Spain Dad, a baby blog

April stood at the corner of the playground and blew bubbles. Alleke stood next to her and watched as one little girl left her shovel in the sand and started swatting at the small, crystal planets hovering in orbit over their heads. Two little boys on the teeter totter noticed next and came running. Before [...]

St Mary’s Church by roytsaplinjr. I spent Saturday afternoon in a tank top weed eating around tombstones in the cemetery where my grandmother is buried. The stones are scattered around a rural church, which sits like a schoolhouse on the corner where two highways cross, giving a handful of folks a reason to pull into [...]

Alleke sat at the end of the bed and held her blankie. She watched as I lowered the curtains, dimmed the light, and kneeled down next to her. “I want to tell you something before you go to sleep tonight,” I said. I ran my fingers through her hair. “Tomorrow dad is going to go [...]

I watched DJ copy his spelling words onto lined paper. s-c-a-r-e-c-r-o-w t-o-o-t-h-p-a-s-t-e a-w-h-i-l-e c-h-e-r-r-y k-a-p-u-t I stared at the last word. “Kaput?” I asked. I looked at my sister who was making rice in the kitchen. “DJ has some Dutch spelling words,” she explained. “You know, the words we still use around here.” I raised [...]

One reason I was looking forward to our trip to the US was because I thought Alleke would improve in her ability to speak English. Being around people who only spoke English, I thought she might begin to differentiate between English and Spanish and see that they were not one language, but two. On Saturday [...]

I collapsed on the couch. I had been unpacking boxes all morning. The stack of cardboard by the front door was my witness, and Alleke, who had stood by my side watching. To her, I was the magician, pulling things from our old house out of a box. From the couch, I could see the [...]

This is the second post in a two-part series about how to make long distance relationships work with your family. Here are a few methods we use to keep in touch with our families from a distance. I’ll try to be as specific as I can in case you would like to try them out [...]

April and I have always said the most difficult part about living abroad is being away from our families. Now that we have Alleke, even more so. It’s not just a matter of April and I maintaining our family relationships, it’s a matter of giving Alleke the opportunity to begin and grow them. Alleke helped [...]

jedi puppy kitchen tricks, originally uploaded by dro!d. Alleke sat quietly in her high chair reading a board book while April and I finished lunch. At one point Alleke put down the book and looked at us, as if she had been reading the daily newspaper and had lowered it to tell us about what [...]

My parents used to go for walks, just the two of them, when the weather was good. My brother and sister and I were never invited to go with them, but they couldn’t stop us from watching them from the tall windows in the living room as they wandered down the gravel road among the [...]