OK, you’ve seen the video of Emily counting for the very first time. Well, the following video was taken just three days later:

And that was about a week ago! We’re not sure if it’s sheep or not, but we listened to Emily via the baby monitor the other night and she stayed up counting in bed for about a half an hour. I still think it’s best if I wait at least another week before I try to introduce the number six.

EDIT: Just 24 hours after writing this post, I was following Emily down the stairs. She counted each step as she descended and, without prompting, proceeded past five to count 6, 7, 8! I was dumbstruck. I rushed into the living room to tell everyone and Emily calmly followed me and, I shit you not, declared to the room, “9, 10, 11”. Hurray for Sesame Street!

Most people in Spain take a four-week vacation sometime during the summer. We’re planning on doing the same, just not all at once.

June 26-30: stay with David and Emma in Jersey
July 24-30: stay with Jan’s parents in Outwell (near Upwell, near Wisbech, near King’s Lynn)
August 11-18: stay with Chris and Fedde in their mountain home in the north of Italy
September ?-?: spend a relaxing week on the sun-swept beaches of Menorca

And then Emily turns two years old and we’re forced to pay full fare for her. That just seems so wrong.

Dear Nana and Aunt Amy,

It was wonderful having you stay with us and we were very sad to see you go. Six days together seemed to fly by so quickly! Getting GG that ticket to Barcelona for her 85th birthday was a great idea and we’re happy we had the time together that we did.

We can’t thank you enough for all you did while you were here. Thank you for waking up with Emily. For bringing us such lovely gifts from The States. For doing the dishes, babysitting, changing diapers, helping us finish that bottle of Kahlua, chasing after Emily in the park and teaching her how to count. Thank you.

And what a stroke of luck to have you visit during Barcelona’s Grec Festival! Watching Eiji Oue conduct Carmina Burana was a trip and Complicite’s A Disappearing Number was an unforgettable experience for me. I’m glad we were able to see them all together.

The current plan is to try to get to your neck of the woods sometime in early December but we’ve got a lot on our plate between now and then. We’ll let you know as soon as we’ve finalized our travel plans.

Again, thank you for making the long trip to come out here and see us. With Emily growing up so quickly, it’s nice to have family around to see (and inspire) some of these epic milestones. Speaking of which, here is a video of that night Amy taught Emily how to count. I couldn’t believe what I was hearing when I walked through the door!

We had a great time with the “Brighton Crew” in Jersey as this past week’s entires may have conveyed. I thank you for sitting through the endless videos of our little fireball – I had fun making them. The time has come, though, to speak of other things. So I leave you with a slideshow of the photos I took on our little holiday. Click here to enjoy.

I can’t believed I actually managed to blog every day this week (Mon-Fri). I can’t remember the last time I did that. This has certainly been an exercise in discipline, stress management, and sleep deprivation. Why do I insist on writing at 2am?

OK, where was I…? Ah yes. Flying home from Jersey.

Summary of lessons learned: never again book connecting flights that a) require me to pick up my bags after the first leg and check them in again at the interim airport before continuing on to my destination, and b) always make sure to leave at least 1.5 hours between flights. This is doubly (if not triply) true when traveling with children.

A simple 20 minute delay of the first leg of our trip had us scrambling to fetch our luggage and saw us manically sprinting through London’s Gatwick airport in a feeble attempt to make our connecting flight home to Barcelona. Poor planning on my part made sure that, even if the first flight had not been delayed, we never stood a chance.

There were no more flights to Barcelona for the rest of the day. Shit! A defeated and out of breath march with heads hung low lead us to the airport hotel reservation counter. After spending 15 minutes trying to convince the woman behind the counter that Emily was not four years old (“but she runs and speaks so well!”) and that we would therefore not need a “family-size” room, a night in the nearest Holiday Inn was agreed upon. We booked the next flight to Barcelona (6:55am on SleazyJet) and made our way to our temporary digs.

The positive? The hotel set up a crib for us, free of charge. The Thai vegetable curry from room service was surprisingly scrumptious. Emily went to sleep with minimal coaxing. Jan had a relaxing bath. I didn’t get fooled into using the extortionate Wi-Fi connection. And there probably weren’t any bed bugs in the room even though I had an uncontrollable urge to scratch my arms every time I sat on the couch.

Nobody got as much sleep as they should have before we were out the door by 5:30am. Bus to airport; tram to terminal; plane to Barcelona; taxi to city center. I had to go straight to the recording studio to make an 11am session in which I voiced a corporate video for McDonald’s while Jan was stuck with the luggage and Emily.

As brain-bashingly exhausting as that trip was, I have mostly fond memories of our time spent in Gatwick airport, thanks in no small part to the following two videos:

We weren’t able to attend David and Emma’s wedding a couple of years ago because Emily decided to be born that month (or week, I can’t remember) and the drive to the south of France just didn’t seem like the best idea at the time. So we missed the wedding. And never got David and Emma a wedding present. So just a few hours before we were to leave for the airport and head home, Jan and I went into town to find a thoughtful wedding/house-warming gift.

David and Emma have a lovely yet bare garden beside their new house so we went in search of the most logical of gifts – a comfortable deck chair and an outdoor barometer. After much searching, we ended up settling for an outdoor thermometer instead of a barometer, but we found the most wonderful garden lounge chair. The store didn’t have any in stock so I would have to walk to their warehouse down by the docks to pick one up. I sent Jan back to the house and headed south “past the big yellow building”. Only a 10-15 minute walk, I was told. A-bullsh!t.

After walking for what seemed like 45 minutes, asking anyone I could find along the way for directions (most of whom ended up being friendly port construction workers), under the blazing midday sun, past an endless succession of nameless warehouses, and increasing my stride to a hurried New York pace whenever I thought about our impending flight, I finally reached the southern most tip of the island of Jersey and my destination. “I’m here to pick up the Sun Chair” I said as I handed them my receipt from the store. And off they went to get it for me. And I waited. And waited. God, this is painful just thinking about how to narrate this story…

OK, long story short: there weren’t any left in the warehouse. They sent me back to the store. I double-timed my walk. They apologized. I didn’t accept. I demanded the floor model that had enchanted us just an hour and a half earlier. And a discount. And I got it. I folded the chair over my shoulder and walked back to David and Emma’s house.

The look on Jan’s face when I arrived sweating and exhausted, almost two hours later than the 30 minutes I had promised her, with a Sun Chair flung over my back, was priceless. Thank goodness Jan had the foresight to go ahead and pack without me. I got back with just enough time to have a quick lunch with David and Emma before we had to catch a cab to the airport. And that was just the beginning of the return flight from hell…

Here’s a fun video of Emily doing her thing in the waiting lounge of the Jersey airport:

Our second Jersey group adventure was a Sunday trip to the beach. The beach on the west coast of Jersey is beautiful – one could almost forget you were only 100 miles south of England. No wonder this place was the number one British beach destination before EasyJet made Barcelona as accessible as it is today.

When we arrived, you could fit a football field between the beginning of the sand and where the waves were lapping the shore. A lot of sand. Just a couple of hours later, the tide had risen and waves were crashing against the boardwalk with not so much as a grain of sand to be seen. Very impressive.

Before the tide swallowed the beach, we had a chance to get wet. Ian stayed dry on the rocks with his IPod but Claire and David ventured out into the surf even though they didn’t have any appropriate clothing with them. Emma went whole hog and rented a boogy board from the local surf shop. I was surprised to see how many surfers there were in Jersey! And Jan and I took turns splashing about with Emily.

We had an amazing lunch at a beach-side restaurant before it was time to bid farewell to Ian and Clarie. Real life was waiting for them on the mainland. Jan and I still had another day of holidays to enjoy so we set off down the shore with David and Emma on a leisurely sunset stroll… until we saw our bus approaching in the distance and were forced to make a mad dash to catch our ride back to town.

We all caught a little too much sun.

Our first group adventure in the Channel Islands was a trip to the Jersey Zoo. We made our way to the quiet bus station in the middle of St. Helier and boarded the zoo-bound bus along with 5,000 teenage girls from Holland. Or Sweden. I don’t know.

The island is less than 10 miles wide yet it took a surprisingly long time to get there. We started off with the cheeky meerkats and pristine ring-tailed lemurs, spent a surprisingly long time in the botanical garden, moved on to the larger-than-life Livingstone’s fruit bats, shared some laughs with the Sumatran orangutans, then finished up with the Andean bears accompanied by their comic sidekick of an Oriental short-clawed otter.

Then we had lunch and made sure that the seagulls didn’t steal our food like in the warning photos. And then we lied down on the lush grass and slept in the warm summer sun.

My favorite part was definitely the orangutans. They’re just so fascinating. And wacky! Especially that mischievous one who kept hiding in a burlap sack. And the little babies. And that giant one with the flappy things on his face. So strong. So exact in their movements. So intense in their gaze. So kooky.

After the zoo, we wondered off down the endless hidden country roads along the coast on our way to a little pub in a little village with big glasses of much-needed beverages.

Here’s Emily taunting the snakes in the sugar bowl:

Yes, we’re back from our holiday in Jersey. The island was lovely. Seeing friends was wonderful. The trip home was a nightmare.

I shot some nice videos (of Emily) while there so I’ll be ambitious and plan a short entry for each day this week in which I will recount an anecdote from our trip and leave you with an unrelated yet entertaining video snippet. Sound good? Good.

The reason for our trip was to catch up with some of Jan’s friends whom we had not seen for what seemed like a very long time. David and Emma live in Jersey now that his government job brought him there and their subsequent wedding meant that she pretty much had to follow sooner or later. She now works for the government, too. They should own half the island in another couple of years.

David and Emma put us up in their new house and we convinced Ian and Hastings Claire to fly down from England and join us. These are all really Jan’s friends but they’re such great people that I feel like they’re my friends, too. We lucked out and had wonderful weather almost the whole time we were there. This allowed us to go on island adventures (when we weren’t sitting up late drinking spirits and singing along with Flanders and Swann and The Muppets). I’ll tell you more about some of these adventures tomorrow. In the meantime, here’s Emily and a fountain:

Every once in a while, like yesterday, I get home from a long day’s work and discover that Emily is so much older than the last time I saw her. I really hate when that happens.

On a positive note, today was the first time that I attempted to steal Emily’s nose. It went down great!

On The Run

ps – In case you hadn’t noticed, Emily’s got both feet off the ground in that photo!

pps – After titling this blog entry, I was forced by my feeble nostalgic mind to listen to that song. Damn you Jim Croce for choking me up and playing me like a sap!