baby shower

My dear friends here hosted a baby shower for me on May 30. I realized the other day the pictures were on my camera and therefore hadn't been shared with you yet. 

In China there's a tradition at Chinese New Year to give red envelopes full of money called "hong bao."

The shower adopted this tradition and we were blessed to receive diapers, wipes, and hong baos. 

We played a few games, one where the ladies had to guess if a certain statement applied to me, to James or to both. The highest scoring pairs were both the pairs that had a local participant (not two foreigners paired together). Even with a language barrier of playing a game their second or third language, our local friends still know us best :)

The hostess of the shower has two daughters who made this sign for the door so we would know which house to enter :)

Robot restaurant

A new restaurant opened not far from our house recently. It's just like every other Chinese fast food restaurant, with one major exception: Robots. 

When you walk in downstairs there's a coin-operated robot that will move around and speak to you in Chinese and English for 1 RMB (about 15 cents)/

Despite Catherine's love of robots, the voice, the lights, and the movement were better enjoyed from the safety of daddy's arms.

Upstairs in the actual restaurant, a robot delivers the food to your table. 

They were even smart enough to divide up the food (dishes, then rice, then drinks, etc) so the girls got to watch it move more than once. 

The robot in action below. One would hope that with a food-delivering robot in the place, we wouldn't be the biggest attraction, but I'm not sure that was true. We still got stares and folks asking to take photos with the girls. :)

more videos, alternatively titled "sometimes we fully dress both our children"

The girls gave us a little performance yesterday. I hope you love Word World like they do....

And this is them playing "at the beach." I think they were pretending to jump into the ocean. And, for the record, Ann normally does wear pants. 

where we plan to deliver baby #3

There's a book called There's a Sheep in My Bathtub that tells the story of an American family who lived in the country of Mongolia in early 1990s. It's humorous and heartbreaking. You can read it for the real point of the book sometime, but I'd like to highlight a very minor detail the author shares in the book. He is sharing how his family decided what parts of their host culture to absorb and which parts of their home culture to retain. He recommends engaging fully in the culture where you're living and taking on as much of it as possible. However, he offers three exceptions that one should retain: giving birth, death/funeral customs, and what one eats for breakfast. He furthers explains these reasons by saying that when a woman is in labor, it's no time to convince her to do something differently or accept a new culture, that when one is grieving a loss they should do that in a familiar way, and that no one should have to eat a sheep's head before 10 am. :)

Anyway, the point of this post deals with that first exception. There are so many differences in the birthing experience in my home culture and that of my current host culture. Here are just a few:

• For one month after birth, Chinese women practice a custom called "zuo yue zi" or a "sitting in" for 30 days. They don't shower, they eat special foods, they can't get out of bed often, they put cotton in their ears, and avoid a host of other bad things (cold air, radiation from television, computers, phones and other devices). Maybe I'll write more about this particular customs in another post. 
• It's not a big deal for the husband to be present at the birth. I mean he's generally at the hospital, but it's rare for the hospital to let him actually be present at the birth. It is slowly changing, but mostly the woman's mom or mother-in-law accompany her. (Only one person is allowed at most hospitals). 
• In urban areas, C sections now account for about 60% of births. I could write another entire post about some of the reasons behind this fact, but not today.
• "Informed consent" as we know it doesn't really exists. I mean, the hospital will ask someone for consent, but it may be a family member and not the patient herself. It's not common to question doctors about what drugs are being administered or what procedures are being done and why. 

We considered many options before we decided to give birth. We first thought we would use one of the large, international hospitals in Beijing or Tianjin. But, the cost is well above what it would be even in America and it still wasn't the environment I was looking for. (Remember the other two were born at home). 

We called a hospital that was recommended by a foreign friend in Nanjing. It seemed like a good fit, but it's really far away and not a city we have any knowledge about or connections to. 

I considered a home birth here, but since James wasn't comfortable with that idea, that was a no. 

We corresponded with a couple of midwives from America about coming to attend our birth here, but that didn't work because there aren't good transfer options from home and the local hospital wouldn't agree to let us bring our own provider in. (I knew it was a big stretch when asking)

We considered delivering here and had chosen the local hospital we would use and were feeling pretty good about our decision. They doctor is the one I've seen for prenatal care for my pregnancy with Ann and this pregnancy. She's nice and willing to allow some concessions to make us comfortable and knows our customs are different. BUT, in the end she doesn't have the authority to guarantee that those things will happen. (like James getting to be there). She also speaks no English and James was concerned he would have problems communicating when I am in no state to be trying to pull up Chinese medical terminology from my brain. :)

Then there's one of the biggest issues for us here in our city: foreigners are still very much a novelty. At my last check up, a few random strangers stopped by the exam room just to check us out. Granted, we had the girls with us which always draws more attention, but it wasn't comfortable. I was pretty sure that they actual delivery in the delivery room would be private, but the days in the hospital afterwards I'm pretty certain we'd have lots of curious people stopping in, peeking in the door, or doing what they can to check us out. And I just wasn't sure that my sleep-deprived, hormonal, post birth self would be able to handle that. Actually, most days my "normal" self doesn't handle it well. And I started thinking more about the quote I started this post with....about labor and delivery not rally being the time to try to acclimate to a new culture or way of doing things. So, we started over with making the decision about where to deliver.

Through an internet search and a call to a friend who lives there, we found a service in Chengdu that provides natural childbirth and breastfeeding education classes. I called to ask them about delivery options in Chengdu or other parts of China that would be natural birth friendly and reasonably priced. They have a relationship with a doctor who speaks excellent English, has a birthing suite where you can labor, deliver, and recover in one place (none of the other options other than Nanjing had that) and the price was half of the least expensive international hospital.

I ended up flying to Chengdu the next week to meet the doctor and see the hospital first hand. The first question he asked me after taking a history was, "Are there things you'd like to consider at the birth that aren't the normal protocol for Chinese hospitals?" I rattled off my list and he was happy to oblige all of them. It was such a different experience than anywhere else we'd been where we felt like we were having to push and advocate forcefully for everything we wanted (ability to move around during birth, for example).

I came home and gave the full report to James and we started making plans to go there for the delivery.

Here are some pics of where we plan for smallest Judd to be born:

Three other GREAT things

1. A few folks who went to my college live in Chengdu. One of those families are in America now and will let us live in their house while we're there!
2. James' mom will join us in Chengdu to help out with the girls while we deliver and acclimate to three small Judd girls. 
3. The consulting/education service I first called to ask about options in Chengdu provides doula services as well so we'll have a sweet, sweet lady assisting us at the birth. 

And, that's the very long version of the story. We'll leave on Friday and have a 20+ hour train ride to get there. That's right folks. 20+ hours in a train car with Catherine and Ann. (China's airlines have more stringent requirements than the US about flying when pregnant so I'm already past the point they allow pregnant ladies to fly). Perhaps another time I'll tell you the story of buying our train tickets. :)

We appreciate your prayers for our family!

trip to a "ghost city"

Our family took a mini-vacation to a somewhat famous city in China about 6 hours away. The city is famous for being one of China's "Ghost Cities." The moniker has nothing to do with being haunted, but merely means empty. It was a city that was planned and developed and invested in with the hopes of roughly one million inhabitants, but those inhabitants didn't arrive initially. So, there were fancily built buildings and wide streets and infrastructure, but no people! However, since it's creation is has filled up some, so we didn't find it to be as "ghost town like" as many articles portray it. There were definitely businesses there and lots of commerce, even McDonald's, Subway, and other chains that even larger cities don't have. It may not have the anticipated population and it may indeed be financially defunct, but by our observations, it was far from a ghost city. 

Here are a few articles about such cities in China if you're interested.

http://content.time.com/time/photogallery/0,29307,1975397_2094498,00.html

http://blogs.reuters.com/great-debate/2015/04/21/the-myth-of-chinas-ghost-cities/

http://multimedia.scmp.com/china-ghost-towns/

The great thing for us about this particular ghost city is that even the nicest hotels aren't full so you can get an excellent deal for a much nicer room than we would typically stay in. On this trip we got a deluxe room at a 5 star hotel for about $50/night. 

not bad, right?

We rented a car and drove there. We saw lots of stunning bridges along the way. China does architecture design very well.

This was a large plaza/square along the river/lake in the city. Catherine has been a bit obsessed with ferris wheels recently so it was a "must see" on her list. There were also carnival-like rides for the kids (more of those pictures later).

I need one of these for our house. Seriously. Hey girls-go run off some energy!

We went to a big park in the city. It was big and even designed to drive through whereas most of the parks in our city don't even allow bicycles, much less cars. We did park and walk a little while and stumbled upon this enclosure with dear. 

One development that may be evidence that perhaps it is a "ghost town."

part of the skyline. This location is famous for having a fountain show. We tried to show up twice at the times published on the sign that the fountains would be on. No fountains. 

sisters driving a car

daddy helping with the remote control. (for the safety of everyone!)

And this is our life most of the time when we're out and about with the girls. Lots of attention, lots of stares, and lots of onlookers taking photos. 

There was one particular housing development that was HUGE! We could see it from everywhere we went. But it was so large we could never get the whole thing in one photo. 

Until we went to a wetlands park outside of town. All those pink-ish buildings are ONE housing complex. But again, occupancy is very low. 

We wrote in our newsletter a bit about the culture of swimming here. What we didn't say was that like always, strangers wanted to take pictures with the girls. You may remember from last summer that Catherine doesn't like swimming because it makes her swimsuit wet. One such onlooker was trying to take a picture with her as she is standing on the side of the pool crying and trying to take off her swimsuit because it's wet. We're telling at her (and him!) and trying to get out the pool quickly enough to stop the inappropriate photo and disrobing!

Doesn't your local indoor pool have a lounge chairs where you can sit and smoke?

Some of the carnival rides the girls enjoyed. 

This ride was cars that rolled in a circle around a small track. A device in the middle shot up ping pong balls which one attempted to catch in the net. Catherine has asked to go back and do this weekly since we've been home.

I have so many more pictures, but as I need to pack for our next excursion to the border, we'll finish here. Hope you enjoyed seeing part of our vacation!