Coffee from a Reusable Ceramic Mug

So, I mentioned that Cliff was going to take some photos of yoga postures for me. He did an amazing job! There are a bunch of great photos. I still don’t know what will be done with them, but they would be great for teaching and advertising purposes. Here are just a few:

PS - Cliff, we totally owe you dinner (at least) for your Skilz!

On Tuesday, just before the doctor’s appointment where we found out that there was a good chance that I might get induced over the weekend, my work computer kicked me off, and it wouldn’t let me log back in. I sent out an SOS to my coworkers for when they got in the office, and after some IT intervention and several reboots, it worked again. However, I had decided by that point to stop working then in order to give myself a few days to prepare in case the induction happened. It was as if my work computer was telling me that I have had enough time using it and should go away.

Yesterday, after a restless night due to some stronger pre-labor contraction, I was up at 3:30 AM. For the first time in out four years with this DSL setup, the internet wasn’t working! Since I wasn’t farting around on the internet, I did get to tune into the DNC live on CNN in time to see Joe Biden accept his nomination. I also had the chance to do a bit of yoga and just do nothing, which usually doesn’t happen when there is a computer around. Once the sun came up, I went out an enjoyed the day. It was as if the computer was telling me to get out of the house! Aside from a couple of long naps, I obeyed.

Anyway, aside from getting messages from the divine through the internet, I had a followup doctor’s appointment yesterday, and she said that things looked better than they did on Tuesday. She didn’t thinks we can let nature take its course and let the baby decide when she is coming out. She was sending out some ‘I’m ready’ signals yesterday, but she seems to have relaxed a bit today.

I have definitely taken up the pregnant waddle, which is not so much a choice as a necessity. Sarah seems to be the only one who can slow herself down enough to stay at my slow waddling pace, so we spent a lot of time walking in the past couple of days. They say it is good to walk a lot at this point in the pregnancy, and just by virtue of living in Regensburg and wanting to get out of the house, I get plenty of walking in. I also did a long yoga practice yesterday with a paparazzo nearby (Cliff, Actually). He kindly offered to do some early morning yoga photos for me with his fancy camera. I am really excited to see what came out of the shoot, but I can’t access his computer at the moment to see the previews (the computer gods speak again). Either Cliff or I will post a few good ones soon. I have no idea what I look like in a yoga postures these days, but I suspect it is a lot different than I remember.

A lot has been happening lately, like a great Thai dinner with some of the gang at Christina and Rainer’s over the weekend(Christina and Cliff post much more quickly than I do about theses things). Matthias and I also did a belly cast on Sunday. I have a photo of the cast on me, but it basically just looks like me topless, which I thought better to leave off of the blog. Once we paint it up, I’ll post a photo.

We had a doctor’s appointment today and learned a few things. First, my friend Julie delivered her baby this morning. I saw just going into her appointment with the midwife yesterday, and her water apparently broke less than 30 minutes later! We got a chance to say hi to the the growing family. Her baby was also breech, and she had a wonderful birth, so that was really nice to hear.

Most importantly, for us at the moment, is that there is a chance that the blob may be coming into the world a bit sooner than expected. My body may trigger the labor on it’s own or the doctor and midwife may help stimulate it by the weekend. Matthias looked a bit shocked my the news. I suspect the blob is trying to make things happen on their own for a few reasons, but who knows what will happen in the next few days.

I may not be doing much updating over the next week if for no other reason than I just need to isolate a bit and prepare. I just thought I’d give you all a heads up!

I was at the pool earlier today. The pool has become more therapeutic than ever as the baby and I grow. She sits low in my belly, and her little butt has a way of making it really uncomfortable to do anything that involves moving my legs around. When I am in the water though, she floats a little higher, and it feels AMAZINGLY good. The only down side of the pool is that I really feel the extra 25 pounds or so that have put on as I step out of the water. It feels like someone is stacking lead bricks on me with each step. It is the strangest sensation but totally worth the relief I get from being in the water.

In other news, I have a new nickname for the blob - my little Steisslage. Steisslage means breech in German (my pregnancy vocabulary is growing rapidly). We have tried a lot of different things to turn her in the past few weeks, but she is quite happy where she sits. My last effort was with an osteopath yesterday. I think the baby made a new best friend because he gently manipulated her position for almost an hour. She seems to respond when anyone puts their hands on my belly so she was wiggling in his hands the whole time and seemed to enjoy it. He said she seemed to start turning a lot and then would turn back (which is what I have noticed her doing as well). Perhaps the girl has good reason not to flip all the way around. After meeting with the doctors and midwives, we are going to go ahead and do a breech birth - unless she decides to turn on her own. The hospital we are going to specializes in them (the only on in the area), and the baby has good proportions for such a delivery. I really appreciate that she has a small head!

I think she is just trying to be like her uncle Mark who also came into the world butt-first (I won’t comment on what that implies about Mark’s personality ). Plus, I get to share the experience of a breech birth with my mom, which she doesn’t wish for me, but sometimes life gives you the experiences you need to have rather than the ones you planned for.

I found this article in the NY Times to be really interesting. It is about an economist, Nouriel Roubini, who some refer to as a prophet for being the one to predict the economic current economic situation in the US based on an analysis of past economic turbulence in numerous countries (others say he is just a pessimist who got lucky). The article is worth a read if your interested in understanding some of the economic factors that triggered the current crises and explains why deficit spending (a joy of the current administration) seriously undermines the national economy. Here is one quote that kind of sums up his view of the situation today.

“Reckless people have deluded themselves that this was a subprime crisis,” he told me. “But we have problems with credit-card debt, student-loan debt, auto loans, commercial real estate loans, home-equity loans, corporate debt and loans that financed leveraged buyouts.” All of these forms of debt, he argues, suffer from some or all of the same traits that first surfaced in the housing market: shoddy underwriting, securitization, negligence on the part of the credit-rating agencies and lax government oversight. “We have a subprime financial system,” he said, “not a subprime mortgage market.”

Roubini argues that most of the losses from this bad debt have yet to be written off, and the toll from bad commercial real estate loans alone may help send hundreds of local banks into the arms of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation. “A good third of the regional banks won’t make it,” he predicted. In turn, these bailouts will add hundreds of billions of dollars to an already gargantuan federal debt, and someone, somewhere, is going to have to finance that debt, along with all the other debt accumulated by consumers and corporations. “Our biggest financiers are China, Russia and the gulf states,” Roubini noted. “These are rivals, not allies.”

We had a rough start to the long weekend here. I planned on reading a stack of proposals on Friday while Matthias enjoyed the day off (it was some Catholic holiday here i Bavaria). Instead, Matthias spent the entire day in bed thanks to some stomach flu he picked up. I read some proposals in bed to keep him company. I ran out to the only store open (the grocery store at the train station) to get some emergency soup to try to get something in his stomach that would stay down. Int he afternoon, I wasn’t feeling so well, but luckily, some sleep seemed to do the job for me, and I didn’t get nearly as ill as Matthias.

Saturday was MUCH better. After a nice breakfast at Kaminski where neither of us could eat much, we picked up a spice set that I have been wanted to get from a new kitchen store in town. They ordered it for me a few weeks ago.

The spices are those from a Vietnamese meat-broth soup. Our favorite place in Irvine was a little Vietnamese restaurant. I don’t remember who introduced us to it, but we went there often, and Matthias LOVED the soup. In Regensburg, we live across the street from a Vietnamese place too, and they have the soup as well, though Matthias says it’s not as good as in Irvine. When I saw the spice set at the store a few weeks ago, I knew that Matthias would love the chance to make the soup himself.

So, after picking up the spice set, and taking a look at the recipe it included, we headed to the ‘China Laden’ (China market) to get the ingredients we needed. We decided that everything east of Turkey is considered ‘China’ in Germany. The store is great for getting ‘ethnic’ food ingredients for lands east of Turkey. They are also the only store to sell packed brown sugar for some reason.

We headed home and Mathias set to work. The soup takes at least four hours to prepare. Frankie (our real Vietnamese chef who is very picky about his food) always said that the Pho usually cooks over night to really suck the flavor out of the meat and ox-tail, but Matthias decided to follow the recipe from the spices for the first round. While the soup cooked, we puttered around the house and attempted to clean up the mess that has been accumulating over the past weeks (we have more left to do today). Eventually, we sat down to dinner - Matthias with his soup and salad, and me with a tuna fish sandwich and salad. The soup looked very pho-like to me! Notice how the bits of fat reflect the camera flash to make the soup look all sparkly. Matthias said it was good, and almost as good as the soup he can get from a restaurant, which probably means it is pretty good. I suspect he’ll play with it a bit more and prefect it to his liking. The entire fridge smells like meat at the moment, but he seemed to enjoy it. We have half of the soup in the freezer as well, so I think the sup will be around for a while.

As I was looking in the mirror tonight, I realized that I can’t imagine what has happened to my internal organs! I am pretty much full of baby and uterus from my pubic bone to my sternum. I know where my bladder is as I am reminded that it sits below a 5 pound baby about every 45 minutes. I know my stomach is there as well as I am up because the food I had for dinner is trying really hard not to come back out despite the pressure said baby is putting on my stomach. My lungs also seem to be there as they are on the other side of my stomach getting just as squished, evident from the yawning and gasping I have been doing all day. What is missing is everything in between my pelvis and ribs. I had quite a bit of intestines, not to mention a nice liver, spleen, kidneys, etc. How can it all possibly still be in there with all of that baby, much less functioning normally??

My theory is that the bulk of my abdominal organs have found a doorway to another dimension, and they hang out there while the baby is baking. I hope they all chose to return once my gigantic uterus shrinks back down.

There is something about visiting Gerda and Bruno (matthias’s folks as seen above) that makes me sleepy. When we arrived on Thursday night, I went upstairs to lay down for a few minutes and passed out in my clothes until about 12 hours later. It was just so relaxing to lay there and listen to the wind coming in. They live a bit out in the country, so it is quiet, and it was cool that evening.

Once I woke up on Friday morning, we had a great breakfast, and then I needed a little nap (for about 3 hours) before lunch. I was awake a bit more after that, but it was a relaxing weekend to say the least. Matthias got his share of sleep as well and played a lot with his iphone, which always makes him happy. All the photos on this post came from his iphone because I was too sleepy to take any with the camera. We, of course, ate lots of good food and chilled out chatting with the folks as well. My German was not very good as I kept spacing out, but the in laws have a lot of patience with my German so we mostly understood each other.

The blob is still determined to come out butt-first, but we’ll keep working on convincing her otherwise. She is starting to shift to different positions this week more than she has previously, so maybe she is thinking about inverting. I am working on not becoming obsessed with it (though it is easy to become so). I suspect it is just the first in a long line of things that this girl won’t do just because I want her to so I better start working on taking these things in stride. I have found a few yoga postures that convince her to shift a bit, but she is happy to return to what has become her standard position. My pelvis must make a nice recliner. (note in the photo how my boobs can now rest on my belly! A new milestone in my life)

We watched the Olympic opening ceremony this weekend. I have to say had a bit of a bad taste in my mouth because women were hardly present in the entire thing. The most women in camera shots were standing on the side lines in beautiful outfits (often bowing as participants walked by) as if they were living decorations for the event. This may not have been too bad had it not been for the thousands of men used to perform an artistic history of China - it made the contrast between the role of men and women in the event more obvious. It was also a bit strange how the camera shots of the Chinese Olympic team focused on the men 99% of the time even though there was a huge contingent of women as well (about 50% of the size of the men’s team)- the longest time the women from the team were on camera was when there was a bad camera angle which showed the women from their necks to their knees. I’d like to believe that was not intentional - maybe am I just getting overly sensitive with this stuff as I get older…..

I have been thinking about posting some updates, but it seems like time is flying at the moment that I keep putting it off. There is a bunch of stuff going on at the moment. Here are some highlights from our week:

The baby is still breech as I write. We met with the doc on Monday and I started acupuncture treatment and something called Moxibustion (or Moxi for short). I’ll do the acupuncture once a week with the doctor and the moxi a few times a week with the doc and the midwives. We’ll do this for about two weeks. These methods aren’t as effective as the baby grows. I have an appointment in two weeks to meet with an osteopath as well. He said he can try a few things and also help with my shoulders which are constantly wacky these days. In the mean time, I am trying an array of home remedies including yoga postures, meditation, sound, vibration, music, etc to stimulate her to move around. She seems quite happy where she is at the moment though. She changed position for a little while yesterday after a couple of hours in the pool, but she is back in her comfy position today.

Also, I am helping in a new blog call Mamas Worldwide. Christina has done all of the work so far, and it looks fabulous. I am working on a first post as well, though I can only talk about pregnancy at the moment. I just realized that I can talk a bit about prenatal and eventually postpartum yoga stuff too. Since I don’t really feel like a mom yet, I am still trying to figure out how I can contribute. I am a bit of a research nut like Christina (though not nearly at her level of organization) so I’m sure I have some useful stuff to share.

We also looked at another apartment last weekend, and if all goes well, we will sign the lease on Tuesday. I won’t divulge any more about it until then, as we have lost a couple of places we thought we had, and I am getting superstitious….

I spoke perfect German for 2 whole minutes this week! My German has been terrible lately, as it usually is when I am tired. I am tired a lot lately. I notice that I also speak poorly when people are looking at me. I know that sounds silly, but I can ‘perform’ really well in front of people if I am not interacting with them. This is why I am comfortable teaching. I put on my teacher hat and my voice changes and my mind becomes clear usually. However, when I am in a small group interacting with people, I am not as comfortable ‘performing.’ The “vorbereitungs Kurs” (preparation class) is a small group setting, and I felt like my German was awful. I have been having a hard time at the doctor’s office as well, but Matthias was there this week to back me up. Anyway, I had to leave a message on a doctor’s voice mail on Tuesday, and after I got off the phone, Matthias was staring at me. He said, “That was perfect! You didn’t make any mistakes and you totally communicated what you needed from him!” This whole foreign language things is a mysterious process. I seem to have no control over how well my brain will work from one moment to the next when it comes to understanding or speaking German.

Speaking of the Vorbereitungs Kurs, we finished the last of them on Saturday. Since it is a ‘preparation’ class, I guess that means we are ‘prepared’ - Ha! We do have the basics for having a baby in the house - diapers, a bed, some clothes and my boobs. Neither one of us is having an urge to ‘nest.’ I have declared that I don’t do anything that requires me to pick things up from the floor or vacuum (both are not very easy right now as the baby is poking her butt as low as she can into my uterus). Matthias has been doing everything so far and not even complaining about it! (both of those things really impress me - I mean, I would at least have complained about it). The place is generally messier, but like I said, no nesting urges means I don’t care. I have also given up on shopping for any more than five items at once since carrying stuff while walking for a while is now not so much fun either. The good news is that I get this wonderful moments when the baby shifts just a little and takes the pressure off - aside from that, I waddle and move slowly from seat to seat.

Often, one of the seats I am moving to is the toilet as the time between visits is decreasing to about 45 minutes.

There are a few other things worth mentioning, but this post is already really long, and they aren’t that important. Anybody who NEEDS to know is free to call :-). One last update is the trip to the in-laws this weekend. We are heading up this afternoon to hang out and get out of Regensburg for a few days. I am getting the urge to travel again, and this trip will have to keep me filled up for a while. Oh how I miss the excitement of starting a new adventure with a ride to the airport! The baby will definitely have to learn how to travel young.