Dec 1
Next week marks six months since S arrived in Manila with the kids. Junebug, whose second birthday we celebrated a couple of weeks early during our last weekend together in DC, is quickly approaching the midway point of her third year. Now that she is speaking up a storm, her personality has truly blossomed. It is a curious age, as she seems caught between holding onto her baby tendencies and striving to catch up to her older brother.
Several weeks after returning from Japan, we are still sorting through our photos and mentally processing the trip. Culturally, Japan is unlike any other country where we have traveled. The half dozen posts we have already devoted to our ten-day visit barely scratch the surface of what we want to share, both in terms of our observations and our favorite images of the striking places we visited. To avoid Japan overkill, however, we’d like to break up our overseas travel tales with a post about our adventures closer to home.
Mar 7
We are not yet at the point of measuring our own elderliness by our kids’ ages, but those days are not far off. Junebug reset the clock for us, so we can still think of ourselves as “young parents” for a few more years by virtue of having young children. Meanwhile Munchkin turned five last month – an age that straddles the little between early childhood and the self-sufficient realm of school-age big kids.
Despite moving to DC in July, we’ve written very little about our time thus far in the nation’s capital. It’s not for lack of things to write about either. On the contrary, we’ve been so busy that sometimes sitting down with a book in the evening feels like a guilty pleasure because of how much there is to research and take care of. From purchasing a car to arranging childcare, finding new doctors, and adjusting our finances, it’s taken a lot of adulting to get us settled in our new home.
The mileposts keep flashing by. Thursday was Munchkin’s last day of school in Rwanda, and yesterday the school held a graduation ceremony, which featured a hilarious, if somewhat bizarre, theatrical production in which the kids wore “bedazzled” underwear and pretended to be aliens.
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.
