On Jaws 2.

So having ridiculed it a few posts back (Christmas, all two of it, was basically good, thanks. You took the decorations down a couple of days ago. Just after Old New Year. You may never wash the smell of mince pies out of your hair), it appears that you are doing baby led weaning with your daughter.

This actually started at British-Christmas-at-your-parents-dinner, when in order to keep the Comet satisfied, you handed her a blini to chew on. She ate it. Then she ate another one. Then she ate some sprouts. And some carrots and parsnips. And half a banana.

For Christmas tea she had cucumber and lettuce. Plus another couple of blini. And to be honest, since all you had to do was sit there and scrape the mush off her face and the high chair later, you rapidly revised your opinion of the whole thing.

Thing is, it works because the Comet is a chewer. The Star was never a chewer. In fact, the Star has only really quite recently embraced chewing as a concept for regular use.

You can hear the baby led weaners saying, yes of course, if he was weaned on purees, of course he didn’t chew. But you can safely say that chewing is basically the Comet’s default state regardless of the stage of weaning, including ‘before’.

It’s amazing what a very mobile baby can find on the floor.

Let’s not go too mad though. There’s a certain level of mess into which you are not prepared to descend. So you are still pureeing anything which she can’t get into her mouth relatively cleanly.

Of course, the chewing frenzy might have something to do with the two small teeth poking out of her bottom gums. You are certainly hoping that is the explanation for the Comet’s complete and utter failure to sleep through the night the last few months.

Of course it could be the constipation. Poor girl’s bowels didn’t really recover after you introduced cauliflower cheese and she scoffed a rather larger bowl than was probably wise.

Prunes. What would you do without them?

On blogging for the BBC

You are proud to announce that you are now blogging in Russian (*cough* in translation *cough*)  for the BBC World Service. 

Writing something you knew would be translated was an odd experience. Especially translated into Russian. You have read a fair number of Russian-to-English texts in your time and many of them have been quite odd. Translated Russian can be brutally choppy, something you suspect the fact that Russians do commas all wrong* doesn’t help with although it’s probably the fault of having both more flexible word order in sentences and some really dauntingly information-packed adjectival phrases. In addition, any attempt to render slang across the language barrier is invariably a horrible horrible mistake.

As a result you have decided that the two languages are fundamentally incompatible.

So you decided to try to make life easier for your translator by eschewing things like the affected ‘you’ and the hyperbole, the overuse of adverbs, and the ungrammatical subordinate clauses made to do the work of a full sentence that you use on this blog. A bit. Still, you are deeply grateful to the person who translated this, who clearly had the bigger job of the two of you.

This is what you wrote:

I first went to Russia in 1996 intending to stay for six months and have never entirely left. Well, that’s not literally true. Right now I live in the UK, but in a corner of London that will be forever Slavic because my husband is Russian and my two children are, therefore, half Russian.

Why Russia? No reason, particularly, except that I wanted to live abroad for a while after university and had a choice between Russia and India.

I really hate hot weather.

I come from a small town about thirty miles outside of London. The most interesting thing about it is that Lewis Hamilton, the formula one driver is from there. It’s pleasant but not terribly exciting and Moscow was a bit of a shock, made more so by the fact that I didn’t speak a word of Russian before I arrived. I learned to read the alphabet while negotiating my way round the Metro stations.

Moscow, you see, is big. There are big buildings, some tall, some just heavily monolithic. The doors are built for giants. The roads have seventeen million lanes (some of them). Parks are like walks in the country, and as you fly into the airport, you look down on miles and miles and miles and miles of forest. It is very disconcerting to realise that Moscow has been built in one rather large clearing.

In fact what with coming from a small island nation, I never have really managed to comprehend properly how big Russia itself is. You have to show three maps just to get the weather forecast done and even then the distances involved are mind-boggling.

In addition, the history is impressively, and sometimes oppressively, huge, and it was a history that Russia was still very much living through when I arrived almost completely (you will have gathered) unprepared. I may be a historian by training, but I specialised in 18^th Century France and Venice.

I survived and refused to leave because I enjoyed finding out everything I didn’t know before I came and because I adore Russian people (and snow). They are warm, helpful, funny, intelligent, determined and practical. Which is why, of course, I married one of them (and miss snow in winter).

In the fullness of time we had children. And at this point, multicultural families often hit problems, not least of which is whose language do you teach them? Or, how do you make sure that they learn both languages? If you don’t want them to, why not? If you do, how well do you want them to speak?

Our decision, when our son was born in 2008 and reaffirmed when my daughter joined us this year, was that we wanted them to be as balanced bilingual speakers as possible, which means that we wanted them to speak (and read, and write) both English and Russian equally well. This presents some challenges again, especially as we live outside of Russia. I do a lot of the childcare and my Russian is brutal and largely ungrammatical (but with a really good vocabulary relating to potty training, weaning and childhood illnesses).

So I will be writing about how my husband and I, with a lot of help from their Russian babushka, are trying to bring those children up bilingually and with a sound bi-cultural understanding of both Britain and Russia as well.

At the moment this seems to involve me watching a lot of Soviet-era cartoons and having my Russian grammar and vocabulary corrected by a three year old.

*Or is it the English speakers?