Hi everyone! I’m still here, mostly. I’ve fallen out of the habit of writing regularly (both here and elsewhere), and this post is my attempt to to get back into the swing of things.

A lot has been going on with me while I’ve been gone. The biggest thing is that I am going to have a baby this spring! My initial absence from the blog was in part because I was feeling pretty terrible all day, every day, and it was hard to motivate myself to do much of anything. But I’m well into the second trimester now and feeling much better, though as the baby grows I expect new difficulties will arise. I want to take advantage of this time when I’m feeling pretty good and I’m not yet preoccupied with a newborn to get back into blogging, at least for a bit.

We live in a fairly small house, which means to make room for the baby and all its accoutrements, we’ve got to do some serious culling of stuff. This meant consolidating some bookshelves, which in turn meant getting rid of a lot of books. This wasn’t as painful as I thought it would be. I honestly couldn’t tell you more than five titles that I actually remember deciding to cull – these were mostly books that I’d had for years and finally decided I was never going to read, or books I had already read but didn’t actually care for that much.

Of course, part of the reason we got rid of so many of our own books was to make room for books for the baby! We have a nice little collection going so far consisting of books from our childhoods plus some gifts from family. I also picked out some favorite board books to give to family “from” the baby for Christmas so they’d have something to read with the little one when he visits them. It was a ton of fun choosing books that I hoped our relatives would enjoy reading to the baby – a music and dance themed one for the musician, a baking themed one for the hobbyist baker, a grandpa one for the first-time grandpa, and so on. (I noticed that most grandma-specific board books are pretty regressive, focusing a lot on gendered activities like cooking, sewing, shopping, etc. If they weren’t about stereotypically feminine activities, they were super generic about how much grandma loves the grandkid, which is nice but also a bit boring. Writers for board books about grandmas, please step up your game.)

In other book news, I’m super happy that I was able to participate in Cybils again this year. I’m on the second round of judges for the YA speculative fiction category, and we’re deep into reading the seven finalists before we choose and announce a winner on February 14. I can’t talk about my thoughts on any of the titles specifically until then, but I can say generically that this is a great crop of finalists and I’ve really enjoyed diving into them. It’s also been great to *have to* read some books in print (as opposed to audio, which has been my standby for the past several months), simply because they’re not available in another format. My attention span for anything but work or baby preparation has really suffered recently, so forcing myself to focus on reading, and only on reading, for an hour or so at a time has been really nice.

I’m excited to share some of the bookish parts of raising a child with you here. Thanks for sticking with us through all these years and all these changes in the blog and our own lives. I hope you have a happy start to 2022, and that you and your families stay safe and healthy.