Push not kick

Today, Mini showed me her new trick... many times over! She can now push, instead of kick. I am telling you that's quite a difference and I much prefer the kick than the push. She had two favourite places, possibly where her two extremities are: the first is to my right side, almost below my ribs. The other is about 1.5 inches left of my belly button. On these two spots, Mini has pushed and pushed, for prolonged amounts of time. A couple of times, I decided to push her back to see what would happen. Well of course my pushing her, pushed her away from where she was so i was no longer lopsided but the cheeky girl then came back with a vengeance and pushed at the same spot again!

Domestic Zen

My friendship with lovely CD has had two definite benefits, both of which are of domestic nature.
The first is that I have started knitting. I remember I used to knit and crochet with my grandmother when I was kid. She was a tailor when younger and when we were younger a lot of our clothes were sewed or knitted or etc by my mother and grandmother. It was part necessity, part of pleasure but man, I look back at my clothes and am impressed!

My grandmother was also the best cook in the world. No exaggeration! :-) My mum does a pretty good job of following her goodness closely, however (and unfortunately) I have not been able to continue the line. But this is related to the second benefit of my friendship with CD. I have been baking a lot more!!
For Xmas we had a cookie baking session where I made Rosettes which is the same as shirini panjerei in Persian.
You simply need some rosette irons and a cooking thermometer.
I also learned how to use cookie press and (didn't make but ate) a whole bunch of yummy sugar cookies. Cookie presses make such goodlooking cookies! In fact both these cookies have a very high impress-effort ratio. Maximize that utility function and you are gold.

I was also introduced to chocolate crinkles which are easy and delicious. The other plus is that they look pretty good!

Lets end this post with a bit of philosophical soul searching. Since you bake cookies, why aren't they called bakies instead of cookies?
[I heard this from someone but I can't remember who so I can't give them their due credit.]

and the second gem which I attribute to Jessica B is that STRESSED spelled backwards is DESSERTS.

Think about it.

Home Stretch

Tomorrow our 30th week of pregnancy is going to finish and we will officially be starting the 31st. The fact that there is now a 3 as the second digit of my decimal gestational age scares the crap out of me. In theory, the baby will be considered full term in one and a half month. Let the freak out begin.
Maybe I should count using the fetal age method which would mean the baby is still 28 weeks which has no mention of 3.
Repeating a curse that I learnt during the New Year period, God damn shit. :-P

ok lets be serious. No even serious I am starting to freak out.
ok forget the seriousness. Lets put the freak out on the side.

Our class schedule for the following months is crazy. We had a late pregnancy class last week which was about 2 hours and covered at a high level what goes on during labor and delivery and aftermath. (Did you know the baby's first poo is a black tar mess which is really sticky and hard to clean? lovely.)
There was an ahhhh moment or two in there especially when they talked about the hospitals preference for skin to skin contact for the baby and mother/father during the first couple of days, esp the first couple of hours. How gorgeous is the thought of having a naked lump of breathing baby on your chest? (as long as the tar poo is kept away!) (Did you know that this type of skin to skin care is becoming more prevalent and is called kangaroo care? it was invented in Bogota, Colombia http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/12/13/the-human-incubator/). Oh and another interesting thing is that it seems the mother's body temperature can adjust itself so that the baby is never overheated however the father doesn't have such a feedback loop and so the baby can overheat and so fathers if your kiddo starts sweating, you know why.

We also have a breastfeeding class (multiple people have told me how hard breastfeeding is, argh!!) and 3 childbirth classes and a new born care class. All petty much in Feb. So much!!

Meanwhile we are taking improv classes once a week, we have a dance class for Feb and I have two huge work deadlines by end of Jan.

My freak out makes more sense huh!

so you thought...

you have an uncommon name? What do you say about this!!

Do I need to say more?!!

On a more serious note, I love the following song (mostly the first half):



One of the comments in youtube has the following translation:

ZANKO11 "Rough translation: 0:0-3:50 Being brotherless has killed me not the fire of bullets If your brother dies your sword will be blunt A father, without a son a sister, without a brother make all hearts sigh Sky is so dark, so dark oh God let no kafir see 2 brothers dying My pains are so heavy the cure for my heart is in Lorestan people, my pains cannot be told my legs are so weak and cannot walk the road"

29 weeks!

oh btw I have now finished my 29th week of pregnancy! woweee! time flies! :-)

One other funny thing that has been happening has to do with my baby shower. Several people have come and asked me when i am holding my baby shower and I don't know how to tell them that generally other people hold showers for the pregnant person! I don't want to have a party and ask people to buy me things! sigh!

Dear Abby, what do I do with this situation?!! :-P

Blood

This pregnancy has turned out very different to what I expected ...not that I really knew what I expected. I don't think I had really thought about it, more about when a baby was here and the baby growing up. I did think experiencing a baby inside me would be an extra-ordinary thing but didn't really appreciate how extraordinary (notice the difference between the spellings? it's intentional!)

But it really has been and I have been loving it and loving the little one kicking. Oh that's another thing, people wonder how they can make their mini stop kicking and I am more along the lines of oh how can i make mini kick me more? :-P Am I a masochist? quite possibly! but it's really cool knowing the baby is alive and kicking and moving inside you :-)

So where was I going with this post? right, blood. My blood in particular.

I have been pretty healthy so far in my pregnancy and I haven't had to do the dreaded glucose test where supposedly they give you a high sugar drink and take your blood sample before and one hour after and they see how you are absorbing that sugar. This will indicate if you have gestational diabetes.

Anyhow on various pregnancy forums which I have been perusing, the glucose test is supposedly this horror of a test, where everyone dreads it and the sugary drink that you have to take. People throw it up, throw it around and generally want to throw it.

Seriously I think people over react so much! I had to do mine yesterday (I started it, I spilt the drink when I tried to take a phone call and wham! I have to take it again because it is very important to be precise with the amount of sugar in your blood. arrghh!). Anyway the drink was a sugary orange which was fine. Just like any soft drink. I didn't love it, I wouldn't drink it if it was optional but it was fine.

It makes me wonder about all these people!

Then again, every pregnancy is different and some people have a lot of problems with their pregnancies... but sometimes I think people also use it as an excuse!