Glutter

Eat

I had some chicken and ginger ale left over, so I thought I would try this and see if it would work...

Marinate Chicken breasts in Soy Sauce and some sort of soft drink (7 up, I used ginger ale this time), garlic and ginger.

Put over night or a few hours...Take out of marinade and cover with corn starch on a plate.

Put a few table spoons of olive oil and make it hot (!!)

Fry until golden brown, and then flip,

Turn heat down, and make sure it's cooked all the way through.

Yummi....

(Happy it worked)

Just a grrl

Up again. This is something that happens during pregnancy. When one is calm and relaxed, the baby moves a lot. While one is busy with the day, the baby is lulled into sleep as mummy is rocking him or her. I should have known this will happen as today I hardly felt the baby move, which means baby will be awake longer in the middle of the might. To think I feel worried earlier. Pieter laughs as everyday I feel the baby is moving less and I feel worried. But I do know baby has moved less than before. No more wild kicks and turns. I read this is because he or she is getting larger and there is not a lot of space to play in.

I am tired. I would really like to sleep. Tonight is extra tiring as I did not nap. Sometimes I nap. But I was busy with paper work, and so I stayed up through the afternoon. Now I feel slightly hungry, so I might have to make something to eat. Pieter says that I have a whole different second life. He goes to bed and I stay up, I write to my friends, I talk to my mum on skype, I am on the phone to New Zealand, Dubai, Oman, Australia and Messenger friends in HK. I play on the internet, I read, I do things around the house. All the while he sleeps and has no idea. I baked shortbread once early in the pregnancy. He woke up with little biscuits sitting on a cooing rack. He laughed so hard. He found me asleep on the couch as well, as sometimes sleeping somewhere else helps. I had a week or two of great sleep in the bed. Maybe it's time to move to the studio downstairs and sleep on the fold out mattress because it suddenly feels comfortable. Sometimes a hard bed is better, sometimes the soft one is.

Pregnancy makes one's needs and wants skew to whatever it is, it's a little like food cravings except I call it "life style cravings." One day I decided i didn't like body gel anymore, I wanted soap. But I wanted something that was really foamy, but had no scent. I walked around silver lake for a few hours looking for soap. I was shopping, but I kept looking for the "right" soap, until i came across a tomato one. It worked well. I was happy and ever since then I have used soap. Don't ask. It makes no sense, but Pieter and I are so used to strange needs and wants that make no sense we don't even give it a second thought. Sometimes I want oranges, others mellon and chocolate milk, sometimes I am happy and sometimes I am sad. One day I feel like everything is under control, the next, I do not. In fact, let me take that back. Sometimes I feel all those things within hours of each other. I have learned this is normal. I have heard of stories of people yelling at their classmates, crying over hall mark commercials, a woman getting angry at her husband because he did not eat the beans and rice in the "right" order at dinner. Shouting at him in front of everyone in the family. Someone said to me last week that the worse thing for a marriage is getting pregnant and having a baby. Women go a bit nuts during this time, there is a lot of stress, and I am only in the seventh month, I don't even know how I will feel after the labour with the screaming child that only has needs...

I woke up this evening feeling itchy and dirty, like somehow everything feels wrong of my surface. I laid in bed trying to fight the feeling and was tossing and turning so much that I woke him. So I get up instead. It's better, he worked late tonight and has to be back at work really early tomorrow. I can go back to bed in the day even if I don't want to. I want to go to the pool and exercise. In order to have a natural birth they say you should exercise a lot. I try to but I still don't think it's enough. Because the baby takes up so much space, one's stomach and lungs are squished making it hard to eat a lot and breath deeply. Which means one is out of breath, and out of energy a lot quicker. It's a full moon tonight. I wonder if it's making it harder for me to sleep. I have no idea. I don't feel like I am being pulled by the suns and stars, I feel like I am being pulled in ways of dust, swishing at the whims of the wind. I am hungry, I think I shall find something to eat and try to go to bed. Maybe I will write more later. After all these months, I suddenly want to share my thoughts and feelings. For no reason. Just Because...

Just a grrl

How did all this time go? I am not sure. How come I haven't written for so long. Not even sure if I can write. My life is completely different now. My friends, my future. I have a cactus garden. I am renovating, we are building an extension. I spend a lot of time looking at furniture. I pick out paints. I realize I do not have a knack in house decorating even if I thought I would. I am terrible. I can never make any decisions unless I see something that is "perfect" otherwise I look and look and never see what I need. I live with a dichotomy in home furnishing, which is I have expensive tastes but I hate spending huge amounts of money. So I always hope I will find a bargain. I hope that I will find something that will match what I want with the price I want to pay. One thing about the US I have learnt in that over here you get what you pay for. And pay for is a lot more than in HK or Asia, and you still have to pay the damn 8 % sales tax. We are very very far away from the rest of the world. There is no popping over in Macau or Thailand or across the border where labour costs are low, and beautiful pieces of furniture gets made.

I know I like modern Asian furniture now. Not modern furniture which LA is full off. Not Asian furniture which you can also find in abundance. I like furniture that is designed now, not five hundred years ago, but has accents of home. I think it would be very hard to find in HK, as European furniture is what we had mostly, but it's really hard to find here as well. I think Americans can be so frumpy. The clothes are frumpy, the furniture is frumpy. Finding a crib for the baby has almost ripped my heart out with dread. I hated every crib I had seen, and the only one I genuinely liked was $800, which I found a bit much as you can get a pretty decent one for $200. I looked in so many places, and in the end there was one if Toys R Us's Baby section that I liked for $400. A good compromise I decided. There are a lot of baby stuff you can spend your money on. Most of it is vanity money, it's "can you live with the design" money. If you don't mind what it looks like, you can get things really cheap. I guess that's with everything, but I never had a baby before.

Baby is due September 16th 2008. From then on, I will be a mum for a few years. Maybe I will have another baby as well. I will have a family. I am going to stay home with the baby. I will breast feed, and make my own baby food. I will not have a nanny. I will raise the kids by myself. I will hopefully still be a full fledge human being, and still can do some things I did before. I hope I don't become a mumbot. Pieter asks me a lot whenever we have to fill in forms what my occupation is. I always reply "housewife," he always looks uncomfortable and says, "Are you sure?" and I say "Yes, that's what I am now."

I guess I can still say "Artist" or "Writer" or "Something Creative" but I don't. I don't because I don't have any projects running, no goals, no exhibitions, I just do some fun things when I have the energy, and put them around the house. I still read interesting articles about law and I spend a lot of time listening to NPR or BBC, and I ruminate on political ideas and thoughts. I still have opinions about the protests in Tibet, the protests in San Francisco, the state of the world, and things that is happening in HK, but I don't write about it. I don't actually have the energy. I try to eat well. I try to improve our standard of living by fixing little things in the house, and buying stuff or replacing stuff or cooking. I quit smoking cigarettes which was a relief, and hard to believe because there aren't many people who smoked as much as I did at my age. I stopped wearing high heels and buy my sweatpants at Ross (a discount store). I like Ross, they have good brands there if you have time to look. I only buy sweat pants there tho.

I took an art class in a junior college. A drawing class. I was not very good, but I got an A. My teacher liked the things I did because I had my own distinct style. I went often to a pottery studio and made some stuff I really liked. I have all these ideas of things I wanted to do for the house in the future. I went to law school seminars. I enjoyed talking to people who was interested in the same things I did. All that time we were thinking we might have a baby, but we didn't really know. I didn't make a conscious choice between career or baby. I just found I had a baby coming and was too tired for anything else. I found once a baby is on the way, your whole focus in life shifts and it blocks out other thoughts and feelings, wants and desires. You are so very very very tired. You want to sleep a lot. You cry a lot. Things that was once so simple becomes hard. Your body changes in a way that you did not expect. Sometimes you are so tired that you have to fall asleep in a parking lot of a supermarket so you have energy enough to drive home. I do not know how other women work though the pregnancy. I do not know how they can work, and do housework, and be themselves. Once you are pregnant, you slow, you forget, you are a different person. I hear over and over again, you actually never quite become the person you were before. You will never be as sharp, as together, as present as you were before the baby came along. I believe that.

When I was first pregnant, I wanted to write a "pregnancy diary" and see what the changes were going to be. But I didn't, I was too tired, each day was something strange. Throwing up, hands swelling, needing the bathroom, insomnia, tears, tantrums, strange feelings, worry, joy, excitement. A roller coaster of emotions far beyond anything before. It was impossible to write because one had no point. It was just a burst of feelings followed by being tired. Needing to eat, needing to sleep. For four months, I was barely able to get up and even go to class. Then slowly things started to settle down, but then one had so much to do. Birth classes, buying baby stuff, reading up on being a mum, housework, making sure one is eating properly, exercise. Prenatal yoga, prenatal aqua aerobics, walking, lying in bed and sleeping. Doctor's appointments and knowing what you need to do, tests, worry, sleep. I started to feel unhappy about not writing the diary, and Pieter said, "Well, really how many millions of words has been written about this topic, I mean, it would be hard to contribute something really different. Maybe this is not the time you write." I felt better and didn't write.

I spent a lot of time on facebook. I like looking at photos of my friends babies, I like seeing my single friends out and about looking beautiful. I like reconnecting with my friends from primary or secondary school, people who I knew at 8 or 9 or 16. We have all moved on with our lives and it's fun to see that somehow, somewhere, we all met up in about the same time. Lots of babies, renovation, moving countries, return to grad school, and lots of baby talk. It's fun. I wish they were all closer, but the truth is we're so busy we probably would not see much of each other anyway.

The baby is coming in six weeks, or at least is ready to be. I can feel the baby move every day now. It's "normal." I no longer feel excited or tell everyone that happens to be nearby about it. Sometimes I forget to let people know. There is still so much to do. I need to buy things, I need to sort things out. Since we're building an extra room, I need to get furniture. I want the house painted before the baby is here, as we're moving everything around anyway. So it's a good time. We have to find non toxic paint because of the baby, which is good. It's good for the environment, it's good for our peace of mind. It's also twice as much as normal paint. But we're glad we made that decision.

There is a lot of things to decide. Not just what crib or sling, but how you want to have your birth. Do you want a natural birth? Do you want to have a drip? Do you want an epidural? A C section? Do you want to take a 12 week birthing class or a one day intensive class? Infant CPR? Breastfeeding class? Do you want photos of you being pregnant taken? Lots of decisions at a time one is most indecisive.

Getting ready to be a mum is starting all over again. Everything you knew before this time is no longer relevant. Your job, your knowledge, your education, your friends, your relationships, your family. Mum will be grandma, partner husband becomes dad, dad becomes grandpa. Career becomes something you decide if you want to keep or can afford to lose. Your friends you used to have so much to talk about with, is bored by your constant blabbing about which baby crib. Some are jealous, some find it so alien and uninteresting, and you yourself find some of their worries small. Sorry, you slept with some guy you didn't know and now he doesn't want to be your boyfriend -deal with it, you're too old for that crap. Find someone good, so you can get married too and have babies because we're all in our mid-30s now. Maybe it seems trivial to worry if I am spending $100 or $700 for a baby stroller, but I live on a hill, it has unpaved roads, if I don't get a good one maybe I can't take walks with my child. My friend spent $800 on a stroller that can flip and move up and down stairs and escalators. She is moving to Tokyo. She will not have a car. I understand why she did that. Another had post-natal depression, one friend lost her baby at 30 weeks. Do I really care to deal with a tantrum of a single girl friend over something about some guy she is seeing, while she is drunk and stoned. My main concern was she is so selfish to drink and smoke pot when she is driving me and my baby around. I know she had no idea. She's never been pregnant. She didn't even know why I walked away from her when she lit a pipe. I was shocked and grossed out. No one near me does things like that anymore. But before I guess I would just smile and let her be.

Suddenly that beautiful shoe I once so converted doesn't even have to wait, it's out of the question. My shoe size is now one size bigger and I have no idea whether it will shrink back or stay the same. Anyway, there really really is more important things to spend one's money on. Especially when three of you will live off one salary for a while. Suddenly everything is different.

It's a very quiet night over here.

Pieter is working late. We're really happy he got a promotion. It made our life so much easier but it means he works longer hours. But this is not why it's so extra quiet. All the apartments and houses directly opposite me is empty. Two are empty because the neighbours all moved out. The other is because my neighbour is in the hospital. The reason both of them are there is because she is having a baby. She is being induced. Her baby needs to come out. It's so strange to know that in about 24 hours, there will be a new human being living opposite us. There will be three of them. One day she was pregnant just like me, and now her baby will be born and be alive in a whole different way. I am excited. I look out the window waiting for them to come home. It might be in about three to four days if she is having a C section. But when they do finally come home they are embarking on a journey that no matter how much one reads about, or talks about it won't make any sense until it happens to you.