Holi color-wala, Batman!

Being that people here are celebrating Holi, I couldn't resist the title... for those of you who aren't familiar with the old TV show Batman, his sidekick, Robin, would always exclaim things like this.

Imagine you live in a place with no snow to have snowball fights, no paintball, and no water park. Well, they have combined here what we love about all those three things: they chuck watery powdered paints at each other in this spring festival.  It leaves the city -in some places- very colorful.

Matt and a friend went out the night before Holi thinking that they would explore part of the city and not get ambushed by color walas, but they were wrong! While videoing an early parade of people be-decked in splashed colors, one man in the parade took note of them and came over to smear paint on both of their foreheads. As he was doing this, several other men followed and began chucking paint on Matt and his friend.

All in all, I enjoyed this vicariously through Matt because Emma and I stayed home that day and the next to avoid the paint party. When she gets bigger, she will LOVE this... they even have slip-n-slides of colored water and encourage the kids to get as painted up as possible. How fun!

Palm Sunday

After a nearly two month hiatus, we returned to church today for Palm Sunday.  The church across the road is pastored by a friend of ours.  I want to clarify something -- we haven't been avoiding church, but people LOVE babies here and that includes touching and handling them.  We wanted to make sure that Emma was old enough and healthy enough to handle ...um... being handled.

It was a great service.  She kicked and grinned through the musical part, ate through half the sermon, and slept through the remainder of the service.  She woke after the crowds left in time to smile at our pastor friend and coo for some other friends.

She didn't like walking back home in the baby carrier.  The temperature is rising here and was in the upper 90s on our way home.  The high this week says it will be 106F.  We haven't turned on our air conditioners in the remainder of the house, yet, but this might be the week we start running it at midday.

Here are a couple of pictures from today:

GETTING LOVED ON BY FRIENDS

RELAXING AFTER CHURCH

Goldilocks and the Three Bears

We all know the story.  A girl enters a house, nitpicks around until she finds the things she can live with in it, and discards the rest, leaving the house in shambles.  There are other details, but that is the skeleton... oh, and not to forget the bears who survey the aftermath and get upset.

Someone enters your home and their words tear apart what, for you, was lovely and fit your family perfectly.   I think hurt feelings and defensiveness come to all new mamas, wherever they live, when we are confronted with unsolicited advice, criticism, and worst of all doubts about our abilities to correctly raise and nurture our child.

This is where we found ourselves during a visit we had from a family this week.  Goldilocks in this case was the wife of my husband's friend - a very direct young woman with two children. The details of those words are not important, but the lesson our Father gave to me afterward (and a bit of humor) were the blessing.

I need to forgive as I have been forgiven much and have been freely offered grace.  This is the same grace He is extending to this family, to the woman who hurt my feelings that night.  My Father wants for this woman to come to know Him and to bring beauty to the ashes of her life, joy where there is hurting, and freedom where there is guilt and shame.

I did not react to her the way the mama bear in the story of Goldilocks reacted to her destruction of the home she had so lovingly set up.  I was upset and vented to my husband afterward, prayed, and told a couple of friends afterward, though.

In retrospect, this young woman saw some things that she did not have a cultural framework for and had to in good conscience react to them because she was taught to do things differently.  We always would choose to do what our doctor or mama had taught us to do, right?  When that is challenged in practice by another, we react.  Plain and simple -- though not easy when you're called out for being the one who deterred from normative mothering.  Thankfully, though, the Father showed me that it was partially catty and partially because this woman struggles with bitterness.

On the up side, our daughters had a lovely time together which melted both of our hearts...

 ...and their exit was particularly comical from a safety standpoint.

Emma's Grand Entrance

Emma arrived a week before our due date.  I had heard that first time moms' babies come late, and so we had started walking a lot that week to try and provoke Emma to come on time.  

On February 1, 2013, contractions started at 1:30am and were regular.  I knew to wait, though, because I'd had these pains before in December and nothing came of them.  My water broke at 3:30am, though.  I informed Matt, "my water broke. We get to meet her today!" 

Since we were one week early, our bag was not fully packed and turned into two bags.  At 6:30am, a cab arrived and its bewildered driver was informed by my husband that "my wife is in labor, drive slow and avoid potholes."  Bug-eyed, he opened the door for me and chauffeured us to Cloud Nine (the hospital where we delivered - no joke!)

DURING EARLY LABOR AT CLOUD NINE

We had a 29 hour natural childbirth, with two medication assists: a Tylenol supository at 1am on 2/2/2013, and laughing gas for a while after 5am to help me relax and get from 8cm to 9cm so I could start pushing.  Other than these and the local anesthetic prior to my episiotomy, I was medication-free.  

EMMA'S GRAND ENTRANCE - JUST AS SHE WAS HANDED TO US

I had five significant attendants: my mother-in-law who arrived on the scene during transition and was a strength alongside and a medical sounding board for me, a precious lady friend who was pretty much a doula for us from 11am to 11pm, a nurse who checked Emma's heart rate every hour on the hour so I wouldn't have to be hooked up to machines or IV fluids, a nurse who pressed on my fundus at the peak of contractions as I was pushing, and my amazing five-star doctor

THE DAY AFTER EMMA WAS BORN 

Emma arrived completely complication-free.  I had no idea that birth could be that drama-less... though transition is pretty dramatic, pushing was not.  The assist I got from the nurse pushing on my fundus and the doctor's expert guiding of Emma's head and shoulders (knees and toes) got Emma from crowning to fully born in only one push.  From the start of pushing to her arrival into the world, 10-15 minutes transpired!  Praise the Lord!

OUR DOCTOR 

EMMA KATE

FEBRUARY 2, 2013

7LBS 3OZ, 20" 

MOM-IN-LAW, HUSBAND, AND I WITH EMMA

it's beginning to look a lot like Christmas

 

We bought our first ever Christmas tree this past weekend and put it up on Sunday.  How fun!  We had never bought one before because we knew we wouldn't be in Louisville for long.  Now that we have a homestead of sorts, we can feel free to make this apartment a home.  (hopefully this desire to make a house a home will find pictures on our walls soon...)

We keep reminding ourselves that this is the new normal.  We will be home for Christmas in our dreams and on Skype, but we also know that we are home for Christmas in our new home.  Home is a strange word - for me it means "where my family lives".  However, with our baby coming in only 10 weeks, I am keenly aware of the fact that our family is also here.  If "home is where the heart is", then our hearts dwell in many places because our family is all over the USA and in two distinct Asian vicinities.

I comfort myself in the thought that there will be times when my family will be gathered together and I look forward to taking pictures of those times and treasuring those moments.  I'm looking forward to visa runs with Matt's parents and visits from Amy.  I'm also looking forward to future Taylor/Ivey family excursions to places we can introduce our child(ren) to in Kentuckiana that I loved as a child.  

Time will be treasured when time comes for us to gather together with family.  For now, we will savor our talks on the Internet phone and on video chat screens... and enjoy the proximity that we have available to us that previous generations did not have accessible to them.  

Newborn from the previous Baby Shower

I got to visit my friend whose 7-month baby party I had gone to in either July or August.  She and her husband were there with their newborn.  He has such a creative name: ReezVahz (is how it is pronounced).  What a cutie he is!

The aunties of the home have decided that I'm carrying a son because my belly is protruding forward like a ball or cone and girl-babies are carried from side to side and swell your whole body and abdomen.  Funny - my first old wives tale told by two old wives themselves!  They were conversing between themselves and pointing at me as they chattered.  Then asked me if I wanted a boy or a girl and I told them, "as God wills".  They smiled and said, "not a girl. Stomach is holding only son."  Haha!  They have 50% odds that they are right.

Cultural notes:

• Baby was not wearing a diaper or pants, but only had on a long-sleeved t-shirt, tied bonnet, and he had a man's handkerchief underneath his bottom
• Even though it is 80F most days (or hotter) here, they keep the baby in a bunting bag of sorts that is really warm - even in the hottest part of the day, and have only a ceiling fan with no A/C
• This is the first new baby I've seen without eyeliner on his/her face to ward off the evil eye (usually parents will draw a large 'mole' on the baby's temple or center of the forehead)
• My friend said that she had a "normal delivery by cesarean" - later her husband clarified that two hours after their arrival, the doctor said they must surgically remove the baby since the baby was 3 kilos (6.6lbs) and delivering the baby vaginally would be too risky.  
• It is okay to feed the baby in front of guests, as long as you have a modest way of covering-up

Birthday!

This year, we decided to celebrate at the Hard Rock Cafe in our city (unbelievable that we have one, I know)!  We got the most AMAZING burgers, Caesar salad, and fries I've had in a LONG time.  There was great music for about the first 20 minutes, though, ironically it was rock music played on low volume.  This is strange because most restaurants that play music blast it here, and because rock music is meant for blasting!  Even more funny, the music was entirely shut off after 20 minutes and a cricket game replaced it.  Cricket looks like the most boring game (aside from tennis and golf) that ever existed... just sayin'.  Sadly, it is virtually the only sport played here, and everybody else here are big fans of it.  Matt and I have no clue how it is played, the rules, and what a "dot" is, either.

Later on, our friends made cookies and put a candle in one so that they could sing to me.  Fun times!