Alex's News

So today I started that fine family tradition of cutting white bread slices into tiny cubes made a week in advance of the Thanksgiving: eight to ten cups of potential turkey stuffing.

I feel like I've done pretty well so far this year, making do with the food that's available in Switzerland, but Thanksgiving is a problem.  It turns out that it's not easy to cook America's feast in Europe. For one thing, I don't think Europeans ever roast any beast as large as a turkey. Those aluminum roasting trays that are ubiquitous in grocery stores only come in small and smaller sizes here.  I'd be willing to pay a bit for a true roasting pan, but so far I haven't found one of those, either.  I guess we'll see what can be done with a tray and some tented foil.

Redundant?

And as for the stuffing, I've always made my mother's divine stuffing recipe as she does, with sliced, white sandwich bread.  So far this year, we haven't bought any sliced bread: there are all of two different brands available at the grocery store.  But I worry about using bakery bread for stuffing, since it's so crusty, and cutting the crusts of Butterzopf, the Swiss braided bread that we usually buy, sounds a little too fiddly.  So, in keeping with tradition, I finally went and bought a few packages of the last-greatest thing.

I had to do my slicing quickly: Joey really wasn't interested in giving my any time at all to myself today.  But Alex, my back-up, came home at noon and gave me a little respite, although I soon got drawn into a game with the boys, just because it looked so fun.

They were playing hide-and-seek, you see.  Alex has always excelled at this game, even when he was two or three years old.  He can hide in the most improbable places, and he has always been ninja-silent.   At one point today, when I was seeking for him, I opened the door to my wardrobe and then walked away before doubling back, realizing that those were Alex's legs I'd been staring at in amongst my dresses. He's so still.

Joey, we discovered, has the advantage of being very bendy and tiny.  I helped him hide, and put him in the recycling bin, the cupboard of pots and pans, the laundry basket. I even hid him inside a pillow case.  But he's not exactly quiet.  Sometimes when Alex would enter the room, he'd just, quite plainly, yell out, "I'm over here!" Sometimes, though, he'd really try to hide, but he'd always give himself away with a giggle or a rustle or a peek through a door.  Whenever Alex caught Joey's signs, he'd grin at me and then make a big, dramatic show of looking around the room:  "Is Joey in the shoes? No! Is he under the bed? No! Is he...in the toilet?"  This, of course, would inevitably get a huge laugh, and end the game, once and for all.  Tuck that away, just in case you ever play hide-and-seek with Joey.  Potty jokes are key.

When he wasn't amusing his brother, Alex spent some time catching up on his correspondence, and wrote a little thank-you note to his friend Sonja, whose family sent the kids so many lovely books recently.






It's quite true, what he says about his  tooth: it's extremely loose, so much so that you can see the new tooth coming in behind it.

And it's definitely on his mind, mostly because Alex has a lot of trepidation about his first visit from the tooth fairy.  He's asked me many times if I could possibly read him extra stories on the night his tooth falls out, to help him sleep.  He's afraid he won't be able to sleep from the excitement, you see, but he really, really doesn't want to be awake when Miss Fairy shows up "because it's against the rules."

At one point today he suggested just skipping the whole thing, and sending the tooth fairy a letter saying that Alex's teeth were not for sale.  But then he hit upon the best plan of all.  The night of his first lost tooth, Alex has negotiated rights to falling asleep in our bed, to be moved to his own only after reaching unconsciousness.  Foolproof.

Alex also got to announce his wiggly tooth to Grandma and Grandpa Geels, whom we video chatted with tonight.  When Grandma was talking to him about his old preschool, Alex slipped and talked about "Frau Pam," instead of "Teacher Pam."  I've noticed that here are a couple of words that he often says in German, mostly classroom words such as Ordner (binder) or Schule (school) or Schuhe (shoes). And he often says unfamiliar words, things that he's learning or trying out for the first time, with a German accent.  It'll be so interesting to see how many of his habits he tries to carry over into his American Kindergarten.