August

We had planned to go to a party in Belgium, but it was cancelled at the last minute. Seeing as we had arranged for our babysitter to cover the whole weekend we decided to take the opportunity to celebrate 10 glorious years of marriage with a weekend just for the two of us. We had a very nice time and so we hope that this will be the start of a new tradition.

When we came back Marjolein paid the babysitter and Daniel asked why. After we explained he scampered upstairs and got two euros out of his piggy bank for her “because we like you looking after us so much”. She is very fond of them and it seems to be entirely mutual. Daniel tends to be less “in your face” than Matthijs and his affection are less quickly granted, but when it is, it runs deep….

Daniel also wanted to know why his and his brothers’ birthdays were not neatly in sequence, from small to big for instance. A typical Daniel question: he likes things just-so and sensible reasons for everything. Explaining was difficult: his time-sense is in the early stages: anything that is in the future is happening “tomorrow” for Daniel and anything in the past (even far in the past) is “yesterday”.

The first two weeks of this (holiday) month Marjolein mostly just took the toads out to the local playgrounds, but after that I was off work and we expanded our range.

First of all we went to “Apenheul” (Monkey Hill), a monkey safari-park which has the reputation that you can get really close to the monkeys. It was quite nice, but less interesting than Marjolein remembered from her own childhood visit: we saw a few small monkeys at arms length but the rest were far off behind nets and moats, doing their own thing.

We had a small party for Falco’s birthday, just his (Dutch) grandparents, but we shall have a combined celebration of Falco’s and Matthijs’ birthdays next month. Falco got a nice present from his grandparents: a small bouncy castle that produced great joy him and his siblings but nearly deprived them of a father due to the excessive strain of inflating the damn thing.

We also discovered the Haarlem municipal plant nursery. It is a beautiful garden and park at walking distance from our house with greenhouses, a ruin/folly, climable cows (really) and stacks of kiddo activities: in the picture they are following a “Gnome trail” which has just told them to pretend they can fly.

We spent a rainy day inside the beautiful and ancient Teylers Museum, situated on a curve of Spaarne river in the middle of Haarlem. It is actually a rich man’s enormous cabinet of scientific curiosities and art collection. Mammoth skulls and encysted amethysts rub shoulders with Dutch interiors and Leyden jars. They have attempted to broaden their appeal, undoubtedly entirely in the spirit of the founder: he was obviously not above astounding the incredulous with electrical wonders and convex mirrors. Unfortunately their kiddo-friendly expo on volcano’s threw rather too many complex scientific terms for types of lava into the mix even for Matthijs, so the show was somewhat uneven. The rest of the collection actually worked better: weird wooden and glass machines, shiny mineral marvels and the mammoth skull which Falco adopted as a “dinosaur elephant”.

We would have gone further than playgrounds and such, but our beloved Jimmy became very ill at this time. Despite antibiotics and all other care the cancer advanced and he became quieter and slower, until he could no longer walk or eat. When we saw that even the permanent unflagging wag was gone from his tail we knew that it should not go further and gave him such mercy as we would want ourselves: he went peacefully to sleep on the 25th of August.

Jimmy was the sweetest, gentlest dog you can imagine. In all his eight and a half years he never growled and the only biting he did was his fiendish habit of slowly “grooming” people, so softly that they only realized much later that the friendly attention had left a large hole and we needed to buy a new sweater.

The children rode on his back, curled up on his stomach, pulled his ears and tail (until we caught them) and even in one instance used his uncomplaining head as a step to reach the biscuits. Sometimes it was too much and he excused himself and fled to his basket, but the draw of company was too great and he would be back after a few minutes, thumping down like a cheerful furry bolster in the middle of the game.

He really, truly loved being with people and wherever you were sitting you would soon find a large furry object encumbering your feet and shedding long black hairs on your trousers. His tail was always, always wagging, particularly if you dared to pay any sort of attention to him, and it was powerful enough to sweep smaller people off their feet.

Everyone always thought he was a big puppy, because he bounced around with all four feet off the ground, playing with anything and anyone available. He was a real retriever, two things made him happy, sniffing out where you hid his ball and walking tail up, chest out, mane bristling with some enormous piece of timber (literally doors and a five meter planks) in his mouth. People used to think we were stealing building materials.

He was a joyful, gentle and innocent soul and we are sure that a kind and just creator will provide him with an infinite beach, interesting smells and cheerful people to throw his ball forever.Ave atque vale Jim…