Living

Murmuring

Posted on Jun 25, 2013 in Living | 0 comments

  • We used to live in a cave and we never had a chance to buy potted plants. But now we have a lot of sun in our place and bought a sweet basil pot. It’s great. I’m looking for shiso leaves as well, but it’s a bit difficult to find here… All food, yes of course! ^^
  • Are you really an animal lover? Why are you eating meat then? You have to kill some to have some. You never raise them and kill them. But you are eating the meat…
  • Seems like I received 4 boxes from parents in Japan. They are coming for 2 months in summer. Mail carrier really came to deliver them? I was at home all day, but never heard the bell ring. Were you really here with the boxes?
  • While thinking about shopping for baby items and father’s day gifts online for a day, they got sold out! Oops. Better buy the things you want right away…
  • I was cleaning my old Mac’s keyboard on June 12th. Suddenly hail started to fall!
    IMG_3827 IMG_3828
  • My handstanding hubby.
    IMG_3829
  • I made crepes yesterday. Very busy moving, settling-in, shopping, work and preparing for baby delivery. But I can not move around as I like. That’s frustrating. I need to eat something like this! ^^
    IMG_3831
  • Today a lot of fluff was in the air flying. It was fantastic.

Busy Month

Posted on Jun 25, 2013 in Living | 0 comments

No time for blogging… need to make time….

The last 30 days were very busy!

  • got a strained back
  • a friend visited us from HK
  • visited Toronto for 4 days
  • joined a 1-day prenatal class with my husband
  • moved within Edmonton without any moving company’s help
  • ultrasound

The 3 most stressful things in life seem to be

  1. death
  2. marriage
  3. moving

We moved 8 times in last 13 years. Including small moves, it’s 10 times. So we have a lot of experience, but still it’s tiring, big work.
We don’t have furniture, but have a lot of stuff.
My husband did all of the heavy work. The day we moved with a van was rainy… We had to walk on the grass and mud a lot, and the both houses got quite dirty… Great day to move…

One more month to go for the due delivery date. Hope we can do a lot of necessary things and things we want to do. I still haven’t completed to write about the last summer holiday on this blog! I wanna complete that for sure.

Strained Back

Posted on May 12, 2013 in Living, Pregnancy | 0 comments

At the end of April, the temperature went down to -6°C and it snowed. But the last Sunday it went up to 30°C. The season is skipping spring seriously!

At night it’s still like 5 °C and the temperature differs a lot in a day. It’s nice to hear warm warnings about it from many of my friends. Yes, we really have to take care of ourselves not to catch cold. Thank you.

So it’s been warm or hot for the last 2 weeks outside. But somehow our basement suite has been about 3°C colder than the temperature it’s supposed to be. It is set for 21.5°C. But it’s been much colder! As soon as we get home from the hot outdoors, we feel chilly and I have get on a turtle neck sweater right away. A turtle neck sweater is an all-year-round item for me in this basement.

I had a headache this morning… chilly, chilly.

After living in a basement suite for 2 years, now I finally understand how it is. It’s like a cave. Cooler and colder. My hubby’s cough didn’t get better quickly because of this chilliness here. So a year and a half ago, we bought a small heater. But we found out the usage of it can make the house short of the electricity and also found it’s restricted on our lease. Oops… so we bought it, but we couldn’t really use it.
But in this case ( 3°C colder  for 2 weeks), we need to use it. We explained and got permission from the landlord. They didn’t know why the temperature was like that here. They have 23°C up there, they said. Wow, nice!

Anyway, when you live in a basement, you always have to have heat and the lights turned on, even though the outside is warm/hot and very sunny and bright. It’s quite anti-eco, but how can we help ourselves…?

AND… today I strained my back! This might be a bit serious. I’ve had a back pain once or twice since I came to Canada, but I recovered within 1 or 2 days, and it wasn’t serious like the ones I got in HK. I think some yoga and some certain foods helped. And also since I got here, I was practicing some poses once in a while that can prevent back pain. I think that was good. But that pose is difficult to do when your belly is big. So I stopped doing it. Maybe that’s why… My balance of weight has been changed, which also could be a reason.
Tying a shoe lace is quite difficult now. When you crouch down, you have to open your legs because the belly is there. So the maternity denim skirt that I bought wasn’t so practical. My legs don’t open side to side (Can’t do that anyway when someone is watching!?).

I don’t want to catch cold anymore during this pregnancy! So I’m wearing a turtle neck, a fleece, and then a blanket on top of it, while sitting around the desk.

I really don’t mind moving out soon!

 

May 5th, 2013, Hawrelak Park. The last snow (30°C) :

Hawrelak ParkHawrelak Park

North Saskatchewan River:

Hawrelak ParkHawrelak Park

 

By the way, now 100 Japanese yen = CAD$1!

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.

Screen-Shot-2013-04-26

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.

Happy Eggs!

Posted on Feb 24, 2013 in Animals, Living | 0 comments

I had eggs yesterday morning and this morning.

Yesterday, I got a twin egg, aka “double yolk”! I think I’ve never cracked a twin egg before. Probably the first time! It means good luck, doesn’t it?

And then this morning, again! It’s rare that I cook eggs 2 days in a row, so it has never happened that I got twins in a row!!!

Super Lucky!?

What kind of lucky things will happen to me!?

And then this morning, my late-rising hubby also made eggs for his breakfast, and it was also a twin! This time I took a picture.
I read young mama hens can lay twin eggs more easily. So these could be from the same mama. But still it’s only 1 or 2 % chance to lay twins.
3 twin eggs in one dozen already. Could be still counting…

Anxiety about how to treat “economic animals” is never ending, and human selfishness makes them suffer so much and they become our food. We still have some choices to treat them better.

One of them is to make hens roam free a bit more out of their cages. If we choose to buy “Free Range” or “Free Run”, demand for that will increase, and encourage farmers to shift to these better conditions.
In fact, in more health conscious countries, people are buying more “Free Range” or “Free Run” eggs. These are a bit more expensive, but when you think of a pregnant woman being caged in her room, compared to a pregnant woman being freely active by going out of the house/getting exercise/getting more sunshine, of course, the latter can produce a much healthier baby. It’s easy to imagine. (I always put myself in the animal’s shoes, and I get a headache very easily.)

In Hong Kong, we saw “Free Run” eggs at the supermarkets, but they are double or triple the cost of cheaper eggs. So we couldn’t buy them all the time. Very expensive.
But in Canada, they are less than double the price. I wonder how it is in Japan.

By the way, I didn’t know the difference between “Free Range” and “Free Run”.

Free-run eggs:
“Free-run” means chickens can move around in open barns, but they don’t necessarily have access to the great outdoors and overcrowding may still be an issue.
Certification: none

Free-range eggs:
“Free-range” means hens see the light of day (depending on the weather) and their feet actually come in contact with the earth.
Certification: none

So, these ones aren’t independently verified!?
When I read the David Suzuki Foundation‘s page, an even better one is “Organic”. To print that on the product, they have to be certified by passing the highest welfare standards. So it’s the best!

Organic:
Hens that produce certified organic eggs benefit from the highest welfare standards. For example, the BC SPCA Certified label assures eggs come from farms that have passed their animal welfare standards. Certified organic labels often require the use of organic feed without growth hormones or antibiotics, too.

Reference: David Suzuki Foundation

Organic eggs… I’ve never seen them at Super Store, I think. Low standard…

To eat healthy food, it costs money… it can’t be helped.