Lola

She was delivered at the end of August in a Munich clinic on the edge of the English Garden. Everyone says it (and they’re all right): nothing prepares you for the moment you actually have a tiny human placed in your arms. She’s been turning our world upside down and we’re still settling into life as parents. I should be back up here soon.

In the meantime, it suffices to say: We’re healthy, happy and thrilled to be three.

 

A Little Calm Before the Storm

I’ve run away to Austria for a final dose of baby-free travel. I’m surrounded by nephews and nieces (and their friends) but there’s still a huge difference between being with kids and having one!

Want

Ok, it’s a bit too early for this but still, how cute it this? Would you let your little one rock this Vespa? I’m tempted, but maybe I just need a real one for myself.

Did You Know? They Eat Porcupine.

Anyone who has been in an international relationship has had the talk about customs and traditions. It tends to happen pretty early on and is part of the we’re-different-but-maybe-not-really-so-different (ie “How weird are you and can I handle it?”) conversation that hopefully eventually leads to you figuring out that although worlds apart you were meant to be together.

Right? Right.

Oliver and I met in the Fall and that led pretty quickly to talk about the winter holidays and Christmas traditions. With him being German, I wasn’t expecting anything too shocking or different to pop up: some real candles on the Christmas tree maybe (yes), celebrating the evening before rather than the morning of (yes), and not following the cult of the Coca-cola Santa (yep, non-Coke Weihnachtsmann).

Everything was pretty much as expected until he floored me with the following: For Christmas dinner, he said, his family ate roasted porcupine.

“Porcupine? Really??,” I asked (did I hear that right?).

Update – Babywatch

This will be great for answering the inevitable question we’ll be getting a lot of this month.

Check out: HaveYouHadThatBabyYet?

Pretty much sums it up, don’t you think?

Barking Up the Wrong Tree

I love knowing the search engine terms that land people on this little web log. But you elephant fetishists and college students are probably terribly disappointed when you find me instead of what you’re really looking for.

I got news for the elephant dudes: according to my stats, you are soo not alone out there!

More Life List Items – Double Check.

To Do (in) Life List Item # 13. Go to Bourbon and Branch and # 21. Have Drinks at the Tonga Room (before it’s gone).

√ Done!

Both of these are long checked off but had never been accounted for. Being 7 1/2 months pregnant, it’s fun to revisit less sober times. I am soo looking forward to my first cocktail and a whole bottle of wine just for me. Until then, memory lane must suffice.

A Slow Crawl to 40 Weeks

Time. It’s never on your side. It had seemed to be flying by until I got pregnant, when suddenly everything skid to an incremental crawl. Each day seemed to last forever. But slowly, one after the other, they accumulated into weeks that I could check off, each one taking me a little closer to that magical three month mark, when everyone tells you that you can relax a little.

When I got pregnant, I started keeping track of the weeks by reading Alphamom’s Zero to Forty calendar – which are the funny, down-to-earth observations made by Amy Storch through her first two pregnancies.  The first time I’d barely gotten started before it became clear things weren’t going anywhere good. So I stopped reading, promising myself I’d be back soon.

Life List – Another One Checked Off

To Do (in) Life List Item # 101. Renovate the Austrian Apartment.

√ Check.

This was one heck of a learning experience. It was fun, often stressful and frankly was enough to give me pause when considering whether we ever want to build a house. I’m not sure I want to care that much about drawer pulls again…at least for a good long while. Now it’s done and we can enjoy it.

There we are!

It's more put together than any apartment we've lived in. I'm not sure if that makes me proud or embarrassed.

Here’re all the related posts:

* A recap of what led up to this (link)

* Before, during and after pictures (link)

* How we dealt with reluctant workers (link)

* The Kitchen (link)

* The Entryway and Bath (link)

* The Bedroom (link)

* The Living Room (link)

* From Dining Nook to Cocktail Corner (here)

And we're done here for now. On to the next one!

Renovation: The Living Room and Cocktail Corner

Part 2: The Cocktail Corner

Cozier, but now seats more.

The dining nook became the cocktail corner, sort of by accident. We replaced the original faux farmhouse table with a much smaller table we got from the proprietors of the oldest Hütte on the mountain. It’s a super cool old little table, but it certainly makes things cozier. But for cocktails, I reasoned, this is more than fine.

We’d been looking a long time for a table and had gotten nowhere until we asked someone on the mountain to help us find something with “Hüttenerfahrung” or a bit of mountain experience. They did one step above that. When we went to  thank them, the wife smiled and said with a wink that the table had tons of experience – including plenty of good times for them in their kitchen. What that really means, was purposely left open to interpretation.