I just noticed the other day that Ju is now producing the "lh" of Portuguese - he no longer says "Olla, mommy!" but "Olha, mommy!" For those unaware, this particular phoneme of Portuguese is similar to the sound of putting the sound of l and y together in English and is difficult for Americans to get right. Many people here have told me they can always spot a gringo because of their lack of proper "lh." Mine is okay, if I do say so myself, but it hardly holds a torch to my not-even-four-year-old son's who gets to speak it naturally. Since I find that I generally find that I follow the same kinds of time lines for speaking Portuguese as children here do (i.e. a child will not use the past tense correctly until around or after age 4, I have been here for more than 4 years, and I find I am using it mostly correctly and innately), there may be no hope for me, as I have been in Brasil longer than Ju has been in existence.

I have been living here about 5 years and I generally can hold my own in Portuguese, although occasionally on the phone I have trouble with people who don't understand that they need to speak slower rather than louder. I was trying to spell something on the phone yesterday - I generally have no problem remembering to say the letters in Portuguese rather than English, except for a few like Q. But what to say when you want to differentiate between things like B,V,D,E etc? I found myself reverting to names, rather than words - V de Victoria, B de Bernardo. I could not for the life of me come up with the usual things like we use in English like B as in boy, V as in valentine. I have no idea what the "regular" words used in this kind of context are. I should probably find that out.

I suppose as part of being a Quaker, I have always had a strong anti-war, anti-violence view of everything. I am constantly trying to instill this in Ju, although it can occasionally be challenging here. When he was given a bunch of made-in-China war toys (plastic hand grenade, knife, gun, etc) there was no question that they would become a donation for kids in the street. I refuse to have anything like that in the house. He is not allowed to watch Power Rangers, Spiderman, Batman, or any of those fight-and-kill violent styles of programming. (I cannot understand why anyone would expose a child so young to these kinds of ideas, although it seems to be the norm here at least in Brasil.)

People here allow boys to be much more wild, misbehave much more, and in general seem to discipline them less about proper human behavior, in my opinion. Girls are put on a much shorter leash. There is a certain view that boys "need" this kind of play where they kick and wrestle with each other, that it's a boy thing and I will never understand. Maybe so. But how much of this is what boys NEED and how much is what we put upon them with expectations based on society? Boys are given toy guns, girls are given dolls. I know I've had this argument with myself before and it never seems to resolve itself. And there is always the view of "well, all these other grown men grew up playing these games and they turned out okay, so why does it matter so much"? I could ramble on about this forever.

Anyway, there were some things I liberated after a time, like Looney Tunes, thinking that they really weren't that harmful. Woody woodpecker is very popular here and all the kids disappear from the outside area of the condo at 6:30 to go watch it. I hadn't really paid much attention to the content of these cartoons, having watched them myself when I was about seven or so. It's just a cartoon, why does it matter? But Ju's behavior at school and with us (direct disobeying of rules, lack of respect for other people's space, hitting and bothering people) has gotten so bad in the last several months, I have been forced to reconsider that age old argument that violent cartoons are bad for your kids. The Looney Tunes characters do horrible things to each other - hitting with mallets, blowing each other up, pushing off of cliffs, getting run over by cars.... And Ju laughs. He laughs at all of it. It bothers me that he finds this funny. I never put much stock in it before, thinking that kids know the difference between real life and cartoons, remembering how I felt at that age when some adult made a comment about how these violent shows were affecting children, thinking that these adults assumed we were all stupid kids who didn't know the difference. Maybe for a seven year old this is true. Maybe. But perhaps for a three year old, this division is a little fuzzier. Certainly when I saw Ju begin head butting people after watching Woody Woodpecker, I started to rethink this line.

So now the Looney Tunes DVDs are banned. Woodywood pecker has gone the same way as Power Rangers - not allowed. We just got some new video tapes of Dora and the Magic School Bus and something called Yo Gabba Gabba that Ju absolutely loves. The desire to have him relate to "normal" Brasilian boys at school by being able to talk about the same characters and play the same games is usurped by my concern that he may end up in the principals office because he broke some kid's nose by head butting him. Lets see if TV really makes a difference.

"Mommy, I have a 'ien.'"

"You have a what?"

"A... a... a this" (points to my ring)

"Ah, you have a ring."

"Uh huh, a eeng."



I feel like I've had this conversation before.

My Sheils is back!

Lela, the cat I brought from Michigan, won't touch anything except cat food and raw meat, and occasionally some cooked chicken or lunch meat. Ju's two cats (Brasilian vira-latas) eat nearly everything that is put in front of them - meat, bread, oatmeal, raisens, apples, mango, papaya, jack fruit, carrots, peas, if it comes from our plates, they will eat it. They are both rather persistent at asking for hand outs as well, which makes it seem a bit like we have very agile dogs living with us, except that they climb up on the table when we're not looking and steal the food from our plates.

"Where we going, 'eing'?"

Ju uses this word frequently now, when talking in English and in Portuguese. "Hein" is like 'what' or 'huh' depending on the context. It's quite common in conversation in Portuguese, but when he uses it in/with English, it makes him sound like someone from the U.P., eh? I am a Michigander (still don't like that word, I am not water fowl) but I am not a Yuper. My son, however, is beginning to sound like one.

Sewing. It's something I always watched my mom do as a kid. I did it by hand for many many years due to an irrational fear of sewing machines (much like my fear of ovens) and their ability to do some horrible damage to fingers if one wasn't careful. Last June I spent $100 on a 3/4 (easier to transport) sized sewing machine, finally determined to conquer my fear and make good on my comment of "well, why pay for that dress/shirt/shorts/whatever-fill-in-the-blank when I can make it." It sat quietly in a cupboard for the last 6 months, until, finally, with three days left in my vacation, I decided to try to play with it.

It still smelled new, the whole three bobbins it came with were still inside their plastic bag inside the removable arm that allows you access to space where you insert them (the name of which still escapes me). I took it out and then went on a hung for the manual that I had left out next to my computer all those months ago, that I read and reread trying to convince myself that I was perfectly capable of using this machine as it had come highly recommended by a friend who bought the same one for her four year old to begin sewing on (come on, if a four year old can do it, I sure can, I told myself).

Where is it? I searched all over, took books down from the shelves... nowhere is this simple manual, so comforting. Hmmm, now what. Well, if a four year old can do it, it can't be that hard. I just randomly tried to thread it, thinking it seems too simple, I must have missed a spot. Okay, let's try to fill a bobbin instead. I dropped some thread on the spool peg. Now what. Okay, here's a hook and another little peg that look like they make it run strait at the bobbin peg. Oh, I remember I have to pull out this round thing on the side. That I do remember reading. And.... Yes, the bobbin is winding! Success! So I had managed to bungle my way through making a bobbin.

So, let's try threading again. Having given up on finding the manual at home, I tried online - Janome does not even list this machine on their site. The manuals site has nothing either. Hmmm, is this really a Janome? Not sure. But I do see some one has posted on a forum that there are guide arrows on the machine, showing you where to thread. Sure enough, there they are. So I thread according to the guide arrows. Hmmm, this seems too easy. There's a little hook there above the needle, since it's so easy to pass the thread in there, it probably goes there, now through the eye and.... Now how the heck do I get the thread from the bobbin to come up? I know it has to go through that hole on the bottom. I try several things that I now can't remember, and nothing works. I am sure this is the key to making this machine work.

Suddenly my husband finds the manual stuffed in an envelope with other random papers from the desk area. From the manual I see I have to thread the machine (which I did correctly, yeay me!) in order to get the bobbin thread to come up, okay, so far so good... And at last I managed to get the thread through the little hole.

Ju watches me do some practice stitches on some random green fabric (the only scrap fabric I have) and gets extremely interested in how the machine moves, what parts do what, and watches avidly as I sew my first project - a dress I have been sitting on for about 6 months. The more I sewed, the more I got creative about it until what should have just been a quick hemming job turned into a shortened dress with triangular inserts that make it spin out flat to show off your underwear (if you're into that) with puffy pockets and straps. Actually I'm still not sure about the straps. And after discovering that I am not all that hot at sewing strait, I decided to do some "decorative artistic" stitches along the bottom and other raw edges rather than hemming. I'm pleased with the result and eager to do more. I just wish fabric weren't so expensive here.

And wouldn't you know it, but as I finished my massive cleaning fest yesterday, it seems one of Ju's kittens knocked over the same potted plant on the veranda that has been knocked over twice before. The pot is (was) made of a dried coconut shell held together by some steel wire in the middle. It is now splintered beyond repair. The plants are no loss really, since they had been torn from the pot and ripped to shreds several times before, probably by the same mystery kitten. They were just barely hanging on. I guess it's a sign that I have one too many pots up there in the middle of the kitten highway.

In other news, apparently the huge massive snow that I am so sad to miss this year trapped my mom in GRR and then again in Chicago and then she got stuck in Miami because she missed her connection. Anyway, now she's there and we are here, up early but not in a rush anymore to get to the airport. I didn't sleep very well between the kittens bounding in at 2 a.m. and some kind of security alarm going off around 3:30 and continuing to sound for another half an hour, so it will be good to get a nap in too. And I'll have time to clean up the mess on the veranda.

Ju is watching Planet Earth, again. At least if he's glued to the T.V. it's educational, as shown by this conversation we had yesterday:

me - "Ju, it's time for a shower and bed.

Ju - "Why?

me - "Because it's dark out and time for sleeping."

Ju - "Why's it dark out?

me - "Because the sun set and that means it's time for sleeping."

Ju - "It's dark out because the terra esta rodando." (the Earth is turning)

me - "Yes, that is exactly what's going on. The Earth is turning and that's why it's dark out."

This particular vacation, I am spending a much better part of my time (where does that expression come from anyway, it makes no sense!) cleaning up the house and playing housewife. I don't feel particularly deprived of vacation fulfilling these duties because I spend pretty much the rest of the year not doing any of it except an occasional floor sweeping or load of laundry. We give our maid her 30 days of vacation at the same time I have mine, and my husband takes off a few weeks and we get to hang out as a family, go to the beach, and maybe travel for a couple of days somewhere outside the city (leaving lots of food for the cats). As my mom arrives tomorrow for a two week (the remainder of my vacation time) visit, I have been making an extra effort to have a "Brasilian clean" house, rather than just "American clean." This means sweeping daily, walking the floors with a wet rag to pick up spare specks of dust, doing most of the laundry, and cleaning the bathrooms. All of this has taken most of this week to complete and I am much more in the groove of cleaning up.

Our bathroom has a lot of issues. The sink leaks, the toilet has gone through some flushing problems, and now the shower faucet is broken, so the only way to turn it off is to shut off the water completely from the bathroom. Even with this "emergency handle" shut off, there is still a great amount of leaking going on and my bathroom is constantly wet, dripping, and has recently grown a lot of mildew. I just noticed how bad it had gotten and took bleach and a scrub brush to it, hopefully to better my sinus and asthma problems, which have been bothering me for some unknown reason (at least until now). Nearly all rooms here have a drain in the floor - this greatly facilitates cleaning your floors. You can empty the floor of objects, fill up a bucket with bleach water, spread it around and then scrub with a broom. Sweep all the water into the drain, then rinse with clean water, and presto - super clean floors! I spent over an hour in each bathroom that gets daily use today and am now waiting for the floors to dry. (Well, the one in my bathroom won't.)

No matter how often I sweep, the floor looks dirty again about half an hour later. Everything is left open here all the time - doors, windows, and there are no screens to keep bugs, leaves, etc. out. Dust is a constant problem. So is cat hair, now that we have three cats in the house.

These cats of Ju's have taken over. The climb up anything that will support their weight - nets, hammocks, curtains, plants, things hanging on the hat tree - and seem to have no fear or respect for human tendencies. I sweep the floor, and they follow me from room to room, trying to get under my feet, having no fear of the broom. I hang laundry to dry on the veranda and they climb up on top of the rack and take a nap on it, knocking several pairs of underwear and socks down in the process, covering everything with cat hair. I go to open the door to take out garbage or sweep and they sit down right in front of it as invisible forces of resistance and don't even jump up out of the way when it starts to move, but rather resign themselves to "riding" it like little floor dusters, staring at me with bemused expressions, completely unconcerned. When I clean out the cat box, they hop in as I am scooping and dirty it further. I don't blame Lela for being cranky with them - they are like Ju, they seem to respect no limits.

I have no idea how to end this post, since I have been trying to write one for several days, but always seem to be uninspired when I am sitting here at the computer (which is far less frequent than most of you probably think).

Off to put Ju to bed.

For your amusement.

Am I on vacation? It sure seems like it. So far I have completed two sewing projects, made more than 6 dozen sugar cookies shaped like stars, made pizza twice, bread sticks, soups, created a ginger molasses chicken dish (to be eaten tomorrow, we'll see how that turns out), made Christmas ornaments for the tree with Ju, started beading some bead strings for the tree, gone to the beach, had a churrasco, gone to the mall on several occasions, gone sailing, lost my glasses in the ocean while sailing, got new glasses (Brand name is Detroit, who knew?), cleaned the floors several times, but have yet to do laundry. Tomorrow. Tomorrow I WILL do the laundry.

Sorry for the long absence. My MA course took over my life and I only recently escaped.

So news in the life in Brasil department in brief:

Was briefly sued for racism by one of the student's mothers because I asked her to talk to her daughter at home about not trying to take home toys from school in her backpack after one of my assistants caught her in the act of putting some of them in her backpack. After three weeks of limbo, the mother went back to the police station and stated she would not pursue the charge (under the threat of the father who said he would stop paying for the kids' school if she did), but has not gone back to sign any papers to that effect so the case remains open. I have since had a long talk with this mother and become somewhat of an ally (or maybe that's my misconception, I don't know) to her and am trying to help her family open up the lines of communication. I don't know why I end up with these irrational acting people as parents of my students. Our population seems to be over run with them.

Bought new washing machine because ours was filling the kitchen with water every time we ran it. Two weeks later canceled the order with Ricardo Electro because they failed to deliver it in the time they said they would (in 48 hours), and then bought the machine instead with Laser Electrico who we always buy from and we should get it on Monday. Ricardo tried to give us a different one (better) for the same price as we had been in and out of the store several times to inquire about why it had not been delivered, but we canceled anyway because we would rather not they get any money. About time since we have had no way to wash clothes for more than two weeks and Ju just got over this vomiting fever thing.

Everyone at school and here at home has had this fever thing, sometimes with vomiting, and sore throat. Ju's class had only half attendance the week before he got it because it seems to be so contagious. I have it now, it's not fun, but I prefer to have fevers and let my body do my thing if I can stand it.

One of my best friends in Brasil has moved back to Salvador, but isn't sure she is going to stay here. I am glad to have her back in my life though and have spent a lot of time with her over the last several weeks.

One of my other best friends in Brasil has returned from her semi-hiatus when she was too busy with work and we have gotten together to chat and hang out and it has been awesome. It's only now that I realize how much I missed having really real friends who are my friends because we have similar spirits and love each other rather than that we were thrown together because of circumstance or because we fell like we "should" be friends. Maybe this is why people outside of their culture often turn to religion and become so involved with people from their church. Maybe I'm just talking out of my ass.

School is almost over, just one more week before we have a whole month off of vacation. I am looking forward to catching up on my art work, playing with my sewing machine, and then having my mom visit in January, when I will finally get to go to Chapada.

Ju's kittens are growing fast and continue to be tolerant and take nearly everything he can dish out at them. They have recently gotten into the habit of unplugging my alarm clock and I hope they don't make me miss my transport to work in the last week of class. They also defy gravity, hang from the window nets, and steal everything, even lipstick from my purse, and turn it into a toy. They are like dogs and eat everything too, eggs, bread, fruit, juice; your plate is not safe anymore.

I have yet to do any Xmas shopping at all.

And this concludes another news brief.

Today, after more than 4 years of living in Brasil and swimming in some not so clean ocean waters, I was stung by a jellyfish. It made my whole arm hurt and left a line of welts in both places that it touched me. I have always been anxious about jellyfish, I suppose from having read somewhere that there are some that the venom can kill you. Now that I've gotten that hurtle out of the way, I suppose I can move onto bigger and better things like venomous snakes or something.

While giving Ju a shower the other night, he began making some really strange sounds that reminded me of his language about a year ago when he would sound a bit like he was speaking Japanese. He would make all kinds of phonemes from both English and Portuguese, having long "conversations" with his toys while he was playing, never sounding like he was speaking either language. When he suddenly began making these sounds again, I asked him

"What language is that? It doesn't sound like English and it doesn't sound like Portuguese. What language are you speaking?"

"I'm speaking 'ingrés'!"

"'Ingrés?"

"Uh huh, ingrés."

I suspect this may be something along the lines of "English spoken by friends at school who say things in a different way and call it ingrés" but I can't be sure. Some sore of weird 3 year old interlanguage.

"What's this for doing?"

One of the consequences of where I work is that we get to know some rather influential (i.e. rich and connected) people here in Bahia. For the most part the relationships aren't life changing, but once in a while you meet some really nice people who you wouldn't have rubbed elbows with otherwise and you remember that the rich are people too.

We spent the afternoon with some of these people, discussed politics (well, my husband did, I just sat there and listened), ate crab, and swam in the pool. This particular couple are very special people and genuinely nice, even if they do vote with the right.

Today part of the discussion turned to the French champagne we were drinking. Apparently it is impossible to buy in Brasil anymore because they bought the whole stock and the importer has not been able to get anymore into the country. Specifically, some of the conversation went something like this:

(bottle comes out and is poured for us at the table by the pool and another guest remarks)

"Oh, wow, where did you get this? Have you been saving this for Bob?" (Bob is another guest)

"Oh, no, there are only about five bottles left. It's a crisis, really. They haven't gotten anymore."

"Yes, you don't find this in Brasil anymore. What will we do with this crisis? It really is terrible."


I wasn't really paying that much attention to this conversation until the woman said something about "this crisis" and then I sort of perked up, thinking maybe she was referring to the global economic situation and feeling I could finally contribute to the conversation. I admit that sometimes when I really miss things from the States they are often edible, but I'm not sure I'd call a lack of French champagne a crisis. It really is a different world when you have enough money to create a certain level of lifestyle. I'm just happy if I can get Granny Smiths of decent quality and some nice mint chocolate.

Our next module of the MA has been postponed. Apparently the professor's passport with the Brasilian visa stamped in it has gone missing in the mail. Some how this had to happen to someone somewhere along the way in this process. It's such a typical story in this kind of situation, one that I myself experienced during my preparations to move down here. Documents getting lost in the mail. Se la vi! This is why I liked that extra chore of driving to Chicago back in the day. My paranoia got the better of me. I'm feeling rather indifferent to the fact that I have an extra two weeks to accomplish the homework and finish reading the last chapter of the book. Life goes on. It's just adding to my procrastination habit.

Ju singing this morning: "Down by the station really in the morning, see the puffy little engines all in a go. You can see the puffy little engines there all in a go."

"Mommy, do the nose!"

(I squeeze his nose hidden under a cloth he has over his face)

"and the mouth."

(I comply)

"and the eye"

(I comply)

"and the testa"

"The forehead?" (I say as I comply)

"No, it's not a forehead."

"The testa is a forehead." (I touch his forehead again)

"No, it's not a forehead. There's no four there."