Babywaiting in Jordan

Skyping every day with my host family’s eldest daughter, Rasha, and her seven months old baby Zahura is not helping me feel particularly patient as I wait anxiously for news about Shayla and John’s incoming baby. The good news is that I’ve learned some baby songs in Arabic that I will sing when it is my turn to Skype with a niece, and in the meantime I get to see a lot of pictures of a very cute Jordanian baby.

Speaking of cute Jordanian babies, Leila hit the jackpot with that one: on the same day she arrived to live with her host family, the host family’s daughter came home to have a baby, which means Leila got a month of up close and person babywaiting, not to mention constant family visitors and a pregnant lady for a roommate. But she was patient and has been rewarded by getting to have a brand new baby in the house with her!

I don’t know what it is with babies and me. I just love ‘em! Hormones, I guess. Anyway while babywaiting is fun, what’s more fun will be finding pictures of a newborn baby in my email! Then I can print them out and show them to every single person I know. To prepare for the occasion, I asked Reema the appropriate way to tell people in Arabic that my brother’s wife will have a baby soon. Reema got very excited and assured me that this is a topic everyone will want to talk about, and that I should bring it up at family gatherings so that my extended host family can ask me lots of questions and give me a chance to practice speaking Arabic.

This is how you say: "My brother is going to have a baby girl!" Apparently it translates literally to something, like, "my brother will soon welcome a girl!" Which is, like, really cute. Anyway, the pronunciation is something like "Akhooy bidha teejeeh binet!" or,

اخوي بدها تيجة بنت

Also important, I learned how to say, "the baby is here!" so that I can tell my host family as soon as I know: "Ejat al binet!" or

ا جت البنت

Anyway, I'm pretty stoked. Pretty ecstatic. More on the baby front as it develops, except that I will probably be tromping around the desert without internet access at the time of the birth, so unless my parents learn how to call my Jordanian cell, I will probably be a few days late to the baby party. Oh well, she will have a present from Jordan and I will have a good story about where I was when my first niece was born.