Can't sleep. I worked tonight to get a test written and some pages scanned to add to the class website. We tucked in early, only to have a friend call just as we were dozing off. After half an hour of tossing and turning, I decided to get up and add the latest photo of Karla.

Here it is:

Big mama #6

It's been a while and I realize we have missed a photo of Karla. The morning we usually take the photo, we headed off to Egypt. I will take one tomorrow morning.

Egypt was an adventure. It was full of ancient and gigantic ruins, but all that was wonderful about the country was eclipsed by the overpowering salesmanship of each and every Egyptian. Photos and a more detailed description of our adventure to come in the travelogue section.

It's been an exhausting week. We got back from Egypt at 10:30 on Friday night and had to show up at school at 7 the next morning. Then all week was an adjustment, getting used to both being back from holiday and going back to the regular schedule after the shortened Ramadan schedule.

We met with our doctor again. Despite having an appointment, we had to wait for an hour to get into the office. We've had to wait for quite a while every time we have gone there this year. Karla got a recommendation from another expectant mother, so we might check out another doctor.

This weekend we had a baby shower put on for us by Jennifer and Jamie, two teachers that we have worked with since we arrived in Kuwait. There was lots of yummy food to eat and we played several baby theme games. I was terrible at the baby product "The Price is Right". I didn't guess a single price correctly, but Karla got three (which tied her for the most correct guesses). People were very generous. A bunch of teachers got together and got us a very nice pine crib and mattress (that turns into a bed later on). We also now have a stroller, some bedding, cute clothes and other odds an ends (including a rubber ducky). When the Christmas break comes we'll head out to finish off the list of baby supplies (since we won't be travelling anywhere).

We also saw "The Station Agent". It won a bunch of awards at the Sundance Festival. It's unusual, but captivatingly so. It slow paced, and says as much with silences as with words (except for the character Joey). I don't think it has a single special effect. It's worth the couple hours it takes to watch.

We visited another hospital - The Dar Al Shifa hospital. It's newly built (a year old) and very near to the school. As we looked around the 3 rooms (Special, Royal and Imperial), I was kicking myself for not bringing the camera. The Imperial room, was actually three rooms. It looked like it came out of a French chateau prior to the revolution - all the walls were paneled in dark wood; heavy gold curtains hung from ceiling to floor; ornate, scrolled couches lined the walls - except for the plasma screen TV hanging at the foot of the bed. There was also a desk and a bar and a second TV in one of the other rooms (in case any of the guests got bored, I suppose). Altogether, I counted couch and easy chair seating for 20.

But, sadly, the room is not for us. Our doctor advised us that the hospital makes up for its second rate medical services with luxurious rooms. We had another doctor's appointment last night (stay tuned for the next ultrasound picture). We talked about the birth plan - and everything went well. Dr. Laila was open to following as natural a birthing process as is possible.

We (finally) watched Super Size Me this weekend. It was mostly what I expected. Yet, even though I expected every grease smeared bit of McDonalds analysis, I still enjoyed all my groans and grimaces at how disgusting it all was. I was surprised at how naive the doctors were about the effects of the McDonalds diet on the body. Even with a common sense approximation of the nutritional value of McDonalds' food, I would have thought that doctors would know that it would do serious harm to a person's body. The nutritionist's numbers sounded about right - double the calories with only about 1/3 of the vitamins and minerals. All of the good stuff that you're supposed to eat just aren't there: no fruit, no veggies.

Temptation. I mean, I'm not really one to speak. A cookie jar in my proximity is in peril of gradual consumption. McDonalds gives you what you want, when you want it, without having to pay much for it. It not much different from smoking or drinking. Some people can resist, some people indulge prudently and others go way overboard to the detriment of their health.

Report card grades had to be entered by Wednesday (our Friday.) The school has bought into a database package to manage all the school goings on - attendance, counseling, illness and grades. Previously, we all entered out grades by hand into a notebook which was transcribed into the computer by one of the secretaries.

I read in a Douglas Coupland book that for the first 30 years that computers were used in the workplace, productivity declined -some confusion over how to use them, some data loss with a game or two of solitaire thrown in. I understood how computers add to the workload, but 30 years seemed like a long time to get used to them. After entering my grades yesterday, it makes more sense to me. The school has duplicated the paper process on the computer and now it takes about three times as long to enter grades. Plus, they've just invested who knows how much in the software and we'll use it forever.

Last night we had our last salsa class with Yann. He was the teacher for the rueda. He was a great teacher. He made the classes a lot of fun.

Tonight we went on our first hospital tour. We took a look at the Mowasat Hospital, where our doctor said she likes to work and the closest hospital to our home. The hospital sent us home with a little price list of the various possibilities: from standard room and delivery up to Royal suite and C-section. The delivery room looked a little more informal than I had expected (from my experience, based mostly on TV viewing and Monty Python's The Meaning of Life). I definitely didn't see the machine that goes "bing". We also looked at the standard rooms and the junior suites. Standard rooms are basic private rooms with phone, tv and bathroom. Junior suites have a little sitting areas and fridge and sink. We didn't check out the VIP and Royal suites. We'll have to talk to our insurer and find out what they will pay for.

There are a couple more hospitals that we are going to check out. One near the school and one closer to downtown. We'll keep you updated.

We came out of the hospital to find a shiny new Rolls Royce looking for a parking spot. It was enormous. Very tall, and boxy. Like a Hummer sedan. It actually made the Caprice look like sporty.

Ok. I started Ramadan with great intentions to get some work done on the website, but it really hasn't turned out. Even though we spend less time teaching, it feels like I'm even busier than usual. Karla is still feeling sick. I convinced her to stay home one day this week to rest. She is starting to feel better. We skipped dance last night and will stay home this weekend to get caught up on some work.

Last night I found myself in a place that I would not have predicted. It was Friday night and I was at home, eating pizza with alcohol free beer, and reading about the procedures involved in delivery. Last night we worked on a birth plan together. Well, we started. By the time we were halfway through the labour and delivery chapter, we had six pages of notes: a list of questions to ask and decisions to be made about the delivery - from location, to medical decisions to how mother and baby will be taken care of at the hospital after the delivery. The book (What to Expect When You're Expecting) describes the current philosophies about what doctors and hospitals do, as well as what they used to do. We'll see how the Kuwaiti hospitals measure up.

This week I noticed that Pepsi giving away one iPod every hour from now until Christmas. The trick was that every hour they started fresh - they got rid of all the old entries and started over. I was interested for a while - you could get free entries online. At first you had to fill in a short survey, but by the end, the survey had gotten longer and harder to find. And now, the site reports that they have given away all the free entries they are going to. From now on you need a entry number from a Pepsi product sold in Canada. So I guess I am cut off. I thought I might have a better than average chance, since when I was at school is when everyone was sleeping in Canada. I could enter all of the draws with fewer entries.

Our Egypt trip plan was more or less finalized this week. The travel agent that I had been emailing got it all set up. He's meeting us at the airport when we arrive and taking us to the train station where we will go on the fancy overnight sleeper train down to Aswan. We will go on a tour to Abu Simbel, a pair of temples that had been in the side of a mountain until the Egyptians decided to dam the Nile. The whole temple was cut out and moved to higher ground where it currently resides. That night we will return to Aswan to spend the next three days on a sight seeing cruise up to Luxor. After a day to rest in Luxor, we will get back on the train to Cairo, where we will have two days to visit the Pyramids, Old Cairo and the fabulous Egyptian museum before returning to Kuwait. There will be no Christmas vacation for us Just a few shopping trips to get the nursery stocked up for the baby's arrival.

I just did a little web page maintenance. I moved some of the main page into the archive section. I thought that it might be getting a little slow to load for some of you since there are so many more pictures this year. It's probably actually not that much faster since I didn't really take any of the pictures off the site. I will have to take some of the pictures off the page - or at least change them to links (like the animations) so that they don't automatically load with the page.

I was also looking at the site statistics. Geocities is nice enough to keep track of how many people visit and even when they do. By far the heaviest months for visit - with 2-3 times as many hits were last year after the Cambodian and Omani travelogues (even though Oman was just photos - I never found time to write the description of what we did).

Ramadan should give me a few minutes every morning to get things organized a little better.

Sorry it's a day late. Karla's feeling under the weather with a cold, so photo taking was delayed. Ramadan officially began today. Karla napped and corrected. I watched Kill Bill, one of the films left us by a teacher last year. It was awful. Tomorrow school starts two hours late - which is good for sick mamas. Karla has a light load tomorrow (I have already been encouraging her to stay home and get well), so she says she will go in tomorrow. Hopefully, she'll take the day off on Sunday if she isn't feeling better. Anyway, I should be getting to bed soon too. And here's the photo.

Big mama #5

Last weekend we tried to watch Super Size Me, which (I thought) I had been clever enough to download from the internet and copy onto a DVD. I mostly worked. The audio track was flawless; however the video track ran at double speed. I tried to watch it, but it was too hard. You had to pay attention to the audio and at the same time remember what was happening on the screen (because the audio would be coming in a while) AND remember the scenes that you had seen a few minutes ago that corresponded with the commentary that was currently playing.

Not much has been happening here the past two weeks. We've been making plans to go to Egypt at the end of Ramadan (which begins tomorrow). Tutoring is going well. We both started clubs at school. Karla is running the photography club and I am risking disaster with a tie-dye club. So far they are both going great. I've even got a couple boys doing tie-dye. Except Karla's field trip bus was late both to take them out and bring them back. When we get home, it's a long day, which makes going to salsa class hard. There's not time for a nap in between school and dance like there was before clubs. Since there are no clubs during Ramadan, we'll be able to dance a little more.

Our dance groups is a very international collection of people. We still haven't figured out where everyone is and how they got to be taking salsa in Kuwait. There are a few Kuwaitis, a guy from Equador who works in the oil industry, a Lebanese mother and daughter (the daughter made the mother to come lessons, but she really enjoys it now), an Egyptian woman, our teacher Yann is Algerian-Guadaloupe, and a new Austrian woman showed up last night who spoke English, French, an Arabic (and, I assume, German too).
I'm still waiting for Karla to get up this morning to take this week's photo, but here are a couple things I have been meaning to post.

First, here's the ultrasound of the baby. It's the computer generated 3D picture, not the ordinary kind. It's a little less like looking for animals in the clouds. In both pictures little Prudence is demonstrating prenatal flexibility, with her face resting against her shins. Just above the arm you can see the umbilical cord (which the doctor promised us was not wrapped around the neck, but in a perfectly normal position). Sorry it took so long to post, I hadn't set up the scanner yet.


October ultrasound

The second is just a bit of a laugh. It's a box of cleaner that the maids at the school use to keep it clean. I always wondered what the smell was... (the directions on the side panel are especially peculiar)

What's that smell? It's Barf!

What helpful directions!

She's Pregnant!

Class was interupted by an eruption of students' laughter. "She's pregnant," several voices called out. The story was explained to Karla as one particular student turned bright red. The student, noticing Karla's increase in size, commented to the people around him, "The teacher is getting fat." He had no idea that she was pregnant.

Living in an Aquarium

It's hot and now it's gotten humid. Kuwaiti weather is more awful than ever. We wake up to all the windows completely covered with condensation. Stepping outside is to have all your clothes stick to you. You don't sweat so much as the humidity condneses on you. When we are driving in the car with the AC on, the windows fog up from the outside.

Lianne, Kalra's sister, was looking for a web solution so she could keep everyone updated without sending group emails, so I suggested a weblog to her. Then I decided to try it myself.

Blog Experiment

In less than ten minutes I was about to set up this baby and make this little post. The hardest part was picking a name that nobody else had used.

So far, it's very easy!

Hello world. I know you have been waiting for another photo and I've got the goods.

Big mama #4
We're doing well. Nothing much to report. We've got an appointment with the doctor on Saturday. There might even be a little ultrasound picture in it for you, if the baby will sit still enough to get a clear shot.

The name search continues. Since discovering the provincial lists of names, we have all but abandoned several of the ones that were top ten names. Karla's new favourite for boys is Atticus. I support the idea behind it, from Atticus Finch in To Kill a Mockingbird, but I don't like the sound of it. I think it would make a good middle name. I still like Conan. Even more since I started to think about all the cute little nicknames that the names inspires, such as Conan the veterinarian, Conan the humanitarian, or Conan the centenarian.

Our vacation plans for Egypt are progressing. We have booked a flight and will spend the week there with Martine. Her boyfriend, Willy, who is a farrier (he makes horseshoes), can't get time off work. We're planning on spending a few days in Cairo, then cruising the Nile from Aswan to Luxor to see some of the ruins in Upper Egypt, like Karnak and the Valleys of the Kings and Queens.

The car is back and is freshly painted. It's a relief to have it again. I went to have it checked again. It took a few minutes since all of the inspectors took the first 15 minutes of work to go pray. When they got back though, they all set to work: one stamping the papers, one inspecting the cars and the third reading a magazine. Eventually I was processed through and they licensed it for the year.

No photo this week. But Karla continues to do well. She can feel the baby's movements regularly now.

School is back in full swing now. I gave my first test this week and Karla's got lots of marking to do. She always had lots to do last year in grade 5. She might have to slow down a little since grade 8 produce quite a bit more than itty-bitty grade 5's do. Tutoring has picked up. I've got 7 or 8 hours a week (two kids I taught last year (the good ones, thankfully) and one new guy I see today for the first time). And on Tuesday I went out to tutor and came home to find Karla sitting at our dining room table with a grade nine student. Karla talked to the mom and told her that she would only tutor if the kid came to our place. The mom said they would talk about it and called back to say that they would like to come over right away. That's right "they". Both mother and daughter came over. Mom sat in our living room and chatted on her mobile phone during the lesson. I guess you never know what wickedness we might be imparting to children under the guise of parts of speech and algebra.

We were back at salsa and rueda class last night. Still no do-si-does, so it's not that much like square dancing. Tonight, we're going to games night at Josh and Tamara's place. It's a busy weekend! Josh is planning on running in the Dubai marathon in January and I am thinking about going with him to run the 10K. It's the weekend right after the Christmas holiday, but since Karla and I will be staying here, the timing is pretty good. Plus, it's only an hour away and there are several flights a day. It's not likely, but in case I need to come back right away, I will be able to.

Last weekend I took the car in to be painted. We've had to beg rides here and there all week. Hopefully it will be done today. We were also headed to get some groceries. We had to stop at the bank to get some cash. I popped in my card and punched all the usual buttons (when you hit "fast cash" in Kuwait, the lowest amount offered to you is worth about $250). Then the machine started beeping at me. "Take your card," it said. But my card hadn't come out. When I peered into the card slot, I could just see the edge of it, but there was no way to get. After a moment the machine sucked it back, the edge disappeared, and tried again, the edge reappeared. It looked like it was getting caught on the plastic trim around the card slot. I thought that if slid a paper business card into the slot, the bank card would slide along the card over the lip of the trim that it was getting caught on. I was all ready when the machine stopped beeping at me the second time. The edge disappeared. I stuck the card in. The screen flashed a message that said since I didn't take my card, it would keep it. Oh, it didn't give me any money either. Karla can't remember the code to her card since we never use them (tutoring money provides all the cash that we need). We pooled all the money we had and did manage to get some groceries. The bank phone line told me that I had to go into the branch when it opened in two days to get my card. But when I went in, they had sent my card to my home branch, which is a long way away from where I live. But in the end, they will send it back to the branch I can walk to. I pick it up today (inshallah). But they were nice enough to give me some money.

Oh well, I'd better see to those tests I gave yesterday. Masallama until next week.