Free enterprise & free speech

First, I should say that I'm working on the Congo post. There are thousands of photos to go through, and I'm a bit overwhelmed at how to convey all we saw and learned. But I'm working on it.
In the meantime we continue to acclimate to our new home, and there are moments I don't want to let slip by unrecorded. The school year will start soon, and who knows if there will be any more blogging time.

Edith may also have to slacken up on her new business endeavor once kindergarten begins. It all began yesterday when Tom took the girls to the used-bookstore/cafe/toy-store downtown (yes, a perfect combo), and Edith saw a mother and baby horse pair in the toy store that she wanted to buy. Horses have become her new love this summer. However, Edith had emptied her piggybank just last week of all but eight cents to buy a toy pegasus at the same store. She loves the pegasus (name: Bowling Star of the Winds), but now she wanted to add to the menagerie. Tom told her it would take her half a year of saving--even with her newly increased allowance of $1.25/week--to get the two horses. He then handed the girls off to me for an hour while he went to an informational interview about a possible job, and I found myself with a cross Edith on my hands. After about fifteen minutes of her whining about wanting the horses, I told her that I was worried she was becoming greedy: Given how many animals she has and how frequently she gets new toys, it wasn't okay for her to complain about those she lacked.

My reference to the size of her animal collection apparently made her think, because she was quiet for about ten minutes. Then she announced that she had a plan: She would sell off some of the stuffed animals in her collection that she no longer plays with and use the money to buy the new animals she wanted. I nodded some vague assent, affirming her idea while not believing she would actually make it happen.

An hour later I handed the girls back to Tom for the afternoon and returned to work. When they picked me up at dinnertime, I learned that Edith had spent the whole afternoon outside on our front lawn staffing a table of stuffed animals for sale, all labeled with the prices ranging from $1 to $5. She hadn't had any takers, but the neighbor girls had come over to see what was going on. Indeed, when we returned they came running back over to look at the animals again and to talk to Edith. Their parents had said they couldn't buy any, but could they bring some of their own over to sell at the table, too?

For the next three hours, until dark fell, Edith and the other three girls worked the table together. Tom and I were we were amused when she came in for dinner with four quarters in hand, having sold a stuffed cat to a boy down the street. (At first the girls had shooed boys away--"they're the kind you can tell will bother girls"--but they must have changed their tune when they realized the boys were serious customers).

But as we got Alice ready for bed and the dinner dishes cleaned up, we were astonished as Edith and the other girls kept running into the house with quarters and dollar bills. By bedtime Edith had augmented the eight cents in her piggybank with another $5 in stuffed animal sales, shaving more than a month off her saving time.

More important from our perspective, of course, is that Edith is making friends and finding ready partners in impromptu play. We couldn't have asked better of our new neighborhood.

The only challenge is that Alice wants to be along for all of it. And while the kids are good to her, we can't trust a one year old out on a sidewalk-less street with only K, 1st and 2nd graders to look after her. So we're either lurking in the background keeping an eye on Alice or trying to compel her to do things indoors with us. She so wants to be part of the action. She was the first in the family to learn all the neighborhood kids' names, and whenever we mention anything about kindergarten, she pipes up, "Alice go school!" or "Alice have class!" or "I comin' da school bus!" The morning that Edith climbs on that big yellow bus for the first time and leaves her little sister behind is going to be a hard one indeed.

But school is around the corner whether Alice likes it or not. Yesterday we went to see the class lists, posted at the school office, to find out who Edith's teacher would be. We discovered it was the one we had met on our tour of the school and found nice (even if Tom and I couldn't quite get over the fact that she looks about 25). And we figured out that of the eight kindergartners on our block, Edith is in the same class as the girl directly across the street and the boy on the corner. Prospects are good. Today Edith received a postcard from her teacher and we all got a letter, welcoming us to the school and inviting us to various orientation activities. Much to my surprise, all of this preparation gets me choked up. It's not about parting from my child during the daytime hours, of course, or about seeing her off to a classroom for the first time. But something about its being a big school with multiple classes and lots of kids and its being my little girl who has left behind everyone she knows on the other side of the continent...well, I get a little tremulous.

For her part Alice will be learning and growing whether she's at school or not. She is a non-stop talking machine these days, beginning every morning with "Mommy, comin' da waffle!" or "Daddy, comin' da waffle!" inviting us to get out of bed and make her breakfast. She apes everything Edith says but also understands more than we always give her credit for. The other night, for example, Edith started moaning, "I don't feel good!" and Alice came over to me and said, "Mommy, Edith hurt tummy." The rephrasing suggested to me that she understood exactly what not feeling good meant. She is good at reading others' emotional clues and will often ask "What?" when she hears one of us sigh or laugh. She wants to be in on everything and loves recounting what has happened, whether it's telling Daddy that she fell off a chair while eating waffles or me that Daddy wouldn't let her fill up her mouth with too much cheese or both of us that she knocked over Edith's sand castles at the beach when she was there with Mor-mor, Grandpa, and Peter last month. She usually can get her point across. Most of her pronunciation is pretty clear now, though we still love the babyisms, such as "O cookie!" for "Oky-doky!"

Two nights ago Alice had an uncharacteristic bout of wee-hour wakefulness, to our chagrin, and kept up a steady stream of chatter on her every passing thought, there between me and Tom in the bed. "Grover funny! Daddy, Grover funny. Ali watch Sesame Steet? [No, Alice, it's the middle of the night.] I go potty. Off diaper. Poop in potty. I go potty? [Yes, you pooped in the potty this week for the first time, but not now--it's the middle of the night.] Holly f[r]iend. Holly come in da mountains? Holly come in da mountains! [You remember your friends from daycare? You want Holly to come visit us from Princeton?] Yeah! Holly come in da mountains! Ali and E-Tre hold hands. Betsy! Violet!"

And so on.

The other morning when she was up at 6 and I felt reasonably rested, she and I headed out for a morning walk to add more of the neighborhood to our mental maps. (And she has one of those, too: She knows exactly when we're turning onto the streets in town with the good playgrounds, even if the playgrounds aren't in sight, and she asks to press the garage door opener starting about a quarter mile from our house.)

Here are some pictures from our morning outing.

The view out our front window, facing east, at dawn

The view out the back window as the sun crept over the top of the house. You can't tell, but that's Pike's Peak behind the neighbor's house.

A view down toward Garden of the Gods from the top of the street

The deer roam everywhere--and they aren't timid like Eastern deer. I stamped my feet forcefully as Alice and I walked through a cluster of seven of them at an intersection where we had to cross.

That's the view of Pike's Peak (center) from the end of our block

Lessons in Colorado living-1

There's a reason people wait until morning to put their trash out.

In our Princeton neighborhood you were a slacker if you didn't have your garbage cans at the curb by dinnertime the night before pickup. Indeed, if you didn't get them out the night before you were likely to miss the truck, which could come as early as 5:30am. So having learned over the last two years to be good citizens who don't disturb the neighbors by rolling cans to the street at either midnight or 5am, here in our new Colorado neighborhood we dutifully took our trash to the curb at twilight the night before pickup. We noticed no one else had theirs out yet but imagined they would be putting it out soon.

At midnight I was headed to bed and glanced out the front window to see that our garbage can was lying open in the street, the contents seemingly spilled about. My first thought was that it was an obnoxious teen prank. Then Tom and I went out to pick up the mess and determined that the bags had been shredded and the contents mauled. On talking to the neighbors the next morning we confirmed that we'd almost surely had a run-in with a black bear.

Lesson learned: In Princeton a good citizen puts out the trash the night before pickup, so as not to offend the neighbors' ears by dragging it down the driveway at the crack of dawn. In Colorado a good citizen puts out the trash at the crack of dawn, so as not to offend the neighbors' eyes and noses with a display of dirty diapers strewn across the lawn.

Never mind how they might feel if they ran into the bear you were treating to a midnight snack.

Backtracking, I: Wedding

In July Edith was a flower girl and Tom was presiding minister at his cousin Keri's wedding. It was blazing hot, but you'd never know it from looking at the wedding party--nor at the fresh-cut hydrangeas, gathered from everyone in the county who had some to give and resulting in a stunning range of colors.


Keri was a gorgeous bride, and there are marvelous pictures of the whole affair floating around Facebook and other parts of the ether. As this is Edith and Alice's blog, however, "Between the Dark and the Daylight" features the wedding from the flower girls' perspective.

At the beauty parlor

Skeptical at first....

Evaluating...

Pleased as punch!

One of the best parts of serving as a flower girl was serving as one of two flower girls. Edith and Jenna, the daughter of the groom, got along with each other from the get-go and had that much more fun participating together. Their quick friendship made me hopeful that E. would make friends just as easily when moving to Colorado and starting kindergarten.

The "limo bus" was another big highlight of the day for Edith, seen here with Jenna and the ubiquitous Aunt Sharon. That's right: Between packing our moving pods in New Jersey in June and driving our car cross-country and unloading our moving pods in Colorado in August, Aunt Sharon had the small matter of coordinating and hosting her daughter's wedding.

The girls knew they were supposed to walk in sync, but each was waiting for the other to start. Eventually they got going, and because it was an outdoor affair, they actually got to toss rose petals along the aisle.

Alice boogied down, oblivious to the fact that her parents would abandon her in less than 24 hours

Next post, Congo.

Back in the land of the living

...if that's what cyberspace is. I'm not so sure. We've enjoyed an invigorating stream of novel experiences in the month we've been offline, and I can't help but think that that's partly due to being unwired and actually focusing on the here and now, where we are, at the moment we're there.

Still, since most of you are not here but far away, and since you are dear to us, we are glad to return to cyber-communication to be in touch with you. I've enjoyed catching up on some of your blogs and emails today, seeing what everyone has been up to over the summer, and look forward to more.

For our part, there's plenty to report. We are all reunited after a summer of wandering and are now checking in from the Rocky Mountains. I'm staring out my new office window at Pike's Peak as I type; the girls and Tom are off checking out Cave of the Winds, one of many natural attractions on our "BORD OF FUN," a list of things to do in the area as compiled by Edith. We're enjoying playing tourists in our new locale in the weeks before school begins and before we develop obligations and attachments.

I intend to post pictures and updates on all our summer adventures, but I feel a bit overwhelmed by where to begin. So for now, just a few teasers.

First, some mythbusting--a.k.a. new wisdom we've acquired.

Myth #1: Congo is a dangerous place riddled with disease, crime, and warfare, and you shouldn't go there.

More on this later. But we came home healthy, safe, and rich in new Congolese friends, who are industrious, warm, funny, determined people working hard to make a go of life even where the odds look staggering to an American.

Myth #2: The surefire way to wean a toddler is to go away for a week or more; she'll have forgotten about nursing by the time you return.

I reunited with the girls in North Carolina after 2.5 weeks away. Alice reportedly had a wonderful time with her uncle and grandparents after the first rocky 24 hours or so. Indeed, my mom put us to shame by getting Alice on a clockwork 11:30-2:30 nap and 7:30-7:30 night sleep schedule. Nevertheless, during the car ride from the Raleigh-Durham airport to my parents' house, Alice kept announcing, "Mommy go sit bed," and when we got to the house, she promptly led me to my bed, told me to sit, and announced, "Mommy milk!" before clambering into my lap. She picked right up where she left off. Tom's comment: "I think you must lactate cocaine."

Myth #3: We can't ever be completely sure of the divine will or purpose but must live humbly, striving to do as we believe is right, knowing that the mysteries of the universe are greater than its certainties.

In fact, we've been learning a good deal from Colorado bumper stickers and billboards. Did you know, for example, that Our Iraq War is God's Will? And has the news made it to your town yet that Christ is returning on May 21, 2011? His advance men have funds to advertise all over Colorado Springs. Save the date.

It's going to take some adjusting, living among people so certain of the specifics. We're a little behind.

Meanwhile, just a few pictures.

A flower girl and presiding clergy, Delaware


Distributing Mectizan in Katanga Province, Democratic Republic of Congo


Congolese children (and our American friend, Michelle)

Exploring Colorado Springs

At the Cheyenne Mountain Zoo

Headed up Pike's Peak on the cog railway with Aunt Sharon (of Two Aunts Moving Company, a top-of-the-line, door-to-door operation)