4 months in ...

A sunny Sunday after churros y chocolate

An update!

We realized this week that it has now been 4 months since we left Bexley for our sabbatical adventure. 33% of the year gone already! We have lots of ways of marking the time (2 months since start of school, 2 weeks until we visit London...), but this “1/3 done” milestone kind of snuck up on us. So – it’s time for a full-family update.

Charlotte: This girl is doing GREAT. She sometimes experiences real and unsurprising pangs of sadness about missing life at home: not just worries about the new social structure she’s not participating in (yet) in the middle school, but also about missing the bar/bat mitzvahs, school trips, sports and classes that her friends in Bexley write to her about. She is working hard in school here, and managing to stay on top of everything: making flash cards in Spanish for a recent science test, being selected to play the xylophone in the school’s fall festival, being invited on long (5 hour!) playdates with new friends. Her teacher is super mellow and seems just shocked whenever she pipes up with an answer to something or does well on a test, and I have the sense that being a year older than many of her peers has been wonderful for her confidence. Because the school day is shorter here – kids are done by 2 but Piers and I are still working until more like 5 – her afternoons involve lots of reading (To Kill a Mockingbird and the Adventures of Huckleberry Finn this week), spending at least 30 minutes working on the math she’s missing in Ohio, usually some exercises from her classes at school, and some self-study in Spanish through Duo Lingo. Charlotte’s Spanish comprehension is pretty good. She’s might be the best in the family at being able to decipher fast speech on the street – even if she doesn’t know what the words mean, she can separate the syllables enough for Piers and me to make sense of it. She is speaking some, shyly – this is the next big step she’s gearing up for. She’s also working out, and hard! She goes to rhythmic gymnastics 2x a week – the changes to her strength and flexibility in just 1.5 months are stunning – and she and I go together to swim with a coach 1x a week (increasing to 2x a week after Christmas). These classes are hard work, but she’s also experiencing the benefit of getting stronger, faster, more coordinated, etc. She seems older every day – not just in her ideas, but also in her looks (she grew 0.5” in the last 2 months), her taste in books, her insight about people and news and the like. I do have pangs of nostalgia when I see old photos or remember funny things she said or did as a small child, but generally, it’s wonderful to see her grow.

Cyrus: This kid is also doing GREAT! Cyrus spends a lot less time worrying about what is happening at home without him. When he thinks about Ohio, he thinks about things in our house he’d like to play with, and wonders about the snow and cold, and laughs about the antics of teachers at Cassingham he wants to re-connect with, but he assumes his friends are and will be there when he gets home. This is wonderful and means he rarely has tearful thoughts about home. School has been more challenging for Cyrus for a few reasons. His teacher Antonio had surgery just a couple of weeks after the year started, and the class had a rotation of substitutes until the more permanent replacement, Laura, was hired (Antonio is coming back after Christmas). So there were several weeks where Cy did not get any kind of specialized focus from teachers. Then when Laura started – this is her first teaching job – she was a bit overwhelmed by the class (Eva describes the group this way: “Everyone is really loud and shouts all the time – our class has a reputation for being VERY BAD”). Again, helping Cyrus get his bearings was not (and continues not to be) her priority. She lacks all the mellowness of Charlotte’s teacher, and fairly or not, Cy was feeling lots of pressure from her (Laura) to hurry up and get it together. He had one week with an exam every day, all in Spanish. Although there is a Spanish tutor for kids who don’t speak Spanish, our children spend only 3 hours a week with her – this just isn’t a lot of time to make progress. Also, chemistry matters, and Cy didn’t have the best dynamic with that Spanish teacher at first – though she has now won him over and he enjoys being with her. Another factor which has emerged as a challenge for Cyrus is that from the beginning he shared a desk with Eva. When he was struggling to figure out what was happening, Eva's presence was amazing - she translated and helped him get oriented. He was able to play with her and her friends during recreo, get her help with homework and lots of other things. This was wonderful at first, and became less wonderful over time, as it let him completely tune out during the day and not have to do the work of figuring out what was happening in Spanish around him. (It was also really stressing Eva out, very understandably, because she was having to explain everything to Cyrus all the time). So this week we (all – Joe, Jess, Piers and me) agreed that the 2 need to be separated. Cyrus has now moved to share his desk with another kid, who is super nice but speaks absolutely no English. So this is good! I also met with Rocio, the language school teacher who worked with the kids over the summer, to get some ideas about how to keep introducing Spanish into everything we do – she loaned me some books and games to use at home. Each night, Cyrus and I talk in Spanish about our rose, thorn and bud (one good thing about the day, one bad thing, and one thing you are looking forward to about tomorrow), and he constructs simple, correct sentences. And there have been other successes - after lots of practice, Cy was selected with some others from his class to play the recorder in the school's Fall Festival. Last – Cyrus is also super active in the evenings each week. I love this new aspect of our life, which is really different from home. He swims 2x each week and goes to a salsa and bachata class 2x a week. It’s an adult beginner class, and he is making great progress. It’s also great fun to see him dancing with these adult women partners who find him so earnest and charming. (We also get frequent dance moves at home, involving hips and bums – insert eyeroll). See video in next post.

Wearing their homemade top hats for the Fall Festival

Me: Writing about how I feel about my own work during sabbatical feels a bit like writing my own letter of recommendation. Awkward! So I’ll be brief, and I won’t describe the actual academic work because that is boring and not why you are reading this. I came into this year with a set of professional goals that I had outlined in the proposal the Provost signed off on when the sabbatical was approved. I am making reasonably good progress on that list, so I will have enough to write about in my end-of-year report. I had a number of other life goals as well – exercise every day (which I am very good about in Columbus and have been ok about here – not as good as at home. But I absolutely love having a swim coach and am trying to figure out how to make this part of my life back in Ohio), sleep more (I am overachieving on this one), eat better (sharing many meals with vegans has facilitated this, so I think I can say we are doing pretty well on that one), care less about the political shitshow that is the USA right now (not succeeding at this), travel (Portugal, Switzerland and Italy so far; England, Paris, Belgium and Germany by the end of winter break – and more in the spring…), and most important, spend lots and lots of time with the kids (we are doing great on that, see below). Interestingly, learning to speak better Spanish was not a goal for me in the beginning. I had a “we get by fine” attitude and that is true – our Spanish is crappy but we rarely can’t communicate something we need to. However, once I got here I realized spending time on Spanish was making me happy and I was making progress and it felt like something I was doing just for my own interest and advancement instead of for other professional or personal reasons. Piers and I together did 5 weeks of language school in August and September and I am restarting in December. I have signed up for an “intercambio” partner with whom I will meet once a week. And I have tried to make the most of the everyday encounters which allow for lots of practice: with kids’ teachers and coaches, Pedro the fruit guy, the parents of the kids’ friends, etc.

Family time: People had told us last year that time together was one of the best parts of a foreign sabbatical. Given our flexibility in our jobs in Ohio, I have always been aware that we are able to spend lots of time with our kids, more than lots of working parents, and so I wasn’t sure exactly what that meant. But it has been marvelous! First, for the kids – the last year (before this) had brought out a somewhat tedious dynamic between C&C, which was both hard to ignore and hard to solve. Lots of fighting over mostly stupid things. I’m not saying everything is harmonious all the time, but it is MUCH better. Also, I lovelovelove that we are experiencing this year with a 10 year old and a 12 year old. They are capable of both handling the challenges of living away from home/being immersed in a new language and culture, and also of remembering the experiences and articulating how they are changing because of them. In their first week at school here, they both recognized how important it was that kind children made an effort to get to know them – and pledged to be more like that in their own lives at the next opportunity. There are lots of ways in which being younger would be better – less to miss at home, language learning – but we wouldn’t get to do a lot of the very active adventures we’ve pursued on our travels (for example, 20,000+ step days as tourists in foreign cities, gladiator school in Rome, floating down the Reuss River rapids outside Zurich) nor gotten their participation in the research for those trips (last week, kids prepared reports on London and Paris which include sites to see and also helpful information about the expected weather and the transit systems).  And our slower schedule means we (Piers and I) are able to observe them (Charlotte & Cyrus) at much closer distance, talk with them about the advantages and disadvantages of the day and the week and the year, without trying to compete with the professional and personal noise of Ohio in the background. It's not all amazing - we had lice this past week! ;) - but overall, it is such a gift.

Travel research

(Don’t read anything into the lack of update about Piers – he’s just back from 3 days in Germany for a Mill workshop. He’s also doing great, professionally and personally, but I’ll let him write his own summary of how he’s doing.)