Posts made in April 26th, 2013

Braxton Hicks

Posted on Apr 26, 2013 in Living, Pregnancy | 0 comments

Today it seems like the spring has suddenly come and the temperature went up to 20 c degrees! Much warmer than my home in Japan and close to HK temperature! The snow is almost gone and the roads are sandy and dusty now.

When the temperature goes up suddenly, our house’s auto heater gets confused or something and our place gets colder… it’s the fate for basement residents?

We went out for a branch to IHOP. It was Friday, but it was crowded like Saturday. The waiter with a tattoo was a friendly guy and gave us funny drawings of Micky Mouse on my pancake and my husband’s waffle. ^^

 

It’s another finding about being pregnant.
I heard the expression of a tightened tummy or a bloated tummy, but I never imagined it was like this! It’s totally different from the feeling of eating too much and being bloated with food or gas.

Apr 22
I felt my tummy tightened. When I was sleeping in bed in the early morning, my tummy suddenly felt tightened and hard. It was softer before. I was surprised, but no pain. I wondered what happened, but it got soft again. Was I just imagining!?

Apr 23
When I went to bed, my tummy tightened again. It’s abnormal. When it’s hard, I don’t feel the baby moving. It stayed like that for 30 seconds or so. And then it got softer. It repeatedly happened like 5 times within a hour and I got worried. But no pain, and when it’s not tightened, I still felt the baby moving. So I quit worrying and tried to sleep.

Apr 24
I checked on my book and on line about it, I ended up finding it was a normal thing. It’s called Braxton Hicks in English.
Online, it said,
At 28 weeks pregnant you may notice shortness of breath, difficulty sleeping, and scattered Braxton Hicks contractions. These contractions are normally painless and consist when the uterus hardens for a minute then releases.
Yes, I’m on 28 weeks now. They know it very well.
In my book, this Braxton Hicks was explained a lot on the section of 8 months. I’m still on 7 months, so I hadn’t read that part too carefully… (yes, it’s an excuse.)
Anyway, I’m relieved.

And last night, I felt the baby had hiccups. It was like every 2 seconds, some little spasms were happening in my tummy constantly and continued for more than 1 minute. I got worried about this too. But after checking in a book, I found out it was fetal hiccups. So interesting.

The World’s Biggest and Smelliest Flower

Posted on Apr 26, 2013 in Uncategorized | 0 comments

We went to Muttart conservatory to see an morphophallus titanum on Apr 23th. Entrance fee was $12. No student price.

My hubby heard the news first on Sat, and then we found out it was already blooming on Monday. The facility’s opening hours were extended on Monday and a lot of people were talking about it. So we gotta see it! I had a yoga class on Monday night, so we decided to go there on Tuesday morning.
It has a really short time of blooming. By Tuesday, the petals were already starting to close. The smell was supposed to be very bad and we wanted to try smelling it but by that time, the smell was gone. Too bad! But still it was really interesting to see this flower.

The waiting time was about 15 minutes. It was 2 hour wait on Monday night, we heard!

The flower only blooms once in 2 years and originated in Sumatra, Indonesia. It’s one of the biggest flowers in the world and it stinks a lot!

Not only that, but it grows so quickly!
As seen below, it was planted on March 12, this year. And then it started growing like a bamboo, and then kept growing so fast.

Flowers are normally supposed to smell nice, aren’t they? This plant chose not to and decided to smell like a corpse… Why? This flower is called a corpse flower. The smell attracts bugs for them to carry the pollen. We at first thought it’s called a corpse flower, because it can contain a dead human body.
A lady at the reception was describing this smell as a dirty diaper smell.

This flower has a male and a female day. This day was male, we were told. It has an area to produce pollen and also an area for receiving pollen. But it can not self-produce, so it needs bugs to do the job.

We saw other nice flowers and plants. It was a really nice refreshing day.

My hubby’s blog is here (The Rebel Kind)