Poland Visit

One could yet used to this Proud Papa stuff. This is our first time visiting E's family since the announcement - first grand child for both sets of grandparents. Handshakes and hugs were plentiful and E's mom and sister got her some maternity stuff. The baby is craving good Polish food; we've been enjoying all the hams, sausages, horseradish, herring, cottage cheese, bigos, homemade chicken broth and kohlrabi. I've been busy reading, watching NCAA replays on the web and through iTunes, doing crosswords and trying to keep up to date with what's happening with work in my absence.

Flying Again

Our little fetus has now flown to his/her third country. We flew EasyJet to Berlin to see E's family and then drove across the border to Poland. So that's a fourth country. Well traveled little bean. E wanted me to write that this pregnancy thing is making her normally very organized mind scramble.
To get to Ciampino for our 9:30am flight, we had to be there at 7:30. Unfortunately, since Termoli is 3 hr drive we should leave at 4:30am. However, due to my sister's delayed departure from Sunday, we left Termoli at 1:30am, on NO sleep, and dropped her off at Fiumicino before double-backing to Ciampino and crashing for two hours in the rental car return lot. You won't see two people passed out using North Face jackets as pillows with a pizza box on the dash in the cold, rainy and dark rental car return lot at Rome's ugly-kid-sister airport in any C-Max commercials soon - but that would be a major selling point. We checked in nice and early and got 'A' boarding passes, not that any perceivable boarding order would occur to Italians. It didn't, despite the fact that the flight was mostly German. We were still the 3rd party on the plane and got exit row seating, together, with no one in the seat between us. But, leading up to that point.
E went to make herself pretty while I was reading "A Widow for One Year" and listening to Wolf Parade. She came out of the bathroom in a panic. Somehow, some way, while she was putting in her contacts and freshening up she had her ring box on the lip of the sink. The ring box, for some reason unknown to non-pregnant people, held her gold earrings. At some point the ring box overturned and knocked her gold earring, just one, down the drain. She came out, complained to me and told me to go into the ladies' bathroom to see if I can see it down in the drain. I explained that this is probably not the best course and that we should find a maintenance man. She found one and showed him the problem, explaining that 'sono incinta e sto dimenticando tutto'. Here is a woman who traveled alone to India, with another woman to Jordan, Morocco, Macau; and has traipsed around the world with me, and this is the first time she has done something like this - and in our quasi-home airport. All those pregnancy websites are right, you do get forgetful and lose focus.

Ultrasound pictures - 13th week

This is a top down view of the brain. The doctor measured the circumference and the diameter.
Here is the little one all nestled in.
A side on view.
Here you can see the ribs and the leg bones. We didn't get a good shot of the fingers, but they were wiggling!

Belly Shot - 13th week

Latest Dr Visit

Its been a while. Things on the baby front have been going well. E and I had an appointment with Dr. Molinari last Wednesday and my sister was the first family member to see the little tyke on the ultrasound. He/She is bouncing around in there and as it is the 13th week now, the doctor can see the bridge of the nose, the base of the skull, the brain, the fingers, femur and tibia/fibia bones; lots of details. We could see the heart beating, like a metronome, at 160 beats/minute. The Doc tried to record a DVD of the ultrasound, and though I can see the etching of the laser on the disc, it won’t play. Oh well, next time I will take my lap top with me to make sure it works before I leave the office.

He prescribed some more standard bloodwork to just check on E’s levels going into the 4th month. That required another trip to the local public hospital. Its like clockwork now. We arrived at 7:30am, E waited in the “pay your ticket” line and I went to get a ticket at the analisi line. My ticket was coming due, so I pulled another and traded my original to some other guy who was sitting down. He didn’t believe me when I said I wanted to trade, he thought I was trying to scam him, but I showed him my number and pointed to the deli counter (the number display) and he got the hint. Unfortunately for me, his number was only a few spots ahead of my second pull, but it was better than nothing. E showed up soon after, actually just as my trading partner was leaving, and she went in to drop off her urine and blood. My trading buddy even gave me a token grazie on the way out. Italians just aren’t used to this kind of social conduct, I think he was really taken aback.
I’ve got new pics of the latest ultrasound. Still too early to tell the sex; the doctor doesn’t need to see us for two more months, so we will have to wait until then. E feels well, though her tummy is definitely starting to shine through and she has developed a superfan type habit of unbolting and unbuttoning her pants for comfort when she has to sit upright for prolonged periods of time; ie meals.

Expecting Mother Sandwiche

As described; turkey, butter, spicy ketchup on an open faced roll. Buon pranzo!

Slow Weekend

Another pregnant couple’s weekend has passed. I like them. I was feeling a bit under the weather on Friday afternoon so E and I had a quiet weekend. Our pattern of grocery shopping, soccer and Buffy watching is nice and comfortable. It hit near 70 today and we walked along the beach and watched the end of a bike race. Soon - next week - we are going to announce to our friends here that we are pregnant. E wants to have a girls’ day and tell her friends. I’m really looking excited to it being out in the open, but I hope not to bore people when conversations drift towards the pregnancy. I took a picture of E eating lunch today, only because it was a great pregnancy sandwich; open-faced roll, butter, turkey cold cuts, Emmental-like cheese and Heinz chili ketchup. Her belly is growing slowly, almost imperceptibly. Not much else to report right now.

Grandma's latest advice

Now that my own grandmother is reading this I have to restructure my use of the term “old grandma” when describing the woman who gives E her shots. I don’t want thhe term to sound derogatory, so, without further ado; the much-needed description of the “old grandma.” First, I don’t know her name. Not a good start.

She lives in an apartment on the other side of the tracks, literally. Her apartment is about 500m from ours, but the train tracks separate us. She lives across the street from an arcade. There is Dr. Molinari’s office afianco (next door). The front door to her building is always open. She’s on the ground floor. E thinks that there are two older couples living in the apartment together. It’s a tiny place. She administers the shots in the room just inside the front door. It’s a cross between a storage room and a formal living room. It has a saggy old couch along one wall. I’ve only seen it in winter so I assume the mass of greenery in the room is the winter sunning spot for her plants. They face north, but it’s the only chance of exposure. The plants dominate half the room, the couch takes up one wall, a long low shelved bookcase with various cubbies and glass cabinets is opposite the couch and in the middle is a round dining room table. Various artifacts grace the surfaces; religious statues, picture frames and other knick-knacks. On the dining room table are boxes of new hypodermics, latex gloves and other tools of the trade. The woman herself is tiny. She carries herself with determination and purpose, sprightly. She may be all of 4’9”.

She always has nuggets of wisdom to dispose. The latest is that its too early to tell if the fetus has a pisellino (little pea) or a patatina (little potato). Still have to wait a few weeks for that.