Announcing the Marie & Baby Bicycle Fund!

Okay all you well-wishers with itchy trigger fingers, welcome to my Virtual Baby Shower 2.0!

I recently explained that we would prefer not to receive any baby gifts, either before or after our little one arrives. Some of you have expressed your dismay, others your burning curiosity, and I know that a few of you are quietly mourning the loss of a chance to buy adorable pink onesies and receiving blankets while daydreaming about baby toes and that sweet smell of a newborn's head. And they're probably some who are relieved that we aren't expecting them to go on a shopping spree on our behalf (I don't blame them!). Believe me, I've had my own struggles to keep my money in my pockets and not splurge on cute baby stuff. But we really do have everything we need. After everyone was so generous last time around and given the fact that we're having another girl, we're in no shortage of baby supplies (although if you know of a place where I can get my hands on a few extra hours of sleep a night, let me know!).

So, what do we want?

Your money!

More specifically, we want a bicycle, a beautiful, practical, environmentally friendly bicycle that we could never, ever afford on our own. And to make this possible, we'd like a little of your hard-earned cash. Here, let me show you the awesomeness of the bicycle:

Is that cool or what? These Dutch and Danish cargo bikes seat up to four children (with seat belts and everything!), and have the means to safely transport an infant by securing an infant car seat. The children are better protected against accident and injury in these bikes than they are in a child's bicycle seat or bicycle trailer. And when you're not carting quite so many kids around, there's tons of room for groceries, dogs, adults or whatever you need to take with you. They come with rain covers and sun covers to keep your precious cargo protected in all kinds of weather. Each bicycle is customized to the needs of the buyer. They are a city family's dream come true!


See? Even grandma can get a lift!

But seriously, folks, we have been eyeing these bikes for almost 2 years now, and as a no-car family, bicycles are already our main mode of transportation. But soon with two children, it's going to be tough to keep up our mobility, let alone to transport groceries. We could try to find a good used car, but we prefer this healthy, environmentally friendly option. In a big city like Berlin, cars are more of a hassle than a help. Most of our destinations are within biking distance, though not within walking-with-babies-and-toddlers distance.

But the awesomeness comes at a price - a hefty price of about 1,500 Euros - and we just don't have that kind of money, nor are we in a position to really save anything toward such a goal. And thus, we ask you, dear friends, to help us out. Instead of going baby shopping, take the money you would have spent on onesies, booties and blankies (plus the postage it would have cost you to send it to us), and make a small donation to our Marie & Baby Bicycle Fund.

To make the process as convenient as possible for you, we've set up a PayPal button right here on this website, meaning you can use any major credit card to make the donation. This eliminates the hassle of international money transfers, currency conversion and all that mess. When you click on the "Donate" button, you'll be taken through a simple, step-by-step process. You can enter the amount in Dollars, and we receive the equivalent in Euros. When you think about it, this is a very green gift-giving option! Maybe even carbon-neutral! No packaging, no shipping stuff halfway around the world. Just a simple contribution.

If you live in Germany and/or have a German bank account, you're more than welcome to transfer the money directly. If that's the case, just email me: apfelmus [at] gmail [dot] com, and I'll send you all the details.

If any of our mutual friends are considering sending us baby gifts, please tell them about this little fund we're setting up for our daughters.

And lastly, please know that this fund is meant for those of you who can afford to make a contribution - large or small. If times are tough, we
t o t a l l y understand. Maybe you can make a contribution sometime down the road (I don't expect to raise the money overnight), but we'd be just as happy to receive a thoughtful card or email when we welcome our new family member to this world!

no gifts, please!

Some of you have started asking us what sort of gifts we'd like to receive when the baby arrives (and/or beforehand). It's very sweet of y'all to think of us, so to simplify things, I'm going to preempt any further questions by saying this:

Please don't buy us anything!!!

And yes, I'm being totally serious. As irresistible as baby shopping can be (believe me, I have to restrain myself), we have just about everything we need. We're having another girl, and we have soooooo many cute baby girl clothes in all sizes that to buy or receive more would just be ridiculous. The same goes for stuffed animals, baby blankets, teething toys, bibs and just about every other imaginable category of baby goodies.

But please, don't fret. There IS something you can do for us. I won't tell you what it is yet, but rest assured, after being so brazen as to host my own virtual baby shower last time, I'll be doing it again for our new baby. And when I do, you'll have the opportunity to give us something we really, really want as a family of four to be!

Marie's Bakery

You might think it’s unbelievable that I never baked with Marie until she was over 2 years old. Or maybe that’s normal – I’m not sure. In any case, her father has made pancakes and crepes with her before, but although she likes to stand on a stepladder and watch me make her oatmeal in the mornings, all past attempts to cook or bake with her were more or less disastrous.

But three weeks ago, I had a hankering for chocolate chip cookies, and I thought it might be a good time to try letting Marie help. It was wonderful! What a difference a few months makes!

I measured the ingredients, and Marie dumped them into the appropriate bowls. We took turns mixing, with Marie doing most of it at the beginning, and me taking over at the end, when the dough became to thick for her. And then I showed her that when you’re done, you can lick the bowl. You should have seen the look on her face – it was as if she had suddenly seen the light.

Anyway, since then, we’ve baked on one day each weekend, and I must say that I look forward to it as much as Marie does.

The real action was too much fun to stop and take pictures, but here’s Marie, hangin’ out with the cooling rack, hardly able to wait for the first batch to come out of the oven:

And here she is at another crucial moment – “cleaning” the bowl:

And here she is after today’s baking fun, modeling one of my aprons:

Amazing, but true: baking with 2-year-olds is fun!

confessions of an overwhelmed mom

Parenthood really tests your limits. So far, our family consists of a mom, a dad, a two-year-old, a neurotic 11-year-old dog and a very active fetus. I know single moms taking care of two children, happily married moms taking care of four children, and others with two to three children who are happily married but whose husbands are seemingly constantly away on business.

I don't know how they do it.

Do you?

I have to remind myself from time to time that no one "does it all." Even if it seems like they do, it's probably just what it looks like to someone on the outside. And even when you scratch beneath the surface and it still looks like they're "doing it all," they're not.

Anyone "doing it all" is neglecting something, usually themselves.

I have to remind myself of this because it helps keep me from despairing when I feel like I'm failing as a mom, wife, translator or member of society. In fact, I have to remind myself in general of the deceptiveness of the feeling of "the grass is always greener on the other side." For example, some of my favorite blogs include Soule Mama, Betz White and Angry Chicken. And when I read their thoughts and see their pictures, it's easy to think my life would be easier and more harmonious if I didn't live in a big metropolis. So many of the things I value in family life seem so much easier to include in said life when you live somewhere a little quieter. And then I have to remind myself that a) I'm not seeing the whole picture of any of these women's lives, and b) there are things about living in a big city that I would miss horribly. I see my Ozzie friend Amanda raising her two young children while her husband jets around the globe on business, and I see her do it with such seeming effortlessness, that I wonder if I'm just plain incompetent.

But if I really stop and think about it, I'm not incompetent, and while city living does make certain family rituals much harder to establish and uphold, it's not the reason I feel like a failure sometimes.

I am, quite simply, overwhelmed right now.

Why, you ask?

• I have a two-year-old;
• I am six months pregnant;
• This pregnancy, while not high-risk, has been very hard;
• I have been laid up with a sinus infection for the last seven days;
• My social network in Berlin has shrunk to miniscule proportions;
• We're going through a major financial rough spot (oddly enough, totally unrelated to the global financial crisis, but I'll address this whole can of worms in another post);
• And lastly, alas, after 28+ years of life in this body, I still tend to bite off more than I can chew.

I have a very spirited daughter who is incredibly intelligent but also seems to epitomize the "terrible twos." She's growing up bilingual, and that seems to have slowed her speech development a little. Her comprehension is excellent. She also has a fairly large vocabulary, but if you don't speak both German and English, it's pretty hard to understand what she says, and even if you do, it's still not easy. This communication barrier does not exactly serve to diffuse the many little conflicts we have on a day-to-day basis. We're also going through a rather difficult potty learning phase. She HATES wearing a diaper or having her diaper changed. She shows all the physical signs of readiness for potty learning, including telling us she has to go right before she does go, and she seems willing enough to use the potty at daycare. But at home, she has no interest in sitting on her potty for longer than about 2 seconds. And inevitably, the pee ends up streaming down her legs (if she's not wearing a diaper), and she gets very, very upset. Now, please don't tell me it won't be long before she connects the dots and becomes willing to use the potty - we've been at this plane for about 6 months now. Oh, and when I change her diaper, she kicks me - and I mean hard - in my 6-months-pregnant belly.

Which brings us to the next part. I'm pregnant. And this has not been an easy pregnancy, nor is it likely to get any easier. It started out as a twin pregnancy; I lost one of the twins due to a hormonal imbalance. When this condition was identified, I began taking supplementary hormones, which was no fun. Months of exhaustion and nausea later, recent lab tests revealed that I'm anemic (no surprise there - I was last time, too) and that I have ketonuria, which basically means that my body is malnourished and therefore dipping into its own reserves to keep me going. Okay, so I suppose that explains why I still feel so incredibly run down and weak, and it may help explain why I'm still experiencing morning sickness at 28 weeks. It also proves that it's not "all in my head," like I've sometimes wondered in moments where mind-over-matter thinking has got the better of me. It also doesn't help that my blood pressure is regularly around 100/55 and sometimes even lower. Put all these factors together, and there's simply no way I could feel physically fit.

Fortunately, I have an awesome midwife, and together, we've come up with a plan for strengthening my body and mind from inside and out. A lot of it has to do with nutrition, a lot of it has to do with yoga and massage, and a lot of it has to do with me filtering out some of the junk in my head so that I can focus on what I need and want right now, both for myself and my family. I had a good start on this, a couple days of truly nourishing food, a less hectic schedule that still allowed me to feel a sense of accomplishment, but then I went and overdid it.

One morning last week, I was picking up a package at the post office when I had a sudden fainting episode. A postal worker called my husband, who picked me up right away and told me to take it easy for the rest of the day. But I wouldn't listen. I rested for the first couple hours, but then I insisted on shopping for some essentials we needed for some home improvement projects. Toffi insisted on coming with me, since he didn't want his wife collapsing again, and so off we went. On our way back home, I could feel my right sinus cavity closing up, a very strange and very unpleasant sensation. Once we were home, we picked up Marie from daycare and had tea and cakes with Toffi's sister and her boyfriend. By the end of all this, I was completely spent, and when I woke up the next morning, I was in Sinus Infection Hell.

That was seven days ago. I seem to have gotten over the worst of the sinus infection and to have avoided the dreaded prolonged bacterial infection, but I'm still not feeling well. I have spent seven days in bed, and I'm still too weak to do any normal activities, but at least I can get up and do a few simple things around the apartment. After the first three days were over and I was no longer sleeping 18 hours a day, one of the hardest things was to just lie there and not go crazy thinking about all things I needed and wanted to get done. I hate feeling so powerless.

But I'm trying to focus on the plan my midwife and I put together:

• more rest
• whole foods nutrition
• no caffeine (or at least no more than a cup of green tea per day)
• yoga, one class a week and at least one hour a week at home
• massage, both professional and from my husband
• being more present when I'm spending time with Marie, giving her more loving attention so she doesn't have as many reasons to "act out"
• working on my social network

The last point is crucial, I think. I made a lot of friends in the first couple years I lived in Berlin, but I've devoted less and less energy to meeting new people in the past few years. While I've kept up my friendships with a lot of people from my early days, quite a few of them don't live in Berlin anymore. So I have a lot of long-distance friendships and not very many friends whom I can see in the flesh very often. This also means I don't have the best support network when it comes to finding someone to help me out with something at the last minute. Although it's not the same thing, being out there in the blogosphere had been very helpful, but I haven't really been around in that sense lately. So I'm really going to try to work on my virtual and real friendships, and hopefully make some new friends. Maybe the next time I go to the playground with Marie... whenever I get over this damn cold.

gone fishing

We’re on vacation, and although I had every intention of posting regularly, it turns out it’s just too hot in my parents’ computer room to get anything more done than checking email. Ah well, that’s what vacations are for, right?

titanium man

"It is a truth universally acknowledged that as soon as one part of your life starts looking up, another part falls spectacularly to pieces."

This quotation from Bridget Jones's Diary (an homage to the opening lines of Pride and Prejudice) has been rattling around my brain the last few days. My pregnancy symptoms have lessened in severity, I have been able to sleep at least half the time and Marie's sleep has also begun to improve a little. And then, on Monday, I got a phone call from Toffi.

He was supposed to be playing soccer. If the game had been canceled, he would have called earlier. But it was too early for the game to be over already. I instantly knew something was up.

"Yeah, hi. I think I just broke my arm. I'm on my way to the hospital. Can you text me my health insurance info?"

Three hours and change later, Toffi came home with a cast on his arm. But I hadn't even heard the real news yet. The fracture is very complicated, and it won't heal properly unless he has surgery and a titanium pin implanted. And for reasons that I still haven't completely managed to understand, he needs to stay in the hospital for 4-5 days after the surgery so that he can be under close observation in case his body rejects the foreign object. Surgery is scheduled for tomorrow morning. So for the next five days, Marie and I will be making daily trips to the hospital to visit her papa. I hope it doesn't freak her out too much.

two years

Remember this bundle of joy?
Can you believe this is the same little girl?
I can hardly believe it myself, but we've been blessed with her smiles and infectious laughter for 2 whole years now. Happy Birthday, Marie!