Award time...

Award rules:
1) Thank the person(s) who nominated you for this award
- Thanks MeKate (whose beautifully written blog is well worth checking out)!
2) Copy the award and place it in your blog
3) Link to the person(s) who nominated you for this award
4) Tell us 7 interesting things about you
- See below for my ramblings...
5) Nominate 7 bloggers and link to their blogs:
I don't expect that everyone will have time to do this, since , but these are a few of the blogs I really enjoy reading these days. It's hard to choose, and sorry if you already got the award!
http://birdsandsquirrels.wordpress.com/ - she's got a beautiful daughter and is currently blogging about the trials of breastfeeding.
http://allthingsnew-joannah.blogspot.com/ - Joannah is dealing with her DH's illness with eloquence, faith and grace.
http://drdandle.blogspot.com/ - I love her scientific approach to IF and treatments, which is so like the way I look at everything.
http://ifoptimist.blogspot.com/ - In the mid-second trimester trials and tribulations of a twin pregnancy with a misbehaving cervix.
http://impatientwithpcos.blogspot.com/ - Recently had her baby, and has a great story of a wonderful delivery. So nice to read when there are so many horror stories out there!
http://infertilityrocks.wordpress.com/ - Eve has a wonderful son and is now having a rough pregnancy with the loss of one of her twins in utero (the other is still doing great). She's also very eloquent and deserves a lot of support, as many nurses and physicians and others IRL aren't exactly models of how to handle loss.
http://mommysmidlifecrisis.blogspot.com/ - 36 weeks with a unicornuate uterus, which is hard to believe. Her baby should be here any day now!

Seven interesting things about me? That feels very difficult to come up with, because I don't find myself all that terribly interesting.
1. I speak English and German fluently, have a rusty French bilingual secondary school diploma, and speak a little Spanish. I love languages, and have been lucky enough to live in Canada, California, France, Finland and Germany so far. All my mandatory arts credits in undergrad were taken in German and Spanish language courses. And DH and I speak German at home and intend to raise our child(ren) to be bilingual.
2. My 3 month exchange program to German at age 15 was the worst 3 months of my life. I was very sheltered in my home life, and young for my age, and had huge issues living with people who weren't welcoming me as a part of the family. I was expected to wait for someone to offer me a bun at Sunday breakfast, rather than digging in like the rest of them. I wasn't allowed to be in the house if someone else wasn't there. And so I spent a lot of time wandering alone around the downtown of the town I was in. I was with a different class for many of the subjects I was placed in at school (normally the whole class takes all the same subjects, and it's often the teachers who move from room to room to provide the lessons), so it was hard for me to get to know people, and any free periods I had were generally not shared with someone that I knew. It was very lonely, and I spent most of each Sunday phone call from home sobbing to my parents about how unhappy I was. My parents had driven their daughter to parties when she was staying with us - they wouldn't even drive me the few blocks to church when it was pouring with rain. Bike there yourself, or no church service for you. Unfortunately, I didn't have the brains to complain about the situation to the organizers of the exchange, who probably would have been able to arrange to move me to a more welcoming family. Fortunately, I picked up a lot more German, and figured out that if I could survive those 3 months with people who didn't seem to want me around at all, and so my move to Germany at age 21 for work was much easier. At least there I wasn't stuck living in a toxic environment.
3. I've been very shy and introverted my entire life. My Mom used to give me pep talks about making friends on the drive to the first day of school. I'm just not good at striking up conversations with people. DH and I went to a party last night where we basically knew the hosts and no one else. There must have been at least 30 people there. We clung together, and probably spoke briefly with two other guests apart from the hosts. And apart from that, I just couldn't bring myself to go stand by a group of people who already knew each other and try to get into the conversation. DH was no better. But it's a different story with work situations for both DH and I. We can both make small talk and meet people at work functions. I can speak up in classes at school, or at huge meetings, and not have any problem making my opinions known. I'm much more comfortable in tiny groups of people when it's a social thing though, and much prefer quietly listening to what other people have to say rather than speaking myself. I hope I'll be able to make myself become a little more extroverted to set a good example for the kid. I don't want her to be without playdates or to end up painfully shy.
4. I'm a packrat and hoarde books, amongst other things. We have probably 30 largish boxes of books up on the third floor of our house right now that are just waiting for me to buy bookshelves and unpack them. Many are childrens' books, many are the scifi ones I've loved for years, some are trashy romances. Lots have been rescued from library book sales or bought second-hand from ebay. I still have all my university textbooks. Clothes I wore in high school. All sorts of Bir.kenstock shoes and sandals that I bought at their outlet store in Germany before I moved back to Canada - and haven't even worn yet. DH is going to flip out when he sees the full extent of the amount of crap that I've amassed. Right now, our walk-in closet has 3/4 of the hanging room taken up by my things, and probably 2/3 of the shelf space. Good thing DH is better at throwing things away than I am!
5. I'm a bit of a spendthrift and really need to work on being more generous. My family was definitely middle class, if not upper middle class, as I was growing up. But I was raised on stories of how my father grew up dirt poor in England, and how when his mother emigrated to Canada with him and his sister when he was 14, they landed here with $200 to their name. He worked through high school, did engineering as a coop program in university and worked two jobs on most of his work terms to pay his tuition. They'd shop in the discount section of the grocery store, and eat the green meat cuts and rotting fruit. He'd take raw liver in to work for lunch, so that his colleagues' stomachs would turn and they'd offer him the rest of their lunches. And so I grew up with him, going grocery shopping on Saturday morning and learning how to calculate the price per 100g so we could figure out which was the least expensive thing to buy. I'd be chastized if I didn't pick up a penny off the ground when I saw one, because every penny counted. And I took all of it to heart. Even though I've never wanted for money, I have trouble ordering something pricy off the menu at a restaurant. Having Italian for dinner? No $25 osso bucco for me, I'll stick with the $13 pasta dish. Wine or a cocktail with dinner? No thanks, tap water is fine with me. When I think about it, it's pretty bad. I'm the type who gets anxious going for a group dinner when I know that at the end of the night, everyone is going to want to just split the bill. And yet my meal will have cost way less than theirs and I won't have had anythig to drink. And it drives me nuts to be paying for their food. I can't say that I like this trait in myself, but it's so engrained that I haven't been able to overcome it. But then put me in the Bir.kenstock outlet store, and I'll find all these bargains that I can't resist, and end up with 5 pairs of shoes that aren't cheap and that I'll rarely wear. Or I'll go to Win.ners and come out with clothes I don't really need (or baby stuff when I wasn't even pregnant and was in the throes of infertility treatments and miscarriages).
6. I've had two careers already at age 35. Did my undergrad degree in Engineering Physics, Electrical option (kind of half pure physics, half electrical engineering), where engineering was a back-up choice in case I didn't get into medical school or changed my mind about becoming a doctor. I love science and math, and thought I might as well enjoy those subjects while I had the chance, and at the same time get a degree that would get me a real job if I didn't get into medicine. And so I didn't get off the waitlists the first time I applied to med school (while my boyfriend at the time, who was from a family of doctors, and who only applied because I kept going on about how great medicine was, got in easily). And I lucked into a great job in Germany with a Canadian company, moved there, and ended up staying for 5 years because I loved what I was doing. I met DH at work while I was there, and we'd been together for 3.5 years by the time I decided that if I was going to go into medicine, it was now or never. He said that me moving back to Canada for med school wouldn't automatically end our relationship, so back I moved, and we dealt with transatlantic long-distance for the next 4 years before we finally bit the bullet and got married so that he could move here to be with me. This June will be our 5th anniversary, and this August will be the 5th anniversary of us living together.
7. I'm very detail-oriented and picky. It's driving DH insane how much I'm complaining about in the new house. It seems like every day I'm finding some new flaw. This wall isn't perfectly straight, that light switch cover isn't installed level. The bedside lights and tables that I spent an hour marking the installation location for the contractors for, so that they'd be exactly equidistant from the headboard on either side, are a 1/4" closer on my side of the bed than on his. There are cracks in various spots on the parquet floors throughout the house, and the fact that they didn't screw down the subflooring and there are squeaky bits throughout is driving me insane! Even that the floors aren't level, but have a slope to them that our contractor says is a really minor thing, and nothing to worry about. The areas of paint that were touched up are really noticeable when the light hits them in certain ways. There are cracks by the crown moulding. The sliding glass doors at the back of the house creak and shift when the wind hits them. And the wood cabinet doors in the kitchen have slowly warped a little over time, so that slivers of unstained wood are peeking out in spots. Seriously, I could drive myself insane. And DH too. Hopefully when the baby gets here I'll be too tired and busy with her to care any more.
Thanks for thinking of me Kate - I always figure my blog entries are totally boring, so the real fun of blogging to me is follow other people's blogs and leaving encouraging comments.