Baby and Bariloche!

Well, the big news first -- Mike and I are expecting a baby in February!  I'm about 15 weeks along now, feeling great now that the first trimester is done.  I highly recommend spending your first trimester working in Mexico where no one knows that you don't usually go to bed at 8:30 every night, and where you can stay in a hotel and don't have to cook anything or deal with kitchen smells making you nauseous. And though I was glad Mike didn't have to suffer my continual moaning and complaining (amazing how you don't complain when there's no one to complain to!), I sure did miss him.  Due to a bureaucratic technicality, he couldn't come visit me in Mexico after all, so he went straight to the US to hang out with my family a couple days before I got there.  We loved spending time with them, and loved celebrating the big news with lots of hugs and smiles.

Although I'll likely give birth in the US near my family, in the meantime we are having the unique experience of going to all our pre-natal medical appointments in another country.  We are really lucky to have a great embassy doctor who meets with us before and after our local obstetrician appointments to make sure we aren't completely lost.  Although we could technically speak English to the doctors at our local appointments, the staff speaks Spanish and the doctors tend to slip into Spanish too.  The real miscommunications happen I think because of a cultural gap -- they're not really sure what to say to us because we're foreigners and we're not really sure what to ask (since it's our first time).

For example, at our first ultrasound appointment, the doctors were so focused on one particular measurement (which is actually the purpose of that whole appointment, come to find out later), that we had to shout out things like "Um, is there a heartbeat!?"  "Of course there is!"  Then they'd say something like "Good grief, I wish the baby would put those hands down."  "Oh, he has hands!?"

At the end I asked if the baby had legs, and the answer was affirmative.  So far so good :)  All my test results have come back normal so far.

Right around 6-7 weeks, we took a trip to a beautiful part of Argentina called Bariloche.  Mike made reservations for us at the finest lodge in the area (see below).  Unfortunately, I wanted to spend most of our time curled up in bed at the hotel room.  I was able to muster enough energy to check out the town, try the local chocolate and fondue (they go for the Swiss Alps experience there), take a tram up the mountain to have hot chocolate in a rotating restaurant with panoramic views, and I learned from Mike how to walk in the snow (missionaries in Siberia have to learn that first thing, dig your heels in the ice so you don't slip and break your back).  Thanks to Mike's patience and great planning, the trip turned out really well.  Absolutely breathtaking views.