Mom's on her way (no baby yet)

My mom is on her way to the airport as I type. She will be here by (my) Wednesday afternoon. We put together all sorts of auxiliary plans just in case I was in labor and could not get to the airport to pick her up, but given that 1st labors are often over 8-12 hours and we've got nothing started yet, it seems likely that I'll be there to get her.

And of course she apparently has 2 suitcases and a carry-on packed full of baby goodies.

Furniture shopping

This past weekend we finally went out and did some furniture shopping that we have been meaning to do for... um... about a year. We were even well prepared as we went around the apartment and took measurements and made lists of the stuff we would like to get. Our first purchase? My stool!!
I am very excited about this stool as I have been searching around the apartment for something just this height. Shown next to one of our dining room chairs for scale, this lovely three legged stool can be seen on the streets of Beijing as a comfortable and portable seat for some of the more elderly population. It is just slightly above squatting height so if you want to squat (which is the way many Chinese hang out) it can take the pressure off your thighs.

It is also very useful if you think you might want to do some squatting during the first stage of labor but find that your legs get tired after about 10 minutes. It is a great little stool!

Preggers Massages

One of the great joys of living here in Beijing are the massages. (This has ever so briefly been mentioned here, here, and here.) Unfortunately for me, they are somewhat off limits to pregnant women. There are some pretty strong feelings about messing with pressure points, chi, or preggers in general and possibly causing bad things to happen to the baby. At one point I was thinking about visiting a friend's Chinese doctor and acupressurist to see if he could help with my 1st trimester nausea. (He had done AMAZING things for her.) My friend told the doc the situation and asked if he could help. His response was. "I can see her after the baby is born." Not so helpful.

So, while I am still feeling pretty darn good, a nice, deep back, foot, and leg massage would be wonderful. I tried about a month ago and the masseur asked me if I was pregnant. After I said 'yup' he told me the foot massage would then need to be "light light". sigh.

Then, a funny thing happened. When I was out earlier this week I met a Chinese woman at the hospital and she didn't realize I was pregnant. Admittedly I was wearing some baggy clothes but still. I was short of shocked... and then I had a brilliant idea :)

After being joined by a friend, we made our way to my favorite massage place and, being careful to never do anything really tell tale, like rubbing the belly, asked for 2 foot massages. 90 minutes later the world was a much more relaxed place. Ahhh - it felt so nice.

Last note -I did check with various massage experts from other cultures and other than 2 specific pressure points, they all said it was safe and not to worry. But I am looking forward to being able to go with no subterfuge.

Oct 2nd?

Okay people.
Thats not funny

(well, maybe a little funny)

New Polling Question

Since it has come up in conversations a few times now, we thought we'd let our worldwide friends get in on the biggest ShamrockJews question yet! When will Moose arrive! We've started a poll below which should allow you to enter your very own personal guess.
(This is the first time we've tried to use this software and we can't really check it since we can't view the blog, but hopefully it will all be spiffy keen.)

Using my higher level math skills, I can tell you that the due date is only 9 days away.
Wow.
9 months, 9 days, whatever.
UPDATE: it turns out the poll won't automatically show all the "other" responses let alone tell us who wrote them. So if you are willing to take the time to write your answers out under the comments section - even better!

One More Down

Finished another MBA class on Sunday, this one was strategic information systems - quite interesting. Well, almost finished. Still have to turn in my 10 page post-work assignment but other than that...
To celebrate, I decided to share this class picture from 2 classes ago.

Belly Love

Here is Roxanne in her favorite pose looking for a little belly lov'n

She is one floofy kitty

Class Time

Its that time again so I am back in class. I'm feeling pretty lucky that Moose is not giving me too hard a time with these 10 hour days. I did come prepared with a whole bag full of snacks and drinks.

My classmates have been very helpful by linking arms with me when I walk between the classroom and our group work rooms. They are also making sure that I eat enough and that I don't carry too much - like my laptop.

I am doing my best to just enjoy the attention and assistance.

Wild Animals of Beijing

One of our good friends in town, Maya of blog-posts past, lives in a traditional Chinese courtyard home. Occasionally she gets visits from a huang shu lang.

A what?

You heard me, a huang shu lang. This is sort of a ferret like creature who hangs around some of the older sections of Beijing. You can see some pictures of a little one here. A huang shu lang sighting is generally considered good luck and Maya was really looking forward to seeing some.

Then, when Maya and Jeremy were out hiking in the wilds outside of Beijing they also ran into a pig badger.

Again we can hear you say: A what?

Well, this one we had not heard of before, but you can read more about it here.

They got some crazy animals here in China.

French cooking and butter

That's right. We invited a bunch of pregnant women over for brunch this past weekend and thought they'd really appreciate a pan full of butter with a brick of cream cheese thrown in there to mix things up a bit.

What? You don't believe me? Okay, here's a little more context for you: The recipe is for Indian-style scrambled eggs. We love Indian food, so this seemed like a winner out of the gate. The problem, it turns out, is that the Frog Commissary is a French Cookbook, not an Indian one. So they don't really understand that loads of butter and cream cheese (and enough black pepper to make steak au poive) may not make for the most convincingly authentic Indian food. But what the heck! It's got 16 eggs to go with all of that, so maybe we can pretend it's the French version of the Adkins diet.

Sorry to keep hammering on how much butter we put into this dish, but the photograph doesn't do it justice. The butter you see there is just for the scrambled eggs (which also got the full brick of cream cheese added), and the base of that omelette pan the butter's sitting in is a full 12 inches across. I had to toss in another half-stick to make the tomato relish and rice-and-dhal sides that were meant to pair up with this lipid bonanza.