So my baby is  now growing up s so fast that I cannot keep up with him. He is just about walking. He took his first steps about two months ago and now periodically tries to walk aroudn the houe by holdign on to people, toys, and furniture to keep himself steady. He is different baby. He looks right at me and puts dust fuzz in his mouth and then gags and take it out to hand it to me while I try to leap and get it out of his mouth in time before he chokes. Yuck! Olivia did not do that.

 

He is signing like crazy. He tells us he is sleepy by sweeping his hand across his head which is very close to the ASL sign. My sister watched him the other day and she thought he was trying to say he had a headache because he kept doing that over and over and then putting his head down on the floor. She was a little worried but he didn't fall and didn't have a fever so she thought she would just wait to see if he got better. When I walked in the door, he immediately did that sign to me and then grunted. It was a little too late to give him a nap but sometimes I think he is just experimenting with signing and doesn't actually mean what he says.

 

Today he signed diaper, as in change my diaper, as clear as can be. I was so thrilled. Not so thrilled to change the nasty nappie as they call them in the UK but happy he can tell me he has one. And he definitely has shown me the sign for cereal and more. He smacks his hands together to tell me more and then grunts. WHne he is all done, he takes both his hand and pushes away, which is pretty much the sign for all done in ASL.

 

Taylor is more of a risk taker than Olivia was as a baby. He tries to climb everything and he smashes things together and tries to see what happens when he puts this toy into that toy. He is very active. I can barely get him to sit still long enough to go through a touch and feel type book. But he is doign great and I feel proud and lucky to have two great kids.

So I have moved beyond having to plan my life around rain and clouds. That sounds a little crazy, I know. But here is the deal: I have lived in both Seattle WA in USA and in Aachen, Germany and it rained just about every day in both places. Seattle was beautiful in the summer. Sorry but I cannot say the same for Aachen Germany. Now that I am here in Boston, MA, I find that eventhough it is bitter cold some days, most of the time the sun is still shining and their are blue skies. It really makes a difference for me. I think I have suffered from S.A.D. (Seasonal Affective Disorder) otherwise known as sadess due to lack of sun for too long and I am just now starting to feel a little more normal.

 

Now that i have moved beyond livign with cloluds, i have to move beyond havig my head in the clouds so to speak. Reality here is a bit more harsh when it comes to what it comes down to here is those that have money and those that don't. We find ourselves in the middle. We have started to do our first home buying search and it is both scary, sickenign and exciting all at the same time. Scary? Well there are a lot of homes out there that are way overpriced pieces of junk. THen there are the ones that really are sick. I mean falling down. Then there are deals to be had because people are defaulting on their loans. Now the last ones are great deals but scary because what you get is what you get no guarantees and you oftentimes have only 48 hours to decide to purchase. Ikes! Down the street from us in Cambridge there is a falling down piece of junk for (and brace yourself here) $675,000.00. THat's right. Step right up and sign right here and you can be the owner of a tear-me-down for almost 3/4 of a million dollars! Unbelievable.

 

So what are we to do? Well, I have been taking the MBTA site and checking every town that it goes to and seeing what the school district looks like and then seeing if we can afford any house with 3 bedrooms. It has to have a basement. What I keep finding is that the best schools are on the MBTA line or within a 45 minute drive to Boston and the houses start at, yes, you have guessed it 1/2 million dollars. SO we are waiting. We are looking and we are waiting. Maybe the market will crash even in those places and we can get a decent house. Oh please let it happen. Sorry to wish that but there is no other way we can afford a decent house in a decent school district with a reasonable commute. We make decent money. We have saved for a down payment. We planned for the market to crash. And yes, although we could afford something more than what we are looking at, we don't want to become another statistic. No, we won't take a crazy loan with variable interest rates and no, I can't live in crackville just to live close enough to Boston. I'm sorry but there are the desirable places to live that are a stone's throw from Boston and then there are the very undesirable places to live...I hate gentrificationt too...I hate that some places are out of a Martha Stewart catalog (look I like her stuff too but sometimes it is all a little too sterile, a little too homogenous) but I am not willing to experiment with my kids' education and safety. THere are places. We see places with potential. I can roll up my sleeves. I painted walls for a third job to put myself through college. I know what hard work means but I also have a baby and a toddler and I also know how little time we have right now. I guess some how some way we will make it work.

 

So how far would you drive? (lots of people here spend 2 hours or more total a day commuting...that is tough to do with a family but becomign more and more the reality.)

Okay. It has been almost 5 months now since arriving back in the US of A. In many ways i feel like i have entered back in to the blog into the sameold sameold antville mentality..back into the machine workforce that just keeps on working on to do something to make somethign to buy something to be something. Consume. Consume. Buy. Eat. Be Merry! It is so easy to fall back into that trap. The marketing is so good it is scary or so bad that you can't turn away. Your purpose in life is to buy. eat. be merry! I fell prey to a pair of shoes, then it was the dress, the cardigan, the ad was showing women away in a faraway land...away because they deserve to be away and oh you so deserve to buy that shirt, skirt, those shoes....

 

Sorry off on another crazy speil.

 

Back to Germany. There are a lot of things that are fantastic about Germany and in General Western Europe. I can only speak about Western Europe because that is where I lived one time ago in a land far far away. I understand why Americans romanticize europe. Hey Mr. Tambeourine Man play a song for me. In the jingle jangle morning I'll come following you. Hey MR. Tambourine man I made a song for you. I'm not sleepy and there is no place I'm going to....(I like Dylan's words but not so sure I like what happened to his voice...) Anyways Germany made it their priority to take the environment seriously. They treated it like a pragmatic engineering problem and said, hello it just doesn't make sense to waste. Waste not, want not. I love that about Germany, The Netherlands, France, and Belgium. They recycle everything and if the packaging cannot be recycled, then the company who makes it and the stores that sell it have to pay a fee and/or figure out how to dispose of it.

 

Speaking of voices: What happened to the voices of the people who beleived in love and peace and being good to the earth? What happened to the love? the belief that things can change? (Kockamaney hooey treehugging hippie mantra stuff?!) What happened to their kids? What happen to the people in my generation? The people in the "me" generation, did they give up or never care? Why is it they don't seem to change? Why are we voting for the same two parties that make broken promises about our health care, our kid's education, our environment. Hell, why is it we have "No child left behind" but in reality, it seems as though every child, woman, and man who doesn't make enough, are left behind. We are behind America. We are behind. We have not seen the light. We don't realize that we have to change our consuming ways. We have to learn how to save. How to care for one another. We have to learn how to care for our planet, our earth. We need to be shaken into realizing that many of those people we see on the streets holding up signs are recent veterans and still we have our grandfathers on the streets from Vietnam. And still we don't see them. We don't want to see them. Our colored recylced paper gets sent to China on a boat as trash. They take our trash, sort out all the colored paper, and sell it back to us as recycled paper. Meanwhile our own people are losing their jobs. They are losing their homes. Their kids are struggling to make it through the new experimental math problems. Meanwhile we as a nation have fallen so terribly behind all other first world coutries in mathematics, language, and history, that yes, the word on the street in this global market is that the American bully can't cut it anymore and is in some sort of spinned out world going out of control, losing their jobs and their houses. Oh histroy? Do you think we need to know about history? History is why you are who you are. At the end of the day you are who you are because of history: Bad history; Slave history; "Exploration" history, women's history (or herstory if you prefer) and in the end, humankinds's history. You call it one thing and chances are, someone somewhere is going to see the other side to the story. So is it really history? Well, facts are facts and we should start with that. So yes, at the very least, please acknowledge that we all agree at some point We are all going to run out of natural resources and there just won't be any way or reason to make, buy, sell or trade that STUFF anymore. (Yes, I am talking about oil in case you were wondering.)

 

*(anyways forgive me...not sure where this is all coming from...I guess at the end of the day, I am not so impressed with ANY of presidential choices and really, I am looking not just for change but for radical change. Is that so hard to ask?)