our birthday

Saturday the in-laws arrived and Teoman especially has been one happy boy.  His Babanne is his buddy.  She does whatever he wants.  She sits on the floor with him, she drives cars with him, she hand feeds him... eventually Babaanne will get tired and Teoman may lose some of the thrill of his grandma being here ... but the time right now is pretty sweet.  Everybody's happy.  Maybe even a little over stimulated, but it's back to "normal".

Teoman telling his Babaanne a story

Tolga sat down with his Baba and played backgammon.  I love watching them play together.  It is their culture, their mannerisms, their relationship.  Their faces are so serious and the game is fast.  It is the sound of Turkey, the game of men.  While it's hard to talk to Tolga during a football match, it's a bit easier during backgammon - he plays for bigger reasons than culture.  He plays to connect with his Baba, to test his Baba's mind, to humor himself but keep up a serious demeanor for his Baba.

Baba has little patience for slow counters (me) and little interruptions (Tomris).  She climbed up on the table to "help" throw the die, slowing their game down a lot.  Baba was losing and blamed it on Tomris and Tolga getting help from his wife watching.

Tolga playing tala with his Baba.  Tomris "helping"

The in-laws only plan on staying a month.  While there are many hard things about all of us in one house, I can't help but feel a bit slighted that they have come so late in the year, and will stay such a short time.  Kusadasi is cold right now, but it feels as if they chose the cold over family, the garden over their grandkids, eating all the olives and mandarins over sharing with us...

Seeing the kids going back and forth, hugging everyone and happily playing - these are the good things of a full house.

Body odor and bad breath is the down side of a full house.

So, we used this time to escape.  Up to this point in our kids lives, I have never liked leaving them, but seeing them with their grandparents and uncle - Tolga and I decided to go out together while they napped.  We had planned on this for quite a while actually.  January 10th is Tolga's legal birthday - a common thing in Turkey where a person's actual birthdate and legal birthdate have been fudged.  Tolga's was pushed past the new year to delay his military service.   Tolga's father has two birthdays, and Tolga's mother's birthdate was fudged by a couple of years.  (It's hard to get a straight answer out of anyone about how old they actually are because some Turks say the year they will turn rather than the actual year.  Gokhan has been telling people he's forty for the past few years, because he almost is...).

I usually celebrate Tolga's second birthday as a joke, sometimes with another present - but last year, somehow we came up with the idea his second birthday would be our birthday.  That we'd start going out and celebrating it together.  We rarely go out together, and at Christmas, and even Valentines we usually prefer to celebrate with our families.  But Tolga reminded me that we had decided to make this our birthday and go out.

We left the house and had no idea what to do... the freedom was overwhelming.  Movie? Shopping?   Gym? Out to eat? Coffee?  We ended up with a mid-day meal, a little shopping and some coffee.  Two days of going out together without the kids - its like our pre-kid days, and we are remembering those days before, and appreciating our days now just as much.

celebrating our birthday