Where, Oh Where, has January Gone?

Time flies when you have a little one (well, on a large scale it does, though day to day, not necessarily). It seems that January is almost over and we haven't posted anything since Christmas. It has been a busy month for Amelia. We went out for dinner on New Year's eve and brought in the New Year in the center of Aveiro with big crowds, champagne popping, a big fireworks show, and Amelia awake and wide-eyed taking it all in. A few days later she rolled herself over for the first time, with a mixture of delight and surprise, and now she pretty much flips over onto her tummy every time I set her down on her back. She has gone the other way a few times, but doesn't quite have the mechanics of it down yet. She has also really discovered her hands and will grab anything and everything within reach. This is usually a fistful of my hair with each hand, though it has also included her various toys, cans off the grocery store aisle, pots, pans, and things from the kitchen, dirty diapers as I am trying to remove them, dog ears, cell phones, etc. Hmmm...just wait until she is mobile and can do this! Now her daddy has gone off and left us again for a week, but Grandma Karen is here for an extended visit. Amelia is so excited about the latter that she can hardly sleep (literally), but we are hoping she will get used to the new faces soon. She is a very social girl and doesn't want to miss any of the action.

Click here for some recent pictures of her.

Merry Christmas to All!

We have safely returned from our holiday visit to France, no problems at the borders either way, and it was a great visit with family there. We had a marvelous Christmas Eve feast of oysters, smoked salmon, foie gras, escargots, a Christmas goose, chestnuts, and a vegetable that looked like celery but tasted like artichokes (endemic to Lyon). Dinner lasted from 9:30 until after midnight, followed by presents and a parade of truffles and other sweets, before concluding the party at 4am. Amelia was having so much fun visiting with everyone, including her cousins and her 91 year old great-grandfather, that we couldn't get her to sleep until 2am.

Part of the joy of this trip was seeing Amelia and Michel (her great-grandfather) get to know one another. There's a large age-gap, but they seemed to get along perfectly. Papy loved to smile at her and she would always smile back. It was sad to see them have to say good-bye, but we hope to reunite them in Spain next summer. And the way Papy is still cruising along, we don't expect anything but more of the same fun and smiles.The rest of the trip was full of great food and good company, and Amelia braved the plane rides like a champ. A bit of fussing on the first flight, but completely passed out the whole ride home. Probably due to the fact that with all of the new and exciting things going on she couldn't manage to close her eyes. Of course she took a 4 hour nap when we got home yesterday afternoon, and then slept in until 11am this morning (waking up to eat of course).

For more pictures of our Christmas trip, click here.

Gymboree!

One of the biggest thing I hear expats complain about here is the lack of activities designed with our smallest family members in mind. Of course some people in the US tend to go a bit overboard with classes and activities, but in general I think it is great for the babies to enrich their mind and meet other wee ones, and great for us parents (particularly those of us that stay home) to get out and meet other parents. So I was excited when a colleague of Dan's who has a baby 6 weeks younger than Amelia told us that a Gymboree was opening in Aveiro this month. We made it to our first class last Sunday, and we have now signed up to make it a weekly occurance. It is definitely expensive by Portuguese standards, so I wonder how successful they will be, but I hope for our sake they stick around for a while. Here are a couple of photos of Amelia's first class, so far she really seems to like it, lots of colors, music, singing, and other babies and people to look at, what's not to like?

MY KINGDOM FOR A VISA

I learned last week that my visa that allows me to work in Portugal is the wrong visa. Apparently the company applied for the type of visa that allows me to work in Portugal but for an American company, whereas I work for a Portuguese company. What this means, in short, is that I’m here illegally at the moment (shhhh).

Our HR department has apparently known this since June and was kind enough to tell me about it in December. They’ve applied for the correct visa, but the Portuguese authorities don’t move that quickly. The locals say that if the government employees work too fast then it will be obvious that half of them aren’t needed.

The lawyers, as you might expect, chose the cautious (and law-abiding) route and told me, first, to not leave the country and, second, to go back to the US until this is resolved. The problem with the first is we have plans to go to France for X-mas, and the problems with the second are too numerous to count.

Then, by a miraculous stroke of luck, my French citizenship was granted the other day. Since my dad was born in France he recently regained his French citizenship and, as his son, I’m eligible for the same. It took many months of paperwork but I now have a French birth certificate which I took to the French consulate in Porto to apply for a passport. I can then apply for a work permit in Portugal as an EU citizen which should make all the difference.

In the short term, this means that we will get to go to France for Christmas and introduce 3-month old Amelia to her 91-year old great-grandfather. In the medium term, it means we should be able to continue living and working in Portugal for a while. And in the long term, we will now have the opportunity to live and work in any EU country without having to worry about visas (thanks, Dad!).

November Recap

As usual, November has been a pretty quiet month. Although the weather this year, like last year, was gorgeous until late in the month. Now it’s cold and rainy again, which is our winter norm. We had three activities in the month we wanted to share with you.

First my mom came over for a visit and to meet Amelia. That was wonderful to have some family here again, and to see Amelia spending time with her grandma (aka gemma). They had some good times together and we (especially Katrin) got a little bit of a breather. We even went out on our first date since early September when Mom was nice enough to take the baby for an evening. We enjoyed some sushi in town which, while it didn’t compare to the sushi we’ve had in some far-flung parts of the world, made for a very relaxing evening.

Second we hosted some friends for an Amelia play date. This was a chance to introduce her to some of our friends who hadn’t met her yet, and for others to come over and play with her. She was on her best behavior all night and did some smiling and even laughing when Fernando was making faces at her. Our friends brought her some sweet gifts too…she’s well taken care of over here.

And third we celebrated Thanksgiving. We did it on Saturday since I naturally have to work on Thursday and the following Friday, and it worked well this way. It was a chilly rainy day, i.e. perfect to stay in and cook and eat. Katrin found a turkey this year that was small enough to fit into our European oven. We were happy to celebrate the holiday despite the fact that it makes no sense been here. Perhaps next year we’ll try to organize something and introduce our friends to it. As we've been told, it is the perfect Portuguese holiday…all about family and food.

Finally, as we are posting this on December 7, Amelia turns 3 months old today. She is alreadly looking like there are all sorts of things that she would like to do but she can't quite manage them on her own yet. She has been pulling herself from her back to her side, but can't quite get up enough umph to get all the way over to her tummy yet. She loves to have us help her sit-up and stand, and of course her all time favorite so far is nonstop kicking and babbling while on the changing table. Click here for a few more photos of Amelia from month three.

WEEKEND GETAWAY

For my birthday this year Katrin took me on a weekend excursion to visit a new part of Portugal. This was our first overnight stay with Amelia, which added to the adventure. We decided to visit some historic towns about 1.5 hours to the south. Fatima is the site of an annual pilgrimage that receives hundreds of thousands of Catholics every May 13, most of them making the journey on foot from around the country, with the last few hundred yards travelled on their knees. It was on May 13, 1917, that three young children apparently saw an apparition of the Virgin Mary in this town and since then the Church has built an enormous square (twice the size of that at Saint Peter’s) to hold the visitors.

Juxtaposed with this bastion of Catholic faith, a mere 10 kilometers south, is a valley where those of the Darwinian faith can contemplate the 100s of dinosaur tracks that have been found preserved in the stone. There is a path surrounding the area, and you can even get down and walk among some of the very large footprints. Needless to say in this country of 98 percent Catholic there were hundreds of visitors lighting candles and worshipping in Fatima, but I believe we only saw 2 other couples tracing the steps of the dinosaurs with us.

The town we visited on Sunday was Tomar, a town with an enormous monastery built in a variety of architectural styles that used to serve as the headquarters of the Knights Templar many centuries ago. It was quite a place to explore, and very easy to get lost in once we were inside. The town of Tomar itself was very pretty and quaint, right on a river with a lovely park and had some pedestrian only cobbled streets filled with shops and restaurants.

But the real story of this trip was the ease of traveling with Amelia. She’s a good car sleeper and as long as we kept her rested and fed, she seemed to take everything else in stride. We had concerns about eating meals in restaurants with her, but the Portuguese are extremely amenable to having small children in restaurants…not only the employees, but the patrons too. At lunch the first day nearly every table had a stroller alongside, and dinner had several small diners as well. We never felt even remotely uncomfortable if she started to whine, as Portuguese restaurants are usually loud and boisterous, and no one notices or cares about the added noise. However, we’ve quickly learned that new parents can’t try to stick to a schedule. Dinner will not necessarily happen at 8:00, but rather when the baby decides it’s a good time to take her out into public.

We stayed in a cute B&B on the edge of a river in the very tiny village of Dornes. It would be a great place to return to in the summer with the dogs (which they allow, one of the few places we have seen in Portugal that do). The trip was enjoyable not only because it was the first time we’ve done a trip like this in several months, but because now we get to bring our daughter along. We’re talking about doing a similar trip in a few weeks when I have a 3-day weekend. After all, we need to practice for our Christmas visit to France, which will be a longer trip and will involve plane travel.

For more pictures of our weekend and Amelia's second month of life, click here.

What Bad Americans We Are

Halloween is synonymous with Trick or Treating, or at least in the US it is. Here Dan had colleagues ask if children really go from door to door and people hand out candy to them. Neither Dan nor I remember anyone coming to our door last year, though we both vaguely recall me buying candy, just in case. This year I had an almost 8 week old baby, and I had my first winter cold since last December this week, so Halloween was not on the top of my head. So I was mortified when at 7pm on Friday night the doorbell rang and 4 costumed children were at my gate with outstretched bags! I had two things going in my favor at that point, 1) I had just made some cookies earlier in the week, and 2) the Portuguese don't seem to have the paranoia that people in the US do about their children accepting homemade goods for Halloween. So I bagged them up while Tazzy kept our young visitors entertained. We had a total of 14 trick-or-treaters this year, so we learned our lesson, and if anyone is brave enough to come back next year I will be more prepared! Chalk it up to yet another American export catching on in the rest of the world.