Feb 27
The biggest downside to D’s most recent South Africa trip was that he was away for Munchkin’s fourth birthday. D made it back for the party, but could not accompany the little man to school to mark his special day with his classmates. The little man, meanwhile, has quietly grown up quite a bit – especially over the last several months.
Shortly after our surreal parent-teacher conference — while we were making our way around South Africa’s Garden Route — we received an end-of-semester progress report from Munchkin’s school. Unlike the over-the-top adulation in the previous midyear evaluation, this report struck a more balanced approach, praising Munchkin’s kindness, creativity, and academic progress while highlighting a number of behavioral attributes where “strengthening is needed.”
And just like that, 2017 is behind us – and so is the first half-year of Junebug’s life. Six months old and her personality coming into full focus, Junebug is a joyful handful – all smiles unless she isn’t getting what she wants and feels the need to assert herself.
Dec 21
Sitting in tiny tot chairs across a small wooden table from Munchkin’s teachers last week was a surreal experience, and not because of the diminutive furniture.
How and when did he get so big? It’s a question we’ve been asking ourselves with increasing frequency of late, and one we are likely to keep asking for the foreseeable future now that we’ve started.
If at first you don’t succeed, try and try again. And if the source of your failure is your utter inability to sway your three-year-old towards a particular course of action, then best of luck to you; we empathize completely!
With Junebug steadfastly refusing to nap in the evenings and Munchkin continuing his Tasmanian devil act by tearing up the house on a daily basis, we are still very much living day to day.
Towards the end of our Nairobi tour – after hosting our fifteenth group of visitors in just under two years – we joked that at some point in the future we should make concert-style t-shirts featuring our various Foreign Service tours to gift to people who visit us at all of our overseas postings. More than halfway through our third tour, the only person who would currently qualify for such a memento would be S’s mom.
By the time Munchkin was a couple months old, we had already spilled a considerable amount of digital ink chronicling his every squirm, coo, and nascent personality quirk in the pages of this blog. As Junebug’s due date approached, we talked about the need to ensure that she does not get second billing – that we devote at least as much attention to her as to him so that she does not feel like she is growing up in his shadow.
Serving in Kenya, shortly after we got married and before we even thought about having children, we tried to take advantage of every extended holiday weekend to get out of Nairobi and explore the country. We continued to travel a lot after Munchkin was born, using our posting in Moldova as a springboard to explore Eastern and Central Europe, but we also came to appreciate the value of spending long weekends at home to soak in the wonderment of new parenthood.
