Miscellaneous and sundry

As I said in my previous post, I’ve been more tired this week than I’ve ever been in my life. That may be an exaggeration – I was so tired I hallucinated in class when I was in grad school (leading to an unfortunate remark in Prof. Fredrickson’s algorithms class – sorry!), and both times I’ve lived abroad and spent a large portion of the day speaking another language I was superexhausted, and, well, there was that time when I was four and had mono… but aside from that, I’ve never been more tired.

Yes, I understand that once I have this baby, I’m going to be exhausted all the time. You can tell me that again and again, and I will understand it intellectually, but until you develop a sleep storage system, you’re not being helpful.

But anyway, in spite of being tired, it’s been a good week. My German class is great – it’s a seminar on the German experience of war, and it’s a good group of people in the class. It won’t help me with my “how to speak to the baby” German, mind you, but it’s challenging and it’ll be a good way to keep my brain in German mode before the baby comes. Yayyy…

This other thing I’m doing which I keep alluding to is something I’ve been a little reluctant to talk about. I don’t, in general, talk about religion publicly, and there are two reasons for this – from one side of things, having grown up around evangelistic bible-bashers and folks who use religion as a way to exclude, persecute, and generally antagonize people, I am particularly wary of either encouraging such people to come here to this little corner of the blogosphere or of sounding like one of those people (because if there is anything I am not, it’s that); on the other side of things, having grown up in a household and tradition where science and reason reign supreme (and this is still my viewpoint), I am reluctant to seem as if I have discarded these things (because I have not). My belief has pretty much always been that my spirituality is my own business, and that there’s nothing about spiritual beliefs and rational beliefs that must be mutually exclusive. (Note to the reader: the current sneaky method of saying “everything is a theory” (and subsequent misinterpretation of the word “theory”, something that drives my scientist father bonkers) as a way to get around the idea of things like evolution really gets under my skin…) And as soon as I mention religion, I end up with a long list of disclaimers and explanations I didn’t want to give in the first place. I don’t wear my religious beliefs on my sleeve – I wear me on my sleeve. And that doesn’t change.

So anyway, what I’m doing on Wednesday nights, in that context, is going to catechumenate classes – as a social thing, as a way of being part of a broader community, and because we’d like to give our son some sense of a religious tradition, even if that isn’t what he follows or believes later on. I was raised without a religious tradition, my husband was raised with one, and it turns out that while our own resultant beliefs are surprisingly similar, we want Small Monster to be able to make his own informed choices about what he believes, and no matter what he believes, to respect people’s spiritual and personal belief systems even if he doesn’t share those beliefs. So anyway, I spend my Wednesday nights these days meeting with some very nice people, having a nice dinner, and having interesting discussions. I really enjoyed it last week, and while I doubt I’ll say much about it (as I said, religion is an intensely personal thing for me), that’s one more thing on the schedule.

And that’s all I’m saying about that right now, but that was the cliffhanger #2, Mrs. Mustard

And, of course, there are the occasional meetings with the local pregnant women (which is fun and good and very nice), and the childbirth/baby preparation classes start up tomorrow. Tomorrow is the breastfeeding class, which my poor husband – support system for Haus Grothoff – is going to have to sit through. He’s insanely busy right now, but he’s being a good husband/papa and sitting through what will probably be the least exciting discussion of breasts he’s ever had in his life Poor man…

And that is what’s up and why I’m so tired right now. I’ve gone from lazy days and trips to the library to having stuff to do and an actual social life in the space of a week, all at the beginning of my third trimester.

Am I on crack, or what?