Well, it is pretty official that Sava is poised to become a big brother some time in October. So far, he is blissfully unaware of the growing bump, asking only occasionally about "the baby," usually in reference to something we have said; it all seems like a pretty solid abstraction to him. For a while the first couple of weeks after we told him, he insisted that the baby is a girl and asked me several times, "Mommy, what's the girl's name in your belly?" I kept saying that we don't know if it's a girl or boy--that we are not going to find out until it arrives--and each time he insisted loudly that it was a girl and he did not want a boy. After some coaching from us, though, emphasizing the point that a boy would be more likely to play with trucks, he now seems to have changed his opinion. For the official record, I think it's a boy and Dad is making no guesses.
In the meantime, we've spent the last several months in the company of Dad's parents who have been helping us take care of Sava after his nanny left in order to have her own baby. He is currently being looked after by grandma, as I finish (with some sadness, as I will not be going back) my school year at Pinewood, and it would be safe to say that he adores her. They go to the park every morning, play silly games, have all sorts of absurd conversations which usually involve Sava teaching his grandma something about life or language.
His Bulgarian before January had gone into serious decline, since he gradually gave up responding to Dad in Bulgarian even though Dad never spoke English to him, and we were finding it hard to maintain his spoken skills in his far-away "mother" tongue, which at two he had been wielding phenomenally. Now, it will not be an overstatement to say that he is equally fluent in both languages, and he takes especial pride in acting as a translator between his grandmother and us. Whenever Rado and I speak to each other in English, which we do often, since our lives revolve around that language, and if it is a topic that he deems of any importance, Sava turns to his grandma and says, "Grandma, Daddy said...or Mommy said." His grandma always thanks him profusely for being so helpful, which gives him especial joy.
We know he is tired at the end of the day when he starts speaking in what we jokingly call "Savahili," which is a spontaneous made-up language of words that sometimes don't sound either like English or Bulgarian, or if they do, make no sense in the sentences which he constructs. In those moments I get an image of his brain as an overheated radiator.
In real life, outside the home, he remains painfully reticent around other people. We've been working on getting him used to a playschool for a couple of hours twice a week, but it's been hard to make that consistent, since many days he sleeps through the whole thing and we never make it there. Still, he has gotten to know the teachers and appears more confident there than in any other public space. We also signed him up for one of those absurd faddish "Little Gym" experiences, not because we have any illusions that it will develop his "motor skills" or teach him anything that the park can't offer, but because we thought it was another way to get him accustomed to being in big groups of kids. He has adapated more easily there than to school, in great part because one of us, usually Dad, always participates. I still can't help laughing when I see the "teacher" trying to teach 2-year olds to make a "forward flip," and I don't think that the teacher likes me; she must see my half-stifled skepticism.
There have been too many favorite books to count lately, and I should leave those for another post.
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