Bochuan
Bochuan is currently finishing up his final intensive Finnish course. His current level is about a B2 on the CEFR framework. What does that mean? According to this site, students at a B2 level “can function independently in a variety of academic and professional environments… although with a limited range of nuance and precision.” For example, his homework last weekend was to read an academic article in Finnish and then write a 2-page summary of the article. For the organic farming (horticulture) program he will start in August, he only needs an A2 (CEFR levels go from A1-C2, with C2 being native-like proficiency).
One of the criteria to apply for Finnish citizenship is passing a Finnish or Swedish national test at the B1 level. Bochuan passed that test on his first try back in March. To go from 0 to a B2 level in less than two years is remarkable and really a testament to the amount of time Bochuan has been studying the language intensively, thanks to the support of the employment office in Finland. Not only has he attended these courses free of charge, but he’s also being paid unemployment while studying. It’s incredible.
Beyond finishing up the language course and starting his horticulture studies, Bochuan’s parents are here visiting. They are staying with us until August 24th.
Alaya
This brings me to Alaya, who loves having her grandparents here. She gets so much attention with four adults around. In particular, Bochuan’s mom is very young at heart, and she makes a great a playmate for Alaya. It’s even better that she’s actually an adult because she’s fun but also able to take care of Alaya. I have taken as much time as possible to rest while they are here.
Besides enjoying her grandparents, Alaya is looking forward to her fourth birthday next month. It’s incredible how much she has grown, what she can do, and just how smart she is. I don’t mean in comparison to other children. I just mean in general. It’s amazing to watch her grow. It’s also funny to listen to her teach Bochuan’s mom some Finnish and English.
She’s no longer a baby. She’s fully continent during the day and night. She no longer breastfeeds. She also sleeps through the night. She still sleeps with us, but she has her own little nook that mostly doesn’t impact my own sleep. It’s amazing how much things have changed from this past April, when she was still wearing diapers and waking up in the middle of the night to breastfeed.
She’s also become so much more expressive. Her memory has vastly improved, and she’s able to talk about her day. It’s so nice talking with her about things that happened in the past. I also love how much she loves books. She’ll spend a long time flipping through books even though she can’t read the words. She just looks at the pictures and follows along with the story line. Sometimes she looks up from a book she’s been “reading,” and asks me, “Mom, what kind of (facial) expression is this?” in Mandarin. I don’t always have a good answer, but she manages to read between the lines just fine. I look forward to when the world of written text is opened up to her.
Maxi
And me? I’m so glad to have survived my first semester at Aalto given all the physical problems that came up alongside caring for a puppy and toddler. I’m wrapping up my summer vacation, which is shockingly short in comparison to what I am used to. My academic year didn’t wrap up until June 15th, and I start meeting with students again on August 1st, which means I need to be reading and giving feedback on master’s theses no later this week.
I know what you’re thinking. Oh, poor Maxi, only 6 weeks of vacation. But in comparison to 3-ish months, it is pretty short. More importantly, with Bochuan’s parents having arrived on July 1st, I feel like I really only had one week of proper vacation, and I was on a silent meditation retreat that week, which while amazing, was also not a vacation. The week after that retreat I was completely focused on getting my two-bedroom apartment ready for two additional adults. Bochuan and I have given his parents our room, and we’re crashing in Alaya’s. She’s been really gracious about the whole thing. Besides deep cleaning the apartment, we were also planning what Bochuan’s parents would do while they were here. Researching tours and cruises around Europe took up no small number of hours.
And did I mention that I have a puppy and toddler? While Alaya has still been going to daycare throughout the summer, we’ve sent her later in the day because she’s a night owl and walking up before 8 am in the morning is her personal form of torture. This morning she didn’t wake up until 9:15. I’m not sure what she’ll be like as a teenager. In any case, I just feel like if you can’t sleep for as long as you'd like at 3-years-old, when will you be able to do it? So, we don’t send her to daycare until she wakes up. This does mean that she misses breakfast there, so we have to feed her at home before she goes, and the whole process takes much longer. But she’s not weeping “I want to sleep!” in Mandarin the whole time we’re getting her dressed. So, mostly, it is an improvement, even if that means a decrease in the amount of time I get to rest, recharge, and get the work I still have to do over the summer done. Yes, I still have work to do during my 6-week “vacation” preparing a course I’m designing and a teacher training workshop I’m leading mid-August.
I hope you’re feeling a little sorrier for me now. But, if not, that’s okay too. I have a dedicated “feel sorry for myself” personality I can call upon whenever it’s necessary.
Besides all that, we’re also actively looking to purchase a home. This is the first time in my career that I have to pay a significant amount of money to rent an apartment. In China, my housing was always paid for by the university where I worked. After moving to Finland, being a student and getting the housing fund support from the Finnish government, meant we paid a very small rent (only like $350). However, as a permanent, full-time employee living close to the capital city, the housing benefit is a thing of the past, and rent is three times what we were paying in Lappeenranta. At this price, buying a home is much more fiscally sensible. Also, if you’ve been following this blog since we first moved to Finland, you might remember that Bochuan and I started saving toward buying a home almost two years ago. Now, it’s getting to be the time where we could use that savings account to apply for a home loan. In addition, Bochuan sold his apartment in China this past April, so we could use some of that to pay for the new home.
At least, in theory, all of those things are possible. Unfortunately, things are never that simple when one lives the expat lifestyle. One issue is related to the movement of money between countries. Both China and Finland’s laws about the movement of money make it almost impossible to bring the money from the sale of his apartment, legal as those funds may be, into the country. How so? Well, Finland needs to know the origin of the funds (e.g., Bill of Sale and bank statements), but that documentation needs to be provided in Finnish, English, or Swedish, and China will not authorize the translation of the document that proves Bochuan gained the money in his account from the sale of his home. China also does not provide bank statements in any language. It’s just not a thing. When trying to explain that to the Finnish bank we currently use, there is just a restatement of required documents as if putting the list into other words would cause these documents to suddenly materialize. In any case, I have been back and forth with the bank for weeks now, and I have mostly given up hope that we can bring the money here any time soon. We’re going to see what translation options we have here, but everyone is on vacation because it’s July. So, yeah, no definitive responses are likely in the next couple of weeks.
Then there is actually looking at homes. We’ve seen 15 homes so far, and we will go to see another one today. Of the 15 homes we’ve seen, three homes are contenders, though each has their downsides. The one we will see today looks almost perfect, at least based on what we can see of it on the internet. However, I’m not sure if any of that will mean anything. We may find the perfect home for us, at the ideal price point, and not be able to get a loan because I don’t have enough of a credit history here, or we can’t use the money we have as collateral because we can’t prove that it exists or move it into the country. Or, our residency status, which I like to call permanent-ish and gives us access to pretty any service we would need but is not an actual green card, might impact whether the bank feels confident about giving us a loan. And the irony of all this is that, technically speaking, we have enough money in our accounts globally to buy any of our top contenders cash, but at the same time, we don’t have that money in the only account where it would be needed to buy a home here. So, yeah, the money exists, and it doesn’t.
If you’re confused after reading this, good. I have managed to express the mental exhaustion of the situation.
Miska
And did I mention I have a puppy?
In my last blog post, I said I would post a future blog post on educating Miska. I wrote that blog post, and I sat with it, and I sat with it. And it’s not posted. I’m glad I wrote it though, and maybe I’ll post it next year, with a reflection about how things have changed in that time. What I can say is this: raising this puppy is hard. Bochuan put into words what I think is most difficult about having this puppy. We thought that having a dog would help us connect with others and build a community here. We’d have short conversations with other dog owners, and people would smile at us upon seeing our gorgeous dog. Afterall, he is pretty good-looking: his only strength.
But this dog is reactive. When I see another person walking a dog, I don’t smile at them and nod in a knowing way, like “Yeah, two people out in the world, walking their dogs.” Instead, I panic, and look for the closest place I can take Miska so he avoids seeing the other dog and completely loses it.
Once I was walking Miska in the forest, when I turned around and saw a young woman walking toward me with what looked to be a Labrador puppy. She smiled when she saw me. I’m confident I didn’t mirror her expression. I’m sure the look on my face was one of sheer terror and impending embarrassment. She was too close. I had no time to distract my puppy, move him further away from the main path, or anything. The next second Miska noticed them too and started barking and lunging at the other dog (in his surprise and excitement) to the extent that the other puppy, I kid you not, jumped straight into the air from fright. It was the kind of jump one only sees in cartoons because one would assume that physics wouldn't actually allow a dog to jump straight up in the air like that. But my dog can inspire a change to the laws of physics. Miska was on leash and so was the other dog because of Finland’s strict leash laws. And to be honest, off-leash Miska wouldn’t have done anything but go up to the dog and bark loudly and excitedly in his terrible idea of “inviting play.” But anyway, I was left in the position of restraining my overly enthusiastic dog while the other woman tried to edge by with her completely freaked out puppy.
And I don’t know how to write about Miska’s reactivity without feeling like some in the audience will blame me for the situation. I didn’t train him enough. I didn’t socialize him enough. I didn’t X enough, and now I’m complaining about the results. But I have read The Education of Will, and I know that dog reactivity can occur even when the puppy is adopted from 8 weeks old, is living in the best, dog-friendly environment, and with someone so experienced with problematic dog behavior, she has a PhD and multiple books published on the subject. I didn’t break my dog, but it significantly impacts my life and my health that he is so reactive. Bochuan said recently, “We definitely get our daily exercise because of this dog, though the benefits of that exercise might not be enough to counteract the stress we feel every time we take him outside.” I bow to the wisdom of this reflection.
There is so much I am doing to manage my dog’s excitement, stress, and anxiety levels, and it is exhausting. I manage his environment so closely. I have a notebook where I write down what I do with him at what time of day to help me keep his routine as regular as humanly possible to avoid any unnecessary stress that comes from uncertainty about what will happen next. He wears a calming collar, and I sometimes give him an additional calming pill recommended by the veterinarian when he is going to encounter a high-stress situation like a trip to daycare or the veterinarian. His daycare hours have been significantly cut back too because he gets so overly stimulated in the presence of other dogs. I time dog park trips (which I still do only so he can get some off-leash time each day) so that no one else is there. I know other people’s dog walking and dog park visit schedule almost as well as they do. I find the windows of time to take the puppy out where I am least likely to run into another dog.
The house hunt is also significantly impacted by the dog’s needs. We can’t live in an apartment for sure. However, a house with a yard is not enough either. A densely built housing community is not an option for us, even if it’s a community of row homes with big front and back yards. At our last house visit, one of the questions we asked was, “Do the neighbors have dogs? Do they hang out in the backyard?” If we went with that place, we would actually want to meet the neighbors and their dogs to see if our dog would be able to manage or if he would just become a nuisance to the whole neighborhood. The reason we are so excited about the house we will see today is that the back yard leads into a forest. In other words, we need a place close enough to the train network that I can commute to work, but far enough away from human civilization to limit the impact our reactive dog has on others.
This puppy is a lot.
Final thoughts
So, yeah. Summer. Chill times at the BAMM family residence. Nothing to report. :P
Yesterday, I was looking at the wall paper on my phone lock screen and app screen. I hadn’t updated the photos in a year. I thought now was a good time.
I changed the background photo of my lock screen to a photo of myself and Bochuan as we got ready to go on a Day Date. Day Dates are a new tradition for us. While Miska and Alaya are at their respective daycares, on one day a month, Bochuan and I will go out and do something fun together. The first day date was to an amusement park. The second date we rode bicycles around the lake that spans our and neighboring cities. Both dates were really fun, and I’m excited to see what we will do for the August date.
I changed the background photo of the app screen to a photo of Alaya and Miska (see the July photos below), and it really sunk in as I looked at it that our family had grown; it had changed; and this is what it was like now. And it was beautiful. Life is beautiful.
May Photos:
*The first photo is of Miska (right) and his best friend of the same breed from daycare Vaiski (left). The caption says, "How old they look: 110 years old and 99 years old; How old they are: 11 months old and 9 months old." In reality, Miska looks about 65, but Vaiski does look at least 110.
June Photos:
July Photos:
*The last photo of me was taken by Alaya. She's a pretty good photographer.
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