Happy New Year

Happy New Year everybody!

Not much is new across the pond. We’re very excited to have a new administration and really hope that the generalized excitement and positivity inspired by the election will continue. Those in the foreign service community are especially hopeful that upcoming changes will be beneficial to the U.S. and it’s reputation/influence abroad.

It has been interesting to watch an election from overseas. Since the U.S. is such a powerful and influential nation, the entire international community was very concerned about the outcome. (With the frequency of Belgian and British news and radio reports on the U.S. election, you would have thought it was happening right next door.) The day-to-day of Jay’s job is usually not impacted by a change in the administration. However, the general morale of the State Department is definitely affected…which does impact him. Jay was hoping that he would have Colin Powell as his boss again, but sadly, that is not the case. He’s trying to be positive about the new Madame Secretary.

Our highlight this month was driving to Dusseldorf, Germany to hang out with Mike. He had a job interview there, so we took advantage of the rare opportunity to visit with family.

For some reason, we thought Dusseldorf would be different. It was smaller and more commercial than we expected. It featured lots of Art Deco and ritzy, high-end shopping. Since we don’t have a lot of Euros to throw around, we mostly just ate yummy food and wandered around while Mike and Jay pointed out a lot of “fahrt” signs. Mike figures that his boys would find Germany hilarious because of the prevalence of “fahrts”. Emily figures that many men are really 10-year-olds in full-grown bodies. (“Fahrt” means “ride, journey, way, or mode of transportation” in German.)

James continues to surprise and amuse us. Our favorite thing about James these days is his little stick-out belly. Some of his shirts are now too small only because they don’t make it past his tummy. He continues to babble almost continually, and his attempts at real words are comical. Buster makes noises that sound like words but they are mostly tonal grunts – like uh-oh turns out to be grunt-grunt (vary the pitch to sound like uh-oh).

We totally rearranged the furniture on the ground floor of our house so that James could have his own space to play in (destroy). So, our dining room has become a family eating area/playroom. We’ll see how well it goes. Emily is just happy to keep the toy mess in one room that glad that James can play in the next room while she prepares dinner.

Buster is getting much better at signing and we are excited to begin a baby signing class this month. A few weeks ago, Emily was helping James eat lunch and he kept making the sign for airplane. She kept looking out the glass doors and around the room trying to figure out why he was signing “airplane.” After a couple of minutes, Emily realized that James wanted her to “zoom” the food into his mouth like an airplane… something she does during many meals, but had failed to do during that one. Once she began “zooming”, James was content to eat his lunch. What a silly kid!

Christmas Slackers

We slacked off in November and are late with this month’s update. Although we do have a legitimate excuse for this month – WE ALL GOT SICK! In November we were extremely busy traveling and studying.

We traveled to Detroit for Thankgiving to take Bimmy’s dreaded board exam and we were also able to hang out with Mike, Sarah, Roo, Alisa, and company so it was a two-fer. Bim was in full freak-out mode. Jay’s favorite memory (great fodder for future teasing) was the night before the exam when Bim tried the last batch of practice tests and performed dismally. She kept asking Jay (only half-kidding) if he’d still love her if she didn’t pass the exam. Those who know Bim well should find this story pretty funny. Considering the 3 months of study, lousy mom-cooked dinners, and pathetic social calendar, not to mention the price of plane tickets, the exorbitant cost of the exam, Bim still maintains that the question was a fair one.

She doomed and gloomed all the way to the testing center and of course passed. For those that didn’t hear, the printer at the center broke down the morning of her exam. So, only the edges of the printout were readable. The sheet said, “Congratulations, you have…” Mike kept teasing Bim that the sentence concluded with “…completed the test.” However, Bim was confident that she passed because of the “Congratulations” and because the exam ended up being much easier than the practice tests from the night before.

We received the official scores in the mail a couple weeks later, and Bim performed just fine… although I’m sure some of you can guess what she said when she saw that she earned less than a perfect score. It’s probably okay that Bim pushes herself to do better, but Jay thinks (rightfully so) that she is ridiculous sometimes. So, hooray! Bim is now officially a Board Certified Pediatric Nurse Practitioner and a heck of a wife and mom.

During December we decompressed from studying and prepared for the holidays. We got our Christmas tree up a full 2 weeks before Christmas, and (if all goes well) we should have it down by the end of January. (This is a big improvement compared to last year.) Shortly after returning from Detroit, we learned that our church congregation (the international, English-speaking ward) would be dissolved at the end of 2008. Now we’ll attend services in the Brussels First Ward – with folks who speak French. We look forward to the challenges that a new group of people will bring. Struggling with communication will definitely be humbling and will hopefully bring us closer together. We will miss the other half of our old congregation that will go to the Brussels Second Ward in downtown Brussels.

We went on a festive trip to Bruges and went to an Ice Festival (As a sidenote, the lady on the internet site is scary! But she wasn’t there – whew!). It turned out to be very cool (in more ways than one) - a whole ice maze filled with various ice sculptures with a Harry-Potteresque/ wizarding theme. A giant ice slide ended the maze so Jay and James went down it – James liked it since his bum didn’t have to touch the ice.

Christmas Day was fun. We opened lots of toys (James was spoiled), played Wii Super Mario Cart, and ate Christmas dinner with our neighbors and friends (the Harrisons).

We celebrated New Years in Vienna, Austria. We were there for 4 days, but struggled with illness and frigid weather the whole time. Fortunately, the company was great. We stayed with some friends, the Petersens, who went with us to Italy last summer.

Since temperatures turned out to be -4 Celsius, we didn’t do much besides walk around downtown Vienna. All of Europe is experiencing very cold weather right now and we are not used to it…especially not James. We also visited a Hapsburg Palace, Schoenbrunn that turned out to be very lovely and interesting. The cool thing about Vienna (besides that fact that everything is called “Wiener”) is that they have no restrictions on fireworks – it’s like the one thing Austrian’s go nuts over. So everyone buys big fireworks (not like 4th of July Home fireworks – BETTER) that shoot up in the air. The embassy hosted a party in a building downtown, so we went and welcomed the New Year with tons of fireworks 360 degrees around. It was cool.

Just a few words about James… He has been weaned since mid-December…yay! He weighs almost 22 pounds now, has a cute protuberant toddler belly, and is busy and talkative. We don’t understand much of Buster’s babble. The only understandable words so far are “hi”, “mama”, “more”, “uh-oh”, “arf-arf” (which means doggy), and an occasional “aaa duh” (all done) and “dink” (drink). James has also learned some sign language words which he uses sporadically (milk, drink, all done, airplane). He is a speedy walker and gets into trouble very quickly when his mom has her back turned. Fortunate for him, James has a cute impish grin and gives really great hugs, so we can’t help but forgive him. He has more teeth (eight) and sports what Jay calls a white-blonde baby mullet. Buster liked Christmas, especially undecorating the tree and tearing open wrapping paper.

Buster has been a trouper. We have schlepped him all over during the past 3 months and we are so grateful that he is a pleasant travel companion. During our most recent visit to Vienna, we were all congested and miserable on the flight back to Belgium. James was starting to develop a fever. Even so, his parents probably fussed more than he did.

We hope you have a Happy and Prosperous New Year. Come visit us in 2009!

California (and Utah) Here We Come

Old Man Winter approaches with his trademark nip-in-the-air…but we didn’t write to talk about the weather. So, we were boring last month, even Jay’s birthday was pretty low-key (though we did have awesome cake made out of chocolate). If you’re still looking for someone to vote for in the upcoming presidential election, Jay is now eligible.

For us, October involved getting ready to go to the U.S., and then being in the U.S., and then recovering from the trip to the U.S. As you can see we’re pretty patriotic in that the U.S. occupies most of our lives and we don’t even live there. We had a great time during our visit – it was really nice to see everybody and to meet lil’ Bennett for the first time. James enjoyed spending time with family and meeting all his cousins. Grandpa Biddulph spoiled James with all-he-could-eat berries which ended up spoiling his shorts but (fortunately for Grandpa Stu) we were the ones who had to deal with that. Jay got a chance to hang out with Matt and Dan on Strawberry Reservoir and (for those that haven’t heard already) Jay also experienced the colder side of Strawberry by accidentally falling in. What kind of lake trip is complete unless someone ends up soaked?

Since returning from Utah James has started to prefer walking to crawling. He’s not very good at it though and looks pretty much drunk all the time. Even though we joke about beating him, all those forehead and shin bruises are from his walking accidents.

We dressed James up in the obligatory Halloween costume this year – a purple dragon – and used him to get candy for his parents at the “Trunk or Treat” hosted by the U.S. Army Garrison. As you’ve seen in videos of his early days, James can produce some really great ROARS! So, we were a little surprised and dismayed when our menacing dragon ignored parental prompts to roar and ended up waving his index finger and babbling “scidley, skidley, scadily” to the treat givers. Fortunately, they all thought he was adorable and gave him candy anyway. James’ “conversation” sounded really important. I’m sure a babble translator would explain that he was expounding on something very profound about the finer points of Halloween celebration and lore but since we mock what we do not understand, we just laughed at him.

Jay has started biking to work (whenever he feels green and liberal or whenever Bimmy needs the car). He’s slowing getting better at it and didn’t have to walk his bike up the hill last time he rode to work. Bimmy’s friend Craig would be proud. Apart from our vacation, Bimmy mostly studied in October for her PNP Board Exam. She’ll take the actual test while we are visiting the Mike and Roo Peterson families in Detroit during “U.S. Tour Take-Two” over Thanksgiving.

Bye Bye Summer

The weather has turned cool, so it seems that summer in Belgium is pretty much over. Hopefully, we will be spared the rain and gloom for a while longer yet. We had a really enjoyable August this year. It’s difficult to believe that we’ve been in Belgium for a whole year now, with only two more to go. Without the sunshine, the summer would have been pretty depressing because of the mass exodus. Many of our friends left town on holiday and were gone nearly the entire summer. Then there are the families that moved from Belgium in July and August: both sets of neighbors, the Thains, the Scherbels, the Pehrsons, the Williams, the Spauldings, the Wingeters, the Sauers, and the Simons, to name a few. We really enjoyed getting to know these families and will miss them greatly. The fortunate thing about working for the foreign service is that you tend to run into people again.
Even though the past couple of months have been a little lonely (especially at church), things are looking up. Folks have returned from vacation and we have great people moving into the neighborhood.

Our last entry was a little devoid of Buster news, so we’ll try to get you back up to speed.James is 10 months old now and has grown up quite a bit. He has a little more white-blond hair and is nearly 19 pounds. Emily laments that he’s growing up too fast. His four front teeth are almost all grown in. His top lateral incisors are emerging too. James is cruising around furniture and sometimes we catch him standing on his own for a few seconds. He is a really speedy crawler, but we think he may give it up for walking sometime soon. James is very silly and (unless he is in front of a camera) is usually smiley. He’s a happy boy and a very curious little nut who loves to touch everything (regardless of whether or not he should). Months 8 through 10 have been especially enjoyable so far. Dan/Charone and Sam/Deborah…hope you are looking forward to a lot of fun.

James’ latest trick is to crawl around carrying the belt to Emily’s robe (or some other similarly-shaped piece of fabric). He rubs the belt on a piece of furniture or window and then moves along to other items in the room. The only thing we can figure is that he is mimicking Emily, since he often sees her cleaning up the house. James’ “cleaning” efforts are really funny to watch because he really concentrates and is very diligent about his “work”.

A few days ago, Emily introduced him to one of those back massagers made of wood with a handle and rollers on the end. James loves it. He drives it around on the carpet, shakes it in the air, and then drives it around some more. James also enjoys climbing on top of stools, riding toys, and the dishwasher door. It’s obvious that he’s related to Anders. James has started singing in Church during the hymns and squealing at/chasing one of the little baby girls in our congregation. We had hoped for a weird kid to provide us with hours of entertainment and it looks like we got our wish.

The last weekend in August, we returned to Paris and spent a couple of days just hanging out. We went to two art museums, (for those that know Paris) the Orangerie and the Museé d’Orsay. Both Museums have lots of impressionist and turn of the century paintings featuring cubism and pointillism. Orsay also has a bunch of sculptures and one of Jay’s favorites “The Gates of Hell” by Auguste Rodin. Walking through the museum, Jay considered how strange it is who society chooses to acknowledge as contributors to humanity: writers, painters, sculptors, sometimes architects, actors, singers, yada-yada- yada. Hardly any thought is given to the efforts of common workers which resulted in the creation of such a fantastic city and made possible the lives that these artists enjoyed. During our visit, we spent time walking around enjoying Paris in the summertime. We also met up with Suzannah Bingham who has been living in Paris for 3 years and has nearly completed a masters degree in French history. Of course, we couldn’t resist indulging in a delicious French meal. Our deepest respects go to the French peasants who built such a lovely city and created such delicious cuisine.