Ireland, Week One

The sun is shining, crocuses and snowdrops are in bloom, and even the daffodils are well on their way.  It seems that spring starts in February, here, unlike on Martha's Vineyard where it won't get rolling until sometime in May. This time last week I was back there in the cold, frantically stuffing half-dried cloth diapers into already over-stuffed suitcases.  Nova, who is getting rapidly on towards the 3-month mark, was relatively unperturbed by the whole process.  We brought along a few small things but had to leave behind anything remotely like furniture.  

I suppose I should introduce myself, for those of you who don't know me already.  I set up this blog a bit over a year ago, hoping to write about writing.  The title comes from a quote from David Eddings who said something about a writer's apprenticeship being their first million words.  I'm fairly sure I'm almost there.

This time last year I was living in Cambridge, Massachusetts, making a daily walk up Pleasant Street to the 1369 where I sat with my MacBook, Moleskine and a medium chai, working on my never-ending, as-yet-unpublishable fantasy series.  Round about mid-February I went to Boskone and came home with a young Irishman.  I got pregnant.  As I was 36 years old and had been wanting to have a baby for a while, this was hardly a disaster, but it was a disruption.  

I stayed in Cambridge for a while, writing and wandering around and generally failing to make a living as a real estate agent.  At the end of the summer, I moved back to my parents' place for a little while, because I was broke and my roommates weren't so keen on having a baby knocking around the place.  In the fall, my boyfriend came over from Ireland, and we sat around waiting for Nova to make her appearance.  We waited.  Her due date came and went.  Another week passed, and another. Finally I went in to the hospital for an induction which took four days, on and off.  

There's Nova now, waking up.  She was born on November 29th, three weeks after her supposed due date.  The people at the hospital were a little alarmed by her lateness, but apart from wrinkly hands and feet and an excess of phlegm, she was fine. We took her home two days later, and she quickly recovered from her newborn sleepiness and charged on ahead.  At three weeks, we took her to Boston to get a passport.  At four and a half weeks, she was on the plane to Ireland for a 3-week visit.  

The visit was all well and good until US immigration got a look at Mike, my boyfriend/fiance, and his three visits to the US in the past 12 months. They said that he wouldn't be able to come back as a visitor, but only as an immigrant.  Never mind that he didn't want to live in the US permanently.  We could have challenged the decision, but that would have taken months, and I was getting sick of the back and forth.  That's how Nova and I have come to Galway now, rather than later in the year as I had planned.  

For now, we're staying with Mike's mum.  I think we've found an apartment, which we'll be moving into in a few weeks' time.  I'm looking for a cafe to write in, a place where I can sit Nova in a pram or something and be as pretentious as I like on my computer, but I don't think I'll be able to top the chai from the 1369.