Ber, Laimite, sudrabinu
Ziemassvetku vakara,
Lai mirdzeja visas takas
Jaunaja gadina!
All the very best wishes to our family and friends in 2012. May the new year bring showers of sunshine and love, just enough rain to help us grow, and above all plenty of those magical moments of stopping to take it all, leaving you with nothing but a smile!
One of the great benefits to starting a family in Latvia is the maternity leave. It starts 70 days before your due date and continues for up to a year after the birth. For the record, I got to choose my own due date (within a certain range) as was most convenient for my work schedule - I chose February 8 meaning I've technically been on maternity leave since December 1.
The first weeks went by in a flash - lots of midwife and doctors visits and a few trips to government offices to get the maternity leave squared away. (Luckily, since sunrise isn't until nearly 9am in December, I showed up at the offices when they opened at 8.30 and was able to avoid the lines.) Plus I actually spent a fair amount of time at school still in December wrapping things up, and will still be in to finish up a few things in January.
And of course I could not just allow myself to relax during this time - I am on three graduate level online courses (two of which I'm aiming to start and finish in the month of January before we become a family of three). I figured I sure won't have extra time on my hands after February, so might as well take advantage of these 70 days I got. At the rate we're going though, I feel like I could blink one more time and February will be upon us!
Lots of my time is filled with reading - preparing myself for birth and parenting, reading texts for coursework, and also just for fun. Mims the Wondercat has taken this as a time to start getting to know the baby. She kneads my stomach for a while, then lays down and he kicks and pokes her for a while, then she kneads him again, and so we go on.... It's a pretty cozy way to spend this season of hibernation if I do say so myself. :)
It's not that the last year and a half in Latvia hasn't been as deliciously sunny, as soak-you-to-your-bones rainy and as magically rainbow-y as the previous years. It's just that I didn't really care as much to experience it in the same way.
After the first years of excitement at every new experience, friendship and opportunity, realities started settling in. Dear friends who had become our local family moved away one or two at a time. The economic situation was a whole lot rainier than sunny for longer than was comfortable, and the repetition of one-step-forward, two-steps-back just wears on you after a while. And just as promptly as we were filled with excitement again at the biggest ray of sunshine we'd seen in a long time, that got rained out as well when 2010 started with a positive pregnancy test that ended with a miscarriage exactly on my Name's Day a short 8 weeks later. Not so much a downpour as storm that just plain knocks you off your feet.
Now that I am finally slowing down and taking some much needed time for reflection, I realize how I've stepped back from life in the last year and a half. It's not even that I've identified more with the rainy side of life during this time, it's just been more comfortable to spend lots of "me time" in the calm and relative safety of our home. Not sunny or rainy, it just "is".
Happily, this chapter of my life has wrapped itself up (and that's not said in regret, it was certainly a time that was needed and served its own purpose) and I'm ready to waddle back out into the highs and lows of life in Latvia - smile intact. :)
Why waddle?
In the next 5-9 weeks we'll be joined in our journey by a new little person - also already lovingly known as Mazais Saimnieks ("little farmer"), Little Drummer Boy, Pucite (little owl), Chupins (short for "chupins of cuteness" or "little pile of cuteness"),
Mini Dude and "Mazins bet Mighty" (little but mighty). I'm quite sure I'm joining mothers around the world in saying this, but from my point of view, never before has another little human being been awaited with this much love and excitement. :)
I recently had a conversation with my own mom in which she was reflecting on how having children impacted her own life. She remembered actually having free time before us, but even now that we have been out of the house for years, she still hasn't been able to regain that sense of "me time" because something always needs to be done. I already put it down for the record with her, but now I am going public with that (and feel free to remind me of this at any point in the next X amount of years that I'm on earth) - I realize my life will never be just my own anymore and I am ready for this.
Surely there will be days that I'll be ready to give anything for five minutes to myself, but at this moment which I hope I'll always be able to remind myself of - I am ready for this little person to come into my life with all of his quirks and needs because with that comes all of his magic. If I haven't been so interested in getting out to see something new or even to do the same-old in the last while, I simply can't wait to do it all - new and old - with our little person because for him EVERYthing will be brand new and magical. There is so much to learn and experience and do in this life and to see it all through his eyes will be amazing. I've seen it with children I've worked with for years, and I'm thankful beyond words that this will be part of my daily experience. He will bring heaps of sunshine, undoubtedly plenty of rain, and above all brilliant rainbows into this home.
We're working hard to catch the Christmas spirit this year with the soupy gray weather just outside our window and sloppy ground that instantly absorbs any chance at brightness that the few attempts at snow have tried to bring. The thing that warms us every time is talking about how next year, our Mazais Saimnieks will be enjoying his first Christmas - probably already pulling himself up on furniture and cruising around as we hold his hands, wide eyes taking it all in.
How can that thought alone not make you look at the whole world with a smile again?
