Joshua Zamrycki's Weblog

The light was just right. The composition had taken care of itself. The images were adorable, timeless, and yanked at your heartstrings. Jan and Emily sat next to each other, each being pampered and primped, as they sat in the hair salon together today. Emily had a serious look of concentration on her face from atop her special child seat on the barber chair as she observed the young stylist spritzing, combing, and cutting her orange locks. Jan calmly watched her own progression while proudly sneaking peeks at Emily out of the corner of her eye. I sat between the two girls, grinning enormously, while they both looked miles into the mirrors in front of them. The sun streamed in from the street-side window behind them while quirky Italian lounge jazz filled the old-world hair salon. The moment was absolutely beautiful. And I didn’t have my fucking camera with me!!!

Half a year ago today, our little boy swam into our world. And he’s been nothing but a joy ever since.

Seriously, Sebastian is the most laid back, jovial, low-maintenance kid we could have ever hoped for. I’m not saying that he never gives us any trouble but, if he does, it’s usually due to an easily solvable request and all is soon well once again with the universe. What I am saying is that his current disposition is a welcome complement to Emily’s frenetic lifestyle.

What does Sebastian enjoy doing in his free time these days? Well, he’s all about rolling and smiling at the moment. He can cover a surprising amount of distance utilizing nothing but his barrel rolls. He’s also quite fond of reaching for things and jamming them into his mouth – especially Emily’s works of art. At the same time, he is also completely content just staring at his hands. Or grabbing his feet. It’s all good.

He’s not crawling yet but he’s definitely working his way up to it. He massively enjoys raising himself to upward-facing dog position and rocking his hips from side to side. I give him another month before he’s officially crawling. If he doesn’t start walking first, that is.

Sebastian is starting to develop a fine acoustic appreciation. In addition to his newly acquired ridiculous habit of prolonged full-volume droning whenever he’s tired, Sebastian can often be found scratching various textures around the house to compare the different sounds they make.

And he looks different. Besides the new chiseled pectorals, rugged jaw, and iron brow, we think his hair might be getting a bit lighter. It’s certainly not red but it appears to have gone from a very dark brown to what Jan insists as blondish. I don’t see it. I do, however, see those baby blues slowly settling into brown.

Six months!!

Wednesday morning, at 7am, Jan quietly sneaked into Emily’s bedroom with the secret mission of pilfering her dummy (that’s a pacifier, for all you Americans). Once said dummy was retrieved from said sleeping child, a shiny new scooter was placed in the middle of her room. Unbeknownst to Emily, she had just been visited by the Dummy Fairy.

Emily has always “needed” her dummy to fall asleep at night. And recently, she has began regressing and requesting it during the day whenever she is sad or tired. With only three weeks until our trip to The States, followed immediately by her first day of school, we knew that if something was to be done, it would have to be now.

Desperate for a winning strategy, we scoured the Interwebs for tactics and techniques and “The Dummy Fairy” seemed like the loveliest one. Kind of like The Tooth Fairy. And Emily loves fairies. How could we lose?

“WHERE IS MY DUMMY?!!”
“Emily, dear, the Dummy Fairy came last night and took them.”
“I WANT MY DUMMY!!”
“But Emily, dear, you’re a big girl now.”
“NO, I’M LITTLE!! I’M LITTLE!! I’M LITTLE!! I WANT MY DUMMY!!”
“The Dummy Fairy has them.”
“I DON’T LIKE THE DUMMY FAIRY!!”
“Look. She left you a new scooter!”
“I DON’T LIKE THE SCOOTER!! I DON’T LIKE THE DUMMY FAIRY!! I WANT THE DUMMY FAIRY TO COME BACK AND TAKE THE SCOOTER!! I WANT MY DUMMY!!!!”

The first hour of her new big-girl life went on like this and was filled with streams of tears and blood-curdling shrieks, pleading for mercy or to be put out of her misery. Then she got over it, loved her scooter and rode it all day. That night was six times worse than the morning. As Jan so insightfully put it, it was as if Emily was a heroine addict, forced to go cold turkey and clawing at the walls.

Yes, going to sleep that night wasn’t easy. After hours of failed soothing and encouragement, Emily successfully negotiated her way to the living room couch where she swiftly fell soundly asleep. Without her dummy.

The next day was more or less the same, but only 63% as bad.

On Friday, Emily was able to sleep in her own bed with only minimal dummy requests.

Saturday (Day 4) was the breakthrough. Emily informed us that she would go to bed without her dummy and without crying because she was now a big girl. And she did.

Here are some pictures of our big girl. Only one more month until she turns three!!

The Savvy Traveler

The Connoisseur

Fairy Training

I just found some dusty old video footage (from three months ago) that made me smile. I’d like to post it here for posterity. But before I do, allow me to set the scene.

Jan celebrated her 40th birthday this past April. I wanted to make it special so I invited a few friends. Here’s an excerpt from the super-secret email invitation.

Hello friends,

I’m throwing a little surprise lunch tapas party this coming weekend to celebrate Jan’s 40th birthday and I know she would love to see you there. Yes, a surprise party. So don’t say anything to anyone!

Her actual birthday is this Friday the 17th. I am planning to take her out to dinner to celebrate Friday night so I hope she doesn’t expect anything for the following afternoon. As I said, the surprise party will be a lunchtime tapas event.

The plan is for everyone to arrive at the restaurant at about 13:30-13:45, and then I will arrive with an unsuspecting Jan by 14:00. There will be a lovely and varied tapas and wine menu for all (at 28 euros + IVA per adult head) and we’re even planning on organizing a little table for the kiddies with a child minder so you’ll be free to drink heavily even if you bring a little rug rat. Please try and wear a white shirt/top to the restaurant and I will try to get Jan to wear red or some other color that will really allow her to stand out in the crowd.

Here’s the video. It’s about eight minutes long and rather boring in parts so I wouldn’t be offended if you chose to give it a miss. It just brings back nice memories for me so, dammit, I’m posting it.

Points of interest:

• 0:00 – Jan and I arrive with Ed and Basia (who are in on the surprise). The story was that we were treating them to lunch to pay them back for babysitting for us the night before.
• 0:30 – Jan thinks to herself, “Why the hell do we have to carry these heavy-ass pushchairs up the stairs if the downstairs dining room is empty?”
• 1:50 – Blitzkrieg!
• 2:00 – My hand starts shaking due to the release of all my pent-up adrenaline. The shaking gets steadily worse and continues for three whole minutes.
• 2:08 – It finally hits Jan what has just happened.
• 2:33 – A little kiss tells everyone they can now form an orderly line to wish Jan a happy happy.
• 2:45 – Notice everyone in white. Well, almost everyone.
• 3:53 – I stupidly put my finger over the camera’s stupid microphone which is stupidly located on top of the stupid camera. 40 seconds.
• 4:07 – Jan starts to piece together clues that she had previously missed, like the text message from Val telling me how much a kid’s menu would cost.
• 4:44 – Sophie and I reminisce about how we saw each other just minutes earlier on the way to the restaurant but I cleverly averted Jan’s attention.
• 4:59 – Julian is the first of many to ask where Sebastian is. He was only two months old and many people had not yet met him at this point.
• 6:12 – Anna Spanner tries to avoid the camera and then apologizes for not going out to dinner with us the night before. Another camera duck at 6:52.
• 7:08 – Checking up on the birthday girl.
• 7:30 – Jan starts to tell everyone the story of what was going through her mind as we arrived.
• 7:50 – Happy birthday.

And we actually managed to get a half-decent group photo.

Wanna see the amazing photos I took while we were in England last week?

Don’t worry. I didn’t upload every single picture I took. In fact, I only uploaded about 5%. You see, I took over 900 photos but, as soon as I got home, I dutifully deleted more than half of them. And then I selected only 10% of those 400 survivors that best summarized our week in England. OK, so maybe 90% of those are of my kids, but they’re all different! Don’t you hate it when people upload 12 different versions of the same photo? I hate that!

Feel free to reread my last post to get a better idea of what’s going on in the pictures.

As always, you’ve got two ways to enjoy the photos:
Fancy-shmancy slideshow
Bog-standard Flickr set

Enjoy!