Update From the Front

Be wary of waging war on foreign soil. Our adversary, Randy the Rat, is Chinese and clearly brings the benefit of guangxi to his battle. He may be slowly starving to death, and periodically freezing, but he is well enough connected to wear us down as well.

Yesterday morning, workers awoke us at 6am by swinging pick-axes and driving jackhammers into the concrete in our lane. The picture below shows the progress by the time the girls walked to school at 9am:

See the green number 8 on the right? That's our house, our front walk. Our bedroom window faces this. Our front walk is, well, unwalkable.


The sewer line is being replaced. The workers, clearly directed by Colonel Randy the Rat, turned off our water and "forgot" to turn it back on for most of the day. When they needed electricity, Colonel Randy the Rat apparently gave them permission to connect to our power lines. It is possible that our electric bill will have powered the replacing on a sewer line for the entire lane. Wendy thinks this is unlikely, but I wouldn't put it past that wily rat.

He won the battle. We've left town. I'm writing from Chicago.
But he hasn't won the war. Wendy called the Pest Control Company back again, and they are under strict instructions to "do what it takes." We will return to a rat-free house. Or, at least, a house with a dead rat somewhere inside.

And I'm kidding - although I am writing from Chicago, its not because we couldn't fight this silly rat. He may be gross, but he hasn't managed to kick us out of our house. Dave's grandmother is very sick, and so we moved forward our home leave. On Sunday night, with the status update on Great-Grandma, we decided it was time to go home. We flew out today. The last two days were a whirlwind of packing, shopping, and making loads of phone calls. But this is certainly the right place to be right now.

The girls and I will be in Chicago through the holiday weekend, spend the next 2 weeks in St. Louis, and then return to Chicago for our final week in the states. Dave will join us on the way to Chicago, having spent 2 weeks alone (with a dead rat) in Shanghai. We will all return to Shanghai on Dec. 20th to enjoy a quiet family Christmas in our certainly rat-free home, having finally emerged victorious - I am confident.

War of Attrition

Our rat has not succumbed to any of our traps. He has not eaten any of the bright blue poison balls. He has not given in to the temptation of treats hanging inside a metal trap. And he has actually moved glue traps out of his way rather than step on them.

So we seem to have engaged in a War of Attrition - and our side has much greater resources.

We have removed all free foods. The bowl of fruit sits vacant and lonely on the kitchen table, while the refrigerator is full of chilled produce. The sack of flour rests neatly inside a Ziploc bag. Loaves of bread are stored in the oven. And bags of corn flour and chocolate squares rest inside an airtight box.

Every food in this house rests inside at least one air-tight container.

We rinse the dishes after dinner, and we take out the trash twice a day.

Unless he is eating the plaster in the walls of the stuffing in the couch, this rat must be slowly starving to death.

But the powers that be saw the starvation diet as too slow, and notched up our military strategy.

The heat has gone out in our home. Although the taps all run hot water, and the stove displays lovely blue flames, our radiators all sit cold. The outside temperature is 41, and the inside temperature can not be much higher than 55. We're cooking dinner now, which keeps me warm. And we've got thick blankets on our beds for later. We can stand the cold until the landlord deems it appropriate to send someone to repair the radiators (as a sidenote - I would expect immediately to be the appropriate time).

I just hope I'm not the one to stumble across a frozen, emaciated rat.

There's a Baby in There!

I visited my OB on Thursday morning. She ran various little tests - blood work, disease scans, urinalysis, asked some questions. And she did an ultrasound. It seems that in China, ultrasounds happen at the drop of a hat. Unlike in the states, where a girl is lucky to get 2 in the course of her pregnancy. Here, I had a 13 week visit and so I had a 13 week ultrasound.

And oh my goodness - there is really a baby in there!


With my previous pregnancies, I had a big ultrasound at about 22 weeks. This was an amazing time for me. We saw the baby for the first time, and we learned the gender. The sickness of pregnancy became the development of a child. With this picture, the pregnancy became a child that much sooner. And the amazing thing about a 13 week ultrasound is that we're still in the 1st trimester, and so the entire child can be seen in one picture. Were this picture less pixalated, you could see his head, his body, his arm and both of his legs. That's a little baby in there!

And the results of the survey:
The folks at Uncle H-- were 4 for 4, and we were 2 for 2.
But those of you who posted were 20 right, 10 wrong, 1 uncertain and 1 person with twins!

That gives us states of 26 right out of a sample size of 36 babies. They may not be 50/50, but with such a small sample size I'm still comfortable with our odds.

its in the house

11:50pm

The rat is in the house.

A Good China Day

8:30am
The family bed awoke, and Dave and Lilly bravely went downstairs to explore the various mouse traps set throughout the house.

9am
No rats or mice in the traps, so Dave made waffles, bacon and apples. We talked to Nana and Poppa via Skype.

9:40am
The landlord's contractor arrived. I had greatly feared coming downstairs first thing in the morning. I had no desire to see a mouse dying a slow death on top of my kitchen cabinets. My second fear was greeting and working with this morning's contractor. You see, a pest control company came to our home yesterday afternoon with a mouse-free guarantee. They left behind glue traps, poison pellets, and a big hole in the side of the wall that they refused to seal. So, after many phone calls to many different people, a contractor arrived this morning to fix the hole. I had no expectations that he would complete the job, but I was pleasantly surprised. He climbed right up onto the neighbor's higgledy-piggledy roof (none of us would have been surprised to see him fall right through) with a bucket of mixed concrete. And he tightly packed every pipe going into our home. He either sealed the mouse into our home, or outside of it. But he certainly left no holes. And he was done before we had even finished our waffles!

10:00am
With waffles and bacon chased down by grape juice, and the table cleared away, Dave took the girls out to color the lane with sidewalk chalk. They moved onto sports gear, and enjoyed a chilly autumn morning outdoors while I tried to make my first ever pie crust. I began work on it promptly at ten, cutting my butter into exactly 1/2 inch squares and measuring all of my ingredients just so to be fully prepared for this intimidating task.

11:30am
I followed every procedure, down to the last detail.

1:15pm
Everything went smoothly. The apples smelled delicious. The crust laid out well.

2:00pm
It even transferred beautifully from the tabletop to the pie plate. I began to pat myself on the back. Who says making a pie from scratch is so hard?

3:00pm
Wendy arrived to babysit for our Saturday date. I put the pie in the 375 degree oven. I began to clear up a bit, when I noticed smoke coming from the oven. I whipped open the door, and saw the egg wash dripping from the pie onto the oven floor. With cloth hot pads, I pulled the doughy pie back out of the oven and set it on the stove. I watced the bottom of the oven spew out smoke, and tried to come up with a solution. Nothing brilliant appeared.

3:15pm
A small shard of brilliance. Turned off the gas to the oven, used a wooden spoon and a wet washcloth and cleaned the base of the oven. Replaced the wet with a dry washcloth, and finished the mopping job. No more smoke - very nice.

3:20pm
I turned the gas back on, and waited for the oven to get back up to 375.

3:55pm
It didn't.

4:00pm
Dave and I left on our date. We left Wendy in charge of the pie. Now is a good time to remind you that Chinese people don't bake. They don't buy flour or butter. They don't have ovens in their homes. I had Wendy monitoring my first pie crust, which had baked for 10 minutes and then sat on a countertop for an hour. What's done was done.

4:30pm
Dave and I reached the Fabric Market. For a total of 3,750 RMB we began the tailoring process for 3 suits of Super 180s Wool suits with silk lining, 10 work shirts, a pair of jeans and a white cashmere scarf. That's about $500.

6:00pm
We reached our dinner destination, Yu Xin Sichuan Restaurant. It was a thoroughly Chinese restaurant, with red decor throughout, wait staff bustling around the many corners, partitions between every table, and a long menu full of photos. And nearly every food on the menu had been cooked with chilis. The meal was delicious.

7:30pm
We stopped at the video store on the way home. People don't rent movies in China. We buy pirated versions at full-blown stores with really interesting selections. Yu Xin was near one of our favorites, and so we perused. With a baby in my belly, we find ourselves watching movies more frequently, and so we grabbed movies freely. For 126 RMB we walked out with 9 movies and 1 season of Entourage. That's about $20 - heavy spending at the video store.

8:00pm
We walked in, and put the girls to bed. A very strange looking pie sat on top of the oven. We haven't tried it yet, as our bellies are still too full of Sichuan peppercorns. But by about 9:30pm...

Rats! continued

When we called the landlord about the rats, we said that a Pest Control Company would again need to come to our home.

She said we should get a cat.

After much wrangling between her and our agent, and then much wrangling between our agent and the Pest Control Company, a technician will arrive at our home at 1:00 this afternoon.

My understanding is that sticky traps are the most common form of mouse and rat control in China. This is where they lay out a very sticky piece of paper. When the rat steps on it, he can not remove his foot from the paper. My further understanding is that when the rat begins to panic, he may tear himself apart in fright.

I am not looking forward to such a greeting tomorrow morning.

Upon further research, I've learned that sticky traps are generally thought to be inhumane in the west. It can take a long time for the mouse to die, and our household will be forced to listen to the sad cries and struggles all night.

I told Wendy that maybe we will just leave town this weekend, stay in a hotel, and return on Monday... after she has already arrived.

She says I am weak.

Rats!

Well, we sort of expected it.

Tuesday night, as I lay in bed reading, I heard some noise downstairs. Worried about burglars or sleepwalking kids, I went down to check. All seemed in order.

The next morning, Lynne found teeth marks in the butter. And Wendy found a half-eaten apple.

We put out a trap last night. Apparently we should have had Wendy help. We used cheese (just like in the cartoons, right?). Apparently Chinese rats, like most Chinese people, don't particularly like cheese. Wendy said pork would work better. We'll see.

So this morning I came down and ate breakfast on the couch. Hearing a noise, I looked over and saw a long tail scurrying up the wall.

So the exterminators gave a bid today and should return tomorrow to begin the extermination. This is China.

The Baby Predictor

We had some of Dave's coworkers over for dinner on Friday night. This was a pretty Chinese crowd, which is always fun. Discussions about whether or not you can eat broccoli raw and stories about feeding crabs to the pigs bounce over the table and the piles of food. Dave announced the baby at dinner that night as well, which received much excitement and many questions.

We also learned that the Chinese can predict the sex of the baby. A particularly urgent need in a country where ultrasound technicians are forbidden by law from revealing the sex of the baby. Nina shared a spreadsheet with these inputs: Month of conception and Mother's actual age at the date of conception plus 9 months. Apparently, these inputs have made accurate predictions among Uncle H--'s new babies over the last year - 100% accurate. This is over a sample size of only 4. Still, when we looked back at our two babies, the predictions were correct. That brings us to 6 out of 6 - still 100%!

So, all you Mamas, we need your help. Let's put the predictor to the test. Try to remember your details, and post the accuracy in a comment. Dave's hoping to discredit the thing - it says we're going to have another girl!

生男生女圖 Boy or Girl? 中國在七百年前的皇家墓地裡發現了這幅生男生女圖。 這幅圖現在保存在北京科學院。它已被成千上萬的人所證實。據說其準確達99%。 豎行﹕懷孕的月份 橫行﹕年齡 (懷孕時的歲數 + 9個月) 交叉處即為結果 (男孩或女孩) 網主及一些朋友們測試近20個小孩，全部正確。讓人驚嘆﹗您不妨試試。

男 Boy = 女 Girl = Mother's actual age at the date of conception plus 9 months "母親年齡" /懷孕月份 Month of Conception 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 1月 Jan 2月 Feb 3月 March 4月 April 5月 May 6月 June 7月 July 8月 Aug 9月 Sept 10月Oct 11月Nov 12月Dec