So...

...So why another blog?  One morning I was lying next to Salim so that he would keep napping after he woke up too soon.  That worked.  He slept for an extra hour and a half.  I did not sleep.  Instead my brain ran around and around STUFF.  Stuff about being here.  Stuff about being here with a baby.  Stuff about what I want being here to look like.  Stuff about being.

Then I thought, I should be writing all this down.  I have never been good about keeping a journal.  You know, with a pen and a notebook.  So I also thought, I should start a new blog to have someplace to put this.  And then I thought, why would I try to do that when most of the day is spent trying to keep Salim fed, somewhat clean, and out of tremendous danger, and once Papa is home I'm competing with him for time on the interwebs, i.e. it's not always convenient to try to keep up with typing the things, especially when writing typically isn't my first choice for downtime.  But then my Nap-Soaked Optimism said, No No!  You can do this!  Look: your child has been sleeping for an hour and a half (leaving you SO MUCH TIME for contemplation), and soon - So Soon! - he will sleep better at night so that you don't have to go to bed at 8 PM in order to get a sufficient number of short blocks of sleep!  And I thought, Yes!  You are right, Nap-Soaked Optimism.  This IS a good idea!

So here we are.

It should be noted that this happened about two weeks ago, and I am just starting to write now.  Also, no real change in Salim's sleep habits since then.  All the same, I think it may be a good idea.

...So why name it Oum Salim?  I guess because I am always weighing my still-new parental identity.  I'm expecting parenthood to play a much larger role in my identity (or at least in my social identity) here than it did in the States.  Frankly, I don't think anyone in the U.S. thought of me as "Salim's mother", at least not primarily, and I don't really even think of myself that way.  Yes, of course, for the past nine months there's been an extra person in our house, very small, for whom I am partly responsible and who requires a lot of attention, but I've never defined myself in terms of my relationship to said small person.  I thought that at least external opinions here would really seize on the parent role, and they probably do, but, for whatever it's worth, the only time someone has referred to me as Oum Salim so far has been as an afterthought.

Or this: it's at least as plausible that I named this Oum Salim because I find the naming/titling part of blogging to be kind of a pain, so I seized on one of the first things that came to mind.