Bloggogriff

I: Slow Start “One thing I learned from the first time around,” I told Eric as we headed out of Carnoustie towards Dundee, “this time I’m not going to try to be a hero. I’m going to ask for the epidural when I get to the Substantial Discomfort phase instead of waiting until I get to the Agony phase.” It was around seven p.m., dark and rainy, on March 13. After waiting around at home all afternoon, we had the go-ahead from the hospital to come in for my induction. I wasn’t overdue – in fact, I was at 39 weeks – but a diagnosis of gestational diabetes four weeks earlier had altered the birth plans. So once again we had escaped the speeding-through-town-with-woman-in-labor movie trope. We dropped Owen off with our friends Jason and Melpi in Tayport, got dinner near the university, and arrived at Ninewells around nine. The induction process would begin slowly. The midwife in the antenatal ward inserted a pessary behind my cervix that would release prostaglandins for 24 hours. This ...

Please welcome Evelyn Aurora, born at 6:34 pm on March 14, 19 1/2", 8 lbs 3 oz. She made her entrance to the world in an astonishing 39 minutes. Now one week old, she is doing beautifully!

If I don't get this done now, I never will. So, here goes the rest of the trip in a much more abridged form: The Extremely Abbreviated Adventures of the Griffis Family in China (Days 6-10) Day 6: We visit Tiananmen Square and the Forbidden City. Both are extraordinarily vast and impressive and hard to describe or get good pictures of because of their vast impressiveness. The former is magnificently austere, the latter magnificently ornate. We also get to see “new” Beijing in the form of a vast urban mall for lunch (San Francisco readers, imagine the Westfield, with all Chinese food and only a slightly more skewed ratio of Chinese to Anglo diners.) That night Guangsho takes us out for Peking duck, yum yum. Day 7: Eric spends the morning talking to people at Peking University. Owen and I spend the morning wandering the university grounds with our guide for the day, whose English is, alas, extremely limited, to the point that conversation is pretty much nonexistent. We meet a Ca...

Day 5, Saturday. One of my American-style indulgences last night was a vanilla Coke. In retrospect, this was a Bad Idea. Eric and Owen both slept all night for the first time since our arrival, as I can testify because, well, I didn’t. I had thought that Owen might get less attention in Beijing, but so far that seems not to be the case. Yesterday a young woman checking in at the same time as us asked for a picture with him, and this morning at breakfast the waitresses are cooing over him like mad. He is not at all ready to deal with the attention so early in the day, and sits very stiffly with his eyes averted until they leave him alone. Eric’s brother Kevin had warned us that on his trip to China, the “Western breakfast” at his hotel seemed to have been created by people who knew of some American foods but had no clue which ones were eaten at breakfast, so we are pleasantly surprised by the non-random nature of the hotel buffet, which has both Chinese and Western options. Owen is ...

Day 4, Friday. I wake in the night with a fever and sleepily try to calculate how much of Owen’s kiddie Tylenol will make an adult dose. Several teaspoons of grape-flavored syrup later, I stop shivering and fall asleep. Luckily, I feel fine in the morning, though a little annoyed when Eric tells me he had regular acetaminophen in his bag the whole time. Jun takes us to the Tianjin Museum, whose major exhibit concerns the history of the city. Tianjin was a center of colonial power in the early twentieth century, which made its political and economic history quite remarkable. I wish I could give more details, but since I mainly spent the visit trying to keep Owen under some kind of minimal control as he careened around the halls, I didn’t get to read much of the signage. What I did see was amusingly heavy-handed in tone (though unusually correct in its English): “The courageous people of Tianjin fought a mighty and tragic battle to resist the imperialist aggressors,” and so on. Or lat...

Day 3, Thursday. Our sleep, particularly Owen’s, is about what you might expect with an eight-hour time difference. I awake in the morning with an upset stomach of weirdly ill-defined symptoms: am I feeling nausea? Indigestion? Sore abdominal muscles from stair-climbing? Maybe a little of each. So Eric goes to breakfast alone and I nibble gingerly at Nutri-Grain bars in the room. Eric leaves for the lab, and Jun’s wife Minh arrives to keep me and Owen entertained for the morning. In the interest of time, Eric has suggested using the hotel’s valet laundry service to finish up the washing (or more importantly, the drying). Given the earlier towel episode, I ask Minh to handle the call to housekeeping for me. What unfolds next reminds me of the scene in Douglas Adams’ The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy where Arthur Dent jams up the spaceship’s entire computer system with his request for tea. After an oddly long phone conversation, Minh reports: the laundry service, though listed in...

Hope everyone had a lovely day. We did.