The Swiss Army clearly has it in for me

When I was pregnant with Alex, Reto had military service at the very end of my pregnancy. (Alex’s due date was February 9; Reto was in the military January 24th to February 4.) For the average Swiss, "in the military" means at a site someplace in Switzerland (you're expected to remain there overnight during the week but are generally allowed to go home over the weekends) so this is not, in the grand scheme of things, a giant tragedy. It's not as if he had been off in Iraq while I was giving birth to a child he wouldn't see for months. I'm well aware of that. It's annoying at worst. Nevertheless, it is annoying to be home alone in your 39th week. We were still living in Grafenried back then, and although we have a car and a good train connection to Bern, it can feel fairly isolated when you're speeding towards your due date and know you’ll be spending your nights alone. I arranged for our friend Robin to stay over for a few nights while Reto was away; of course it snowed about 10 inches that week and Robin, California girl that she is, has never driven in the snow in her life. We quickly decided that if I did go into labor Robin would provide moral support and company but Reto’s parents or a cab company would provide the transportation. Reto came home over the weekend and since he wasn't scheduled for military service in the week of my actual due date, I figured we were pretty well covered.

Do I even need to say that Alex arrived early? At least he had the great good sense to jump start my labor on the middle Sunday of Reto’s service, meaning he was at home with me when my water broke in the middle of the night. Alex was born Sunday night, and Reto was graciously granted leave on Monday, but Tuesday he had to go back into service. He was stationed about 2 hours away and was allowed to leave overnight for the remainder of the week, so he drove two hours home in the evenings, saw us in the hospital at night and then early the next morning before the two hour drive back. It wasn't ideal, but it worked out okay since I stayed in the hospital all that week anyway. If we'd been in the States, where they send you home after a day or two, it would have been awful to go home to an empty house with a newborn. As it was, I stayed in the hospital my standard five days and we all went home together on the following Saturday. The one thing that went awry was that we didn't have enough baby clothes at home. At some point we stopped shopping because Alex – known in utero as “The Blob” - was starting to look a bit huge and the size 50's (for 50 cm long) were starting to seem a wee bit small. We figured we'd wait until the baby was born, see how big it was, and then Reto could finish shopping while I was still in the hospital. Since as it turned out Reto was in the military while I was in the hospital that didn't happen and he had to buy some panic onesies on Saturday afternoon. They were overpriced, but remain among the cuter onesies Alex ever had.

Some of you can probably see where this little trip down memory lane is headed. This baby is due December 10 and Reto has military service – wait for it – December 3 through December 7. Isn’t that great!? (Robin, I can hear you laughing.) And during weeks 36 and 37 he'll be attending courses in Zurich where he will, in all likelihood, stay overnight during the week. Okay, Zurich is only an hour or so away, but still. That's an awful lot of away time in the final four weeks. Given that Alex was early, and most second babies arrive before their due date, I’m thinking we have a small window of opportunity – week 38 – to have a panic-free onset of labor. Needless to say the plan is to have all of our rubber duckies in a row before that Zurich course begins. And the cab company's phone number on speed dial.

And if all else fails, the hospital is only a 15 minute walk from our apartment.

Gruess Gott!

In Switzerland, you greet people. It's what you do; it's an important part of the unwritten social script. When you enter a shop, you greet the salesperson. When you go to the bakery to buy a loaf of bread, you greet whoever is behind the counter before placing your order. At a restaurant you greet your waiter, and if the table next to your is occupied you probably greet the people sitting next to you. You might even wish them "en Guete!" (Guten Appetite, or enjoy your meal) when their food is served. If you're in a small village and somebody walks past you on the street, you greet them (you don't have to do this in the city); you greet people on Wanderwegs (hiking trails) and when you enter an elevator that's already occupied. Here in Bern we say "Gruesseuch;" in Zurich it's "Gruezi." Swiss people can figure out where you come from by how you pronounce your greeting. Reto, who worked in Zurich for five years, switches to whatever is local; I'm a hopeless "Gruesseuch-er." (It's a wonder I'm speaking German at all, don't ask me to change those things I labored over!)

I thought the Swiss were big greeters, but Reto and I just returned from a long weekend at a wellness hotel and spa in Austria (more on this in a post of its own), and I'm here to tell you: the Austrians will greet you to death. I've never been greeted so many times a day in my life. (I suppose it helped that we were in a five star hotel and the staff was unfailingly correct, but still.) In Austria the traditional greeting is "Gruess Gott!" (literally, greetings to God) and I could not for the life of me adjust to it. I have a hard enough time saying Gruezi in Zurich - Gruess Gott was a cultural step too far. I alternated between my Bernese Gruesseuch - which was just fine because about half the people in our hotel were Swiss, and half of them were Bernese - and a German inflected "Hallo!" I can Gruesseuch with the best of them, but the Austrians really raise it to a whole new level.

Reto and I had a great weekend spa-ing, sauna-ing, and wellness-ing (details and a few pictures coming in a day or two). Alex stayed with his grandparents at the farm and had a great time too; he did get homesick for us at bed-time but otherwise did well on his first long weekend without us. It'll be awhile before Reto and I can sneak away just the two of us, so we wanted to sneak in this trip before December. We had two days of beautiful weather and one day of steady rain, which when you're staying at a wellness hotel is a great excuse for hanging out in the spa all day. We had a great time, but really missed Alex, so it's not so bad coming back to real life.

And I'm glad to back in the land of the Gruesseuch.

A few pictures of the garden

It's not much by American standards (67 sq. meters), but it's a bit of private green space in the middle of an urban neighborhood. You're not going to find much better in the middle of the city.

The bumble-bee moment of a bilingual baby, or how Alex started to talk

Alex was a bit slow to start talking. Not so slow that we thought we had an issue on our hands, but slow enough that we brought it up with our pediatrician at the 18-month well-baby appointment. (And certainly slow enough that we were growing weary of his fall-back position of just pointing at the thing he wanted and yelling.) Our pediatrician (who is Norwegian, of all things, and wonderful) asked us if Alex used "Mama" and "Papa" (the Swiss say Papa or Papi but we actually use Dada) properly and if he can follow basic directions; if children are doing that before their second birthday he's not concerned but makes a note to follow up at the two-year well-baby appointment. And yes, at 18 months Alex was calling us Mama and Dada and he had a small handful of other words as well; not many, granted, but he was in command of a fistful of simple random nouns - water, ball, music, star, bus, moon. (It's no accident that all of those words are cognates - words that are the same [or remarkably similar] in English and German: water/Wasser, ball/Ball, music/Musik, star/Stern, bus/Bus, moon/Mond.)

A lot of parents of bilingual children will tell you that their children didn’t start talking until the end of their second year, but I’ve seen some literature that suggests that the delay for bilingual children relative to monolingual children is actually closer to the delay for boys relative to girls; that is, about four to six weeks rather than the much longer delay assumed by conventional wisdom. I can’t explain this discrepancy, and I tend to trust parents’ assessments of their own children, so when my friends with bilingual children tell me their children didn’t start speaking until quite late – compared to where they "should be" on a developmental assessment chart, anyway – I tend to believe them. And in light of the linguistic chaos Alex negotiates on any given day, we really tried to cut him some slack in the Onset of Speech Department.

Reto and I are raising Alex bi-lingually. We take a a one-parent/one-language approach - each parent speaks one and only one language with the child - and we're pretty strict about it. I speak English with Alex in private and in public, in mixed-language groups and when we're together with Reto's parents who do not understand English. Some of you have experienced speaking English with Reto only to have him turn his head and rattle off something incomprehensibly Swiss to Alex. It sounds straightforward, and for the most part it is, but consider the full language environment in which Alex operates: although I speak only English with Alex, I often speak German (not Swiss) in front of him - with my in-laws, in a store or restaurant, when we visit the Mütterberaterin, with some of the mothers in play group. He hears me switching back and forth, and that must be confusing on some level. It must be even more confusing when he watches Reto switch from Swiss with him to English with me, unless we’re at his parents’ in which case he speaks Swiss with Alex and German with me, unless his parents aren’t in the room and then he might address me in English or German, depending on mood and context and topic; but if the two of them are visiting his parents without me Reto stays in Swiss the whole time. I get confused just writing all of that so I can only imagine what Alex's mental map of the world must look like.

Whatever the professional literature says, I can honestly say that in Alex's case it was well past his second birthday when he hit that moment all the baby books refer to as the "word-a-day" stage. It was late April (so Alex was almost 27 months old) and Alex and I were taking a walk through a little triangular park between our apartment and the university. We were looking at the flowers and a big fat bumble-bee staggered, pollen-drunk, from one tulip to the next.

"Alex! Look!" I said. "A bumble-bee!"

"Bum-bum bee!" Alex said. "Bum-bum bee!"

And he's never looked back. The words piled on top of one another, one two three a day. There were ants! and ladybugs! and bees! and worms! Leaves! Dogs! Birdies! And not just words in English. Wa-wa became Wasser. He chose Baum over tree, Blumen over flowers, Auto over car, Zug over train. Nouns, nouns, nouns to name his world. He went from two word sentences to four word sentences like a colt tripping down hill. He's into double digits and I've stopped counting and can hardly remember those days when his method of asking for something to eat was to slap the palm of his hand against the refrigerator door. In fact, in the four months since our bumble-bee moment not only has Alex become a chatterbox, he has become a chatterbox with a clear langugage preference.

Are you ready for this?

Alex prefers speaking Swiss. He understands everything I say to him in English, but very clearly prefers to speak Swiss. I'll confess that this scenario never really occurred to me. I've always held in the back of my mind the very real possibility - the likelihood, really - that once he started attending school he wouldn't want to speak English in front of his friends, wouldn't want to stand out as different like that, but I always assumed that up until that point he'd show a preference for English. I'm a stay at home mother and I'm a motor-mouth, ergo Alex will have a bias for English, right? But Alex, Alex prefers Swiss. One of the many ways he reminds me every day how very much his own person he is. From the minute that boy was born he had personality pouring off him, he had his own ideas.

And for now he's expressing those ideas in Swiss.