We found us a rockin' chair

Another week and some more stuff to tell. And there’s just so much, I really don’t know where to begin…Trying to make people feel like they’re here experiencing everything with us treads a thin line between entertaining (i.e., Tim’s encounters and learnings from up north) and potentially quite boring (after months of looking I might have found an Australian substitute for my “Hans the German sausage Saturday morning at the Fredericton market” fix- very exciting for me, perhaps not so much for you…)

First off, to piggyback on Tim’s entry from last week, this week I had an appointment with a midwife at the hospital that we’ll be working on delivering the Goob from an aquatic to a terrestrial state in. I usually see the same midwife every three weeks, but this week the hospital was short staffed and I had a different lady. She’s actually an aboriginal midwife who usually works in clinics liaising young & pregnant aboriginal women with the public healthcare system. This day she’d been asked to help out in the midwife clinic that I was attending. So I got to have a pretty great chat with her about what her job was like. Apparently she’s been working with young aboriginal women for the past 20 years and is finally seeing that young women are feeling comfortable/confident using the public system for not only birthing issues, but for things like addressing the social issues that are plaguing many aboriginal communities here in Australia, alcohol abuse, domestic violence, etc. (very similar to social issues found in first nations communities in Canada…although I would argue that if you looked closely you’d see the same problems in many non-first nations communities in Canada and Australia). Either way, she (the midwife), and other women like her have been able to relate with and successfully engage new generations of aboriginal women in ways that other non-indigenous people haven’t been able to, which she believes is key to the changes that she’s seeing. It was an encouraging conversation. And she was really good at her job, made me feel like I knew what I was talking about when we discussed my own pregnancy, which is a feeling a lot of other healthcare professionals haven’t given me. It’s easy to see how she’s changing the way that young aboriginal women perceive the public resources that are available to them.

So during that clinic, I finally got weighed again, it’d been over 2 months because either the midwives thought I looked fine at my previous appointments or I’d forgot to ask to step on the scales. I haven’t mentioned this, but you might have guessed that Tim and I don’t have a lot of stuff here in Australia (a fact that we love), and a bathroom scale hasn’t been something that we’ve even thought of. So, throughout this whole pregnancy I’ve counted on the doc’s or midwife’s scales (even been tempted to pop a dollar into the scales that they have at the mall that give your weight AND fortune, but have resisted thus far). I guess my capacity to remember to ask to get weighed at appointments in the past months has been quite low. Either way, on Thursday I finally got weighed and guess who now weighs the same as her husband? That’s right. I leave it up to you to decide if Tim’s getting shrimpy or whether I’m getting tubby, but I think we’re both looking great! He carries his weight a little more evenly distributed than I do though. We’re both in a good fitness routine right now and are feeling good in general.

Last weekend we took our final honeymoon (I think that puts our honeymoon count up to around 30- and the word “honeymoon” is loosely defined by us as a trip (sans enfants) to somewhere where someone cooks us a great breakfast and we have access to a place to swim (or get into water), most preferably a hot tub). After work last Friday afternoon we picked up a rental car and headed north to Sunshine Coast where we stayed in a lovely little bed and breakfast in a lovely little town (Montville) near the Blackall Range, which is a part of the Great Dividing Range that runs down the eastern coast of Australia. We had a great time together. We did 3 or 4 hikes, the longest being roughly 3km I think, so maybe wouldn’t be considered “hikes” to some although we’re talking some serious up and down trails that were enough to get me panting (isn’t as big a feat as it used to be). We also checked out a cheese making operation which I think might have pushed me the final couple of pounds to the big 150, and of course we ate and ate and ate amazing food in general. Some of that food we found at the largest farmers market in Australia which was nearby (Eumundi). That’s a funny thing about Tim and I. Although we may not be so attached to material possessions, we’d have a hard time giving up good food. This is most likely reflected in the way that we spend our money. Speaking of which, we ate our last supper there at an upscale restaurant called “The Treehouse”. I had grilled Barramundi, which is a very popular whitefish here in Australia, probably closest to tasting like Haddock from the east coast of Canada. It was delicious…melted right on my tongue. I have been a bit sketched out by the seafood here in Australia, from what I’ve seen, it comes nowhere near the quality of seafood that we used to have so readily back home, so I’ve been avoiding it a bit. That meal at the Treehouse saved a bit of face for Australian seafood…I believe that I’ll be exploring it a bit more in the weeks to come. Of course, dairy products are my first love, but seafood used to be up there on my list…I’d give a lot of money right now for some Atlantic lobster fresh from the pot, or even better, fresh Digby scallops fried in butter…mmmmmmmm. Or chowder…Thankfully Australia makes up for its seafood quality with its amazing produce. It’s strawberry season here now…need I say more? Oh, on the food note, we’re grilling roo steaks for supper tonight. We’ve already been using roo as a substitute for ground beef in sauces and things, but a whole steak will most likely be a bit stronger in flavour. We’ll let you know how it goes.

Our short (in distance) but long (in duration due to waddling pregnant woman) hikes proved to be excellent places for bird/wildlife viewing. We saw some new (to us) birds and animals that are only present in rainforest climate…Isn’t it nuts that we live near rainforests? I’m so used to Christmas trees that I must look like the biggest weirdo walking these trails just gawking at the size of and amazing features of even just the trees. It really is straight out a movie scene from Tarzan or perhaps the Jungle Book (Dad used to play that movie every morning while we were getting ready for school as kids…I can still quote lines from it with the best of them (“them” being my brother and sisters mostly…and my Dad of course)). We’re talking vines hanging everywhere, huge waterfalls, trees bigger then I’ve ever seen, strangling trees that wrap themselves around these huge trees in the most amazing contortions. Amazing stuff. We were the most pleasantly surprised by the sighting of 2 Padymelons, which look like mini-kangaroos. They didn’t seem too phased by us so we got to sit and watch them for a while before they hopped off. Unfortunately our photography on this trip was a bit lackluster. We tired so hard to get good pictures of the wildlife, but our limitation might just be the camera we’re using. Ahh well, the nice thing about digital is the fact that we took so many pictures that at least some of them turned out nicely. It’s purely a statistical phenomenon. The more pictures you can take, the more chances of getting something worth posting on a blog. Someone was thinking.

So Tim and I finished our antenatal classes yesterday (still hard to believe that we’re actually going to have a baby in about a month now…or less, or more…). We had 1 evening (Tuesday) and 2 full-day sessions (Saturday and Sunday) to gather all of the information that we could get from the midwives running the workshops. It was nothing like what we expected. My idea of prenatal classes probably links up with the many sitcoms that I’ve subjected myself to over my lifetime that have the girl sitting on the floor learning how to breathe during labour (heee heee hoooo), with the partner coaching from behind. And of course it would always end up with a scene in the delivery room where the partner faints at the site of the birth. A popular storyline in the 80s and early 90s I think. These classes were nothing like that. The first session was all about the physiology of a pregnant woman and how to best address the changes that happen in a woman’s body, including fallen arches…I truly would not recognize my feet and ankles right now if I had to pick them out of a lineup. The Saturday was spent on discussing labour and strategies for coping, along available options for dealing with pain during delivery (apparently the hee hee hooo breathing is not all that common, or recommended). And the 3^rd day was spent learning what the heck you do with a baby once it’s out, and all that goes along with that in terms of physical and emotional well-being. In all of that, we got to visit the birthing suite that we’ll be using at the hospital (just finished being constructed in June, and so top of the line it seems like you shouldn’t even touch anything in it, let alone have a baby in there) and got to witness a 2 day old infant have its first bath, she was pretty cute, and the midwife definitely made things look easy. The whole thing was pretty intense I’ll say. It was nice to go through the sessions with other couples who were looking just as uncomfortable as we were, and I’m sure that there are a few with whom we’ll keep in touch. Overall, I came away from the classes excited about the fact that there is a CD player in the birthing suites, so we have the option of having music during delivery. So the question is, do I risk having a negative association with one of my favorite artists simply because labour was a horrific experience (if it happens to be horrific), or do I think that having my favorite music on during labour will make the delivery less horrific? I suppose the midwives that ran the sessions on the weekend were probably hoping for deeper thought questions coming out of the sessions. But I’m really excited about selecting music.

In other news, Tim and I have been on the hunt for a rocking chair for the past couple of months, mostly for rocking with the Goob. We were looking for a solid timber rocker that was comfortable. In general, we like to buy things that were once owned by someone else a) because it was most likely loved by someone prior to us, so we know it’s got to be good and b) because we’re tired of greasing the wheels of economy through purchasing from the same major corporations over and over again and try to avoid it, and c) the mass production factor really doesn’t make us feel good. I think we’d rather use our purchasing power to spread the wealth rather than allow one company (although there are some good ones out there) to distribute or hoard profits as they see fit. So, despite the fact that we like to buy second-hand, we were getting kind of desperate thinking that we wouldn’t be able to find what we were looking for 2^nd hand. We even resorted to looking around in stores that we normally would never go in to, but thankfully resisted the purchase. Why thankfully? Because early Sunday morning at the market we happened to stumble across an old man and woman selling off some of their old furniture. In the middle of their lot was an old wide-bottomed wooden rocker. Tim and I both had a rock and fell in love. So we handed the couple the $60 they were asking for it and picked it up later in the afternoon. It’s so very comfortable and is now sitting in the sun porch so that we can rock and watch the birds outside. It’s also perfect for sitting in while consuming amazing fruit salad in a housecoat every morning. Life is good.

Speaking of bird watching though, it’s very interesting these days. There’s definitely something in the air, something like pheromones (or being twitterpaited, according to Bambi, another classic movie in my house growing up). The crested pigeons were the first that we noticed were acting a little oddly, and over the past week we’ve seen why. They’re mating! Or “doin’ it” if that’s more clear (that’s what I yelled to Tim when I looked out of the window and saw the act the other morning). But since then, we’ve noticed that all of the birds seem to be getting much more aggressive with each other. The miners are going nutso, flying after anything else that moves in the most erratic flying patterns…They’re aggressive anyway, but are getting super brave these days. It’s a great time to have a rocking chair in the front porch to watch the action.

So, to wrap up, if we ran a trend analysis on topics discussed in my blog entries, I’m sure that we would see a significant increase in baby references the closer we get to d-day. I’d like to think that I’d be able to be more broad-scaled in topics, but it’s harder than I thought it would be. The big bump I’m carrying that seems in perpetual motion these days seems to take up a lot of my thought life. And of course, our activities seem to revolve more and more around it as well. I know what it’s like to have friends become engulfed by baby talk when I wasn’t in a baby-state myself, and it’s hard not to feel weird about it (or at least it was for me). So, to those who might feel that way, I apologize. For those who like it…good?

I forgot to mention that a few weeks ago I received a package from our friend Joy who took the time to learn to knit this winter. Amongst many other baby treats, we received a little cardigan and booties for the Goob that she’d knit herself (see picture). So very amazing! Thanks Joy! On the other hand, I think that Australia Post ate the package from home that my family sent over at the beginning of June. I still haven’t seen it Mom! Perhaps there is another Australian family enjoying the goodies, and if that’s the case, good! And maybe the guy reading the label thought that the address said Austria, not Australia. Hmmm. So many possibilities!

Love to all, please take care!

Laura