And then I got up and planned to write, but we three had a Sunday morning cuddlefest in bed once C awoke, and, eh, nothing beats that.

And then I realized I didn’t have my LaTeX environment set up on this desktop the way I wanted to start writing, so I did that…

And there was some Torsten-wrangling, and a bath, and some breakfast, and…

And now it’s 12:45 pm. The usual NaNo procrastination appears to be well underway, because I haven’t written a word.

(To be fair, no real procrastination is involved except for this post – this is just a typical weekend day with kids, and I wouldn’t trade it for anything. I just want to get writing, because this novel is a very tiny part of what I plan to get done this month!)

Posting has been at the bottom of my list for several reasons (below the cut, for your reading pleasure):

1. I was looking, desperately, for both work and childcare. In Germany you can’t get a childcare slot, reasonably speaking, unless you have a job. And you can’t get a job unless you have childcare. Catch-22.  Fortunately I had excellent and concerted help from several people, and in fact was able to find a slot much more quickly than I could have dreamed because of it, but it was a busy time.
2. I found childcare. This means there is an “adaptation phase” (“orientation phase” sounds like a better translation, actually – “Eingewöhnungsphase” in German, at any rate), which means that Torsten and I go together to his new caregiver for a few hours a day for a couple of weeks, and then I start disappearing for more and more time. So far, so good, though it got interrupted by other things (see item 5 below).
3. I found a job right around the time 2) happened. This is a very happy thing indeed, not just because I needed a job, but because it’s really the job I want, and I get to do my PhD using both tracks of my skillset. I’m quite happy with how it’s turned out, but there was a lot of paperwork involved (in bureaucratic German of course), and so that took a while… I haven’t started yet, but I will soon. In the meantime…
4. I have an active child who is nearly two. Enough said.
5. We are recovering from what is likely that sickness. I have never been so sick. Torsten was super-sick for about 48 hours and then seems to have bounced back no worse for the wear, but it was scary enough. C and I are still clawing our way out of the tail end of it. It is horrid. Horrid horrid horrid horrid. Don’t get it if you can avoid it. I could not walk straight for two days, and breathing? HAH. It sucks. That is all.
   
6. Um… laundry?
7. I’m sure there’s more, but because of 5), I don’t have the mental faculties remaining to remember any of it.

I know I’m behind on Torsten posts again – the pictures are all queued up, and if I haven’t gotten the posts ready by Saturday night, I’m just going to post the pictures with no commentary and be done with it for now, because I have a bunch of technical reading I intend to do to get back up to speed with things, and on top of that, Torsten turns two a few weeks thereafter and I want to be all caught up by then. Because really, this is ridiculous (Also, um, NaNoWriMo starts November 1st. Ahem.)

Anyhow, no one is dead here (though it felt like a close thing), and maybe someday I’ll write again. I’m just not under any delusions that it will be with any degree of regularity. Except for a November lull (where “lull” means flexibility in my “too much to do” pile, not absence of things to do), my life is only going to get busier from here on out.

On the other hand, I will admit that it’s going to be nice to be both Mama and Krista again.

The bio is still a bit incomplete because they wanted to confirm what I meant by living with my “Evil German”, but I’m still tickled that they liked the story of Torsten’s and my heroic finish last year!

And this year, I yet again challenge all of my peeps who have no time and even less sleep to go on the thirty-day odyssey of insanity and caffeine that is National Novel Writing Month to produce something that will surprise even you.

This year, I’m still trying to decide between writing sci-fi/fantasy or a cheesy romance novel, but fortunately, I still have three weeks to decide. How I am going to write another book between laundry, Torsten, and my own insanity I don’t know, but I am totally going to do it.

And for those that don’t know my story last year, I was 700 words from finishing when I ended up being in the hospital for a C-Section. Bugger! And yet, at about 11 pm, November 30th, I finished the novel with my newborn son on my lap.

Because I am totally a winner

You can be a winner too – do it with me! Go to http://nanowrimo.org, sign up to write 50,000 words in November, and become my novelling buddy.

I’ll see you at the finish line.

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.

That’s all for now. Hope everyone is well, and I hope to be back with more soon…

So there are these curtains – roman shades, really – I’m supposed to have been working on forever. We have this house, you see, with very oddly-sized windows, and since the outer walls are just masonry – outside brick exposed to the inside directly, in fact – mounting regular curtains into what are effectively cut-outs for the windows seemed to be a real pain-in-the-butt idea when we first moved in. In retrospect, I was on crack, but what can you do? Anyway, I have in fact finished many of them (our living and dining rooms, for example, and all done finally – they were mostly done a year ago, but I didn’t finish the raising-and-lowering mechanisms until a few weeks ago), but the ones for our bedroom have been on hold for some time, and with as cold as that room gets, it’s about time to get them done, hopefully before Small Monster gets here. They’re nice and insulated and keep out light well, and I know that’s going to be important, since he’ll be in our room for some time. We do not want a Small-Monstercicle.

Now you may be asking why it is that all of the curtains in the front rooms are done before our bedroom, when one might think bedroom curtains were *ahem* a bit more important, but let’s just say I had a guest last Christmas that was demanding in no uncertain terms that they be up before s/he arrived because s/he was staying in the living room. And since I have always had some fear of this person’s wrath and irritation (and I was trying to be as good a host as I could be under the circumstances), they got done.

And now here it is, a year later, and I haven’t bothered with the shades in our own room, and we like, need them. Yesterday.

Thing is, I just don’t want to do it. And pregnant me wants to do it sooooo much less. I don’t really want to do anything, to be honest, except that sitting still hurts. So does moving. Late pregnancy is fun, folks!

I mean, regular curtains are easy (or easier) – line a sheet and hem it – but I am hardly a seamstress, and I have real trouble cutting out large rectangles of cloth evenly. Seriously. I suck at it. I’m not even sure how it’s really supposed to be done. The sewing part I don’t mind as much, but the cloth cutting?

I suck.

And since I have to lay out these rolls of lining on the ground and get down on my hands and knees to measure and cut – great position for baby, rotten position for heavy mama whose wrists hurt – I have totally been putting it off forever.

A great friend of mine mentioned yesterday that maybe the novel was my pre-labor nesting, but this strong internal command that I get these curtains done in the next couple of days sounds more like it to me. With my luck, my water will break all over the place while I’m cutting out material tonight, but I don’t think I’d complain except that the curtains just wouldn’t get done.

Bah. So anyway, there will be little blogging tonight, and no noveling beyond the 1k I pushed out earlier just for the Hell of it. I’m gonna get these MoFos done, darnit.

Ok, so it’s 4:30 am on Sunday, but I’m still up and just about to go to bed on an enforced-bedtime-so-that-I-don’t-sleep-too-late-Monday deadline. Yeah, yeah, 4:30 am is too late by anyone’s measure, but it was 6:30 or something yesterday, and so I figured if I can turn it back to 2:30 by tomorrow, I’ll be doing well.

Small Monster, for those of you keeping track, is still in there. He’s increasingly cramped, which makes my belly dancing especially interesting (note: I do not belly dance. My belly dances. Like does the wave all by itself. Big difference), and there are times when I really feel like he may just claw his way out through my belly button. I am so big and round right now that I might not even complain.

Kid, I am so ready for you to come out. It’s like, I knew before there was a baby in there, you know, the size and kind of baby they show in pictures in A Child is Born, but your size and the power of your muscles make it clear that there’s a full-grown baby in there. As in the kind we have here on the outside. So it’s time for you to come out.

But so far, kid seems to be staying in, and happy about it (I’m a little afraid he’s going to start ordering Domino’s for delivery to his little house. That delivery man is so not coming to the door, I’m telling you, child). None of the things they tell you might work is bringing it on so far (pineapple, spicy food, squats, walking, the full moon, etc), but I figure it just means he isn’t quite ready, so I’ll keep on walking and squatting and eating peppers like a fool. Oh, don’t get me wrong, there’s some early labor stuff going on – I’m crampy and all, and my back aches like Hell sometimes, so I figure (pray) my cervix is probably progressing some more, but as far as I can tell, he still hasn’t dropped all the way into my pelvis – he seems to much prefer sticking his fist in there, or at least that’s what it feels like. It’s creepy. And that’s as far as it goes. I’m just hoping they don’t get to the point where they decide they have to induce on my due date.

So, as a special message to my son: Come on down, Small Monster! You’re the next contestant on The Price is Right! (N.B.: Price = $300, which is about $293 more than my parents paid for me – $260 more, really, adjusted for inflation – but then, I was born in special circumstances )

Anyhow. Mostly it’s just waiting now. I got another 6k out on the novel, which puts me within easy striking range of the big 50k, but like the last time I won, the novel isn’t nearly done (my last one hit about 90k by the time I finished it, and I figure I’m about halfway through the storyline on this one). There’s no way in Hell I plan on trying to finish this one before the kid comes, but it gives me something to do other than to check websites going, “Is this a sign of labor? how about this? does this mean I’ll deliver this week? come on, kid, come out!” Not that I don’t have more to do than that, but it’s a favorite pastime of enormously pregnant women.

Other than that, I cooked a big turkey breast today (Grothoff tradition – don’t buy turkey until the day after Thanksgiving. We’re weirdos like that ) and did a wee bit of coding. Not much accomplished, but then, I didn’t have to I’m totally not going to stress and tire myself out in the next couple of weeks – I have labor to look forward to and all, and I figure that’ll be enough work for me.

And did I mention hormones? (Small Monster, you’d better come out soon, or your mother is going to lose it…)

Anyway…

So I’ll be updating this post all evening with hot… NaNoWriMo… action, with the Internet forbidden to me otherwise, starting… now.

6:27 pm

Starting point for today – 30958 words (pathetic!).Tea? Check.
Updated novel draft? Check.
Internet ready to be banned for at least the next hour? Check.
Cookies? Damn, I knew I’d forgotten something. Oh well, no time to bake them now. I’ll find something.
Off to the races. Post to be updated as the evening wears on.

7:34 pm

32241 words. It goes slowly, but it’s going. I hate it when I do flashbacks to backstory though – I go on forever (just like in real life, now that I think of it…)

8:07 pm

Bad me. Answered e-mail for 30 minutes. Now need snack. And then back to the grind.

9:47 pm

34809 words. And I’m a slacker, totally managing not to respect my Internet ban. It’s Olbermann time, so I’ll be back later to hack on it some more.

10:12 pm

Boo. No Olbermann tonight. I’m sorry, but who can watch so much To Catch a Predator that they can actually watch a To Catch a Predator marathon? Distinctly creepy. Keith would have been much better. 2 pieces of cinnamon toast later (as close as I could get to cookies) and I’m back to the grind.

11:47 pm

36526 words. Still going slowly, as I’m trying to slog my way to a certain point in the story and advance some side-plots at the same time and I keep having to talk about things I don’t know about so I have to look up information on the Internet. Bah! But still, words are being written. And my main characters are even more miserable than before. Muahahahaha.
Now, off for a walk with the husband and a movie. Walk might, perhaps, lead to cookies. Muahahaha. And then maybe I’ll write more tonight, and maybe not. We shall see.

2:48 am

Post-walk, post-movie, and, um, post-cookies. Writing a little more before bed

3:48 am

38111 words! I’m getting a little tired of the story for the evening, but I’ll push on a little farther before I crash. I slept really late, so I’m not all that tired yet…

5:49 am

Bunches of writing and a few conversations with Christian later, and I am now at:

40196 / 50,000 (80.4%)

Good night Internets! (Er, good morning, but I’m going to bed, knowing that I, impossibly, am officially caught up as of now!!!)