Can't Take My Eyes Off of You

As I promised, this is a post about the new baby in the household.

I ended up staying in South Bohemia longer than I had intended by a few days. Somehow this was not communicated properly with my host mom so on the original date of my return I received a text message from her. It asked, where are you? are you ok? we are waiting. We have a surprise for you!"

I immediately knew surprise = baby. On the one hand, I was sad that I wasn't actually there when it happened. But the more I thought about it, having someone who doesn't speak the language and isn't actually part of the family, actually being there? Most likely I would have ended up staying home alone and just waiting to hear something. It's the difference between seeing him when he was 4 days old and when he was 10 days old. Still ridiculously small and ridiculously cute. It would have been nice to have been a part of something with my host family though.

He doesn't cry all that much -- except occasionally in the middle of the night. Generally not that bad, but this week I was on a more regular college schedule working on my final paper. Which means going to bed at strange hours of the night. Which coincides, however, with when we little babies get hungry.

He's so bundled all the time that I sometimes forget how small he actually is. My host sisters, who turned 17 this week, take care of him a lot. While at first I thought it was really surprising that my host parents would have another baby, 15 years after their youngest, it means built in babysitting. But the odd thing is when I first say my host sisters with him, I realized that there are girls their age who have babies. Not that they would, but it was such a scary realization. I'm older and love babies, but I got a shiver down my spine thinking about what my life would be like with a baby. Especially now that I've started thinking that grad school might not be as scary and useless as I once did -- can't see it.

I've got one week left in the Czech Republic and then my mom comes to join me for a whirlwind week of traveling across the continent. Prague, Berlin, Amsterdam, Brussels before heading home right in time for Christmas. I keep being torn between telling myself I've ready to come home and telling myself there was so much I didn't do here in Prague. Now that I don't have any work, I would love to take the time to explore and really feel like I've done stuff. I'm very much a creature of habit so I've only just realized how many places I haven't been to or things I haven't seen. Perhaps that's better for another trip.