When you announce to family and friends that you're expecting your first child, one of the first results is that a whole bunch of advice comes in. One such piece of advice, that Christina and I decided to avail ourselves of, was to have a "babymoon": a holiday to celebrate the closing of the time when our family means just the two of us, before things get fancy and complicated. It's a time to celebrate years of happy marriage, indulge in the common interests which brought us together in the first place, and celebrate ourselves as a couple.

We've come to Valencia, Spain, to have a bit of a beach holiday¹. This was in deliberate contrast to our honeymoon, for which we went to Iceland. That was a beautiful, unforgettable trip, but this time, it was important for us to go someplace warm.

Spain is known for its late starts and late meals. Just today, we were a bit startled to discover that restaurants wouldn't open for dinner until 2030! But it turns out that there's a reason for this. At the conclusion of the Spanish Civil War in the 1930s, Spain was ruled by General Francisco Franco. As a sign of solidarity with his German allies, who'd helped his faction win that war, Franco decreed that Spain would run on Central European Time (UTC+1), just like Germany. Geographically speaking, it really should run at UTC+0, like England². Geography is no match for a dictator.

What this bit of historical trivia means for us personally is that after a very early morning getting to the airport, on arrival several hours later at 1330 local time, the restaurants had just closed up after stopping serving breakfast. It took some time to get to our hotel, and the first priority was to take a quick nap to regain some of the rest we'd missed, but unfortunately during that nap, we missed lunch. As stated earlier, none of the restaurants we saw began serving dinner before 2030. You may imagine Christina in a third-trimester low-blood-sugar rampage, but then you'd be imagining inaccurately; she handled it better than I did.

We ended up talking a walk down a few miles of empty beach directly in front of our hotel, and eventually found an ice-cream and tapas place that was actually open at the un-dinner-like hour of 1700. After some spicy potatoes and cheese sticks, suddenly this whole babymoon thing seemed like a much better idea. I was surprised and pleased to discover that horchata is actually a Spanish thing, not the Mexican thing I'd always assumed it was³.

Still, beyond the beach walk, we've largely been homebodies on this first day of the babymoon. Starting tomorrow, we have a busy schedule of lazing about in the sun planned.

I haven't mentioned Olive herself so far for this entire post, but of course, she's made herself felt. Her favorite trick these days is to hold very still until Christina isn't paying attention, then push hard in a rotary motion. We're still not sure if this is her rolling her entire body over in there, or if she's drawing circles with her fist for whatever reason, but whatever it is, it's attention-grabbing.