Foreign Circus: October 2011

Happy Halloween!

This weekend, we enjoyed some Halloween festivities. This particular American holiday is kind of a new thing in Spain, but there were enough activities going on to keep the boys busy and happy. They even sell pumpkins here, which is great. In Abidjan, our only option was to carve a watermelon. As you might be able to guess, James chose the costumes this year. Apparently he cares about protecting his secret identity more than Simon does.

Jay’s sister, Heather, is coming to visit next week with one of her friends. We’re excited to see her and to have an excuse to venture out and do some sightseeing. We’ve done a little, but are saving a lot of it for when we have visitors… otherwise we’ll end up seeing all of the Madrid sights a zillion times before we leave. Aside from the lack of humidity, the weather here has been sunny and awesome. Up until last week, the daily highs were in the 70s and 80s. Weather-wise, it seems like spring and autumn are good times to visit, just FYI.

So, apparently, our stuff is enroute from Abidjan. We thought that since Cote d’Ivoire is relatively close geographically, it would get here faster… but no such luck. It will probably arrive around the middle of November. Our new car should arrive at the same time. Yee haw! As thankful as Emily is for Madrid’s public transportation system, she will be glad not to have to use it as frequently. Schlepping kids around on the Metro can be complicated at times.

Church is good. It takes us an hour and 20 minutes (one-way) to travel there by public transportation. Fortunately the commute will be much faster and easier when we have a car. About 80% of our ward members are Latino. (We have picked out a handful of Spaniards by their fabulous accents.) Everyone is nice. Almost no one speaks English. Emily’s Spanish is still quite limited…and she knows very little gospel vocabulary, which means we have a hard time following the talks/lessons. (The fact that we are often wrangling kids doesn’t help much either.) The language is still a bit intimidating but it gets a little easier every week. This Sunday was Stake Conference, held at the stake center next to the Madrid Temple.

Jay takes Spanish classes at the Embassy and is learning quickly. Unfortunately, since classes are only offered during the day, Em can’t take advantage of that option, so she will probably sound like a cavewoman for a while longer. At least she can get her point across most of the time, but it is a lesson in humility to be sure.

The boys have adjusted nicely. James likes his new friends and is especially elated that Jay gets to come home after work every night. Simon has a naturally friendly disposition, so he is getting along swimmingly. Within days of our arrival, Emily noticed that nearly all Spanish children are away from home from about 9am - 5pm. Our neighborhood is eerily quiet during the day because every child older than three years is in school. Any children that we do see during the day are being toted by women in uniform. So as far as we can tell, parents here (at least those who are middle to upper-middle class) don’t really care for their own kids…except in the evenings and on holidays and weekends. This even appears to be true for families where only one parent works. Em gets strange looks and even inquiries from time to time.

Due to the schedule and the costs involved, we aren’t interested in sending James and Simon to a local nursery school. However, since Emily does want them to have some socialization and an opportunity to get out of the house, she looked until she found something fun and manageable. The boys go to a little English playschool 2 mornings a week and they really seem to enjoy it. The teachers are bilingual and most of their classmates are Spanish-speaking, so it doesn’t seem strange to James anymore that people talk differently. He keeps asking Em to “make his movies Spanish” (to use the Spanish soundtrack) so that’s probably a good sign. We might put James in a part-time bilingual preschool next year, but we’ll see. We just want to ease him into it since he’s had enough upheaval in his life over the past year. It just occured to Emily the other day that in the past 12 months, our boys have lived in 3 countries on 3 different continents. Pretty crazy… have to give them some credit. They are pretty resilient little guys.