A big help in keeping that commitment has been the museums commitment to having free days and kids activities.  Most of the museums have at least one free day a month.  The Museum of Science and Industry was free the whole month of January and the Art Institute was free in February.  Michael had been learning about Claude Monet in Kindergarten so he and I took the train downtown to see the Impressionist collection and see the real Monets.  What a treat for him to get to stand so close to the Monets that he could see the texture of the paint.  We did a kids’ tour and did a children themed program where you get to draw some of the sculptures.  All free.

Surprisingly though, by far the biggest hit has been the Museum of Contemporary Art.  I don’t generally think kid-friendly when I think of modern art, but the MCA puts on such a great program.  One Saturday a month Target sponsors a family day.  Admission is free for families and they set up themed activity stations.  The February day was on Valentine’s Day so there were Valentine’s themed activities.  Yesterday’s activities were based on the artist/futurist Buckminster Fuller so the activities were geometric themed.  And the activities aren’t your typcial color and paint, but are high concept projects like building a geodesic dome, making a map or your heart, or a movement activity that creates dance from shapes and colors.  Every month there’s an art scavenger hunt so the kids get to know the art in the museum.   

It’s so wonderful to visit a museum with hundreds of kids actively engaged, doing art scavenger hunts and loving every minute of it.  They even have a room with snacks (juice boxes and gold fish) for a break.  As we walked out of the MCA yesterday with the portfolios they had made to hold their art, Michael and Jacob wanted to know when the April family day was and wanted to make sure we could go back.  It’s amazing to me that the Museum of Contemporary art has rapidly become one of the favorite places for a 3-year old and a 6-year old.  I’m glad they love it and I have a few more tricks up my sleeve.  Summer is near with weekends filled with the Jazz Fest, Blues Fest and Gospel Music Festival.  All free and a wonderland for children who love music. 

The photos in this post are from last month’s Valentine’s Day trip to the MCA.  Click here for a few more museum themed photos.     

As a parent I’m often struck by how often I need my children to help show me how to be a good parent and how grateful I am when it works.  With those few words Jacob was able to help me shift my focus from being upset with him to trying to figure out how to help him.  It was also an admission on his part that he needed the help and was willing and ready to accept it.  We shifted from adversaries to partners and from that point on we were able to figure out a way to make it through mass together.  

We’ve worked really hard to help the kids understand what is going on in their brains and bodies and to tell us so that we can figure out how best to help them and so that eventually they can figure out strategies to work through it themselves.  ”I’m having a hard time,” “I’m tired,” “I’m hungry,” “I was really angry,” and “I just couldn’t control my brain” are a few of the things I’ve heard from the kids lately.  

It’s not rocket science of course and seems obvious that to help kids (or adults for that matter) deal with their emotions the first step is recognizing and verbalizing that.  But when it happens, like it did yesterday, it feels so good.  It helps me be a better parent and for that I am grateful.  I’m hoping that this trend will continue, but I know that the coming years (particularly those that end “een”) will present some serious challenges to the kids being able to recognize and share what’s going on inside of them.  But for now, I’ll take comfort in the small success of yesterday and hope that because he was able to verbalize how he was feeling and we worked through it together it made Jacob’s “hard time” a little easier for him to bear.

And below are some video previews.

When we learned that we were pregnant we had just about decided that we were done having children.  We had three beautiful children, we were happy, we were good with three.  The amazing gift of our fourth child is that he or she opened up space in my heart that I didn’t know existed.  The striking thing about a miscarriage is that it so often happens just as you were getting used to the idea of being pregnant, of being a parent.  We had started to think of ourselves as a family of 6, making plans for our four children.  In the two weeks we were pregnant suddenly there was this space for this child whom I loved, whose father I was and who I wanted so very much to meet.      

And now there is an emptiness, a sadness that is there because I will never have that chance.  Every time I think about it I think of this quote I misremembered from a class Erika and I took in college.  All I can think of is that the empty space is somewhere new and exciting in my heart that in time will be filled with joy.  I don’t know how that space will be filled but I do know that it is a gift from a child who I will never know but love so very much.  

Note:  The quote at the beginning of the post is from Leon Bloy.  As I said, I misrembered the quote substituting sadness where Bloy writes suffering which more accurately described how I felt.  The actual quote reads “There are places in the heart that do not yet exist, and it is into these that suffering enters, that they may have existence.”

The newest tweak to Myette.org is on our photo album page that is hosted by Picasa (Google’s photo sharing software and website).  Amidst the hype of Chrome, Google’s new web browser released on Tuesday, was the much less hyped release of a new version of Picasa and Picasa Web Albums.  Picasa can now recongize faces and with a fair amount of accuracy identify who they are with a little help from the user.  I spent about an hour identifying about 2000 faces that Google recognized in our albums.  The result is that now you can sort throug our photos based on who is in them, make a slide show of just them, or find a photo quickly. 

Note:  I only made public the tagged photos of our immediate family.  If you want to see all the photos I tagged of you drop me an e-mail and I will send you the link. 

Michael has been riding the bus to and from school.  Worry not, we’re not sending Michael out to the boulevard with a couple of Lempiras (the Honduran currency) and telling him to hop on the public bus.  The bus is a 15 passenger van with a driver and a bus monitor that picks Michael up and drops him off at our front door.  His initial excitement at being a big kid and riding the bus gave way to trepidation as the first day of school came around.  With a little encouragement and some creative thought he made it through his first bus ride (”Mama, I’m going to take this book and ask the bus muchacha if I can read it on the bus.”) 

Thus trepidation in turn gave way to comfort and sure enough within the first week Michael was talking about his bus friend Luke.  It quickly became apparent that we needed to send an additional snack for Michael to share on the bus ride home and over Michael’s shared goldfish our two pint sized commuters decided that they wanted to set up a play date.  But how to arrange it?  A plan was hatched and Luke and Michael decided that the obvious solution was to exchange maps.  After all, the bus ride allowed them to see where each other lived and surely they would be able to guide their respective parents to the aforementioned playdate. 

When told of the plan, Erika responded as any good mother with a plan of her own.  The next day, along with Michael’s sharing goldfish, Erika tucked a note.  “Dear Luke’s mom…”  A phone call later that evening revealed that Luke’s mom was Elizabeth, mother of three kids just a year or two older than each of ours.  Luke’s dad works for the U.S. Embassy and like us they are newly arrived in Teguz. 

So this Friday, Michael and Lukes plan to exchange maps will come to fruition with a playdate at Luke’s house.  While this is a story about sophisticated five year olds it is also a story about the ease with which Erika has found connections here in Teguz.  Within the first week Erika has connected with a bunch of other spouses of people working at the embassy or for other internaitonal organizaitons.  The kids have been a good contact point and mostly we’ve met other parents from school.  It’s amazing how simply being an American in a foreign capital provides an instant connection that is sometimes hard to come by in normal social situations.  Moving overseas disrupts your normal social circles but it also provides opportunities for new ones to form.  All it takes is for your five year old to swap maps with his bus friend.   

After my last post about resorting to Burger King for my children’s amusement I thought I would just post an update that we found something much better than a BK playland.  It turns out that Tegucigalpa has a world class children’s museum.  We’re talking 4 floors of pure educational fun.  Costumes, kid sized construction vehicles, a giant nose that sneezes on you and a life sized game of Operation to name just a few. 

We spent the day there this afternoon and had a great time.  Really an awesome surprise and someplace we’ll be going back to many times I’m sure. 

Normally I would think about this in terms of globalization, American cultural hegemony or other vaguely academic terms.  But on Wednesday night I could only think about it in one way:  The Burger King has a playland.  The boys have been troopers through this move and while it has been relatively smooth the biggest impact on them has been that they have been cooped up in a hotel room with TV as their only friend for 5 days now.  They have been hopping in and out of cars, offices and apartments as we looked at 15 houses in our househunting search.  They’ve been shushed in the hotel lobby and have had to eat three meals a day in a restaurant. 

There aren’t really parks around Tegucigalpa or at least we haven’t found them yet and we’ve had to put so much energy into finding a house and a school for Michael that we haven’t been really able to focus on finding stuff for them to do.  As Jacob says, “We boys.  We need to run.”  So Wednesday night we bit the bullet and headed to Burger King for dinner. 

Strangely enough I don’t regret it a bit.  It’s a touchstone for me about how there are tradeoffs involved in living overseas and I think it’s only right that we make those calculations both for our children and for ourselves.  Just because I would never go to BK if it were just me traveling doesn’t mean I shouldn’t do it for the boys to make their transition succesful. 

And then there was Thursday night when Michael asked the inevitable.  “Can we go to Burger King for dinner?”