ANNA

MY FIRST WEEKS

My name is Anastasia Maria Majoor and I was born on the 2nd of May 2003 in Tashkent, Uzbekistan, in the International Clinic. Actually, my parents call me Anna, even though the Uzbeks find that ridiculous since, if your name is Anastasia, it should definitely be shortened to Nastia.  However, my parents did not find me nasty enough for such a name. For now, Anna suits me well; when I grow up and become an important lady, I will probably be Anastasia.
I was born on a beautiful day in May. Around 4 o'clock at night, I started to announce that it was time for me to enter into the big world, which was no surprise, since I was two days late already.

 I was supposed to arrive at the Queen's birthday, but since my parents had a party with the Dutch consul for that occasion, I kept quiet. My mother decided in her wisdom, that she and Teb should bring my brothers and sister to school first, and therefore my mother was suffering her contractions every two minutes on the backseat of the car on the way to school (which was her own fault after all). But as a result, I arrived, as a good Dutch girl should, at coffee time.
In the top right corner, you can see my mother when she was still pregnant of me, wearing an extremely stupid and old fashioned dress, which was far too hot for the nice weather. Unfortunately, maternity clothes were impossible to find in Uzbekistan and she had the choice of this, a grey plastic bag or a flowered, velours local dress.

Not that she complained, because she thoroughly enjoyed the 4 months long maternity leave, which came in my package!
On the right is my first pasfoto ever. You may wonder why a 5 day old baby needs such a picture. My parents had decided, to go to the Netherlands five weeks after I was born to show off my beauty to friends and family. However, this was not as easy as it may sound. Since I was born in Uzbekistan, I was not yet registered as a Dutch citizen; also my passport had to come from the Dutch embassy in Moscow.

And, no traveling but also no registration without such passport! The passport was said to take at least four weeks, so I could smell problems. My father was emailing and calling with Moscow all the time, to beg them to speed up the process. A few days before our leave the passport arrived, too late to receive an exit visa, let alone a re-entry visa. So there I went on my first big journey, without visa and without citizenship!They allowed us to leave the country, but almost made us miss the plane, since they had to produce numerous documents, photocopies and the like (this is Uzbekistan). Luckily we already checked in our luggage, so they had to wait for us to avoid the risk that my parents might have put some explosives between the wipies.
I still have the passport because it is valid for 5 years; I cannot imagine how custom people can recognize me from this picture, it could have been anybody. My parents did not want to use this opportunity for baby smuggling, because they thought their family was large enough. In the meantime, I am also a Dutch citizen, which took six months but was achieved in the end.

I received many presents, clothes, toys, even jewellery! Here I am wearing one of the little ensembles that mama's colleague gave. My mother had no clothes or baby things at all. She threw everything away, thinking three was a crowd. So the first months I lived in presented and borrowed clothes. Not that it mattered to me, I was not as committed to fashion in those times as my older sister. My sister is seven years old now. She is very smart and loves to take care of me. She decided she also wants to be a mother of four. As you can see, in summer she is not so fashionable after all and simply runs around in swimming trunks.  
What I liked most, was drink and sleep, preferably on the shoulder of my father. I could barely keep my eyes open for two hours in a row. When I was four weeks old, my parents decided to throw in a "plov party" for me.
In Uzbekistan, there are some cultural rules concerning babies. The baby is only given a name after a week. Furthermore, people usually don't show their newborns to the world for forty days. After that a celebration is allowed.

However, since we planned to go to the Netherlands already after 5 weeks, we had to break the rules a little bit. The Dutch are never so law-abiding after all. So we invited neighbors, friends and colleagues to celebrate with us.
As we are foreigners and thus supposed to be rich, the neighbors told us that apart from plov, we should also serve shaslick and white tea (vodka). Keen to stay friends with them, we did as they said. However, we did not follow up their suggestion that we should slaughter a whole sleep. It was better to save that one for my dowry. The neighbors were disappointed, for sure they would have loved to sell their own sheep to us and make a little profit.

Our next door neighbor, gardener and owner of five sheep really enjoyed the party and finished a whole bottle of vodka on his own. It did not spoil the quality of his shaslick, luckily. It was a nice party, my first one, even though to be honest I slept through most of it. Now we were ready to visit the country of birth of my parents, brothers and sister!