The difference that four letters make

At one of our recent hospital appointments to monitor the baby's heart rate and movements, we had to spend about 2 1/2 hours hooked up to the monitors, rather than the standard 20 minutes, because I was noted to be having steady contractions and the doctors wanted to see if I was going into labor. So, we called Mario and said that we might be a little later getting home than we had anticipated. In the end, I was indeed not in labor and we went on our merry way home to continue waiting for this baby to make his grand appearance.

Shortly thereafter, however, Berni and I began to realize that quite a few people around town--neighbors, family friends- seemed to know about this seemingly inconsequential experience in the hospital, and were calling to ask for health updates about me and the baby with surprising seriousness. "We heard about the false alarm! What a scare!" "So, the doctors didn't have to induce labor?" "You are already home?! We thought that you would be kept in the hospital until the delivery!"

It all made much more sense when Maria informed us that Mario had told her, and likely everyone else, that I had been in the hospital having convulsions.

Driver's Ed. revisited

This is not an experience that I wish upon any of you. Especially not in the 3rd trimester of pregnancy. I went through with it only because driving without a valid Spanish license merits 3-6 months in prison, no questions asked, and I have never aspired to deliver a child behind bars. However, having now officially passed both the written and practical Spanish driver's exam and with a peach-colored, hologrammed Spanish license in my hand, I know that I have safely and definitively escaped the trial and can appreciate it for the humor that it presented, as opposed to merely the motion sickness and disbelief.

It's not that I think that Spanish teenagers are any more incompetent behind the wheel than those of other nationalities. It is simply that total inexperience driving a motorized vehicle combined with a setting in which all of the cars are of the stick-shift variety and the multi-laned traffic circle is an oft-used form of urban vehicular circulation results in a recipe for disaster--especially for the 34-week pregnant, experienced driver who is forced to spend 7 hours observing said drivers in the backseat of a compact Mitsubishi in order to obtain a Spanish driver's license. Observe I did. And I have never seen driving like this.

I realized that I was in for a very long first session when Laura got behind the wheel and it became clear that she is yet incapable of shifting gears without looking at the gearshift. This means that she is not looking at the road a good deal of the time. Yikes. I am, unfortunately, not lying when I say that she came within inches of running over an elderly pedestrian in a crosswalk; Laura wasn't aware of it since she wasn't looking, however, and so she wasn't traumatized by the situation as I was. Once we got onto the highway, I came to understand that Laura was also unable (or unaware? unwilling?) to adjust her speed according to the conditions of the road. We happily puttered along at 40 mph on the straight-aways of the wide, open 4-lane highway and then incomprehensibly accelerated to 75 mph on the curvy, mountainous passes. (as you can imagine, since this kind of acceleration required a shift of gears, there was one very important person in the vehicle whose eyes were not on the curvy, mountain road.) I am not exaggerating when I say that I feared for my safety and that of my unborn child. I considered asking to be dropped off somewhere en route so as to illegally hitchhike back to Mieres.

And then we reached the traffic circles. I do wish that I could have filmed at least one of the several traffic circle encounters we had with Laura behind the wheel that day because my description will not do justice to just how impressively ludicrous her driving was in this context. There was something about merging into a traffic circle that suddenly and inexplicably made Laura lose all sense of time, space and logic. She defied all reason. She accelerated, negated the concept of lanes and whipped around and around the circle as though she were chasing her own bumper. And since, as a rule in our driving school, you cannot exit a traffic circle until the instructor has told you which exit to take, and since our instructor did not want to direct Laura to exit the circle until she had stabilized the vehicle within one of its lanes, we continued to fly around and around and around in tight, tortuous loops, 3...8...12 times, generating nausea and panic in ours and other vehicles, effectively preventing any other car from safely entering the traffic circle. Around and around the little car careened, blazing a hellish ring that would have inspired Dante himself. The instructor, surprisingly unfazed, would finally break down once we had chaotically rounded the circle on the order of double digits and grab his right-sided, secondary steering wheel, maneuver us out an exit and mutter something about how she has to learn how to drive. I am not kidding. You can't make this stuff up.

I met Patricia while she was chain-smoking outside of the driving school before our class together. She is a tiny girl with thin hair and bright red wire-rim glasses. Her hands were shaking as she introduced herself, which I was soon to realize was due to her nerves and not the nicotine. She immediately blurted out, "I just hope that I don't cause us to crash." I laughed and told her she would do just fine, to which she responded, "No, really. I hate this, I hate driving. I am sure that I am going to crash." She looked me over and then said, as though it couldn't get any worse, "And you are pregnant!" Yes, crashing would be less than ideal, Patricia. I admit that I did begin to share a sense of her panic myself as we got into the car together. While she was, ultimately, a pretty terrible driver, it was her explosive language that I found most impressive about the small girl. All it took was a fellow driver feigning to access the road within a 10-meter radius of our car for Patricia to gasp, release a string of expletives (my favorite being what translates directly to "Sh*t on my mother! Sh*t on my mother!") and say "He could have warned me!" or "What is she doing there?!" This applied to law-abiding pedestrians, as well.

There were many other assorted variations to the classes, including the many students who repetitively mistook 2nd gear for 4th gear when shifting up from 3rd or--my favorite--down from 5th (you've got to love inertia slamming you forward into your seat belt strap as the motor screams for mercy) and the parallel parking jobs realized only (and sometimes not even) after 15+ maneuvers.

The additional element that made these situations surreal was that our instructor, Alberto, very infrequently used his steering wheel or set of pedals to help us avoid what always appeared to me as impending disaster. He instead paid very little attention to the frightful driving of my comrades and spent the majority of our classes with his head craned towards the back seat, asking me involved questions about life and culture in the United States. So as our little driver's ed. car lurched and veered across the highways and city streets, I watched in silent horror as Maria inadvertently blew through a stop sign and in the wrong direction down a one-way street and I tried to accurately explain to Alberto the theological differences between Catholics and Protestants. (True story.) I have to hand it to him, though--in this town, that guy has job security if anyone does.

Birds and Bees

The timing of my daily trips to the community swimming pool almost always coincides with the hour of the 5 and 6 year-old girls' swimming class. Our daily encounters in the women's locker room has led to many curious and wide-eyed stares at my belly from inquiring little girls and has given rise to more than just a couple of terribly endearing and not-so-private "Where do babies come from?" mother-daughter discussions, some of which I think "hit home" with the little girls a bit more than others. (One girl flat-out refused to believe that there was actually a baby inside of me, denying the entire explanation with a resolute shaking of her head--I think she preferred the idea of the stork bringing the babies here to Mieres from Paris, as she had been told previously.)

There is one little girl in particular, Lucia, who is especially awed by my pregnancy. I think that she has never been in such close quarters with a pregnant woman before, and she can utterly not take her eyes off of my belly as her mother shampoos and bathes her/towels her off/dresses her/combs her hair, etc. The first day that we coincided in the locker room, Lucia's mother pointed to me and said "Look, that woman has a baby inside!" Lucia responded with visible excitement, "In her backpack?" (To her credit, I did have a large, red backpack with me in which one--or two, even?--small children could likely fit, so it wasn't such an illogical question on her part.) Once her mother explained that I, in fact, have a baby growing inside of me, the little girl was absolutely awestruck. She looked at me with wide eyes as though she had been told the world's most marvelous secret--not far from the truth, I would say. A few days later, Lucia was waiting in a line of children outside of the locker room, her mom at her side, to enter the pool area for her class. I passed her in my swimming suit and towel and as soon as she saw me she shrieked with excitement and exclaimed, "Look, Mom! The lady brought her baby with her again!!" I could not help but laugh with delight. I told her, "That's right--I couldn't just leave him at home." Lucia then turned knowingly to the girls in line with her and announced with glee, "That baby is going swimming!"

An hour later, while we were showering in the locker room, Lucia approached me on the sly and whispered, "But how did your baby learn how to swim?" (She, of course, being just now in the process of learning herself.) "He just knows," I said, "He follows me." She returned to her mother to think about it and finish getting dressed before approaching me one last time, nodding knowingly, and said, "Does the baby have to wear goggles, too?"

Children are wonderful.

Happy Birthday, Berni!

We dedicated the weekend to celebrating Bernardo's birthday, complete with the perfectly-timed arrival of Mom's care package (full of our favorite teas, cookies, books and an all-American birthday brownie) and a beautiful Sunday afternoon lunching and then walking along the beach in Gijón.

We also include the obligatory visual update of the growth of our little one, as seen through the increasing central expansion of his mom, here 34 weeks pregnant. These days, we do little else than delight in how much of a wonderful presence this little guy already is in our life and how excited we are to have him join us "in full" a few short weeks from now.

Happy Father's Day to our dad, who we are toasting from afar, and to all fathers honored today.

Spring Review

To inaugurate the blog, we have a collection of pictures from the past months, featuring a lovely visit from our parents, a growing belly and some day-to-day images of springtime in Asturias.

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Becky and Charles (Mom and Dad) came to visit us in Spain last month and let us fill their week here to the brim with a road trip along the Asturian coast and then down to the stunning city of Salamanca.

Ribadesella, Asturias

an afternoon in the Plaza Mayor, Salamanca

mass at the Dominican Convent of San Esteban, Salamanca

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All the while, our son continues to grow and bounce around in my belly and fill us with anticipation of his impending arrival.

Sunday in the countryside with shepherd canine entertainment (33 weeks pregnant)

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picture from the spring concert for bernardo's violin students

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That is all for now. I cannot figure out how to upload any more photos. More to come in upcoming days as Bernardo finishes teaching little ones at the conservatory here in Mieres for the summer and wraps up this semester of his music therapy masters program in Salamanca and I finish up work in the hospital and transition into much-awaited maternity leave. We hope that you are all well.