Happy birthday, Jonah!

April 5: Where have the last two weeks gone? They seem to have flown by more quickly here than any other place we’ve been. I’m not sure why that is. Although we’re not in our usual surroundings, life seems so “normal” here. Perhaps that’s why. Could that be? Life goes by more quickly when you’re senses aren’t as overloaded? We’re not running off to tourist stop after tourist stop. Instead, we’re living our lives almost as though we would were we back in the states. Jeremy actually leaves the house to go to work most days. Our weekends are full of supermarkets, shopping malls, and play dates. My cell phone has multiple numbers in the contacts listing (the majority are taxi drivers, but some friends too). We’ve quickly made a life for ourselves—filled with friends and a good mix of entertainment and relaxation—that we’re very much enjoying. The first part of our sabbatical brought new experiences, sites, and adventures almost every day, at least for Jonah and me with our various outings. And now we get to experience “normal” life in a place quite unlike home but with some qualities of home that bring a nice sense of familiarity and comfort. Seems we struck a perfect balance on this journey of ours, I’d say.

And so, with this being more like “normal” life, it would be boring for me to give a day by day rundown I think.

Since I last wrote, we did indeed buy Jonah a scoot-scoot motorcycle (boda boda, actually—that’s what you call taxi motorcycles here). The day after Jonah borrowed a boy’s boda boda at the club, Jonah and I headed down to Game to buy one for him. We’ve made that trip many times in the last two weeks—to the Lugogo strip mall with its Shoprite, Game, and other stores. Jonah and I usually go twice a week during the week in the mornings. We grab a taxi from the club. Usually Jackson is our driver. He calls me “ma’am”. Everyone does actually. Makes me feel old and like a colonist. Some days we have to change money at the foreign currency exchange, where they give you a worse rate if you bring dollars in less than $50 denominations and won’t take bills printed before 2000. We just discovered that we can use the ATM at a bank there, so we don’t have to deal with that anymore.

Then we head to the café I’ve now become a regular at called Good African Coffee. How’s that for a name? Straightforward, let’s you know what they’re selling. And hilariously unoriginal. But, so be it because they actually make very good coffee. Oh, so yes, I’m back on the wagon, or I’ve fallen off the wagon. I guess it depends on your perspective. In any event, I’m truly enjoying the coffee lattes here, as they call them. So good, so good.

From the café we head either straight to Shoprite (the supermarket) or to Game (the Target-type store), depending on what it is that I need to pick up. (This part makes me feel like a suburban housewife.) At Game, Jonah spends a fair bit of time riding the cars around. He likes to try out each go-cart even though they’re the exact same. He gets into his very giddy, babbling/talking-up-a-storm mode because he just can’t contain his excitement. This was what our mornings looked like on Monday and Wednesday of the week before last. And it’s what we did one morning last week as well.

Last weekend I made a trip down to Game on my own to pick up a few things for Jonah’s birthday. As I was in the far back corner of the store, suddenly the lights flickered and—poof!—the electricity was out. Let me tell you that a huge box store with only one entrance is VERY dark when there are no lights on. I’ll admit that it momentarily freaked me out. I suddenly was concerned for my personal safety. I immediately remembered that on my key chain was a tiny flashlight (thanks to Su who gave Jonah a Winnie-the-Pooh keychain with a flashlight on it during one of our many excursions together—she always had great little things to keep him occupied during our adventures), so I pulled it out of my pocket and quickly pushed my cart to the checkout line. The funny thing was that no one made any sort of “ooh” or “ahh” or screamed or acted like this was anything but totally normal. In the states, I’m sure there’d be screams, gasps, you name it. But losing power here seems to be a way of life. We lose it in the middle of the night every couple of days. I know this because we sleep with the AC on, and I hear it going off and back on with each power outage. (Remember? I’m a light sleeper. Oh, and the AC is still not fixed in Jonah’s room, but we’ve come up with our own solution, which is to only have him in his pajamas with no sleep sack and a fan going on the nights it’s really warm. Seems to be sufficient for him.) The cash registers still seemed to be working, and so I bought my items and made my way out the door. When I got to Shoprite after my stop at Game, it was clear that their lights were running on a generator because the store was darker than usual. Jeremy told me when I got home that they too had no power for about 20 minutes, so I suppose this either affected the entire city or was load shedding to avoid massive, unintended blackouts. They apparently load shed here when there is too much of a drain on the electricity system.

In addition to our Lugogo mall outings, we’ve spent a few mornings at the play center here at the club. Although many of the toys inside are broken, Jonah still loves the place (particularly the play kitchen and parking garage). Now though, he’s more interested in the big sandpit with its digging implements, buckets, and bulldozers. He also likes the play structure, especially climbing up the stairs on his own, running back and forth along the bridges, and rolling either balls or a big, plastic school bus down the slide before making his way down himself. So this is where we spent Tuesday and Thursday mornings the week before last. I ordered a coffee latte (that’s what they call it here, not a cafe latte) and had it delivered to the play center, which is the icing on the cake of a nice, warm day.

As I recall though, that Tuesday was the first rain we had here in Kampala since we arrived. It’s clear that the rainy season has arrived because it has rained almost every day for the past week. The nice thing though is that it either rains in the morning and is lovely and warm in the afternoon or vice versa. So it’s not the totally-gray-get-you-down-need-to-sit-under-a-light-for-sun-therapy kind of rainy season. And it’s never too cold. I’ve still only needed a long-sleeved, lightweight sweatshirt once for about 20 minutes.

I’ve struck up a friendship with one of the women who work at the play center. Her name is Jackie, and she’s wonderful. She has three kids—two of her own (Jonathan who’s 2.5 years and Joryne who’s just over 1 year old) and a nine-year-old girl she adopted from a family who couldn’t care for her because the father had passed away and the mother was sick with HIV/AIDS. We talk about everything from our kids to family life, her aspiration to be a teacher, my work on toxics, life here, life in the states. Most Ugandans I’ve talked to don’t ask many questions, perhaps to avoid feeling intrusive, I’m not sure why. Jackie is more like someone I’d meet back home with conversations that run both ways. For Jonah’s birthday she gave him a card and a little toy car. It was incredibly thoughtful and generous of her. I know she doesn’t make very much money here.

I also met Kate and her kids, Max and Eva, at the play center the week before last. Kate is not only a lovely British woman (married to a German man, both of whom work for Malaria Consortium here), but she’s been a fabulous source of information. She works in the afternoons but spends her mornings with her kids and so does the circuit of play places/groups with them. It was from Kate that I learned of the place that became our wonderful refuge last week on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday and on the previous Friday as well. It’s called Magic Mornings, and it has indeed been just that for Jonah.

It was unnerving trying to find Magic Mornings on that first Friday because I didn’t have an address. Kate could only remember the cross streets and not the exact address, but I figured I’d try my luck in finding the place. Worst case scenario was having to pay a taxi driver to drive around for a while and then back to Kabira (the club). We caught a ride with Jackson, who got us to the intersection where I was supposed to find the corner plot. Seems simple enough, but the place had no signs, and with the high gates surrounding all of the homes, I couldn’t tell what was behind. I managed to reach Kate on her cell, and she told me to have Jackson go up to the first gate and honk the horn. And so we did.

With the help of a friendly guy, the gates opened onto a huge piece of property with a big house, a lovely covered patio, gardens, a chicken coop with two chickens, and tons of grassy, outdoor play space. As soon as the taxi stopped and I plopped Jonah on the ground, he took off. I turned around, and he was lost among the children, chasing after a couple of kids on boda bodas. I immediately wondered what I’d gotten myself into as I tried to wrap my head around all that I saw—dozens of nannies sitting in the patio, barefoot kids running around, some half clothed, such a different scene than play groups/child care centers back home. But I soon realized what a wonderful, wonderful place it was.

Run by a South African woman named Jeanie and Zambian woman named Impanga, Magic Mornings first opened in December of last year. Jeanie currently runs the place out of her home, although after the Easter holiday, it will be moving to its own location across town and will be every day rather than M-W-F. You can leave your kids and go if you’d like, but most kids are there with their nannies. (It seems that all of the expats and the wealthy Ugandans have nannies for their kids. Apparently, even many working class folks in Uganda have house girls, I’ve heard them called, who watch the kids and tend to the house chores.) A few moms come, some stay just for a short while, one or two stay the entire time. I’d thought about leaving Jonah until I realized that he’d likely go wandering off into the garden in the back of the house or who knows where…perhaps into Jeanie’s house. He has no qualms about exploring on his own, so I’d rather be there to follow him as needed or at least keep an eye on him from a distance.

There are usually around twenty kids on any given morning, so it makes for a very busy place (particularly when you add a nanny for each child). It runs from 8:30 am until about noon. We usually get there around 9:30 and leave just before noon, in time to be home for lunch and a nap. Each day brings new activities; the reoccurring one seems to be play-doh (a different color each week and different types of implements and toys to use with the play-doh each day). The various activities are situated on low tables that come up to the kids’ waists, a perfect height for them. There was painting one day, toy cars on a homemade map another (Jonah LOVED this one), musical instruments on yet another, play dinosaurs, blocks, you name it. There’s a reading corner from which I’ve plucked many a book to read to either just Jonah or a half dozen kids sitting in a semi-circle.

On our first day there, it was a water play day. I didn’t know that so wasn’t prepared with Jonah’s bathing suit. No matter though. He played in his diaper. Half the kids were running around naked anyway. Before discovering the water though, Jonah rode the boda boda around, played with play-doh (very happy to be using a reusable plastic knife to cut it), checked out the chickens, and drew on the asphalt with chalk. Once he found the water, however, that was it. We were between the little pool (one of those above ground infant pools that you fill with about a foot of water) and a water table that had dyed-red water with bubbles, empty plastic containers to pour the water from one section of the table to another, and sponges. Jonah is a water guy. I’ve mentioned this before. It continues to be the case.

Jonah was not happy to discover that water play day isn’t every Magic Morning day. It’s typically only on Fridays, and we couldn’t do it last Friday because it was raining in the morning. But he quickly got over his initial disappointment and merrily went about doing something else—whether it was digging in the garden and putting dirt in the wheelbarrow, running after the bubbles Jeanie was making with a tube of bubbles and bubble wand, chasing after another kid, or throwing balls out of and into a tub, I can’t remember. He’s done all of these things and more.

I can’t emphasize how much Jonah loves Magic Mornings. “Ma-ic Mor-ings,” he calls for when he wakes up every day. Now it’s Maya he’s calling for, but I’ll get to her soon. For me it’s also been wonderful. I’ve really enjoyed becoming a temporary part of this place, playing with the other kids, talking to the other moms and nannies, Impanga, and Jeanie. When the kids sit in their circle and have a snack together, all of the moms and nannies take their tea and biscuits. On one of the days, a woman was available to give manicures and pedicures. What kind of play group/center is this?

Sadly, Magic Mornings—which will become Magic Moments at its new location—will be closed for the next two weeks for the Easter holiday and then on a limited schedule through the end of the month as they hold open houses at the new site and shift things over. Bummer! Kate and I lamented this fact the last couple of times I saw her (Friday at Magic Mornings and today at the club’s pool). I guess it just means Jonah and I will have to take some other types of outings.

So that’s the gist of our morning routine thus far. It’s either been Magic Mornings or some café/supermarket/club play center combo. We spend most afternoons at the pool when it’s warm and at the play center when the sky is gray or when Jonah has a cold (which was the case for a few days last week). We take the washing basin that I bought at Game out to the main pool and fill it with water and put in a couple of empty yogurt containers, a water pitcher, a couple of shovels, a few boats, and a couple of Jonah’s stacking cups. Jonah can sit in there forever! We got this great idea from an expat (husband works at the U.S. Embassy) who we met at the pool last weekend. Jonah sat in one of the two tubs she had out there for well over an hour. On the weekends, we sit by Jonah’s tub in the sun and enjoy a cold beer. Yum.

Speaking of weekends, they’ve been quite busy. Last weekend we had brunch at the club with Jeremy’s former research assistant for his scorecard project (Jeff) and his girlfriend (Leah). We discovered that Jonah loves watermelon. Then we spent the rest of the morning by the pool, meeting a bunch of expats (mostly American, British, a few from EU countries) who live in Uganda and bring their kids to the club on the weekends. I’d met a few of the moms at Magic Mornings my first Friday there (the day before), including the wife of the U.S. Defense Attaché for Uganda. Everyone was quite friendly and welcoming.

After Jonah’s nap that day, we went over to the home of William Pike and his wife, Cathy Watson, for a late tea. Jeremy knows William and Cathy from his dissertation days here when William ran The New Vision (state-run Ugandan newspaper) and was a great source of information for him. Their property is gorgeous with huge gardens and green, open space. I only got a peek in the house, but it too looked beautiful. We enjoyed tea and cake outside, where Jonah happily ran around, chased and got chased by William and Cathy’s three huge dogs, tried to “pet” their cat (in a I-think-I’m-being-gentle-but-I’m-really-slapping-the-cat kind of way), and kicked a ball. He was exhausted by the time we left. We also got to see monkeys swinging about in the trees on their property, which was very cool. Jonah had such a wonderful time that he talked nonstop in the taxi all the way home.

That Sunday, we went to the Garden City shopping mall so we could pick up some books at Aristoc (a bookstore with a decent selection of books) and also go grocery shopping at Uchumi, which has the shopping carts with cars attached for kids. The bookstore was supposed to open at 10 am, but by ten after ten, it was still closed. A woman who worked at Aristoc told us that the morning’s rain was delaying people so the store was going to open a bit late. While we waited, we had milk, tea, and coffee for Jonah, Jeremy, and me, respectively, and a couple of muffins at Java Dave’s. How San Diego is that? Java Dave’s?

That afternoon, Jeremy’s friend Ian came over to hang out for a bit. Jonah was quite taken with him. I think it’s because he's so gentle and has a very soothing voice. Jonah asked Ian to read him stories, and he happily sat in Ian’s lap to hear them. It was so cute. After Ian left, we went out to the pool, where we met up with Advah, Guy, and Maya for the first time. Guy is a student of Macartan’s at Columbia, and he’s here doing research for his dissertation. Like Jonah and me, Advah and Maya came along for the adventure. They’re from Israel but have been living in New York for the past several years and are friends with Macartan, Jacobia, and Aoife. Lucky timing for us that we overlap with them here. They’re fabulous, fabulous. I’d be happy to spend every day with them. Jonah and I saw Advah and Maya several times last week, including at Magic Mornings on Wednesday and at the play center a couple of afternoons, including on Jonah’s birthday.

So, Jonah’s birthday kicked off this weekend. It’s hard to believe that he’s two! All week we kept asking him what Friday was, and he’d say, “Jonah’s birthday!” Then, starting on Thursday, he started to answer, “My birthday party!” which concerned me a bit since we didn’t have a party planned for him. We also asked him how old he was turning. He started by replying, “Two!” and then, by the end of the week, was saying, “Two months!”

Everyone around the club knew it was Jonah’s birthday, so he ended up getting lots of birthday wishes that day. They sang to him at Magic Mornings. (There was also an Easter egg hunt that day, but Jonah wasn’t interested in participating because he wanted to play with the little cars on the table instead.) That afternoon Advah and Maya met the three of us at the play center at the club, where the kids played until we decided to grab dinner at the club’s restaurant. (Guy joined us after he finished working for the day.) As we were waiting for our food, Jonah and Maya took turns riding and pushing each other on the boda boda up and down the long patio alongside the restaurant. It was very cute. We’d ordered a cake from the Sheraton Hotel’s bakery, which we’d heard was good. I was hoping for something like a Safeway sheet cake. Instead, it was a dry, dense, chocolate cake with little flavor. Yuck. Jonah and Maya loved it though and devoured their pieces. Needless to say, we left the rest of the cake behind.

On Saturday, we went with Advah, Guy, and Maya to the Uganda Wildlife Education Center in Entebbe. Advah and Guy have a car, so we all piled in together for the ride. On the way, we saw a demonstration in the street with people carrying signs with slogans like “No more child sacrifice” and “Why sell your children for money”, and I thought, oh, this is good, a demonstration against the kidnapping of children and forced servitude in guerilla armies. Instead, it was an anti-gay protest led by an old white guy (presumably a missionary) holding a small Ugandan child in his arms as he rode on the back of a boda boda. Following the boda boda were dozens of Ugandans with their equally ridiculous and disturbing signs.

We arrived at the wildlife preserve just before noon and grabbed a snack (chapatti—like a fried tortilla) at the food kiosk as we entered the park. When you walk in, you can’t miss the vervet monkeys running all around. The monkeys saw us with something in our hands, so several made their way over to us. Guy was holding Maya in his arms, and Maya was holding a chunk of the chapatti. Suddenly, one of the monkeys leapt up and grabbed the chapatti from Maya’s hand and dashed off. It all happened so fast. The monkey didn’t even touch her. We all stood there stunned though, and then, to make sure Maya didn’t get freaked out, we laughed, “Ha, ha! How funny that the monkey came and grabbed your pita!?” I guess we could have seen this coming, as the preserve is where a monkey stole a banana from me back in 2000, when I was here visiting Jeremy. (It was a hilarious scene, actually, with Jeremy and me throwing the banana back and forth to each other with the monkey running from Jeremy to me and back, and the monkey snatching the banana after one bad throw.) But, I just didn’t expect that the monkeys would want chapatti! In addition to the monkeys, we saw some huge snakes (enclosed in glass, of course), chimpanzees, a rhinoceros, a lion, zebras, crocodiles, and a couple of other animals. Jonah was actually quite interested in the animals at the preserve, much more so than he was when we went to the children’s zoo in Battersea Park in London.

From the preserve, we went to the Imperial Botanical Beach Hotel to eat lunch in their lovely garden. Jonah and Maya enjoyed running around, pretending to talk on their cell phones, just being dang cute together. We got to the hotel around 2 pm or so, and it took forever for them to bring our food, so we ended up having a very late lunch. The kids didn’t sleep in the car, so it was early to bed for Jonah soon after we got home and had dinner.

This morning we went to Good African Coffee for my latte, milk for little J, and juice for big J, and then did our weekly shopping at Shoprite. It had rained much of the night, but it turned into a gorgeous day. After the Lugogo mall, we spent a bit of time on our patio and garden, where Jonah liked cleaning the patio floor with a mop and opening and closing the gate between our cottage and the neighbor’s. We had a late lunch, after which Jonah took a great long nap. After Jonah’s nap, we headed out to the pool with his wash basin, which he sat in for over an hour, while Jeremy and I relaxed with a couple of beers and chatted with various people we know who came by. Ahhhhhh, when the weather is nice here, it’s SO nice.

Other things of note. I’m back on the gym circuit. Over the past two weeks, I’ve gone 4 or 5 times a week. It feels great to be getting back into good aerobic health, and it’s nice to have a bit of time to myself in the morning before my day really begins. On my first day at the gym, I could only last twenty minutes on the elliptical machine. I made it up to forty minutes after a couple of days (though prefer about thirty-five minutes), so I’m back on track. The view out the floor-to-ceiling windows from the elliptical machine is quite something in the morning. Especially if it’s still fairly early—say, 7 am or so—the morning mist, combined with the smoke from burning debris, drapes Kampala’s hills in a wonderfully mysterious way. By 7:30 though, the parking lot is bustling with parents dropping their kids off at the international school located next to the club. Oh, and I did see a HUGE roach just outside our front door on my way to the gym that first day. Yuck! Yuck! Yuck! It seriously was the size of a silver dollar. Ack!! That is one critter I could really do without seeing.

Speaking of good health, I see very few people smoking here, save from the addicted expats. Perhaps it’s because it’s such an expensive habit. I also don’t see many babies/toddlers in diapers; most are just in a long t-shirt. Especially in the villages, I imagine parents use reusable cloths for diapers but only when they’re really, really small probably. Disposable diapers are super expensive here. We pay about $27 for a package of 42 diapers. And these are just Huggies!

Let’s see…our cottage has many geckoes living in it. They’re small—about 1.5 inches long. Jonah loves to chase them when he finds them on the floor, and he yells out, “No, gecko! No!” if it stops running. There was a gecko on his ceiling one night when Jeremy was getting Jonah ready for bed, and now Jonah is constantly asking where that gecko went. He wants it to return to its spot on the ceiling. We also find ginormous ants crawling across our floor several times a night. They make their way in under our front door. Last night I think I must have escorted the same ant out multiple times until I finally realized that I needed to send him off farther into our garden. We also have a resident cat that particularly likes our patio furniture.

Jennifer is now the woman who regularly cleans our cottage. She’s very nice. Until just recently, Jonah kept calling her Amy. Amy comes once or twice a week, but Jennifer is now the person who shows up around 9 am every day (after 10 am on Sunday) to wash the dishes in the sink, wash all of the table tops, make our bed, clean the kitchen and bathroom, and mop the floors. I think the housekeeping staff has to buy their own equipment because I noticed the other day that Jennifer’s broom and mop have her name on them. If that’s the case, I wouldn’t be surprised, but I do think that’s totally ridiculous. Jonah loves having people come and go in our cottage. Whether it’s Jennifer or Amy in the morning or the AC guys in the afternoons (still working on it multiple times a week), Jonah loves talking to them, showing them his cars, asking them to read him a book. Speaking of books, Jonah can now thumb through pages of a paperback book. He seems quite pleased with this new skill and loves to do it so that he can more easily find different pictures for which he’s looking (usually a car).

Jonah seems to have a hard time distinguishing one Ugandan from another, so, in addition to calling Jennifer Amy, he called Jackson Edward for a long time since Edward was our first taxi driver here. Now I try to tell Jonah who it is that we’re walking up to or going to pass so that he can call them by their right name. He obviously doesn’t know any better, but it makes me feel bad for the person when he addresses them with the wrong name.

A few nights a week we find something on television worth watching, and I’m always quite intrigued by the words that get dubbed out. The word “god” gets bleeped out, for example, if someone on t.v. says, “Oh, my god!” Sometimes whole sentences are bleeped out, and I can’t figure out whether it’s just because it’s easier than trying to bleep the single word the-powers-that-be are concerned about or whether the idea conveyed in the sentence is problematic. I can’t hear the sentence and can’t read lips moving that fast, so I just don’t know.

I’ve been able to get a better sense of the goods being sold along the side of the road headed to the club from the supermarket. Many of the stalls/shacks sell water, fruit, and other snacks, some sell bags of charcoal to use for cooking, another sells wood. I love driving by construction sites here because I love the scaffolding. It’s not your typical metal rods. It’s made of thick, round tree branches with no bark and tied with some type of twine. It looks so Gilligan’s Island (that being my first exposure to thatched roofs and one of my favorite television shows as a kid). Another interesting thing to see: women riding on boda bodas holding umbrellas when it’s raining.

Although English is the official language of Uganda and most Ugandans in Kampala speak it, there still seems to be a bit of a language barrier. I try not to use slang, but even the way I phrase things or ask questions sometimes isn’t understood. And some Ugandans have an accent that makes it difficult for me to understand their English as well. People tend to say, “I am called so-and-so,” rather than “My name is so-and-so.” I notice that when the staff here talk to each other they talk in Luganda, the most widely locally spoken language in Uganda. Jeremy tried to learn Luganda back in the states a couple of years ago. He had a private tutor twice a week for about a year, but Jeremy said there were no grammatical rules to make learning the language manageable. There were more exceptions than rules and so it was impossible to learn.

Speaking of “that guy” (as Jonah points and refers to people we pass), Jeremy is keeping quite busy. His work is going very well here. Within our first week here, he’d helped get his scorecard project back on track—met with a few members of Parliament, got the Parliament clerks collecting the data he needed, helped get the NGO he’s partnering with back on track, basically revived a project that seemed likely to closedown this year. So he’s thrilled about this progress. He gets out of the house, has meetings and lunches with people, keeps quite busy, which I think is a welcome change from sitting at his computer all day.

And now to Jonah… The first week of the last two were napless ones for Jonah, much, MUCH to my chagrin. Jonah was waking up later than usual (around 7:15 or 7:30 am) because the sun doesn’t rise until close to 7, and I think it kept him from napping in the afternoons. Since his naps tend to be my sacred Rachel time, it took a bit of a toll on me for sure. By the end of the first week, I was sitting on the café patio with a cold beer by my side (a tasty Tusker Malt Lager from Kenya), wondering how I was going to manage the next X number of weeks with no time for a nap myself, to send emails, check cnn.com, read a book (just finished Loving Frank, which I really enjoyed), you name it. Then I decided a solution was in order to right this problem, so I started opening up Jonah’s curtains before Jeremy and I went to sleep for the night. It starts to get light outside around 6:30 am or so (with the sun making its bright appearance some 30 minutes later), and just having the bit of light shining in his room has started him rising closer to 6:30 or 6:45 am. And his naps have reappeared. Hallelujah!

Jonah has acquired more cars since we’ve arrived in Uganda. We accidentally left Jonah’s beloved police car (which we just gave to him on the flight to London) at the play center one morning. When I went back for it a few hours later, it was gone. Kids apparently take all of the little cars with them when they leave the play center, whether they belong to another kid, the center, or them. Big bummer. Jonah had quickly become quite attached to that car. That afternoon though Jeremy picked up a new black car with doors that open, and we’ve been calling it the undercover police car. Jonah has asked about the other police car several times but is always fine with the explanation that we lost it and now have the undercover car instead. And for Jonah's birthday, he got more cars from Maya (Advah and Guy too, of course) and Jackie.

We’ve been able to get Jonah to take his Malarone (antimalarial) every day since we got here, which has been a huge relief. At first we were going to crush it up in food, but the nurse told us it was a very bitter pill underneath its coating. So we decided to try to stick it into a bite of food that he typically just swallows and see what happens. It worked! For the first couple of weeks we buried it in the tip of a spoonful of yogurt and down the hatch it went. No problems. But Jonah is now in a “no yogurt” phase, so we’ve had to put it in other food, such as soft cheese, avocado, and now oatmeal. A few times he definitely has noticed something hard and different in the bite, but for the most part he has been totally oblivious to it. Thank goodness! One night we went out to dinner and forgot to give him his pill. I only realized it when Jeremy was in Jonah’s room singing him a song after we’d put him in his crib. So I quickly grabbed a triangle of soft cheese, shoved the pill into a bite, and went into Jonah’s room to find out if he maybe wanted a good-night bite of cheese. He was thrown off by this interruption and so just went along with one bite—the bite I had put the Malarone in—but then wanted nothing more to do with the cheese. We now give Jonah his pill in the morning, which is a meal we always have at home.

He is talking up a storm. I love to hear him walking around our cottage talking to himself or whomever, I’m not exactly sure to whom or what sometimes. Here are some of the latest:

“Want daddy, peez,” he said one day at the pool shortly after we got here. Jonah got used to having Jeremy around during the day and now misses not seeing him throughout the day here.

“Those people exercising!” a common thing we hear whenever we walk from the main part of the club past the gym to our place.

“There you go,” something that I say very often and now Jonah says as well when handing something over.

“Want to hold brush your teeth peez,” is a great line I love to hear. He loves brushing his teeth, and he calls the toothbrush a “brush your teeth”.

“One motorcycle be repaired,” he reminded me about the boda boda at Magic Mornings that only had three wheels and was being “fixed” by a little girl with some play tools.

“Penguin book o’er there. I know penguin book!” as he saw the Cape Town guidebook on my nightstand. He particularly likes looking at one page with a picture of an old car on it.

“No go shloofy. Wake up!” when we told him that it was time to go to bed for the night.

“My too big for passenger seat,” referencing himself (“my”) and the fact that he was too big to get into the passenger seat of one of his little toy cars.

With Jeremy sitting in Jonah’s “house” (our closet), Jonah walked in and asked, “How my day?”

“No poops, just toots,” is a line we now here often after Jonah goes poop in his diaper and one of us is standing right there. He doesn’t want to have his diaper changed, so he’s telling us he didn’t poop he just farted. He also calls out “Toot!” whenever he hears Jeremy or me fart. It cracks me up.

Jeremy: “What’s that, bud?” Jonah: “Diapers.” Jeremy: “What are they for?” Jonah: “My tushie.”

“What’s that guy, mommy?” a question he asks me many, many times a day about either a person (man, woman, or child, doesn’t matter, they’re all “guys”) or for things. I’ve tried to get him to ask “Who’s that?” with people, but he hasn’t caught on just yet.

“Skeetoes,” what he calls mosquitoes. Ugandans call them mo-skWEE-toes.

“What happin?” Jonah asked as he was looking at his car seat with my sweatshirt on it. “That my jacket, siwwy!” I guess I’ve been using the word “silly” because Jonah now uses it, and the crazy thing is that he knows when to use it in the context of being funny.

“Bit air,” as he rolls down the window in the taxi and waves his hand around. “I put window down.” This comes from my telling him that I’m going to leave my window down some because we want a bit of air in the taxi as we’re driving. Now he lets me know that this is what he needs.

Jonah’s empathy now comes out in stories we read in addition to people he sees. He has a book about hugs (thank you, Tanta), and one of the pages has a picture of a pig that skinned its knee and needs a hug. Jonah always asks me what happened to the pig. When I tell him the pig skinned its knee, he says, “Kiss it,” very sadly, and kisses the picture of the pig.

“Kiss it,” is something he asks of me at least twenty times a day. Any time he bonks his head, stubs a toe, lightly knocks his knee, the very smallest of unintentional taps, he comes to me, and says, “Kiss it.” He rarely cries when he falls, only when it’s really bad.

“I locked the door closed,” as he pretends to lock one of his little cars with the house key.

“What’s this name?” as he pointed to the label “Kabira Country Club” stamped on one of our plates. I found it interesting that he knew the letters made a word.

Me: “It’s Passover next week.” Jonah: “Where Passover go?” He often asks where abstract concepts went off to.

“Have car pway wif?” wanting to know if I had a car in my backpack for him to play with.

“Daddy, come in! All done wif mommy,” he let us know one morning when he was sitting in bed with me after Jeremy finished showering and it was my turn to get ready. He also yells out, “Daddy, come in house!” or “Mommy, come in house!” whenever he sees us outside the cottage, having just returned home from somewhere.

Jonah also likes to instruct me in my morning routine. “Mommy, get in shower!” And after I’ve finished showering, “Mommy, get dressed!” Is this karma?

Okay, folks. For those who celebrate, happy Passover and happy Easter! (We’ll be enjoying a Seder with Advah, Guy, Maya, and a few others.)

Picture descriptions: Jonah sitting on his bed, reading a book before going to sleep; Jonah and daddy dress alike...I wonder who dresses them?; Jonah learns how to play foosball (although he usually tries to grab the ball from the table); Jonah enjoys Magic Mornings; same; same; Jonah enjoys his washing basin; same; Jonah heads for the cat's tail at William and Cathy's house; enjoying a book with Ian; view from the car on way out of Kampala toward Entebbe; hanging with a monkey at the Uganda Wildlife Education Center; Jonah and Maya talk on their cell phones; Uganda Wildlife Education Center with Advah and Maya (see the zebras in the back??); our little man; Jonah enjoys washing his hands in buckets at the club's play center.