May

So there’s this “blog every day in May” thing going on, and here I am, letting my blog whither and die in May.  Oops.

I don’t even know quite what it’s been…But I’m hoping to pick it up again, and while I’m not going to resolve to post every day for the rest of May, I’m hoping to do a lot better than I have been doing!

So, my birthday is on Wednesday, but what is by far overshadowing that is that I have Part One of my Prøve i Dansk 3 which is my big Danish test (let’s call it PD3 so that I don’t have to keep switching back and forth between English and Danish keyboard configurations…).  I imagine it kind of like Mordor, casting its looming black shadow over the Shire (my birthday).  But the good news is that we’ve done a few practice tests, and I’ve gotten between 10 and 12 on all of them (on a 12-scale which looks like this: -03, 00 (which are both failing) then 02, 04, 07, 10, and 12)  Please don’t ask me why the scale goes from negative three to positive twelve because I am even more confused than you.  The important thing to know is that to get into the next class that I need to get into in order to take the next test which I need to pass to get into school here (whew!), I need to get at least 10s on every section of the test.  (I’ve been told that getting one seven might not be the worst, but, this is confusing enough as it is, so let’s just say 10s).  Wednesday’s test is the reading comprehension and writing sections, which is five to six hours of sitting and being tested.  Part Two of the test takes place on June 17th and is the oral part, which consists of me giving a monologue, then answering questions about it, then looking at pictures and talking about those.

I think that the anxiety and worry about those has been kind of squelching a lot of my joy lately, as well as Andreas being sick for a good five weeks, and then *tada!* I get sick with whatever it is that he had.  Luckily, I don’t think mine will last for five weeks, and I should be in okay stand to take my test on Wednesday.  So for now, I’ll just blow my nose every couple of minutes, and be thankful that the whole fever/aches/headache stuff happened over the weekend.

We’re also getting closer to August which is when Mini-Mine is due.  We managed to buy a cradle/hammock thing on Danish Craigslist a week ago, and I also got a nursing pillow, and we have a minimal amount of clothing (and some cloth diapers!) so we’re getting there…  What I’m most excited to get done is to set up some serious baby-stuff storage, so we have a place to put all these things.  In a less-than-500-square-foot apartment, it can get tricky to find space, but we’ll be creative, and luckily we don’t have too much junk of our own.

Being so overwhelmed with my tests, and other stuff in my life (mainly homesickness and friend-sickness) makes the whole baby thing seem a bit overwhelming at times as well, but what actually really helps me get excited for August is reading birth stories!  I’m not one to get grossed out about all that, and thinking about actually having our baby and being a family makes getting the apartment ready for a baby and adjusting to life here in Denmark a bit less overwhelming.  So for now, I’m just trying to focus on the positives, get over this cold, and ace my Danish tests.  I’m also switching Danish teachers (starting tomorrow) so of course, I’m nervous about that as well.  But as of June 17th, it’ll all be over, and I can maybe relax a bit more for a while.

I feel like I just have to hold on for the next month, and then it’ll all be okay.  It feels  a lot like how I felt before the last month of the semester in college, when work suddenly got crazy along with classes, projects, and finals, except this time, it’s just very important Danish tests.  I’m actually am getting a bit jealous of seeing everyone’s “finals are over!” posts and graduation pictures on Facebook, while I’m just starting over here.

I’m also bracing myself for waves of nostalgia and missing-people as two of my lovely friends back in the US are getting married within the next month, and I know I’m going to see photos on top of photos and wish I could be in them. *sigh*

Catch-up

So, I just realized that my last post was sort of a ditch of half-depression, and that I’d better get back to posting, lest everyone think I’m still living in perpetual “blah.”

I’m not, but honestly I’m not feeling the greatest yet either.  I’m still super stressed out about my test (both written and oral), fairly discouraged (depending on the day), and anxious about the future.  But…The trees are for real budding, and it hasn’t reached below freezing in probably two weeks now!  The bad news is that Andreas is still sick.  Still!  It’s been one thing after another, and if he isn’t sick for a day, he has allergies, but finally he’s going to see our doctor about it all and maybe get a referral to find out what he’s actually allergic to.  But his being sick meant that our three-day weekend (thank you Big Praying Day!), while not exactly a bust, wasn’t super fantastic either.  We’re crossing our fingers (yet again) for another good-weather weekend so maybe we can get out and do something FUN!  Like…you know…go downtown and use our Groupon deal at the super big candy store…

Danish classes have been going medium-well, probably.  The classes themselves are actually really good, and I feel like I get a lot out of them.  I’m also starting to feel comfortable with the other women in the class, so I’m generally not as nervous.  Except for today, when I had to give my little oral presentation in front of everyone, and my heart started pounding like crazy, and I spoke at a superhuman speed, and could barely catch my breath.  (Sorry, baby).

Hopefully we’ll still have quite a few writing assignments between now and the 22nd of May (which is the date of my written exam), and I can continue to get better.

In other news, I’m obviously pregnant.  As in, obvious to anyone who sees me.  I’ve been told I’m really big, I’ve been told I’m small, I’ve been told I’m having a boy, and that I’m having a girl.  I have yet to be offered a seat on the bus, but I don’t mind, since I’d usually turn one down, anyway.  Also, if it’s a short busride, I try to avoid sitting down, because I tend to forget to get off.  I’m not even going to pretend that’s due to what people call “pregnancy brain” because that’s just the fault of “Zeta’s brain.”

And in miscellaneous news, I made a chocolate-spotted cheesecake yesterday, and I am super duper looking forward to eating it, but I think I’m going to make myself wait until Andreas comes home today.  Just because.  I’ve also gotten a second (or, you know, seventeenth) wind with regards to the whole mealplanning/cooking thing.  I think it actually has something to do with the fact that when I have daytime classes, it’s super easy for me to stop at the grocery store on the way home.  This makes meal planning a bit less of a have-to-do-it-all-on-the-weekend-and-then-do-a-huge-shop sort of thing, and makes it a bit more flexible and fun, so I’m happy about that!  If I do the shopping by myself, it also gives Andreas and I a bit more time together in the evenings/weekends, and we’ve been using that time wisely.  By reading Mistborn out loud to each other…and the baby, as I realized today.

So now you’re mostly caught up, and I can maybe fit some of the more themed posts I had planned in the next few weeks.  We’ll see.  I’m trying to be easy on myself until my exams are over, since I’m super stressed out about them.

At risk of sounding emo…

I’ve been sad kind of a lot recently.  It’s a mixture of a lot of things: having a lot to do, being stressed about any one of the hundred things I have to be stressed about, and facing huge life changes (and little mini ones, too).  Part of what’s really hit me within the last week, though, is loneliness.

Not loneliness in that I never see anyone, or I have no one to talk to or care about.  But Andreas has been sick for a week straight now.  I’ve been on nursing duty, which I actually generally really like, but I’ve also felt a bit like I needed taking care of recently.  When Andreas is sick, he just can’t be there for me in the way that he normally is.  That isn’t to say that he doesn’t want to be, or try to be.  But when you’re trying to pour out your woes to someone who’s cutting you off with their coughing every other word, it just doesn’t seem worth it.

I guess it just made me realize (again) that when Andreas can’t be there for me, I don’t really have anyone else.  Sure, I have my family and my friends, but they’re all really far away and have their own lives with their own stuff going on.  And I don’t want a proverbial shoulder to cry on.  I want a real shoulder to cry on.  I wouldn’t say that I have a super hard time making friends, even though I do get really anxious, nervous, and shy.  But I’m well aware that it takes a long time to really create the kind of friendship that I’m yearning for, and amidst all my other worries and life changes, it just seems like it’s not going to happen.

I worry that of the friends I have left from my “old life,” having a baby is going to distance most of them even more than they already are.  I’ve also heard that having a new baby in the house can be extremely isolating, and I’m worried that since I’m having mine before I’ve made any real, strong, solid social ties here, I’m just further dooming myself.

I don’t mean to sound like a super-downer, and these feelings will pass at some point (and show up again at some point later, I’m sure), but I do want to keep this blog as a sort of real portrayal of what my life has been like after the move across the water and before/during the starting-a-family thing, and a big part of my reality is loneliness, or rather worrying about loneliness.

More positive post coming up soon, hopefully!

 

Warm Fuzzies

So, since my last post, there’s something I’ve been doing a lot.  Unfortunately, it isn’t yoga, working on my puzzle, or eating much other than cookies, but it is going through old chat/message archives.

It started with homesickness, which always leads to some level of nostalgia.  This time, I fed the Nostalgia Monster, and went back to the very first messages that Andreas and I sent back and forth.  I’ve read it time, and time again, but for some reason, this time I suddenly very vividly felt like I did the first time I read it.  He’d probably take away my internet access if I posted that message here for the world to see, but it started with “Zeta, please read this when you are alone.”

I got the message when I was visiting my parents for the weekend.  I was sitting on the futon in my little sister’s room, and when I read the first line, I looked up to make sure I was, in fact, alone.  It wasn’t a love letter by any means, but it was the first acknowledgement that there was something there that was strong enough to keep going and to get stronger despite the fact that we wouldn’t see eachother again for nearly a whole year.

Once I ran through all the Facebook messages we sent to each other during that first year apart, I decided to go back and look through our MSN chat logs.  Hey, I might as well take advantage of having as much time to myself as I have at the moment, right?  Anyway, besides reliving the warm fuzzies and the thrills of many of our “firsts,”  I’ve also been getting the thrill of reading something we wished, and realizing that it’s totally coming true.  Like, right now.

We talked so often about how much we looked forward to getting married, how we both wanted to be married young, how we so often thought to ourselves throughout the day “if only _______ were here, this would be at least twice as good.”  Andreas even said at one point, that he was struck with the random thought that he would like to have kids at around the same time as one of his sisters, so they would be around the same age.  It’s like each one of our little thoughts and hopes was actually a mini prophecy.  Getting married was the best thing that’s happened to us so far.  We did get married young.  Grocery shopping, doing puzzles, watching TV, and even cleaning up after dinner is at least twice as good when we’re together.  And why yes, your mom does love me.

But it wasn’t all warm fuzzies.  Rereading our conversations and messages reminded me how tough of a time I had sometimes in school. Being sleep-deprived, overworked, overhomeworked, and dealing with drama between friends was really tough.  I was often depressed, and sadder than I remember being when I think back on my college days in general.  It reminded me that nostalgia is all well and good, but that what I have now is so much better.  Moving to Denmark, dealing with visa issues, language barriers, frustrations, and homesickness has not been easy.  At all.  But sometimes I forget how hard things used to be, when Andreas didn’t come home to me every night.  Things have changed so much in the last few years, and even though I haven’t really made fast friends here yet, or feel very at home, or feel like I’ll ever get over my homesickness, things, on average, are a lot better than they ever were before.

I’m nervous for the next step in our lives.  I’m nervous for my Danish tests, and sometimes sad that I don’t have friends to hang out with, get coffee with, or sit around and do a puzzle with.  But I am so, so thankful to have gone through everything I have, and to be done with it and to have reached where we are now.

I also realized the other day that there is one respect in which this whole moving-overseas thing has been easy for me.  I never, ever think about not having done it.  Maybe it’s just because it was sort of my plan for so long, or because we worked so hard for it, but I never have considered the fact that maybe it was a mistake.  It wasn’t.  This was the best thing we could have done, for Andreas, for me, for us, and for Baby ZA (Zeta+Andreas…also, that’s not actually its name.  Don’t freak out.)  Knowing this helps me get through the hard times, because I can’t really think of anything that, without some sort of magic wand, could be better.

This was longer, and sort of lovey-dovier than I expected, but sometimes you just need a little confirmation, and sometimes you have to type out that confirmation to make sure that you remember it.  Things are actually going really well at the moment, but I’ve been  busy with plans Andreas and I have with others, and starting my new Danish class this week that it’s been a lot overwhelming.

But the sun has started to shine, and one of the high temperatures for the week is 10! (celcius!)!   Also, after a really long 3-4 days of facing my spine and kicking my intestines, the baby has turned around again, and I get to see  and feel it kicking my belly again, which cheers me up considerably.  Also, also, I made really, really delicious peanut butter, oatmeal, chocolate chip cookies the other the day, and although I’ve been eating way too many (seriously.  I’m not even going to write how many I eat each day because it’s embarrassing.  No, I should.  I’ve eaten like 10 each day.)

I hope everyone else’s spring is springing and they have as much to be thankful for as I do!

Excuses, excuses!

Oops.

I forgot to write for a while, guys.  I have a bunch of excuses, but none of them are very good, so I’ll spare the space and just get one with a catch-up post!

Things are definitely starting to move faster, now.  When I was in the beginning weeks of my pregnancy, I would count down the days until I could be in the next week, longing for double digits and a sense of security that sort of comes with that.  Now that I’m smack dab in the middle of the fun part, I wouldn’t mind staying where I am for a while before I start to get really big, really heavy, and turn into that whale/elephant/hippopotamus I hear shows up in the eight/ninth months.

Life is also starting to move along at quite a pace!  The last week or two have been sort of out of the ordinary for us.  I took my module test for Danish, which went perfectly fine, but caused me to have a pretty busy and hectic week.  Then after a visit to our little niece, Andreas and I both came down with rough colds, and by the time we recovered from that, it was Andreas’s “spring break” which was also when his family came to visit for the long weekend, and we had a string of get-togethers which were all very lovely, but as usual, made me feel more homesick than usual.  No matter how much I feel accepted by and lucky to have Andreas’s family, every time I’m with them I’m rammed with double-feelings.  Happy to be with them, and suddenly really sad to not have my own family around.  I think it’s been a lot worse since I”ve been pregnant, and more prone to feelings in general, haha!

Anyway, this week is also quite busy, with just a lot of things going on, but I’m looking forward to tonight and the next few days where we can relax and get back into our normal routine again.

It also seems that spring has sprung, and although it’s a cold spring, it’s been sunny and above freezing (for the most part) for several days!  There are rumors of a snowstorm on Friday/Saturday, but I’m choosing to ignore them and be optimistic.

I’m also going to be starting a new daily routine as of next week.  I’m going to have Danish classes four days a week from 9-12 am, and the fourth day I”ll have my evening grammer class.  I’m excited to have a schedule, and a reason to get out of bed in the morning instead of stay cuddled up in bed with my laptop until nearly noon, and while I’m a bit nervous for starting what feels like a “real life” here, I’m sure it’ll be fine, especially once I get started.  The bad news is that I checked out the class schedule for the summer/fall, and I won’t be able to complete any of the six-week “modules” but I’m hoping that with maybe online classes combined with some real-life ones, I’ll be able to keep up with some of it.  We’ll see if I even care, come August…but I know it’s really important for me to keep going so I can go onto real school, and I know Andreas will help keep me on track.

For now, I’m going to bust out the puzzle I bought at the flea market last week (along with some other sweet finds), try to get into a real routine, and look forward to everything that’s to come (summer weather, baby, visit to the US) and forget about all the other things (big Danish test, cold weather, stress, and homesickness).

Well, this is kind of embarrassing…

So I promise that I have another mouth-watering cake post coming up (I know that it’s mouth-watering, because I just finished taking the photos and I almost drooled on the camera).  But before that, I have to write this post, which is less fun, and a lot more embarrassing.

For the past few weeks, Andreas and I have debated whether or not we should find out if the baby I’m growing is a boy or a girl.  At first, I was all for having a surprise, but as the ultrasound got closer, and I realized more and more how much easier it would be to gather all our baby-things if we knew the sex, it was pretty tempting to find out.  We were at a standstill, but the lovely woman from MontgomeryFest acted as a tie-breaker, and we decided we’d find out!  We wanted our friends and family who are far away, and excited about the coming baby, to be able to feel more “a part” of what’s happening.

So, the scan was scheduled for Friday, and after a late night on Thursday, I woke up at 4am.  And couldn’t go back to sleep.  I spent the morning baking cake in a half-stupor, only staving off a severe case of the grumpies because I was excited about our afternoon appointment.  Andreas came home early, and we set off for the hospital.  When we got there, the waiting room was rather full, and we waited a bit longer than usual.  When they called our name, we went into a sort of strange room, where a student was going to do the first part of the scan, and her teacher, the second half.

Now, I had planned to tell Andreas ahead of time that if they don’t offer to tell us the sex, or ask if we want to know, that he would need to ask.  I know myself well enough to know that I would have a hard time speaking up, especially when I’m on a table with goo on my belly and a stranger prodding around.  But in my sleepy stupor, I’d forgotten to tell him.  Now, when I get overtired, I don’t just get grumpy (although goodness, do I get grumpy), but I also get anxious.  While they were doing the scan, showing us all the heart chambers, and the halves of the brain, I was taking it all in, and filing it under “things to be grateful for” in my brain, but I was also desperately trying to get up the courage to ask about the sex.  I couldn’t seem to find the right Danish words, and I sent Andreas some pleading looks, but he mistook them for beaming joy or something, because he didn’t say a word.  I was so anxious, I was practically paralyzed, my mouth just wouldn’t move.  I couldn’t ask.

The woman tried to get some good photos (although the baby had its head buried somewhere around my hipbone) and then wiped off the ultrasound wand, and told me I could dry off my belly.  Andreas and I were left alone for a few minutes, while they filled out some paperwork, and I could finally spill what I’d been dying to tell him the whole time.  Turns out, Andreas forgot to ask.  He just completely forgot that we could probably find out the sex today.  He asked when they came back, but they said that they don’t look unless we ask, which we hadn’t, so we thanked them, and went on our way.

When I get tired, I’m also prone to overreacting, which I promptly did, as I tried in vain to hold back my tears on the way back to the bus stop.  I knew that I was being ridiculous.  We had a healthy, perfect-looking baby, and I hadn’t even been that set on finding out the sex until a few days before the scan.  But I knew, at the same time, that I wasn’t crying because we didn’t know if Baby Us is a boy or a girl.

I was crying because I felt helpless.  I felt vulnerable and cowardly and really out of my depth.  I felt like “how am I going to be a mother here?  I can’t even speak to people here.”  I was mad at myself, and so frustrated about my anxiety.  Even now, when I’m not overtired, and I’ve had plenty of time to get over the disappointment of not knowing, it brings tears to my eyes.  I know that I’m incredibly lucky.  I have a perfect-for-me, loving husband (who totally understood why I was crying), who I get to live with and see every day.  I get to live in the Magical Land of Denmark that enchanted me from the moment my plane touched down three years ago, and we have a baby on the way–something I’ve dreamed about since I was small.  I know that my life is wonderful, and I’m incredibly grateful.  But that doesn’t mean it’s been very easy, or that it will get a lot easier anytime soon.

It’s just discouraging when I feel like I can’t get over my anxiety enough to do a “normal people” thing, like asking a simple question.  Some days are better than others, but the bad days are still just as discouraging as they ever were.

The good news is, that even though my anxiety doesn’t seem to be going anywhere, my writing skills are improving a lot with the class in Danish grammar that I’m taking these days!  Hopefully in a few weeks, I’ll continue with this class, and also start the one to help me prepare for my big Danish test that’s coming up in May!  Crossing my fingers to get into a daytime class!

Catching Up (and a plea for your opinions at the end)

Life here seems to be settling into some sort of a routine.  On Mondays, we go to a Ruhi study circle.

*Sidenote* I started this blog post thinking I could get it done real quick before I went to sleep, but upon searching for a link for the Ruhi institute, I came across a Baha’i joke blog where I consequently spent more time than I had assumed writing this whole blog would take.  Oops.

Anyway, like I said we’re getting into a bit of a routine.  Wednesdays, I have my Danish class, so we have some sort of a salad for supper (lately it’s been Tuna Macaroni Slaw because it always reminds me of home).  Fridays, Andreas usually has badminton after work (how cute is that?!), and weekends have becoming less stressful, too!

We even managed to buy a TV last weekend, and although we live in a dead zone, so we can’t get any real channels, it came with Netflix and wi-fi, so it’s been really great to have a nice big screen to watch our movies on (as compared to my little laptop with the worst speakers ever).

My Danish class is still going well.  It’s still challenging, and even though my first assignment came back with a discouraging amount of red ink on it, I managed to not be too discouraged after all.  I have to keep reminding myself that I’ve never, ever learned this stuff (it’s review for most of the people in my class) and all I need is practice, practice, practice.  I’m already starting to get nervous for the Big Test coming up in May/June (the one I’m postponing my visit to the US for) but I’m trying to forget about it as much as possible.  I wouldn’t be nervous, but I have to get a B-equivalent to be able to move on to the next class which is preparation for the other Big Danish Test that I have to pass to get into university here.  I was told that if I pass, but don’t get a high enough score, I can retake it, but that I won’t be offered any more classes to prepare for the re-take and that I’ll have to pay for it myself (around $200-250) so I’m feeling a bit of pressure.  However, I’m trying to remind myself that I still have time to get better before May, and if my teacher at that point really doesn’t think I can do it, I can always back out and wait until November.  When I have a baby.  That sounds like a better time to take a Very Important Test, right?

Things have just been being good in general lately, and I’m trying to remember to be really grateful.  The Baha’i Fast is in full swing now, and although I obviously can’t fast because of my “delicate condition,”  I’m still getting up pre-dawn every day to make Andreas and myself a bowl of oatmeal and to say some prayers.  While I can’t physically fast, I’m trying to pay extra special attention to things I want to work on, and one of those is gratitude.  I actually think that I do very well with this normally.  All the work and waiting and stress that we had to go through to get to this point (married, settled (in Denmark), with a nice apartment and a baby on the way) makes a person really appreciate what they have.  But, I want to get better at remembering to be grateful when I go through my periodic bouts of the blues, when I get homesick, when I suddenly feel lonely and like I have no friends left, or when I run out of ice cream.

I’m also happy about being able to meet some of the Baha’is in Copenhagen.  This is becoming a little bit of a Baha’i-(and link-)heavy post, but bear with me!  It has been quite lonely here, and as probably most foreigners who have moved to Denmark can tell you, it’s not easy to make friends here.  Well, in my opinion, it’s not particularly easy to make friends anywhere, but especially when you don’t go to school or have a full-time job, the meeting-people thing is hard to do.  I’m really glad that the community has been so welcoming and I’ve met people that I feel genuinely connected to right away!  It’s exciting, and since a lot of the Baha’i community tends to be a bit international, I think there are a lot of sympathetic souls ready and waiting to lend an understanding ear.

So things aren’t particularly easy at the moment.  We’re still stressed about some things, I’m still a bit lonely, but I’m doing really well and I’m really happy about where we are.

Oh!  But one last thing…

We have our second (and probably last) ultrasound coming up next Friday.  The thing is, this is the one where one can normally tell if the baby is of the boy or girl persuasion.  We’re having the hardest time deciding whether or not to find out now, or to wait until it actually makes its entrance into the world.

I originally thought I would never find out, that it’s more exciting, and makes it easier to buy gender-neutral clothing, etc.  But the closer we get to the ultrasound, the more tempting it is to find out.  We’re also having a lot of trouble finding any boy-name possibilities we love, so we’d kind of like to be spared the trouble if it’s not even a boy after all (although I have a pretty good feeling that it is), and we’re going to mostly be using hand-me-downs as far as clothing goes, so we would be able to know ahead of time from whom we should borrow.

Thoughts?  Pros?  Cons?

I think we might end up flipping a coin…

Danish Courses: Take Two!

This Wednesday, I started in my new course at Studieskolen.  The last course I took wasn’t really what I was hoping for, as you might remember from my whiney posts about it.  It was a mix of everything and had us practicing vocabulary, pronunciation, writing, reading, listening, and speaking in general.  It’s a well-rounded course, and I’m sure if you build up from knowing absolutely no Danish and go through the courses from the beginning, it makes a lot of sense, but for me, it didn’t.

Because I learned to speak by listening, speaking, reading, and writing a bit, I can get by in daily life really well.  I can have conversations, and my accent, while definitely there, is decidedly not American, and I think I can blend in pretty well.  What I can’t do very well, is write.  It’s not just the spelling, but I’m completely missing any knowledge of Danish grammar.

So I talked with my teacher from my last class, and she switched me to a class for written Danish in particular.  The first day, he did what was a review of basic sentence structures to most of the class, but for me, it was all new.  I was hurriedly scribbling notes, filing away the new vocabulary (like the Danish word for “substantive clause”) and trying to soak up as much as possible.  I felt like everything we learned was completely new to me, and I was so happy about it.

This is what I wanted.  So even though I spent hours on the homework today (and am pretty sure that I got about half of it wrong), and I’m still not finished, I’m really glad.  When I was in my last course, I would think to myself “this is what school was like?  This is awful.  Maybe I don’t like this after all.”  But today, I really felt like I was back in school, struggling a bit, challenging myself, and feeling like I was learning a ton!

Although I hope that not every class will be quite as overwhelming as Wednesday’s was, I’m so glad to be learning new things, and to feel like I’m on a track to quickly improve my Danish skills (a track I need to be on since I decided to take the big Danish test in May).

To end, here’s a picture of me sitting curled up with my homework today (I’ve missed this so much!!).  If you look closely, there’s evidence of the baby (in the form of my protruding belly) at the bottom.  I’ve got a homework buddy!

I’m back! And I’ve brought a friend…

I am completely aware of the fact that I’ve been super absent lately.  It’s not because I’ve become so busy that I don’t have time for blogging.  It’s not because I’ve been so boring that nothing worth blogging about has been happening, either!  The truth is that I’ve had a secret, and I couldn’t write here without spilling all of my beans, so all you’ve gotten is my radio silence.  Believe me, things have not been silent.

I recently stumbled upon a quote by Paulo Coelho that goes like this: “Life has a way of testing a person’s will, either by having nothing happen at all or by having everything happen at once. ”  Now…Paulo Coelho was kind of an eccentric, but boy did he sure get this one right.  I’ve spent the last year learning now to deal with life when nothing is happening.  At all.  I’ve learned to keep busy, and I’ve learned that time alone with my own thoughts isn’t the worst thing ever.  I’ve learned a whole lot about Danish, knitting, baking, and a little about computer programming, but mostly, I’ve learned about patience.

This will surely come in handy now that I’ve started hurtling down the roller coaster hill I’ve spent the past year chugging up.  In the fall, everything started happening at once.  I got my visa in October, and we moved in November.  I’ve started language classes, and had to adjust (yet again) to living in a new country.  I “touristed” Copenhagen, and took a weekend trip out to Stockholm on what felt like the coldest days all winter.  But most of all, I’ve been working on something else…

 

No, it hasn’t taken me three months to finish this teeny tiny project.  But it has taken me that long grow the mini-version of the baby we’ll be having in August!  So, all of a sudden, everything is happening.  Not only does that mean that the past few months have been really overwhelming, but it also means that I find myself having everything I’ve dreamed of having for the past few years (and some things I’ve been wanting since I was about 4).  Everything isn’t perfect at the moment, we’re working through challenges, and we know there are lots more to come, but we try to keep in mind that we’ve got the important stuff: each other, our wonderful families, a place to live, enough to live on, and now, the beginnings of our own little family.  What more could we ask for? (except for a TV…a TV would be nice.)

 

 

 

A Year (and a little bit)

Woah.  Hold on, guys.

I’ve had a lot of stuff going on in the past couple of months, and the “anniversary” of this little blog, and my adventures here in Scandinavia has completely slipped past me without warning!

Last night, as I was on my way home from Danish, I was just sitting there on the bus, and suddenly, my entire life just…hit me.  I’ve had several moments of this as I’ve passed through various life stages and changes.  When I was very little, I used to look at my sisters’ schoolbooks with awe, thinking that I couldn’t wait until I had a textbook three inches thick.  Then suddenly, it was ten years later, and I was flipping with purpose through my three-inch-thick literature textbook, scanning for quotes when I realized just how perfect my life was.

For me, at least, my life hardly ever seems “perfect.”  Day-to-day worries and stressors cloud my long-term vision, but every once in a while I have to take a step back and realize how completely ideal my current life is, and how wonderfully in line it is with how I imagined my life to be when I was 3 or 8 or 19.

I remembered back to three years ago (almost to the day!), when I was visiting Denmark for the first time.  Andreas and I were spending a weekend in Copenhagen, staying with his sister and her then-boyfriend (now husband).  We took the train there, and she herded us onto the metro, then later onto a bus or two and I clutched my backpack and thought to myself, “Wow.  She actually lives here, and she knows everything.”

I flashed forward to the present, and here I was, catching subsequent buses, just walking down the street like someone who belongs in Copenhagen, doing my Copenhagen stuff, and just living.  Here I am, married to Andreas (which I know for a fact was the thing that I wanted most back then during that first visit to Denmark because that’s when I started wishing it on all of my lost eyelashes), living together, seeing each other every single day.  Here I am, living in Denmark, with a real visa, speaking Danish, and getting mail from the hospital, for goodness’ sake!

I know I’ve been being a bit of a negative nancy recently, but it really helped me yesterday to realize that my life is, indeed, headed exactly in the direction I’ve wanted and imagined it to be.

Nothing like a little life-assessment on the bus ride home.