Morjes!

Welcome to my blog. I write about fitting in, sticking out, and missing the motherland as a serial foreigner.

The fairy tale is over

Jeremy will laugh at my description of Middlebury as being like living in a fairy tale (one of these days I'll do a post on a typical day in the life of Jeremy), but I think I've made it pretty clear on this blog that I have loved being here.

But now that a newborn has been thrown into the mix, and I'm essentially confined to the house (except for dinner tonight if I'm brave enough), things have lost some of their luster. Specifically, our house. Our lovely house.

It is almost impossible to get any rest here. The floors (entirely wood, throughout the house) creak terribly. The doors all squeak on their hinges. Some of them don't close entirely unless you slam them. The beds are noisy to climb in and out of (I was hoping having lost some of that pregnancy weight already would help some of that). If it were just us, maybe we could plan around it, but four people live upstairs and if they decide to come home while I'm trying to rest, who am I to fault them for it?

And in the tradition of this being pseudo-Arabia, there is construction going on right across the street, all the time. Starting at 6am. I know because it wakes me up, if I happen to be asleep.

Today, my mom took Miriam out for the morning so I could get some rest. I settled in, got Magdalena to sleep, and just as I was drowsing off...a maintenance guy came over to repair the freaky water pump in our basement of terror. He hammered away for a while and then left.

So I settled in again, ready to finally catch some sleep, when the custodial people showed up to exchange sheets and towels and also vacuum the floors. Sigh.

I think I'm just being extra sensitive. Maybe it's an instinct of new mothers to be so sensitive to (and irritated by) noise. The good news is that I did get some sleep in the afternoon, but it took some sacrifice. Poor Jeremy stayed out in the living room for 45 minutes after coming home from class just so he wouldn't have to open our door in all its creaky glory and wake me up. Now that's a considerate husband and father.

Emerging

Eww.