Rumbles and travels

I'm still here, although I've somehow let more than a few days go by without further commentary. March is being very...March-y, with a few scattered days of sunny promise tucked into the usual damp gray cold of Belgium. We're flying to Barcelona today for a long weekend and another grab at Catalonian spring, and the forecast promises some lovely weather. Gabriel is finally old enough to require his own seat, which I'm relieved about because it means we have much more space and take up a whole row of our own. Plus, the flight is not rescheduled for some late hour, instead falling in the middle of the afternoon, which *should* make things smoother (although my first rule of travel with children is that any time I anticipate a smooth flight the whole thing is a disaster and vice versa).

Other than that, we've had more visitors, which is always a treat, I've been plugging away at Dutch and a few academic projects, and Gabriel has been a delight and a crazy two-year-old (more blogging on that later, I promise). Oh, and this has been happening ten inches from our front door:

Most mornings I have to wave somebody down to make sure the digger operator sees me and doesn't swing the...digger part towards me and Gabriel, then precariously maneuver the stroller along the soft dirt edge of the massive pit that is our street. Someday, this will pass. Someday.

I've entered the third trimester of this pregnancy, which means there are three months to go. ONLY three months to go! I'm mostly taking it easy and alternate between feeling like we still have lots of time and worrying that it will be here in a flash.

For now, a weekend in sunny Barcelona with extra grandma-aunty-cousin hands to help wrangle the toddler sounds pretty nice. We're bringing no computer, just the iPad, so I plan to read and play Words with Friends and check Facebook and blogs but not much else. We'll come down loaded to the gills on the return flight, of course, because there are still piles of baby blankets and baby clothes that we migrated from America to Barcelona but not yet to Belgium.

One of the construction men with a rather smelly cigar, in fact one of the guys from the picture above, just knocked on the door and asked to see our basement. I hope this doesn't mean the walls will cave in, which we actually do worry about given how much the house shakes at 7am and throughout the day as trucks rumble past and diggers smash into the ground. Here's hoping that the house is intact when we get back from the weekend away!