Due date?

I just looked at an online due date calendar and according to the date of my last menstrual period, my due date would be December 28. It says a pregnancy test could have picked up a pregnancy four days ago, that the first heartbeat would be on May 5th (yikes!). I think the dates would be 2-4 days later for me, given my longer cycles. So that would mean a due date in the Christmas to New Year’s region. Perhaps an incentive to induce for a last minute tax credit. I don’t know why I don’t take a pregnancy test, since I think I’d probably get an answer now. I prefer to wait until my temperature has been high for 18 days. Which is only two days from now. Then I can feel pretty confident about what the result will be.

I went to a baby shower today – a really fancy affair, where a three course meal was served at a restaurant and the mom-to-be got enough clothes so the baby will have a different outfit per day for the first several months. And enough books to fill a bookshelf. If anything, I was envious of the book selection. I think the baby is lucky to have that much imagination and fantasy so early in life I’m still waiting eagerly for the box of 140 books in Spanish I recently purchased on ebay. I think it will be about as exciting to me to fill River’s shelves as it will be for him.

I’m very happy for my friend, who is expecting her first. Though she is a slender person, she is very large at 35 weeks, bigger than I think I ever was in my pregnancy, even with my extra 65 pounds. It doesn’t look comfortable at all and I pity her having to move around that way for another five weeks. Yet I now have a better understanding of what the end result is, which makes it more worth it. If I am pregnant, I will convince Mark to replace our ten-year-old mattress with a good one. I’ve learned that third trimester pregnant women need all the help getting quality sleep they can get.

A Bolivian Baby Shower

I went to a café in the popular Montsenor district of Santa Cruz, Bolivia with my colleagues from work. We were going to attend our co-worker's baby shower. In the blocks heading away from the giant Christ statue, the streets are filled with one café after another, as well as a selection of great restaurants – Italian, Mexican, duck, frozen yogurt. About 20 people got together to celebrate the baby showers of two women, both named Claudia, and due in August and September respectively.

I was really curious to see what a Bolivian shower is like. The fact that they refer to it as a “baby shower,” in English, made me think it was probably imported from the States. For much of the time, it wasn’t much different from any other gathering of friends at a café, except that two of the attendees were visibly pregnant. Both males and females came, they ordered coffee, tea and snacks, and chatted amongst themselves.

At one point they presented congratulatory cards to the two women, which everyone had signed. And they presented them each with an attractive green baby carrier, purchased through a collection. There wasn’t too much planned or personalized about it – no games, no stories, no pictures.

Toward the end, the Claudia who is due in September made the rounds around the tables with a gold chain. She swung it over the palm of both men and women to predict the number and sex of the children that person would have in the future. After raising and lowering the chain toward the palm three times, she let it move of its own accord. If the chain swung up and down, it would be a boy, if it swung in a circle, it would be a girl, if it didn’t move, there wouldn’t be any children.

My colleague Maria was upset, because when she’d had it done the previous day, it hadn’t moved at all over her right palm.

“I’m never going to be a mother!” the 29-year-old, currently without a boyfriend, lamented. “Try my left hand,” she insisted.

There, she received the answer that she’d have one girl. They explained that since Maria is left-handed, her energy came only from her left hand.

When they did it to me, they told me I’d have a boy, then a girl. The third time it didn’t move, which meant two biological children would be it. I told them I’d get back to them in several months to let them know how accurate their predictions were. But they seemed to believe pretty strongly.

Only my German colleague, Helen, refused to be tested – either not believing in the game passed down by Bolivian grandmothers, or not wanting her reproductive future to be made public knowledge.