Week 38: All kinds of progress

I didn’t start out intending this to be an official pregnancy post – it’s really more about other stuff – but since part of the progress I refer to has to do with Small Monster’s progress, I’ll put it in with the rest. You’ll just have to bear with the other crap

Well, I may not have gotten much farther on my novel (ok, any farther) , but I’ll play catchup later this week. Meanwhile, I’ve been working on my German final which needs to be in by Thursday. I aim to finish it tonight (for obvious reasons which may or may not become more obvious soon), but there are three essays, and since I opted to do the two last ones in German (I had the option of writing them in English), it’s taking longer than expected. Part of the problem, of course, is that sometimes my thoughts are harder to organize in German than in English because I think about the subject from the start in German. While it might seem easier upfront to just outline it in English and then write it in German, the only time I’ve really done that in any of the languages I write in was in writing a very long joint letter, and that took much longer than it might have taken just to write it in the second language in the first place. I can’t even really easily take notes in English during German class unless the discussion switches to English because it’s just not the mindset I’m in at the time.

There comes a point when speaking a language when translation is far more work than just thinking in the language you intend to write in/speak. But that doesn’t necessarily make it easy. However much my German may have advanced in the very few years I’ve been studying it (and I discovered the other day that I can finally now complete a thought in Dutch or German without the other language interfering!!! Progress!), it still doesn’t come all that easily when I’m trying to do something requiring analysis, and I worry that I’m more verbose than I need to be simply because I can’t always find the most concise way to say something. (Let’s not get into my verbosity in English, ok? )

I could of course always ask my husband, but I prefer to ask him after I’ve finished working through a thought, and then usually only for an abstraction or part of the idea to check my intuition. Actually, in this class, I don’t think I’ve asked him about German at all. But this is an exam, so I’m not discussing that stuff with him, even if I’m not going to be graded on my German (although I guess I am, indirectly – if I’m incomprehensible, obviously my German isn’t sufficient).

Anyhow. So I have a third of the German exam done, which may not sound like much, but since I had to watch a long movie (Deutschland, bleiche Mutter) to answer the question, and since I was so exhausted yesterday, I only got part of the essay written before I crashed.

Ok, so that’s progress point 1.

Progress point 2 is, um, something I won’t get into detail about. If you’re squeamish, let’s just say there are more signs of progress toward Small Monster coming, although they’re small and they could mean it’s going to be a while still. If you’re not squeamish (and don’t say I didn’t warn you if you look – I very specifically selected a link which didn’t have any identifying info in the URL for what happened), let’s just say that this has started to happen, gradually, but it was very obviously that this morning. Doesn’t mean much more than yesterday’s signs, but given the occasional cramping etc., we’re making progress. It may be progress toward three weeks from now (19 days until our due date!), but it’s progress nonetheless.

So progress on my exam will lead toward progress on relaxation and my novel and/or curtains and/or study organization, depending on what I feel up to. And progress on Small Monster is always welcome, no matter how it occurs.