The Xpat Files

I voted!

2008-10-03T10:45:00.001+02:00

If you're an American living abroad and you want to vote, go here to get information about receiving your federal write-in ballot.

Dear International Herald Tribune print edition printed in Switzerland:

2008-09-27T10:23:00.007+02:00

If you have space in your print edition for a short blurb about Jet Man, you might want to mention that the Swiss Finance Minister had major heart surgery and was in a medically induced coma for two days and that it remains unclear when or if he will return to the government, all in the middle of the worst world financial crisis in decades.

Just sayin'.

Love and strange priorities,
Swissmiss

A confession

2008-08-30T09:37:00.007+02:00

It started out as a business relationship, someplace to concentrate on my writing, perhaps a way to meet fellow poets. But it started getting personal. I told a few stories about my children, I shared a few poems. I started spending more and more time there, neglecting other relationships. I'd save up experiences and stories to share there. I realized I was putting my emotional energies someplace else, but I can't give it up.

It's true. I have another blog.

This blog is clearly on life-support

2008-07-29T18:18:00.003+02:00

June 20? Really? My last post was June 20th? Maddy's comment down there ("why can't I see the countdown clock?") inspired me to at least post some random bulltets of update:

R. is back from his trip, which is why you can't see the countdown clock. I took it down.
We survived.
I had a few classic Great Moments in Parenting, but we survived.
I do not do well on continued sleep deprivation.
R. brought back fireman rain boots for Small Boy. He would wear them all day in 30 degree weather if I let him.
R. also brought back the most authentic little fireman suit I've ever seen. We're hiding it. Because if Small Boy saw it, we'd never get him out of it. I'm waiting for cooler weather.
Boychen has six teeth. Six!
Boychen isn't crawling yet but manages to scootch from here to there somehow.
When Boychen starts to crawl I am so. screwed.
These are really good.
Hey guess what? He's got another one of these in November! Oh joy!
These are really good.
This blog is clearly on life-support.

Sigh

2008-06-20T12:39:00.002+02:00

You know it is going to be a long day when you have taken a walk, finished with the zoo, eaten a happy meal and exhausted the McPlayland all before noon. And hey, check out the countdown clock in my sidebar. Oh yeah.

On the upside, I fit into a pair of pre-pregnancy summer pants today. Which is nice. Since it's summer.

Euro 08 comes to an end in Bern

2008-06-18T17:04:00.002+02:00

Well, Bern's part of playing host to the Euro 08 is over; from here on out we're not hosting any games anymore. Contrary to my concerns, it was really hardly an issue at all. On the three days we hosted the Dutch games the city was at capacity, but it was a friendly capacity. Once the Swiss team crashed out, the Bernese seemed to adopt the Dutch - staff at many restaurants were wearing Dutch jerseys and a lot of shops had "Hup Holland!" ("Go Holland!") banners up. But all in all I have to say the overall "Euro-phoria" was muted, to say the least.

Finding a fellow traveller

2008-06-11T15:04:00.000+02:00

Remember "gaydar?" The little bell that goes off in the heads of the gay and gay-friendly that makes you think somebody is part of the community, a fellow traveller? That little something? Do you think infertiles have something similar? (What would we call it? Inf-dar? Bar-dar? ART-dar?) Because I did the strangest thing this afternoon.

I hold my cards pretty close to the vest regarding the whole IVF-thing. Neither my family nor R's knows that Small Boy and Boychen are IVF/FET babies (though sometimes I think R's mom might suspect). Some of our good friends know - three we told during the process, people we'd been friends with for over a decade and who stood up for us at our US wedding; but Small Boy was one before I told Dutch Friend and two before I told Australian Friend. I don't mind people knowing, but I don't broadcast it. As I said, I hold my cards pretty close to the vest.

Today I was at a playgroup some of the expat moms have been trying to get off the ground forever and talking with a new woman; I had come into the conversation late and she and Australian Friend were talking about how hard twins would have been and we don't know how we would have done it. But then we all agreed that we would have done it because it is what it is, and you just do it. Especially twins with a first (successful) pregnancy - you don't have any basis of comparison and infants are just hard anyway. And then we all agreed that twins the second time around would be really hard and I said - to a woman I'd just met five minutes ago - that when we were trying to get pregnant with the Small Boy I was willing to risk twins with a two-embryo transfer but the second time around, with Boychen, we only ever considered single embryo transfers. It just slipped out of mouth with all the natural ease in the world.

And she said, that's what we're doing too.

Whoa.

Her child is an IVF baby too. We have different REs but they use the same lab and she knows Herr G, the Labmeister, too; we agreed he's a super-nice guy. (Did I ever mention that after my last transfer - the Boychen transfer - we hung around with Herr G chatting about cycling, the Tour de France, Lance Armstrong, and Fabian Cancellara? Well we did.) What a small world. And how strange that I would have picked that moment, with that woman, to say something that honestly I never introduce into conversation.

What do you think, fellow ART-ers? Do you think we have an "ART-dar?" Has yours ever tingled? And were you right?

Officially Swissally

2008-06-04T10:06:00.004+02:00

The boys' (I love saying "the boys" - who would have imagined I'd be saying "the boys?") Swiss passports and ID cards arrived (by registered mail). Small Boy is renewed and Boychen is official. Yay. (Well, Boychen was official at birth due to the whole Swissness of the Dada thing....but it's nice to have the documents.)

If I don't blog it, will it still happen?

2008-06-02T09:57:00.006+02:00

Here's something I haven't blogged. Bern is one of the host cities for the Euro2008 (that's the European Football [aka soccer] Championships). I can't begin to express the many ways in which this does not excite me, but I'll try:

I'm not a football fan. I didn't grow up playing it, I didn't grow up watching it, and I'm too old and too busy to get interested in a new sport now.
I don't like crowds. When I lived in Washington, DC, inauguration day was a nightmare. Protest times were a nightmare. Heck, high tourist season was a nightmare. People lost, taking up tables at my favorite restaurants, crowding the Metro, people standing still on the left-hand side of of escalators! Ack.
I don't like drunken crowds.
I hate lines.
The Old Town is being converted into a fan-zone.
I have to cut through the Old Town to get to several of my old stand-by playgrounds and other interesting Smal Boy places.
Plus, I just like to hang out in the Old Town.
The stadium is on the same tram line as Dr. Norwegian (our pediatrician).
The most convenient grocery store to shop in with two small children is directly next to the stadium.
There are, apparantly, fears of a Wurst shortage! (link via This Non-American Life)
The camp ground that has apparantly been booked out by the Dutch is on the same tram line as our Tagesmutter.
The camp ground that has apparantly been booked out by the Dutch is just upstream from one of my Small Boy hangouts.
Half of the games start at 8:45 pm and will end around 10:30; so the horn-honking car brigades will roll from 10:30 until....?
The Euro2008 will last for three weeks.
R will be gone for those exact three weeks: 1 week in Zurich (also a host city) and two weeks in the United States!
Could there be a worse overlap?

Seriously. If I ignore this, will it go away?

Finally, my long overdue post about getting the boys' their Swiss passports and a post that has something to do with being an expat!

2008-05-24T11:06:00.012+02:00

So. Forever ago we went through the process of getting Boychen his US passport and registering his birth with the US embassy. At the time, I said the Swiss story would follow soon. Life with two children and two procrastinating parents being what it is, "soon" turned into, um, five months but who's counting? Since both boys had passports they could travel on (in fact, if one possesses a US passport one is required to enter the US using that passport), we didn't feel rushed.

We needed to get a passport and national identity card for the Boychen and to renew them for Small Boy; the US passport is good for five years (so yes, my three year old is using a passport with a photo of him at ten weeks, which seems just the tiniest bit odd...I mean, do you have any idea how much a three year old does not look like his ten week old self?) but the Swiss identification both expired after three years. Since I took care of the legwork on getting the US documents I left the Swiss legwork up to R.

R called the Einwohnerdienste (that would translate literally as resident services - I can't think of a good colloquial term for that in English) to ask what we needed to do and to make an appointment. Yes, unlike at the US embassy we were able to make an appointment so we didn't have to take a number and wait there all morning with two small children. Switzerland 1- US 0.

To get the new passport and ID for Boychen, we needed the following documents:

Niederlassungsausweis - I have never known how to translate this. It's a one page document that basically confirms that R lives where he says he lives.
For children under 18 a birth certificate or the Familienbuchlein
A recent passport photo
And for a passport, the parents' travel documents (i.e. my passport and R's passport).
And in the case of Small Boy, who was renewing documents, the old ones.

These are standard Swiss documents; if you're here legally chances are there is no trouble getting your hands on these, though if you don't have a passport and you want one for your child, you'd have to apply for (and pay for) yours, too.

We took the boys to get passport photos taken; we had procrastinated so long that Boychen's photos were too old so we needed pictures for both of them. The new rule is that you're not allowed to smile in your passport picture, which was very disappointing for Small Boy as he loves to ham it up for a camera. But he followed directions and didn't smile. Boychen just sort of sat there like a lump.

On the day of the appointment R took the boys and the documents to the Einwohnerdienste; unlike at the US embassy, the presence of both parents is not required. Switzerland 2-US 0. So while R and the boys were dealing with Swiss bureaucracy, I sat in the sun and drank a coffee. All alone. Switzerland 3-US 0.

The appointment lasted about 15 minutes, unlike the 2 hours we waited at the embassy. Switzerland 4-US 0. Because of the registration system in Switzerland, the Einwohnerdienste has all the necessary information about the boys on file, so they printed out the completed application forms for R to review and sign. Unlike the forms DS-11 and DS2029. Switzerland 5-US 0. R signed the forms and paid a total of 146 Swiss francs for two passports and two national ID cards compared to the 176.40 Swiss francs we paid for Boychen's one passport and one registration of birth. Switzerland 6-US 0. The documents will arrive in about three weeks by registered mail. Switzerland 7-US 0. Oh, and we didn't have to bring a stamp. For those of you playing at home, that's Switzerland 8-US 0.

So why, after all this complaining, did I get the boys US passports at all? Because if we're on on holiday and a tsunami hits, or an earthquake, or some form of violent civil strive, the US is so much better at evacuating its citizens than Switzerland because Switzerland doesn't have military transport planes like a Hercules and the US does. So I'll be waving those little blue books at the Marines for all I'm worth, thank you very much. That's probably worth 8 points. Let's call it a draw then.

I am the best. mother. ever.

2008-05-23T14:37:00.004+02:00

Lunch. Green eggs and ham.

(Click here if you're not familiar with them.)

Yes, I'm alive, aka the briefest of updates.

2008-05-16T11:47:00.004+02:00

Some days there is not enough coffee in the world; nor are there enough hours in the day.

I've sent out some poems. Three of them came back to me like children who did not get into the college of their choice, and three are sitting in some editor's pile waiting their turn.

We're trying to get our sleeping household in order. As in everybody in their proper beds. Boychen did surprisingly well last night; but once again I have given birth to a son who wakes at 5:45. Good lord. If those two boys didn't resemble us and each other so strongly I'd suspect lab error. Seriously, how can R and I - for whom sleeping is an Extreme Sport - have produced these roosters crowing at the sun? Stupid farming genes.

The weather, at least, is lovely.

We bought Small Boy a new bicycle helmet because the last one vanished off the face of the earth and it is strictly forbidden to ride anything with wheels sans helmet and Small Boy was missing his Like-a-Bike so. We got him a Giro brand, like his mama. I'm a Giro girl 'til death - back in the day I cracked a few helmets but never a skull. Giro's been good to me.

Boychen will be six months old on Monday. I can't believe it. He can sit up unassisted for brief periods. He puts everything in his mouth. He's got two teeth. He is a happy child. He loves his brother. He covets the cat. He's eating baby food. I leave you with a picture:

Romanisch, Switzerland's fourth official language

2008-05-02T20:48:00.003+02:00

Switzerland has four official languages: German, French, Italian, and Romanisch (that's in order of the percentage of the population claiming each language as their first language). About one percent of the population speaks Romanisch; I doubt if it will survive my sons' lifetimes. Which is a shame, because it's always a shame when a language dies and because I think Romanisch is beautiful. I don't understand a word of it, but it's beautiful.

Now ne of these days I'll learn how to embed a YouTube video into a post. Today is not that day. If you click here you'll get a clip where you can here Romanisch (the big Steinbock - let's call in a mountain goat in English - is speaking Romanisch and the little one is translating into the local dialekt). I love the sound of Romanisch. I also love the Graubünden, the region this clip is advertising and the native home of Romanisch; it's my favorite region of Switzerland.

I'd like to learn some Romanisch one day.

Ah, the Belgians

2008-04-26T10:31:00.001+02:00

This might be the best! world! record! ever!

http://gizmodo.com/383936/belgian-students-break-mento+and+coke-world-record

Hat-tip to Husband for sending me the link.

Things I already knew

2008-04-10T18:45:00.003+02:00

This headline, for example. Even if you don't understand German you can probably figure it out. But here's a translation:

No Swiss quality by Swiss sperm.

The sub-headline informs us that in a study of 800 young Swiss men, more than half of them had sperm quality (including total quantity, mobility, and speed) under the international norm. There is at this point no explanation for this, but as for "speed" it's a known fact that Bernese Swiss in particular are slow. What's your excuse, Geneva?

Hat-tip to Husband for SMSing me the headline.

Dear FedEx Guy,

2008-04-09T13:13:00.002+02:00

Sorry about missing your delivery. I'm sure you suspected that somebody was home, what with Boychen screaming uncontrollably and Small Boy calling out "Hellooo? Hellooo?" after you rang the bell. You were quite patient, giving me a chance to come to the door, but between the screaming baby and the fact that I was still wet and not dressed from my extremely truncated and unsatisfying shower (see Baby, screaming) and the fact that Small Boy, who heaven help me still isn't potty-trained, had a dirty diaper it just wasn't gonna happen. Thanks for trying though.

Love and redeliveries,
Swissmiss

Poetry of witness for the internet

2008-04-08T12:07:00.008+02:00

I generally don't write poetry of witness. I'm not good at it, not good at mastering that control of outrage that keeps it from spiling over into shrill soapbox sputtering. The best poetry of witness (much of which is gathered in this excellent collection) is controlled and specific, understated even, and all the more powerful for the control. Think of a horse at full run. Now think of a horse being reined in, jerking at the bit, wanting to be at a full run. That's the kind of power good poetry of witness - good poetry, period - should have. In not good at reining in, especially in political poetry - I let go the reins and watch my words bolt across the fields. Nevertheless, I'm trying to push my limits as a poet, so here's a political poem written especially for the blogging format - I've incorporated into the poem links to stories and pictures about the events I'm writing about.

Is this a new way to use the internet in poetry or simply too clever by half? Does it weaken the poem; that is, do the links imply that I can't convey what I'm talking about without them? Really. I want to know what you think of this format.

***

Fifty Years in the Making

Flame of shame
is too obvious a rhyme,
but sometimes the obvious is true.
Sometimes the obvious sits in front of you
fifty years
waiting to be noticed
and when it is, pent-up energy sparks
a chain reaction
picked up by strangers
who don't speak your language
but understand every word
and send the signal on down the line.
We're the flame now
this conflagration of outrage
sending sparks across channels
and oceans
and to the roof of the world
where they wait for this burning
fifty years in the making.
No domesticated flame, this
no desecrated flame, this
just the fire of an outrage
fifty years in the making.

What I've been up to

2008-04-02T12:32:00.004+02:00

I've been a very bad blogger lately, I realize. I keep meaning to recommit to this blog and I keep not getting it done and I'm grateful that I have any readers left at all and that you say kind things when I throw up lazy posts involving pictures of The Boys. (A mother's entitled to be biased, but they are cute, aren't they?) I keep meaning to come back to writing in this space but at the moment most of my writing is in my notebooks.

For years I have been calling myself a writer while always finding excuses to keep it safe: writing in my journals, writing on my blogs, writing "for myself." I have been writing stories and poems since, literally, I could grasp a pencil. And I have always lacked the courage - for long and complicated reasons that no longer interest me but generally start with the phrase "my mother" - to throw my writing out into the world and see what happens. And for long and complicated reasons that do interest me, I'm suddenly finding myself wanting to do that. Really wanting to. Wanting to so much that it is a physical effort to hold back and wait, to not send immature poems out into the world to be crushed by the last late snow of spring.

I'm writing poetry again. Rather a lot and, even better, I'm actually revising it, crafting it, working. Really working. And I'm enjoying it so much. The work. The effort. I have a goal, and a plan, and a long thought out series of steps to get me from here to there. Step number one, of course, is to actually do the work, write the poems, revise the poems, tear them down and build them again. That is what I'm spending most of my free time doing these days - and since free time with two small children is hard to come by, the blog has taken a back seat. I hope to change this, but we'll see what time allows me to do. But right now I have to ride this wave of poetry and crash onto whatever shore it brings me to.

For the most part I'm not going to be posting most of the poems I'm working on, for a variety of reasons including the fact that there are journals that don't want to publish poems that have already appeared on line, even on a personal blog. But this is National Poetry Month and I am trying to write a poem a day in April. Draft poems. Very rough draft poems that I can come back to later and really work. I expect that a lot of these poems are going to be inspired by the 20 minute exercises in the back of this wonderful little book (because that's about how much time I have on a given non-babysitting R out of town day), and there will be useful poetry prompts here, too. I expect them to read as though they'd been written in twenty minutes, since most of them will have been. But they'll be sitting there in my journal to go back to later, and one or two of them might turn into something.

I will post the one I wrote yesterday, because even though I jammed it out in 15 minutes, I kind of like it. It was inspired by an exercise in Addonizio & Laux with the following instructions:
1. Write about writing
2. It's cold outside
3. It should have snowed by now but hasn't
4. Mention the time of day
5. Use the pronoun "we" as your speaker
6. Use the word "florid" in a way not ordinarily used.

So here it is.

The Clinic

We've nearly given up
trying to tell you how we feel,
trying to turn this messy truth
into a poem that would suit you.
We have filled pages
and are done with all that,
this record-keeping
of our florid failure to reproduce.
Night is falling
and though outside our window it is spring
where we are it is cold.
It is always winter here,
but it never snows.

Why Boychen will never learn to crawl

2008-03-30T18:31:00.002+02:00

Boychen doesn't get a lot of "tummy time" around here, certainly not two 10-20 minute sessions a day as recommended by many experts. I know about tummy time and I know why it's important. Now that babies are going to sleep on their backs, a practice which dramatically reduces instances of crib death, time on the belly is even more important to help them develop the skills and upper body strength that lead to rolling and crawling. And I try, dutifully putting Boychen on his belly on his very colorful and interesting playmat (courtesy of Australian Friend) daily. But Boychen hates tummy time and starts crying - really wailing - after about three minutes. No matter what toys I present him with, however much I lower myself onto the floor to get fact-to-face with him, no matter how much Mozart that playmat belts out, Boychen wails. Which I can be hard-hearted enough to disregard for the sake of his physical development but for one thing: Small Boy comes running, yelling "Mi bruder ! Mi bruder! Nay nay hor oof!!* He doesn't like that!" and starts to try to roll Boychen onto his back.

Which is totally interfering with Boychen's development but is kind of the cutest thing ever.

I hope Small Boy is always this protective of his chly bruder.**

* Translation: My brother! My brother! No no stop that!

**Translation: little brother

Newsflash: Swiss people have televisions!

2008-03-26T12:11:00.002+01:00

Dear Former Mayor Dinkins: (jump to the last line of the linked story for the money line)

As a resident of Switzerland may I inform you that we have televisions and newspapers too? I live in Switzerland, and the Swiss evening news followed the Spitzer story. Not as boorishly as US cable news, I've no doubt, but we here in Switzerland live in the heart of Western Europe, not on the moon.

Love and chocolates,
Swissmiss

As for the best review of the rest of the article, read this Bitch PhD post.

Is this the sort of thing I should keep social services from seeing?

2008-03-14T14:00:00.002+01:00

Presenting the new and improved Boychen

2008-02-29T18:32:00.004+01:00

I mentioned in my last post that Boychen has taken a turn for the cheeful. Here's proof.

The whole is greater than the sum of the parts

2008-02-25T12:48:00.004+01:00

When the storm clouds of post-partum depression started gathering, a confluence of events conspired to push me over the edge: Boychen reacted badly to his first round of immunizations and there was much crankiness; my milk supply seemed to drop and it's possible he was hungry; the weather took a turn for the cold and grey; we hit the height of the six-to-eight week night colic; and perhaps most importantly R returned to work full-time after an extended period of paternity leave, part-time paternity leave, and Christmas and New Years holidays; then one week after he returned to work, he spent three weeks at a course in Zurich. I would say it was a post-partum perfect storm scenario except that I've sort of vowed never to refer to a confluence of events as a perfect storm scenario. Still. It all sort of went wrong at the same time and once the ball of depression started rolling down that hill it excelerated with alarming alacrity.

By the same token, miraculously, when things started looking up, things started looking up at the same time: thanks to a series of herbal suppliments the milk supply is back up and Boychen seems more content; the weather has been delightful for weeks, these almost kitchy post-card picture days; the Deroxat (Paxil) is clearly doing its job; and Boychen, at just over three months old, has turned the corner from newborn to baby. Those first three months, when the baby is disorganized and struggling to adjust to life on earth, are over and things really have gotten better. Boychen naps. In the house. Without touching my body. He falls asleep fairly easily at night. He's much happier during his waking periods; he can clumsily grasp soft toys and shove them in the general direction of his face. He can be awake on my knee or in his bouncy chair for 30 or 40 minutes without fussing. This is approaching a miracle. It's been a wonder.

I'm enjoying my baby. He's a delight. Imagine that. He's a positive delight.

Nice to know it's not all in my head

2008-02-19T11:53:00.004+01:00

"You're doing better," Dr. Fantabulous said when I sat down in his office yesterday. It was a statement, not a question.

"I'm feeling much better," I replied.

"I only have to look at your face to see you're feeling better. I'm happy for you.* Are you seeing Dr. FeelGood?"

"Yes, and I'm taking the medication."

"Well, it shows."

* Actually he said "I'm lucky for you" but I know what he meant; it's a common mistake among German-speakers speaking English. In German the same noun, Glück, is used for luck and for happiness and the adjective glücklich can mean either lucky or happy. So when German-speakers turn around and speak English, they often use lucky and happy interchangeably. Later in the appointment we switched over to German because he said his English is no good first thing Monday morning. I love that we can do our appointments in either language, or, as usually happens, both.

Retail therapy

2008-02-17T11:23:00.003+01:00

I didn't want to do it; I've been putting it off. But I still don't fit into my pre-pregnancy clothes and as part of my effort to face the post-partum depression head-on I simply cannot go schlumping about in maternity clothes any longer. I am not naive enough to think that a new outfit and jeans that fit properly are the solution to my problems - post-partum depression is real and serious and cannot be solved with retail therapy and a hot bath - but it is a tiny piece of the puzzle. Catching a glimpse of my reflection and thinking "I can't believe I'm walking around looking like this." Dissatisfaction with the way I look. Mild embarrassment over wearing the same five (maternity) shirts over and over. It's certainly not the root cause of the problem, but it doesn't help.

So yesterday R took the boys on a stroller nap and I went shopping. I dread shopping. My size has crept up over the years and I have a hard time accepting that I am no longer twenty-five with a body that made guys walk across the bar and say "come dance with me." Or hang around taking forever to dance with me even though I thought I was sending out all sorts of hey-come-dance-with-me smiles (yeah, I'm talking about you , R!). And clothes in Switzerland are just expensive, and I'm hoping that I will, eventually, lose at least some of the baby weight; I hate to spend that kind of money on something I plant to shrink myself out of. But it had to be done. I'm not going to let the Paxil do all the heavy lifting; that's why I'm back to seeing Dr. FeelGood regularly, it's why R has found a few hours in his schedule to take Boychen during the week (on days Small Boy is at The Farm or with the Tagesmutter) so that I am completely child-free for an hour and a half, and it's why I'm forcing myself into social situations. And it's why I went shopping. The result? Four tops, a necklace, and one pair of jeans that actually fits.

It's a little thing, but it is nice to feel like I look...good.

Better living through pharmaceuticals

2008-02-13T17:22:00.004+01:00

I don't know exactly to what I should attribute the slight parting in the clouds but there is a slight parting in the clouds, the sort of parting that a hopeful person would say augers a change in the weather. Surely the Paxil* that I started taking a week ago is doing most of the heavy lifting though there is probably also a placebo effect as it's a bit early for the medication to really be making much of a difference. Then there is the fact that there has been a literal parting of the clouds: for the past week we've had about ten hours of sunshine a day, beautiful blue sky days with crisp temperatures of 6 or 7 degrees (Celcius). Unabashed good weather, ostentatiously beautiful days. I've been spending loads of time outside, getting away from the narrow Gasschens of the Old Town where the sun does not penetrate and which hold a chill well into the late spring. Walks along the river, up at the Rose Garden, even just kicking a ball with Small Boy around the Grosse Schanze which looms above the city and collects the sun. It helps, the sun, the tall blue skies, the fresh air. But as much as I would like to believe that a change in the weather can bring about a change in my weather, I know perfectly well that right now the Paxil is necessary.

I'm not entirely comfortable taking medication; there is enough multi-generational alcoholism in my family to lift an ordinary degree of caution to levels approaching paranoia in my case. But then again, I'm not at all comfortable with my three year old son telling me that it scares him when I cry, which is what happened two weekends ago, so for the time being the medication is most definitely the lesser of two evils. And I have to say, I feel better. I feel rational. I feel like I can find a way out of this snowstorm. I feel like it won't be this way forever. I didn't cry today, and I didn't cry yesterday, and I feel like I won't cry tomorrow.

Here's how I see it. I'm on Everest and a storm is blowing in, and if I need supplemental oxygen to make it back to base camp then baby, pass the tanks and hook me up. Because somewhere down there is base camp where my family is waiting.

* which goes by the name Deroxat in Switzerland

Three

2008-02-04T15:22:00.000+01:00

Small Boy turned three last Wednesday. We had a few of his playmates over for a party - I meant to invite at least two more friends over but couldn't get my act together to do it, which, judging from the chaos we had with just the four of them, may have been a good thing in the long run. Maybe less a party than a playdate with cupcakes and balloons, during which I discovered that my son does not like frosting. Really? A son of mine? How is that even possible? I mean, the only purpose to cakes and cupcakes is to serve as a conduit for frosting, right?

There was playing and running around and some sharing of toys and some less than good sharing of toys. Small Boy was serenaded in three languages - English, German and a solo in Dutch courtesy of Dutch Friend - and there were cupcakes with and without frosting. There were flowers, and presents, and my son turned three. After everybody left we had his favorite dinner - take out pizza with viele viele schwarze Oliven (lots and lots of black olives) - and at bed time he told me "thank you for my lovely birthday." Yes, he actually said lovely.

Three.

What's that song? Who knows where the time goes, who knows where the time goes.

Because things haven't sucked enough lately

2008-01-31T15:35:00.000+01:00

I got my period. Ten-and-a-half weeks post partum. Yeeha.

Random bullets of updates

2008-01-28T13:30:00.000+01:00

Boychen's daytime sleep situation is slowly getting better. Why, he's asleep right now. In the house. Stationary. (Well, sort of - I'm rocking his little chair with my foot. But hey. We're in the house.) I took a piece of advice out of Weissbluth and started instituting shorter periods of wakefulness between naps. Seems to help. The day naps are still short, but they exist. And did I mention we're in the house? Stationary?

Boychen is smiling more.

He rolled over onto his right side yesterday.

Small Boy showed some of the first signs of jealousy yesterday, invovling Bahdi (Grandma). She was, fairly enough, gaga-ing over Boychen smiles and Small Boy started getting all "look at me!" Also fairly enough.

We've taken Small Boy ice skating twice. He loves it. Post with pictures soon.

Saving the best for last, there seems to be a general concensus that I'm circling the drain of post-partum depression (PPD). I'm going back to see Dr. FeelGood and will probably keep a prescription for an SSRI in my back pocket.

UPDATE on the updates: That nap in the apartment lasted less than 30 minutes followed by 45 minutes pointless of rocking, swaddling, rolling, and heartbeat CDs followed by yet another expletive deleted walk. And even the walk was only mildly successful. What is wrong with this child?! Is he trying to kill me?

Bureaucracy American style part last, subsection one

2008-01-24T19:20:00.000+01:00

Boychen's Social Security card arrived today so the whole matter is closed and I can claim him as a dependant on my 2007 taxes. Yay.

Tea and sympathy

2008-01-22T16:40:00.000+01:00

I'm all sharp edges, the broken glass of sleep deprivation and the shards of a crying baby. I can't even begin to fit the pieces back together; I try instead to at least smooth off all the dangerous cutting points, hoping to make sea-glass out of this broken bottle.

I'm a loner by nature, more mama bear alone with her cubs than she-wolf raising them in a pack. It worked well enough - it worked wonderfully - when I was single, when I was childless - I loved being a loner and filling the four walls of my own apartment with imaginary worlds. It worked okay when it was just Small Boy and me, but I'm finding that being a loner with two kids yields none of the advantages of being a loner and all of the downside. I'm starting to feel like a bear at the zoo, pacing back and forth, back and forth, rather than a bear in Yellowstone with my 400 square-mile prowling grounds.

The sleep deprivation doesn't help. I'm drowning in long days and short nights. I'm losing all perspective and any patience I might have had. It's such a jumbled mess of tangled yarn. It wasn't supposed to be like this. So today I do something completely out of character: I call a friend and throw myself on her mercy, inviting myself and my two boys over to play with her two girls. Fortunately they're at home, fortunately they have no plans, fortunately she's been there and says "C'mon over!"

Her 4-year old daughter distracts my 3-year old Small Boy. Her 1-year old is a delight. Boychen is less cranky than ususal, sleeps in the BabyBjorn, seems distracted by the chaos around him, and Australian Friend serves me tea and soup and good fresh bread for lunch. I complain, and she sympathizes, and states the obvious: "It's hard!" Yes, thank you, it is. The sympathy is good and hearty, like the bread, and more nourishing.

I leave feeling sane, for today at least, and drive the long way home when I see that my sons have fallen asleep in the back seat.

While he was sleeping

2008-01-21T16:55:00.000+01:00

You have to look at the second to last one closely - check out the sign on that cluster of rocks on the right hand side.

Boychen, sleeping

2008-01-19T15:54:00.000+01:00

A break in the storm

2008-01-17T12:23:00.000+01:00

Today, perhaps sensing how close to the edge Mama is, Boychen pulls out all the stops to charm me. He falls back asleep after the 7 a.m. nusring session, allowing me to shower before noon. He gazes at me from his bouncy chair while I eat breakfast without having to wolf it down or eat standing up with a baby in the Tragetuch. He plays on the floor mat, swatting out at the dangling monkey and watching in awe as I pull down the elephant that dances back up on its retracting string.* He seeks out my face and locks on to my eyes on the changing table, pumping his fat little legs, trying to smile, making funny little noises and saying "Baaah!" and "Aoo." He cries, but normal baby crying, not Seventh Circle of Hell crying, and then falls asleep on my chest.

Is there anything sweeter than a baby falling asleep on your chest?

We go for a walk, because that's what we do, but a short one, because I am tired of walking and even though it's a lovely day all I really want to do is hang out at home, listen to NPR, and watch biathlon. So instead of walking along the river, I just curl briefly through the Old Town and come back to the quiet apartment.** And when we come home Boychen stays asleep in the stroller, letting me eat lunch and write this. He really is doing his best to charm me today, but I have to say: Boychen, you had me at "Baaah."

I know this is just a brief respite, a break in the storm, and that I'm still out in the snow a long way from my cozy hearth. But I'm grateful for this repreive and content to biouvac here and get some rest before heading back out into the snow and finding my way home.

UPDATE: When Boychen sets out to charm, he really sets out to charm. I have watched sunrise over the Grand Canyon, I have watched sunset on the Swiss Alps, but nothing beats a baby's first real smile.

* Thanks to Australian Friend for the loan. This floor mat is much better than the one we have from Small Boy. It even plays Mozart!

** Small Boy is at The Farm, and for the millionth time I have to say, Let us all praise retired grandparents who live on a farm 20 minutes away and who love to host their grandson.

Snowstorm

2008-01-16T20:49:00.000+01:00

The Boychen cries.

The Boychen cries and cries and cries until I feel like I'm lost in a snowstorm and can't see my way out of it and all I can think about, as the snow swirls around me, is how nice and cozy I was before I set out into this storm. Warm and safe at home by the fire with my little family of three, and I set out into this snowstorm by choice, ripping up all my comforts on an icicle wind.

He cries until I cry and think that we did, in fact, make a mistake; that all my ambivalence was well founded; that I've shredded my happy little family and tossed the pieces out into the winter wind; that we will never find a way to mend these four pieces; that we will never be happy again. He cries until I can't see through it anymore, until I can't remember if I love him.

He cries until I put him in the stroller and walk and walk and walk. I walk the streets of the most beautiful city in the world and see nothing. Without even looking up I walk past vistas that once made poetry pour out of me as easily as snow falling from the sky. I walk without thinking, I walk without direction, I walk without seeing. I walk until the Boychen sleeps.

When the Boychen sleeps I keep walking. I walk along the river, I walk past the embassy, I walk through the Old Town, I walk until I can hear something besides the sound of his cries. I walk until I look up. I look up until I see something. The Münsterturm keeping watch over the Old Town. A cherry-red tram reflected in the waters of the Aare. The slope of the Rosengarten. The cobblestones of the Old Town. The statue of Gerechtigkeit. I walk until I can see these things. I walk until I can breathe. I walk until I remember that I love him. Until this. Until this. I walk until this.

Bureaucracy American style, part last

2008-01-10T14:34:00.000+01:00

Boychen is officially a US citizen and able to travel! Just one week after signing the forms, Boychen's Consular Report of Birth Abroad of a Citizen of the United States of America and passport arrived in the mail. One week. I'm astounded, actually. The Social Security card will come in a separate post from the US; it took about a month, I think, with Small Boy so we're still waiting on that.

Boychen's passport is one of the new electronic passports with the data chip embedded in it, which frankly I'm not all too happy about. I'm one of those crazy privacy advocates who think it's a security concern and will be the person in line in front of you at immigration unwrapping her son's passport from its packaging of tin-foil.

My appologies in advance for any delay this might cause.

The morning after

2008-01-09T13:36:00.000+01:00

Waking up the morning after a colicky night - and yes, it's official, the Boychen is colicky - I have to scrape away the night before like a clean-up crew shovelling away the sludge that stays behind and fouls the house after a flood. Close my eyes. Breathe. Scrape. I walk Boychen to the hospital for his hip ultrasound and the cold morning air and fine drizzle help clear my mind. Breathe. Get the alpine air into my lungs. Let go of the night before.

In the waiting room Boychen is awake and content, pulling the entire room into his blue eyes. I murmur to him, play with his soft hair as long as a one year old's and as pretty as a girl's. The night before is gone now, left behind on the side of the road, and it's just the Boychen and me and I can see through the colic, past the colic, to the soft place that is my Boychen.

Getting ready for the ultrasound Boychen charms the nurse, holding her hostage with his eyes, his funny crooked little mouth - oh God I am dying for my first kiss from that crooked little mouth! - and his ernest expression. Waiting for the technician he is patient, staring around, waving his arms, accepting my kisses as his due. During the ultrasound he is skeptical, then suspicious, then alarmed and finally cries during the imaging of his left hip.

Then it is over. I quickly dress him - as quickly as one can dress a distressed seven-week old - and comfort-nurse him in the waiting room. I watch his eyes for the moment they flutter, roll back into his head milk-drunk, and then bundle him back into the snowsuit, the hat, the blanket, the stroller bag, and walk home again by a different tangle of streets than the ones that took me here. One tiny step of intention today, walking a new way, choosing a street rather than letting my feet mindlessly follow the same old path like migrating herds. At home Boychen sleeps in the stroller and I write by the dull grey daylight with a Mandelgipfeli - a croissant filled with sticky sweet almost paste - and a cup of coffee at my elbow.

It will pass it will pass it will pass. Every morning scrape away the night before and find my way back to the Boychen, the sticky sweet center of my Mandelgipfeli days.

Intention

2008-01-07T10:45:00.000+01:00

So I see some people are making their New Year's resolutions. I tried it myself last year and, as predicted, failed miserably; unless you count the conception, gestation and delivery of the Boychen as the physical challenge I waxed poetic about craving, in which case I succeeded beyond my wildest expectations.* But for the most part, the first two sentences of last year's New Years post summed me and my year up nicely: I am a resolution-maker in spite of my better judgment, and I am a resolution-breaker. And yet. And yet the new year rolls around and the empty pages of a new calendar carry me off like white wings. I am ever turning over a blank page and covering it with my scrawls. It is either hopeful or pathetic, I can never decide, how I continue to believe in the blank page of tomorrow.

And yet I regularly fail at the big ticket Resolution with a capital R. Partly it's human nature, I suppose - many people fail at the capital R resolution - and partly it's my own particular failing. Over the years I seem to have lost the ability to keep my eye on a long-term goal. I was good at it back in the day; I trained all year for a single bicycle race; I would grind my way up Firehouse Hill in October all the while thinking of the track in April. But somewhere along the line the distant goal on the far horizon became less compelling to me. Hence the zero marathons I've run in all my years of resolving to run a marathon. And with a new baby in the house I think this is a year I need to be particularly gentle with myself in the resolutions department. This year I'm leaving the Resolutions with a capital R on the side of the road.

I do, however, like the idea of having a theme for the year (as seen at Profgrrrrl). A theme for the year seems like a good way of inviting a particular quality into my life, a quality I feel to be lacking while leaving open the specific ways that might happen. Rather than detailed resolutions I'm thinking of more broad-brush intentions for the year (as seen at Scrivenings). In fact, my intention for the year is Intention. I don't know what my year is going to look like; I still can't see what kind of baby the Boychen is going to turn into - he's covered both easy and colicky in the first seven weeks of his life and right now is at the peak of his disorganized needy early infancy. He could go either way; he's evolving so fast that every morning I wake up to a different person. But I do know enough to know that life with a baby in the house means stiching stolen blocks of time together like a patchwork quilt. There is never enough of any one material to cover the bed; the best I can hope for is fitting the scraps together into a sunburst. Knowing that, I also know that I can't take on a project that requires large consolideated blocks of time. Not yet anyway. I'm not even sure I can take on a project that involves counting on the same block of time every week. Not yet anyway. I do know I am going to have scraps of time, yellow and orange and solid and patterned scraps of time to stitch together.

What can I do with such crazy quilt pieces of time? I don't think I can plan big. I know enough to know that this new small person will take the carefully constructed jigsaw puzzle of my day and sweep it to the floor. I know that he'll scribble on my blank calender days, dribble paint on my journal leaving only a tiny blank corner for me. I know enough to know that for months I won't know what any given day will look like other than that it will have sunrise and a sunset. So I know that I cannot plan big. But I can plan deep. I don't know how many minutes a day I will get and I don't know how I want to spend them - writing poetry? catching up on sleep? photography? playing with my sons? - but I know if I spend them with intention I'll be spending them well.

I don't know if I want to run a marathon or publish a poem or play with my children this year. I just know I want to be present in my life. Those minutes I get here and there, I want to live them with intention. That's all.

That's everything.

* At the end of my labor - maybe 9 centimeters dialated, unmedicated, and battered by waves of contractions like so much flotsam and jetsam on the open sea - I managed to grunt out to R: "It takes a guy like Lance Armstrong 47 minutes to climb L'Alp d'Huez. I can do this for another 20." Yes, in labor. Seriously. Lance Armstrong. I know. I am such a dork.

A new favorite building

2008-01-04T17:55:00.000+01:00

I found this building on a walk this afternoon. Boychen was being a crankypants so I didn't have a lot of time to stop and take pictures but I'll definitely be going back here with my camera.

Bureaucracy American style, part three

2008-01-03T17:25:00.000+01:00

You can find parts one and two here and here.

R and I took the Boychen and my stack of original documents to the embassy today to complete the application process for Boychen's registration of birth, passport, and social security number. Because I had mailed the application materials for advance review, all we had to do was sign the forms in the presense of a consular official and pay.

It took two hours.

US Citizen Services works on a first come first serve basis; we were number 14. Somehow, I was under the impression that because I had taken advantage of the opportunity to have everything reviewed and approved in advance that our application would be expedited, that since all we had to do was sign and pay we'd be in a different line. Basically, I thought that since we had made their jobs easier and shortened the wait time for everybody by sending in the forms in advance that we'd get preferential treatment. In fairness, nothing on the embassy website said this but the phone call I got on Friday certainly left me with this mistaken impression. Or maybe I was just kidding myself. It would certainly make sense: to encourage people to send in the forms in for review so all the problems are solved in advance and you're not wasting everybody's time at the counter not knowing your husband's social security number, not knowing if your daughter has a social security number, and not having your daughter's birth certificate with you (yes, I'm talking about you Number 10) send those of us who used the mail preview option to the front of the line. Over time, more and more people would do this, wait times would go down, embassy employee's jobs would be easier, and there would be fewer complaints and grumbling people in the waiting room. But that's not the way it works, and we had to wait a very long time just to pay and sign.

But pay and sign we finally did. The registration of birth and passport will arrive in the mail in a couple of weeks - in the envelope that I had to pre-stamp. How cheap is that? Seriously. If you want to charge me for the postage just add it to the cost of the application but don't make me stamp my own envelope, that's just insulting. As an American living abroad I'm required to file income taxes and depending on income pay taxes and males are required by law to register for the draft even if they've lived their entire lives abroad (but cannot automatically pass on their citizenship). The least they could do in return is buy me a freaking stamp.

The year in review

2007-12-31T19:22:00.001+01:00

I did this last year and was reminded to do it again this year when I saw it over at Postcards from the Mothership . Here's how it works. To get your blog year in review, take the first sentence from the first post of each month.

Here's what my blog year looked like:

I'm a resolution-maker in spite of my better judgment. Sorry for the lack of posting, but everybody is sick over here (even the grandparents!) and I'm just trying to keep my head above water until Thursday when we do transfer. According to my Highly Placed Source within the Swiss government: "the swiss army 'invaded' lichtenstein today. A company of swiss iinfantry (about 170 men) took a wrong turn during a 25 K training march and 'invaded' Lichtenstein. No casualties or prisoners are reported." I love purses. Remember this "match made in heaven?" 10. You think doing a top ten list a la David Letterman is still funny. Could any of my readers out there recommend a children's book about bringing home a new baby? I think of it more as changing apartments, since we're staying in the same building, but I guess it is actually moving since although we're only going 30 meters up the street we will be hiring - and paying - movers (because yes, we have that much stuff and you can be sure I won't be lifting any of it at almost 26 weeks pregnant). We're in the new apartment. After two years of improvising, or just plain doing without, R and I ordered curtains custom-made for our bedroom in the new apartment. Hm. Mausi kindly awarded me a purple lion for powerful words.

That's a pretty good representation of the year, actually. It makes no sense, was completely disjointed, and not a lot happened but for the highlights of Boychen and the new apartment.

How about you? What did your blog year look like?

Housekeeping

2007-12-31T15:41:00.001+01:00

Over the next few days I'm finally going to update my blogroll. I've blogs listed I no longer read; blogs that have moved; blogs that have gone belly up; blogs that have gone password protected; and I've been reading a lot of blogs that I never listed. I'm going to do away with my categories, except for the expats and the Swiss stuff, and list everybody alphabetically under something along the lines of "all the other blogs I read."

So for the next few days my blogroll might be a mess, incomplete and/or riddled with errors and duplicates but bear with me, I'm working on it.

Bureaucracy American style, part two

2007-12-28T17:12:00.000+01:00

The US Embassy called today to let me know that the application materials for Boychen's US Passport, Social Security card and Consular Registration of Birth pass muster and we can come in to complete the process anytime during opening hours. The embassy is closed Monday through Wednesday of next week, but seems to be open Thursday and Friday, so maybe we can take care of this by the end of next week. Yay!

And the cold I have must be even worse than it feels, which is pretty awful, because at the end of the phone call the woman said "and Gute Besserig" which is Swiss for get well soon. So I guess I sound like crap.

Next step, Swiss passport and national ID card for the Boychen.

Hm, and probably for me, too. I'm eligible and I've been meaning to do it. It would be time.

Presenting the BEST! CHRISTMAS! PRESENT! EVER!

2007-12-28T10:31:00.001+01:00

From the grandparents. Could Small Boy be any happier?

The ghost of Christmas kitsch exorcised?

2007-12-26T13:41:00.000+01:00

For Small Boy's first Christmas R and I started a tradition of getting him a Christmas ornament for the tree each year. Since he was almost one year old that first Christmas, he was old enough to pick out his own and he's picked his own ever since. This is a lovely tradition in theory, but in practice, if you stay true to the "you can pick your own" idea, it sometimes ends up looking like this:

or this (yes, that's a trailor home. It says "Home is where you hook up"):

or this:

This year, Small Boy chose this one:

A massive downscaling of the kitsch factor, but still, could Small Boy have taste less like mine? Me, I like a nice delicate glass ball, perhaps frosted sky blue, with just a hint of silver sparkle, or plain etched glass. Really, if I were stupid rich I'd rent a studio apartment just so that I could put up my own perfect tree every Christmas.

This year Small Boy was old enough to help us decorate the tree. Last year helping involved his bringing us the ornaments and we would hang them. This year, he was able to hang the ornaments on the lower branches. This of course means that our tree is never going to find itself in Martha Stewart Living or House Beautiful; it's a bit...haphazard, shall we say. At least he clustered all the kitsch together in one place.

Sorry about the funky formatting; I've tried to fix it about ten times and I give up now. Maybe I'll come back in a few days to make it look pretty, because I'm really obsessed with that sort of thing, but I can't take it any more right now.

The belated birth announcement card

2007-12-23T08:45:00.000+01:00

We finally got our act together and ordered birth announcements, which arrived this week.

Your children are not your children.
They are the sons and daughters of Life's longing for itself.
They come through you but not from you,
and though they are with you yet they belong not to you.
You may give them your love but not your thoughts.
For they have their own thoughts.
You may house their bodies but not their souls,
for their souls dwell in the house of tomorrow,
which you cannot visit, not even in your dreams.

Eure Kinder sind nicht Eure Kinder.
Es sind Söhne und Töchter der Sehnsucht des Lebens nach sich selbst.
Sie kommen durch Euch, aber nicht von Euch,
und obwohl sie mit Euch sind, gehören sie Euch doch nicht.
Ihr könnt ihnen Eure Liebe geben, aber nicht Eure Gedanken,
denn sie haben ihre eigenen Gedanken.
Ihr könnt ihrem Körper ein Heim geben, aber nicht ihrer Seele,
denn ihre Seele wohnt in Haus von morgen
das Ihr nicht besuchen könnt, nicht mal in Euren Träumen.

Bureaucracy, American style

2007-12-17T10:06:00.003+01:00

Or how to get a US passport for a child born abroad, round two.

The requirements remain annoyingly onerous, but the US Embassy - at least in Bern - seems to have improved the process of registering the birth and applying for a passport and Social Security card since I went through this almost three years ago with Small Boy. I still need to provide Boychen's birth certificate, international version ("Extract of the Birth Registry Issued in Pursuance of the Convention signed at Vienna on September 8, 1976"); my passport; R's passport; and a copy of our marriage certificate. R and I were married in the US so I can just provide our license. Had we been married abroad I would need to request "Extract for the Marriage Registry Issue in Pursuance of the Convention signed at Vienna on September 8, 1976." Because only one of the Boychen's parents is a US citizen (that would be me), I need to provide evidence of my physical presence in the US for at least five years, two of which were after the age of 14.* This can be done through school records, tax returns, pay stubs, or the like. I just happen to have every report card I've ever gotten from Kindergarten through graduate school, so I'll be using those just like I did with Small Boy.** I still need to fill out but not sign form SS-5 for the Social Security number, form DS-11 for the passport, and Application for Consular Report of Birth Abroad form DS-2029. I stil lneed to provide two color passport photos with a plain white background and a maximum head size of 3.5cm and a minimum head size of 2.5 cm.*** I still need to go in person, with my infant child and non-citizen spouse, to complete the process.****

Where they seem to have improved the process is by sending you, upon request, an application packet with the necessary forms (no more searching and downloading! no more filling them out at the embassy while your baby cries!), two pages of instructions, and a sample completed form DS-2029. You can then fill out all the forms at home and send them, along with the passport photos and photocopies of the relevant documents, back to the embassy. Embassy staff will review the documents and contact you if there are problems. Once they have reviewed the application packet and have determined that everything is in order, only then do you go in person with your child (required by law) to the embassy to complete the process - which at that point involves signing the forms in the presence of a consular official and paying a total of 176.40 Swiss francs (US $147).*****

This preview by mail is a major improvement, since you are required by law to bring your minor child with you when you apply for a passport. It's a serious pain to go to the embassy with your child and non-citizen spouse during the work-week only to be told your passport photos are wrong and you have to come back another time. Or to be sent away from the desk repeatedly because something was wrong on your form DS-2029. So yay US Embassy in Bern. A change for the better.

Photos have been taken, documents have been copied, and I hope to make it to the Post in time to send off my packet for review today. Getting Boychen's passport, step one, has certainly been easier than getting Small Boy's was. With the holidays coming up, meaning the embassy will probably be closed for two weeks, I don't expect to actually get this done before the new year, but we'll see.

Coming tomorrow: Bureaucracy, Swiss style.

* If the law doesn't change, this means that if the Boychen lives his whole life in Switzerland and has a child one day, he will not be able to pass on his US citizenship. Bastards.

** Actually, wouldn't simply showing them Small Boy's registration of birth suffice, since it proves I've gone through this rigamarole successfully once already? But that would be too easy.

*** If you live in or near Bern and you need US passport photos for an infant, save yourself some bother and just go to FotoDany on Waisenhausplatz. They know what they're doing.

**** If only one parent appears, the non-appearing parent needs to provide a notarized letter of consent and a copy of a valid signed passport. This is so that I can't give Boychen US citizenship without R's consent.

***** Amazingly, the price has not gone up since I did this with Small Boy.

Continued in part two, part three, part last, and part last subsection one.

Love is in the air

2007-12-15T15:42:00.000+01:00

It's here, it's here! The day I wait for all year is finally here! My 2008 Abfallkalender has arrived. Oh Abfallkalender, every year I fall in love with you all over again.

Hee hee - political humor

2007-12-13T15:29:00.000+01:00

R just forwarded me this:

(Those are the first names of all the Bundesrat members; Christoph is Christoph Blocher)

You need to have seen this SVP flyer to fully get the joke.

More Swiss politics: SVP goes into the opposition

2007-12-13T15:13:00.000+01:00

I see via Global Librarian that Frau Widmer-Schlumpf did indeed accept the nomination to the Bundesrat and in response to that the SVP basically threw her and Samuel Schmid out of the party. So the SVP is not (by their own design) in the cabinet any longer and has gone into opposition. Blocher is no longer in the Parliament but he is surely not leaving the Swiss political scene. Schmidt and Widmer-Schlumpf are in the cabinet without a party affiliation.

This is unprecedented.

It's also starting to hit a bit close to home. It's hard to say why without ripping off the veil of anonymity but R's job has something to do with somebody involved in this whole mess. His job is secure, as far as we can see, but it'll probably get weird and stressful around the office in the near future.

Blocher abgewahlt!

2007-12-12T10:47:00.001+01:00

I know, I know. There is a labor and delivery story to tell, the counting of small fingers during the middle of the night nursing sessions, the oh! my! this is a gassy little baby complaints to make, the astounding pace of his weight gain to marvel over (born 3390 grams, three weeks later he is 4 kilos with multiple chins - perhaps that helps explain why I'm exhausted and eating 17 times a day?), the mystery of a whole new person to explore. I know, there is all that to write and I try, but I'm going to bed thirty seconds after the Small Boy these days and when I sit to think about these things, about the Boychen, it all disappears like early morning fog burning off with the sunrise. It's all in there, somewhere, in the incoherent bits and pieces in my hand-written journal. I'll get it out into something, something, eventually.

For now I can give you this: Swiss politics. Christoph Blocher, the leader* of the Swiss People's Party (SVP) - the wonderful people who brought you these flyers - has been voted out of the seven-member Bundesrat (Executive Council, or cabinet). Elected in his place with 125 votes is Eveline Widmer-Schlumpf, an SVP member from the Kanton of Graubundin about whom I know nothing. Members of the Bundesrat are not elected by the general public, they are elected by members of the Swiss Parliament (there is a little primer on the Swiss Parliament in English here) - this means that the Parliament, where the SVP holds the most seats (but not a majority), voted out Blocher - probably the most well-known and certainly the most controversial politician in Switzerland - and replaced him with a different member of his party. So the SVP still holds two of the seven seats in the Bundesrat; they cannot reasonably argue that the all-important "concordance" (cooperation, congeniality) has been broken or that the SVP, as the most popular political party, has been deprived of a seat in the Bundesrat. It was a vote against Blocher and against the hard-line politics of the Zurich wing of the SVP (Samuel Schmid, the other SVP member of the Bundesrat, who is far more moderate than Blocher, was re-elected easily).

The SVP had threatened to go into opposition if Blocher wasn't re-elected to the Bundesrat; I can't see how they can realistically do that, though, seeing as how two of their members were voted into the Bundesrat. The Parliament is reflecting the will of the voters - the SVP won the most votes in the last election and they are entitled to two seats in the Bundesrat. The Parliament has given them that. They just haven't given them Blocher. So what is the SVP to do? At the moment - I'm writing this half an hour after Blocher results came in - the SVP is talking about how Frau Widmer needs to decide if she's going to accept the position (read: SVP party members behind the scene are pressuring her hard to turn down the position so that there is still a chance to elect Blocher).

Over the past few weeks cracks have appeared in the SVP internal party politics. The Zurich wing of the party seems to have gone a step too far in trying to enforce its version of the party line on party members. The hard-liners might have over-reached. The SVP, founded 100 years ago as a farmers' party - conservative, yes but hard-line xenophobic and isolationist no - the SVP is fighting for its soul.

This could get interesting.

* He is not the official party chief any more than George W. Bush is the actual party head of the Republican Party but Blocher is the leader of the SVP in the same sense you'd say Bush is the leader of the Republican party.

UPDATED TO ADD: Swiss Guy has a much more detailed post on the situation here.

A clarification

2007-12-09T12:09:00.000+01:00

Dear Small Boy,

When I wrote "may you always be willful," it was not meant to apply to dinner time. Or bedtime. Or to the wearing of hats on cold days. It was meant in a Lance Armstrong on L'Alp d'Huez, Roger Federer on grass, Rick Hoyt on Heartbreak Hill* triumph of the human spirit kind of way.

So eat your dinner and go to bed.

Love,
Mama

* I originally saw this video via margalit. Watch it. Get some tissues and watch it.

Purple prose

2007-12-03T13:32:00.000+01:00

Mausi kindly awarded me a purple lion for powerful words. The idea is for recipients to list three things they think are necessary for powerful writing and then to pass the award along to five fellow bloggers. So what do I think is fundamental to powerful writing? Unrelenting honesty. Fearlessness in the face of the uncomfortable truth. And allowing, as Sy Safransky writes, "some room on the page for everyone who isn't us; for how much unspeakable suffering there is on this ublelievably beautiful planet; for the shining mystery at the heart of things."

I think most of my NaBloPoMo posts fell far far short of that (most of my posts do, but it's the landmark on the distant horizon I aim for, my true north), but it's nice to get points for sheer perseverence. I'm a great believer in the virtue of sheer perseverence, you know, so I'm honored to take my purple lion and to pass it on to the following five bloggers who are all much further down the road to the shining mystery than I.

In Search of Desert for refusing to click on "post" until she's satisfied.

My Topography for unrelenting honesty and beautiful prose.

Stepping Stones for transcending prose.

Southern Infertility for having the courage to make an intangible loss tangible.

Phantom Scribbler (though she's on a bit of a sabbatical at the moment) for being able to write like this while fielding questions like this from Adorable Offspring.

Bullets of NaBloPoMo wrap-up

2007-11-30T10:53:00.001+01:00

29 posts.
28 days.
2 days missed.
But I had a good excuse.
At least I think so.
Most of the posts were really uninteresting and appallingly short.
But this one was sort of good.
Anybody else think it's interesting that I went into labor the day after I wrote "I wanted to write about how it's taken forever to get here but that doesn't matter anymore either. Because it may have taken forever to get here, but I'm here."
I almost wrote in that post "It's taken me forever to fall in love with this baby, but I am in love with this baby at last" but some sense of propriety made me delete it.
Although my ambivalence about changing everything has not been kept entirely secret, neither had it been so clearly stated and seeing it so starkly written made me reach for the delete key.
But it had been written and it had been thought.
And The Boychen, lodged just beneath my heart, heard it.
He heard me think "I'm in love with this baby at last."
And he said "Then I'm coming now!"
And he came.
Three weeks early.
On the day of his choosing.
Like his big brother.
My sons are willful that way.
May you always be willful my sons.
And may you always do great things on the day of your choosing.

Word for today:

2007-11-29T15:49:00.000+01:00

Swaddling. Oh how I love you.

Things I'm stressing about that I'm going to have to let go of

2007-11-28T17:30:00.000+01:00

that one will wake the other
that one will need! me! desperately! when I'm in the middle of something with the other that can't be interupted (diaper change, nursing)
that somebody will feel neglected
that I will always have somebody's food and/or drink on my clothing
that I will never find the mental silence to write a poem again
that I can't be all things to all people

And here he is...

2007-11-27T11:17:00.000+01:00

What I'm doing when I'm not having a baby

2007-11-26T12:09:00.001+01:00

Reading this book.

Coveting this one.

Writing in this one.

Revisiting this one.

I dropped another day in NaBloPoMo but really, I gave birth a week ago. To a whole new human being.

Home

2007-11-24T14:23:00.000+01:00

Discharged today. Home. Total chaos, but good.

FYI, Boychen left the hospital weighing 3470g - a gain of 80 grams during the period where infants typically lose up to 250 grams. Maybe I'll get that chubby baby after all.

Boys

2007-11-23T14:51:00.000+01:00

Small Boy has already said "I love you Baby." Then again, he also said "Hor uf Boychen! Hor uf!" (Stop [actually used Boychen's proper name]! Stop!" so, you know.

(Here's an interesting aside. So far Small Boy seems to address The Boychen predominantly in English. Huh? What made him decide that? He is a linguistic mixed salad, as a former teacher of mine used to say.)

You haven't lived until...

2007-11-22T14:17:00.000+01:00

... you've heard a Swiss guy try to read Fox in Socks aloud!

Hair

2007-11-21T14:48:00.000+01:00

Did I mention that Boychen has a full head of hair at least an inch long all over? Seriously. The boy came out needing a haircut. And whereas Small Boy is fair of hair, Boychen is dark like his Dada.

27 minutes

2007-11-21T14:40:00.000+01:00

I’ve got my computer in the hospital with me but only intermittent Internet access; R and I are sharing a network card and he’s got it in Zurich with him now. Does it count for NaBloPoMo that I’m typing this on Tuesday and will post it Wednesday when I get my crack at the network card? (R skipped Zurich Monday, went Tuesday [today], will skip half of Wednesday and probably all of Thursday and then go back to Zurich on Friday. Probably. This works fine for me and the Boychen since we’re just hanging out in the hospital all week anyway; but Small Boy is getting shuttled between home and The Farm more than we had hoped would happen.)

So far Boychen is a sleeper but they always are the first day or two so we’ll see if that changes. And early babies tend to be big sleepers, too, although thanks to those 27 minutes past midnight he is not, technically, preterm. Monday, the day he was born, marked 37 weeks and 0 days – medically, the definition of a full-term pregnancy. Had Boychen arrived just an hour earlier – just before midnight instead of just after – he would have arrived in the 36th week of pregnancy and technically would have been considered pre-term. Clearly a matter of an hour is meaningless in terms of his physical development – the closer you get to the 37 week mark the more arbitrary a line it seems, really. In Boychen’s case – will he emerge just before or just after midnight? – it was a truly arbitrary marker but not one without meaning. Had he arrived just an hour earlier, had he arrived any time on Sunday, the hospital would have been obligated to classify him as a pre-term baby, which in turn would have obligated them to run a few additional tests on him and to monitor him more closely and more frequently during our hospital stay.

Those 27 minutes – which were completely meaningless in terms of in utero development – put him on the other side of the line and gets us out additional testing requirements.

Random, no?

And yeah, how huge is he for 37 weeks? Had we gone to 40 we’d have been looking at C-section for sure. As it was…well, I’ll attempt the labor and delivery story when I can face it. But let me just say for now that I’m a good mother, and I rock at breastfeeding, but apparently I just suck at labor and delivery.

The Boychen is here

2007-11-19T16:53:00.000+01:00

This morning at 00.27 am The Boychen arrived. Three weeks early, 3390 grams (7.5 pounds), 49 cm (19 inches), healthy and beautiful.

I am in love.

Again.

More later.

Hmmmm.....

2007-11-18T11:50:00.001+01:00

I think my water broke. The midwives want to see me. This could be the end of NaBloPoMo for me....

:-)

Thoughts for a Saturday when my husband is home and I can think again

2007-11-17T16:28:00.001+01:00

R is home for the weekend and I've got some breathing room. I wanted to write something about how different this pregnancy has been from my first. By "different" I mean both physically unpleasant and emotionally unsettling but also just different; frankly, I'm happy to see it drawing to a close. A friend of mine in the States has been pestering me for a belly shot and it occurred to me that I don't have any. I don't seem to have a single picture of me pregnant this time around. R and I are going to fix that tomorrow, but I think a good sum up of how differently I've worn these two pregnancies - or how differently they've worn me - is that the first time around I had studio portraits taken - and yes, some of them are the obligatory nude pregnancy photos and I have to say they're all fantastic - and this time around I don't even think we snapped off something with the digital camera. I'm sure there is something very telling in that, but I'm equally sure that whatever it says doesn't really matter. The baby. The baby matters.

Or I wanted to write something about how at some point in the last month wee faeries have apparantly visited my son in the night and turned him into a full-blown boy. One day last week in the park he went tearing away from me and suddenly I saw how very different he's become, different in some untouchable way. More sure of himself, more rambuctious, more...I would say more there, but he has always been so very there. But he's older and more confident and there was a moment last week when I saw a flash of something I'd never seen before and I wondered where it had come from and just how long it had been there and had I missed it before? Or had it really just happened, just that day, just in that moment did I catch out of the corner of my eye the very instant in which a page in my son's life turned? Did I catch, just once, the very moment he grew?

Or I wanted to write how Thursday night in the dim light from the nightlight I turned to him in bed - because of course he sleeps with me when R is away - and he looked like a baby, curled on his side one hand on his neck, sucking his thumb. He could have been nine months old, or nine days old. He bends the lines of time, growing in circles it seems, swinging from boy to baby and back again.

I wanted to write about how today is my mother's birthday again and about how it doesn't matter anymore. I wanted to write about how it's taken forever to get here but that doesn't matter anymore either.

Because it may have taken forever to get here, but I'm here.

HPSP: Day five...

2007-11-16T19:00:00.000+01:00

... is over. That's all there is to say about today. Except that my boy is so cute in a snow-suit (but the one we have is too small). He is the most outdoors-y boy ever and I don't know how I'm going to manage that when it's zero degrees out and I've got a newborn.

Actually the newborn we can bundle just fine. I'm the one freezing my butt off out there.

One week of Heavily Pregnant Single Parenting down, one to go. I'm off to take a bath.

HPSP: Day four...

2007-11-15T19:08:00.001+01:00

... kind of sucked.

But Small Boy loves the snow (we got just the tiniest bit of snow today) and watching him race across the snow-covered grass shouting "Wheeeeeeee!" sort of salvaged some of the day. Well, it salvaged rather a lot, actually.

HPSP: Day three...

2007-11-14T19:59:00.000+01:00

... brought to you by my in-laws who have Small Boy for his regular Wednesday visit to The Farm.

I spent most of the afternoon hunched over the loom and have finally reached the actual weaving stage of weaving this baby blanket. I've always been slow at the mechanics of dressing my loom (warping the loom, threading the heddles, slaying the reed, and fine-tuning the tension) even without an enormous belly getting in my way, but boy the belly really slowed me down this time. Even under the best of circumstances, dressing the loom for a project of any size, say for example a 30"x30" baby blanket, will easily take me as long, if not longer, than actually weaving the project off. It's frustrating, and there must be more efficient ways to do what I do, or maybe I just don't weave often enough to develop a good fast repetative motion. At any rate, the grunt work is done and now I can move on to the rhythm of throwing the shuttle.

In baby news, I had an appointment with Dr. Fantabulous this morning - 36 weeks 2 days. Baby is continuing to grow, I have ample amniotic fluid, urine dip and blood pressure nothing to worry about, see you in two weeks. I need to think about if I want to be tested for Group B Strep (testing isn't standard here and we didn't do it in the Small Boy pregnancy) at my next appointment. Basically my chances of losing a baby to a GBS infection (in Switzerland it's 6 fatalities per 80,000 births though rates of non-fatal complications are of course higher) are about equal to my chances of going into anaphylactic shock - and thus endangering my life and the baby's - as a result of the IV penicillan I'd be given should a swab turn up positive. I have an allergy to erythromycin - this always confuses the heck out of my doctors because erythromycin is the drug of choice for people allergic to penicillan and they always think I've got it backwards - and although I've never experienced and allergic reaction to penicillan I also haven't taken penicillan in about 20 years. This would be a pretty sub-optimal time to discover that I've developed a cross-allergy/penicillan sensitivity in the intervening years. I didn't give not getting the test a second thought in the Small Boy pregnancy and I can't figure out why I'm less certain this time around.

Ach je! I hate making decisions like this.

Heavily pregnant single parenting: Day two...

2007-11-13T15:50:00.000+01:00

...was longer. 'Cuz, you know, I actually had Small Boy today. And because I'd forgotten that I don't sleep particularly well when Small Boy shares a bed with me. And because last night at about 22:30 he woke up in tears, inconsolable, for reasons neither he nor I were ever able to understand. We called R in Zurich and after much "Choem hai! Choem hai!" from the Small Boy (come home! come home!) R was able to settle him down with a song (I ghörre äs Gloggli das lütet so nätt/Dr Tag isch vergange itz gang i ins Bett/Im Bett tuen i bäte und schlafe de i/Dr lieb Gott im Himmel wird ou bi mir si!)* He then came back to bed with me and slept the rest of the night, but he seemed restless.

I owe getting through the morning today to the kids' corner at our local bakery/cafe and open play time at Gymboree.

I owe getting through the afternoon to our secret unconventional way of tricking Small Boy into taking an afternoon nap (R, you know what I'm talking about. As for the rest of you it just might be too embarrassing to blog, even anonymously) and to the in-laws who are giving him dinner and a sleep-over.

I'm getting a lot of help these days. People who know me know how hard it is for me to ask for help, or to accept unsolicited offers of help. I'm almost feeling guilty over how much help I'm accepting but knowing how much Small Boy loves his grandparents makes it easier to put him on the train. That and I've noticed that since I've started accepting more help the frequency of my contractions has gone from "Uh, yeah, that's not good" to "Eh, whatever" and I haven't had another spotting incident. So I'm going to keep accepting help. Because 36-weekers do well, but 38-weekers do better.

* rough translation:

I hear a bell it chimes so sweet
The day is over now I'm going to bed
In bed I'll pray and then fall asleep
Dear God in heaven will watch over me.

Heavily pregnant single parenting: Day One...

2007-11-12T20:21:00.000+01:00

...was not too bad. Mostly because Mondays are Tagesmutter days, so my day with Small Boy involved getting him to eat breakfast (which is actually turning into a bit of an issue around here - any breakfast ideas for a three-year old?), getting him dressed and out the door with M&M (the Tagesmutter and her daughter, who came here to pick him up. How good do I have it that I didn't even have to drop him off this morning?), then eight hours later giving him dinner (I'm going to confess it: IKEA meatballs. He loves those things, and he's not alone) and putting him to bed. (My bed, that is. When R is away it doesn't occur to Small Boy for a second that he's actually going to sleep in his own bed. We go through the bed-time routine as usual; I get him into his PJs; and then for story time he walks to his bookshelf, grabs two books, and shuffles confidently down the hall to MamaDadaBed. Whatever. At this point, with two weeks of Heavily Pregnant Single Parenting ahead I'm definitely taking the path of least resistance on sleep-related matters. When he doesn't sleep enough, Small Boy is supremely cranky. When I don't sleep enough I'm a short-tempered shrew. The two of us sleep-deprived at the same time is a DEF-CON 1 situation best avoided. So I'm thinking he's going to be sleeping with me this week.)

I used the intervening eight hours to dress the loom, heat up some of my home-made minnestrone soup for lunch, flip through my splurge purchase of Martha Stewart Living (and when I say splurge, I mean splurge: 14 Francs 40!! That's $12.78 for a magazine!!), have a leisurely latte with a decadant brownie, and think about doing some writing. Not a bad day.

One down, four to go.

We have a plan but I have a question

2007-11-11T16:49:00.000+01:00

Well, tomorrow R heads off to his two-week course in Zurich and I enter week 36 of the pregnancy. We've got a plan for the first week ("plan" making it sound wildly more thought out than it is, it's more like just rolling with the punches). R will be staying in Zurich the entire time, leaving Monday morning and returning Friday evening. Small Boy goes to the Tagesmutter on Monday like always and the Farm on Wednesday like always, but he'll go over there Tuesday for dinner and to sleep over. From Wednesday dinner to Friday dinner it's just the two of us at home. I don't expect to go into labor next week, but if I do if it's daytime the in-laws will come and get Small Boy and take him to the Farm and if it's the middle of the night they'll come here and sleep on the guest bed and be here when Small Boy wakes up.

Anybody have any input on, if I do eventually have to go to the hospital at 3am one day, we should wake Small Boy up and say good bye and tell him I'm going to have the baby now? I'm thinking yes, even though it means he probably will cry and not be able to go to sleep again and the poor grandparents will have to cope with that. (Having him present during labor is out of the question - this is a boy who bursts into tears if he thinks I'm in pain. Stubbing my toe and saying "Ow!" makes him come running calling "Mama! You okay?!")

What arrangements did you make for your older child/ren when you gave birth the second (third, etc) time around?

Down on the farm

2007-11-10T20:30:00.000+01:00

The Farm where Small Boy spends his Wednesdays with the grandparents is a working farm (that's part of what makes it so fun, I'm sure - all that machinery). R's parents are in the process of transitioning to retirement as R's younger brother takes over the farm. Well, technically they are retired but at harvest and/or threshing time when lots of extra hands are needed they're still doing a lot of work. They raise crops, mostly corn, wheat, potatoes, and sugar beets. Even with machinery, potatoes are labor intensive and every summer since I've known her R's mom has turned up black and blue after the potato harvest. She really needs to stop helping already, but I don't think she can. She grew up on a farm and married a farmer and raised a farming son and god willing she'll die at home on the farm she loves.

Small Boy loves his days at the farm and he's an outdoorsy boy and he's all about the tractors and trailers. I want for him what he wants for himself and he could do a whole lot worse than being a farmer, but it's a hard life, physically and financially, and I'll be honest when I say that I hope his heart pulls him, ultimately, in other directions. I have tremendous respect for family farmers, for R's family, and I know full well I'd flat out starve without the farmers of the world, but I guess I'd feel better if I saw Small Boy do other things in his future. (I have the same feelings about Small Boy's other current obsession, the Feuerwehr - fire department: I have all the respect in the world for firemen but I'm not sure I want my own son to do something so risky for a living.)

However. Small Boy just helped out with his first harvest and I'm so proud. He helped cover the sugar beets. Big piles of sugar beets.

He carried sugar beets and used them to weigh down the ends of the tarp, like this:

He showed us the piles today when we went to The Farm and was so proud of himself.

My Big Boy.

Oh well.

2007-11-09T09:41:00.000+01:00

It rained overnight. It's still raining. So much for leaf-pile pictures.

Why I should always carry the camera

2007-11-08T16:58:00.001+01:00

One huge pile of leaves raked up from the enitre park, conveniently located at the bottom of a grassy incline. One Small Boy.

I hope it's still there tomorrow. I am so going back with the camera.

Baby blanket blues

2007-11-07T14:31:00.000+01:00

Actually, there would be two reasons to ask Dr. Fantabulous about the sex of the baby. In addition to the whole male name drama, there's the baby blanket situation. I wove this baby blanket for the Small Boy

and I want to weave a blanket for this baby as well. But it's been very difficult find a yarn to work with. I'm not a terribly advanced weaver and I only have a four-shaft loom; what this means is that the patterns I'm capable of working with - as a result of limitations of both skill and technology - are quite basic. I rely on color and texture to produce interesting work. Small Boy's blanket uses the most basic of all weave structures, a plain weave, but by working with a nubby yarn in multiple colors I was able to put together a blanket that's far more interesting than the underlying weave structure could ever be.

I've had a heck of a time finding a good yarn this time around. There's not a lot textured out there - a good nubby popcorn yarn can make almost anything interesting - or I can't find the right combination of gender-neutral colors, or both. I thought I found a nice yarn to work with (it's the one called Pearl on this page), but when I put it on the loom to weave a sample, three of my warp threads broke under tension and as a result of friction from the beater; I know there is a fix to this problem (probably involving fewer ends per inch), but I don't really have the time or inclination to find it just now. Another interesting yarn (the mohair at the very bottom of this page) turns out to look far too fragile and etherial for a baby blanket (and might be scratchy for the little one), though it would make a lovely scarf for me.

I decided to go back to a yarn I've worked with before (it's the one called Zoom); I know exactly how it behaves on the loom so I only need to make the smallest of samples to see how the colors work together (I am running out of time on this, after all). There are some nice colors available and by scouring this book I was able to find a pattern that appears complex but can still be woven on a four-shaft loom. I picked my gender-neutral colors, wove my sample, drew up my final pattern draft, did my warp and weft calculations, and went to buy the yarn.

And there's not enough of one of the colors I need, one of the colors that I really need, and it could take up to four weeks to order it (that would put me at week 38 before I could even start the thing, for those of you not keeping track at home). I can't deal with picking out an entirely different yarn at this point; I'd have to recalculate the sett and weave a real sample to see how the yarn behaves on the loom and I really don't feel like doing that; hunching over a loom threading heddles with this bulging belly is no fun and I'd like to do it as little as possible. There are, however, three shades of blue in the Zoom that would make a splendid blanket for a boy. (There are not, however, three equally splendid stereotypical girl colors; in fact, in the absence of the purple I really need I'm having a hard time finding three gender-neutral colors I want to work with.) If it's a boy, I could make a really really nice baby blanket. If it's a boy.

This is not a good reason to call Dr. Fantabulous's office and ask for the sex, is it?

Cookies

2007-11-06T16:16:00.000+01:00

Small Boy and I made chocolate chip cookies this afternoon. It's the first time he's really helped. He added the baking soda and the salt to the flour, cracked the eggs, and stirred the dry ingredients into the butter-sugar mix. Of course I helped him help - I measured out the baking soda and salt properly and helped him with the stirring (that dough gets thick for a little boy!) - but he really did help. And he had the patience to stand there on his step stool watching - or stirring fake ingredients - when he couldn't help and he asked "what's that?" "what are you doing?" "can I?" as we worked. He's already pretty good at pressing out shapes with cookie cutters (we use them on the Play-Doh) - I see Christmas cookies in our future!

The name game

2007-11-05T16:40:00.000+01:00

Although I wore this shirt to my last appointment with Dr. Fantabulous, I didn't actually ask the question. I'm 35 weeks today and my next appointment is a week from Wednesday (36w2d), so at this late date it's pretty pointless to ask about the baby's sex. I'm amazed I resisted the temptation, frankly, especially when it became clear that choosing a name for a boy was going to be a lot harder this time around than last - and it was hard enough last time. A girl's name was easy - basically I told R what I wanted and he recognized the futility of resistance - but boys? I don't know why it was so hard, but we just put off the boy's name during the Small Boy pregnancy. Then at 34 weeks I almost went into labor (part of the curse of New Year's Eve) and realized we have no name if it's a boy. After a few days in the hospital Dr. Fantabulous sent me home and I insisted that we come up with a boy name ASAP.

We made lists. R made an excel worksheet with our choices, where we overlapped, how we each ranked the name, and the meaning (because he's a computer geek like that). In the end we had ten boys' names to choose from. We picked a first and middle name for Small Boy (and may I say we chose a fabulous combination) and good thing, seeing as how he turned out to be a small boy and all.

Fast forward to this pregnancy and once again we have the girl's name (the same one) and are struggling with the boy. I found the lists we made when trying to name Small Boy, the one with the eight other names that we in theory liked and agreed on and of the eight? Yeah, I don't like them anymore. Which makes sense as my heart knows they are names I turned down once. So we're back to the drawing board picking boy names. We're making some headway, but I don't know why we have such trouble with male names.

I think most parents put a lot of thought and energy into choosing names; it's a big deal after all. And it's hard to come to terms: your favorite name reminds him of the guy who stole his milk money every day in the forth grade, his favorite name is your brother's name, your sister gives birth and uses the name you picked out (the hazards of keeping these things secret). You just don't like it, he just thinks it's funny. You want to name her after your grandmother, he wants to name her after his. The first name has to work with the last name; if there are older children the names should sound nice together. There's a lot of negotiating.

On top of the standard naming issues, R and I have an additional consideration: the name has to work in English and German pronunciations and in US and Swiss cultures at a bare minimum. (It's bad enough that R's last name uses an umlaut, which the US social security administration cannot accomodate so his name and Small Boy's are spelled differently on US and Swiss documents; I never changed my name when we got married, in some small part because of that pesky umlaut.) Although our current plans and R's career trajectory see us living in Switzerland well into Small Boy's school years, and probably this Player-to-be-Named-Later's as well, we've never ruled out moving if the conditions were right; moving to the US or moving to an interesting third country. So names that translate, names that are at least recognizable in multiple cultures, names that don't change genders when you cross borders (Jan, anyone?) are important to us. This leaves us with some really nice classic names, but it also rules out a lot.

For example, one of my favorite Swiss names for a boy is Beat - and all my English-speaking readers who just rhymed that with "feet" in their heads have demonstrated why that name won't work for somebody who will be living half of his life in English. It's pronounced "Bay-aht" in Switzerland. R and I happen to know a Beat who, as luck would have it, is married to an American woman, and he pretty much spends his life correcting the mispronunciation of his name. For an adult it's an annoyance (for that matter, R's name is no piece of cake in the US either - it's very Swiss) but can you imagine if we move to the US just in time for a son of ours named Beat to enter, say, the fifth grade? Fun times on the playground for sure.

Then there are the names that just sound funny when pronounced in German or are too Swiss - see above, Beat - for the US. Or too American for Switzerland. And then there is the nick-name issue. The Swiss, they loooove the nicknames. If your name is Jane, the Swiss will find a way to give you a diminuative. Jacob becomes Kobi; Sebastian becomes Sebu; Christian becomes Chrigu; Konrad becomes Konu; Thomas becomes Thomu. As an adult it's possible to get people to use your full name, but you couldn't get a Swiss teacher to call a seven year old boy "Sebastian" for love or money. He would be a Sebu. I like some of the nicknames - personally, I like Chrigu well enough - and dislike others. I love the name Sebastian - Sebu, not so much. Konrad, yes; Konu, eh. Every time I think of a boy's name, I ask R for the nick-name (and there is always a nick-name). And half the time it leads to scratching another name off the list. If there had been one reason to ask Dr. Fantabulous to tell us the baby's sex, it would have been on the off chance we'd get to avoid the whole boy name issue. It's taking up rather a lot of mental energy that I don't really have to spare.

All that having been said, however, if I gave birth to a boy tonight we could name the baby. It's quite a relief.

(But a blog pseudonym I still don't have...)

Sweet relief

2007-11-04T14:59:00.001+01:00

I just found a tin of ginger cookies I forgot we had. The day is saved.

Why aren't you in your office?

2007-11-03T13:25:00.000+01:00

R and I ran into Dr. L on the street this morning. We were coming out of the bakery and I saw a face I recognized but couldn't quite place. Honestly, I thought he was either a news anchor or a politician - you know, a recognizable face but not somebody you really know. (I've seen her, her, him and him on the streets of Bern and he noticed me noticing him and said hello. Well, he said "Gruesseuch wohl" but you know, that's hello.) Even when R said hello and shook his hand I thought he was a work colleague; it really took that long to sink in - it was seeing him completely out of context standing outside the bakery and waiting for a tram. What's he doing out roaming in the city? I had the same experience when R and I ran into Dr. Fantabulous in a shopping center once - what are you doing out here in the real world?

I don't think people who've seen my girly bits so up close and personal should just be able to roam the streets like that. It's really disconcerting.

Looking for advice

2007-11-02T09:12:00.000+01:00

Can anybody with two little ones tell me anything about this stroller?

It's going to be a long month

2007-11-01T19:53:00.000+01:00

Hm. It's only the first of November and I'm already posting a post of nothing at 8pm. It's going to be a long month.

Something that won't help the posting situation is that Small Boy has walked away from the afternoon nap. This happened about a month ago and it's thrown my life into complete turmoil. NaBloPoMo is the least of my concerns; did Small Boy really have to give up the nap just before the baby comes? I mean, is that the best timing in the world, or what? And to make matters worse, he will not nap but cannot really get through the day without a nap: the two hours from 5:30 until bedtime are long and cranky. Dinner falls into that time zone, and he doesn't eat particularly well when he's tired and cranky and his table manners, such as they were, have taken a serious nose-dive, as has his consumption. Given that he's already a bean-pole, this then troubles me, and I really don't need more anxiety at this point.

I've already decided that I hope this next baby is thoroughly fat. Although Dr. Norwegian always declares himself very pleased with the Small Boy, though he tells me that he is seeing more and more overweight children in his practice and he's always happy to see a boy built like Small Boy, I still want a plump baby; I still wish Small Boy weighed a kilo more than he does. I think there is a deep-seated almost genetic instinct to want to see your baby plump and round; it must harken back (did I really just use the phrase "harken back"?)to a time when an extra layer of fat really would have been a form of protection, a visible sign that this baby could survive the winter, the flu, the crop failure. It would have been seen as a sign of robust health.* It would have been reassuring.

* And of course a nice plump baby can have health problems either completely unrelated to weight and diet or connected to them, but I still think the first instinct is to see a plump infant and think: thriving.

NaBloPoMo

2007-10-31T08:43:00.000+01:00

Well, I've signed up for National Blog Posting Month. Things that could seriously derail my attempt to post every day in November?

Giving birth (increasingly likely as the month progresses)
Total exhaustion because for ten days of November - weeks 36 and 37 of the pregnancy, no less - R will be away from home (fairly likely)

Hospital-based bed rest (very very unlikely; I have no reason on earth to assume this would happen)

Total lameness on my part (this is the wild card)

So. There we have it. Let the posting begin!

You knew it had to happen sooner or later

2007-10-30T15:18:00.000+01:00

I've got a really good deal with the in-laws. Not only do they take Small Boy one day a week, but they seem to go out of their way to make it convenient for me. My mother-in-law takes the train into the city in the morning and Small Boy and I meet her on the platform where I hand over the boy, give him hugs and kisses, and wave bye-bye as they get on the train and go back out to The Farm. In the evening, my father-in-law drives Small Boy back home. I couldn't ask for an easier situation.

Today Small Boy and I were quite rushed for the drop-off at the train station. We usually walk to the station at a Small Boy pace and he can generally stop now and then to look at something exciting, shuffle through some leaves, and pick up sticks. Today it was all go! go! go! we're going to be late! So we were both a bit frazzeled when we arrived at the platform. I helped load him onto the train, gave him a hug and a kiss, and then went back onto the platform to wave good-bye. Through the window I could see his little face slowly crumpling, a little tear starting, and I could tell he was saying "A hug and a kiss! A hug and a kiss!" The goodbye had been rushed, and though I'd given him a hug and a kiss on the train, he wanted another. I popped back onto the train for another quick hug and kiss and....the train pulled out of the station.

Sigh.

Fortunatley I have a local public transport pass that meant as long as I got off the train at one of the next two stops my fare was covered. I sat with Small Boy in my lap and gave him hugs and kisses and explained I'd be getting off the train at the Z. stop. With plenty of advance warning he seemed okay with that, though of course he tried to talk me into going all the way to The Farm with him. But he seemed okay when I got off the train at Z. Then I had to wait for a train back into the city, which fortunately was only a ten minute wait because of course today was the one day in a hundred I left the house without a book in my purse.

Sigh.

But the next train came, I climbed on, and a few minutes later I was back in the city after a short detour. Not a big deal. It had to happen sooner or later and honestly, I'm surprised it took this long.

34 Weeks

2007-10-29T16:28:00.000+01:00

At 34 weeks, I'm huge. I believe the proper medical term is "ginormous." Small Boy can't sit on my lap (what lap?) for bed-time stories anymore; we lay on the rug together. Clothes that got me to the end of the Small Boy pregnancy have long ago been consigned to the back of the closet, I can only wear slip-on clogs (because I can't bend to tie laces), and I had to buy a new winter maternity jacket over the weekend because it's cold here and unzipped just wasn't cutting it anymore. I'm profoundly annoyed at spending real money on a down maternity jacket in the final month of the pregnancy, but I figure after the baby is born I can wear the baby and zip the jacket so I can stretch some extra use out of it. Then I just have to hope that at some point in the future a friend is heavily pregnant in the winter so I can loan out the coat to her and get the satisfaction of seeing somebody use it.

At 34 weeks I'm also now allowed to give birth in my hospital of choice, which is a low-key birthing hospital (though they are equiped to perform C-sections) lacking a NICU or an intensive care station for adults. Therefore, as a precaution, Dr. Fantabulous won't let his patients deliver there before 34 weeks. After 34 weeks it becomes a possibility, though of course it would depend on the particular circumstances of any given pregnancy/labor. If it's "just" early without any indications of trauma or distress or danger to me or the baby, Dr. Fantabulous will let me deliver there; a friend of mine delivered there at 35 weeks and she and her son went home after 4 days. This is a big relief to me for two reasons: 1) I really like the hospital and had a very good experience there with Small Boy and 2) if I delivered at the university hospital with the NICU, Dr. Fantabulous probably would not be the one to attend the birth, and I'm rather attached to Dr. Fantabulous.

At 34 weeks I'm also almost ready to not ask Dr. Fantabulous to tell me the baby's sex. Every appointment is an exercise in self-control; we've managed not to ask so far and at this point I figure we've made it 34 weeks without asking, we can make it the final six (though I have to confess I'm hoping this baby, like Small Boy, comes a bit early; not scary early, just a little early). I might just be able to let it go now.

At 34 weeks I'm ready to say hello to the baby, and a little sad to say goodbye to this special time alone with Small Boy. I'm confident that we're ready, and scared for things to change. I'm so done being pregnant, and just now realizing that I'll never be pregnant again. It changes from day to day, like this season; sometimes pure autumn, sometimes I can taste winter on the air. On the cusp. But moving inexorably forward.

Hey, we have a chest of drawers after all

2007-10-27T16:57:00.000+02:00

R found them in our back-up grocery store, of all places. Carrefour, for those of you who know Switzerland. Seriously. Carrefour. Go figure.

The Swiss do love their bureaucracy

2007-10-26T16:52:00.000+02:00

In addition to finally trying to get the baby's room together - and one reason why I haven't felt a great sense of urgency about this is because we already know the baby will be sleeping with us for the first several months, we already have a changing table, a bouncy chair, a Stubenwagon (that's not ours, it's just an example of what a Stubenwagon is), and there are clothes in the house - I've also pulled together all the documents I'll need to bring to the hospital and put them in a bright yellow folder labeled "Dox to bring to Spital" (I guess Small Boy is not the only one who mixes languages) placed prominently on my desk.

Interested in what documentation you need to provide when you give birth in Switzerland? Read on! (I wrote about many of these documents in this post.)

All patients must bring:

your blood group card (you get this from your OB after your first pre-natal appointment)

completed naming card for the child (we've got a girl's name picked out but boys' names are killing us. We used the best two names on Small Boy!)

In addition to the above, married patients must provide:

your Familienbüchlein - this literally translates as "little family book" and the less literal translation would be the family record book. It serves as your identification when you interact with all sorts of civil authorities and must be kept updated.*
the Niederlassungsbewilligung for both partners - I still don't have a proper translation for this. It confirms that you live where you say you live and must be kept updated. (When we moved next door, R needed to get a new Niederlassungsbewilligung - as an Ausländerin I don't have one of these, I have an Ausländerausweis [visa] instead).

Single patients, on the other had, must provide:

the Niederlassungsbewilligung of the mother

recognition of the father, when known (I believe this is in compliance with the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child)

Foreign patients (that's me!) must bring (in addition to the blood group and naming cards):

Ausländerausweis (i.e. your visa/permission to reside in Switzerland)

both passports (I think they assume all foreigners are married to other foreigners, because I'm pretty sure they weren't interested in R's passport when Small Boy was born)

a copy of your marriage certificate (again, I think they're assuming I'm married to another foreigner because the Familienbüchlein should cover this)**

I'm working on the cover all your bases system and bringing everything we have that's on that list - meaning the Familienbüchlein and R's Niederlassungbewilligung and his passport and our marriage certificate (we were married in the US) and my passport and my Ausländerausweis. That really should cover it.

On the other hand, if anything happens to that folder R and I will, in the eyes of the state, have ceased to exist. Small Boy's passports, US social security card, Consular Report of Birth, and Swiss national ID card are someplace else, so I guess he would continue to exist. On the other hand, he's attached to R's Niederlassungbewilligung, so maybe he wouldn't. Or maybe in the US but not in Switzerland?

* For example, births must be registered with the appropriate civil authorities within three days (the hospital does this, which is why they need all this information) and deaths within two days.

** This list of documents required to give birth in a Swiss hospital is one of the reasons I always thought "Natascha's" mother was undocumented. Let me rephrase that - I'm sure if you showed up with no papers the hospital would still treat you and care for the newborn but I suspect they would be obligated to report the patients' undocumented status. But I'm not sure about that. Something to research in all of my free time.

Nesting. Or panicking.

2007-10-24T16:32:00.000+02:00

It suddenly dawned on me that I'm almost 34 weeks pregnant and the baby's room is still essentially being used as a storage closet. Keeping the door closed has proven to be a remarkably effective avoidance strategy, but I'll be 34 weeks on Monday and let's not forget that my goal was to have everything in order before R heads off for his two-week course in Zurich. That starts two weeks from Monday, people, and right now the baby's room is holding R's military equipment, my loom, a broken chair, several ceiling lights that we have not yet mounted (we're slow on the lighting, remember?), three bags of books I plan on donating to...somebody, the ironing board, some pictures we haven't hung, a lot of my pre-pregnacy clothes, and some other random stuff.

Lots of stuff. None of it is actually baby-related, of course, but there's lots of stuff in there.

So today I devoted the better part of the afternoon to organizing the easy stuff (as in no heavy lifting), including washing Small Boy's old size 50's and 56's (of course, I don't have a chest of drawers to put the clothes in, but at least the baby has some clean stuff in the house). This meant going through the box labelled "[Small Boy] - old." I found the little mittens knitted by R's grandmother, the outfit Small Boy wore home from the hospital, the emergency onesies R bought when I called his cell in a panic to report that Small Boy had just peed all over his last clean outfit (it turns out infant boys pee all over themselves, and you, and the floor and the wall and ceiling if you're not careful). His little red suit where the shirt and the pants are from slightly different dye lots. Little socks, such little socks (or as Small Boy calls them "liiiiniii socks"*) that I can't believe his feet were ever that small, that he was ever such a wee little bundle.

Small Boy will be three in January. How did that happen? How did he go from the boy who wore those tiny socks, those little knitted booties, to this boy who can pull on his rubber boots all by himself - and even get them on the right feet? Who shuffles through the dry leaves and collects acorns? Who can steer an electric bumper-car all by himself? Who loves all things Feuerwehr (fire department)? Who eats steak, for goodness sake. Steak! Just yesterday he had no teeth and I met all his needs and now he eats steak and the whole world is barely big enough for him.

Little socks, little booties all left so far behind.

When?

PJs then and now.

* Another half Swiss-half English utterance - "little" in Swiss would be chli or chlini; Small Boy drops the initial ch and just says li or lini.

Marchbefehl rescinded

2007-10-16T19:29:00.000+02:00

Perhaps somebody in the Swiss Army reads my blog? R just got word that his December military service has been cancelled.

That's one fewer thing to worry about.

Great, I'm raising a literalist 3

2007-10-12T17:01:00.000+02:00

Small Boy: "Wasser!"

Me: "How do you say that nicely?"

Small Boy: "Wasser nicely!"

(Can you tell we're working on "May I?" and "Please"?

Interestingly enough, he can ask spontaneously in Swiss "Darf i das ha?" [May I have that?] or "Darf i das mache?" [May I do that?])

Shop 'til you drop

2007-10-11T20:53:00.000+02:00

Small Boy. Saturday. IKEA.

Do I even want to calculate his BMI?

2007-10-05T15:53:00.001+02:00

I've finally figured out why Small Boy strikes me as so darn skinny in spite of his regularly falling just shy of the 50th percentile in weight for his age group: he's off the chart - as in beyond the 100th percentile - for height. (Seems in the weight department I actually look at the charts whereas for height I tend to go "huh, he's pretty tall isn't he?")

Anybody know the German word for "bean-pole?"

Great, I'm raising a literalist 2

2007-10-04T16:17:00.000+02:00

Small Boy, calling from the next room: "Potato chips!"

Me: "Potato chip what?"

Small Boy: "Potato chips!"

Me: "Potato chips what?"

Small Boy: "Potato chips zum esse!" (Potato chips to eat)

Me: "The word I was looking for was please."

Small Boy: "Potato chips zum esse please."

Let there be darkness

2007-10-03T13:02:00.000+02:00

After two years of improvising, or just plain doing without, R and I ordered curtains custom-made for our bedroom in the new apartment. They fit the windows perfectly and are made from a "Verdunklungsmaterial" - extra heavy material designed to block the sun.

The verdict?

We are blinking idiots for not having done this sooner.

You say Almabtrieb, I say Alpabfahrt

2007-09-28T15:16:00.000+02:00

R and I escaped for FOUR! WHOLE! DAYS! to a wellness hotel and spa in Austria (Austria - or at least the Tirol - seems to have cornered the market on wellness hotels; when you tell a Swiss person you're going to Austria chances are they'll say "Oh? Wellness?") while Small Boy vacationed at The Farm. It was pretty much heaven, though I missed the Boy a lot more than I expected - and I fully expected to miss him a lot. Small Boy had bouts of homesickness at bed-time, but otherwise he had a good time at The Farm. The grandparents kept the day packed with adventures so he didn't have much time to think about missing us.

I'd love to blog the vacation, but there's not much to it. In a nutshell we slept, ate (breakfast, lunch, afternoon tea and dinner were included, and the food was incredible), and spa-ed. Read in quiet rooms. Fell asleep on waterbeds with views of the mountains. Floated in the circular sea-water pool. We went for one leisurely "hike" one day, and on another day, by sheer coincidence, the village we were staying in celebrated their Alpabfahrt.

In Austria, or at least in this village, it's called the Almabtrieb. The other big difference is the head-dresses for the cows. In Switzerland the cows wear flowers and wreaths on top of their head (there are some pictures in the link above); in the Almabtrieb we saw the poor cows had the head gear on their foreheads and muzzles, covering their faces so that they couldn't see; some cows were rebelling and had to be led quite firmly.

The head-gear wasn't just right over the cows' faces, it was large and heavy as well - those pine boughs are mounted on wooden frames. I felt sorry for the poor Austrian cows and prefer the Swiss flowers.

In which I rave about Dr. Fantabulous once again

2007-09-20T12:03:00.000+02:00

I had an appointment with Dr. Fantabulous yesterday; everything is going great - from the baby's perspective, anyway. At 28 weeks 4 days, baby is measuring 28w6d and weighs 1350 grams (2.9 pounds)*, is nicely head down (Small Boy went head down early too), and has plenty of amniotic fluid to swim around in. We got a close-up of baby's face with the 4D ultrasound and if I had to guess based on the facial features of a 28 week old fetus as revealed by ultrasound - a sure bet if ever there was one, right? - I'd say this kid is a boy. It looks exactly like Small Boy. I think it's got hair already, which according to some "old-wives' tales" would account for the Mt. Etna-like heartburn I've been enduring since, oh I don't know, let's call it the dawn of time.

So baby's got it good. I, on the other hand, pretty much want to die every day between 8 pm and 2 am. Every pregnancy symptom in the book comes crashing down on me - heartburn that has me on my hands and knees gasping for air, headaches, backache, hot-flashes, Braxton-Hicks-a-palooza, and, as you can imagine, a resulting inability to sleep. All day long I'm fine - the baby rolls around a lot, now and then a lady-like little burp escapes me, maybe I'll get a little contraction now and then - but without fail night falls and Bam! Misery. There's nothing wrong; it's just a rough pregnancy. Dr. Fantabulous is not at all worried about me (he's obviously not pleased I'm so miserable, and is prescribing me any and every pregnancy-safe medication he can to alliviate my misery, but he's not concerned about my underlying health) or the baby or the health of the pregnancy. It's just rough going.

My next appointment is in four weeks and that doesn't seem like such a long time. Just four weeks until Dr. Fantabulous tells me again that everything is going great. I have to say, it's slightly embarrassing how reassuring I find Dr. Fantabulous's mere presence. Seriously, it's like he's doused in Stress-be-Gone or something. He walks back to the waiting room, calls my name and shakes my hand and whoosh go any worries I might have been harboring. I know how lucky I am to have stumbled upon him - to think, when I first started going to him his main qualification was that he speaks English! Now I can't imagine anybody else delivering my babies. As long as he's in the room, everything will be fine. He's my petronus.

* I find it a bit astounding - can something be just a bit astounding? - that it took baby 28 weeks (okay, 26) to gain 1300 grams - a nice healthy weight which puts it smack in the middle of the growth curve for 28 weeks - but it's supposed to gain another 2000-plus (that's 4.4 pounds) in just 10 to 12 weeks. Yikes.

Holistic medicine

2007-09-19T16:07:00.001+02:00

You know, when you've had a rough day a Small Boy exclaiming "Oooh! Yum! Chinese!" at the dinner table has remarkable restorative powers.

Writing my own stories

2007-09-17T17:39:00.000+02:00

My brother and I grew up with one foot out the door. It's not surprising, with our home life being what it was, that we were more than happy to play sports (all that practice time!) and get after-school jobs as soon as we could drive; in high school we took summer school classes and got summer jobs as soon as we were old enough. My brother took to the golf course. I let my bicycle take me miles from home. Home was where we did homework up in our rooms, ate dinner, and slept. We didn't have Family Game Night or bed-time routines or mother-daughter time. We weren't that kind of family. We were a family my default, we were a family because my parents got married- and believe me, the whys behind that are legion - and had children. I think they had children because that was what one did when one got married. I don't think they gave it a lot of thought; I don't think they even considered the possiblility of child-free living, though at the risk of writing myself - and thus Small Boy - out of existence it would have been the obvious choice for them. For my mother, certainly.

They belonged to a generation of hands-off and passive parenting, but they raised it to an art form. Why, exactly, would you have children only to proceed to have absolutely no interest in them or what they did or who they were and how they dreamed? One of my most vivid memories of my mother involves her telling me - me, the girl who started to write stories and poems the minute she could hold a pencil - that she didn't "give a shit" about writing. She couldn't seem to see us - my brother and me - as actual people with personalities. (Or perhaps she saw us all too clearly - she did have a nack for saying exactly the most hurtful thing. See above, writing, "don't give a shit.") She certainly didn't try to have a relationship with us. And so we grew up with one foot out the door and nobody should have been surprised that when the other foot was old enough to follow, follow it did. We did not, in the years before her death, have a relationship with her that surpassed obligation. When she died it had been six weeks since she and I had spoken and as last words go they leave a great deal to be desired.

My father, to his credit, did try, to the extent he was able, to forge something resembling a relationship with his children. Sports provided the bridge for him. He coached many of my brother's hockey teams and when I ran track in high school he came to every home meet. When I started cycling, we would watch TV coverage of the Tour de France (what little of it there was back then) and I would explain to him about team-work and drafting and strategy and why Greg LeMond wasn't going to waste his energy trying to win every day. I don't think he understood me, not really. But he could understand the cycling. He could learn the lingo. He could, approaching sixty and dying of cancer, become a fan of this strange new sport because his daughter was. I'm sure he found me a baffling girl and he must have watched in growing confusion as I grew into a baffling young woman. But he tried, in his clumsy born of a different generation ex-Marine quiet man way, to find at least one thing, a tenuous link between us.

Maybe that's one of the reasons I continue to believe in the transformative power of sports. It is surely one of the reasons I continue to hold a deep affection for the increasingly tarnished sport of professional cycling. As I went from a child to a young woman, something my father could only have watched with a growing sense of unease as the distance between us grew, there was always a new bike helmet to buy, a training session to hear about during the weekly call home from college, a race to look forward to. After he died, I met people at his memorial service - members of his AA group, people I had never met and would never see again - who knew all about me and my cycling and who to a person repeated how proud my father had been of me in the last race of mine he'd seen. He had, it seems, bragged about me. We might not have understood eachother across the distance of gender and years and personality, but he boasted. I was his daughter. I rode bikes. I was good. My father grasped at the one thing about me he could hope to understand - athletic endeavour - and he used it to cultivate something between us. He was quiet and clumsy in his love, as I think a lot of men of his generation can be, but he tried. Our relationship was limited and never touched on matters of the heart, I don't think he could have told his friends about the life I wanted for myself or the future I imagined for myself, but he could buy me a slice of pie and we'd be able to have a conversation while we ate.

I know my father loved me, and I'm pretty sure he liked me as well. I am far from certain I can say the same thing about my mother. And, in fairness, that was a two-way street. I didn't like her. I didn't want to spend time with her as a child, and I didn't care to spend time with her as an adult. It's not a pleasant truth, but there it is. But I have friends who like their parents, who in their thirties make time to go visit them on long weekends, who go out to dinner and Broadway shows with them. These friends of mine are like Martians to me, but they are also guide-posts along the way. They show me that there is another way, that I don't have to recreate the family I was so eager to get away from. When I'm able to step away from myself and look at the way R and I are living our lives with Small Boy I'm able to have a certain degree of confidence that we'll continue to have a good relationship with him as he grows, when he becomes an adult. But it's hard to step outside of your own narrative, and there are many days when I'm pierced by the thought that when he's grown he won't want to be our friend, that he won't want anything to do with us, that he'll always have one foot out the door. It's hard to step away from a narrative like that, so posts like this, that remind me of all the things that are possible with my children, are like little blessings.

Because it may be hard to step away from a narrative, but it is just a narrative. I can write it however I want. It's what I learned to hold the pencil for.

Ooops, he did it again

2007-09-09T10:02:00.000+02:00

R has a pesky habit of having military service in the days right before my due date. Small Boy's due date was February 9; R was in the military January 24th to February 4. For the average Swiss, "in the military" means at a site someplace in Switzerland (you're expected to remain there overnight during the week but are generally allowed to go home over the weekends) so this is not, in the grand scheme of things, a giant tragedy. It's not as if he was off in Iraq while I was giving birth to a child he wouldn't see for months. I'm well aware of that. It's annoying at worst. Nevertheless, it is annoying to be home alone in your 39th week. We were still in Small Village back then, and although we have a car and a good train connection to the city, it can feel fairly isolated when you're speeding towards your due date. I had a friend stay over several nights while R was away, and he came home over the weekend. And he wasn't scheduled for military service in the week of my actual due date, so we were pretty well covered.

Need I say Small Boy arrived early? At least he had the great good sense to jump start my labor on the middle Sunday of R's service, meaning R was at home with me when my water broke in the middle of the night. Small Boy was born Sunday night, and R was graciously granted leave on Monday, but Tuesday he had to go back into service. He was stationed about 2 hours away and was allowed to leave overnight for the remainder of the week, so he drove two hours home in the evenings, saw us in the hospital late at night and then early the next morning before the two hour drive back. It wasn't ideal, but it worked out okay since I stayed in the hospital all that week anyway. If we'd been in the States, where they send you home after a day or two, it would have been awful to go home to an empty house with a newborn. As it was, I stayed my standard five days and we all went home together on the following Saturday.

The one thing that went awry was that we didn't have enough baby clothes at home. At some point we stopped shopping because Small Boy was starting to get a bit huge in utero and the size 50's (for 50 cm long) were starting to look a wee bit small. We figured we'd wait until the baby was born, see how big it was, and R could finish shopping while I was still in the hospital. Since as it turned out R was in the military while I was in the hospital that didn't happen and he had to buy some panic onesies on Saturday afternoon. They were overpriced, but remain among the cuter onesies Small Boy ever had.

Well. This baby is due December 10 and R has military service December 3 through December 7. And during weeks 36 and 37 he'll be attending courses in Zurich where he will, in all likelihood, stay overnight during the week. Okay, Zurich is only an hour or so away, but still. That's an awful lot of away time in the final four weeks. Needless to say this time the plan is to have all of our rubber duckies in a row before that Zurich course begins.

And the cab company's phone number on speed dial.

Why we moved

2007-09-07T16:43:00.000+02:00

It's not much - 67 square meters (don't ask me to convert that). You US suburban types are probably wondering what all the fuss is about, but private green space in the middle of a thriving urban neighborhood is quite a coup. (Oh, and we don't have to take care of it - the management company does that!)

Here it is, the reason we switched apartments: