Cold Front- Hooray

Everything here is going great. All of Jenny's tests came back with positive results and she, nor the baby seem to be at any risk of diabetes. She is very healthy and looks great. Two different friends both commented last week that if you are standing behind her, she doesn't look pregnant whatsoever. This of course scored extra browny points for the Canadians. And they weren't exaggerating. Her belly is huge from the side but if she is waddling at you head on, she looks the same as she always has. She has a week and a half left of work and then will take a break for the next four to six months. She will still teach some private classes at our house but she won't be teaching at the school. I am quite happy that she did decide to take time off because we have enough money with my income and SO many students are sick right now. I am worried that they will pass it on to her.
One of my junior high classes last week looked like they had all been consumed by the plague. There were 18 kids in the class and only one wasn't sick. So the first thing I did the next morning was go get a flu shot. I am sure it will be $8 well spent.
Our weather finally cooled off and is now glorious. It is 27 degrees today, which sounds hot but it is quite chilly when you spent the last 6 months in 34- 36 degree weather. At night it is dropping down to about 20 degrees. We finally unplugged the air-conditioners which will save us some coin. I forgot how beautiful the Taiwan winters were.

The nursery is almost finished. I still need to blow up big-sized pictures for the walls but other than that, we are done. The countdown now begins for my son to enter this world. 48 days and counting...

I am so excited to look into his eyes, feel him squeeze my finger and hear his voice. Although the voice novelty will probably wear off quickly.

It's A New Day

The world seems a little less scary to bring a baby into this week.
This song makes me happy.



Some might think we are naive to believe so much in a politician but there really isn't anything wrong with a little hope now and then now is there?

S M R T ?

Well first of all- OBAMA!!! OBAMA!! We can finally not be embarrassed to live next to the American people and the world seems like a less scary place to bring my son into. But enough about the election. Let's move on to the real story.

Yea... I am not so smart. This will come as a huge surprise to most of you but it is true. Take this week for example...

I decided that instead of painting the nursery, I would have photos of stuffed animals blown up to huge proportions and mounted on pieces of wood. This would cost a fortune in Canada but it is quite cheap to do in Taiwan. So after scouring the internet for hours looking for suitable pictures, I realized that the only images big enough to do this with- cost a fortune to download. So I asked my mother the photographer to take some photos of stuffed animals she had lying around the house. She came through, put them on a CD, mailed them to Taiwan and we chose three to use. I carefully measured the size of the walls that I wanted to cover and upon writing down my desired dimensions, we hopped on my scooter and drove around to several print shops before finally finding one that could do what I wanted. Which was to have the photos blown up to 60 by 40 sized prints and mounted on boards which we could then cover the walls with. I was a little worried that the photos taken; even with a professional quality camera may not have a high enough megapixel resolution for what I wanted to do. We gave them the CD with the images on them and they assured us that it would be no problem to do so without losing picture quality. Things were coming along nicely. As ol' Hannibal from the A-Team used to say, "I love it when a plan comes together." They then offered us an astoundingly cheap price to do so. I was shocked, excited and a little bewildered at how much lower the price was in Taiwan compared to Canada.

A day later they called to say my wall hangings were ready; which impressed me even more. I asked Jenny to ask them if they could deliver them because I didn’t want to try and drive with these massive pictures on a scooter in Taiwan traffic. She didn’t have their number to do so as neither of us had picked up their business card. So I decided to double her there and then have her take a taxi back with the pictures. We were both concerned that they might have been too big to even fit into a taxi as they would not be bendable.

Upon arriving we were shocked as the clerk presented our purchase to us. Have you figured out where this is going?
They are metric in Taiwan! We are metric in Canada. I have been using the metric system since grade 3. Why the hell would I measure the wall in inches? Now then... if you will excuse me, I am off to go get a 3 dollar haircut.

Halloween

Happy Halloween everybody. I hope you are all well. We are doing well. We had a bit of a scare this week with the pregnancy. Jenny’s family has a history of diabetes and the doctor called to say that there were some issues with Jenny’s last blood test. So we rushed in to get checked out and apparently she is borderline diabetic. It is strange because she never really eats anything that causes diabetes. Regardless, we now have to get checked up more often and she has to really monitor her eating in order to avoid any major complications. I am sure she and the baby will be fine though. He is still break dancing in her belly non-stop. Definitely an active little guy.
My school didn’t have a Halloween party this year. I think because the economy is getting worse so they can’t afford to do big parties anymore but I decided to celebrate nonetheless. The Taiwanese are incredibly scared of ghosts and probably about 75% of them not only believe in the deathly ghouls but also believe that ghosts will try to hurt them whenever possible. Enter Danny with his newest monster mask and his Canon Powershot. I began bursting into classrooms of unsuspecting children, howling while recording their reactions. Man can Taiwanese kids scream. You can see one of the videos on my Facebook. I scared Jonathon and another Teacher Steven really bad, too. I generally don’t stick around after scaring Jonathon as he told me about a year ago, after a particularly good string of frightening encounters -that he would punch me in the head the next time I scared him. Thankfully, I think Halloween tricks are accepted by him, as I was not pummeled. He has a new class, which is in the Facebook video. They are all Grade 1s and 2s and new to the school. They don’t know me and have no idea about my antics. My own students are fairly hard to scare now. So the fresh blood of Jonathon’s students was a welcome treat for my Halloween. Before I left on Friday night, I used a mop, the mask and a few other things lying around to make a scarecrow in the bathroom. So whoever was the first to walk into the bathroom Saturday morning would come face to face with a monster. I look forward to hearing who that scared. Most likely our secretary.
The weeks are flying by like crazy right now. I will have a son in no-time at all. The pics below are stills I took from the videos of the terrified kids.

Photos of Scared Kids

Children tend to move in erractic motions when confronted by ghouls. Thus the blurry photos.