Update: Or, I guess, there’s the “doesn’t work, but doesn’t break anything option…”

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.

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…