A New Baby

Here's my new baby:

Photo courtesy of Nikon Malaysia

Complete with DX 18-135 lens. Although the lens came second hand but it's almost as good as new. Set me back a few grand but I figured, this will be my first DSLR and the last thing that I indulge myself in for a looooooong time to come.

Pretty soon we'll be driven deep into debt by the blob, so what the hey! I might as well splurge now while I can.

Vital Statistics

Measurement from head to rump: 42mm
Nuchal fold scan: normal
Limbs: all accounted for


The blob is healthy as of Tuesday. Other than making the mistake of drinking two and a half mugs of water, the nuchal fold scan showed the little blob is 85% chance free of Down's syndrome.

I had my normal morning quota of microwaved bun with butter and mug of milo. The milo was flushed out while I was getting ready. Remembering my doc's advice to drink plenty of water before going in for the scan, I downed 2.5 mugs of water right before getting into the car.

Big mistake.

By the time we got there and I'd parked, I'd difficulty just making those few steps into the doc's office. I swear I looked like I had something stuffed up my ass except that it was more like I had to pee, REALLY bad.

By the time I got up onto the bed and the doc was rolling the scan over my abdomen, I was practically whimpering. The great thing about the technology is that we could see just how distended my bladder was.

Dr. Viknesh turned to me and asked, "Just how much water did you actually drink?"

Still trying not to whimper, I said, "Only 2.5 mugs. Oh I had milo in the morning, but that was flushed out already!"

He took pity on me. "Go to the bathroom. Your bladder's too full and you're too uncomfortable. At the same time, you might as well give me a urine sample."

I just about scrambled to empty my bladder. While I was weeing enough water to put out a small fire, Rizal was left alone with Dr.Viknesh and I wondered if the good doc was recounting his tale of his whole family falling sick in India while on holiday.

Try as i might I couldn't expel all the fluids I taken in. "Phew!! That's is such a relief! But I think there's still more water in there," I announced as I came back into the examining room and clambered up the bed.

"Ah, this is perfect. Now you have just the right amount of fluids in you," he said as he ran the scan over me.

No wonder Dr. Viknesh ordered me to empty my bladder first. I would not have been able to lie still and not whimper or squirm for the next 10 or 15 minutes or even guaranteed that I would nto wet the bed as he tried to get the blob into position so that he could do the nuchal fold scan. To perform this scan, the blob's neck fold and the bridge of its nose needed to be measured. And it was not cooperating. Instead of bobbing and moving about, it was happy to stay stationary in one position.

It was Rizal's first visit to the doc's where a scan is done. For a first timer, there wasn't much of a reaction. I wonder if his expression would be as bland if I'm delivering?

So there I was, with belly exposed, jelly smeared over it and the doc moving the scan all over it and the stubborn blob still wasn't budging. Not even when he tried probing a little. It wasn't until I coughed that the blob decided its water coccoon was not so comfy and moved just a tiny bit. A bit more of a cough and it moved again. Ahah, bingo! Caught on screen.

The test done, Dr. Viknesh took my weight: 51kg. He was not happy. I'd weighed 52 kg four weeks ago. Take into account my brush with fever and gastric, I think I was doing pretty OK. "I want you to put on at least 1-2 kg by the time you come and see me in 5 weeks' time. You need more carbo," he admonished me. OK, we shall try to accomplish that as long as I don't feel too nauseous eating full meals.

So next appointment with the doc will be in early February. Week 16. I wonder if we'll be able to tell if the blob's a she or a he?

Myopic vision

Why is it that when you are pregnant, you notice more pregnant women walking around than you have ever noticed before?

We were at Ikano during the late morning, getting our groceries done, getting a bolster for me and getting a bite for lunch. In the span of under 3 hours, I saw about 8 pregnant women walking around; with hubbies, with children in tow, with baby carriers, or just by themselves, but definitely pregnant. The only places we went to were Ace Hardware, Aussino, Cold Storage and lunch. That covers about three floors of shopping space and less than a fraction of the stores at Ikano.

Maybe it's the ever mysterious moon cycle of the sisterhood working in balance to bring all hormonally imbalanced women together.

Go figure.

Progress!

I had a craving today. To eat dinner!

And I polished off 2/3 of a plate of cantonese style fried kuay teow (as compared to yesterday: a few stalks of kai lan and a piece of sizzling tofu).

Hang on though, I feel some gas building up...

They say it gets better after this

So far this week:

• Have suffered gastric pains so acute, I was left curling up on the couch wishing I could just shrivel up and die. If gastric pains can render me so incapable, I cannot imagine how I am going to go through labour. Thank gawd for epidural.

• Passed enough stink bombs in the house to contaminate it for a whole month.

• Hubby has a new affinity for the couch since it's been his new bed for the past week or so.

• Racked up the electricity bill since hubby has been having a field day with the air-conditioning and watching DVDs till the cows come home on his new bed on the living room couch.

• Onion is my new enemy.

• The way my muscles are slacking off, another week of hormone-induced muscle slacking will result in me not being able to fit into my snug pants anymore.

• Cannot tolerate my 6-heaping teaspons of milo per mug rule anymore. Four flat teaspoons is more than sufficient. Less is even better.

• Sweet potatoes are my friends.

• Being trapped in an area with strong food smells makes me feel nauseous.

• Did I mention gas?

Merry Christmas, everyone!!

Here poochie, poochie, poochie!

All those maternity books, they lie!!

Am just into my 10th week and all the maternity books that I've read have said that if this is my first pregnancy, I am not supposed to show. My foot I'm not supposed to show. It's taking all my willpower and whatever lax muscle skill I have to try and suck it in but it's not working! the stubborn bulge still pooches out.

My loose pants are starting to feel snug and my snug pants are tight. I can't button my jeans up without feeling like I'm trying to squeeze a watermelon into my waistband.

And I have absolutely no appetite. Ask me what I want to eat and I just stare at you as if you've asked me the equivalent of a calculus problem. "Huh?" I don't care. I don't feel like eating. I don't want to eat. I don't want to think of food. I'm just eating for the sake of sustenance. I'm eating because if I don't eat I will suffer a worse fate: gastric pains.

And I feel like burning my maternity books. No pooch my ass.

It's a blob!

All right, I suppose announcing it this early on my blog would go against all pantang and superstitions about telling people you're pregnant before the third month. Well, screw it. If I don't talk about it here, I can hardly talk about it anywhere else since blogging has taken over my daily written journal entries.

So, I officially have a parasite growing in me and it should be about 8 weeks old. We've still got a ways to go. A long way to go.

A week ago the doc scanned my non-existent bump and I could not make anything out on the screen. Other than what looked like scratchings or etchings on a black background, all I could see was a blob in a black hole.

And then he upped the volume. Lo and behold! There was an audible heartbeat and it was going like there was no tomorrow. "146 beats per second," announced the doc. Wow, I thought. "That's damn fast!" I exclaimed. "Yes, the baby's heartbeat beats at around twice the rate of the mother's," he confirmed.

That's nature for you.

It's mindboggling.

My other half, chef extroadinaire

On Tuesday evening, Rizal decided to roast us a chicken for dinner. A la Jamie Oliver.

It was delicious, other than the fact that he was a bit too generous with the salt. The rosemary and thyme gave off a distinct and delicious aroma, infusing potatoes, onions and carrot with character. Rizal couldn't help gushing about how juicy and fragrant the lemon was after it was parboiled and pierced just before he stuffed it into the chicken.

It's a good thing my hubby is so enthusiastic about cooking. I don't mind someone else doing the cooking. I like helping to eat. I'm not a half bad cook myself, it's just that I'm too lazy most of the time to get my butt off the couch and do the preparations needed to cook a dish, or two.

Not so Rizal. He loves the whole process of cooking. Or I think he does. I've never seen him happier other than when he's gaming or salsa-ing. Grocery shopping with a mission fuels him.

Like I said, I'm lucky someone else in the family can cook. If we were to wait for me to whip up a dish, we could wait till the cows come home. Sigh, luckily he's been patient with me and not demanding at all.

So the next project we'll be working on together is Christmas dinner with/for the friends. What we're planning: stir-fried corn, jacket potatoes, portobello or field mushrooms with cheese on a tomato base, seafood couscous, a la Jamie Oliver again. And of course, turkey but that will be bought. We hope the rest of the group should be able to come up with salads, drinks and desserts. Or maybe we could whip up some Christmas punch?

It would be a dinner to look forward to.

All the world conspires against you getting what you want

I had a terrible craving for fish head noodles last Monday. I had no time to drive all the way to my favourite fish head noodle shop in Taman Tun for lunch. By Wednesday I was still craving said FHN. I had a break after my appointment and decided to drive over to the shop before heading back to the office. It was 2pm. The shop was CLOSED!!!

It's not a dinner place, so I wouldn't get a chance to have FHN for dinner. So I asked a friend if he knew anywhere that had passable FHN for dinner. He pointed out a place which is notoriosly difficult to get to because of the rush hour traffic. Forget it.

On Friday after work, I was circling around my area on the way home before heading to a dinner appointment. Eureka!! A shop which had FHN popped out at me. I parked the car and almost skipped all the way to the shop. I got there, but ARGH!!! was told by the girls that the boss had not arrived yet, therefore the stall wasn't ready to sell any FHN. ARGH!

It goes to show, if you really want something bad enough, you may not get it at all. But then again, maybe it's just me.

Reading the subtitles

I was surfing Astro and stopped on 8TV the other night. It was a programme called "Rodger Dodger". It was in English with BM subtitles.

A group of yuppies were discussing the role of men and women, and whether they needed each other. Or something to that effect. The talk moved on to sex and whether women really needed men or not in this act. As I watched the conversation unfold, whenever the protagonist mentioned "vagina" or "clitoris", the words would be bleeped out of oblivion. So you'd see the characters mouths moving but you wouldn't hear the word uttered. Sigh...nothing new since we all know how taboo it is in this day and age in this country to talk about sex and genitalia or anything related to either.

What the censors at Astro failed to do was bleep out the subtitles as well. So while the characters are "air-talking" about vaginas and clitorises (is that the plural?), any viewer with brains the size of a peanut could figure out for themselves what they were saying by reading the subtitles. In the BM version, of course, which worked out to be "vagina" and "klitoris" since knowing how taboo we all are about sex, I doubt if we could find the equivalent of the female anatomy translated in BM. We're talking about proper BM and not slang or coarse words.

I digress. If the censor's job is to censor what they or the government think is taboo, how did bleeping out the uttered word but leaving the subtitles intact serve as doing their job?

So I suppose, if there were any other reason at all to drive our literacy rate up, it would be to tell our kids, "Hey, even if they censor it on the TV, if you're literate, you can understand what they say by reading the subtitles. So go finish conjugating those vowels."