Year: 2005

Jumbo

Maxim hasn’t seen much outside of our apartment. He has visited the pediatrician’s office and has been in the park and at Molos promenade. Today we took him to Jumbo hypermarket. Jumbo is the huge shop that sells kids’ products – toys, clothes, furniture, school items, etc.

Maxim slept through most of it though…

Olga and I though saw Jumbo in the new light. Firstly, we noticed how badly the shop is organized. There are rows and rows of products, but there is no signs indicating what is where. There are no resting places, like caffeterias or benchs. This is especially hard for the pregnant women to take. The tired ones are sitting on the floor.

Secondly, I noticed the looks of pregnant parents. I remembered how we were walking around Jumbo, when Olga was pregnant and how we were jelously looking at all young parents. We were checking all the kids, inspecting what they have, what there parenst are buying for them, how they behave, etc. Today we were walking around thinking nothing about anyone else, just choosing things that we need to buy. But all the pregnant parents were staring at us, at Maxim, at what we do and how we do it. Heh. The cycle of life…

Thidly, or course I noticed something obvious, something that always happens with Olga and me when we go shopping. We went to Jumbo to buy few specific items. When we walked out more than an hour later, we bought a lot of other stuff. But we haven’t bought anything from the things we intended to.

Overall, of course, we had lots of fun. Is there any other way you can spend time in the supermarket full of toys for all ages?

6 weeks and counting

Maxim is six weeks old today. That is one and a half month. By now we figured that:

  • He loves to bath.
  • He loves outside.
  • He loves being butt naked.
  • He can hold his head straight, although it is still hard for him.
  • He can smile. Even though he can’t control it yet. But he is trying.
  • He loves Olga’s left breast more than loves her right one.
  • He can sleep four ours straight. He just hates doing so due to extreme feeling of hunger afterwords.
  • He cries differently when he is hungry, when he is in pain, and when he is bored.

We’ve probably figured a bunch of other things, but I forgot to write them down…

Dream

Today I had the best sleep since Maxim was born. I slept for about 8 hours or even more. Olga was taking care of Maxim and I didn’t even heard them. Ok, maybe once or twice, but that doesn’t count really.

Usually, I don’t have dreams in those two or three hour sleeping breaks that I am used to have recently. Today though I had enough rest to notice the dreams in my head. One of them was particularly entertaining.

There is an expression in Russian which can be translated as “as ugly as a crocodile”. This was the base for my dream. I don’t know why it came up though. So I was there, in the dream, telling a story to some British folks. In Englihs. Strange, I know. And I came to the point where I wanted some nice graphical description which would sound funny. I am bad at these things, but I try anyway. And I was telling them something along the lines of:

She was ugly. She was ugly as a crocodile. No, actually there is this type of crocodiles which are so ugly that all normal crocodiles don’t want to hang out with them. So she was as ugly as one of these.

Being just funny is not enough. I had to be smart. So instead of using “this type of crocodiles” and “that type of crocodiles” I wanted to actually name the types. And than I realized that I totally uneducated about crocodiles. All I could remember were Nile crocodiles and alligators. And I had no idea which one of them is uglier.

Actually, I don’t think crocodiles are ugly. They are kind of cute. In the phrase that uses crocodiles to describe human ugliness, all of them are equally ugly.

So there I was – standing in my dream, stuck in the middle of telling the story, trying to be funny and smart, and lacking one good metaphore. It’s not exactly a nightmare, but surely not one of my most pleasant dreams.

Thus I woke up…

P.S.: From a quick Google search I learned that there are alligators, caimans, crocodiles (reptiles), and gavials. All of these are in a crocodile family.