when in doubt, google!

so lets say you are 36 weeks pregnant...and lets say you notice that your stool in a grayish white color...so what do you do??? you google it. And then you read all these medical articles about how white stool is an indicator of liver disease - WHAT! ...since you are not exhibiting any other symptoms that are in conjunction with liver disease, ie: high fever, abdominal pain, etc...you go on googling...and finally you find your answer - too many antacids. So FYI: when you eat curry and get major heartburn and then ingest 4-5 antacids in one day...you will have white stool.

The Yak effect

I think the elevation is getting to me here in Mt. Everest land...Every time I see the word 'Yak' or a picture of a yak I get the giggles. Z is barely putting up with me at this point of our trip. Here is my attempt at sharing the comedic chi of Yak.
~ Our first day we stepped into a small seven eleven type store to pick up some sugarless snacks...I eat around five times a day now so snacks are necessary. On the dairy aisle in its full glory was an assortment of Yak cheeses. We will be taking Yak cheese home with us to Curry Land.
~ The hotel we are staying at is super swank...it has a bar/lounge in it like all super swank hotels, except the bars' name is...'The Yak Bar' - I'm guessing the drinks are as strong as a Yak and you will be feeling it in the morning
~ Second day we went perusing through the tourist part of town...stores were littered with Yak paintings, Yak wool, Yak pillow covers, Yak books and finally my favorite Yak puzzles. Every time I saw something Yak in this market I pointed and giggled like a four year old. Consequently every time I pointed and giggled like a four year old the store keeper came up to Z thinking we were interested in purchasing the Yak paraphernalia...Z got pretty tired of explaining 'no we do not want the Yak (blank)please excuse my wife.' I really did want the Yak puzzle but by that time Z had had enough of my strange sense of humor.
~ Day three - we took a tour of the palace here, it's a lovely place chock full of great antiques and stories...my favorite piece in the entire collection - a mounted Yak head! It was smiling at us, possibly the most heartwarming taxidermy that I have ever seen.
~ Now we are on day four...Z and me are going to be adventurous today and try Yak butter tea, it's on my bucket list ya know :)
Still no signs of Yak rides...maybe we'll try the local zoo.

The Terminal

First off, if you’ve never seen the movie The Terminal go and rent it really quick before proceeding to read this.
Z and me were heading to Mt. Everest land…we had to wake up butt crack early to get to the airport and lately I don’t do butt crack early very well (ok honestly I’ve never done butt crack early well). We check in with our cheap Curry Land carrier, I hand over all medical paperwork that I knew I would need because I am 34 weeks pregnant. Bags go on the conveyor belt, boarding passes are in hand. We were just about to get in the immigration line and then suddenly check in guy from Curry Land carrier comes and gets us. He asks me to come back to the customer service desk (in Curry Land ‘customer service desk’ means someone has or is about to make you really angry). Needless to say after an hour of them calling people, looking over my medical records and back and forth arguments we are not allowed to board the plane. They gave us back our bags and money and wished us a happy journey with another carrier. From the broken English conversations that we had the only real reason they could give us why we were not allowed to fly with them was that if our child happened to be born on their flight then they would have to give our child free airfare for the rest of its life. In my mind that is the ONLY perk to giving birth while flying.
So we had to repurchase tickets with an international carrier that at least has reasonable policies posted on their fancy international website. The only drawback with flight #2 is that we had to wait ten hours in the airport till departure. Being the tired prego that I am I wanted to get from the check in counter of the airport to the terminals because Curry Land terminal is really nice. There are several international restaurants, moving sidewalks, and recliners…its dreamland compared to the sterile check in area with hard Formica benches. So we tried to check in early with International carrier…to no avail. So like Tom Hanks in The Terminal, I was barred from my desired destination by silly bureaucratic excuses and a sliding glass door.

up and away

We are traveling to Mt. Everest Land...no, we are not hiking Mt. Everest while I am 8 months pregnant...we are simply going to that particular country and I have never been there so this is the most creative nickname I have come up with so far. Other nickname contenders were 'poverty land': because it is the poorest country, 'yak & yeti land': this one would be a good name for a theme park, and then there was 'trekker land': which did not sound as grandiose as Mt. Everest Land. By the way M is so jealous, she has always wanted to ride a yak.

With drawls

During my first trimester I went through caffeine with drawls with flying colors, I only experience minimal headaches and agitation for a week or two. Sugar with drawls are completely different. I now am looking back on my relationship with sugar and realizing that I was the equivalent of a crack addict...so sugar detox this week has been just as gruesome as someone going through rehab.
Here are a few symptoms I am experiencing so far...
~ discolored splotches on my face
~ dark under eye shadows
~ extreme mood swings (Z is being pretty understanding since he himself leads a heavy caffeine/sugar dependent lifestyle)
~ headaches
~ and finally, salivating anytime I see a cookie.
...so far no shakes or night sweats, if it gets that bad I will hospitalize myself.

getting ready for Baby B!

After months of talking it through and planning we decided the best course of action was to create a baby nook instead of a baby room. A lot of factors went into our decision; ie. Culture - in Curry Land infants sleep in the same bed as parents so putting a baby in its own separate room would seem really cruel to most our friends. Space - We have a two bedroom, two bath house...but luckily there are tons of closets and cabinets, so utilizing space in those effectively has given us more space...or we simply could've expanded our living room when our neighbors knocked a hole through our wall :). And thirdly, expense - creating a nook instead of a room means that we did not have to buy tons of baby furniture...that money saved went into buying baby B a steel alloy enforced car seat, for some reason I wanted more than just plastic and styrofoam protecting our baby on the roads here. Anyways here is the low down on getting the nook ready for its upcoming inhabitant.

Baby nook project phase 1: SCHMORGANIZING!!!  

Z measured, picked out and purchased these lovely baskets then handed them to me and told me exactly what needed to go into each and where to store them...I cannot schmorganize.

The contents of this dresser had to be relocated to my newly schmorganized closet so we could have a place for the Baby's clothes, diapers and changing mat.

This was our linen closet, we had to empty this closet out to make room for a baby bed.

Baby nook project phase 2: DEMOLITION

Z knocked out the shelf in the linen closet and then re plastered and repainted the wall where the shelf had been

Baby nook project phase 3: BABYFYING

The nook is located between our bedroom and bathroom so curtains were put up in the open doorway.

The dresser top has been changed into a changing table

All of Baby B's belongings are snugly stored away.

What once was a linen closet is now a 50'' by 30'' Baby bed...Some friends are coming to Curry Land in a week and they happily agreed to bring the tension railing that will go on the front of the sleeping nook.

The rocking chair is beside my closet, unfortunately not enough room in the nook...but that means I can use it as a kindle nook when I am not rocking a baby right?

My new Arch Nemesis

Sugar!!! Our Dr. informed us that baby B is too big so I had to get my blood sugar checked for gestational diabetes. The results are that my blood sugar is high so Dr. has me on a no sugar & no white starch diet.
A couple days after my sugarless diet started these items in my kitchen kept catching my eye and tempting me...

Out of emotional angst I probably would've thrown every last one of them in the trash just to show them not to taunt me...but thankfully I was thinking rationally and realized that most of the items came from precious American Land. So instead I boxed up the items that would keep for two months and put them way down in the back depths of a kitchen cabinet, then the things that would not last for two months I put in a grocery bag and gave them to Sue.

Even though these items are out of sight and out of mind there are still a lot of Curry Land foods I cannot partake of because they are either loaded with sugar or white starches :(

FYI: Here is a Curry Land fact about sugar...Brazil is the leading producer of sugar (Curry Land comes in #2)...but as far as consumption is concerned Curry Land is the leading consumer of Sugar...Brazil uses their sugar as an alternate fuel source, where as here it is simply ingested that often by billions of people. 

my Curry Land look alike

So my America Land look alike is A my twin sister...so needless to say it is not weird or annoying to constantly be mistaken for someone else...I just see it as a fun opportunity to play weird mind games on people. Sue is my Curry Land look alike.

I do have to admit Sue and I look like we could be siblings. Everywhere I go in and around the 'rut' people mistake me for her all the time. And as usually my response is to play mind games on these unsuspecting persons...the mind games have become way more fun recently since Sue has a 7 month old baby and I am 8 months pregnant. People awkwardly ask me 'where is your baby?'...and I just respond by point to my stomach - and since talking about pregnancy is a big foo pah they usually walk away with so many curious questions nagging at them. 

YES!

8 months y'all...there is light at the end of the tunnel!

Curry Land pregnancy tip #5: 'Don't scratch your belly it will cause perminent lines'...I still haven't mustered up the heart to tell my friends that we call those lines stretch marks and they are not caused by scratching.

living room redo

So remember our neighbors who broke the lock off our gate so they could have their wedding on our roof...you know, the groomzilla. Well for two months now they are expanding their house...
Unfortunately their expansion efforts have weakened the structural integrity of our wall.

I like to call this picture 'well hello neighbor'...while I was home alone one day the workers were chiseling away at our neighbors house and some how the pick and chisel went all the way through to our side. Having a peep hole in my living room wall definitely put me on edge until Z came home. 

This was our wall at its worst. We brought our groomzilla neighbor over and showed him the damage that their remodel had havoced and then they promised to have it fixed.

It took a month for them to get around to fixing our wall...luckily it was patched up and as good as new right before Christmas, so we did not have to 'deck the walls' with tacky wreaths and bows to hide the unsightly hole.



Also right before Christmas I had new couch and pillow covers made for our Curry Land sectional...whatcha think?