Oh, the waiting!

On a ship floating towards Cozumel, friends of my mother-in-law's are wondering whether the twins have been born.  A message from Sydney came through the other day asking if the babies had arrived.   On Skype, another friend in France left me a message to say that I should change my profile picture to one of them when they make their appearance.  And in Capitola, California, I waddle from my bed to my chair to the supermarket and out into the garden, wondering when the contractions will begin. But still there is no action!

Every woman gets to this stage in their pregnancy...the last few days and weeks when the anticipation has already peaked and transmogrified into a baser feeling...when will this happen already?  But whereas most singleton pregnancies are expected to go to 39 or 40 weeks, some 60% of twins are born by 36 weeks, and the "average" twin pregnancy lasts 35 weeks.  I guess the positive spin as I hove towards 38 weeks of gestation (this Saturday) is that I have never liked being just average.   But I am also asking myself just how large these two bundles of joy are going to be! 

At the last count, (on July 28th), the ultrasound technician estimated that they weighed 6lb 3oz and 6lb 4oz each.  And they are supposed to gain an ounce a day, which means that they would now be a stonking 7lb 7oz and 7lb 8oz today.  This is great from a health perspective, meaning that they are far less likely to need to spend time in the neonatal intensive care unit.  But it sure will be some work getting two regular weight babies out for me.

So the question arises, should I consider letting the doctor intervene in some way?  She has suggested an amniotomy (breaking the waters), which should get labor going.  But it was just her bad luck that a few days before this option was mentioned, I had read an article about the new March of Dimes campaign Healthy Babies are Worth the Wait, which makes me feel leary about sticking an oar in (or, rather more literally, an implement that resembles a crochet hook).  Plus I remember that the person who taught our childbirth classes muttered darkly about one intervention leading to another....In other words it's a short journey from an amniotomy to Pitocin to a Caesarean...On the other hand, if they get too big, it is likely that they would be delivered by Caesarean anyway! 

It's a fairly humbling lesson that, as evolved as we are, we really still don't understand what gets labor going.  Of course, there are a bundle of old wives' tales about how to help it along, including spicy foods, long walks and amorous relations as methods to start things up.  But while they might work for some, I can report that none of these has yet pushed the button for us. 

And so we wait.  In time, of course, I shall look back on this period of calm and laugh...maybe even wishing to get it back.  But in the interim, it is about time for my mid-morning snack of cherries.  I'll let you know if they happen to do the trick.

Tiger Mother?

I just finished reading Amy Chua's Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother.  It caused a furor in the States, mainly due to a Wall Street Journal headline which read Why Chinese Mothers are Superior.  The article generated over 8000 comments.  But when my Mum recommended I read it also, I realized that I was missing out on a worldwide phenomenon!  And it made me start to wonder what sort of parents Eric and I will be.

The basic premise of the book is that Western parents tend to coddle their kids, go fairly easy on them, and value creating self esteem over measurable achievements.  By contrast, Chinese parents (a term which Chua defines loosely to include all sorts of high-achieving ethnicities - often immigrants) expect nothing less than A grades, in addition to excellence in other areas, such as music, and will go to fairly drastic lengths to help their kids achieve their expectations.  A tad stereotypical, sure.  But there's more than just a grain of truth in it, too.  And Chua acknowledges that so-called Chinese parenting is not foolproof, when she relates her own comeuppance at the hands of her 13 year old daughter.

I think there may be a little of the Tiger Mother in me.  Not for nothing was I called Tolerance Torres at university (with typical British irony, my so-called tolerance was just the reverse).  And I was accepted at my first job despite being told that in one of the character tests, I had "steamrollered" over the other candidates' objections. (They also told me that my logic was good, and my ideas were strong, but that perhaps I should consider an alternative management style to get my way).

As for Eric, his primary concern is to see how young he can get the twinlets whitewater rafting.  So far, for any serious sort of river, the answer seems to be 4.  I hope his patience can hold out until then, but at least he can amuse himself in the meantime by teaching them self-sufficiency, particularly with regards to how to swim!

Of course, much will depend on the personalities of the twins themselves.  For that, barring any current empirical evidence, beyond a convincing ability to kick hard, I turned to the Chinese zodiac, which tells me that they will be born under the sign of the Rabbit.  I was delighted to learn that Rabbits are "classy, sophisticated, expressive, well-mannered and stylish, [and] enjoy leaning about cultural issues and learning about people from other countries".  Now those sound like pretty neat kids.
 
It's odd that while there are classes for most things in life (like training dogs) few parents ever take any kind of educational stab at learning what they should be doing.  Like most parents, we will probably make it up as we go along, and hope for the best.


I see only one fly in the ointment with this plan.  The zodiac helpfully talks about compatibility between signs (presumably for future romantic interests).  The problem is that Rabbits apparently don't get on with Roosters or Rats.  And, Dear Reader... I'm a Rat.

Babymoon

In January this year, I was seduced by a New York Times Travel section headline: 10 Restaurants Worth a Plane Ride.  With Singapore, Sydney and Uruguay on the list, I was not hopeful that I'd be visiting any of them soon.  But the last one on the list, the Willows Inn on Lummi Island in Washington seemed feasible...

Not a month later, while browsing through the out-of-date selection of magazines as I had a pedicure, I came upon a Sunset magazine article which mentioned Lummi.  And when the restaurant came up again in something else I was reading, I was hooked.  This was where we'd go our our Babymoon.

A babymoon, in case you are not familiar with the term, is an opportunity for expectant parents to take a mini-vacation before the pandemonium of child-rearing begins. Eric was up for the vacation, but was deeply dubious about flying 700 miles to the rainy northwest to a restaurant that we might (or might not) like.

But after persistent lobbying, and the addition of Vancouver to the itinerary, the trip was booked, and last week, we headed out, on an unusually rainy weekend for California in June to see what all the fuss was about.

From the get-go, the gods smiled on us.  We touched down to a Seattle basking in sunshine (and we know that's not normal from the thrilled car rental attendant who gushed "isn't this weather great") as we left the parking lot after knocking off $170 of unnecessary charges that Thrifty had tacked on to our rock-bottom Priceline rental.  When we drove up to the line for the once an hour car ferry to Lummi, we waited only 10 minutes before being loaded on for the 6 minute trip to the island.  And then we checked into our room for the night, which had a spectacular view of the Sound, with waves lapping gently on to the beach - Hollywood style - immediately beneath our wide open windows.

It didn't hurt that our neighbors for the evening, three ladies who had escaped their daily lives for a taste of luxury, included a food writer for Seattle magazine, who promptly gave us additional foodie recommendations for the next leg of our stay in Vancouver.

But the real treat was the restaurant experience itself.  Perhaps because I had checked the "anniversary" button when I made my online reservation (babymoon, oddly, wasn't an option), Eric and I were the first to be ushered into the restaurant, and we were seated in the prime window with a perfect view of the about-to-set sun. 

We knew that for our $85 per head, we would enjoy 5 courses of dinner.  But before we even started on those, we were treated to a series of amuse bouches - six in all - which bested anything for creativity and innovation that I have ever eaten, anywhere, in my life.

[Spoiler alert! Do not read this section if you are going to go to the Willows Inn!] 

A chef (who we later realized was the rising star Blaine Wetzel himself) arrived with a small wooden box, and let us know that it contained smoked salmon.  We smiled politely and ignored him, as we were still figuring out drinks and the view.  Then we opened it, and  - ta da - it contained smoked salmon that was still smoking on tiny embers of cedar and other aromatic woods!  O.K, so I can just see the expressions on the faces of some of my foodie friends - that's not that impressive, right?  But follow it up with a basket of leaves and "dirt" (not real dirt, roasted barley that looked like the earth hadn't been shaken off the locally foraged herbs and leaves), or the brown butter toast with edible flowers, and the kale with truffles...and you can begin to see how the experience was  both cumulative and genuinely original.  In fact, when we finally got to the first course mentioned on the menu, it would have been an anticlimax (no surprises now) - except that it, too, was delicious.

We sat happily marveling at the privilege of it all, and contemplating our future (more likely to be filled with trips to Applebee's than fancy restaurants) and felt ever so slightly smug to be "in" on a place that has become a destination restaurant despite its somewhat remote location.  So strong is its pull that the Times has anointed it again in today's piece on Seattle - even though it is about 2 hours away.

I could bore you with the walks along the beach, and the bike ride round the island - or the pretty cool meals we enjoyed in Vancouver, but I'm not sure that y'all have the appetite for that.  So I'll conclude with a picture from Lynn Canyon park, about 20 minutes outside of Canada's overpriced western hub.  Most people who travel to Vancouver visit Capilano suspension bridge, which costs an outrageous $35 per person to enjoy.  We skipped that in favor of the free, ignored-by-tourists Lynn Canyon suspension bridge.  This picture is a favorite from the trip, because of the easy analogy with our lives right now.  We're caught up in the waiting - suspended between the end of our free-wheeling, white water rafting, fancy restaurant present, and the unknowable future adventure of parenting.