibs, while HJ and Jinu are more like beloved roommates. I presume I'll integrate them into my concept of "relative" eventually, but I'm not there yet.

Mack

The low grey clouds finally lifted on the day we left, so we decided to make one last trip to SuperBesse to take the cable-car up the Puy de Sancy. It was -7C at the base and at the summit the wind was so strong they were issuing safety warnings. So we said balls to that, ate a jam sandwich, climbed back in the car and set off home without having taken in a single panoramic view the whole week. Huzzah!

Foreign again

2010-09-12T05:37:00.001-07:00

Without wanting to sound melodramatic, coming back to our Clermont-Ferrand apartment was a little like stepping into an abandoned sewer. `Abandoned' because, after living in close quarters with two extended families for over a month, the sudden isolation of our compact little unit was palpable. `Sewer' because of the smell.

Note, though, that `abandoned' is how you'd want your sewer if you had to step into it, and indeed the smell was bad but not intolerable. At first I thought we'd merely forgotten to take out the rubbish or something, but then we stepped into the bathroom. The s-bend was dry, allowing a direct line of smell to the main sewage line, and the whole room was covered in a fine spray of brown flecks which, as HJ put it, were "definitely not our poo". In the end, not a big deal, though it cost HJ a lot of elbow grease from an already jetlagged body.

If you're not on the right continent, you'd be excused for not knowing that we even left. More about that soon, I hope. This blog is straining under the demands of increased toddler waking hours. I find it hard to justify blogging while he's awake ("Go away, I'm writing about how much fun you are!"), and since he's taken to the european lifestyle of long siesta and late bed-time, that leaves me with precious little opportunity for this sort of solitary activity. In any case, I still haven't written about June's trip to eat duck and see bison on the cave-walls of the Dordogne, let alone Aunty Did's european visit.

But let me try to gain some momentum by starting in the present. Like I said, HJ and I were a tad glum to be alone in foreignville again. Jinu, on the other hand, couldn't have been happier to be back:

What's more, his happiness counts double because it knocks on so easily.

That's how it was until we went to the Jardin Lecoq the next day. Wandering round the town had perked me up a bit, because I do still love France. Jinu, on the other hand, was in the middle of a playground teeming with kids when suddenly it dawned on him that he can no longer talk to anyone.

Ever since we decided to head to France, everyone has had the same reaction: "Oh, he's so lucky! He'll grow up knowing three languages. I've always been less enthusiastic about that. It might have been different if he'd been in France from the start, but in my opinion, two is the wrong age to be thrown into a new language. He's done with being misunderstood now. He wants to start interacting. His conversation needs polish, not Polish.

To be honest, the whole multilingual childhood thing seems a bit of a rabid 21st century pseudo-intellectual fetish sometimes. Easy for me to say since we're in there anyway, but people do seem to get a bit overexcited. Like Heath's friends who insist on speaking to their boy in nothing but bad high-school French, so that he can grow up speaking a second language -- namely, bad high-school French.

To set the record straight, for a start there is some minor cost (multilingual kids speak later and wind up with less vocab in each language). But that's not really what bothers me. The point is that some kids grow up with two languages in the house, and some grow up with cello players, and some go fishing and camping every fortnight, and some have pastry cooks for parents, but none of those other immersively acquired skills get any cred.

Well, ranting aside, Jinu was increasingly dumbstruck as the other kids repeatedly stared blankly at him and went elsewhere. One of the Polliwogs even caught a wallop in a sudden spate of toddler xenophobia. It was unsettling to watch.

He's settled back into it now, the way he was before -- comfortably solitary. And he meets his comfortable old friends again. (Interesting linguistic question there.. when a Korean-English kid hangs out with his Japanese-French friends, what kind of creole is spawned? Do they all intermix, or do the language groups separate like oil and water?)

Still, I've decided that it's time to rip off the band-aid. While HJ is looks for a French course, we're simultaneously seeking out a creche for Jinu's own education. He needs to be able to socialize sooner rather than later, even if it costs him a few months of pain.

Complications (Coming to Perth)

2010-07-30T05:04:00.000-07:00

Suddenly, I find that Jinu and I will be in Perth on Thursday (5/8).

Firstly, the bad news is that HJ's sister, Yeong-a, has just had an emergency C-section after a very complicated pregnancy. The good news is that they're all reasonably fine, relative to the situation, although the little guy is very underweight and will have to spend his first weeks in an incubator.

The other bad news is that HJ's mum is unable bring forward her trip to Maroochydore (the backdrop of this dramatic scenario) any earlier than planned (late August). Yeong-a and her husband only moved there earlier in the year, so they know no-one. HJ has been really stressed this last week, and we've spent the last 24 hours trying to figure out how best to get some help to them.

As a consquence, the other good news is that we're coming back to Oz for a month. HJ is going straight to Sunshine Coast; Jinu and I will hang out in City Beach for the first three weeks. The theory is that this is the best way to give Yeong-a support and space, Jinu some family and me at least some time to work. In the latter respect, it's sort of like we're cashing in on two years' worth of grandma-babysitting all at once. (Are you ready, mum?)

In conclusion, what are people up to next weekend?

Chili surprise

2010-07-12T22:11:00.000-07:00

Heheh. 고추 (gochu = 'chili pepper') is Korean for willy.

A month ago, we sent over a huge box of dresses and pink tights for HJ's sister's little girl, expected in Maroochydore in ten weeks. Then last week they went for the second ultrasound... Surprise reversal!!

Two years old

2010-07-09T13:37:00.000-07:00

They tell you that it gets easier as they get older. True, it's much less intense. But the thing they neglect to mention is that regardless, you still have much less free time. For a start, he sleeps less now, especially since he has by osmosis adopted a late-sleeping franco life-style. But more importantly, when he's up he's more interested in interacting -- which for that matter, it's reciprocated -- so it's rare now to find myself with a quiet half hour to tap away at the computer or read a book.

Thus, I find myself at five in the morning, taking advantage of some jet-lag (conference last week) to record for posterity some very old news.

Six weeks ago, the odometer clicked over. Thus, the warranty is now voided, but yet we've not really noticed any of the instant personality malfunctions that the users' forums predict. The closest hint is the appearance of Opinions, which I actually quite enjoy. Take, for instance, the Helicopter Shirt.

This is the first piece of clothing to be asked for by name. The photo was taken the morning after he received it in a big package from Gran & Grandpa. The package contained, amongst other treasures...

He grabbed the Vegemite instantly, ignoring numerous gift-wrapped goodies, and ran off saying "want some bread!"

But that was all several days later. The day itself started with Jinu discovering that, inexplicably, the pokie of life was coming up cherries.

7:30am

From Halmeoni, Harabeoji.

Very, very exciting, though he can't yet reach the floor. Maybe in six months. Note once again that full-length mirrors are ace. Admiring oneself seems to be another two-year old trait.

Next, an enormous garage from gran & grandpa.

Assembly required, but couldn't wait

Even though we were expecting it to some degree, we were astounded by the scale of the present haul. On the other hand, HJ and I bought him a pathetic little set of five matchbox cars (which he would have loved, but still...). Perhaps somewhat presciently, we didn't hand it over in the morning. When the guests arrived later, they came bearing such enormous construction sets and giant, fully equipped farm houses that we were glad we didn't go to any of their kids' birthday parties yet.

Then Yumi mentioned that her four-year old has great piles of toy cars that he never plays with, and so offered us a huge garbage bag full of them. Somewhat guiltily, I took our completely redundant little car set back to the toyshop the next day. So in the end, we gave Jinu absolutely nothing for his birthday, unless you count David Bowie narrating Peter and the Wolf.

Aunty Did, in form, sent an enormous wooden train set which his room can barely contain. As is the way with train sets, I play with it much better than he does. Not more, just better. It's also good for mind-games (using the power of topology for evil..)

Train pwn!

To his credit, and my disappointment, he pretty quickly realized he could just reverse up.

Quick desperate nap before party guests arrived

Actually, Aunty Did's does pretty well with presents that get clutched at bedtime. The other huge winner of the birthday was "bus-card", which showed up in the mail a few days later:

Before nap

During nap

After nap.

It still gets carried about to this day. He was showing it to me via Skype while I was away.

The party was a great success. Our shoebox of an apartment barely held the food, let alone the guests, but that makes for a great atmosphere. HJ spent days preparing the menu of course, and that helps the mood too.

Actually, we felt lucky to have friends for him to play with, considering we'd been just two months in the new country. There are precious few Koreans in Clermont, but fortunately it's a connected graph, so once you've located a node you've got the lot of them. By incredible coincidence, Yumi and her son even live just a block away, though sadly for us they've gone back to Korea for the whole summer.

Presents

Cake

Playing with haul

Actually, a note on this. Being nerd-parents, we've been pretty neglectful in buying him imagination toys. I hadn't realized how much fun he would have at this age with a bunch of farm animals. The farmer's wife and the tow-truck driver spend hours gossiping to each other through the barn window.

And that was that. As usual, Jinu refused to sit still long enough to take a family snap. In the end we gave up. We'll be putting up with photo albums full of shots like this.

Maybe it's better that way.

Clermont goes nuts (addendum)

2010-06-03T14:06:00.000-07:00

Just found a short video I snapped of the Place de Jaude after the buzzer.

The Kickstand Song

2010-06-03T12:36:00.001-07:00

Apologies to the rellies, to whom I've repeatedly promised to post more photos of the lad, particularly with his birthday gifts, which he uniformly adored. I'll get to that as soon as I find the time. Not this weekend -- we're off to the Périgord.

But to placate, let me just throw up a video from brekky this morning. He's all over the Kickstand Song at the moment. A Darren Hanlon classic, this is one of the first songs I ever sung to the newly emerged baby Jinu, and it's suddenly back in style. Normally there's not so much desperate prompting from us, but you know, a rolling camera makes anyone self-conscious.

Clermont goes nuts

2010-05-30T12:10:00.000-07:00

11:00pm, Saturday night.

As we all know, europeans don't need much cajoling to celebrate a sporting victory, but even by the local standards this has been impressive.

We're deep in rugby territory here, and Clermont has a stellar team. Saturday night, they took the national championships. But more important here is the history, which is as follows.

They have never, ever, not once in their proud history, taken the championship. They've been to the finals eleven times, and choked on every single one of them, including the last three years running. Last year it was a particularly impressive choke in the dying minutes against Perpignon, also this year's adversary. So, clearly, the tension was high.

Kick-off was at 9:00, but already by midday, the Place de Jaude was filling up with crazies.

Note that Chuck Norris jokes transcend cultures. Even old Vercingetorix was showing his colours.

We gave Jinu a long late nap with the intention of watching the game on the big screen. This didn't work. For a start, he was still tired and irritable at nine. But the real problems with the plan were more systemic than that.

There were easily ten thousand people crammed into the Place de Jaude, with no remaining line of sight to the big screen. But moreover, the whole square was wall to wall broken glass. Remember the scene in Die Hard where Hans Gruber shoots out the office windows to cut up McClane's bare feet? You could not take a step without landing on shards of glass. With so many smashed up Heineken bottles, there must have been a goodly number of PAFOs, and every one of them must have resulted in a trip to the lacerations ward.

Like a news anchor without pants,
this shot looks more orderly than the reality.

So we took Jinu home. He fell gratefully asleep, and then I snuck out to watch the last fifteen minutes. But by then it was 19-6 Clermont, and all over bar the shouting. Of which there was much, obviously.

We're central enough that we didn't sleep much that night, and in fact they were still honking car horns 48 hours later. As HJ noted, they're so unaccustomed to victory that they don't know what to do about it.

Fireworks in crowd on field of broken glass = yay.

Jinu at 1 year, 364 days

2010-05-23T13:24:00.000-07:00

Scrabble in Vichy

2010-05-20T13:24:00.000-07:00

Okay, first some bellyaching. This is therapy, humour me.

You see, the Canadians are beholden to tight American security regulations. This means that filthy foreigners like HJ and me are kept on a short leash vis-a-vis driver's licenses. I'll spare you the gory bureaucratic details, but in short, a six day delay by the work permit bureaucrats dominoed into me being denied a photo id card. Instead, the woman behind the counter would only issue me a two-month paper permit.

"It's legally exactly the same," she says. "The French will accept it just like a regular license."

This is homo sapiens displaying its outstanding ability to rectify cognitive dissonance. Unable to admit to herself that she is a small-minded bureaucrat, she instead convinces herself that there is in fact no such thing as a small-minded bureaucrat.

Oh, I begged and begged, but to no avail. Sure enough, the French bureaucrats laughed me out of the building, along with Hervé, who had bravely come in to bat for me. And now, here we are in a mediocre city surrounded by glorious countryside, with no way out. All visitors are hereby requisitioned to chauffeur duties.

So the train's all we've got. You can't explore the villages or the mountains or the streams or the cheese-farms, but you can go to Vichy. Which is where we went last weekend. Actually, we would have gone pretty much anywhere, since the main motivation was just to let Jinu finally get on a train.

Actually, like climbing a mountain, he sort of became aware that trains look better from the outside. Still, a satisfying accomplishment.

Vichy is smaller but more toursity, hence better pavements and less dog-poo. You're supposed to take the waters (salty!). Check-off list completed, Jinu fell asleep and we had a coffee. That was pretty much a bankable day right there.

Little did I realize that that very day, Vichy was hosting the 2010 Fédération Française de Scrabble championships!

Seems they were playing duplicate, which is kinda cheesy, but maybe that's the norm for tournaments. I'm assuming the grosses légumes were off playing one-on-one in the VIP room somewhere.

Tragically, I stepped in just as they were clearing up for dinner break. But merely the sight of that oversize board got the Scrabble juices rearing up in me. And indeed, I went on to play a 560-point game against my iPod's Scrabble robot* later that day, then immediately signed up for some mano-a-mano action on Facebook (where Jon P has since held me to a humbling three straight defeats). Taking all comers!

[*Drone on highest difficulty level, for the record. I remark though, that while the robot is tough to beat, when it's losing it plays open (sensible strategy) which can lead to big scores if the tiles fall your way.]

Fact for the day: French for "parallel play" is maçonnerie.

Capped the day off with a good old-fashioned brass-band-in-a-rotunda, albeit in the rain. We even got to proudly stand for the Marseillaise.

Allons enfants..!

For the record

2010-05-20T13:16:00.000-07:00

Did took pity on my sorry ass and sent over a jar of Vegemite. Jinu nearly tore it off the shelf when he saw it. The only bread in the house was an old crust of two-day-old pain rustique, but he devoured it like it was food of the gods.

Some random photos

2010-05-15T13:02:00.000-07:00

Trainspotting.

(This is why Jinu misses our old apartment)

Jinu engaging in the fine European art of pigeon-chasing.

Can only end badly.

Find the odd one out.

He got away from me. That was at Clermont-Ferrand's Carnival. Which also looked like this:

And this:

My, look at all those stilt-walking girlies! Judging from that day, stiltwalkers are something that Europe is not in short-supply of. Unlike, say, buckwheat noodles or size 13 shoes.

And now just some photos that I like:

Goofing around in some square or other.

(Some days he really looks like an asian kid.)

Jardin Lecoq again.

Dinner in the Place du Jaude.

Picnic with Hervé and Lucie.
(Ah, Orangina, how I've missed you!)

I like the mood of that photo, though I'm slightly embarassed by it because it seems like we're fawning over him. Honestly, I don't spend all my time staring at him fondly.

And speaking of plumbing...

2010-05-15T12:50:00.000-07:00

Why is it that centuries at the forefront of engineering technology hasn't endowed Europe with decent toilets? Ours seems to have an blundering reversal in design: first fill the bowl with a cistern of water, then empty the difference. Clearly, this leads to only an exponential decay situation (with respect to number of flushes).

Ah well, I guess it's better than the German shelf.

Settled

2010-05-09T00:02:00.000-07:00

Whoa, so much to log, but so much real life happening. I've still got things to talk about from Victoria, a month and a half ago. Like, here is a picture of everything we own:

That's 47 cubic feet of existence, or 1.3 cubic metres if you want to make it sound even more monastic. (Volume scaling is always much faster than my intuition will accept.)

In truth, you have to add to that total six suitcases, a few carry-ons, a stroller, a car-seat, and, as of last week, a glorious reconditioned front-loading washing machine. Ah, the 20th century! It's the first white good we've owned, and we're like freakin' 1950's housewives over here. No more Saturday afternoons pushing coins into the communal washers. No dryer, of course, but we do have clothes lines hanging over the courtyard beneath our apartment windows, which is much more de rigeur, I'd like to think.

It's the apartment that I really want to get onto here, since I've had a half-written draft on the subject for the better part of a month now. The point here is really to lay the scenery for the blog's transition onto the new continent.

So, um, dang, now I'm all self-conscious. Er. Okay start with the facts, Bob, and work it up from there.

It's a smallish apartment, two floors up, in a 17th century building in the centreville. Luminous, well-ventilated, fully furnished and then some. Furnished apartments are hard to come by, so we could have easily ended out in, say, Royat -- a pleasant enough satellite, popular with the spa seekers -- but really, what's the point of a year in France if you're not going to be living amongst the labyrinthine cobbled alleyways of an old town, surrounded by boulangeries and cafés and middle eastern guys selling replacement TV remotes?

We chose the place because it was the only one that landed within our constraints on size and price. But it also has some nice features. For instance, unusually for the centreville, it has a gated courtyard, which though cobbled and bare, will at least provide a space for a run-around when Jinu needs a quick spot of exercise.

Actually, the cobbled semi-pedestrian alleyways themselves provide a solution to one of my biggest annoyances about urban life with a kid: metropolitan toddlers have to be constantly kept on a leash. In Canada I got really tired of constantly dragging Jinu back from the edge of the street. Here, he can wander and explore at his own pace, as long as you watch out for the enormous dog-turds everywhere.

Right around the corner from the place there's another, better, pan-asian market. This one seems to be run by Vietnamese. Or Cambodians. (French Indochina is not my strong suit.) In any case, it's again a mild improvement over the last one, selling for instance 된장 (a heavy Korean miso paste) and a badly preserved kimchi. In bad news, we've had official confirmation from a Japanese local that there is no Korean, Japanese or even Chinese market in Clermont-Ferrand. This woman orders her groceries online from Germany!

I've found a couple of small urban climbing frames, tucked away in nearby squares, and according to a colleague, there's a small but nice park a short walk away. It's yet to be seen first-hand. Still, the short tram-ride to Lecoq is a much better pay-off.

The main drawbacks of the new place? Well, it's two high-ceilinged storeys up, with no elevator, so that we'll end up with either an expert stair-climber or severe back pain. Early data suggests the former, fortunately. Other quirks are satisfyingly French. The "shower" is essentially a corner of the bathroom with a hose. Man, the French really know how to take the fun out of bathing. I might give it a miss altogether. Also, the pantry reeked of garlic. All good.

I'll put up some photos of the place sometime, but for privacy reasons I'll refrain from posting the Google StreetView. If you're super curious what the area looks like, you can always take a virtual stroll around the cathedral. You should note, though, that Google can only take you along roads with car traffic.

The cathedral is awesome, by the way. Firstly, its made from volcanic stone, so it's black. It's also enormous and it sits right on the crown of the hill of the town, sticking out of the mound of cream-plastered old buildings like a giant black wart.

My sister, Did, has been virtualling around our new neighbourhood, finding things for me, which is a testament to the power of Google. She implied that she barely needs to visit now. I was going to prove her wrong by providing a StreetView of an inviting patisserie, but it turns out all the good ones are in the pedestrian parts. And even our favorite one, which is in a crappy part of town, was apparently still being built when Google drove by.

Let me finish off with some photos. These were shot by a random friendly French hobbyist (pseudonym: "Far"). He was visiting Clermont-Ferrand for the weekend, shooting around the old town, when Jinu stumbled in to his frame. He offered me some shots to post.

Cathédrale Notre-Dame-de-l'Assomption de Clermont-Ferrand.

The head of our research group says it's black because of the sin of the Crusaders. For reference, Pope Urban II was Clermontois.

Foutain in the cathedral square, with the
Puy-de-Dôme (ex-volcano) in the background.
Atop the Puy is where Blaise-Pascal, another Clermont lad, confirmed that atmospheric pressure is just the weight of all that air.

Statue of Vercingetorix in the Place du Jaude.

Gaulish chieftain, last to stand up to Caesar (unsuccessfully),
and the third famous Clermontois. The fourth is this guy:

Street in the centreville (backed again by the Puy-de-Dôme).

To be commemorated in stone in due course.

(All photos © Far, except the obvious one.)

Saltybittersweet breakfast

2010-04-23T21:31:00.000-07:00

Dear reader, I write to you with a broken heart.

I'm now in Charles de Gaulle Terminal 2G. Air France domestic flights take only one checked bag.

Going to New Zealand I didn't check nuthin', so this shouldn't have been a problem. The Korean food box was solidly overweight, I knew, but not so much that I couldn't talk my way through it, and indeed, it went on with a minimum of negotiation. I'd planned to check my mini-suitcase too, which is now also pretty heavy thanks to all the English language kids' books and second-hand novels. But the woman had her limits and she would only let me stretch the rules by taking the bag on board as a significantly overweight carry-on. Well, so be it.

Oh the casualties of sleeplessness! Five minutes later, I was detained at the x-ray for carrying 1.2kg of Vegemite.

I was speechless. The security staff sent me back to the check-in counter to beg, but I'd already pushed the envelope so far, and my best efforts failed. I couldn't justify to myself the €70 excess baggage fee. It was time to let go.

Tossing the Vegemite into a bin seemed unforgiveably disrespectful. Instead, I carried all four jars with me and turned them in ceremoniously at the security check, like a state funeral. They had to prise the last jar out of my trembling hand. I shambled forward four paces, but my legs could take me no further. The pain was overwhelming. With a certain amount of shame, I confess that I turned and fought my way back through the crowd.

With just one precious, glorious jar of Vegemite in my hand, I found the one land-side cafe in the terminal and bought a small and rather tasty baguette. Plastic knife in hand, I twisted off the yellow lid and set to work. Fortunately, my flight was delayed, so I had plenty of time to linger over it. It tasted like all the sweet things of life.

When I finished, I stood up, wiped the corner of my eye, and took a deep breath. Then my base instincts kicked in, and I found myself back at the cafe facing the cashier again.

With my second baguette in hand, I decided that the setting was important, so I located a chair by a large viewing window overlooking a vast expanse of airport parking -- the best I could manage, I'm afraid. I'd had just two bites of the black gold when a balding bespectacled middle-aged man sat down on the bench opposite me, took off his glasses, and began crying deeply into his hands. I'll never know what it was about, but I want to believe he'd just surrendered a jar of Promite. In any case, there was a strange, sad solidarity between us in that place as the dawn broke and the sun rose gloriously over the circling shuttle buses.

Charles de Gaulle

2010-04-23T21:27:00.000-07:00

Do we have wifi…?

…?

Ach, yes, but they're gonna charge me for it. I hate paying for airport wifi (oh, I miss Canada!) so I'll write now and post this tomorrow.

Okay, I'm reporting from deep in the heart of Charles de Gaulle airport in Paris, France. It's 11:45pm. I've got this far, so it's looking good, but there are no connecting flights to Clermont-Ferrand until the morning.

I'm in a room that must once have been an open plan office, now sans cubicles. With me are about twenty other passengers, all stranded here for the night. We've each been issued a foam mat and a blanket. They promised a bottle of water too, but no sign of that yet. Also, I've no chance at food, unless you count AU$200 worth of Korean soy sauce, fish sauce, glass noodles, sesame oil, red pepper, dried herbs,… Surprisingly Charles de Gaulle shuts down completely overnight.

Come to think of it, perhaps not so surprisingly. When our plane arrived about 21:00, there were exactly two, yes two, immigration officers on duty, one running the EU counter and one taking the rest of the world. At precisely 21:30, with a couple of hundred passengers still in line, Monsieur EU stood up, walked over to his colleague and declared that he was clocking off.

"What about all these people?" says Rest-of-the-World.

"They can wait."

Ah, France! I was second in line, and thanking God.

As for my predicament now, well, I could have forked out for a hotel I guess. But I'm cheap (the hotels have all doubled their prices) and besides I kind of like the vibe here, incorrigible masochist that I am. I've got a terrible, terrible mixed berry smoothie from the drinks vendie and a Scrabble app for my new iPod Touch. (The Touch itself was a happy coincidence: it's been on my wishlist for a while, and was just about to bubble to the surface when Andrew & Kate mentioned they had one surplus to needs which they'd just won for submitting themselves to a survey.) So how sweet is life!?

And tomorrow… Jinu!!!
And a shower.

Melbourne

2010-04-19T04:55:00.000-07:00

Ah, Iceland. It seems Iceland's influence on the world always far exceeds its stature. And now that Greece is stealing the limelight in the financial crisis, the island has had to take dramatic steps.

There I was in New Zealand for work, minding my own business, when Eyjafjallajökull started vomiting maliciously all over western Europe's commercial airspace. In fact, I was watching BBC World in my hotel room at 4am, jetlagged and insomniac, when the headlines started trickling in. Britain was cautiously shutting its airports, but the chance that it might affect the continent seemed pretty remote.

But in retrospect, why on earth didn't I check the news again before heading to the airport at eleven? I can only blame the continuing jetlag. A three day visit to New Zealand from France is not conducive to sanity.

The flight from Clermont-Ferrand to New Zealand was a record breaker for me, which is saying something considering my Perth origins. Six airports! And in that, three airlines, all un-partnered, which is a recipe for disaster. Thus, Air New Zealand didn't even mention the crisis when I checked in. So the first inkling I got was when the woman at the Emirates desk in Christchurch told me to go and talk to the people at that counter over there, please sir. Meaning, of course, the specially trained Angry Passenger clerks.

Over the years, I've been trying to hone my calibration of the Angry Client clerks the world round. At times I've been firm when I should have been obsequious, or pleading when I should have been stubborn. But this one I got right.

The lowest on the food chain was given a short leash, as usual -- a very tight script intended to minimize complication for the airline. According to this storyline, I was supposed to languish away in a hotel room in Christchurch, at my own expense for the better part of a week. I entreated pathetically, and got to the Manager Level. I'll skip the tedious details, but I ended up with a flight to Sydney and (in theory) out of Melbourne on Wednesday. So after buying a JetStar flight down the east coast corridor, I've wound up with a five day holiday in Melbourne. How sweet is that?

Incidentally, taking the shuttle in from the airport, it really struck me what the attraction is in travel. It's all ownership. Crossing the West Gate Bridge, with the skyline rising up all familiar, the feeling that struck me was that it's all there for me. The cafés of Bridge St and the gelaterias of Lygon and the Vietnamese restaurants of Richmond are all awaiting my arrival -- have been for years -- waiting to serve me as I settle in to my throne. And when that Hanjin container truck passes on the highway, it reminds me of my other fiefdoms in Busan, or wherever. And while it's comforting to return to your serfs, there is always the need to spray your urine on new territories, claiming the boulangeries of the Auvergne or the pine forests of Vancouver island.

But Melbourne is the ancestral home, so after two and a half hours explaining the situation to Perth and Canberra, I spent the rest of the day scheduling meetings with the local dignitaries. It's great. Andrew, Kate & Harriet for Sunday lunch, a play in the park, then straight to AD, Deepti and Naina's for dinner, with smelly rellies planned for the rest of the week.

Oh, and I bought supplies for France too -- I spent so much at the Korean Family Mart in Lonsdale St that their points system instantly earned me 13 free packs of ramen.

Meanwhile, back in Clermont-Ferrand, Jinu's been looking after his mum really dutifully, I hear. And here's a second-hand anecdote... In anticipation of a rainy day trapped in our miniature temporary digs, I bought an off-brand wooden train set, of the kind which is now seemingly a mandatory investment for all parents. HJ deployed it a few days ago, and Jinu was enrapt. He was inseparable from it, playing for hours, and his breathing slows to a slow deep rhythm as all attention focuses on the track.

HJ couldn't convince him to have dinner. Not having the heart to deprive him, she left him to play while she ate. Finally, she had to carefully explain to him that she was going to take the trains away, and they would eat dinner, but that after that she would give it back.

He cried. Not a tantrum, but tears of pure heartbreak. He walked into the bedroom and lay down on the bed and sobbed. Then, after a minute or so, HJ heard him talking to himself in perfect sniffling Korean sentences: "We're going to eat dinner and then mum will give the train back. We're going to eat dinner and then mum will give the train back." It's the first full sentence he's ever said -- up till now it's all been mix-and-match noun with verb, noun with adjective. But with this grammatically correct mantra he psyched himself up for dinner, ate patiently, and then went back gratefully to his trains. He later fell asleep clutching the engine, handing it off to HJ only at the moment when drowsiness finally overcame him.

So it sounds like there's not too much suffering in France, although I'm sure we'll all be very glad to be back together again. In theory, we're supposed to move into our new apartment (about which I have a half-written blog post from two weeks ago) on Friday. My current flight lands in Paris late Thursday, with no connection to Clermont-Ferrand that night, so it's already going to be a tough ask, but if Iceland keeps up its diva-like behaviour for even another day it's going to be all out the window.

Wednesday afternoon in the Jardin Lecoq

2010-04-01T11:16:00.000-07:00

Back to the Jardin Lecoq yesterday. Man, it was the funnest day ever!! I'd forgotten that there's no school on Wednesday in France. All these cultural factoids are drifting back to me from high-school textbooks.

There may not be quantity, but it's sure quality. I think this is the best young kid's playground I've ever been to.

The really big hit with Jinu was the merry-go-round, somehow a very European piece of play equipment. I think what makes it so fun is all the screaming primary-school girlies. Jinu flatly refused it when I tried to coax him on the other morning, so I thought it was too big for him. But the girlies patiently explained to us that the little 'uns go in the middle while the big kids push. Not one to miss a chance at impressing the ladies, Jinu boldly accepted and nearly wet himself laughing. Probably did wet himself laughing.

Then, of course, he wanted to push with the girlies. It took all my strength to hold him back from the whirling circumference of stockinged legs. Fortunately, it was going at an easier pace when he returned with HJ this morning. (I can see we're going to be regulars here.) Jinu and his similarly-sized colleague took turns pushing.

First solo flight on a grown-up swing.
It's so low he can push himself. What a great park!

Clermont-Ferrand: First impressions

2010-03-28T05:54:00.000-07:00

Gritty, beautifully situated, not at all Korean.

Coming in on the train from Lyon is when HJ's experience and mine really began to diverge.

I was grinning stupidly to myself all through the trip. The landscape out there is just how you'd want your French landscape -- rolling hills, vineyards, green pastures, old stone farmhouses. I was getting more and more enamoured with it all. Truth be told, living in France has been on my lifetime to-do list since high-school, I think for the somewhat unromantic reason of justifying six years learning the bloody language, and now I find myself checking it off almost without intention.

On the other hand, HJ was mostly asleep on the train, but when awake she was confirming her mild but all-encompassing fears of the French experiment. I've previously mentioned the word 답답해 (frustrated?, suffocated?) on this blog, in reference to Busan traffic. Now, it perfectly describes how HJ feels to be dumped into French.

Well, fair enough, she's already spent the better part of a decade in Anglophonia, trying to express herself in a language that doesn't even have a word for how 답답해 it makes her feel. Not to mention putting up with conversations like this:

Dear old Jean: That's a beautiful duvet. Is it feather?
HJ: No, it's cotton.
Dear old Jean [smiling kindly]: No, dear, I don't think you under stand my English. Is it feathers in side it?
HJ: No, it's filled with cotton.
Dear old Jean [gesticulating wildly]: NO! I mean IN SIDE it. Is it FEATHERS in SIDE it?!
HJ [through gritted teeth]: No, it's really filled with cotton.
Dear old Jean: Oh. [Pause.] [Turn back to dryer.]

So now here's my impression of HJ's impression of French: "woozhywoozhy-woozhawoozh." That's apparently what erupted from the SNCF ticket-line in Lyon from the Frenchies aggressively defending their queue, as HJ tried to reach me at the counter.

But far worse than the language-barrier is the food-barrier. Gastronomically, HJ is very Korean. I wasn't too worried, because I had never been to any city anywhere in the world that doesn't have a Korean supermarket. Even in Dunsborough, Coles will sell you kimchi and Korean ramyun.

But defying even HJ's worst expectations, Clermont-Ferrand appears to be not only without Korean market, but without Japanese market too. Even without Chinese supermarket!! How can this be possible?! The Chinese are everwhere!! I still can't accept it as true, although HJ collared some Chinese people in the Place de Jaude who told her it was so.

This is an unmitigated disaster. HJ could not even be consoled by the truly superb seafood selection in the Carrefour supermarket (sea-snails!). When we asked for the asian section in this otherwise upscale joint, they pointed us to two end-row shelves which spanned the entire continent from India to Malaysia to Japan. The closest HJ could get to a Korean ingredient was a bottle of Kikkoman soy sauce. They don't even have sushi rice!! We've been eating arborio since arrival. (Basmati just isn't even rice in Korea.)

The fishmonger, seeing how crestfallen we were, directed us to an asian market he knew. This was a strange place. On the outside it had a gigantic flashing red neon sign advertising "produits exotiques," so that at first I thought it was a sex-shop. It was again "pan-asian," although it smelt like the subcontinent (not that there's anything wrong with that). Strangely, it was run by a middle-aged white Frenchman, who would have looked more in place behind the counter at a boulangerie. Still, there were some fundamentals there -- gochujang (red-pepper paste), japanese white noodles, and a tiny tiny bag of sushi-rice, which our family will devour in two meals -- plus some approximating ingredients from neighbouring countries. All at exhorbitant prices.

As for Jinu, well the big problem is that France -- indeed, Romance europe altogether -- doesn't believe in parks. I mean, I like a square with a fountain in it as much as the next guy, but don't they miss the trees? So there are no playgrounds anywhere, and we don't know what to do with him, other than walk to station to admire the trains (which is quite alright by him, incidentally). It's clear that we're not thinking like the French on this issue, but I don't know any French parents yet to teach me the local habits.

Oh, and he falls desperately silent when he hears the language. I imagine it's quite disconcerting for him to be suddenly unable to understand anything, though I reckon he'll get into it soon enough. He managed an au revoir this morning.

Our current digs are not pretty. We've put up for the moment in a long-stay travellers' apartment near the train station. The area confirmed reports of Clermont as "industrial." But we are by the railway stataion, after all. I've since discovered that the old town is quite charming and vibrant, though probably not enough so to warrant it a page in your Lonely Planet. Moving to a new apartment will be first item on our agenda.

Encompassing the town, the low rolling mountains are quite beautiful. The Puy-de-Dôme, which gives it's name to the region, still had the last of its winter snow on it when we arrived, though it blew off in the overzealous wind of the next couple of days. The region is known for its restorative waters (Vichy and Volvic are both close by). Another priority: get a car and go explore.

In fact, our situation is already improving in small ways. I started this post last night, but in the 24 hours since, we've (probably) found a quaint apartment in the old town. I found a gorgeous playground in the Jardin Lecoq, which is a bit of a hike but still worth knowing about. And in looking for those, we stumbled across two Japanese restaurants, and possibly, just possibly, a Japanese market (hard to tell since it was all shuttered up).

Personally, I can't wipe the smile off my face. I've been supremely satisfied to discover that my French is actually functional. I love the idea of spending a year here, even though I do empathize with HJ's dislocation. My aim, once settled, is to invest a good chunk of my present enthusiasm into making a memorable year for HJ and Jinu. Wish me bon chance.

Bye bye, Juni!

2010-03-20T20:29:00.000-07:00

Said goodbye to Jinu's anagrammatic playmate this evening. Sad, violent, noisy, a lot of fun.

The Pusher

2010-03-17T20:49:00.001-07:00

I've been planning for a while to write a post about Jinu's bad behaviour. But right now I'm not really in the mood to scold him. I find it impossible to calibrate what's going on.

For about a month now he's been shoving everyone. He pushes me and HJ. He pushes his playmate Juni over and over until she cries. Then he comes home and talks about it at night, as if rehashing his guilt.

Lots of the kids are pushing and shoving now, of course. Joshua's been a shameless shover for ages, but it's only really when he's fighting over toys. Jinu, on the other hand, doesn't start with a property dispute. He might rush excitedly to greet me at the door, and then, snap, his angry face comes on and he swipes at my face.

If there is a trigger -- which there isn't always -- it's either denial or frustration. This morning he went nuts after trying futilely to reconstruct a Lego bus that he'd accidentally broken. He came at me like a pathological workmate.

Meanwhile, day-care has been degenerating into a complete free-for-all. A dozen or more 1½-to-3 year olds, only two of them girls, and never enough of the good toys. It's a jungle. As a lowerclassman Jinu's been on the receiving end for a good long while, but recently earned a real reputation as an unprovoked shover. And he's got girth. HJ calls him 깡패 (ggangpae ="gangster". Note that while yakuza sounds genuinely frightening, ggangpae feels more like goofy. Koreans are like Australians in that way.)

He twice came home with significant bite-wounds. That's apparently how the girls level the playing field. On Friday last week, when we showed up in the arvo for a farewell party, the room had been emptied of all toys and the whole lot of them were on probation. The carers looked done.

The worst thing is the inevitable spiral. Once he's given one of us a first good shove or smack to the head it begins. A reprimand -- tested at various intensities -- leads to either a tantrum and more shoving, or genuine sorrow followed by a tetchy mood and more shoving. More recently we've tried merely ignoring, but we still get the shoving, and it gets humiliating when he's pushing other kids around. Basically it seems that once he's in the bitter grumpy mood, there's no way out but violence.

Finally, in the last couple of days, there have been a couple of complete breakdowns with tears and misery and whacking from the smallest provocation. Tonight, getting him to bed, he freaked out completely and went into a panic. We couldn't get him to breath steady until the moment he passed out from exhaustion.

It's confusing and distressing and we don't know whether to blame the stress of moving or ineffective parenting or just suck it up as part of the fun. One of the problems with parenting more or less alone is that we have no way to gauge the normality of our experience. Any comments?

Facebook experiment

2010-03-14T23:45:00.000-07:00

Well, I've bitten the bullet and handed myself over to Facebook. I have Opinions about Facebook, which I might expound upon when it's not midnight on a Sunday night. But having Opinions is completely unreasonable for someone whose never even set foot in there. So I'm commencing a trial period in the Facebook paradigm.

I will of course remain patronizingly distant from the whole experience, like a 19th century anthropologist amongst the primitives. In that spirit, I'd intended to go on anonymously, under the name of Kim Bob. But when I thusly signed up, the great beast immediately spewed at me a great list of significant players in my personal life, which freaked the hell out of me. Really freaked the hell out of me.

Two notes on that:

How did it know? I did not hand over my email password to the machine so it could search my inbox for me. ("Please giant android, come into my house and look around..") I can only assume that it took my gmail address and scoured the web for it. Can this be right? My address is my name, so it's conceivable, but still sounds unlikely. Or do they have a deal with Google to search my inbox? Doesn't sound Googlesque. I'm at a loss for an explanation.
Why do I care? Here I am writing a blog from which anyone with half a brain could reconstruct most of the important details of my life. But here you actually have to look for me, which is an entry test in itself. Facebook will be pushing me on other people willy-nilly, leveraging the goodwill of my personal brand to fulfill its economic goals. (If that sounds arrogant, I'm talking about the aggregate brand-power of all our personal lives, of course.) It all feels a tad like exploitation.

That second point is not really my major quibble with the paradigm, incidentally, but I'd be pretty presumptuous to start that discussion as Facebook naif. (I'm trying to indicate here that you should be mighty wary of my experimental conclusions in six months.) And I acknowledge the many advantages, which is why I'm commencing the experiment at all.

In any case, when I finally steeled myself to go back into the Machine, I had given up all hope of avoiding the x-ray gaze of the all-seeing eye. So there I am: naked defenseless me. Go on, friend me senseless.

Now it's real

2010-03-06T22:03:00.001-08:00

And once again, the diarist's conundrum strikes. So much happening so quickly, and hence so little time to write about it.

Also, I think it's a consequence of being overworked that I have all sorts of philosophizing and ridiculous art-projects that I want to post. Still, today's been a pleasant day of respite after the stress of selling the car, so let me at least say hi.

Just over two weeks till the move now. Online classifieds are amazing. Furniture walks out the door. Save for an unsold ancient sofa, a writing desk which was left by the previous tenants, and a couple of coffee tables, we're down to the bare essentials: mattress, crib, dining table & chairs. Despite our conscientiously minimalist lifestyle, boxes of possessions are stacking up in the corners. Confusing miscellaneouses still need to be dealt with: microwave, wireless router, 1000W transformer for Korean rice cooker, ...

Meanwhile, the weather's back to extraordinary, so we had a great afternoon out at Fisherman's Wharf, watching the "sea neng-nengs" (seals) and riding the harbour ferry. Ah, we'll miss it all.

Waagh! A thing!

Jinu sits with anticipation at the start of Aaron Gregg's routine,
then votes with his feet. He mercilessly rejects the meticulous trick-pacing
of the professional busker.

Olympics, incidentally

2010-03-03T04:06:00.001-08:00

In search of a French visa, we did indeed travel to Vancouver in the midst of the Olympic madness. Being $600/night for a two-and-a-half star hotel room, this was only possible thanks to the generosity of Al and Simon, who bravely bared their lives and their apartment to the onslaught of a toddler.

The home of the professional and child-free has more in common with the student bachelor pad than with their child-rearing contemporaries. The crucial difference, of course, is the lack of bomb-proofing, which always leads to a game of perpetual chasing and wrist-slapping, stressful for all involved. Sime and Al's little slice of expat heaven is chock full of destructible objects indicative of Leisure Interests. Since these arouse even my curiosity, it's hard to genuinely chastise Jinu for his wandering fingers. On top of that, he's been going through an experimental phase of bashing and mini-tants recently, so much chaperoning was required. Tiring work, but very well compensated by a slice of pav and a glass or two of red in the quiet after bedtime.

As always with Sime and Al, we were too busy chatting and hanging out to remember to unsheathe the camera. That's perhaps appropriate. A photograph doesn't really seem like the right pair of dimensions with which to cross-section the life of Gummy and Mabs. Instead, I came back with Sime's mum's friend Coral's pavlova revipe, which was an absolute winner at today's departmental tea. Thanks, Al!

I had big expectations for the Olympic madness. I like a bit of chaos, and my juggling friends, who'd been over there in the inexplicable sunshine of the previous week, had had great tales of constant public exuberance in the streets. We, sadly, arrived for the only two days of typical bleak squally west coast drizzle, whereupon the whole affair dissolved and sucked back into those overpriced hotel rooms.

Insistent on some kind of Olympic experience, I dragged HJ and Jinu through the miserable damp and cold, to the ultimate anticlimax: The Olympic Flame. As in, effing lame. Don't let the stylish visual effects of that fortuitious raindrop above distract you. It was truly mediocre. It was a laughable tin-foil structure housed in a perfect mock-up of a construction site, and somehow its great size only amplified the primary-school art project feel of it.

And..?

The visa expedition was a success, though. Like all consular staff everywhere, the French officers had perfected the art of belligerent uncooperativeness which is apparently the first line of defense against international terrorism. When you're sent down the street to a copy shop in order to provide additional photocopies of documents they never requested in the first place, you realize that the $150/person processing fee doesn't pay for any actual administrative services -- photocopying, for instance -- but rather buys you a Badge of Pliability which ensures that under duress, you won't rattle the strongholds of their national bureaucracy. We are certified docile.

And then it was goodbye to the House of Wubbage, and back onto the ferry. With an apartment more or less sorted for us in Clermont-Ferrand, the arrival end of the big move is looking pretty good now. The departure game is a whole nother story...

설

2010-02-21T14:57:00.000-08:00

Happy (belated) new year!

According to the Koreans, you don't want to have a girl in the year of the white tiger, because they'll be so headstrong they'll never get a husband. So Catherine, Shelley, Bron, Rachel, Cristin, Deepti, what have you there?

(Did I miss anyone? I'm losing track!)

We had the Korean-Canadian couples over for a New Year's dinner last night. HJ spent the whole day cooking, of course. I was shopper and sous-chef, so Jinu had to amuse himself alone for the entire afternoon, which he did pretty well. The weather helped, since he could go out and chalk occult symbols all over the balcony.

The dinner was excellent fun. We had just barely enough chairs/bowls/glasses, but it all worked out. The food was great, as you would expect from HJ, and the guests brought fruit and booze and home-made apple pie. Jinu and Joshua chased each other on ride-ons, and 7-month-old Irene was cooed over by everyone except her father, who made a beeline for the beer.

Ellie and Eun-seon.
(and, thinking no-one's looking,
Jinu diving into the forbidden rice container)

February in Canada

2010-02-21T14:28:00.001-08:00

The warmest winter in history, as the Olympic reporters keep enthusiastically telling us.

As for me, I had the most excellent morning hiking up Lone Tree Hill. The summit is wide and grassy with rocky outcrops, and the sun was balmy, so Jinu tossed his shoes and went climbing.

Exploring the Lone Tree.

Actually, the arbutus above is the heir to the hill. The original lone-tree was a 200 year old weather-beaten Douglas Fir, which finally packed it in a while back. You can see him poking his stump out in the photo below.

Another bonus of daycare is that the daily walk has made Jinu into a strong walker. He refused the carrier today, and ambled most of the way up. Coming done was declared "wunning," which led to the hilarious game "Gotcha!" where I repeatedly grab him in the nick of as he tumbles down rock-slopes.

Yesterday, in similar weather, he walked with HJ all the way from home to downtown, a trip that takes me 20 minutes with a tail-wind. We've basically abandoned the stroller by now, which surprises me. Of course, HJ had to sing the whole way -- he's powered by Playschool favorites.

Children's music

2010-02-15T20:32:00.001-08:00

Until about four months ago, I didn't understand the point of children's music. Why not just play good music? But now I see they love to follow the lyrics -- a joy I concur with, I might add -- and that's not so easy for them when the song is a jumble of nostalgic yearnings for adolescent skinny dipping. Or whatever. Plus, kids love to follow directions.

Which brings me to today's video. Notes:

Time to get a new camera.
Excuse the heavy breathing. In fact, don't turn the volume up too loud, because when I kick in with my "yeehaa!" at the end it will freak out your workmates.
His "walk around" invariably degenerates to "spin around", while "sneak around" is more like "kicked in the groin".
The hands clasped behind the back for "walk around" are a remarkable second-hand emulation of our fellow postdoc Thomas from Münster, who has a most excellent professorial gait. (Do you read this, Thomas?)
As soon as the orders cease he has to find something else to do.
He gets airborne! 23 mil of vertical leap!

Jinu!

2010-02-08T21:46:00.000-08:00

Jinu said his name for the first time this morning. "Bye-bye, Jinu!" Excuse the paternal soppiness, but it was pretty cute.

Incidentally, again, he's just learnt "aeroplane" in Korean too ("bihenggi"), so all of a sudden he has three words for them. He must be speaking five or ten new words a day at the moment. I guess the muscle movements all just clicked into place.

Books, books, books!

2010-02-06T21:47:00.000-08:00

This is basically a request for book recommendations from other breeders.

We've been lucky that Jinu loves his books. The home collection, which is sizable (thanks mainly to family, friends and notably HJ's friend who donated to us an enormous box of her son's Korean books), was finally tapped out a few months back, so we ventured out to the library.

The library is an awesome winter day out anyway, even if Jinu just spends the whole time there trying to run into the women's bathroom. But now I've also been through the authors that I know, plus the librarian's recommendations, and a few from the web. I need more suggestions. What are your favorite toddler books?

Since I feel I need to offer something in return, let me at least note some of the many winners we've come across. In order to keep the list relatively concise and hopefully useful, let me pass over the obvious ones: Where the wild things are, The very hungry caterpillar, The Little Engine That Could, Goonight Moon, Dr. Seuss, Mem Fox, Pamela Allen. (Let me urge anyone going for The little engine to find as early an edition as possible. It's a tedious and stupid story in the hands of a modern retelling, while the 1930s version sparkles so politely with it's talk of jack-knives for the kiddies.)

Here are some that Jinu and I really agree on:

Mo Willems rocks. Following an impressive TV writing career (six Emmys for Sesame Street work!) he went on to write some awesome books. Specifically, the Knufflebunny books and Edwina, the Dinosaur Who Didn't Know She Was Extinct. If your kid can say "no!" then get hold of Don't Let the Pidgeon Drive the Bus.
Jeremy Tankard. Grumpy Bird and Me Hungry! are stylish and fun.
We were introduced to Bob Graham when someone* gave Jinu Queenie the Bantam as a first birthday present (Graham's best work, in my opinion). I'm all about character and narrative (hence my love of blogs over facebook), and I've been impressed with Graham's ability to deliver these substantively to toddlers. We've since taken out several of his books. We liked "Let's Get a Pup," said Kate. Even How to Heal a Broken Wing, which teeters on the brink of languorous sentimentality, was a fave with Jinu.
Pete the Sheep (Jackie French & Bruce Whatley) was another birthday prez*. It's a pearler. Haven't got to their award-winning Diary of a Wombat yet. And while I'm doing the birthday prezzies, Hairy MacLary from Donaldson's Dairy (Linley Dodd) was an early favorite, too.
The Gruffalo by Julia Donaldson is a classic. Cute, and has a great rhythm to it.
Jon Scieszka's Trucktown series is pure boy-nip. His aim, apparently, was to get more boys into reading. We've only read Smash-Crash!, but it's gotten enormous mileage, to the point where "Dan" is Jinuese for dumptruck**. I warn you that Gabriella Garbage truck is pink, prissy, and carries a teddy bear, so if you're hypersensative to potentially damaging gender stereotypes, well, you obviously shouldn't considering a book called Trucktown in the first place.
For a pure picture book, Goodnight Gorilla (Peggy Rathmann) is superb. Virtually no text, but a great story. Would suit a pre-toddler too.
Almost forgot Jane Yolen. Sweet but fun, Baby Bear's Big Dreams was at the top of Jinu's chart for several weeks. He never showed much interest in How Do Dinosaurs Say Goodnight, which is strange because it's great. I suppose, gasp, that Jinu is just not much of a.. much of a dinosaur guy. Oh, the shame!!
Did sent over Graeme Base's The Waterhole for Christmas. Anyone who knows anything about Graeme base knows that his picture puzzles are way too subtle for a toddler. But here he also has ten little frogs that hang out on each page, like a kind of Graeme Base lite. Jinu wiles away hours looking for them. On a similar theme, he spent days inseparable from Can You See What I See? (Trucks and Cars) which is a Junior version of the more advanced I Spy series.

[*Aargh! Having neglectfully failed to write thank-yous for Jinu's birthday presents, I've now even lost the list I kept of who gave the gifts. So many of those gifts have been totally loved by Jinu, but I'm left only with completely unactionable suspicions of who gave them. I'm pretty sure I know who gave these three books, for instance (though I might have them permuted), but I'm too embarassed to write names lest I be misremembering. If you know who you are, Jinu thanks you.
**Incidentally, I have been truly impressed by Jinu's ability, since as long as I can remember, to immediately identify an enormous variety of different types of truck, even over great distances from a moving car with poor line of sight.]

The above are the so-to-speak brand-name books. There are a bunch of off-brand books that he's been equally engrossed in, but which would be harder to find: Red is a Dragon (Roseanne Thong & Grace Lin) is a really nice colours book; The Frog Who Wouldn't Laugh (Cecilia Egan & Elizabeth Alger) tells the story of Tiddalik; The Three Little Rigs (David Gordon) was facile but truly adored; Five Little Firefighters (Tom Graham) is simple but fun; and my personal favorite, MacGoose's Grocery (Frank Asch, 1978, now sadly out of print) is a wry little gem. Most of these we picked randomly off the library shelves, or found at swap-meets or second-hand bookstores. There are many others, too numerous to mention.

Oh, and pre-toddling Jinu loved Goonight Moon (Margaret Wise Brown), Oh, David! (David Shannon), and Beep Beep (Petr Horacek), amongst other randoms.

Okay, so now it's your turn. I genuinely want to know. What's next on our reading list?

Status update

2010-02-06T19:11:00.000-08:00

I've really not much to write about. Jinu spent the early afternoon puking all over HJ, and now he's passed out, which gives us a pleasant little oasis of down-time. Since he had his 15,000k service recently, I thought I'd maybe jot down a status report to give you a better picture of where he's at.

Firstly, the physical dimensions. Since about 10 months (he's now 20), he's been downgraded from Huge to Large. At about 89cm, he's just below the 97th percentile for height. It comes as a bit of a reassurance to us that the height-weight gap is narrowing -- he's dropped a little closer to the 97th percentile for mass. (The chart we're working from doesn't have any curves about the 97th, so it's a little hard to extrapolate.) His strongest suit remains cranial circumference, where he's still comfortably off the chart. This observation has reignited HJ's passionate anger at the physiology of the paternal line. (Amazingly, I'm spared this anger. Even with my sizable maternally-bestowed bonce, the anger bypasses clearly to Grandpa Y and his genetic legacy, my generously-benoggined siblings.)

His arms can reach to the top of his head now, which is nice when he attempts to put on a hat (scores about 40% from the field). Legs are lengthening too, but both his parents get all their height from the torso, so he'll be blaming us for the curse of the duck in years to come.

Likes to dance, read (alone or together), wipe the floor, vacuum, do the laundry, walk to the beach to throw rocks and watch the tour-buses sleep, sit enclaved in BusyTown, put nappies on his teddy bear, "jump" (can't get airborne), lie around on the doona. He drags the doona out from our room every day.

Language-wise, he's entered the phase we're he learns things faster than we can recalibrate, which means that we're constantly subjected to parental astonishment. Incidentally, he learned "airplane" recently (don't blame me, he's Canadian!) which is going to be a huge relief to the guy. He's been calling them "bvoo" for a month now, just because he always has to talk about them.

He's confident now with the difference between Korean and English, though most things he can still only vocalize in one language (whichever is easier). He gets a little more English probably, thanks to daycare. But Korean works in his favour in one respect: while his English conversation is just a concatenation of words, it's dead easy to make a sentence in Korean. No articles, subject and object are totally optional when obvious by implication. Boy, their salutations are long-winded, though!

Daycare is a mixed blessing. He's sick precisely once a month, for a fortnight a time. We signed up for a toddler music class at the conservatory, just out of curiosity. He's been well enough to go to only two out of five classes so far.

On the other hand, he has friends, and learns a lot of language there. Plus they're teaching him to sit still, which is impressive. In a busy home-life, it's hard to manufacture the conditions to get him sitting down on a regular basis -- other than by putting on a TMBG* album. We were blown away when we showed up one day to see him sitting unrestrained and otherwise unoccupied at a table.

[*Actually, a couple of other albums also get him sitting attentively on the sofa now.]

I dunno, that outta do, I guess. This post is kind of boring, but I felt I had to say something...

Oh, I guess I can update you on our broader status. We've begun the delicate circus trick of liquidating our assets from underneath ourselves. Nonessential furniture is being sold off. Anxiety about what to do with car/dining table/cookware is setting in.

We'll probably end up having to go to the French Consulate in Vancouver for visas in the middle of the Winter Olympics, which sounds highly suboptimal.

Jinu taking orders from the iPod.

I am a god

2010-01-23T14:28:00.000-08:00

Dan was telling me how great the "terrible" twos are*: despondent wailing when you leave for work, tail-wagging excitement when you return. He also lamented the lack of similar emotion from wifeys.

Jinu has started to bring me Offerings. When he hears the key in the lock, he'll search around the living room for something exciting to bring to me -- his bus, a ball, a doona. Then he'll help me off with my jacket.

Like, the other day I received in four separate trips, a rubbish truck (ahem, recycling truck), Richard Scarry's Busiest Busytown Ever! (fully unfolded), a square of blue Lego, and the shoddy parking garage we shambled together from old nappy boxes and masking tape.

I deem it... worthy!

[*Note: Both Dan and I are secondary care-givers.]

Nephila Memeticus

2010-01-22T23:30:00.000-08:00

Nephila Memeticus

I n quisit ive thought is by con sequence fickle,
T ending inevitably to curious succumbence,
S ince all that it takes is the gentlest of tickle
A t temporal cortex or nucleus accumbens.
T hus nature's response seems quite ineluctable,
R efi ned as it has been with Darwinian grace.
A nd the gossamer's so fine that it's nigh undetectable
P laced interlaced through our cognitive space.
!!

They Might Be Giants

2010-01-12T21:19:00.000-08:00

I bought all of the TMBG kids' albums with no thought to Jinu's interests. According to some comments of theirs which I read once but I can't locate on the internet (What are those TMBWiki nerds doing?), writing for kids doesn't alter their musical approach one jot, except that they avoid songs about divorce, murder, insanity, getting it on, etc, etc. I'd go one step further and say the form inadvertantly keeps them true to their heritage. Plus, a theme can help the writing process, as independently confirmed by Linnell's sensational State Songs.

Because of that, I'd kind of assumed that they were really writing these albums for kids' nerd parents. I mean.. retrogaming!?!

Turns out I'm wrong. Jinu even has the same faves as me. You might argue that I'm projecting, but he doesn't dig Arvo Pärt or the Beastie Boys.

He runs to sit on the sofa, motionless and intent, to listen to Here Come the 123's. At risk of repeating myself, Jinu never sits still. For a boy who doesn't get to watch TV, this is a truly invaluable resource. Triops has three eyes, also known as "EYE!! EYE!!", has become synonymous with music.

For the neophytes, here's a quick overview. Here Come the 123's is a five-star offering. It even got them a Grammy. Linnell is a poet, and on top of it he can sure write a hook. No! is my second pick -- a solid all-rounder with some stellar moments. Here Come the ABC's is not shabby, but I prefer the others. Jinu's second pick is the recent one, Here Comes Science, and yes, it's also fine work. (The opening song, "Science is Real", generated some negative reaction, frankly a self-inflicted wound 'cos it comes across a little preachy. Oh, and check out the t-shirt.)

More moves here.

Kim/Bob in France

2010-01-11T20:28:00.000-08:00

News update: The Kim/Bob Project is moving to France in April.

The Canadian position finished in December, officially, but our bosses were good enough to dig up some support money to keep us going a little longer. Still, all good things must come to an end, and sadly our time in Victoria is no exception. We will dearly miss James Bay, which we've decided is one of the most excellent places for raising a puppy.

Now that we've finally made the decision where to go next (and it was no easy decision), I'm actually kinda psyched. But there are definite pros and cons.

Pros:

Research environment.
Europe is kinda fun.
I get to polish my French, capitalizing on 6 years of high-school education that could quite easily have just gone down the toilet.

Cons:

It's only one year.
Far from Australasia.
HJ has to learn French from scratch. (Where the Germans are quite proud to be able to speak English, the French are quite proud to refrain. I'll let you know if the stereotype holds.)
Jinu gets dumped into French.

Of course, the standard response to that last one is that this is the perfect age for kids to learn a foreign language. But since he's already coping with two (three, if you count the one he's inventing), we'd prefer to let him master some kind of coherent communication before hitting him with the next one.

(Sidetracking myself here. He's got a handful of words in both languages, but generally he just picks up whichever one is easier. "Nae" is easier than "yes". "No" is easier than "anio".
Combined with Jinuese, his few sentences are completely incomprehensible to any but the inner circle: "Jija one 왔다!" = "a bus came".)

The town is Clermont-Ferrand, right in the middle [Google maps, Wikipedia]. It's the home of the French resistance -- the French resistance of 52 BC, that is. Time to reread Asterix and the Chieftain's shield.

So anyway, in the next two months we will once again divest ourselves of all material belongings, pack the indispensables into boxes, and fly off to start all over. At least it'll keep the blog fresh.

Ucluelet

2010-01-09T13:34:00.000-08:00

Christmas Eve.

Following the unmitigated success of last year's Christmas extravaganza on Saltspring Island, Mr. an Mrs. Bob gifted us another Christmas getaway this year. Although the absence of rellies and other smellies made it a little quieter, it was nonetheless another unmitigated success.

Broccoli at a food-court in Nanaimo.

(He loves it!)

The destination was the west coast of Vancouver Island. My original plan was Tofino, but it turns out that Tofino is overpriced and overbooked, so we ended up in Ucluelet ("You-clue-let"), Tofino's poor brother. (I love the names on Vancouver Island. The Nuu-chah-nulth must have such a melodious language.)

Actually, there's very little discernible difference between Ucluelet and Tofino except that the tastemakers have declared it so, resulting in a higher concentration of lattes and surf-shops in Tofino. The two towns lie on opposite ends of a roughly T-shaped peninsula which encompasses a chunk of the Pacific Rim National Park, famous for its ruggedly beautiful coastline.

Pacific Rim National Park, near Ucluelet

The forecast didn't allow for even a hint of snow, which was a touch disappointing after last year. But when I saw the signs on the highway through the Alberni valley -- "Carry chains or equip winter tires at all times Oct-Apr" -- I felt both relieved and a little sheepish.

Just starting into the mountain pass
from the Alberni valley.
(Gets mondo steep and windy.. Could have been ugly.)

The suite that mum rented for us was, frankly, much nicer than our own apartment. We all three had a super time, just hanging out and relaxing.

On the balcony, ready for a quick evening stroll.

Christmas Eve in front of the fireplace.

Jinu in his favorite quiet place.

Quiet places are not usually Jinu's style.

As I mentioned, Santa didn't find us in Ucluelet. Well, those gas fireplaces can be tricky little blighters, anyway. Regardless, obviously we had mcuh fun opening prezzies in the morning.

I don't have enough data yet to know whether this is a given, but every single present Jinu received was an absolute winner with the lad. For instance, I might have thought Graeme Base would be too old for him, but it turns out any book with a hole in it is good.

Still loves it.

But the really big winners, I have to say, were the cars (already visible in several of the above photos, if you're looking). Judging form his reaction, we've been neglectful of his small boy need for vroomable metal cars. In fact, HJ and I have been guiltily aware of this neglect for a few months now. It's painfully obvious every time he goes to play group. So Christmas was really a chance to rectify a shameful oversight.

Classic example of Jinu's supremely content face.

The main criterion for our digs was a proper kitchen, for a Christmas dinner. Just as well, too, because you couldn't even find a gas station coffee in Ucluelet in the Christmas-Boxing Day break.

Apparently, Jinu loves roast veg.

Jinu wanted to take some snaps too..

By the time we'd all recovered from the post-feast nap, we had barely enough daylight for a drive out to the end of the promontory for a quick ogle at the Pacific.

On Boxing Day we drove the half hour up to Tofino, stopping at various parts of the Park on the way.

Long beach.
(Obviously)

Who says you can't have Christmas on the beach in Canada. Mind you, Jinu's hands were freezing, but his curiousity left no alternative.

Jinu, in his radiation suit.

After a really excellent lunch in the only place that was open, we pushed the stroller all over Tofino about three times in the hopes of getting Jinu to nap. Fail. So after a quick spin around the awesome skatepark -- which was hella fun for all involved, but I just couldn't bring myself to video it because it was soo much parental dorkiness -- we headed for a rainforest trail to Schooner Cove. This was Mark's recommendation for the area, and he was totally on the money.

Stupidly, I forgot to bring the hiker-carrier, so I had to carry Jinu in my arms for most of the way there. And all of the way back, when he finally decided to take his nap. Fifteen kilos really is much heavier when it's asleep.

Schooner Cove.

This is often an island, but the tide charts were in our favour.

As is so often the case, HJ started salivating when she began to observe the marine life. She couldn't hold back, so the mussels started being collected.

Man, they were tasty! I guess it's the freshness. I'm so glad she does this kind of thing.

And that was it. Home the next day, after convincing HJ that, no, we didn't have time to drive back to Schooner Cove for more seafood. Skyped with Perth in the evening, and opened mum and dad's present -- a push-along which was too big for the luggage. Jinu's not quite into riding it yet, but the parent handle was a huge success:

No Santa for you!

2010-01-09T12:08:00.000-08:00

We'll after mulling over the discussion from last month, we decided not to put out a stocking this year. I like Did's idea of bringing out my old one from Perth for next year, by which time he should be ready for a little willing fantasy.

We had, however, planned to introduce him to the Jolly Red Fat Man at his daycare Christmas party. Then he got sick. He's sick every month of course, being a daycare kid, and usually his mood doesn't even sag. But this was a boiling fever that didn't reduce for the better part of a week, and it was unclear if he was awake or asleep much of that time. When not drifting in and out of consciousness on our bed, he was in one of two states: attached pitifully to one of us, or numbly staring at Porco Rosso, which I highly recommend for any feverish 18 month old sea-plane fanatic.

We eventually took him to the doctor, who diagnosed him with a throat infection and prescribed antibiotics. That's when we learned that Jinu's also allergic to novo-azithromycin. Now he had a nasty rash to contend with on top of it all.

This was exam week, so HJ and I were tag-teaming it to get in and out of the university for office hours and review sessions. In case you've never tried it, marking exams is one of the most tedious activities known to man. HJ got her 300 papers done surprisingly efficiently, all while half-watching Korean panel games on the internet. A few days later, I had 700 supposedly identical area computations to evaluate which, in my usual bandaid-tearing style, I did in a single 12-hour Sunday marathon. I had to do this at the office, where the only things I had in my iTunes were TMBG's "Here Comes Science" and Uncle Pete's rock opera setting of Godfrey Ho's Bionic Ninja. Fortunately both hold up pretty well under repeat listening.

Grades are to be submitted within seven days of the exam. Given that our exam was on the 18th of December, it's not clear what this really means. Anyway, by the time the other instructors were done, and the tallying and grade boundaries were set, it was early on Christmas Eve morning. While I was punching letter grades into the laptop at the breakfast table, HJ was finalizing the packing for the Christmas getaway, and Jinu was laying into his porridge, taking his first enthusiastic steps to earn back his lost weight from the previous week.

Happy New Year!

2010-01-09T12:02:00.000-08:00

To all our readers, even the bots,
we wish you a happy and prosperous 2010!

Should I Claus?

2009-12-06T21:06:00.000-08:00

(Content may not be suitable for small kiddies.)

We're pretty bad at the full rigmarole of holidays, actually. At Halloween (bigger in North America than Oz), Jinu is always the only little tyke at play group not dressed up as batman or whatever. We missed Korean Thanksgiving due to lack of vigilance, and had Canadian Thanksgiving on the wrong day due to ignorance.

Now I need to think about whether I should get a stocking.

At what age do I instigate the deception? I guess he'd be just old enough now to comprehend a red suited man sneaking into our house at night and leaving things for him. But he's never seen a Santa yet. (I think the big S will be making a visit to the daycare Chrissy party next week.)

Suggestions? I'm curious to hear from both western and semi-western families on this. When did you start?

Ace Truckin'

2009-12-05T21:39:00.001-08:00

(Why does that phrase always make me think of Al?)

We ended up at the Christmas Parade two weeks ago by accident. That was entertaining, and Jinu was transfixed. But in my books, it cannot touch the genius and majesty of Victoria's annual "Lighted Truck Parade".

The photo here doesn't do it justice. (Need a higher ASA than my happy-snapper can muster.) A rotating cement-mixer afire with Christmas lights can only be described as `resplendent'.

I'm not being postmodern ironic here, either. I think this is genuinely meaningful. Christmas parades are all good and well, but all the imagery of stables and reindeer and sleighbells and lanterns is so removed from our experience that it's hard to see it as anything other than an elaborate pantomime. BC Transit and concrete pumps, on the other hand, they are our lives, so to see them bursting with yuletide joy is to feel genuinely uplifted by your fellow man.

Not to mention the accompanying festival of air-horns. What could be more merry?

The wonder of youth.

Apologies to HJ for posting that photo,
but Jinu's face is really lit up like a sewage truck.

Kimjang

2009-12-03T21:23:00.000-08:00

The cabbage harvest is in: it's kimchi season.

A traditional kimjang means 100 heads of cabbage. That would see your family right through the winter. But deaths from winter malnutrition are down sharply, so in a city household today you'd more likely find 25-50 done, and that only in a more traditional-minded family. Otherwise just a trip to the market.

HJ upped to 11 this year, after sending me down to China-town for another four part way through the process. That'll no doubt increase as our family expands (yes, Jinu, I'm talking about you!), but even as it was, the mini-kimjang took her the better part of a weekend.

She went for four varieties this year: the default ('baechu kimchi'), a non-spicy variant ('white kimchi'), a refreshing brine mixture ('water kimchi'), and a baby radish kimchi ('laddie kimchi' -- it's the radishes that are the laddies).

I'm about to sing my wifey's praises here. This batch has been an absolute unmitigated sensation. Spoilt man that I am, I can now call myself a kimchi snob. I haughtily reject the store-bought stuff as chemical-y and lacking the richness of proper fermentation.

But even by HJ's excellent standards, this has been a good year. The 'water' kimchi is crisp and refreshing, like cabbages in Riesling. The 'white' had HJ nervous, since she's never made it before, but it came out perfect. The 'laddies' still haven't reached puberty, but preliminary tests suggest a lovely flavour.

As for the classic... One of my gifts to HJ on her birthday was a dozen oysters. That move, it turns out, started some wheels in motion. You see, kimchi is already made from everything stinky, but in a gourmet variant of increasing scarcity you wrap a raw oyster in each quarter cabbage to rot away in the chili and garlic miasma.

Well, if you've ever seen HJ at a seafood dinner, you would know that this is precisely her MO. Anything maritime is good, and the stinkier the better. She's exasperated by our western love of fillets. If you can't eat the eyeballs, then what's the point? At Dan's place one time her enthusiasm convinced my brother -- who grew up differentiating "fish from the sea" (ugh!) from "fish from the shop" (fish'n'chips) -- to eat rice mixed with the gastrointestinal residue of a blue manna crab. Yes, that is her favorite part.

Anyway, Fishermans Wharf sold us a dozen enormous beach oysters. They were so huge and succulent that it was almost a shame to entomb them in their cabbage sarcophagi, and in fact we did suck down one each as we were packing the last of them away. Even though we haven't unearthed one yet, you can tell that they're enriching the flavour.

This batch has converted Jinu too. Korean mums rinse the kimchi in water for their kids. But Jinu couldn't even stomach that a few months ago -- he grabbed his tongue and cried. This time, though, he was sufficiently moved to learn the word. He refused to eat his main meal, demanding "g'mchi! g'mchi!". HJ had to place one piece on each spoonful of rice, after which he learned directions: "Here!" (points at spoon).

HJ is much relieved. She's been jealous of his love for Vegemite.

________________________________

A final food anecdote: Jinu can now say the blog's name too. Kimbab is supposed to be eaten in one bite, so HJ rolls it extra tight for him.

Kimbab, and little kimbab.

Vegemite

2009-11-17T21:50:00.000-08:00

HJ is amazed that every Aussie kid eats vegemite bread exactly the same way.

It makes me feel sorry for those billions of kids who don't get vegemite.

IT professionals

2009-11-13T20:49:00.000-08:00

Visits from two IT professionals in two months.

Telstra sent Andrew to us in September. Actually to Seattle, but he took the opportunity to step over the Strait for a weekend. He was on his first trip away from his 11-month-old Harriet (now 13-months?). He claims he suffers less from jet-lag now thanks to the sleep-interruption training. I secretly suspect he suffers just as much but his expectations have been lowered. Jet-lag is like parenthood without the smell.

In fact, our jet-lag was undoubtedly much worse, me coming off a week of long days working on a paper and long nights with a cold ridden 15-monther. Jinu was still snotty and tired when Andrew rolled up, but happy to have company as always.

Breakfast at the James Bay Tea-house
Awkward photo smiles all round.

Consequently, we set Andrew a virtually nonexistent tourism schedule, mostly composed of pushing Jinu along our stroller ruts around James Bay. We should have got him a stroller too. Maybe one of those double-seaters for twins.

So, tourism-wise, the most Canadian thing we did was from the wrong side of the country -- Andrew had heard talk of poutine before arriving, which is harder to track down in Victoria than you might imagine. The Beagle gave a decent shot at it, really not too bad, though I can't resist one criticism. Being Fairfield yuppies, they insisted on beer-battered fries, which sounds good on a menu, but merely adds grease and distracts from the cheese-curds. I guess I should be thankful it wasn't yam and blue-cheese poutine.

(Mind you, what right do I have to be a poutine snob? This was only the third time I'd eaten it, and the first was in a greasy food-court, albeit a greasy food-court in Montreal. Thank you Pete.)

Seeing Andrew off at the sea-plane terminal.
He received the customary 400-balloon salute from the blue bridge.

Now how do we get UVic to fly us to Melbourne?

Next, Google sent Trung up in October. That was just to collect his stuff from a storage locker in Esquimalt and sell us his car.

Trung was a PhD classmate of ours at Penn State, but also overlapped for a year at Victoria, which is natural enough since there are really only about 10 obvious places in the world for a post-doc in index theory. He's just recently decided to get out of academia. I wonder how he feels about that. I couldn't say, since we didn't delve into it more than to tell him that he owes it to the world to publish his thesis. But this I can say: Andrew was also a classmate of mine, and he, like the majority of my other non-academic friends, now owns a very nice house. Sigh.

Anyway, as an ex-Victorian, Trung needed nothing more than some home-cooked food and some mental diversion. He passed the Dinosaur Challenge quickly (stack all seven dinosaurs before Jinu can smash them), so we wasted all his remaining hours at Sporcle.

Ja-jang myun

Trung was a big hit with Jinu. Different people react to kids in very different ways -- I'm mainly, but not only, talkin' 'bout the single people, here. Trung, I must confess, surprised me with how well he and Jinu got on. Jinu loved him, and even made an attempt at his name ("G'ng!").

Still, Trung found inappropriately-dangerous-play-time stressful. That's now one of my favorite times, but I don't deny it's bloody hard work. Particularly notable was the scaling of the poorly balustraded stairs around the Gonzales Hill observatory.

You can't tell, but he's squirming (the small one),
trying to get back to those balustrades.

Next month we're hoping for Dale.

Bigger

2009-11-07T21:20:00.001-08:00

Man, it's been a long time. Presumably I've now alienated the fan-base, but rather than explain, let me just get on with some photos to show where we've been at. More specific things will follow.

Drawing.
New addition to list of favorite things.

Reading.
Still high on the list.

Sick.

Low on the list, but Porco Rosso, is high.

HJ's birthday.
(But cake fail.)

Learns to scale chair.
Now much harder to placate when dinner is late.

Imaginative play.
(For Gran)

Voice-activated
He also beeps himself when reversing in the playground.

(For the hard-core, more moving pictures at YouTube here, here and here.)

Fisherman's wharf, Oct 2009.
Family shot for Gran.
Note that Jinu always watches dominant technology.
(Seaplane > Camera)

Up!

2009-09-11T21:38:00.000-07:00

Not the movie, which we missed. Ironically, having a child has made me less in touch with Pixar. "Up!" is the latest addition to Jinu's lexicon (now documented with obsessive-compulsive fervour in the sidebar).

He seized the word from me at the playground. HJ was caught unawares whilst playing under the flying-fox the next day. With the height difference, she couldn't even conceive of where he was expecting to be lifted. He's a heavy lad to hoist above head height.

The word instantly jumped to the top of the charts. In stark contrast with 10-month old Jinu, 15-month Jinu refuses to leave the apartment without being carried ceremonially, regal smugness slapped all over his mug. Standing impatiently at the door while we don our shoes, he cracks that unvoiced bilabial plosive perfectly, never once having used the consonant before.

To be sure, it's a word that captures the zeitgeist. Stepping out of the bathroom a few weeks ago, I saw Jinu standing in the middle of the table, devouring an illicit peach. I'd never even seen him attempt a dining chair before. Mastery of the third dimension came on quick.

Meanwhile, our knick-knacks and electronics had been steadily advancing up the bookshelves like detritus in a flood tide. The upper shelves are now packed solid, but a carelessly misplaced dining chair can put calamity within a giggling arm's reach. Once he figures out that chairs can be moved, the living room will instantly transform into a puzzle-game.

Train

2009-09-06T21:59:00.000-07:00

Through Drew, we were invited to a picnic at the Saanich Historical Artifacts Society. They've got a pretty fun place out there. It's all just run for donation by local enthusiasts, which gives you that feeling that you're just exploring someone's personal fetish.

I dearly want to get one of these for Jinu,

but he's really more of a tractor man...

This is also where the model-trainers -- oops! -- I mean model-trainers hang out. Geek enthusiasts rule! Letting you play with their excellent stuff is how they justify their passion.

A boffin brings his trainload of passengers home

past the trainhouse (the most recent addition to the set-up).

Jinu, me & Drew, awaiting departure.

(Jinu never quite relaxed his grip.)

Nearly two miles of unexpectedly beautiful track.

Swimmingly

2009-09-06T21:12:00.000-07:00

At the 'Y' yesterday for Jinu's first real swim. (The surf-suit has finally been retired.)

First words

2009-08-28T21:06:00.000-07:00

I've been meaning to start a running tally of Jinu's vocab for ages. Since we're inducting his first verb into the hall of fame today, it seems an appropriate occasion.

He's got a lot in common with any language student, locking in nouns and salutations first. And his oral comprehension is streets ahead of his conversation. He's got an extensive knowledge of vehicles, wild animals and daily chores in both English and Korean.

All about matching.

Side story: His clear favorite for the longest time was "소방차" ("fire engine"). Mere mention of it would send him running for his trucks book. But why? How? When we accidentally lumbered into the Oak Bay Classic Car Show a couple of weekends ago, it struck me that he'd never even seen a fire engine. It took Jinu some time to comprehend what he was looking at.

Looks very different full-scale.

Back to the words, and some nerd-crucial technical remarks:

What is as a word? (Actually, I'd be genuinely interested in an answer to this... Did?) Here are my makeshift criteria: vocalized, used repeatedly, in association to a specific context, not typically outside that context.

As with any definition, this leads to questionables. Like "gszhszhszh," (squelch noise out the side of the mouth). This is Jinu's excellent impression of my water pick, which he leaps enthusiastically into, with only a visual cue. It makes the cut. But what about a downward inflected "mmh!", accompanied by right arm swung in an overhead arc. This means "float-plane" (a regular sight off our balcony). But "mmh!" without the gesture is multipurpose for Jinu, so it fails.

Yea, verily I am an unsentimental bastard. All Jinu's young "ommamma"ing and "abbabbabba"ing (="mummy" and "daddy") amount to nought in my catalogue, because they were persistent day-long babblings. The one exception was in the rotaviral ward of Daedong hospital. In the dark days of his despair, Jinu stood up and called out a perfect miserable "Omma!" a handful of times, often lunging into her arms at the time. So HJ wins the grand honour.

It was short-lived, though. As soon as he was back on his feet, she was forgotten, and he was back to his syllable-of-the-day babbling. The lucky recipient of the first permanent word is:

"Neng-neng!"

Everyone has their own theory on the etymology. Corruption of "Genghis"? Onomatopoeia? Here's my characteristically unromantic theory. His all-purpose excited noise of the time was "neh-neh-neh-neh.." (say while giggling idiotically). Nothing brought the giggling idiot out of Jinu better than Genghis. Thus was our misunderstanding returned as reinforcement.

Since Genghis was really Jinu's first real experience with a furry critter, "neng-neng" has since broadened to mean doggies, orangutans, kangaroos, sun-bears,...

Here are the runners up. I'm going to try to get them in historical order, because I have a psychological disorder.

11 months.

Omma.

12 months

Neng-neng.
Dadda. (?) I put this in, but I'm honestly dubious. He said it a lot, often when I was around, but not always.
Uh-hey! "Grandpa Y," or maybe, "what's up gramps?"

(Don't watch all of this -- nothing happens later on. I just couldn't be bothered editing it.)

13 months

Dag-g'ng. Strangely, this drifted to "thankyou" from "ggaggung" (까꿍="peekaboo!"). He says it when he gives us something, since obviously that's when we say it.
Ai/Hai. Hi (also bye). When he actually meets a person close up, he's too gobsmacked to say anything, so his salutations only get used for far distant pedestrians and rubbish trucks.
T'ru(c). "Truck" is a two syllable word in Korean. He'd rarely get all the way through.
Cha. Any wheeled vehicle can be a "cha" ("car") in Korean. Like homo sapiens meeting the neanderthal, Jinu's "cha" soon bred "t'ru(c)" out of existence, since if you can't pronounce either of them, they sound mighty similar. In fact, until recently, he couldn't manage a "ch" sound at all. Thinking the reason was a lack of effort, he pronounced it as "DDDJJah!!!!".

Side note: I must say, the Y-chromosome has surprised me with its completely unprompted magnetism towards things that go vroom. Yes, unprompted I swear. It has of course been mightily reinforced. It's impossible not to share his enthusiasm. But he was excited about trucks at an age when I thought him incapable of even comprehending a truck, and I certainly wasn't pointing them out to him.

His ability to spot cars is prodigious. Model cars in the neighbours' window, a toy car in the shelves of Luis and Maria's fix-it shop, a tiny tractor in the fabric print of the exer-saucer... When he calls "cha!" it can take us ages to catch up with him. These days, the first thing he does when I walk into his bedroom each morning is point out toward the carpark through the still-closed curtains, and inform me: "Cha!".

On the road, though, he only calls the buses (which are plenty in Victoria). Single decker is "Dja!". Double-decker is "D-D-D-DJ-DJ-DJAA!!!!", pointing wildly with both hands and wrenching at the child restraints. It's stressful driving with him, like being in a constant game of punch bug.

Mwo. (뭐="what?") I've also been amazed at how a young human demands to be taught things. He'd spend ages pointing at random animal stickers on the wall. "Mwo?". Within a few days he could point out all the animals in Korean. Then Heath told me off for being inconsistent in my choice of language, so Jinu just went ahead and learned the English too.

14 months

Mamma. "Food" in Korean baby-talk. Also "milk" in particular, to Jinu. The Canadians in the supermarket are surely thinking jokes to themselves about breastfeeding when I carry the hungry lad past the dairy section and he points and screams "mamma! mamma!".
Gzshzshzsh. See above.
Mal. (말="horse"). Plenty of horse-carriage rides in the streets of James Bay.
Nana. If you fire up Skype and hold a banana behind the screen, you can convince gran he's saying "Nanna". (Ssh! Don't tell her.)

15 months

Dedda. (됐다 = "done!"). His first verb. He uses it when he's sick of me washing his face.

Okay, that's the list. Oh, and he has "dada" and "omma" completely down by now, although he seems to use "omma" to refer to both of us, which is cute.

Language tally so far:

Korean: 7 1/2*
English: 3 1/2*
Gibberish: 3

[*"Banana" is bilingual, so counts half each way. The Konglish "t'ruc", though, is clearly distinguishable from English.]