Braxton Hicks
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
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)
Noorish
Apr 13 (Sat)
My Hubby’s cousin, M, came to Edmonton for work last week, so we went out for dinner together. But my hubby was too busy and couldn’t make it… too bad.
Noorish is one of her favorite restaurants in Edmonton. For me too, even though it’s only my 2nd time. (This was my first time.）
I was going to have a Laughing Buddha’s Bowl, and so was she, but they were out of it already this evening. Too bad. So I had Miso Noorish ($17) and she had the special of the day: Spinach gnocchi in a sweet pepper rosè with asparagus.
Mine had a lot of sweet potato. It was filling and pretty good. The sauce was supposed to have a hint of miso, but it was difficult to taste it. Hers was pretty small. Not enough in my opinion.
Dessert was a piece of Rocky Road ($9.5)! It was very nice.
She had a The Ultimate Jing Treasure ($24) , which is a drink of jing herbs with benefits derived from Chinese medicine for thousands of years! It contained cocoa, so it was easy to drink. But expensive! She is enduring hard work. She needs it for her health.
We talked a lot about how we were doing, families, healthy foods, being a mum, traveling and etc. I enjoyed chatting with her over the delicious meal.
At the end, she gave us a box of “raw” chocolate. OK, normally chocolate must be somehow cooked, I guess… yes, usually the cocoa beans get roasted to make chocolate. I checked online and raw chocolate is made without the beans roasted, so that nutrition such as calcium, magnesium, protein, fat, fibre, iron, zinc, copper will remain and get absorbed well enough. The chocolate had some salty hint as well (sea salt) and was tasty. Thank you very much, M!!
Red Lobster
My husband and I agreed that Red Lobster looks like a good place when we are hungry for seafood, we thought by watching their commercial on TV. It’s one of the biggest seafood chains in the US. The big portions are very American with very little veggies or none at all on the menu, I thought. But actually it wasn’t like that so much so when we visited there. When ordering entrees for dinner, it came with a caesar salad or a house salad. That was nice.
The first time we went to one of the two brunches in Edmonton was about 2 months ago. I wasn’t expecting going out for dinner, but we took too long for shopping at WEM, so we went there for a quick dinner. At that time, my hubby ordered the Ultimate Feast ($29.99) which is a great plate with crab legs, shrimp, lobster and etc. I ordered 2 appetizers, which were New England Clam Chowder (bowl $6.5) and Seafood Sampler (about $13). The sampler was a good deal. Hubby’s entree came with a salad, and also each table gets some biscuits (quite salty in my opinion). I got really full and satisfied.
This day (Apr 12), we printed out a coupon and brought it with us: $10 discount for 2 entrees of Lobster Fest menu items.
Biscuits
House Salad and caesar salad that comes with the entrees
We both ordered the same one: Bar Harbor Lobster Bake ($30.99)
It was great! This linguini pasta looks too heavy and it was! Salt and butter. So many calories, I imagined. But it was good… I brought home my left-over.
We liked it, but maybe once in a while is good enough for us.
Surprised to find a brunch in Japan as well! (found it on Wiki)
Red Lobster (780) 484-0660 10111 171 Street, Edmonton, AB
Louisiana Purchase
My friends and I met at Louisiana Purchase for lunch on April 10th. A long stay (11am to after 2pm)! We were the first ones to enter and probably the last ones to leave… As always, we were surprised at how fast the time had passed.
Ms. M recommended this restaurant and we liked it a lot.
The lunch of the day was a fish dish. So I ordered that one. It had a long name, but in short it was tilapia with crayfish. The tilapia was coated with bread crumbs and was deep-fried. It looked like it had very high calories, but no problem. I was hungry. It hit the spot! The sauce was very nice, so were the veggies and rice.
Tilapia with Crayfish (about $16)
Louisiana Jambalaya $13.95 (Lunch) / $15.95 (Dinner)
Grilled Crab Cakes $15.95 (Lunch) / $21.95 (Dinner)
Cheesecake $7.50
I had a taste of both the jambalaya and crab cake, and they were good, too. Jambalaya is a featured dish and it has some shrimp in it, so I thought I wanted to try it next time, but it also has chicken, ham and sausage in the rice. Too bad.
The cheesecake was beautiful with fruits and the heavy cream was also good!
Louisiana Purchase (780) 420-6779 10320 111 St NW, Edmonton, AB
Jambalaya by Hank Williams:
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