A Nickname is Born

You might have noticed a great slacking on my part when it comes to posting. I have several reasons for this that I won't bore you with at this time, but let's just say that life in Russia is much slower than life in America, and I somehow have more time for writing there than I do here.

But I wanted to tell you a funny story, so I'm breaking the silence, for at least a little while, and we'll see what happens.

Lots of you are praying for our newest baby, currently 11 weeks old, and I want to tell you about our baby's nickname, because I think it's cute.

I found out I was pregnant while we were in California in October. Yes, we kept it a secret for a while, being a little skittish after our last 2 babies left us. But I was with my college friends in one part of CA, waiting to meet Thomas in another part of CA, and feeling quite suspicious that something was growing. I mentioned my thoughts to my friend, who just happened to have a pregnancy test. How could I resist such an opportunity? And there it was, a faint but confirmed line. I was speechless, and probably cried, but I don't remember perfectly.

At last I could surprise Thomas with the good news, something I had fantasized about before, being someone who loves surprises.

My friend and I brainstormed a bit and finally came up with an idea. I already had a surprise for Thomas, so I decided to include a special card with the surprise that he was already expecting.

Now I have to tell you a little bit about Russian. In Russian the polite way to tell people you are pregnant is not to say "Oh, by the way, I'm pregnant." Russians say what would literally be translated, "I am waiting on a baby." So on the outside of the card I wrote the word for " we are waiting" and on the inside I used these cute puffy stickers my friend had to spell the word baby. Now baby was in English, so we've got Russian written on the outside and English on the inside. You should also know that baby in English could be read in Russian, but as a different word with different sounds.

So, Thomas finds the card and opens it up, naturally having read we are waiting as the Russian in which it was written and continuing to read the inside in Russian as vavoo, the way the letters would be pronounced in Russian. He looked at me with the most confused look on his face. I told him to read that word in English, and realization began to set in. You probably had to be there to really appreciate the humor of the situation, but now you'll know why you might hear us refer to our baby as Vavoo.

And that's my story.