Kampuchea Crossings

Bump to baby on the beaten expat track

Tales from the bump

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Google is not your friend if you’re pregnant and your hair dryer fries in your hand, briefly electrocuting you. Not to worry, he’s fine (says the doc, and yep he’s looking like a boy) – I can feel those momentous first movements. It’s like tiny little gas bubble rumblings :-\ He’s not packing much of a punch yet.

We spent a week in Jom Tien, Thailand, to check out a hospital and the ob-gyn there. Loved the doc. Loved the seafood – here we’re at a fisherman’s village gorging ourselves on the fresh catch.

About four weeks ago I started looking sufficiently femme fertile where people feel my tummy is public property and they can just reach out and touch the bump. Go away. This trimester’s more interesting than the first. The little rambutan’s stretching my tummy skin like a drum, he’s growing so fast! I’m starting to waddle, I need help turning over in bed, and did you ever notice those tailbone muscles? I didn’t til they hurt all day.

Sometimes we just sit back and marvel at this little tenant taking first dibs on my blood and nutrient supply. And I just have to poke at it a little bit hehe. Keith has been very supportive and indulgent, and my go-to griping board :-)

19 weeks
20 weeks

We spent a week in Bangkok too to check out another hospital. Samitivej Hospital is rated a baby-friendly hospital by WHO and UNICEF, meaning significant breastfeeding support with limited or no bottles allowed in the nursery. The hospital doesn’t accept for distribution to new mothers any free or low-cost formula.

Do you know there’s around a 70% caesarian rate at these hospitals out here?! Parents ask for it. They want an auspicious date and time for the birth. Seems like you’d screw up your kid’s astrological alignment doing that. Anyway I LOVED the birthing suites at this one hospital which is where many foreigners who work in SE Asia beeline for to have their baby. They have dim lighting, music, birthing pools, ladders, ropes and swings, aromatherapy oils, diffusers and candles, etc. Maybe I just haven’t visited a real hospital in a long time. Sure is the first time I have an intimate engagement with a health care system from the patient side. The docs at this hospital have a 3% caesarian rate [two thumbs up!].

20 weeks
20 weeks
21 weeks
22 weeks

So we’re planning for the delivery now. Going the natural birth route was a great idea before I got pregnant. It gets lousy the more you think about how big the sperm donor is, haha, although that supposedly isn’t a contributing factor (by size he’s already 1 1/2 weeks larger than the average). Diet? Low birthweight is the way to go? Induce early? Sigh. My own concerns, like the sneeze-and-pee side effect of a shattered pelvic floor, are suddenly so much less important now. I guess the joy of parenting is about beating these silly narcissisms out of you.

We’re also starting to look at baby things. Poor little guy have the most minimalist parents (maybe we’ve been working out here too long). I don’t understand why it needs a crib, a baby bathtub, baby shampoo, bibs, pacifiers etc…?

But I do notice the recent meltdowns savvied up this niche’s purchasing experience. It’s feel-good shopping on a gratuitous new scale.

An ergonomically awesome baby carrier created by a good ol’ mom-n-pop American shop? Gotta have it. Designer breast pumps and glass bottles, fashioned by professional moms using the latest evidence-based clinical specs, materials and sense? Click – BUY! And check out these adorable little haute couture ensembles for all his potty needs! I can just see the trendy little multi-cultured, fair-labor-, eco-geared, breastmilk-fed bambino being slung about the paddies in organic fitted sherpa (dip-dyed deep sultan!) and matching hand-knit sustainably harvested hemp/bamboo terry blend cover.

The more the buzzwords defy definition the better for you, your baby, the exploited 90% of the world, and the beleaguered planet.

(That narcissistic nimrod will go down fighting.)

So things are progressing quite well for us, thanks for all the emails! Hope everyone’s well! We miss you all!

“natural” birth animation

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So these are the things I spend time on these days. Interesting animation of how the little tykie comes out. I find it interesting that the best options around here (Thailand) for a “natural” birth are so medically-oriented. Facilities have around a 70% caesarian rate. And I thought things were bad in the profit-oriented hospitals in the US!
(edited title from “vaginal” to “natural” birth since several people seemed to dislike that!)

Anti-natal update

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Well, Keith already has a good list of names picked out, for a boy naturally. But for me the pregnancy has so far been very draining. I just want to curl up and be unconscious until after the delivery, but I can’t so instead I whine at Keith. One of the public health dilemmas here involve getting antenatal services to rural women who are hard at work planting and harvesting their crops right to the day they deliver. Not that it’s their choice to continue hard field duties under the harsh sun and intense heat – but it just makes me feel like such an unfit woman crying about 24/7 achiness.

At least I quit full time work, and the consultancy with WHO keeps me in the air-conditioned central offices and not traipsing about the boonies looking for latrines every five minutes cuz there’s less room for the bladder. Unfortunately that superpower pregnant women get – sense of smell on steroids – is not an asset in Phnom Penh. I don’t know if this happens to other women, but sneezes have become really violent – I still forget that I have to double over and hold my stomach or I’m on the floor afterward with intense cramps, bug-eyed that I’d just ripped out the tendons holding the uterus in place. Foods I once loved are now really disgusting – garlic and ginger make me gag. Since nothing tastes good the solution is to just keep eating. And staying fit is such easy advice.. for such a lean mean cardiovascular machine women become when we get pregnant, my energy level has sunk to limiting my movements to a 3block radius of my flat or hotel room. Less if I can get Keith to run errands for me. Hehehe.

Really, I have no idea why anyone would go through this more than once or twice.

So it’s quite fun to do the scan – it makes the baby very real and the aches and pains more tolerable. Somewhat. We had to fly to Bangkok last week to get some diagnostics done cuz they can’t do it in Phnom Penh. Here are some pics, which the doc had us watch on a large screen TV.

One of the markers of chromosomal abnormalities is the absence of cartilage on the nose (nasal bone). So luckily it looks like the nose takes after Keith’s cuz if s/he took after mine that cartilage probably wouldn’t be there yet. S/he looks like s/he’s smiling huh :-)

The nuchal translucency (NT) they measure is that white line along the vertebrae, present only from 10-13weeks. The thicker it is the more likely to have some disorder. The doc took several measurements, with the average about 1mm thick (it’s a bad sign if 3mm+).

The baby was about 2.7inches crown-to-rump :-) And s/he was really active! S/he was flexing arms and kicking legs, stretching neck, twisting around – like s/he just had a caffeine kick or something! The Thai ob/gyn was also really tickled, even though it took him longer to get some good measurements cuz the baby won’t sit still.

We asked the doc what the gender was and he made a wild stab. So anyway, here’s the little guy. Thought we’d share.. :-)

scene in Kampong Cham

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Here are scenes from a recent trip to visit a colleague in Kampong Cham, Cambodia. For more photos see Keith Kelly’s flickr.

For some reason, the cloud formations around here are really cool, especially during the rainy season. They get big and puffy like the clouds you liked to think were bunnies or pandas or other cuddly creatures in the sky when you were a kid – cumulus and cumulonimbus clouds is what I think we used to call it in 2nd grade. It makes for dramatic sunsets. Except the rainy season has refused to come to SE Asia so far this year, and any gorgeous sunset is completely lost on our poor melting gray cells.

Looking for a great meal? This coconut oil fried fish from the Two Dragons Restaurant near the town center is THE BEST DISH EVER!! I tell you I think there’s crack in this dish, it’s SOOO GOOD and that is all the descriptive narrative I can sputter about this.

And you’ve already seen how people travel around here. I don’t like to sit in the middle or the back of the bus cuz I get motion sickness, but sitting in the front and watching these trucks piled high with people swerving in and out of the traffic makes me nervous. Yeyy for iPods. It’s also a good thing that all manner of pirated angry music is available in Cambodia. It’s a good soundtrack for riding the Cambodian highways, to shove aside all empathy for these poor riders in favor of aggressive mental video gaming and point systems.

Bamboo bridges and river rafts

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Would you believe this bamboo bridge in Kampong Cham has to be reconstructed from scratch at the end of each rainy season? The land shifts with the Mekong River flows, and the bamboo washes away with its floods. The folks living on the island get separated from the mainland and use boats for transport. More photos on Keith Kelly’s flickr.

And THIS is how they’d transport SUVs and other similarly heavy equipment across the river, by tying two boats together and nailing a wooden plank on top. I used to cringe every time I traveled this way across raging rivers over a kilometer wide, but now I know these things are indestructible. You just gotta believe.