And now that Mr. T is almost nine months old (?!!??!!) and we’re back from Europe, I am about to dip my toes back in to being a professional X, Y and Z again.

I am not, in any sense, prepared to give up being Mommy at home with Torsten, but since many of the things I do can be done either from home or part-time (and all of them privately, if I so choose), I will soon be firing up the old brain and integrating some work (some combination of programming, writing and teaching – you didn’t think I got that CELTA for nothing, did you? ) into my weekly schedule.

We’ve always planned that I’d start working on getting this together once we got back from abroad, but now that we’re really back and Christian has Torsten for the day, I’m finally sitting down over a cup of coffee to work out the details, and I must say it feels pretty good. At the moment it’s low-pressure while I work things out, but it’s still nice to be on the path.

More on this as things come together…

I’m totally staying at the Jacques Brel youth hostel next month.

I cannot stop laughing every time I see the reservation in my calendar, even 18 years after whatever dialogue that appeared in. Ridiculous. (C’est chouette!)

That is all.

So when I say that I read somewhere that around the 4-5 month mark, most parents start to feel as if they’ve emerged from a cave and begin to start to see glimpses of the life they led before the baby, I mean that I read it somewhere. Like maybe Parents magazine. Or the back of a can of formula. Or a diaper advertisement. I have no idea.

That said, it is true. All of a sudden, life is returning to something which, if not normal, is at the very least human. I’ve been writing on my book all week for the first time since Torsten’s birth (and my spectacularly impossible post-C-section last-minute NaNoWriMo win), and I’ve decided to enroll in a CELTA certification course next month which will presumably eat all of my non-sleeping time for the month of May so that at some point after the summer I can either teach ESL/EFL part-time here in the area or can privately tutor foreign students. (Note that I can only do the course right now because Christian is a) officially on paternity leave, and b) a really nice husband…)

Oh, and this week I got to plan a few days of research in London while we’re in Europe in August. Muahahaha.

In other words, for the first time in months, in addition to being Mama, I get to be Krista too.

Not that I don’t love being Mama – I love being Mama – but it’s sort of exciting to be able to be doing other stuff too. A Mama who is also Krista is a better Mama for Torsten to have – I’m sure of it.

And let me repeat this: my husband is awesome.

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.

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!

From the post, we find that if you buy a Cisco switch, you may be fortunate enough to get gems like:

• “for glue the sex rubber mat (be applicable to 16/24 give cones change the machine)”, and
• “a fast ether lord fucking net ascending”

I think now would be a good time for my friend Rob, net geek and master of all personal technologies, to explain just exactly what alternate uses these Cisco products actually have…

I mean, I never thought buying a switch could be so, um, exciting…

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.

Anyhow, so there’s this passage that’s clearly about breastfeeding. And they start talking about what appears to be nipples, but the word looks suspiciously like the English word for wart. The thought is sort of creepy, but… sure enough, thanks to the friendly neighborhood Leo translation, I now know this:

One of the words for nipple, in German, is in fact the same as the word for wart (die Warze). Which kind of makes you wonder about what the average German-speaker’s view of breasts really is… *cringe*

(Note to German husband/friends/future child: Just kidding. Don’t hurt me.)