As the title already says: The newest member of our family is not there yet. Due date is only 9 days from today and it's getting exhausting. Marlene nearly can't move any more, she's short of breath every time she takes the stairs and everything is hurting. It's almost time for the delivery!
Of yourse we know it won't get any less exhausting, once our boy will be there. But at least the waiting will be over then. Because that's basically what we are currently doing: Waiting for the delivery to start, waiting for my mother in law to arrive next Tuesday, waiting for each day to go by.
Of course Charlotte is not waiting! She knows there's a baby in mommy's belly, but I doubt she knows what that really means. We read a certain book a lot with a family getting their second child. And she also knows that all the new stuff in the house is "for the baby". But of course she has no idea about the change this will mean for her.
Anyway: We have a lot of fun with her, even though she can be stressful sometimes, too, of course.
Marlene started to write down all the words that she can say by now and we come up with about 50 or so. There are also quite a few English words she's talking. Being the whole day in pre-school let's you learn those words really fast: "Clean-up", "all done", "pumpkin" (because of halloween), "spider" (because of an English song) etc.
Sometimes Marlene has to tell me what Charlotte is saying when I hear those words for the first time out of her mouth.
Charlotte now likes pre-school so much that she told Marlene last Thursday that she wanted to go there, although she normally only is there on Mondays and Tuesdays.
She's still watching people a lot, especially people she doesn't know, for example what other children are doing on a playground. But if Marlene and I are telling her about other people and why they are there and what we do with them, she understands immediately and she's getting used to them sometimes within minutes. Here are two examples:
First story is about a colleague of mine. I did a User Interface validation with her here in Palo Alto and she flew in from Germany for a few days. I invited her for dinner one evening and after an hour Charlotte already called her by her name wanting to show her something or to play with her. It was a lot of fun having 3 adults and Charlotte dancing around the sofa :-)
The second story is about last weekend: We did a photoshooting all together. When we met Annie - the photographer - we told Charlotte that Annie would take pictures of us and from then on, Charlotte called her by her name whenever she wanted her to follow us. Of course Annie didn't always want to be right next to us because she wanted to take pictures of us, but Charlotte wanted her close to us :-)
A few pictures of this shooting are published on Annies blog already and we are looking forward to seeing them all shortly.
With that: Think of us in the next week! Next time I write there will be 4 Happels!