Traveling mama, traveling baby

For some reason my pregnancy so far has been full full full of travel. I suppose it’s mostly because I’m starting to work more regularly… more touring, more teaching, more rehearsing. Luckily it’s actually been really easy for me to be so active so far. Thank goodness! I haven’t been sick even once and my biggest complaint is having to go the bathroom all the time (including 5 times per night…no joke!). I realize I’ve been incredibly lucky. I can only imagine what touring would have been like this summer if I had wanted to throw up each time we performed. Yikes. So I continue to travel without much trouble. Today (three days after coming back from Austria) I’m off to Warwick, England to teach for the next three weeks.
So far globe-trotting baby has been all over France (the Alps, Alsace, Bordeaux…), Spain (Barcelona, Saragossa, the Pyrenees), Austria (Corinthia, Salzburg) as well as Germany and Belgium. Now he’s off to visit the U.K. and next month he’ll be off again to Spain.
Though it’s been fun I must say that I am looking forward to settling down and doing some good nesting. I won’t really be able to stop moving until the end of November, but I’m starting to fantasize about just being home and preparing and planning and resting.

In Austria...

Jos has been working on a show in Salzburg and I came to join him for the week. It was a chance to breathe some delicious mountain air and get some baby shopping done. Austria and Germany have such wonderful wooden toys and it's not so easy to find them in France. So yesterday and today we raided the toy stores! A lot of the stuff we got won't be usable until the little one is over a year old... But I couldn't resist all the beautiful things!


Beautiful wooden stacking blocks, a soft rattling cube, a cushy velcroed tower and an adorable little elfin hat.




A jumping-jack cat, a wooden boat with all sorts of activities and a rainbow tower that makes music when you send you send a marble down it.




Colorful wooden clutch toys.

getting bigger

The belly on the 13th of August (3 and a half months in)


9th of september (4 and a half months)


21st of september (5 months)



october 11th in salzburg, austria. (6 months)



october 22nd at home. (6 months and a week)


october 22nd in leamington spa, england (6 and a half months)



december 14th at home (8 months and a week)

It's a...

On the 26th of September we had our second ultrasound. We saw the wee bean squirming around. And his feet and hands really looked like feet and hands! Yes, his... now we know, it's a little boy bouncing around in there.
So now of course we can really start concentrating on choosing a name! We had vaguely started writing things down earlier but our list of girls names was about ten times longer than the boys. It's great to know who it is we're expecting. Everything becomes so much more concrete. I've started staring at little boys in the grocery store and on the metro... analyzing and imagining what he might be like...
So... the names. Well, we've been scrutinizing film credits and reading the newspaper just for the names of the journalists. So far our very favorites are:

Quinn
Aster
Leander

We also kinda like:

Alexi
Cai
Kolya
Florian

But the list is ever expanding. I'll keep you informed...

Can I keep a blog?

I think this is a good idea. I live so far away from so many people that I love so dearly and I want to be able to keep you all informed of the growing belly and baby... buuuut... I am famously bad at most forms of communication... so I wonder if I'm up to the task (I hope so).
Well, I'm not promising anything, but I'll try my hardest to keep this space as up-to-date-ish as possible. Here goes nothing.