I’m off to the university in the snow.

That’s right – you heard me. Snow!!! I know I should have sympathy for all of the Thanksgiving flights that had to come through Denver today, but, well, it’s snow!!! I like snow as long as it doesn’t stick around until May – I’m “from” Wisconsin, after all (well, as much as I’m from anywhere). Seeing dirty snow hang around from November to sometime in late spring is depressing, my friends… it actually melts here, though it didn’t really last year during that evil series of blizzards.

Of course, the problem is that the week I’m due this year is precisely the week where it snowed so badly last year that cars couldn’t make it down our street and the stores closed. We’re prepared for the stores being closed should history repeat itself – lots of emergency rations in the pantry – but if I end up having to call an ambulance to take me to the hospital just because we can’t get a cab to pick us up, I’m gonna be annoyed (though Small Monster will have a story for being born in style!).

Anyhow. I’m off to the university to drop this off, and I hope the freaking building is still open, it being the day before Thanksgiving and all.

Congratulations, Small Monster – we made it to the end of the quarter and finished the course! Now you really should come out and see the world. Seriously. There’s like, snow, you know?

And then… naptime, I’m sure.

Good night, Internets…

Two German essays down, one to go (which is mostly thought out and ready to go, but I did outline it in English for some unknown reason, which if you read my last post, causes some time problems). Not that I wrote all day, mind you – no, after finishing the first essay and taking a short walk to Bed, Bath and Beyond (because we needed some Small Monster and Big Monster stuff, and I have this feeling that even if I don’t give birth anytime before SM’s due date, I’m not going to be up for more such trips – I get SO tired and hot!), I came home and passed out in bed for several more hours. As in passed… out. Collapsed. Went down for the count.

I can no longer survive without these naps. It’s like kindergarten, only I don’t complain about going to sleep.

I’m thinking I might write that last essay in English just to get it over with – I failed to notice until my beloved husband mentioned it that although the exam is due Thursday, Thursday is like, um, Thanksgiving, and the professor wants a hardcopy in the main office of a building that will be locked because it’ll be, um, Thanksgiving. I don’t think the professor noticed it either, because that’s a really silly day to say you want a hardcopy of the exam in your office or your mailbox, since, you know, they lock buildings on Thanksgiving.

So I need to finish it tonight, and frankly, I want to get on to catching up with my novel and, um, Small Monster related stuff (who, by the way, I think says “hi” to you all with that foot that is currently sticking out just under my ribs. The Internets say hi to you too, little one…). And I have so much e-mail and comment and friend-related stuff to catch up on it’s not even funny So having a chance to go there before the little guy comes would be nice. Ugggh!

(N.B.: The desire to get my exam over with has nothing to do with how much I liked the class – it rocked. And got my head back into German-mode for the arrival of unser kleines Monsterlein, so it was an excellent class to be taking and all, but seriously, I am totally ready to just be Mama for a bit, and it makes finishing an exam seem just that much less important…)

Anyway, off to write this third essay and get it over with. Then I can sleeeeep. Or torment my novel characters. Or both!

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.

Yayyyyyyyy!

But I am woefully behind on writing and blog-reading. Oh soooooooooooooo woefully behind. Part of this is busyness, part of this is being tired and in some pain, and part of it was, frankly, some annoyance that the perpetrators of the FFD™ (something that I am finally starting to get past through sheer force of will) are getting rather persistent about trying to read my blog in order to find out what’s going on with me. The key word here is trying, but eventually they will succeed because I simply don’t have the obsession, energy or time to think so much about them that I remain ever-vigilant about them reading a public blog, and as long as I don’t know about it and they don’t bother me, I don’t really care. But for the moment, I do find it rather creepy and annoying that people who I’ve said quite clearly that I’m done with and who have in turn told me never to contact them again (um… why would I want to????) can’t stop trying to get the details of my life anyway. It’s like, move on, people. Make your decisions, accept the consequences, and move on. I’m not taking my blog down (or moderating my comments very much) for their sake, but geez… it’s uncomfortably like being stalked.

Anyhow, I didn’t intend to go off on that, but it certainly does get my creep on.

And now, to the shout-out portion of our program:

NaNoWriMo-sters!!!!: This weekend (Friday, Saturday and Sunday) is big-assed NaNo catchup weekend (presuming Small Monster doesn’t decide to enter the world). To my NaNo peeps who’ve been keeping up, I challenge you to write the number of additional words I have to make up before Sunday at midnight between now and the end of the weekend – 14884! (I’m evil, aren’t I?) And for those who are behind, let us all join in solidarity and get caught up, even if we have to add clowns in buttless leather chaps to our stories to get things moving (“Hmmm… how do I integrate that into a historical romance?”).

Hot Blogging Chicks!: To my favorite bloganistas, I will get caught up eventually in reading your fine writing, although if you can convincingly integrate clowns in buttless leather chaps to your ongoing narrative, I will be much more likely to catch up quickly, probably spewing tea onto my monitors. I will also give you extra points, although if one of my monitors shorts out as a result of the tea, I will have to take those points back

God I need sleep. I’m so going to regret posting that last bit later, aren’t I?

ETA: Ok, so there is a German final, but, eh, I can do that at home and make my husband deliver it anyhow once I’m done with it

I did something I almost never do this morning – missed class. Given how tired I was yesterday just doing small things and how yucky I felt when I woke up in the middle of the night last night, I let my prof know I might not be there today, and he was totally cool about it. I hate missing that class though – it’s really interesting and thought-provoking, and my German needs as much help as it can get before Small Monster arrives. I also have to admit that my German is always better after class, and I feel much more competent since starting it, even if I know my German needs a lot of work – this is the first German class I’ve had where German isn’t explicitly the focus of the course, but rather, it’s on a topic (in this case, the German experience of war) and it’s conducted in German with German sources, etc. It’s nice to be at the point where I can do that – it took me much less time to get to this level of competence in Spanish (and I suspect my Spanish was much more correct, simply because I was younger, had more formal training, and not much other language interference going on), so I’m rather happy with where things are and where they will go. But anyhow, I hate missing class, and I figured given a choice between getting completely better and missing class, I’d just have to give in today.

And guess what? I feel marvelous this afternoon. Tired, but marvelous. So it was all good.

But guess what else folks… I’m well-and-truly pregnant. Yes, yes, I know, you’re shocked, but I’m so pregnant that I just broke down in absolute, bawling tears exclaiming how dumb and embarrassed I felt about something that had happened, and my poor, lovely husband was stuck trying to figure out how to comfort me. It was the kind of overwhelming crying I haven’t experienced since I was a small child, I think. It’s not that it was over nothing, but it wasn’t over much, it certainly didn’t warrant me falling apart.

All I can say is this: HORMONES (search for the words “1000 times” in the text to see what I’m getting at).

Don’t get me wrong – I’ve had hormones and mood swings since the beginning, though up to the past couple of weeks I’ve been able to feel them come on and usually head them off – but lately it’s bad. As in super-sucktacular bad.

Baby is making my stomach jump all over, waking me up at 4 am (which is fine, I don’t mind so far). Cravings for chocolate are uncontrollable. Nesting urges are increasing. Hormones are turning me into a crazy woman. People are finally asking me when I’m due without any hints that I’m pregnant from me or the evil husband. I gush over all babies, even the stock photo ones. I think I might, possibly, be pregnant. I’m very perceptive like that, ya know?

Anyhow, apparently I promised my next post would have belly shots. I wanted to wait until tomorrow when I’ll be dressed a little less sloppily, but, eh, if I don’t do it now, I may never do it, so here they are. My clothes are a mess, my hair’s a mess, and in the second one I look like I’ve gone slightly loony, but here they are anyway:

That “glow” on my face isn’t a glow – my face is red often, yes, but the glow in these pictures is unfortunately chloasma, a really fun added pigmentation that appears on one’s face during pregnancy and is exacerbated by the warm, friendly, very bright Colorado sun. I don’t have it that badly (it just looks like a tan for the most part, which would be fine except for the fact that I don’t tan), but when I’m really blushing it makes my face almost look purple. Fortunately, I’m not blushing here.

Maternity t-shirts are the least flattering of all maternity clothes, but they’re super-cheap and it becomes much less of a shame when food falls on them, which, let’s face it ladies, it does all the time when you’re pregnant…

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?

1. The professor for the advanced German seminar I really wanted to take is going to let me in and says there’s no problem. Yayyy!
2. Something else I have really wanted to do but have not gotten up the nerve to do for the past 6 years or so (shyness, time constraints, and any other variety of excuses) is also going to happen, and I’m excited about it. I’ll talk about it later
3. Baby is playing “kick the mommy” today, causing my stomach to jump. Go baby!

And that is today’s awesomeness report. Hoorah!

As I mentioned in my last post, my husband and I decided that our language at home would be German. Now, it’s not like this was an arbitrary decision – my husband is German after all, and giving our children multiple languages is something we think is a wonderful gift, but it’s still quite something for me to get my head around, mainly because it’s my head that is going to be doing a lot of work to get itself around it (not the idea of it, but the actual doing of it).

Now, understand, I do speak passable German, particularly when I’m comfortable, but I haven’t been speaking it for all that long. In high school and college, I spoke pretty fluent Spanish, decent French, and a touch of German (though not showing up for class did manage to earn me a D in first semester German as well as a complete inability to actually communicate with anyone). I managed to retain, and occasionally use, Spanish and French right up to the point that I became an au pair in Holland.

When I went to Holland, I spoke absolutely no Dutch beyond a few stupid phrases in my “Teach Yourself Dutch” book (e.g. “Waar is de winkelstraat?”, meaning “Where is the shopping street?”- if you read my last post, you will understand exactly how often I used that phrase), and I didn’t really plan to learn Dutch. I’d wanted to go to Spain, but the program I went on had just switched their Spain exchange programs to “study only”, so I picked somewhere where one wasn’t required to have a preexisting knowledge of the language, and off I went.

And that turned out to be the most awesome thing ever. Because Noor and Thijs, the (then) 3 and 6-year-old children in the family, taught me to speak Dutch just by talking with me and playing and being totally awesome through the ins-and-outs of every day life. I admit that I never got really comfortable with adults, although I did start making myself speak with shopkeepers in Dutch, but I think in the end I had a relatively decent degree of fluency going. I certainly surprised the grandparents… Unfortunately, though, the interference of Dutch with all of the other languages I’d learned, since I could really think pretty well in Dutch due to the immersion, managed to pretty much obliterate my ability to speak the other languages. I can get by in Spanish all right if I’m in the right frame of mind, and I can certainly still understand people, but more often than not, when I speak Spanish now, a word will pop out in one of the other languages I know (for a long while it was Dutch – now it’s German), and the same thing tends to happen in Dutch (which I don’t really use anymore anyway, and this makes me sad). And French? I can read it, but I can barely understand it, and I certainly can’t say much of anything. As the old lady I am, I really screw up the vowels, even though I was pretty good with them at 18. Getting old sucks like that.

The upshot of this is that while I certainly “know” a lot of other languages (even if what I remember of Japanese and Old Norse/Icelandic don’t really count), I have a very hard time using any of them. And since I only really started studying German for real about 4 years ago (my semester in college and three weeks in high school certainly don’t count), and only really hardcore for maybe a total of a year of that time, if that, the idea of being the primary caregiver in that language is just a little daunting.

Now, I do give myself some credit. My husband and in-laws may be highly critical of my German (my parents-in-law are highly critical of everything, so this is nothing new), but I certainly speak well enough to get by in most situations, and I am not actually afraid of being a non-native speaker in front of my son. As long as he gets consistent native-speaker input (which he will from my husband), he’ll pick up correct forms, even if he hears incorrect ones from me. And while I do make mistakes, my German has improved a great deal in the last year. I find it extremely tiring to have adult conversations about politics and computer science in German (topics which, quite frankly, occupy a big part of the adult conversation in this house), but come on… those are tiring enough topics in English. I am sure Small Monster and I will get by just fine – but it is something that is going to take a lot of work on my part.

The linguist in me is looking forward to it, and the mama in me who wants to have the closeness being able to speak fluently with one’s child in one’s own tongue allows and to communicate the culture that goes along with it knows that since we’ve decided we’ll speak English outside the home (in the park, with friends, etc.), there is a pressure release valve for me too. If the German is too much for me one morning, a walk to the park will be just the thing. But I’ve always found that living in another language that you don’t speak extremely well is physically exhausting for a while, and it’s not like there won’t be enough to exhaust us then anyway.

Now, a lot of families do what is called One Parent, One Language (OPOL). OPOL, as you might guess from the name, basically specifies that each parent speaks his native language with the child, and this system works very well for lots of families, so I’m totally not knocking it. But while OPOL is really appealing to the part of me that is scared to deal of trying to switch to another language with my husband when our relationship has always been in English, it would be really hard for us to pull this off in a majority English-speaking environment and still ensure our child got enough exposure to German. But since Christian and I speak English with each other almost exclusively and I will be the primary caregiver, we wanted to create an environment where our child would be able to hear conversation in both languages, not just input from one parent, and this for us means switching our language to German. (That’s the part I’m really scared of…) Since the outside world will give us English and English conversation, we’re basically responsible for German and German conversation, and since I’ll be home with the baby most of the day, it just seemed to make more sense to us to make sure the baby was hearing the minority language for most of that time, since when he gets older, most of his input will be in the majority language from everywhere else. So we’re doing what called is Minority Language at Home (ML@H), and we’re ok with that.

So this is why I bought a bunch of books of children’s music/games/rhymes in German today; I already knew that playrhymes and games have a function when children acquire a language, and I sort of felt like since singing Dutch children’s songs and playing games like that helped me, as an adult, pick up a language just from immersion, it made sense to have those in the bag before I was one of the people teaching my child German. Even if I occasionally screw up gender and case, pretty soon, I’m going to be living in German-world. And that’s both really cool and terribly mind-blowing.

Armes kleines Monster…

(N.B.: I begin this post totally aware that this is a prime example of my verbal incontinence and how I can talk forever without really having much of a point at all. Bite me.)

My husband and I are not shoppers.

I must tell you that one of the greatest joys in our relationship, and you may not appreciate this, is that Christian and I both hate to shop. We spend less time in a mall/store/supermarket than probably any couple in history, and our shopping visits are always pretty highly optimized. We’re in and out in less time than it takes me to get grumpy, usually, and that’s pretty damned impressive. (Approximate limit: 10 minutes.) I so married the right man. My mother may be able to spend hours trolling Target and WalMart – she and my brother are both master shoppers – but I did not get the shopping gene. Probably a good thing for my credit rating, actually.

On the other hand, what many of you may not know is that we also do not own a car. This is not because we couldn’t get one, but because we chose not to have one. Yeah, yeah, we’re a couple of those people – Christian is certainly more of one than I am, but intellectually, I agree with it, so that’s how we’ve been living for a long time. Even when we lived in Los Angeles. (It is totally untrue that no one walks in Los Angeles – it is only true that those who walk are considered beneath the notice of those who do not.) I actually sold my car about a year after Christian and I started dating, although to be fair, it was more because that car cost more money to maintain than it was worth and had suffered greatly during my brother’s adolescent years from various kinds of unknown teenage abuse. But what not having a car now means practically is that we rent a car about once a month to do big shopping/run big errands/etc. And only having a car once a month means that when we have this car, we usually have a horribly tiring day doing all of the big shopping at once, and that day is full of shopping.

A day full of shopping. I would totally trade that for a day filled with root canal work, possibly without anesthesia. I am not kidding.

A day full of shopping. High-efficiency shopping, but lots of shopping nonetheless. Now, I mentioned that we hate shopping, right? And that we can usually get out of a store with what we need before I get grumpy?

Well, that’s getting out of one store. Getting out of five stores in that time isn’t going to happen, and so these are usually crappy days, especially since I am the designated shopping driver. Not that Christian can’t drive, but he doesn’t want to, and conveniently, he didn’t get a U.S. license within his first six months of being here, so he can’t drive on the license he has. I hate driving, and I hate shopping days.

Now this post, believe it or not, is actually not about how much I hate shopping. It’s about where, for us, shopping gets really weird.

A couple of weeks ago, when Christian came back from DefCon, we rented a car to get him back from the airport and to do major shopping the next day. And this major shopping for us was something new… we drove to an outlet mall to go shopping. An outlet mall. This in and of itself is a sign of the apocalypse – we drove out-of-town to go shopping, and we went to an outlet mall of all places. We, the high priests of the Holy Sovereign Nation of Shopping Sucks Ass, made a trip to Mecca for shop-a-holics. There were seriously people there who were taking pictures of each other at the outlet mall. It was a like vacation destination for these people.

It creeped us out.

But what’s scarier is that we did something I’d never even thought of doing before… we bought stuff for someone who hasn’t even started breathing air yet, who cannot yet be embarrassed by his parents, who can’t even be appalled by Karl Rove yet. It was a little like buying crap for an imaginary friend.

For two people who hate shopping, I assure you this was an absolutely surreal experience (only made weirder by the salesperson at Carter’s who was giving us all sorts of advice that applies to normal couples who are really interested in doing everything according to tradition, but mainly just made the pregnant lady with the highly sensitive nose here notice that the woman doing all the talking had probably had what my band friends in high school would have called “the liquid breakfast”…).

We bought stuff for our child for the first time. You don’t think that would blow your mind, especially if you’re not someone who has been looking forward to just how much baby stuff you’re going to get to go out there and buy, but if your baby is not primarily an excuse for a fun buying fiesta, this is pretty damned weird.

We managed it, but after buying a suitably small number of starter clothes (mostly onesies, a couple of pairs of pajamas, receiving blankets and various things we knew would get spit up on a lot), we immediately rushed out into reality to buy a couple of pairs of sensible shoes for the two currently tangible people in our relationship and two sturdy suitcases we’ve been looking for for approximately 100 years. And then got the Hell out of there before Rod Serling returned from the dead to give a synopsis of our day to the viewers out there in TV-land.

Because Christian and I? We do not shop. And certainly not for unborn snuggly alien symbiotes who currently do not exist outside of me, however lovable they are. And shopping for our imaginary snuggly alien at an outlet mall? The Holy Land for drivers of SUVs and Hummers who commute an hour to work one way every day and always drive with a cell phone in one hand and a latte in the other???

You are out of your freaking mind.

Ok, ok, so I am exaggerating just a bit. In retrospect, I would be lying if I didn’t say that there was a part of buying clothes for our son that was sort of neat, actually, but it was quite frankly bizarre.

Of course, we did find this, which I think is Teh Awesome (click to embiggen):

I may hate shopping, but I think that all kids should have cool hats and snuggly things with ears on them. He’s due in December, so… it’s appropriate. And sooo soft.

I am a total sucker for babies wearing teddy bear hoods. I have no idea why.

But the bigger part of my shopping aversion is that I feel tremendous guilt spending the money. Now, imagine that you hate shopping anyway. And you don’t like to spend money. And you’re buying clothing for someone who doesn’t even have a birth certificate yet???

You may be able to see why buying baby stuff hasn’t been on the top of my list, and why it felt so weird. When we bought all of these clothes, it had not really hit me that this baby was real and was going to be born. I just knew intellectually that it would be a bad idea to try to take a baby home naked in December and keep him that way until I woke up enough to buy him clothes, somewhere around his 4^th birthday. Now that Small Monster has started poking and prodding and rolling over in my belly so that I can feel him, all of a sudden, I feel like I have a license to believe he’s real. And, of course, he is, but if you’ve got as much ingrained pessimism as I do, it takes just a little longer to get to that point. And all of a sudden, it’s like – wow, there is stuff this kid needs. And there is stuff I need to prepare for him. You know, to prepare for this child of ours that will be here, in our house and will be our kid. Because, you know, we’re having a baby. Did I mention that before?

Excuse me, my head just exploded. I’ll be a minute while I clean up.

And this kid? He’ll be here in 3 ¹/₂ months. Really.

And so I did something voluntarily today you’d never imagine me doing – I spent about $100 at amazon.de on various children’s rhyme/finger play/song books and CDs in German, because German will be our language at home, and I totally realized I don’t have that long to get used to all of the things I totally take for granted with babies in English. Sure, I can have a conversation in German, but baby/toddler games and songs in another language? Totally cultural, and totally not taught in class. You may wonder why I care now, since the baby won’t be able to talk for a good while, but children passively understand language well before they can actively produce it, and all of those little rhymes and songs we all heard as kids are important to language learning. And the part of my brain that used to teach preschool and au pair is totally ok with me spending the money. The linguist is standing there cheering in the background too. And even the part of pessimistic part of me that worries that something will go wrong before the baby is born and that this might all be for naught, the part that cringes at the idea of spending money, was like, yup, this is a very good idea. Good show, Krista.

I spent money… on something for our baby… and I am totally ok with that. I even enjoyed shopping for the books/CDs (ok, it was online, but still), and I spent a while browsing and deciding. But the really big deal is this: my brain has finally moved from the idea of yeah, ok, I’m pregnant, to yeah, ok, we’ll be meeting our child soon, and it’s time to prepare for the way my husband and I want to raise him.

So I may hate shopping, but shopping for the kid for a good reason? That was actually kind of awesome.

Excuse me, I have to go. The four horsemen are at the front door and are looking for a place to stable their mounts.