2.6.2014

What a joy Sundays have become. I am still reminiscing quite fondly on yesterday.

Ever since the Wunderwaffe girls have joined our household after their military training and preparations, the weekends - namely, Sundays - have never been the same. Gernot and I live on a quite a comfortable property due to our careers, a luxury country house-style villa in the outskirts of the capital city that we had purchased after Gernot's election as chancellor for nearly 3,200,000 euros. 1646 square meters, climatized wine cellar, driveway, full-fledged security system with its own server, seven bedrooms, five bathrooms, one partial bath, fifteen rooms (including bedrooms), three-car garage, and a high-quality kitchen befitting of a five-star chef. While I consider myself not one to flaunt luxuriousness or boast of wealth, I am very willing to be perfectly proud of this hard-earned wealth that my husband and I have built up over the years of steady politics and careful investment. Before the Wunderwaffe girls came to live with us or were even constructed, whenever Gernot and I would have coworkers, friends, or family invited over for dinner or for holiday, I would find myself itching to hear the complements that would inevitably roll off the tongues of our guests in regards to our wonderful and comfortable home. Perhaps this can be accounted as a streak of vanity on my part, but I cannot deny it. After all, every woman should have at least something she is quite proud of, whether she shows it off to the world or not.

But when they arrived at our home to stay with us, the Wunderwaffe girls reacted in such an...outgoing way that it is hard for me to forget the first day they spent here. Perhaps it is because of their relative age that they appear to be that gives them such an ability to react so honestly, but they treated our home like it was a castle built for royalty, which at first took me by surprise, for I have seen far more luxurious homes of others who share the same career as me and my husband. But I say this as though I was the one who needed time to adjust - it took them nearly a week before they began to accept this new life of what they perceived as luxurious comfort.

I remember how Bismarck, upon realizing just what kind of a life she and her compatriots would have to live in this grandiose house of ours henceforth, protested our order to have them stay with us for the time being, since at the time there was not much in way of private housing that could be put aside for them at the expense of the government. She believed that such a life would only serve to degrade everyone's attitudes and punctuality and everything that made them soldiers and ship girls. Without the sharp edge of military life, she stated, she and everyone who had been constructed from the Wunderwaffe program would devolve into nothing more than ordinary female high school or college students, something that she absolutely resents being compared to or being called, for that matter. She even went so far as to request that we transfer everyone to one of the military bases outside of Berlin at the very least, and that she would not stand to find herself rotting away in an environment of softness and comfort. Unfortunately, she was the only one among her peers who felt this way, and the inevitable tide of peer pressure motioning to stay with us, combined with the lack of separate housing, whether civilian or military, finally caused Bismarck to desist.

Bismarck is a hard-working young lady. Initially it was difficult to overcome the hurdle of addressing Bismarck as a female, her name being taken directly from the historic Otto von Bismarck. She is extremely work-oriented, and if she senses that you are also in the same mindset as she is, she becomes very cooperative and friendly. This is quite a lovely characteristics for both me and my husband, for whenever we have had to take care of manual labor around the house (we have never kept maids or the like, for we enjoy the little things in life such as cleaning our own home), Bismarck always volunteers to help, and sometimes at moments when we really need it the most and forget that we can just ask one of the girls to help out. If we need an errand done when it is inconvenient for either Gernot or I to complete, Bismarck is always ready to take care of the matter.

However, Bismarck does have a tendency to take this quality too far sometimes...often to the point of annoyance. During the first week or so of her arrival here at our home, whenever Bismarck would complete a chore or a task, she would always come asking for more, and sometimes she would actually think that we were making fun of her by telling her that there was nothing else she needed to do, so I had to sit Bismarck down in my study one night and explain to her that while it was great that she wanted to always be working, she needed to understand that there is nothing wrong with taking a bit of time to relax, and that not everything was about work, work, work. Bismarck explained to me that this was because she loved feeling a sense of accomplishment, no matter how large or small. This made me think about all those times when Prinz Eugen was always showering Bismarck in praise, so I asked Bismarck if it wasn't so much as her wanting to feel a sense of accomplishment as much as it was her simply wanting to be praised. Bismarck finally admitted that she just liked being praised. That puts a smile on my face. So I promised I would give her lots of praise whenever she asked for it.

Bismarck is also surprisingly quite studious. After we had that talk in which I told her that it was alright for her to relax a bit more, I found Bismarck in our personal library, reading through historic German literature, the likes of Mann, Roth, Kafka, Musil, and Döblin. Because she is an enhanced human being with computerized senses, Bismarck is a very speedy reader, and she and I have spent many a weekend discussing great German literature. It is very easy to see that Bismarck has a sharp intuition and wit about her that would have classified her as a very intelligent human being, should she have been born a human and not constructed a ship girl. There has been many a time that I myself have told her, "Bismarck, should you ever retire from military service and enter civilian life, with your beautiful looks and sharpness, you could easily be one of Germany's next great leaders." But every time she rejects it out of politeness, saying that she would rather serve her country by fighting its wars than to push its pencils.

Hence, given all of these qualities, it is only natural for a gorgeous and intelligent maiden like Bismarck to carry herself with an air of confidence - or, dare I say, arrogance. But despite this, Bismarck does have quite the affectionate side to her. It seems she holds an almost stereotypical weakness to anything that she deems cute or adorable. Pets, dolls, plushies, small animals, even to a certain extent little children like Retia - anything of that nature smites Bismarck's heart, and she has admitted to me that she finds it quite difficult to resist her urge to be attracted to anything of that sort of nature. Because she practically lives with Retia now, Bismarck is good with my daughter and has gotten used to the feeling of being around her, but the first few weeks held a different story: every time she saw my daughter, Bismarck would run over, pick up Retia, and proceed to swing her around in circles. At first, I thought this would frighten my baby, but Retia didn't seem to mind. If anything, Retia simply seemed slightly annoyed at being swung around so much, as she would sometimes growl at Bismarck and smack her on the forehead to make her let go. Quite the memories of their first weeks in our home indeed.

Today was family fun night. Gernot said that there were a couple of American action movies he wanted to watch that were on his backlog of movies that he's been compiling, so we watched those for tonight. Luckily, I can appreciate a good action flick here and there, and because the Wunderwaffe girls are all part of the military, they were all for it as well. But I ended up watching the reactions of the girls as we watched through Gernot's movies on our big television in the living room, for their reactions served as my entertainment for the night, not necessarily the movies themselves. Bismarck was glued to the television; having never seen movies of such quality before, she, out of everyone, was the most easily swayed by all the special effects and fancy editing of the movies, and she and Prinz Eugen, the more extroverted girls of the bunch, rode a roller coaster of reactions throughout the night, whooping and cheering at the protagonists' explosive exit to safety and tearing up at the plot-device-scripted death of a beloved comrade. I found myself constantly smiling at the enjoyment that the girls were getting out of the movies, so I didn't mind not being able to actually watch the movies themselves.

I wonder why it is that seeing these girls be normal girls is so enjoyable. Although I doubt "normal" girls their age would enjoy American action movies.