Look! A blog post!

February 28th is National Face Painting day in Romania. This annual event commemorates the time in 1474 when Stefan Cel Mare came home drunk and fell asleep on the sofa, and while he slept, Mrs Cel Mare invited some of her friends round and they painted his face in a series of vivid images, reminiscent of those on the Bucovina Monasteries. Modern day face painting rarely depicts the banishment of the Jews and Muslims to hell, but instead tends towards lighter, less controversial imagery.

Jött a Mikulás

They all look the same to me

It is said that people from one ethnic group cannot tell members of another apart. There does seem to be a grain of truth in that, though if people really say they can't tell two different people apart (assuming they're not identical twins) it seems to me that they're really not trying that hard. Anyway, before this post becomes something serious, let me get onto the not-that-serious point of this post and the reason I started down this dangerous little side track. This is that I have recently become aware of a certain group of (sort-of) people which I cannot tell apart.

My daughter, Paula, is a princess. Obviously as a doting father I sort of think this anyway, but this statement comes not from me but from her. She tells me, and anyone else who is paying attention, on numerous occasions every day. She also is a big fan of other princesses. And so, on my recent trip I brought back a Disney princess memory card game (the kind of game that we used to call pelmanism until that word was co-opted to refer to prejudice against Pelmans). In this game, there are pictures of many princesses from Disney films over the years. The definition appears quite flexible, so a character could have started the film a princess and remained as one, or the character could have started the film a humble woman who lived in a menage-a-huit with a bunch of dwarves, or a mermaid or what-have-you, but finished it shacked up with a prince.

The thing is, I get absolutely trounced in this game every time. Partly this is because my short-term memory is shot to pieces through age and youthful indiscretion, partly because Paula, despite the limited attention span of a three-and-a-half-year old, seems to have the recall skills of a small, blonde, cute elephant, but mostly (I contend) because all these bloody princesses look exactly the bloody same. You pick up one card and it features some indeterminate blonde-haired pink-clothed princess. "Aha", you think to yourself, "I've seen this before", and pick up another card bearing a similar, but crucially in the context of the game, not exactly the same, image. Every time.

To be honest, there are one or two of them which I can tell from the others, but these are the one or two princesses from different ethnic groups. Ariel, for example (ethnic group: mermaids) is clearly different from the others, as is the princess (whatever her name is) from Aladdin (ethnic group: non-threatening Middle Eastern. More belly dancer than burka). But those two aside I'm lost. Why? Why do all princesses have to look the same? Is there a rule? They even all dress the same (exceptions: mermaids and belly dancers). Are there no individualists in the princess world? It's a rum do, and no mistake.

Child Labour

Reforming Paula

I'm quite sure there's some pithy quote that is used to make it clear that children are destined to repeat their parents' lives, or mistakes, or something. Anyway, assuming there is, it would be very apposite here, if only I knew what it was.

When I was very young, and I mean very young, way too young for me to have any memory of it, I was christened in the Church of England. (Christened is the CofE word for "baptised" - I've no idea why they use a different word). Anyway this christening came about despite my parents being avid non-church goers, because my (also non-church going) grandmother kind of pressured them into doing it, since it was traditional and the thing you did and anyway what would the neighbours say? So I was carted along, had my head washed a bit, and was granted some kind of curious non-blood relationship with some of my parents' friends. Having come out of the church, they (my parents that is) turned to each other and vowed never to do that again with any future children as they didn't believe a word of what had passed for the ceremony. Hence neither of my brothers were christened (much to my grandmother's disgust and trauma and fear that whole country were talking about us).

When Paula was born, Erika and I briefly pondered getting her baptised, but since neither of us ever go to church or have a religion to call our own, this seemed a little bit silly. Plus we live in the 21st century and not the 15th, and so were not living in fear that Paula's soul would somehow be forever in limbo unless some bloke in funny clothes put some water on her. But, increasingly we too became aware of grandparently pressure which was gradually being ratcheted up. This despite the grandparent in question (my mother in law) also, like my grandmother before her, not having set in foot in a church for as long as anyone could remember. Last weekend, with my mother in law fairly unwell, we decided to go ahead and perform this meaningless act, as a kind of get-well soon present.

So we fixed up with the priest (when I say we, I mean of course Erika, who takes care of most things that involve language beyond basic shopping vocabulary) to have the ceremony. We went for the Hungarian Reformed Church (since the other two options available in Csikszereda are Roman Catholic - and they are way too serious and would probably need some kind of conversion from me to agree to it - or Romanian Orthodox - which is kind of out of the question for many reasons). I'm not entirely sure what the Hungarian Reformed church is, dogmatically speaking. I don't really understand all the various gradations of protestantism, but I think the Hungarian Reformed Church is Calvinist (though since I have no idea what "Calvinist" means, that's not much use).

The Hungarian Reformed Church, as I discovered when we entered, is very Hungarian. By which I mean it has all the Hungarian paraphernalia on the walls, the red white and green banners and so on, and the priest was the most Hungarian looking man I've ever seen - the big moustache, the works. He should really have entered the church on a horse wearing a wide brimmed hat for the full effect.

Paula, of course, was restless and bored. We quickly discovered why people tend to baptise their kids when they are very young - they may cry, but they don't try running all over the church. As the aforementioned moustachioed priest stepped up the pulpit, she looked up from whatever piece of dirt/hymn book/protruding nail she was focussing on and shouted out "Bácsi! Mit Csinálsz?" (roughly - at least as far as Paula is concerned - "What are you doing, old man?"). The service was, fortunately, mercifully short (another reason to favour the HRC over the Catholic and the Orthodox), and before long we were up the front going through the ritual motions. I have no idea what exactly I agreed to, but since I don't believe in any of it, that doesn't seem terribly relevant. An oral agreement is not worth the paper it's written on. Paula took the opportunity of a break in proceedings while the priest told us our sacred duties or read out his shopping list or just talked about the weather for all I know, to scarper up the stairs to the pulpit itself, so I had to go and rescue/capture her. She was a bit stunned when he actually blessed her, which seemed to take the form of him spreading his arms wide, looming over her, and letting out an odd kind of barking sound in the manner of someone attempting to scare away a mountain lion, but she got over that quickly.

After the service, and after I had handed over a small envelope containing our donation (most transactions in Romania seem to end in this way - even going to the doctor) we repaired to our flat for a traditional slap up feast and traditional slap up palinka with the various new godparents, and other assorted hangers on.

The only negative side to the whole thing (as with more or less anything that involves organised religion) is that because there's all this dogma and tradition involved, there are myriad opportunities to offend. Which we inevitably have unwittingly done and have pissed off about three separate groups of friends who felt that they should have been godparents. So what started out as a nice gesture to cheer up an ailing grandmother, has turned into some kind of icy friendship wasteland (a friendship tundra?). Obviously this is not the fault of religion or the church per se, but it does seem to match up with most of the problems that the church does create. Rigid adherence to arcane rules and bizarre practices, causing conflict and tension.

Anyway, just as Tőkés László is always referred to as a reformed bishop, Paula can now be referred to as a reformed toddler. Mind you, I have to say that she never stuck lego up her nose before she was baptised. There's got to be some kind of message in that.

Blame Denmark

Toys and games tend to have these labels on them saying things like "Not suitable for children under 3", and the like. Until yesterday, I assumed that the main reason for this advice/warning was to do with small pieces that could easily be swallowed. Paula, though, grew out of the sticking everything in her mouth phase some months ago, so I imagined that that, at least, probably wouldn't be much of a problem, as long as we kept an eye on her. Sharp things we obviously keep out of the way, but she likes playing with some of Bogi's toys, which, of course, are not technically for the under threes.

One of her favourite things to play with is Lego. Yesterday afternoon, for example, while she was with me, she expressed a desire to play Lego. "Andy," she said (like Bart calls Homer Homer, Paula calls me Andy most of the time), "Andy, Legozunk" (There is no noun that cannot be verbised in Hungarian. Hence 'Legozunk' which means, roughly, "Let's Lego"). Anyway, I got the Lego down, and we sat down together to legozni. This isn't Duplo or one of those other pre-lego lego things, but real normal lego. While she started to busy herself sticking blocks together, I was making a small plane for her.

Suddenly, in the middle of my deep concentration at the effort of putting together some small plastic blocks, she piped up, "Andy. Lego!" and pointed to her nose. As I know her nose is not made of lego, and knowing also that she is fully aware of that fact, I panicked thinking perhaps she'd stuck some lego up her nose. I put her head back and looked, but couldn't see anything. But something was obviously bothering her. I had her blow her nose, in the hope that if there was something up there, she'd easily get it out. Nothing. But she kept telling me that it tickled. So off we went to the nose hospital. They do cater for more than just noses, dealing with ears and throats too, but it was the nose bit that was of interest to us. We met Erika and Bogi outside the front entrance, and went inside.

I'll gloss over the next bit, but at the end of a session of screaming and crying, the nurse had removed not one, not two, but three small bits of lego. So that's why they say some toys are not suitable for children under three. Who knew that they'd want to experiment with pushing small objects right up inside their nose? Well, when I say "who" knew, obviously many people knew. In fact I suspect I was the only one who didn't. I've already heard from numerous people since this incident "Oh, yes, when I was young I stuck a bean up there"; "My brother got a tic-tac up his nose"; "...peanut..."; "...beads..."; "...pumpkin seed..."; "...copy of 'War and Peace'..."; "...The Hanging Gardens of Babylon..."; etc. etc.

Anyway the lego has now been put out of sight in a box on the highest shelf in the house. It may return to the regular shelves in about two years.

Conversation

...with a slightly-lingual-in-two-languages toddler(is there a word for that?)

Paula (at shelves, arms stretching up to show need for something out of reach): Apuka! [Dad] Puzzle!
Me: You want me to get you a puzzle?
Paula (nodding furiously): Igen! [Yes]
Me: Would you like the big puzzle or the small puzzle?
Paula: Igen!
Me (patiently): The big one or the small one?
Paula (still nodding furiously): Igen! Igen!
Me: Would you like the b-i-g puzzle or the s-m-a-l-l puzzle?
Paula: Igen!
(pause, light of understanding begins to dawn in her eyes, looks at me, and says very slowly and deliberately, as if to an idiot) Yes.

Bilingual Stirrings

Paula is starting, slowly, one word at a time, to speak. She has had one or two words for a while now - one of her first words, for example, was to point very firmly at something which caught her eye and say “Né!”. This is the Hungarian word for “Look!” and sounds not unlike “Ni” - thus for a while she was very much the “baby who says ni”. But anyway, I digress.

So, post né! and a long drawn out, occasionally whiny A-ny-u-ka, she was being quite slow to utter things. This apparently is quite common in bilingual babies who are getting input in more than one language - they take longer to start using the words. She was up to speed with all the other developmental milestones which parenting websites offer up, but speaking was (and is) lagging a tad. But recently the words have started to come - there’s now a very definite “köszi” (thanks), and something which sounds like “this” but is very likely “tessek” (among other things, “here you are”), and a few others. But a couple of days ago we were standing (or I was standing, she was in my arms) at the kitchen window looking for dogs outside (She loves dogs. And pigeons. All animals probably, it’s just that in downtown Csikszereda, dogs and pigeons are broadly speaking the only obvious non human options). As we stood and looked, there round the corner came a dog. Quick as a flash, her arm extended, and her finger pointed quivering at this sight. “Look!” she cried excitedly. In English. Not only had she come up with her first recognisable English word, but she had correctly surmised that she needed to use it with me, and nobody else, and had managed to do that all in the split second of intense excitement at seeing yet another scruffy mongrel. The human brain is an amazing thing.

I’m not sure how long it will be before she learns that an English speaking cockerel goes “Cock-a-doodle-do”, since at present they very definitely say “Kukuriku”, which is what those odd magyar cocks say. (More animal noises in different languages can be found here).

Chicken Varicella

Varicella is not, as you may have thought, a type of pasta. It is in fact more commonly known (in English at least) as chicken pox. Varicella is just the official name of the virus. Although to be more accurate the virus is actually known as "Varicella-Zoster" which sounds less like a pasta and more like a ski resort in Switzerland. Interestingly (or not), in Hungarian it is known as Bárányhimlő which means "lamb-pox". The reason it's called chicken pox in English is nothing to with chickens, just that it was perceived as a small and decidedly un-deadly version of smallpox, and the humble chicken seemed to fit the bill. I'm assuming it got named after a cuddly little fluffy lamb in Hungarian for the same reason. I'm afraid I have no idea as to what it is called in Romanian. Perhaps hamsterpox or something.

Anyway, cuddly and fluffy it may be by name, but cuddly and fluffy it isn't necessarily by nature. Paula has had it since Thursday and this weekend has been extremely unpleasant for all of us (her particularly). Not only does she have a raging fever, but she is covered from head to toe in itchy spots which are driving her mad (and, indirectly, us too). In my investigative reading of anything I can find on the internet which might suggest ways of reducing her irritation, I have discovered that there now exists a vaccination for Varicella, which she could have had from 9 months old. I bloody wish she had, and that we'd known about it. Let this post be a strong piece of advice for all parents to go ahead and get your child vaccinated. Even if it's not offered as a semi-compulsory jab in your state health system, it must be possible to buy the vaccine and have a nurse administer it. Do it. Believe me. It cannot be worth watching your own child attempt to tear her hair out in anger and frustration and exhaustion (did I mention she hasn't slept either?), and to actually wonder, in all seriousness, whether it is possible to buy a baby sized straightjacket to stop her scratching.

One of the more intriguing things about using the internet as your primary resource for health tips is that it throws up all sorts of contradictions - especially across languages. For example, all English language websites I have found recommend a cool bath as a way to ease the itching. Whereas Hungarian ones say you shouldn't have baths, only showers. We've noticed this before, but it seems particularly pronounced in the case of chicken/lamb pox. The most baffling thing is that apparently calamine lotion, which is used worldwide for the treatment of chicken pox sores (and many other dermatological needs), is actually banned in Hungary. There's something about it causing infection - even though everywhere else in the world people are slathering it all over their pus-y and blistered children. It's quite quite bizarre. (Fortunately it is not banned in Romania, so while Erika is nervous about putting it on - having read all this anti-calamine propaganda - we have managed to get some and are using it)

Catching Up

Got back home on Monday evening, with much relief. A week is hard enough to be away, whereas I was gone for nearly 4. In my absence, Paula has stopped climbing on everything (or rather she's no longer obsessively climbing on everything), and is now veryinto walking around on tiptoes. She is also calling everyone bigger than herself "Anyu" or "Anyuka", which is a bit disconcerting. (For non-Hungarian speakers, these are roughly equivalent to "mum" and "mummy", but its unusual even here for babies to skip over the interim "mama" step before going straight to the more commonly used version). Bogi on the other hand has come down with chicken pox (every year I go to to the same conference in the UK in April, and every year while I'm there, Bogi picks up some childhood ailment - last year mumps, this year chicken pox). Fortunately it's a mild case and she isn't itching, she just looks dead spotty.

Now, the next stage in the revolving door family has kicked in, as Erika left this morning for a project meeting in France. We are obviously an international bunch.

Romania made the international news last week twice - once for the political turmoil, with the government suspending the president, pending a referendum on impeachment which he will clearly win -an act that strikes me as being bafflingly time-wasting. But there you go. Secondly because one of the teachers killed at Virginia Tech was a 76 year old holocaust survivor from here.

More to follow, when I have a moment after the kids have crashed.

A Year in the Life

One year on... from this post and this post.

Amazing to imagine that anyone could survive for a year with me as a father, let alone anyone so fragile as a baby. But miraculously Paula is thriving. Yesterday she took her first unsupported tentative half-step. I am still achingly proud.

And I have no idea why this set of pictures ends up all the way down there. Bloody HTML. This is probably a better way of viewing them all

Cruising

Paula recently started cruising. No, no, that’s not what you’re thinking of, it’s something entirely different. It is the official term (I have learned) for that period when she (or any baby, to be honest) starts trying to pull herself to a standing position. She’s only actually been crawling properly for about a month, having spent some while attempting to crawl with her head on the floor as well as her four limbs (go on, try that, it’s dead tricky), and the teacher in me would like her to perfect that skill before moving onto something infinitely more complex, but you know, she won’t be told.

I have no idea why it’s called cruising though. It’s all very confusing. I had always assumed that the preferred holiday of blue-rinsed American over-70s was known as “Going on a cruise” rather than “Cruising” precisely to avoid the confusion around the activity described in the second, most commonly understood definition here. “What are you doing for your holidays this summer, Myrtle?” “O, Walt and I thought we’d do a spot of cruising”. I mean it would lead to endless confusion and suggestive double-entendres wouldn’t it? “I heard Walt and Myrtle are cruising this summer”, “Oh, I bet they are”. But, now, to my surprise, I learn that the word has been co-opted by the parent community to mean something entirely different. How I wish these words weren’t besmirched by their being used by these marginal societal groups, to mean something faintly unsavoury. Oh, for a simpler more innocent world, when cruising was picking people up in toilets and not something involving watching babies repeatedly fall on their arse.

Is nothing sacred? The next thing I’ll discover is that cottaging is a word also used to describe the infant practice of burping lightly and allowing a small pool of half digested milk to spill from the mouth and be deposited on ones (and ones parents’) clothes.

Paula

For no reason other than my own pride, here are a couple of recent pictures of Paula.

Odds and Sods

Paula is three months old today. This is big news for a couple of reasons. Firstly we can tell people that she is three months old. Secondly, I can't believe that she is already 1/4 of a year old. How did that happen? She's even grown out of some of her clothes. Thirdly and most importantly, three months appears to be the cut off point for the period of fear. What I mean is that whenever you look on a website for questions regarding baby health, it basically tells you lots of details about what the problem could be, but then says "If the baby isless than three months old see a doctor - IMMEDIATELY" . So it feels good to know that she's made it to three months and any infection panics like the one we had 6 weeks ago when she had to go to hospital, are now much more handleable (by her, and consequently by us).

It's spring. More or less. The weather has warmed up considereably and now is only negative at night. In the daytime for the last week or so it has been really quite nice. There's still snow everywhere, but it just looks dirty now, and drips everywhere.

As the snow has subsided, the true horror of the roads has become apparent. Pot holes have been a fact of life ever since I moved here, but they were small insignificant potholes - at least in comparison with the ones we have now. So bad are they, that they are beginning to spark protests (this is apparently very unusual in this town). We had posters on our road last week, and now this website has appeared. Basically people are getting at the mayor and the town council, and quite reasonably it would seem. For now, though, I avoid driving if at all possible. We must be the only town in Europe in which it is quite reasonable to commute in a four wheel drive SUV. (as opposed to anywhere else aside from remote hamlets or farms, where ownership of an SUV is a gas guzzling dick extension for the terminally inadequate).

200th post

Just to take my mind off my impending dotage, I thought I'd write my 200th post on this blog. Not sure what the average word count per post is, but it's an awful lot of meaningless drivel. I'm not about to stop now, though, so here are some other small things.

Last night Romania got snowed on, seemingly everywhere, though perhaps not at the coast. On the news, of course, all the talk was of the fact the capital was paralized. Intrepid reporters had gone out of the front door of their TV stations and were filming traffic moving slowly. It was gripping TV, as you can imagine, and once again served to give the impression that anything beyond the county of Ilfov (the county that surrounds Bucharest) doesn't actually exist.

This morning with the capital's 5 cms of snow still the talk of every TV station, the government had promised a "War on Snow". I swear I'm not making that up. What excatly does a war on snow look like? It's an intriguing concept. However, rdiculous, though, it is in some ways a nice way to highlight the ridiculous use of the phrase "A War on XX" which is so in vogue these days. It all started with the War on Drugs, but reached it's nadir with the "War on Terror". The principle weapon in the war on terror is (it seems) fear, which is blackly ironic to say the least. Strangely, real wars are no longer actually called wars anymore - the War on Iraq was never called that by any English speaking media outlets that I saw. It's a War on Language, I reckon.

Meanwhile, have a look at this picture, which I am reliably informed was not photoshopped.. Now, I don't tend to trust anything that FoxNews says, since I regard it as extreme right wing bullshit, for the most part, but I never really thought they'd stoop to this level. I suppose I should be grateful they were even having a debate. I wonder what the "yes" camp had as arguments? It will increase the share price of weapons dealers? If everyone's dead it will make the country much easier for our boys to control?

And finally

Before I sign off, and to take my mind of the idiots who run the world, a short Paula update. She seems to be recovering, though there are still occasional coughs, which send us into a panic. We even took her out for a walk on Sunday, which was an exciting moment - the temperature had cracked zero for once and we seized our chance. Just in time it seems, since it's got cold again. Yesterday she had her first vaccinations. Not quite sure whether there's still a real danger that children will contract diphtheria, but if there is, she won't be the one to get it. The next big worry is mumps, which is currently running rampant in Csikszereda. If Romania offers MMR you don't get it till you're one anyway, so this could be our next panic. With Bogi venturing each day into the mumps factory that is her kindergarten, we are daily inviting those vicious germs in our home. We must declare a War on Mumps (TM), and we must start now.

Health and the lack of it.

I started writing something about our adventures last week, but in all honesty it’s still a little too fresh in my mind, so I really can’t do so in a way that’s either funny or not traumatic (for me).

The long and the short of it is that last Thursday Paula was diagnosed with viral pneumonia. She and Erika had to spend five l-o-n-g days in the hospital. They gave her drugs, they took blood from her, they did loads of things which are difficult enough for a toddler (or even me) to cope with, let alone a 6 week old, and yet she did just fine.

So instead of writing of my trauma and fear and all that stuff, and hence reliving it, I thought I’d discuss the Romanian health care system. Now in the last 7 weeks Erika and Paula have spent a total of 10 days in hospitals – 5 days for happy reasons and 5 for the pneumonia. Thus I have also spent a considerable time in hospitals too. (I use the plural because Paula was born in Udvarhely (Odorheiu), but treated last week here in Csikszereda.)

Hospitals here really look like hospitals. I mean dingy, grey, concrete corridors lit with fluorescent tubes. No comforts (though there was a kind of torn up couch in the visiting area of the pediatric section of the hospital here.). The food is rubbish. At the hospital here, Erika and Paula shared their room with a small brown mouse. So, the initial impression is not exactly positive.

But there are good points too. The most obvious one (to me) is that there is no desperate profit motive driving most of the decisions. Paula was born perfectly normally and she and Erika stayed 5 days in the hospital. A friend of Erika’s had a baby around the same time in the US and despite having to have a caesarean (not a planned one either) she was in and out in two days. Now it’s nice to get home to your family and all that, but I reckon the system whereby money is not a factor in decisions related to health is a better one. A much better one. This time around the moment the doctor had examined her, they were admitted immediately (and there was no question that Erika would be able to stay with her in the same room), and she was kept under constant observation until she was really ready to go home.

Now there are some things in life that “the market” does a fairly good job of regulating and ensuring needs are met efficiently. But there are other areas, like health care and education where it really doesn’t. The US is a great example of this. It probably has the best health care in the world (in terms of doctors, equipment, modern well equipped hospitals etc), but has a terrible system of access to that great health care. And if people are being kicked out of hospitals two days after having a caesarian, there’s got to be some flaw in the system. There is a famously held belief that the best health care system in the Americas is that of Cuba. (I have no idea what this means – how do you measure best health care system? – to me the best health care system would be a public health based one in which fewer people got sick in the first place. And, since it seems to be necessary whenever you write anything on the internet, I am not therefore saying that Cuba has a better political system than the US. OK?).

Having lived in the States, I never had any major issues with healthcare, but I did spend days and days on hold on the phone trying to ensure that everything that insurance companies were supposed to cough up on my behalf was coughed up. There seems to be a suspicion of the idea of people actually getting the treatment they need. The insurance companies press doctors into shifting the sick out as quickly as possible. And when it’s all about profit and money and shareholders and all that, that’s inevitable. And when it comes down to it, despite the mouse, and the ugliness, I’d rather my family were treated in a hospital in which they will be kept under observation as long as is necessary.

In case this is seen as “yet another” Anti-American post, I think it’s pretty bad in the UK too. The NHS used to be the envy of much of the world, but then Thatcher came with her peculiar brand of anti-compassion, and then she was followed by that neo-liberal lying scumbag Blair, and now we have this half arsed system attempting to be “efficient” and “responsive” and (of course) offering “choice”, all of which seems to mean that once again people (sick people) are treated like figures on a balance sheet rather than being given the treatment they need.

The other major issue regarding healthcare around the world is the flow of qualified professionals from poorer to richer countries. British doctors go to work in the US. Hungarian doctors go to Western Europe. Transylvanian Hungarian doctors have gone to Hungary – they speak the language, and the money and conditions are better. I presume some doctors from other parts of Romania go to Germany or France or somewhere. And are replaced by Moldovans? The people in these wealthy countries who protest about immigration ought to have their bluff called. Don’t let the teachers and doctors and nurses in and see how they like it then.

No idea where I’m going with all this (I bet you can tell can’t you?), so I’ll wind up by reassuring you that Paula is on the mend. Still coughs occasionally and has lost some weight through it all, but is improving daily. And we have the doctor’s mobile number in case we have an emergency. And she’s looking cuter than ever.

Fatherhood - One Month In

So, as promised (or threatened depending on your point of view), something about my first four weeks as a father, with passing references to Paula, the most incredible, intelligent, beautiful baby on the planet. Honest.

My reluctance to write this post is down to my own previous reactions. Viz, that babies were not a terribly interesting subject. True, they seemed to be interesting to most women, and to men who were new fathers, but aside from that (rather large) slice of the population, they just were a kind of uninteresting subject (like other people’s holiday photos – you look, and go “ooh”, out of politeness, but you kind of hope the conversation will move on). Confronted with the dread question “Would you like to hold him?” I was always paralysed and unable to answer. What could I say? “No, not really, I don’t really know how and I’m terrified I’ll drop him, and on the off chance that I do manage to hold him the right way isn’t he liable to vomit half digested milk all over me”? I always assumed that this answer, while honest, may be somehow offensive to parents, so I either faked some kind of bizarre elbow injury or attempted to change the subject.

However, I had seen a number of previously quite normal male friends somehow turn oddly baby-obsessed after the birth of their first born, so I guessed there must be more to the experience than suddenly sharing your house with a being that spends its whole existence sleeping, eating, crying, and shitting. And I was right. It’s quite remarkable in fact.

I’m not sure, even now, if the old me would have understood my fascination. How could I explain how incredibly interesting it is to see all of the various facial expressions? To be captivated by a yawn? To think that a long stretching movement is in any way intriguing? I couldn’t possibly explain it to him (the old me).

This, then, is why I’m reluctant to write about Paula on here. Non-parents will read this and …well, let’s face it they won’t even have got this far, they’ll have clicked on some other link already. Parents will learn nothing new from my observations, and will probably find them trite and at best faintly nostalgic. But, then if I don’t write anything about Paula and father-me, then I won’t really write anything (witness weeks of posts about the weather), so screw it, here goes.

Paula, as you may already have got, is great. She’s got some killer moves already, and can and does blow me away with her cuteness. She spends a lot of her time stretching. This, I surmise, is because when she was born she was 55cm long which is actually more than a third of Erika’s height. So it must have been pretty cramped in there and she really needs to spend some time unfurling herself. I like the way she can now spend time awake without crying. The whole sitting in a chair and looking around wide eyed at the world is dead cool. The last couple of days she’s taken to really looking at things – before there was a lot of vague staring into the middle distance, but now some kind of focussing mechanism has kicked in. Yesterday she gave her first faint awake smile.

I could go on and on and on about how she has this little internal diary which has entries like “8pm – Midnight: be grumpy and moan a lot” and “9am – Midday: investigate world around me”. Or about how she makes these little squeaks and quacks. Or about which position she likes to be held in. Or about how she recently discovered by accident that she can put her fingers in her mouth. Or about a million other things, that I suspect are just not that remarkable if you’re not me. And you’re not.

So, enough about her, I can hear you asking, and what about me? How has fatherhood changed me?

Well, I’ll tell you. Just as an example, my tolerance for crying has changed beyond all recognition. While once 5 minutes (max) in the same room (or even next door) to a crying baby sent me almost insane, now crying has taken on a whole new meaning. It’s no longer something to be escaped, but something to be translated. What exactly is being communicated here? Is this an “I’m hungry” cry, or a “I’m bored and awake and what are you going to do about it, hey?” cry? Recently, she’s even invented a new cry which sounds a bit like a goat. Kind of a mair-hair-hair semi-bleat. It doesn’t seem to mean much beyond, “I’ve just discovered I can make this noise and I’m going to try it out”, but for all I know it could mean “I have come bearing some important information from beyond the womb, and I really need you to understand it before I forget it in a couple more weeks.”

Things I do much more than I used to:

Sing. Quite often singing is an effective way of calming a baby (I have learned), and so I have done more singing in the last few weeks than in the last couple of years combined. However, there is a slight problem, which is that I don’t really know any songs. The only song that I know all the way through is Billy Bragg’s “New England”, which while it does contain the classic couple of couplets "I saw two shooting stars last night / I wished on them, but they were only satellites / It’s wrong to wish on space hardware / I wish, I wish, I wish you’d care”, is hardly lullaby material. The rest of the time I find myself singing snatches of songs dredged from some far corner of my memory, most of which are even more inappropriate than that one (The other day I started tunelessly intoning “In a river the colour of lead” before mentally going on ahead and realising that this definitely wasn’t to be sung as a baby soothing ditty. For those unfamiliar with fairly obscure early Smiths songs (what do you mean?), the first verse of that song runs: “In a river the colour of lead / Immerse the baby’s head / Wrap her up in the “News of the World” / Dump her on a doorstep, girl”)

Listen to music. And not just the rubbishy cover versions of early 80s indie classics performed by me. For whatever reason we didn’t listen to that much music before she came, but now, with the TV off much more and a desire for soothing tunes to reverberate around the room, the music selection is being delved into much more, which is nice. I have rediscovered a number of old favourites.

Do laundry. It’s bloody neverending.

Spend time on baby-related websites. Looking up every possible condition that she seems to have. Spots on the face? Baby Acne, apparently, or maybe Milia. Either way nothing much to worry about. (Who knew that babies get acne?) Crying at night? Eating enough? All these questions and more can be answered by judicious googling and a bit of patience. What did people do before the Internet? Actually have conversations with people? Weirdos.

Things I do less than I used to:

Watch TV. It’s rubbish for a start, and it’s loud and distracting and keeps her awake. There is one exception to this rule, and that is sport. I can watch it with the sound muted and it’s on late at night which is perfect for those late night rocking sessions when I’m trying to persuade her to crash out. Plenty of football on TV in Romania - and now that the African Cup of Nations has started it’s even more. (Plus if she wakes up in the middle of the night there is the Australian Open tennis to watch if need be.)

Sleep uninterruptedly. Though I still seem to get enough sleep. It’s just done in different sized chunks and involves switching beds occasionally (Bogi also wakes up and demands an adult to go back to sleep with her. She’d rather have Erika, but since Erika’s breasts need to be available to Paula at short notice, she tends to get me as a substitute adult). Having worked with new fathers before, I had wondered whether I was going to end up as sunken eyed and vacant as they often seemed to, but so far so good.

Blog. Frankly, writing about Romanian politics (even in these days of Nastase’s supicious aunt Tamara), the Romanian Hockey League, Hungarian/Romanian intercultural communication, and days out in Harghita county, even if I had any, is much less interesting than sitting and playing with Paula. And if she’s asleep then Bogi wants attention.

Go out. As alluded to above. Though this is mostly because it’s been so bastard cold of late. Paula’s experience of outside is so far limited to a couple of half hour stints on the balcony when the sun’s been on it.

But, anyway, to wrap up this overlong and not especially noteworthy piece, I am dead happy. Life begins at 40, they say (whoever “they” are), but I reckon they were a couple of months off. Plus of course, what preceded Paula was no less life, nor any less worth doing. So, it’s more like Different Life Begins At 39 Years, 9 Months, and 20 Days. Which is really not quite as pithy, though it is more accurate. Umm, yes. So, there you go then. I'll try and hold off from more such rambles until she reaches two months old.

Oh, and one last thing. A couple of days ago, a 7 month old baby (and his mum) came to visit. He looked ridiculously huge and disproportionate. I don't want Paula to be that big. It's all wrong.

Our micro-climate

More evidence that Csikszereda is in its very own micro-climate. A couple of days ago we had a very heavy snowfall (I think most of Romanian just got sustained pissing rain), leaving us a 30 cm addition to the already fairly deep levels around town. Then yesterday it suddenly got warm. When I say warm I mean above zero, but in the grand scheme of things that's warm. Today it was up to 5 degrees (Plus 5), which meant, among other things, that walking around involved a particularly dangeorus game of Romanian Roulette. This is the dangerous activity of walking along the pavement while large wet slabs of snow fall from the rooves of apartment buildings and come crashing down on to the pathologically unlucky.

Then I drove to Udvarhely to pick up the birth certificate and had a very strange experience. About half way - somehere around Vlahiţa - the landscape changes from completely white to completely non-white. Udvarhely had absolutely no snow in it. And it's only 50 kms away from here. It's baffling. Just to rub salt into the wound, on the way back, just as I got to the top of the pass, it started snowing and back here in the depression it was starting to fill up again.

(Vlahiţa, by the way, is an interesting place. Despite, along with most places round here, being more or less entirely Hungarian , it's generally known by it's Romanian name. I'm not sure why, but I think it has something to with the Hungarian name being repressed as being too religious. It's called Szentegyhaza in Magyarul, which means Holy One House, or House of the One Holy One, or something, and may, I strongly suspect, be a direct reference to the Catholic church. No idea why this particular name-repression took root and people stopped bothering with the Hungarian, but I have friends from there and they all call it Vlahiţa. Maybe it's just easier.)

Colic

Colic sounds like an illness. We even use it as if it is "My baby has colic", and so on. But when you start reading about it (because your baby has it), you discover that it is no such thing and it is just a symptom. And then you get lots of half-arsed medical advice to get over it "Try cutting out citrus fruit from the mother's diet", ""wind down before the evening starts, rather than do stimulating things". Because no-one knows what causes it. It's basically a procedure by which your baby becomes nocturnal, and stays up between midnight and 6am crying, and then sleeps happily all day. It's a right bastard of a symptom, and I wish the medical profession would get their act together to solve it because it's driving me insane.

On the plus side, Paula has already learned how to throw all the hand shapes required of a major hip-hop recording artiste - and she's only 2 weeks old. Put together some rhymes and she's away.

Rom-Anglican

More inter-linguistic cross-cultural bureaucratic fun.

On Tuesday I went to Udvarhely to pick Erika and Paula up and bring them home. Before they could be released from the hospital though, I had to complete a bunch of paperwork, and take it to the city hall to get a birth certificate. I was ushered into an office where myself and a nurse proceeded to complete these forms. This was interesting as it was a conversation that happened in my limited Hungarian and her limited English in order to complete a form in Romanian.

Many of the lines were easy to fill in - the names etc were all printed on the wedding certificate and our ID cards. For that it was just a question of her copying stuff down correctly. Others involved a little bit of dialogue - her asking me what Erika's job is and her level of education and so on. This I could cope with though, and was feeling quite chuffed with my comprehension and responses, when suddenly she asked me something about Erika which question I had absolutely no understanding of. She tried repeating it a couple of times but it wasn't helping, so I asked to see the form - often I can understand Romanian better than Hungarian from speaking other latin languages. Aha, it said "Religia". This I could have a stab at and we continued. Then she had to do the same thing for me, and once again we hit the "Religia" question. Rather than go into detail about my own particular brand of agnosticism, I took the lazy way out and went for "Anglican". Fine. She understood what that was...but then, she realised she had no idea how to write Anglican in Romanian. (It's not terribly surprising, while I'm sure she was pretty fluent in the language, it's unlikely that she would ever have had to use the word Anglican in any way ever in her life before that moment). Eventually, she made the guess that I would have, and wrote Anglican as phonetically as possible as if it were said by a Romanian (which may actually be "Anglican")

So, once I got the papers out, I was free to go to the City Hall and get the birth certificate. This proved to be surprisingly easy and there is no funny story to tell about the experience. I have to go back and get it next week though, since they had a bit of a backlog, what with it having been a holiday period and there being a number of births to go into the register.

Eventually though, my girls were free to go, and were released from the delicious cuisine of Udvarhely Hospital. (Most of my trips over involved a shopping list of goods to supplement the culinary offerings). And now they're home safely and our entire existence has been thrown upside down. In a good way though.

Paula's birthday

Thursday December 22nd, 2005. When we woke up Erika was complaining of some small contractions. I say "small" because that's how she described them, but as everyone knows, women basically have no realistic concept of pain.

Man (slightly cuts finger): Arrrgggghhhhh. Expletive deleted. Expletive deleted. <5 minute tirade of swear words>
Woman (partially amputates own arm with a rusty fish slice): Ooooh. That stings a bit.

So, anyway, she's suffering some level of pain that would probably lay low an entire troop of battle hardened Marines, but thinks that "It's nothing". As the morning goes on, I keep solicitously enquiring after these contractions, but they are still regarded as nothing much, and certainly nothing to get worried about or to start driving over the mountain to the hospital for. I, on the other hand, am frantically consulting our dog-eared copy of "What To Expect When You're Expecting" every few minutes to work out if there are any visible signs I will be able to pick up on to offer up as conclusive evidence that this is in fact the onset of labour, and hence get her to the hospital.

We make stuffed cabbage for Christmas dinner. I do the heavy work, such as grinding up the pork (this at least makes me feel that I'm contributing in some small way as this kind of thing is an odd activity for a vegetarian to be indulging in). Erika does the mixing, and subsequently the stuffing. It is thus, then, that at 2pm on the day in question a visitor would have witnessed Erika bent double over the kitchen counter, gritting her teeth against the pain, and rolling pickled cabbage leaves around a kind of pork/rice paste. By now the contractions were coming every five minutes (by a curious coincidence, my enquiries after her well being were coming at similar intervals). Eventually at 3pm she agreed (in an effort to shut me up perhaps) to call someone at the hospital. There was no answer, but it seemed that she felt she had done all she needed to at this point.

Eventually I convinced her that we really should probably go, as from what she told mne about the frequency and length of the contractions it was certain to me that the baby's head was out by now. We called our friend Gyözö, who had offered (nay insisted) that he drive us over to the hospital, and he came over to pick us up (he has winter tyres on his car). We finally left the house at 4pm.

The road over was not too bad, a little slippy in places and with a light dusting of snow, but at least it was daylight and there were no real problems. I was glad that I was not at the wheel, though, as I was knotted up inside with tension and I think my fists were clenched in traditional white knuckle style. By this time, Erika was timing her contractions down to about three minutes apart, and I wondered whether we'd have to pull over and deliver the baby somewhere on the Harghita Mountain.

Finally, at 5pm, we made it into Udvarhely (Odorheiu Secuiesc in Romanian), and drew up at the hospital. We found the midwife on duty and she examined Erika. She came out and said that she'd called the doctor as she thought the baby would be here in ten minutes to one hour. Ten minutes! I was extremely grateful that I hadn't known this ETA while on the road.

An hour later she told us "I think, about an hour". At this point Erika's doctor arrioved and told us, "an hour or two". We went off to buy Erika some slippers (Romanian hospitals don't provide you with any of the stuff, and the ones that Erika had packed, the midwife had looked upon rather disdainfully). By 7pm we (Gyözö and I) were back in the corridor, looking at bits of old sterilisation machines that had been dismantled and left to clutter up the hallways. Time passed. I sat, I wandered aimlessly, I tried to read a book (without success). At about 8.30, at the edge of the two hours that the doctor had suggested as the outer limit of this wait, a nurse came sprinting past us from some other corner of the hospital and into the delivery area. This did nothing for my nerves, since I knew that Erika was the only person in there, and why would a nurse need to be sprinting unless there was something seriously problematic. By now my wandering had turned to pacing and trying to strain my ears to hear anything at all from behing the doors.

But then, 15 minutes later, out walked the same sprinting nurse from earlier carrying in her arms a little bundle of cloth with a baby stuffed in the middle. My baby. Our baby. Who was fine and healthy and perfect. Apparently, behind the doors, everything had gone very smoothly and normally. Paula got taken away to wherever it is that she was taken to, and Erika had to remain in the delivery room for four hours to rest before going up to the ward where she would be reunited with Paula. I started texting people and taking phone calls. So overcome was I that I completely omitted to slip the doctor his envelope when he came out past us and went home. (There is a system of wage supplementation for doctors here, and for delivering a baby the going discrete backhander is 1.5 million Lei. Had the baby had to be delivered by caesarean, it would have been 3million, so I was all ready with various denominations. The midwife gets a mere half million, which seems a bit unfair, but thems the breaks).

Eventually, with no reason to wait around any longer, Gyözö drove me home. Mother and baby are still doing fine and everyobody is happy and healthy. Two pictures below: