Classes started last week as you may have guessed from my lack of posting. The stares for walking around campus with a pregnant belly were obvious, but I suppose since I seem to have left behind the ‘traditional student’ description i’ll just have to resign myself to the extra attention. I cannot wait to meet this little guy! (And to freely wear my non-maternity clothes completely fastened and normal! I’m not gonna lie or paint it daisies, I’ll be glad to have my figure back.)

Since I already had found myself not wanting to walk the almost a mile distance from my car to my classroom I switched my parking permit to a closer lot. I was very glad they had spaces! This seems like a much better situation as it cuts my walking time in half, my driving time by a third and it’s not in a garage so there aren’t stairs to deal with. This will be nice now, but it was especially in preparation for returning to school as soon after having the baby as I can when I might be even less inclined to move and getting home quickly could be necessary.

I have a good schedule this semester, only 12 credits, and only two classes a day (except fridays when I only have one). I also have an hour and a half between each class so I can go home and check on the new daddy and baby. It should be fun :)

A perk of taking all upper division classes is that all my professors are being very nice about working with me as far as needing time off when our little guy comes. The classes are mostly based on discussion, writing, and reading so it should be doable to stay caught up and borrow someone’s notes. I have two senior seminars (basically capstone classes),one in linguistics and one in spanish, an upper division literature class, and one last linguistics class. So I’ll be studying and participating in language documentation (linguistics seminar – documenting an undocumented language from somalia called Maay-Maay), Mexican Women’s Lit (spanish seminar – we get to borrow iPads for the semester as part of a research program), Literature in Translation (I’m expecting this to be very interesting) and Phonetics and Phonology (all about what sounds exist in any given language, how they are produced and what sounds occur around them). It will be a good semester.

Wednesday finally produced enough snow to call it the first snow of the winter. We got about 6 inches and it stayed for about a day and a half. Now the mountains have snow on them so they look normal, coated in white. I haven’t really had winter since last january because of my chilean adventure, but I haven’t missed it too much. I’m glad the winter days are passing and spring is promised in the lengthening of the days.

I’ve realized that with school starting and the second phase of sleepy pregnancy kicking into full gear I’m needing more quiet: quiet in my head and home and vision. Some days the thought life won’t stop its worry, the noise of the house is too much, and the piles of mess are hard on the eyes, but I think that getting more sleep, making time for silence, and creating pretty and clean spaces in the house will help to feed my introverted self enough to live with though.

I cannot wait to meet our little boy. 32 days!