Not much new

We're chugging along here. We bought a double stroller yesterday from someone in our language school. It is a monster truck of a stroller, red, wide, with huge wheels. It fits in the trunk of our smallish car only barely, by taking the wheels off (luckily they come off easily). Sam spent about an hour practicing getting in and out last night. He woke at 5:15 this morning, saying "car" to Emily, so I think his plan was more play in the new stroller.

Sam is still pretty much a delight. He's coloring now, and has most of his colors down. He can say "elephant," or a close approximation, and is (to my eyes) a fairly graceful toddler. I enjoy the extra time I'm getting with him. I think we both feel some guilt that we will ruin his fun. He's such a fine kid, and we enjoy being a trio. I know it will be a shock for his little system.

Emily's pretty much knocked out by pregnancy last night. She went to bed at 5 (!) last night basically, and except for brushing her teeth and helping to put Sam down, she pretty much has slept through. This is her pattern in the first trimester--morning sickness, some general nausea, and lots of sleep. What's hard for us to tell with the pregnancy is how different it will be from the first one. Will the symptoms be worse? A lot worse? What can we expect? Still hard to know at this point...

Twins—shhhhh!

It’s been an exciting time here in Northern Island. Emily is pregnant, and as of last Friday we know that it’s twins. It’s still very early, only around 8 weeks, but is already reshaping our lives. I think my reading audience here is small, so it seems safe, but we probably won’t tell people on facebook, etc. for a while.

About a month ago Emily found out she was pregnant. It was a bit earlier than we had planned, but not terrible timing. Emily’s breastfeeding-friendly birthcontrol wasn’t available in Taiwan, and we misread the iphone app that charts fertility. Another baby at this point was not necessarily dissertation friendly, but there were several pros: birth in November or December when it’s not roasting hot, the flexibility of language school for the first nine months, time to settle into life here before we return to the states in a couple of years, Sam would be able to go to nursery school with them, etc. So, all in all, not terrible timing.

We scheduled a hospital visit last week. We’d all been encouraged to go to the big Presby hospital downtime. It’s a good hospital and not very far, which is nice. However, when we went there most of our conversations were in Chinese and it is hard to get a personal sense of the people we’d be working with. We probably need one or two people with excellent English, either a nurse or doctor or a midwife or someone from school here who goes with us. The funniest moment was when the doctor told us they were going to “listen for the heart through the vagina.” Thankfully, this turned out to be an ultrasound. When the radiologist told us that it was twins I honestly thought at first that she was joking. She said something about “two eyes,” and I thought she was kidding us. “Haha, yes, we all have two eyes.” But no, it really is twins, at least for now. The doctor said identical are possible based on the shape of the sacs. On the other hand, the odds are in favor of fraternals.

We’re still figuring out where we want to stay for the birth. There are plusses to being at a big hospital, especially with the complications that can with twins. The very close nearby hospital is also appealing and we may be able to go to a clinic. The challenge we’re finding is that we need help, but people can be offended if you reject their recommendation.

That’s the big news here. We’re excited about it, scared, hopeful, worried, distracted, curious… Pray for us.

Wrapping up Year #2

We remember Sam’s birthday over about a week and a half every year. First, there is the formal date, which in this case was a Sunday, but we actually went to the zoo on Saturday, and had cake with the neighbors and talked to family on Monday. We also remember it in the liturgical year, as the days between Good Friday and Easter Sunday. Emily was in labor during Good Friday worship that year, as a friend read a short reflection I’d prepared for Wesminster’s service. Sam was born near sunset on Good Friday and went home on Easter morning. I like the holy week grouping because it reminds me of how tightly packed the Christian story is into these few days (from exultation, to fall, to our existence in brokenness, to future redemption).

A professor of mine talked about how his goal in the Good Friday (or Maundy Thursday service) was to drive all hope out of the Biblical story, to really live in the suffering. (This may be why The Passion of the Christ is so popular.) You can read Easter into Good Friday, but it makes better sense to wallow in the crucifixion. The scriptures are pretty clear about the horror of human being, and all of the Biblical heroes are limited and broken. The Good Friday/Holy Saturday/Easter story is often read as the redemption of the Biblical fall. I think that in some small sense watching Sam’s birth has helped me to understand suffering and redemption in new ways. (Even if I still really don’t like Genesis 3:16 and the ‘pregnancy as atonement’ theology.) Maybe this introduction is a roundabout way of saying that my Chinese has probably come far enough that I should be preaching again.

We are now nearing the end of our celebration of Sam. It’s been a challenging few weeks, but challenging in a helpful way. I’ve survived two language evaluations, a challenging series of negotiations over a coworker, and a deeper knowledge of the community we live in. Sam is coming along in his own ways, and now throws more and more words out (today, for instance, he said “purple” for the first time). I feel like with our 7.5 months here, we’ve made some good progress and are handling the changes and transitions well.

Next week we head south for the meeting of our denomination. I think it will be a fun week for us and will give us a chance to connect to people throughout the island more broadly. I’m excited for new faces, a change of weather, and the opportunity to get away from this big city. Sam is becoming a bit more challenging as a toddler, so I’m not sure how many more “huge meeting” events we’ll want to go to, but this one seems well timed. I’m also helping it spur me on in language, since I’m at a point where it’s easy to pause or rest.

Otherwise, all is well. We’re very grateful for our neighbors, who are good people. I have a Singapore colleague who came over for dinner last week and helped us better understand campus identity. There are lots of people who look after Sam: students who greet him enthusiastically, some office workers who sit at the piano with him or watch him in the cafeteria while we get food, older kids who treat him like a little sibling. It’s not a perfect place, but there are a lot of benefits to being here, and Sam is a pretty happy two year old.