Island Life Rants, Subsection: Cost of Living. Halloween candy: ten bucks a bag. That's not like, Dove or Godiva or anything. That's your basic Hershey stuff, in seasonal wrapping. Ten bucks.
The dumb thing is that I had figured this place to be Guy Fawkes territory. "A penny for the guy" I can handle. But after 70 bucks to fill my gas tank so I can go spend 50 bucks a bag on groceries, now you're extorting candy from me at that price?
These kids had better dress up like a drag revue at Mardi Gras. Make it worth my while to open the door for you, little thieves.

I only have one Monday left this year when I will have to go to work. I think that's pretty sweet. I have eight full workdays remaining for this calendar year. And believe me, they're going to be very full.
The thing is, I keep forgetting that I wasn't working during this point in my pregnancy with Gigi. I was on leave, at "home" in North America, though far from relaxed. We were buying and moving into a house. International moves are tiring and stressful enough; try it sometime when you're eight months pregnant. Ugh. So even though I could lie down in the middle of the day, I didn't feel particularly well-rested.
Now, I'm working 40 hours a week, ferrying a two-year-old to pre-preschool, trying to keep my house from looking like downtown Basra, and still attempting to unpack the occasional box. Oh, and gestating full-time 24-7. It's a wonder I'm upright most of the day. It's a wonder I'm upright at this moment.
Fortunately, I have a husband who cooks and who doesn't especially care if there is toddler paraphernalia embedded in the carpet of every room in the house. I also have a daughter who can be persuaded to make a game of picking up books and toys - though she's not fooled for long. She also likes to play with the broom. Let's hope that behavior continues after she makes the transition to Big Sister.

She is two years old today. I'm still amazed sometimes that she can breathe on her own, but here she is, walking and talking and feeding herself and throwing tantrums and asking to sit on the potty. Her eyes are still blue (mostly - depending on what she's wearing) and she is still a carbon copy of her daddy.
Here's where the Grandparents' Special Edition kicks in, feel free to skip this part if you have a low tolerance for "guess what my kid did today" posts...
Milestones: Yesterday, she spoke the first complex sentence either of us had ever heard from her, "Gigi wanna go outside and see the cows." (There's a nature trail that she and Daddy go to not far from our house; you can see cows from there.) Today, she buttoned Elmo's jammies in her "Good Night Elmo!" activity-story book. She can tell us that her hands are dirty and she wants to wash them. She can sing the ABC song, sometimes missing a few here and there, and she's picking up the concept of numbers. Her favorite songs are "Twinkle Twinkle Little Star", "The Wheels on the Bus" and "B-I-N-G-O". She occasionally puts herself into Time Out when she realizes that she's done something Mommy and Daddy object to. She scolds the cat for no particular reason. She loves having books read to her and pretending to read them. She knows that on the last page of Goodnight Moon, we say, "Good night noises everywhere." And she still loves to play the "going away" game, where she walks out of sight and waits for us to say, "Where'd that little girl go? Gosh, I miss her!" before running back into our arms for hugs and kisses.
Yeah, I think we'll keep her.

The latest from the doctor's office: I had an OB checkup on Thursday. My blood pressure is fine. My weight appears to be unchanged, but Baby continues to grow and kick so there's no issue with the scale numbers. Baby's heart rate was in between 145-155, and the kickage is considerable. I got a strep swab (if you have to ask, you don't want to know) and will be back at the doctor's office again in two weeks to get the results and have yet another checkup. We appear to be on track for an approximate due date of November 20.
I have dusted off the pregnancy books from two years ago -- I have hardly cracked them open this time. It's not so much that I feel like a seasoned veteran, it's just that I figure anything that makes me feel like crap or otherwise weird is to be blamed on the pregnancy and there's little that can be done about it. I know by now what requires an urgent call to the doctor, and everything else I just have to put up with.
But I'm dusting off the books now to remind myself of what labor is all about, since I didn't really go through it the first time. I had a late-evening function at work last Saturday, and when I went to bed that night I had my first experience with full-fledged Braxton-Hicks contractions. Those wouldn't have been so bad if it hadn't been 1:00 in the morning. Ugh. Fortunately, they've stayed away since then. And now I know how they feel, so I hope that I'll be able to tell the difference if/when the real thing starts happening.

Surprise!!! My co-workers threw me a baby shower today. My boss came to sit and chat in my office with the door closed (yikes, I thought, it must be pretty serious) to distract me while they set up. I honestly had no idea. Nice loot, too: lots of nice goodies in blue with sports themes.
The funny thing is that they didn't realize till the last minute that my office is the one with the security camera monitors in it, so in theory I could have caught them in the act. Good thing my boss is still new enough that he commands my undivided attention when he closes the door.
The other gag came when one of my colleagues brought in her four-month old grandson to visit at the end of the day. I said I'd hold him for a few minutes while she went to get her desk straightened up and collect her bag. So there I am, snuggling this cute little puddin' on my lap, when some of the ladies from upstairs came by. Bear in mind that the grandson and I are of obviously different ethnicities... The double-takes were priceless. "Yeah," I said, "while you were upstairs, I've been a little busy, but hey, I've got all these cute outfits now, why wait?" Heeeee!
While I'm camped out this weekend by the washing machine catching up on ten days' worth of laundry, I'll be writing thank-you notes...and giggling my butt off.

"Kvetch and Ye Shall Receive" seems to be the order of the day. The AC in our bedroom is back to life, and at work our servers have gotten the Lazarus treatment as well. My husband swears that we can get the washer to work, we just have to nudge it along - it won't automatically move into the spin cycle. I wasn't planning to spend my weekend camped out by the washing machine, but if that's what it takes, that's what it takes.
On some level, I sympathize with my landlord's plight. We too are landlords, but there's a bit of ocean between us and our tenants, so a management company deals with the tenants most of the time. Our landlord lives downstairs, so he really can't hide from us when the next machine decides to give up the ghost. And everything on the island is expensive, I can't imagine how much it would cost to replace a washing machine here. Heck, if a bag of groceries is 50 bucks, picture the price tag on some durable goods. Eeeek.

Just a quick check-in with Baby: It is now One Month till "due date". My co-workers keep asking me, "When are you due?" and when I tell them, they furrow their brows and mumble something about how I'll be lucky to make it to Halloween. I look like I'm smuggling a beer keg. Earlier this week I kept waking up in the middle of the night with howling leg cramps. When I talked to my doctor yesterday (and yes, Mom, I asked about flu shots) she said she'd gone through the same thing. Usually there isn't much one can do about it but extra calcium can't hurt and it might help. "Extra calcium" is something my brain interprets as a code for "all the ice cream you can snarf down". But since I started chugging extra glasses of milk - and yes, indulging in the occasional scoop or two - I haven't had a night waking. I love going to a female OB.

It's been a stellar week at work, too. One of our security guys quit, and the server my division relies on to support all of its applications Went To Be With Elvis during the Alpha Geek Interregnum. So we have the old systems guy, who agreed to be hired back as a consultant until his replacement starts, coming in at an outrageous hourly rate - which i$ of cour$e the rea$on he left - to tell us that, yep, we need parts from the mainland in order to rebuild it better, stronger, faster. HQ FedExed us repair discs, which turned out to be the wrong ones. (Somebody please tell me why the IT guys back home even have "Migrating from NT4 to Windows 2000" discs in stock?!?!?)
So my division has been out of commission for three days now. I'm not a vindicitive sort, really, honestly, but somebody on the Help Desk had better get fired for a screwup of this magnitude.
New Alpha Geek starts in ten days. In the immortal words of Leonard Cohen, Alleluia.

C-I-L-L my lan'lord.** Our house, which my employer found and rented for us, is turning into the bane of my existence. Okay, we have a great view, many of the fixtures are new, and the location is very nice: 10 minutes' drive to the hospital, for when I go into labor, and only five minutes away from the mental health center, which is going to have to make room for me unless things improve radically. As if the ants weren't bad enough, we have discovered termites. Termites mean one thing: tent fumigation. Tent fumigation means moving out of the house for several days. And the exterminator says they can't schedule it until January.
So in three months, we get to move into a hotel or guest house, for an as-yet-unspecified period, with a two-year-old and a newborn. My Husband the International Telecommuter gets to either set up a new base of operations without his VOIP phone line, or take a few days' vacation under duress. Oh, and I'll still be on leave during that time, so he'll be cooped up with an infant and a stir-crazy mommy. If we're lucky, we can find someone to take the cat during that time.
But it's not just the insect world, oh no. Inanimate objects are also somehow synchronizing their efforts to antagonize us. First, the air conditioner in our bedroom broke down. I know, you're all looking at your calendars and seeing the word "October" up there. Yeah, me too. I'm more used to having snow up to my knees by this time of year, but here the temps are still in the muggy 80s. And when you're eight months pregnant, getting comfortable to fall asleep is hard enough without sweating through your sheets.
Then it was the water filter in the fridge. Then it was the oven. And now, our washing machine has broken down. So we can either schlep to the laundromat, wait for the laundry to crawl out of the hamper and into the bathtub on its own, or we can wash our clothes in a machine that won't spin all the soap and rinsewater out. Ugh.
The repairman who looked at the washer said it would be "a few days" to order the parts. Yeah. Our landlord said something similar about the AC...several weeks ago. We still have the box fan propping the window open.
Island Time: even Einstein and Stephen Hawking would go nuts trying to figure it out.


**Anyone who doesn't get the reference, Google "Eddie Murphy and Saturday Night Live". You know, back when it was actually funny, edgy, and worth staying up for.

I spoke too soon. Today, somebody at nursery took another chomp at my little girl's arm.
I really don't want to be labelled at school as Pain In The A$$ Over-Reacting Mom, but what is with these kids?
The teacher said, "Oh, she was very brave about it." Great. I'm sending her to you because you advertise as a day-care facility, not a friggin' Stoics Academy.
I'd rant a little bit more about where my thinking is on daycare for our Player to Be Named Later, but I didn't sleep very well last night, so I'm at high risk for logorrhea. Best to keep it short right now.

Good news from the Nursery, too. The biting trend among Gigi's peers looks to have run its course. I had a chat this afternoon with the school director, who said there have been no incidents for several weeks. Teacher also had high praise for Gigi's social skills, good nature, and all-around ray-of-sunshine-ness. She seems to be developmentally on target for someone who is about to turn two, so yay, we're happy. I'm always a little skittish about the subject of milestones, not because I'm a fanatic to ensure that Gigi is top of the class, but because she was born two weeks late and was very much on the wee side. But she's always progressed along her curves, according to the pediatrician, so as long as she keeps growing and learning, I'm not going to go into Manic Mommy Superachiever Overdrive.
Okay, enough with the Grandparents' Update, back to our regular blogging, already in progress.

Good news from the OB. My appointment Thursday went very well. I gained a pound in two weeks and my blood pressure is fine. But of course the real news is Baby, who is already as big as his big sister was when she was born. Player to Be Named Later is in the 72nd percentile for this gestational age, based on the sonogram readings from last week. Heartbeat was 155 beats per minute (Yo Dre, kick in the bass!) And kicking? Oh boy, I think this kid is going to come out and head straight to a Riverdance audition.
I'm going through another round of bloodwork to check my thyroid levels (since I've had issues with that gland since college, ugh) but otherwise, it's business as usual, back in two weeks.

I rarely engage in political commentary, but with the U.S. elections just around the corner and every wingnut aflutter, I must ask...
The Republicans have had control of the Executive and the legislature, and exerted tremendous influence over the judiciary for close to five years now. During this time, the U.S. has experienced the worst attack on its soil over 50 years; fewer people earn a living wage and/or have health insurance; both North Korea and Iran are gearing up to join the Nuke Club; a record surplus dissolved into record debt; over half a million Iraqis are dead in a badly destabilized neighborhood; and the guy behind the bombings of two Embassies, one naval vessel, a significant financial center and the national military headquarters is still at large.
These guys have had the reins for five years.
When are they going to stop blaming their problems on Bill Clinton?

I'm just saying, the view from the outside: Gigi's nursery school is not a model of government. Pick up your toys and play nice, set an example for the other kids.

Island Life, subsection: Road Rants. It took less than a month of owning this car for me to put some nice dents and scratches on it. (Parking garage, thankfully, not another car!) It's not that I'm unaccustomed to driving on this side of the road, it's just that I'm not used to roads and corners that are so freaking narrow. Seriously, I've been up and down streets that could barely fit my car on them, and I'm told they're two-way streets. Lance Armstrong couldn't get through there, and you're telling me there could be someone coming at me around the corner? Sheesh.
Oh, and I got my first parking ticket yesterday, while dropping Gigi off at nursery. Argh. There's 50 bucks I can't spend on groceries or bug spray.

The Vampire Chronicles, update: Gigi hasn't been bitten at school so far this month. Grandparents, you may relax. For now.
btw, when it comes to teeth of her own, Gigi has about four left to sprout. They're causing her considerable grumpiness, but at least she can say, "teeth ouchy" now, instead of leaving us to guess what's wrong.

Five years ago, I was in Hawaii. You see, Friday was Our Anniversary. Five years later, we have one adorable kid, another on the way, a house in suburbia with a monster mortgage, and after two freezing winters in Baltic Europe we get to spend the next three years living on an island which has never seen temperatures recorded below 44 degrees. So life is pretty good.
But you see, celebrating our nuptials seems to be fraught with hazards for us. Five years ago, I was in Hawaii - three days after the wedding. Why three days? Because the airlines wouldn't board us the morning after. The tickets were in my married name, and I hadn't brought the marriage certificate with us because hey, that's an important piece of paper, wouldn't want to lose that - so we gave it to our best man for safekeeping. It was less than a month after a particularly horrific episode that made the airlines very skittish about boarding *anyone*, so of course the bleary-eyed couple with new jewelry, tickets to Hawaii in the names of Mr and Mrs, and just shy of having rice falling out of our hair? We were clearly not bona fide honeymooners, we must have been up to no good, we must have wanted to hijack the plane to Cuba or something.
Today's adventure in Attempting to Celebrate Our Wedded Bliss was on a more modest scale. We both took the day off from work to catch a matinee movie while Gigi was at day care. We haven't been to the movies in three months, at least. No Clerks 2, no Wicker Man, no Snakes on a Plane, none of that for us, nosiree. But this weekend, The Departed came to our island. And it was our anniversary. So we had lunch at a little cafe in town, went to the even littler theatre, and settled into our seats for a few hours of escapism. The reviews had been good, I'm okay with giving my money to Martin Scorcese, and let's see how well Matt Damon's Southie accent has held up since Good Will Hunting.
Our story starts out well enough. Despite the size of the theatre and screen leaving you with the expectation that you're going to hear "Ladies and gentlemen,this is your captain speaking, today's cruising altitude should be..." it was a decent place. And the lady at the concession stand gave me free candy when she saw the size of my belly. And Jack Nicholson's character is as loathsome as he oughta be, and Leo D reminds us all that he really can act (forget the sinky boat thing, go see Baz Luhrmann's Romeo and Juliet. You're welcome.) And wow, it's a cool story and Martin Scorcese really is a brilliant director, and we're just at the denouement when blurWHIRRblurrrrr Hey, what's wrong with the picture? BLURRRRRwhirrrBlurwhirrrWhapWhapWhapWhap
I kid you not. Ten minutes shy of the end of the best movie I've seen so far this year, and the projector eats it. And they can't fix it in time for us to catch the end before picking up Gigi.
This being an island of under 100,000 full-time residents, we don't get too many movies in the theatre with a shelf life of over one week. Which means The Departed will likely live up to its name as of Thursday. So Hubby and I have three days left to either persuade the manager to hold this movie over so we can use our consolation freebie coupons without missing two workdays, or we wait several months until video.
One advantage Baltic Europe had over this place: instantaneous bootleg DVDs.
Happy Anniversary to us.

First, my apologies to all non-grandparent readers: It's time for another gratuitous installment of Cute Things Gigi Does. Believe it or not, this kid is going to be two years old in another couple of weeks. For the most part, she is still the sweet, good-natured, turbo-cute little darling we all know her to be (or, as I put it, "the kind of kid who tricks you into having more.") But the twos are sneaking in there. In between minor outbursts, though, she sings Twinkle Twinkle Little Star, the alphabet song, and crawls on Daddy's lap to demand his reenactment of the Wheels on the Bus Going Round and Round. When we drive past my workplace to take her to school, she recognizes the building and shouts, "Mommy Office!!!" She can say "please" and "thank you" with minimal prompting, and shouts, "Go [Mommy's baseball team]!" any time she sees someone on TV wearing a number and breaking a sweat.
I could go on and on, but I don't know how many of you keep insulin shots handy.

Doctor Updates: New ultrasound exam last week shows that we are 95% certainly expecting a bouncing baby boy. Daddy says don't go crazy with the blue shopping, we'll only know for certain on B-day. (This is life with a Red Sox fan, people.) The exam also estimated Baby's weight at 5 lbs 7 oz - just one ounce shy of what Gigi was when she was born (two weeks late...it's in the archives...) Based on the calendar, I'm supposed to be at 33 weeks, but based on the measurements done during the ultrasound, the tech calculated 35 weeks. Huh?
You see, I'm counting on this kid to be reasonably close to the November 20 due date. I'm stopping work as of the 10th; my mom arrives on the 13th; kiddo can show up anytime after that, I figure. Well, the sonogram tech said, "November 9." NOT FUNNY. Of course, if Big Sis was two weeks late...
Ah, forget it. We all know that the concept of due date is severely fungible. As long as my water doesn't break at the office, I'll be cool.
I see the doc again this Thursday. We'll probably talk about my weight, and I will complain about the sciatica that has developed in the past week. There's nothing like shooting pains in your hip when you're already moving like Jabba the Hutt. Ugh!