Prenatal Yoga

One of my new activities these days is attending prenatal yoga classes at the maternity clinic. We meet twice a week on Monday and Wednesday afternoons, and it's been an interesting experience. I am the only foreigner in the class, which is, of course, conducted in Korean, so it is a good chance for me to practice my Korean listening skills and get familiar with body-part vocabulary. I've learned the words for ankle and thigh and to recognize the words for inhale and exhale, as well as getting lots of practice with left and right! I also have learned how to ask when someone's baby is due and to say that "The baby is moving." Still, it is definitely a challenge to communicate with the other students in the class, and it's sometimes frustrating not to be able to join in conversations about pregnancy and impending parenthood.

The class is held on the third floor of the clinic, in the postpartum care center. The center is a place for new moms to stay for a little extra time (up to two weeks) after their babies are born. The babies can stay in the nursery, and the moms can take classes on breastfeeding, infant massage, and postnatal yoga. I think it's nice that there is this option for new mothers to get some support, especially if their families are not nearby to help out during the first weeks of motherhood. I have heard that it is a pretty expensive option, though. The rooms are kept very warm, which I have heard is common practice for households with new babies, although it makes things a bit uncomfortable for our yoga class. We sweat up a storm, even though we are mostly only doing gentle stretching. All of the moms in the postpartum care center wear matching flannel flowered pajamas that are very pretty, but I can imagine that they are sweating up a storm, too. Because the postpartum center nursery adjoins the yoga room, we can often hear the babies crying, and sometimes the shade on the nursery window is up and we can look at the adorable Korean newborns.

The class always begins with us doing some stretches while we sit cross-legged on the floor, and then progresses to more difficult exercises with our legs outstretched or lying on our backs. There is a lot of giggling amongst the class as we try to bend our bodies into various poses while our enormous bellies get in the way. A few times, we have been asked to partner up, much to the mortification of whoever is partnered with me. Although most of the girls are shy about talking to me, as I am shy about talking to them, they are all friendly and smile when we inevitably meet in the bathroom downstairs after the class. At the end of each class, a nurse brings out a box full of chilled apple juice boxed drinks, which I look forward to like crazy while I sweat away in the hot classroom. I plan to continue going to yoga class until the baby comes. Who knows? Maybe I'll run into some of my classmates on the other side of the third floor, in the delivery and recovery area.

Latest Photos

Thought you all might enjoy a few photos of recent events:

A few of the baby shower guests: Sandra (thanks for organizing things!), Jennie, Ellen, Mina, Kayoko, and Joy. Leandra is behind the camera.

Proud mama-to-be at 37 weeks.

Baby Fair and Baby Shower

Baby, baby, baby. It's difficult to imagine that I will be even more obsessed with Baby when she finally arrives in three weeks or so. Seems like all of our activities these days are somehow related to pregnancy and the upcoming birth!

This past weekend Keegan and I met our friends Nathan and Eliza in Busan to attend a Baby Fair at the convention center there. We met them at the Lotte Hotel around 10 and took the subway to the fair. Once we got inside, we were quickly overwhelmed with the sheer variety and number of baby-related products being peddled. Nate and Eliza were interested in car seats and strollers, and Keegan and I found ourselves drawn to the toy and book booths. We did pick out a few English language books, including our new favorite, William Steig's The Amazing Bone. We oohed and ahhed over some very fun and unusual wooden toys, and both couples bought plastic baby bathtubs, which are a bit bulky to ship from the U.S. There were definitely some items at the fair that were different from what we'd expect to find at a similar event in the U.S. For one thing, many of the book booths were very focused on English language learning and advertised expensive packages containing scads of books and CDs to help children learn English. Our daughter is certainly lucky to be growing up in a household with two native English speakers! We also saw some Korean-style cribs meant for keeping baby comfortable on the floor. They were like giant, cushioned pens, with soft padded bottoms and walls. I thought that they looked like a good bed for me to sleep in as long as I curled my legs up. They were like cozy nests. Does their appeal for me mean that I am "nesting"?

After we finished up at the baby fair, we took a quick break at the hotel and then headed back out for dinner at my favorite Italian restaurant, Cine de Chef at the Shinsegae shopping mall. Everyone had a great time choosing something to order from the impressive menu, and it was fun to relax with friends at a classy restaurant. The only slightly odd touch was the ABBA video playing on the big screen over the bar. Why is ABBA so popular in Korea?

On Sunday, Keegan and I headed back to Costco, where we found a few more baby items and stocked up on salmon fillets, which are our new favorite dinner staple. We also got a ginormous beach towel to go with our beach chairs from last time, so we had better have good beach-y weather this weekend!

In other baby-related news, today I had a baby shower with my friends here in Korea. Several invitees were not feeling well and couldn't come, which made me sad, but it was wonderful to see everyone who could be there and to sample all the delicious foods that everyone brought. I have been pestering my friend Joy for weeks to make her world-class potato salad, so I was happy to enjoy it at last this afternoon, along with lots of sweets, and an amazing tomato-cheese quiche. My Korean teacher/friend Jennie made some amazing kim-bap (Korean-style sushi). Everyone was so generous and picked out adorable clothes for Baby, including a bunch of Korean kimono type shirts that are apparently all the rage these days. Baby was kicking a lot while I opened my gifts, and I surmised that she wanted out to try on all her adorable new outfits! Only three more weeks to go, unless she decides to show up a bit early...or late.

I am still feeling very well, although I am tired like never before, possibly as a consequence of getting up so often to go to the bathroom at night. I am dreaming like crazy, and even though I can't always remember everything in the morning, I think I am in the middle of a different dream every time I wake up. Not too many of them have been baby related, although I did have one dream in which Laura was teaching me how to breastfeed by demonstration, and I told her "Ok, stop, now I want to do it!" Guess I'm ready for my more experienced friends to pass the torch. Anyway, we have a doctor's appointment tomorrow evening, so I am hoping that Dr. Lee can give me an idea of whether the pre-labor ball has started rolling yet. I know that the baby's arrival is one of the most unpredictable HUGE events I'll ever have to deal with, and it is driving me crazy. Apparently, fatigue and uncertainty make me prone to rambling, so I'll stop there. I hope I'll have more news to report tomorrow after our doctor's visit.

Campaign Season

Apparently, there will be local elections in Korea on June 2. I think the elections are mostly for city and province-level officials. There has been a growing amount of campaign activity on Geoje for the past few weeks. It started with banners and posters around town featuring the faces of the local candidates, but it's escalated into antics that are much more interesting. For one thing, there are campaign trucks everywhere with huge loudspeakers on them, blasting campaign songs. The songs are pretty catchy, in what I like to call the "Korean polka" genre. Sometimes they feature the name of the candidate, although of course it's hard for me to understand what else they're singing about. The trucks often sit at major intersections in the towns on the island, but they also drive around into the smaller villages like ours. Sometimes, they arrive blaring music at uncivilized hours of the morning. I can't understand how this tactic is supposed to make people think favorably about the candidate in question. My Korean teacher told me that many people call the police to complain that the trucks are disturbing their studying or their babies' sleeping.

Another campaign tactic involves campaign representatives lining up along the roads, again usually at major intersections, wearing sashes and matching t-shirts and dancing or chanting slogans. One particularly memorable display involved a campaign rep wearing a Superman costume, complete with fake muscles and a mask that was a cut-out of the candidate's face. He was posing and flexing his fake muscles for all the stopped cars at the intersection to admire.

I have also seen a few campaign reps out in our neck of the woods with a garbage bag and some metal tongs, apparently out to collect garbage from along the road. Now this is a campaign tactic I could really get behind! There is such a garbage problem here because there are no public trash cans in areas like beaches or parks. If one of the candidates had a plan to improve that situation, I would find that much more convincing than catchy campaign tunes or Superman costumes. Not that I can vote, or evaluate campaign platforms in Korean. But that's my two cents, Geoje candidates!

May Is a Glorious Month!

The weather here in Geoje has finally begun to warm a little, which is a welcome change. This past week on one of my walks, I saw that the local farmers have begun to plant the rice paddies. I love the orderly rows of bright green sprouts and look forward to the summer months when the rice plants get a bit bigger and everything looks so much prettier. The trees all have their leaves now, and azaleas are in full bloom everywhere. Now that things are nicer outside, more and more of our neighbors can be found out in the grassy area in front of our building, playing with their kids or grilling out with friends. It makes a big difference to me to see the neighbors around and have a chance to chat - it feels much less lonely here. The grill parties are bound to pick up this summer now that Keegan and several of his co-workers have contributed a new grill, fashioned from a 55-gallon oil drum. We tried it out last night, and it was quite a success!

Our friends Mark and Chang Mi show off the result of the grill project. It looks much nicer now with a new coat of black paint, a smokestack, and a handle for the lid, but I don't have an updated picture.

Keegan and I had a really nice weekend together last weekend in Gyeongju, the first capital of a united Korea during the Silla dynasty. It was a cool place. Apparently, they have some kind of crazy architectural code in the area that requires all of the gas stations to be built in the style of traditional houses, with fancy tile roofs. There are tons of temples and historical sites to see, including some large grassy mounds that cover the tombs of kings from the Silla dynasty. There were glorious azaleas everywhere and lots of lanterns at the temples in preparation for Buddha's birthday later this month.

Keegan rings the temple bell at Seogeuram Grotto in Gyeongju.

We had a chance to take lots of pictures, eat some new and different Korean dishes (and some old favorites), and just relax. We stopped at Costco in Busan on the way home and bought two beach chairs to take to the beach this summer. You have no idea how hard such chairs are to find around here and how happy I am to have somewhere to sit at the beach.

I continue to grow bigger and bigger, and so does Baby.

Ellen and the belly at 33 weeks

This week we had another doctor's appointment, and all is well. The baby is estimated to be about 2.2 kilograms (4.85 pounds) now, so she is growing quite a bit. I can feel her all the time and see her little feet pressing out against my belly. I've been doing prenatal yoga at the maternity clinic and have met a whole classful of Korean pregnant women, some of whom are due only a few weeks after me in July. I also have gotten to know a Korean woman who lives in our apartment building and is married to one of Keegan's co-workers. She has been riding to the class with me and sharing her pregnancy stories. She is about 20 weeks along now, and she is also having a girl. It's nice to know some more people who are having babies here.

Keegan is unfortunately in Houston this week for training for work. I drove him to the airport yesterday morning, and this morning he checked in on Skype to let me know that he had arrived safe and sound. He has a whole list of little things to pick up in the U.S. and plans to meet up with a high school friend of his, so I hope he will enjoy his time there. Everyone here has been so sympathetic that he is out of town while I am so pregnant, so I am enjoying the recognition of my plight. Seriously, though, I am doing quite well and looking forward to several evenings of Gray's Anatomy and extra time to work on some projects before the baby comes. The week will go by fast, and I'll be on my way back to Busan to pick Keegan up in no time.