Sabbatical epilogue

January 26, 2010: Where to even begin… We returned to the U.S. in mid-July, about six months ago. That’s half the amount of time we spent living abroad. (Feels like we’ve done so little in the last six months compared to any six month period of our sabbatical.) We left as a threesome in August, 2008, and returned a threesome plus a little. We learned about the “plus a little” while at Tyddyn Mawr, our lovely farm in Wales. How happy the owners of the farm were to hear our news when we shared it with them as we packed our car to head to southern England. Seems like forever ago. I’m now two months from my due date with our next babe, although the size of my belly suggests that I could give birth any day now.

The last six months have given me time to reflect—here and there—on the year that we call the best experience of our lives. Jeremy described it this way in talking to friends a couple of weeks ago, and I guess I hadn’t thought about it in those terms. But, it’s true. The freedom from life’s constraints and responsibilities, from the routines, the predictability of most days, planning and schedules. Freedom from all of this became our way of life. New experiences at every turn. Constant change. Endless time together. We lived each day with purpose. Even if the day was spent playing in the sand at a beach, we did it with purpose.

Liberation from my type-A ways felt amazing. No piles. No home to keep too tidy, since we were quickly on our way to another destination. No planning to do aside from thinking about where I would get my next latte and pastry, where we might explore the next day, or where the closest organic store was located.

When Jonah was born, I made a conscious effort to live in the moment, to truly enjoy every stage of his life so that I’d never regret not having experienced it. To my surprise, I did pretty well at adjusting to this new way of being. Sabbatical brought it to an entirely different level. My mind was quiet. No nagging reminders in the back of my head or thoughts of those things that needed to get done. Sitting on the ground with Jonah as he “cooked” for me in our beautiful courtyard in Greece or as he moved cars up and down his garage in South Africa meant being right there with him. Completely being there with him.

For me, the great lesson from our sabbatical has been being aware enough to quickly quiet my mind so I can just be, mostly so I can now enjoy the imaginary latte that Jonah makes for me in his play kitchen, the car ride we’re pretending to take on the couch, or the books we’re reading together as he sits in my lap or snuggles up beside me. Whereas before out sabbatical it would be easy to get caught up in my piles or lists of things to do without thinking about the lost opportunity, now I’m acutely aware of the tradeoffs and make more conscious decisions about how I’m spending my time. It’s not noticeable to an outside observer, including Jeremy I’d imagine. But, my own awareness gives me a greater sense that, even with the routine of “normal” life, I can live life with purpose.

I’d say the one thing that I no longer fret about (to the extent that I fretted about it on our sabbatical) is Jonah picking something up and walking off with it, only to wonder whether he’ll put it in some random drawer that we’ll never think to look in until after we’ve moved to our next country. Things get moved around in our house. Jonah likes taking things out of drawers in our kitchen in particular. But I imagine we’ll eventually find most of the things that matter before it’s time to return to California.

Through December, I felt like I was—to some extent—in a post-sabbatical funk. How can any experience beat the one we’d just had? Turning the corner to 2010 though brings us closer to meeting our next little one and excitement about our growing family. One evening last week, Jonah and I watched a DVD with footage of Jonah the month after he was born. It took Jonah a while to get his head around the fact that he was watching himself as a baby. Remembering him as a little bubs made me especially excited to have another one.

So what exactly are we doing now anyway and where are we??? Always a good question for us, even if we are back in the United States. When we got back to California, we spent a couple of weeks visiting family and friends in southern and northern California. We took another two weeks to sell our townhouse, start looking for housing in the D.C area, and pack up our stuff. Jeremy began his position in the Obama Administration as the Director for Democracy for the National Security Council on August 17, about four days after we got to town and moved ourselves into the basement of our good friends, Debbie and Bill, in Silver Spring, Maryland. We quickly found a house to rent not far from them. It’s lovely with a huge yard, less than a block from a fabulous playground for Jonah and a short walk from a pleasant downtown area.

Before we left California, I started having conversations with colleagues in the environmental health community about opportunities for me in D.C. I soon landed a job as the Chemicals Policy Director for Health Care Without Harm, an international coalition of organizations working to green the health care sector, which I began the third week of September. It’s the perfect job—interesting, challenging, flexible (three days/week mostly from home), and with just the right amount of responsibility.

Jonah had a bit of a tough transition to our new, stable life. I think it was probably more on account of our family size having grown from three to seven when we moved in with Debbie and Bill and their two boys, Fisher and Stuart. Suddenly we were no longer a quiet little threesome.

Within a week of getting to town, however, I found an amazing preschool for Jonah at Temple Emanuel in Kensington. Based on the philosophy of Reggio-Emilia, the school focuses on group projects and documents everything the kids do to show the process and product of their work. Since Jonah had spent the last year with just us and only short periods of time with one other child at any given time, we thought a group focus would be good for him. It has been. He absolutely loves school! On the first day I left him on his own, he was the slightest bit clingy as I was about to leave. But he quickly ran off to do something fun in some part of the classroom. He never shed a tear, not then or since. What a relief. Now when I pick him up each day, he insists on hugging all of the teachers goodbye before we go. He even makes his way into the school director’s office to say goodbye to her.

Jonah knew no other way of life than one that involved a monthly move, so about a month after we moved into our house in Silver Spring he started to ask me when we were moving to our next one. I explained several times that we were going to stay here for a long time, and he would respond with suggestions for our next move anyway. Usually that meant he thought we should move in with his cousin Natalie. Eventually he stopped asking about the next move. And recently, he voiced concern over the possibility of actually having to move. I happened to mention that we were renting this house and that it belonged to another family. He asked questions about the family and said, “I don’t want them to come back to this house.” In other words, “I don’t want to move!”

Since moving to Silver Spring, we’ve had wonderful visits from Safta and Tanta, Nana and Papa, and Guy and Maya. We made a trip back to southern California to spend Thanksgiving with our family. We took a quick road trip to New York to visit Uncle Josh and Aya, my nephew Micha, Macartan, Jacobia, and Aoife, and Advah, Guy, and Maya. We travelled to the Wintergreen Resort outside of Charlottesville, Virginia, to bring in the new year with Nana, Papa, Uncle Josh, and Aya. And I just returned from my first-ever weekend away from both of my boys to meet Liat (who flew in from California) in a suburb of Dallas, Texas, for some rejuvenation and relaxation.

While driving to Heathrow airport from southern England to head back to California in July, Jeremy and I compiled a Harper’s Magazine-like sabbatical recap. So here it goes:

- Number of countries visited: 10 (not breaking out Wales, Scotland, and England separately)
- Number of places we stayed: 21
- Number of places we’d trade in: 2 (Barcelona apartment and Dublin hotel)
- Number of ocean views: 4 (Connemara, Ireland; Lindos, Greece; Istanbul; Cape Town)
- Number of plane segments: 23
- Number of days out of the United States for our sabbatical: 304
- Number of castles and palaces visited: 10 (including one in Uganda)
- Number of religious buildings visited: > 50
- Number of mazes walked through: 4 (Parc del Laberint in Barcelona, Scone Palace in Scotland, Green Forest in Wales, Penny Farm in England)
- Girlfriends Jonah had on our trip: Mayan, Maya, Charlotte
- Number of times Jonah went from liking peas to not and back: 4
- Worst dessert of the trip: “Pumpkin Surprise” in Istanbul
- Best dessert of the trip: chocolate molten cake in Lindos
- Best selection of organic produce: Cape Town
- Place with a high chair in every restaurant: Ireland
- Place with no high chair in any restaurant: Barcelona
- Place Jonah was licked by a cow: Israel
- Number of figureheads we saw (from a distance) on our travels: 2 (the Pope and Queen Elizabeth)
- Cost of our trip: no idea, but we came back with money in the bank!

And as always, I will conclude with more on Jonah… New developments for Jonah in the last several months include: his first dentist appointment (he did fabulously and was extremely patient but did not care for the fluoride treatment), the growth of many more teeth (he’s now only missing his second set of molars on top), the loss of a regular nap (as of about a month ago, we’re lucky if Jonah naps these days, but he always goes to his crib for “rest” time), countless sicknesses with a wake of illness left behind him (for me, Jeremy, Safta, Nana, Papa…), Jonah’s first time in snow (excited to see it from inside, not so excited to be in it outside…until he discovered that he had his own snow shovel and could help his daddy shovel the walkway), a first parent-teacher conference at school during which I was told that we had an extremely delightful, intelligent child, Halloween as Mickey Mouse and trick-or-treating at Jeremy’s office, the addition of a number of songs (mostly Jewish) to his repertoire, an obsession with birthdays and presents, and amazing growth with his language (which already was advanced for his age).

Some of Jonah’s conversational highlights over the last six months:

After Jonah has been in his crib for about 45 minutes or so at naptime, he often calls out for us to hear through the monitor, “I’m all gone shloofing!” or “I’m all gone with my shloofy!” “Did I take a good nap?” he sometimes adds.

While getting dressed one morning, Jonah was crying because he wanted to get dressed in the other room. He said to me, “I having a hard time.” “Oh, why are you having a hard time?” I asked. “‘Cuz I crying,” he replied. If he’s crying about something, sometimes I’ll ask him if he’s having a hard time, which is where that came from.

While driving in the car with the radio playing music, Jonah shouted out from the back, “Good song!” It was a Top 40’s song. I smiled.

Jonah’s classroom has pet hermit crabs that he loves to help take care of. While driving home from school one day, I asked Jonah, “Did you get to play with the hermit crabs today?” Annoyed, he answered, “No, they’re not toys!” “Oh,” I said, “Did you get to see them today?” “Yes,” Jonah replied.

While watching a man walk down the street, Jonah said, “He had a sad, bad day. He has to kiss hiself.”

Jonah announces to us when he’s going poop (still in his diaper) and often goes to find himself some privacy to do so. One morning, when I asked him if he was finished so I could change his diaper, he said, “Poop is still coming out. And then some pee will come down, and I’ll be all done.”

So we’re happy and well in Silver Spring. It’s colder than I’d like, of course, but then you can’t take the California out of a native Californian. We’re really enjoying living so close to some of our dear friends who we left behind back in 2004, and we’re thrilled that we’ll get to make our way back to California when our stint is done here in D.C.

With that, I’ll call this the conclusion to my blog. I’d make a toast, but instead I’ll do what most pregnant women would rather do: eat a piece of cake and go to sleep. So, as Jonah would say, “Night, night!”

Picture descriptions: Jeremy and Jonah pick our pumpkins from a nearby pumpkin patch (Jonah insists on carrying his own); Jonah loving time with his cousin Natalie in California during Thanksgiving; my nephews, nieces, and youngest cousins at Thanksgiving; giving Jonah and his little buddy Natalie (Charlotte's daughter) a lift; Jonah and Casey get ready to man the boats in northern California; hanging out with Uncle Josh and Aya in NYC; Safta reads Jonah a bedtime story; Jonah and Aoife enjoying a park in NYC; lighting the Hanukkah candles; Jonah gets crazy with Fisher and Stuart in his crib; Jonah's first day of preschool; Jonah and Maya reunited; Jonah's cousin Mollie giving Jonah and Natalie a lift during our Thanksgiving visit; hanging out with my nephew Micha in NYC; enjoying Wintergreen with Nana and Papa; walking the halls of Jeremy's office building to trick-or-treat; playing with homemade play doh on a cold fall day; getting a lift from daddy at the Wintergreen play park.