Nest hunting

While Spongebub Fetuspants continues to live the life aquatic in my uterus, we have been on a frantic flat search to house the bundle when it arrives.

It's a bittersweet process, as we love the flat we live in at the moment, but it has very baby-unfriendly stairs to climb, and a rather polluted environment to chill in. Not to mention the flying bags of dried seafood to dodge each time delivery day comes around...

And so we have had to ask ourselves a few questions – do we compromise and submit our little'un to the unsavoury life of our current place? Do we submit ourselves to the market's sky-high rental prices and find another tiny flat in the middle of town? Or do we move out to the middle of nowhere with no friends to get the benefit of a garden? Just thinking about it is exhausting.

And exhausted I'll be, no doubt (I googled "typical day with a newborn baby" and almost threw myself out of the window), so perhaps being a million miles from any sort of cultural or cerebral stimulation would be relaxing. Then again, maybe it would be a mistake - I'd be too tired to move myself to see my old acquaintances, and ever keep abreast of what's going on around town. Not great for an editor – it would be best for me to actually know what was going on...

In any case, we are keeping our options open. We have seen village houses in a field, with wild dogs roaming and cicadas singing; we have seen Mordor-style towers with 2,000 flats piled up high; we have seen tiny rabbit cages with lacquered floors... None of it has grabbed me yet.

How am I supposed to know what I'll want when little chickpea arrives?

Canto life continues

First we discovered that the mythical "wagon" that you can fall off actually exists!


Then we discovered that Krusty's language skills have not improved at all since we arrived - when he gave the taxi our destination in Cantonese, our driver replied "I'm sorry, my English is not so good"!

The rat, the monkey... and the tiger!

Now that the unwritten laws of motherhood have allowed me to lift the shroud of secrecy, I am pleased to announce that Krusty and I are... expecting a tiny Tiger next year!

Of course I could have blogged about a multitude of other things in the meantime, avoiding all hints, but when something this big happens, it's hard to think of anything else to write about. And in fact for some reason, all I see in the streets now is pregnant woman after pregnant woman, if they are not already carting around their bubs. Where had these ladies been hiding until now?!

So far "being up the duff" (as Krusty poetically calls it) has not been a walk in the park, and I have felt none of the glow and "ooohhh your hair is amazing" and more of the heavy eyelids, bloated belly and "ooohhh how come you still have acne at your age?" But they say it is going to get better, and as I have hit the three-month mark, I should start feeling human again soon. I hope.

Hopefully I'll be able to eat normally again, too. At the moment, every morsel of meat that comes near my mouth makes me feels retched - I think the baby is a vegetarian. Which makes sense I guess, when you consider it was conceived in Amsterdam...

But at least I am over my water revulsion - in the beginning, even my favourite brand, Evian, tasted of dust. I could smell damp and humidity and dirty water everywhere, and my mouth was always full of saliva.

I also can't STAND noise anymore, probably because I am so tired. I often give the wrong amount of money to taxi drivers, forget entire conversations and have to ask people to repeat sentences several times... I even had a daydream about standing up and leaving the office forever because of the music in the lobby... Not to mention the weird coincidence that every time I type in a website on my browser I accidentally type .vom instead of .com...

But then we go to the doctor's office, and we get a scan, and all of the bad stuff goes away. The last time we went, we even saw the little tiger's arms and legs moving really fast - it was magical. Krusty is worried that our bambino has inherited his dancing skills (brilliantly described in babymomma's babypapa's excellent wedding speech as "a carefully contrived fusion of African tribal dancing and Robotics. Or just a rare, hitherto undiscovered form of epilepsy") and that its hair will start receding as soon as the umbilical cord is cut, but I know it will be just perfect whatever happens. Thankfully we'll have our parental goggles to shield us from any of its shortcomings.

I am posting below a picture from our last scan. Bambino measured 3cm back then, but by now it has already grown to 6cm! We're going back for another in 8 days, so we'll be able to track its growth very soon. Very exciting.

Anyway, now the secret's out, perhaps I'll be able to think (and talk) about something else. Time to get my life back! What am I talking about, my life as I knew it disappeared forever three months ago... So why do I feel so happy?!

The tiny tiger:

Dishwashing marathon

This weekend, Krusty broke all of his records by agreeing to do the washing up, and taking a record total time to do it of... 48 hours! Incredible.

He spent most of the time explaining to me how his method meant that everything was actually clean, while my method (which only takes a few minutes) only cleaned the surface. Meanwhile what seemed like the entire contents of our kitchen lay spread out on every surface in the process of being cleaned - there were many different stages to this undertaking.

Quite a feat.

Now that the cleaning marathon is over, only one question remains: genuine washing up inefficiency from Krusty, or genius method of never ever being asked to do the washing up ever agin?

In front of our house today

Just the usual roadworks (that have been there for a year) and some lovely dried fish, strategically placed to soak up all the goodness of the bus and taxi fumes as well as a coat of dust from the jackhammer action next to it. Bliss...

Moan moan moan

I was going to sit and write about our honeymoon today, but I am just too angry to - last night Typhoon Koppu destroyed most of our roof furniture, filled our living room with water and now, this morning, I am the only one sitting in the office.

When Typhoon Signal 8 is hoisted, people are allowed to leave the office or not come in. But as I read this morning that the signal should be lowered to 3 by 10am, I imagined that everyone would be in anyway, keen to get on with the day and not stay at home for the sake of an hour. So I rushed in so as not to be the only one who sat at home while others toiled and of course, I lose. I'm more than a little miffed. I could have had an hour's extra sleep.

Not to mention the fact that Krusty left on a 10-day business trip last night, so I was left alone to affront the storm, and now I am alone to clean up the debris.

Harumph.

Actually, this is not dissimilar to a few moments of the honeymoon, in terms of ranting. In fact Krusty started calling it the honeyMOAN at one point...

Crude awakening

We're back from the land of rolling hills and people who talk with their hands, and oh how different this morning's stalls of dried shrimp, oysters and sea cucumber were to the bounty of tomatoes, aubergines and courgettes we left behind...

The last meal we had in Italy was on the terrasse of a pizzeria overlooking the Colosseum. It has been there since 1956. Back in Hong Kong, a new restaurant called Modern Toilet has just opened, with seats shaped like, that's right, toilets and drinks served in cups designed as mini-urinals.

Now where would you rather be:

Here?


Or here?