All mixed up…

This week I decided to write about mixed-race children. I’ve always thought that mixed kids are the most good looking kids you can have, simply look at Keanu Reaves, Halle Berry, just to name a couple. And I’m surrounded by friends who are mixed – Laura (Chinese / Malaysian / New Zealander), April (Filipino / Australian), Lin (Singaporean / Dutch)… So I’m very excited that my kids will fit into this category of good looking people and I expect nothing less than giving birth to a super model in less than 5 months!

And as far as we’re both aware, we are as pure bred as they come. I’m 100% Chinese and David 100% Dutch. And for my side of the family, this is the most mixed-race child to join the family (I do have a cousin who is ¼ Indonesian) so everyone is psyched about the half ghost baby. Oh, and I should explain: when Chinese people first encountered Europeans, they thought that their skin was too impossibly white so they must’ve been ghosts. The name stuck, even till now, and most Chinese people will still refer to Westerners as ‘ghosts’. My grandma, for example, likes to call David ‘ghost boy’. It’s not meant to be derogatory but rather an endearing term. For Chinese people (and Asians in general), pale skin is sign of wealth and health – as only farmers and labourers should be tanned. Which explains my mum’s comment about soy sauce (see my last blog entry)!

And this brings me to some of the questions that we’ve had from David’s family about what surname the baby will take and what nationality he will have (we’re in an even number week, so it’s a ‘he’). We’ve never really discussed the surname as we’ve both always thought that the baby will have David’s surname. It’s not common in Chinese culture for the child to take the mother’s surname. Although, all married women retain their own surnames, rather than changing to their husbands’. And in terms of our baby’s nationality, he’ll of course be an AUSTRALIAN. As far as we know, he won’t be qualified for dual citizenship (definitely not part Chinese citizen and most probably not part Dutch either). I’ve long given up my Chinese citizenship but as long as David remains Dutch, our children will qualify to carry an EU passport. As for me, just like any non-Chinese citizen, I have to apply for a visa when I travel to China. But as soon as I enter the border, I’m required to give my Chinese name as I’m of Chinese ancestry. Isn’t that odd? When my sister first travelled to China, my parents had to come up with a Chinese name on the spot as they’ve never given her one!

And the exciting new for this week – week 18 – is that I felt the baby move for the first time! And so did Dave! I was lying on my back watching tv when all of a sudden there was this ‘flipping’ movement in my lower abdomen. So I quickly grabbed Dave’s hand and he felt the next movement too! It was so amazing – our baby was doing some complicated gymnastics routine at such a young age! Do you think they’ll let he represent China, Holland AND Australia in the 2012 Olympics?

Until next time….

Pregnancy superstitions

David has recently been advised by Simone to massage my little toe! Apparently it’s a technique from Chinese medicine to help with the wellbeing of mother and baby. Since I’m very ticklish with my feet and Dave isn’t too into my mangy little toes, we haven’t put this technique to the test. But it does make me think of all the pregnancy related superstitions……..sorry, I mean ‘advice’…….that I’ve been given lately.

- My mum actually told me to follow this one and she was dead serious: avoid soy sauce. At first I thought she meant it has too much salt but it’s actually a superstition that the colour will give your baby dark skin! (Oh, how my dad laughed!)

- Rachel (one of my close girlfriends) explained that if you deny being pregnant, when in fact you are, it will bring extreme bad luck. But luckily for me, she never asked me the question before our big announcement so I was able to avoid the bad luck for my baby. Phew!

- Wishing your baby is a particular sex: according to my colleague, if you wish that your baby is a particular sex when your baby is actually the opposite, it can create resentment in the baby, towards you (the mother) and its gender! Wow, I’m definitely not going to touch that one!

- Rubbing your tummy – this is one that I read from a website last night and it’s another Chinese superstition. Apparently if you rub your pregnant tummy too much, you’ll produce a demanding child. As if a new born isn’t demanding enough already! I really hope this one isn’t true because I enjoy rubbing my tummy way too much!

And for those of you thinking or wanting to fall pregnant – DON’T talk about it too often! According to my colleague Julia, if you yap about it too much it might never happen to you! So shhhhhhhhhhhhhhh…

One thing that I hope won't be bad luck for my baby is flowers. David surprised me last week with a bunch of baby pink roses! Awwww..... I love being pregnant! I can get used to getting roses every week :)

Where do nicknames come from?

Tonight Viv and I were both sitting on the couch, watching F1. Viv was lovingly putting coconut butter on her belly, hoping to avoid future stretch marks, and having some quality 'bonding' time with the baby (as suggested by the same book that says: 'tighten your stomach muscles to give your baby a hug'). When she was finished, she asked me: 'come and smell my tummy'. Having made myself quite comfortable on the opposite side of the couch I replied: 'can you just pass me the bottle?'. Unfortunately this request wasn't met with the enthusiasm I was hoping for, so I had to haul myself up to lean over to the other side, and have a smell. My first reaction was: 'it smells like an Easter egg, and it looks a bit like one as well', but immediately after it dawned on me; 'It's a Kinder Surprise!' Except that this one won't come out wrapped in a little instruction sheet, or a sticker sheet with a set of cartoonish eyes. Yet another nickname for our unborn child was born.

Week 1 to 2 there was no nickname, because there was nothing to name. From week 2 to 4 we generally referred to 'it' as our 'food baby', having just rented Juno a few weeks earlier. After the pregnancy test it became Baby David, inspired from our favourite show The Royle Family.
The one nickname that entertained me the most was a term introduced to us by Vicky (Vivian's younger sister) about 5 years ago: Oopsies. Accidentally switched tv channels? Oopsies! Dropped a ceramic bowl on your foot? Oopsies! The night I suggested that nickname for our baby was a night filled with laughter, though admittedly it was mainly me who was laughing.

None of these nicknames stuck for very long though, and we generally refer to 'it' as The Baby, seeing as how we don't know whether 'it's' a he or a she.
Our baby book works around the problem in a clever way. Rather than refer to 'it' as 'it' for 40 weeks, or talking about 'The baby' or 'Your baby' the whole way through, they alternate; on even weeks the baby's a He, on uneven weeks the baby's a She. What a great idea! We should do that, then we don't have to talk about 'it' as though it's just some Intra Terrestrial being until the day it's born.

I can't wait what nicknames we can give her when she's born!

David.

16 weeks and counting

Last Thursday was our second hospital appointment. Everything went well, except the doctor couldn’t find the baby heart beat with the Fetal Doppler machine. Although it made some impressive space-time-travel type noises, she just couldn’t quite get the heart beat. At one point she even closed her eyes to listen more closely, talk about being a baby whisperer! She quickly soothed our concern by tracking the baby with the ultrasound machine and we saw the heart ‘blinking’ instead of listening to it on the speaker. She called our baby a little rascal for moving so much and imitated its little ‘dance’ moves. Awwwwwww…….mummy V and daddy D were instantly smitten.

She handed me a clean bill of health: perfect blood pressure, clear urine test and the lowest odds of birth defects she has EVER seen! I felt extremely special by all her soothing words.

And the same goes for the rest of our hospital experience so far. We’ve booked in to give birth on the 26^th September at the Royal Hospital for Women at Randwick, 5 minutes drive from our house. We’ve only heard great things about this place, such as “the best maternity ward in the country”! And after all the horror stories in the news lately about birth in hospital bathrooms (I will spare you the gruesome details) we feel lucky to have such a great facility close to home. The receptionist are always efficient, the ultrasound technicians are highly understanding (even when I didn’t drink enough water for the ultrasound), the midwives are extremely reassuring (I have also been assigned a personal midwife called Alex, who will look after me all the way till I give birth and beyond), I just can’t say enough great things about the place.

My next appointment is scheduled for the 5^th of May. I will first have an ultrasound to track how the baby is developing. And then an appointment with my midwife Alex. I hope I will have more exciting developments for you again!

In the meantime, I am now at 16 weeks. And here is the ‘which bits are growing’ update:

The baby is now the size of an avocado, weighs around 100 grams, and in the next 3 weeks it will double in size. It is now playing with its first toy - the umbilical cord - by pulling and grabbing it. It is also practising breathing by inhaling and exhaling amniotic fluids through its lungs. Its arms and legs are complete and its joints are working. You can now also tell the baby's sex - we're happy either way and as David says "as long as it's not both".

Until next time....

Love,

Viv

More food please!

This week I decided to talk about food. Food is my passion. I can wake up in the morning and genuinely get excited thinking about what I’ll be having for lunch and dinner that day. Ever since I’ve been pregnant I’ve been lapping up the notion of ‘eating for two’. I’ve always been a big eater but now I just have the perfect excuse to eat more.

At first I found that I couldn’t eat as much as I usually do. Meal size became smaller, but I’d get hungry quicker. So snacking became the norm. My favourites include fresh fruit (I’m such a good mum to my baby!), gummy lollies, peanut M&Ms and icey Coke (cola slushy from 7/11). As I now need to eat freshly prepared meals rather than processed food or buffet styled food, I’m eating more noodle soups. They’re always made to order and it brings back memories when I used to go to a noodle house before school everyday while living in China.

On the weekend I stumbled upon a new chocolate café on tv – San Churro. It has a Spanish inspired menu – churros being the Spanish donut – and everything on the menu involves chocolate (their menu). Needless to say, we decided to pay a visit that very night. Food was fantastic and very reasonably priced. We had the chocolate tapas and a Baci chocolate shake and found it just a little too much for the two of us (especially after each having a 500g t-bone steak for dinner, courtesy of my mum). We decided to pack the remaining tapas items – truffles, caramel cup and marshmallows – to take home. In one of my rare but increasingly frequent absent minded moments, I forgot to take our doggy bag with me, and we left the café empty handed. I swear David had a glint of murder in his eyes when he found out what I’ve done. What can I say, we just have to go back in a couple of days and try to finish the whole tapas this time!

So the downside to all this eating – weight gain! While I’ve been lucky to always have a stable low weight, I really can’t predict how my body will react to the whole pregnancy process. I am trying to do some exercise (yes David, I can see you roll your eyes and say that taking a couple flights of stairs doesn’t count) so any gain will be minimised. I can see that our pregnant neighbour is taking a romantic walk with her partner almost every night. So David, do you want to take a walk to San Churro with me every night?

Week 15: Who cares?

When last week Vivian said that everyone's keen to find out what bit is growing this week, I think she assumed everyone wanted to know this information. Nobody explicitly asked for it. But let's face it, when you've started a blog about your unborn child, there's really not much else to talk about is there.

The truth is, if you read about the week by week development of a baby, it all starts to get a bit monotonous. 'Week 11: the liver starts to develop. Week 12: the liver develops a bit more. Week 13: tastebuds start to develop. Also, the liver develops more still. Week 14: the liver is now fully developed. Ears are starting to grow.' Week 15: though fully developed, the liver continues to grow in size. Etc etc.
Of course, they spice things up a bit to make it more interesting. So not only do these taste buds develop, your baby can 'probably taste the food you eat'... while frowning, and dreaming, and listening to the music you play on your stereo. You can't help but think they sometimes make it up as they go.

It does make for very interesting reading though. Take week 13 for instance (and allow me to plagiarise from this particular website the same way Vivian obviously did last week):
“If you're having a girl, she now has approximately 2 million eggs in her ovaries; she will have only a million by the time she's born. She'll have fewer eggs as she gets older, and by age 17, the number will have dropped to 200,000.”

That's just incredible on several levels.
First of all, this baby was itself a single egg just 13 weeks before; now it has ovaries that contains half the population of Sydney's worth of eggs.
Then there's the drastic reduction in numbers from that moment on, as though they've all signed on to some massive Idol competition and have to prove themselves worthy in front of a panel of judges one by one or get a one-way ticket to the egg- shredder.
Then there's the lab assistant who was asked to count all 2 million, only to have the results submitted to some medical journal by the supervising researcher who took all the credit. My thought's go out to him.

All these wonderful titbits of information are there so the mother can lovingly cradle her tummy, and 'know' what's going on inside there. If it wasn't for these books and websites, there really wouldn't be much going on in your life besides a steadily growing belly. It's business as usual. That's why some woman can carry all the way through to full term and not know they were pregnant, instead thinking they were a bit constipated.

But a large shadow looms over all of this baby-bliss. As I read about these amazing little facts and figures as the weeks pass, I can't help but keep wondering: How many foetuses have been dissected on a stainless steel tray with a very sharp scalpel in a cool, brightly lit laboratory in order to provide us with all this amazing info? Surely more than a couple.

And on that bombshell; Goodnight!

David.

Ps: Vivian recently unlocked the ability to leave comments to anyone who cares to do so, and instructed me to inform everyone, because as it stands she's already checking this blog 10 times a day to see if someone left a comment, or whether our list of loyal followers has expanded, and is sure to check 20 times a day from now on.

Which bit is growing this week?

Since everyone’s keen to find out the developmental stages of our baby, thought I’d start giving a summary each week.

At 14 weeks, the baby grows a layer of lanugo – very fine hair covering its whole body. It also starts to grow hair on its head and eyebrows (hopefully not of the mono variety). The baby can now grasp, squint, frown, grimace and even suck its thumb. David has been poking my stomach with his fingers hoping to feel the baby sucking it, it DIDN’T work. From head to bum, the baby should be around 9cm long. If you add the legs, it’s a pretty decent size, but no, I still can’t feel it. Sometimes I think I can feel something, but it’s probably my lunch. I’m also showing a bit more now, people who know that I’m pregnant can definitely tell, everyone else thinks I’ve eaten a horse.

Earth Hour

To celebrate Earth Hour on Saturday we decided to go to Coogee Beach to check out the ‘special message’ the boy scouts would spell out on the beach with candles. What we thought would be a huge message covering the whole beach turned out to be a much smaller affair and we didn’t even wait to see what the final message was. Instead, we went into the city to watch the ‘darkness’. Driving in was a little spooky as the usually well lit cit buildings seemed to have disappeared and it seemed as though we were moving towards a black void. We arrived at Mrs Macquarie’s Point to find a small group of very loud Chinese tourist who weren’t informed about Earth Hour and were busy snapping away thinking the Harbour was a little dim, oh the urge to tell them what they were really looking at! And about 20 minutes before the lights were due to go back up, they were ushered back onto the tour bus! Hehehehe…

We did get some good shots of the darken harbour and a couple of fighting possums in the tree we were standing next to.

Love, Viv