isoglossia

In comparison to Adam, Alek was an idyllic, silent, sweet tiny lovely delicate little baby whose poop smelled like a summer field of French lavender and whose penis would never spurt urine inappropriately. Alek, you slept without even being taught how, you cooed and purred when being bathed, and generally you comported yourself as though plotting to ensure that Adam would be banished from the Duchy of Carniola before his third birthday.

The above paragraph being written in the past tense, it is safe to assume that Aleksander is now severely pissing us off.

What happened? The several viruses you’ve somehow picked up in the last few months justified some restlessness and whining, but at some point that anomalous behavior got jammed in the ‘on’ position. We would do anything to shut you up. And to get you to sleep again. You have not slept through the night in months now, and your current sort of wakefulness is not a quiet sort of wakefulness. We could set our alarm clocks by your wee-hours awakening, if we had any interest whatsoever in setting them to SCREAM O’CLOCK. How does a tiny quiet baby go from natural-born sleeper to full-time PITA?

Answer: world-class teacher.

To your credit, to this day you still have never urinated into my face. This is not a claim your brother can make, not by a long stretch.

And Adam, to your credit, our draconian regimen of not taking you to the swimming pool as daily as you would like seems to be beginning to show signs of starting to consider wondering about maybe bearing fruit, where by ‘fruit’ I mean ‘occasional isolated obedience’ and ‘slight down-tick in whining and in howling time out sessions’.

I suppose that one reason for a cutback in the whining is that your mouth is too busy with other business. Forming a certain question, for example, over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over.

Exile in Why?ville

Me: Wow, that sun is bright!
Adam: Why?
Me: “The sun is a mass of incandescent gas, a gigantic nuclear furnace, where hydrogen is built into helium at a temperature of millions of degrees.”
Adam: Is dat why?
Me: Yes. Dat is why.
Adam: Why?

Also contributing is all the singing, reciting, narrating, and commentating you’ve been doing lately. As mentioned before, we got you the They Might Be Giants ABCs/123s discs, and you have been watching them in an endless slackjawed loop for the last 30 days without pause, the only distraction being your allowing us to moisten your eyes with artificial tears like in “A Clockwork Orange” lest you miss one precious second of “The Seven Days Of The Week (I Never Go To Work)”. This has resulted in a really remarkable spike in your letter and number learning, and is singlehandedly responsible for all the singing in the place, often with a level of verbatim-ness that borders on the Rain Man. If any parents of similar aged children are reading this, in all sincerity we cannot recommend these discs highly enough, assuming that you, like us, weepingly and despairingly and daily resort to the DVD as babysitter/opiate drip. If you are going to spend the next three years with kids’ songs stuck in your heads anyway, these are the ones you want haunting your every waking moment. We can say with no expectation of compensation from They Might Be Giants, their label, or the Deeply Felt Puppet Theater that this is truly top-notch stuff.

And Adam has learned to write his name.

Overall, this month has been all about burgeoning curiosity, demands for explanations of the inexplicable, great leaps in understanding of how the world works, and your overhearing, retaining, and soaking up information like a sponge. It’s terrifying.

“Alek is not embarrassed.” I have no idea what caused you to produce that particular sentence apropos of nothing, Adam, other than perhaps the fact that he should be, and continually. “By da way” has also appeared in your active lexicon, though you don’t seem to be entirely sure how to operate it, since it precedes pretty much every utterance now. My own current favorite: “I’m afraid nope”.

Oh, and Alek’s vocabulary is expanding, too. Just this week he added a whole new high-frequency phrase: GUK GAK!

Adam’s skill and craftiness has exploded, too, particularly in the area of track-building, Lego^® shruckahs, and cololing in your cololing books. You’ve learned all the letters and seem to be planning on reading and writing before too long. Added to this your deep interest in how clocks tell time (something I didn’t learn until I was fifteen or so) and it looks like you’ve decided our lives would be enlivened by a precocious little know-it-all.

And Alek, seriously, you are running us ragged. This was the month that you began really expanding the physical limits of your ability to wreak havoc — climbing up onto furniture you only dreamt of scaling before, tearing precious photos from bulletin boards, ingesting the magnetic alphabet with which Adam was just learning to write GUK GAK on the front of the fridge. I worry that your mother is going to lose her mind one of these days, and she wasn’t even there last night to see you hurl the green plastic watering can off our fifth-storey terrace into the teeming humanity below.

“Papa, I need moal mugnit lettules and numbahs. MAYBE SANTA WILL BRING DEM.”

I point to Adam’s bad example as justification for Alek’s recent nightmarishness, but his good examples are bad, too. Alek watches everything Adam can do (color inside the lines, pour juice, engineer a sophisticated rail system, make the trains run on time, make a shoe smell, etc.) and decides that he needs to be able to do that, too. Any failure in these goals sets off a hissy-fit that is literally painful to be within earshot of. Any thwarting at all brings forth The Piercing Shriek Of Doom. Alek, take this advice. Take it early, take it often: LOWER YOUR EXPECTATIONS.

And get used to being thwarted. Your brother did, and he’s FINE.

In all the years I’ve lived here, I never quite figured out the topography of the ridge north of town until I walked up it on Saturday. I’m surprised and a bit embarrassed that it took us that long to make what turned out to be a very modest hike. Magda pointed out as we approached the top that the last hike she took was our Easter Sunday climb of Mount Sabotin (the prominent peak just right of center in the picture) on what was almost surely the day Adam was conceived. My last hike was a little more recent, but not much. So it wasn’t surprising to me that my shins and knees were feeling the walk a day later.

One reason that this particular hilltop’s form eluded me as much as it did is that it’s not visible from our windows, though a false summit, Sveta Katerina, dominates our view while obscuring the real peak, Škabrijel, by the smallest sliver of tree cover. Walk a block southwest of our house and the peak, with its distinctive treeline notch with observation tower silhouetted in it, jumps into view. It amazes me that I lived here for over six years, looking north at the hills for most of that time, and I never even registered the tower’s existence until a few weeks ago. And of course, once I saw it, I had to stand on top of it.

So Saturday Magda and I left the boys to play with Auntie Rada and drove to the subsidiary peak of Sveta Katerina, about halfway up. There we left the car and trusted in the familiar red-ringed white circle trail blazes to guide us to the top of Škabrijel.

The hike was shorter than we expected, but it had its steep bits and it was a relief to move into the gentling slope near the summit, cooled by conifers. Just below the top we encountered an army mess kit devoured by rust. It’s impossible to walk in the mountains of western Slovenia without the shadows of wars being evoked, and I rarely go out without learning enough to make me want to know more. I knew that the moving lines of the notorious Isonzo/Soča Front had passed right through this area, but my post-hike Google session this time surprised me by revealing that this hill outside our window, our daily view, was such an important part of that front during the Italian attacks on Austrian positions on the Banjška Planota, or Bainsizza Plateau, which sits just beyond. Perceval Gibbon, writing for the New York Times of August 20, 1917:

“Still further south…lies the terrible Austrian buttress of Monte San Gabriele, which is now threatened by Cadorna’s new strategy of movement. San Gabriele, with its southwestern spur, San Caterina, was a kind of sister to Monte Santo. It has been attacked scores of times. There is hardly an inch of its burned and churned slope that has not received its bursting shell. Yet so far it has proved impregnable…the Bainsizza Plateau is the key to Trieste.”

The summit of Sveta gora, also visible from our apartment and seen below capped by a monastery, was no less important an objective. Gibbon again, describing the battle for ‘Monte Santo’ a week later:

“[T]he tricolor of Italy, carried up the slopes by the battalion which assaulted it frontally on its steepest side, floats from a long stone heap that crowns the hill where once a beautifully old monastery stood.The foundations of the monastery, its garden, and the slopes about it were an antheap of passages, tunels [sic], and underground chambers, gruesomely equipped with the everlasting machine guns. The Italian artillery and trench mortars put an intense fire upon them…”

Not surprisingly, the monastery you see today is not so ‘beautifully old’.

The final battle on this front came to be known as Caporetto, for the small town up the river where the Austro-Hungarian army, amply reinforced by Germans (including a young lieutenant Rommel), broke the back of the Italian army. This would give a teenager floating about the area named Ernest Hemingway material for a novel he would write a dozen years later in Arkansas. Hemingway described Caporetto as “a little white town with a campanile in a valley”. It still is. The placename, though, is now happily obsolete — Caporetto ended up on the Yugoslav side of the border’s most recent iteration, and is now Slovenian Kobarid. Caporetto lived on for a time as a term for a humiliating, catastrophic military defeat.

While researching this I was amazed at the richness of the archives at the New York Times. They go back to 1851, and reading colorful, breathless, first-person descriptions of historical events happening within the view from our windows has been nothing short of astonishing. And may turn out to be addictive. Highly recommended.

Aleksander had a brief meeting with a wasp yesterday that ended rather badly. I have a zero-tolerance wasp policy, but I am a big fan of the honeybee and her works. Here we have an example of the preternaturally industrious Carniolan Grey beavering away for the benefit of her human masters.

As I was lying face-down on a bed of hot grass and tiny, fragrant wildflowers (and also: bees), Zdenka, one of the soldiers in the logistics unit, was yelling at me that the little purple blossoms I was photographing (she couldn’t see the bees) are good for making some kind of tea that is healthful and whatnot. She told me the flowers are called materina dušica (‘mother’s breath soul’). When asked what particular ailment the tea is good for she said, “everything”. When this was met with a small but evidently galling bit of skepticism, she advised asking the internet.

Slovenes will make tea out of your shoes if you stand still long enough and then they’ll give it to you for the hangover you got from drinking their schnapps made from flowers.

A good month later than usual, the weather here has finally erupted into painfully beautiful spring. The pale purple carpet of tiny tea-bound flowers murmurs with hundreds of diligent bees. The air outside the front door of our apartment building is heavy with a flower scent that would be cloying overkill in a perfume. Adam’s little bean plantation has cracked the soil asunder and thrust up his precious little plants whose daily progress thrills and baffles him. Cut grass throws off the snappy smell of freshly shelled peas, and the towering, candle-like cones of horse chestnut blossoms are filling the air with down that drifts in the open window of my office. Birds twitter and chirp, and a distant cuckoo underlines their formlessness with a drowsy but metronomic call for Cocoa Puffs.

In some ways, I will certainly miss this place after July.

Okay, you have answered my main question, Rand McNally.

Maybe I need a satellite view.

Jesus, where can I even begin? This has been the month when we thought maybe you two had won, and we’re still not sure we won’t be clambering into a helicopter on the roof before the next month is out, leaving the place to you and your oppressive regime of endless howling and wanting.

Then you’ll be all nice for 25 seconds and we’ll congratulate ourselves on having procreated until the next whine marathon throws us back into our circular recriminations of so whose bright idea was it to have two of them?

Basically, it’s been 30 days of ear-splitting noise punctuated by the occasional crack of a head against a floor or television set — or, remarkably frequently, another head. The weather has not helped, as spring postponed itself behind a veil of nearly constant rain and drizzle, turning the apartment into a stressure-cooker of times-out and germ incubation. And so of course there’s been the related health lock-down as well. When neither of you was coughing up parts of yourself, nearly all of our energy has been spent in trying to come up with ways to distract you from destroying each other. As soon as we got a break from nearly constant nose-siphoning, for example, we fed your shared locomotive obsession by paying a visit to the old Yugoslav steam engine near the railway station:

And there was the first-ice-cream-of-almost-spring outing:

Serving as both a scream-defeating distraction and an incentive to get Adam’s behavior to suck marginally less, there’s been the Swimming Pool Project. This began as a simple If you want x then behave y arrangement, but it quickly devolved into a byzantine array of charts, graphs, calendars, and color-coded stickers for bad, medium-bad, and marginally not-technically-horribly-bad behaviors in a complex Behavior Matrix. Of course Adam understands all the rules and corollaries thereto.

Anyway, he did get to go to the massive Vodno Mesto Atlantis as an Easter Monday treat, evaded the sinister pitfalls of the Behavior Matrix by the skin of his teeth for a return visit (during which he mastered the water slide), and today as I write this he is one time-out/Alek-choking away from the Behavior Matrix’s incontestable decision on whether another visit will take place soon.

Though Adam is the one determining whether or not we go, Alek took to the water with even more enthusiasm and natural talent.

Alek’s other budding enthusiasms include rubbish inspecting, which is nothing new.

We’ve really been impressed with what a pretty little monkey you’ve been turning out to be, but the sweeter you look the more vexing you become in actual fact, which turns out to be rather important. This is a kind of transition month for you, Alek, as you begin to really shed your baby shell and emerge as something approaching a boy. This is accompanied by much deep frustration on your part and a certain amount of resistance from your brother, who is not ready to let you out of his stick-shaped shadow nor to share the limited amount of boy resources in this house. This has only added to the enormous amount of stress in the place, and there really are days that we’re ready to sell you both for medical experiments.

Fortunately, you’ve developed a habit your brother never cultivated: you’ve got a duda addiction bad, a real monkey on your back. We’re trying to break you of it, but it’s no easier for us than it is for you, since it’s often the only way we ever get any silence these days.

A trip to the playground keeps you two from each other’s throats for ten to fifteen minutes, with luck.

Left: quiet Alek puts in a token appearance. At right, the real story (please mute your computer’s speakers). If Adam’s phase provides any guidance, things should quiet down sometime in mid-2010.

I do not know what this is about. Ask your mother.

Now it’s time to admit that we have turned in desperation to the benevolent cyclopic gaze of the TV screen, in amounts that shame us as much as they bring relief. If endless iterations of Thomas The Tank Engine: The Early Years Disc One will not soothe it, it cannot be soothed. Unsoothable. Papa spent long hours slaving over a hot Handbrake to get the Apple TV packed with kid vid, and now it’s paying off in daily languid waves of LCD opiates.

In addition to the deathless embrace of Thomas and Friends, this month we’ve been watching a lot of They Might Be Giants’ ABC/123 stuff, and you guys are deeply in its thrall. Above, you are watching “One Dozen Monkeys”, which, coincidentally, is also the scientific unit for measuring the destructive power of a 15-month-old baby.

And here we all are watching something about two girls and a cup, I guess:

One day you’ll look back on all this television and thank us for convincing you that trains have personalities and weltanschauungen, you’ll be grateful that we exposed you to the twisted outlook of TMBG at such tender ages. But to be thankful later you’ll have to make it that long, so STOP CHOKING EACH OTHER, YOU MONKEYS.

Please don’t destroy each other. Not quite yet.