Gender status

Date July 30th, 2009 8:52 Comments 2 Comments

So…. the baby is a girl, I discovered on the 22 week ultrasound the other day. A girl! I am *mildly* disappointed, mainly because I feel like I’d do a better job raising a boy, than a girl. I find girls kind of scary and intimidating.

But perhaps its a good thing. This baby kicks me non stop. I suppose a boy would be worse! They say my muscles are not stretching out properly, probably due to all the scar tissue from the endometriosis op last year, so maybe that is why things are so uncomfortable. Dunno.

Anyway, she looks cute. I still maintain she has big feet. I’ve seen 3 ultrasounds of her now and in all of them her feet look big. But, what would I know? She had her thumb at her mouth and you could see her lips moving.

She weighs 400g now and has a heart rate of 140bpm. And I have gained approximately 10 pounds. Supposedly she should double in size in the next month, isn’t that crazy!

She did look horribly uncomfortable though. Her back was right up against the wall, but because there was a curve, her head was all bent toward her chest. It can’t be comfy to be in such a cramped little space. Last night I swear she was trying to crawl across my innards. At this rate, I’m really going to have problems when she gets a bit bigger.

It really felt perverted to be peering between her little legs on ultrasound! Long, skinny little legs. I suppose there is still a chance she could be a boy, but I sure as heck couldn’t see anything up there. If she’s a boy, she’ll be fully embarrassed in the high school locker room…

Zaubi and I are wrangling over picking a name for her. He doesn’t like the name I want :’( There are a couple others that we kind of agree on, but I’m always worried about the potential of ugly nicknames… It’s hard. She’ll be stuck with this name for the rest of her life!

Protected: Bah, bah, still family

Date July 23rd, 2009 23:15 Comments Enter your password to view comments

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Protected: Family stress

Date July 17th, 2009 23:02 Comments Enter your password to view comments

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Food

Date July 15th, 2009 1:55 Comments 0 Comments

Have made it to London. Middle of the night, raining (what do you expect??). My sister arrived in Zürich a few days ago and we have had a decent time wandering around, then yesterday my mother and brother arrived and today we spent the day driving to Basel, bumming around in Basel, and then flying out on a late flight to London for my brother’s graduation.

Ate so many random things today. My family is really a head case when it comes to food. The bizarre combination of fast food and swank food combined with food allergies and specific preferences makes eating an experience. Today I have devoured, in whole or in part:

1 helping home-made museli (plain yogurt, grated apple & pear, raisins, museli)
1 mug hot unsweetened cocoa
1 piece of bread slathered with butter & honey
6 radishes
1 Mövenpick ice cream cone (espresso flavor)
1 quarter pounder (er, that is, Cheeseburger Royale) with small green salad
1 bottle bitter lemon
1 bottle liquid purple yogurt
1 nasty sticky fake museli bar
1 large mug hot milk
1 melted mozzerella and tomato sandwich on fancy bread
part of a banana
raw cauliflower/carrot/broccoli with hummus
the better part of a half kilo of cherry tomatoes with hummus

Well I guess it doesn’t look so bad after I write it down, but the indigestion parts of it gave me were not good. I had such intense pain that I thought I was having a heart attack before getting on the plane, but it must have been heartburn from the cheeseburger. It still hurts now, actually. OW.

It’s definitely time for bed. My sole night, it seems, in my own bed, as this rented apartment was advertised as having 4 beds but actually has *two*, one being a double bed, and a pullout sofa. So tomorrow I will likely have to share a bed with my sister or my mother, since my lucky brother, being the only boy, automatically gets his own space. Gah. I really, really, REALLY hate sharing a sleeping space. Except, of course, with Zaubi.

Completely exhausted. My final sister arrives tomorrow evening…

Swiss milk products

Date July 10th, 2009 13:17 Comments 1 Comment

I would just like to say that the milkdepartment in Swiss grocery stores is fantastically difficult to navigate. There are such fine distinctions between different kinds of milk products!

Of course, there is milk (and some other mystifying item which looks like milk and is in the same container as milk but is called milk-drink), and yogurt, and kefir, and cottage cheese, and cream cheese. And then, naturally, about 4000 different kinds of other cheese: mostly in bricks, some in slices. Cheese has a whole bunch of fine distinctions that I won’t even go into. Rege’re all relatively used to that. But then there is this whole *other* section of things called quark. Quark is, as far as I can tell, the same thing as sour cream, but somehow thicker/heavier. Then there is a section, located slightly elsewhere, that is *entirely* filled with rahm (cream). There is doppel-rahm and halb-rahm and sauer halb-rahm and swiss-rahm and weight-watchers rahm and creme fraiche and a whole lot of other things i forgot already.

Next time I go I shall bring a pencil and write them all down, for my amusement.

I am about to make a cheesecake, in honor of my sister’s coming, that contains no cheese and no flour. It is entirely composed of swiss milk products that seem not to exist in other places. I spent 30 minutes in the milk department trying to find them. Confused…

Wowo

Date July 10th, 2009 11:15 Comments 1 Comment

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Notes from the overland

Date July 6th, 2009 20:19 Comments 1 Comment

I did not post at all last week, being too busy and entertained. So I will give highlights list-style, so that I don’t get too behind :-P

1) Baby does well. Went for first *official* ultrasound last Tuesday. He is only 17 weeks, not 18 like he is supposed to be for this ultrasound, but she said everything looked perfect. He has his arms, legs, etc. This ultrasound was *much* high quality: you could see his different organs inside him, all his bones, and even the different parts of his brain! Crazy. Listened to his heartbeat which is strong and fast and interrupted often by a strange swishing noise which is him kicking. On the screen he was waving his arms and legs all around. He is small: only in the 5th percentile of size, but then that is an 18 week old chart, not a 17. We could see his lips: he doesn’t have a cleft palate. I now have a couple pictures of his face in profile. It’s still too early to see if he is a boy or a girl: they said they will likely be able to tell next month. Zaubi is convinced he is a girl. It was funny, at one point the ultrasound lady turned the ultrasound probe thing so I could see a full-back shot: all his back bones and the shape of the skin/muscle around them. it was just for a moment, but it just looked so familiar to me, that shape, and then I realized, it is because Zaubi’s back looks exactly the same. He is skinny so you can see exactly how his back bones are, and baby seems to have inherited the same shape. Very funny.

He keeps socking me with his tiny feet (or is he using his hands?). Perhaps he/she is an upcoming martial artist. It’s pretty nuts, considering that he is still tiny and I have only gained 3 kilos. How can such a tiny person kick so hard? That is a good sign, right?

2) Last Wednesday Zaubi’s work had a field trip and we all went down to somewhere near Schwyz and did a ropes course. it was awesome! There is an entire hilltop covered with a forest, and they have built lots of platforms in the trees, with zip lines between them, and other things to climb upon between them. So you get a climbing harness which has two biners and a pulley thing attached to it, and get yourself high up in a tree, and then just leap about in the treetops dozens to hundreds of feet above the forest floor. you can go really fast on the zip lines or do other hard things like climb between two trees on a wobbly rope bridge, or there was one where there were a bunch of piackaxes hanging vertically, and you had to climb from one to the other (very difficult). or the same thing but with hanging tires. It was fantastic fun. Then we went to the house of Zaubi’s boss (he lives all the way out there) and had a delicious barbecue with the most shockingly tasty food you can imagine. I ate til food was almost coming out of my ears. Everything, bar none, was absolutely top-notch. Sooooo good.

3) We took a mini-break this weekend and went to the Jazz festival in Ascona, a town in the southernmost (Italian) part of Switzerland. The foliage there is quite different: it is almost Mediterranean, and there are even palm trees! Something I would never dream that Switzerland has. It was quite hot: the weather was beautiful. It was the last weekend of the festival, but it was still good. We wandered from bar to restaurant and listened to a lot of good jazz. Spent Saturday night in a charming hotel in Locarno with very high ceilings, then listened to more jazz on Sunday. Also rented a little motorboat, drove out to the middle of the lake there (enormous lake) and went swimming. it was altogether fun and relaxing and enjoyable: good since Zaubi has been working so hard lately. And it was so great to just be able to wander about this charming old-fashioned town — it was all narrow cobbled alleyways and beautiful architechture and palm trees and sunshine and warm scented breezes — and listen to constant jazz and eat tons of gelato.

4) My German class is interesting. There are about 8 people in it, all women, and not a *single* one comes from the same country, and not a single one (aside from me) comes from an English speaking country! They are from Italy, Spain, Portugal, Thailand, Japan, Russia, and Serbia. So everybody’s dictionary goes from German to a different language :-P quite funny, really. There is still too much grammar for my taste (they don’t offer pure conversation classes at my level) but I think it is still useful. Certainly better than doing nothing.

5) My little sister arrives, for a month and a half, this Saturday! And a few days later the rest of the family arrives for a couple of weeks too. I’m looking forward to it…

In search of the elusive

Date July 3rd, 2009 10:30 Comments 8 Comments

For well over two years now I have been searching for an impossibly elusive beast: a hand-held milk foamer.

Now I know, of course, that you can get those hand-held electric milk foamers for about $12. I’ve had more than one, but despite assiduous internet research and concentrated effort I’ve never mastered the art of making foam with them that isn’t of the soap-bubble variety.

Of course, I could splurge and buy an entire coffee/espresso machine complete with proper steam foamer attached, but not only are my coffee-drinking habits too meagre to merit the expense, it just seems like a rather massive thing to buy and have sitting around in the kitchen.

Somewhat over two years ago, I visited my friend A. in Munich. Her husband had a device which absolutely captivated me: a hand-held mechanical milk foamer thing. It was completely simple: plastic or metal I don’t know. You heated up a pan of milk, stuck the device into it, pumped it a bunch of times, and voila! a beautiful perfect foam. Small. Simple. Easy to clean. Perfect.

I have been looking for such a thing since then. I asked A. where he got it and she said "I don’t know… IKEA maybe?" I trolled IKEA to no avail. I went to no end of shops in Australia: I have been to no end of shops here in Zürich, from department stores to specialized coffee/kitchen shops. No one has ever heard of such a thing, let alone stocks it.

In lieu of that, for my birthday a few weeks ago Zaubi bought me a Nespresso Aeroccino Plus. It is a pretty cool thing, though I still feel far too expensive. The foam it makes is pretty good, it is completely silent and does its thing fast. My only beefs with it are: it doesn’t make *enough* milk (I am a milk junkie that likes huge mugs of milk!) and it seems a bit inconsistent with results. One milk we bought simply didn’t work at all. Also, if you use it twice in quick succession the second cup never turns out so well.

I heard tell that if you have a French Press you can just heat milk on the stove, pour it in the French Press and use the coffee plunger as a pump to make foam. I’ve got to give it a try…

Veganism is a choice, but…

Date July 2nd, 2009 10:09 Comments 1 Comment

I found this picture terribly amusing…