Confinement food 坐月餐

Hubby volunteered to cook confinement food for me... haha! So I promised him that we can do some trial run before that. Start with something easy like ginger chicken 姜葱鸡.

One of the confinement food that I look forward to is the Pig trotters with vinegar 猪脚醋! Some people like it some people don't. My dad cooked it once long time ago, and I loved it! However, the correct one, according to him, is with lots of gravy. The one that he cooked was dry. So he said it was a failure. But I thought it was a nice mistake.

The only problem now is, where can I find pig trotters in The Hague? I haven't seen one yet...

Lo Mai Kai 糯米鸡

I have this craving of wanting to eat Lo Mai Kai 糯米鸡 these few days. If you like dim sum, you will probably know what I am talking about. It is a dim sum that has soy sauce marinated chicken/pork with sausage and chinese mushrooms all compacted into a bowl of glutinous rice and steamed. In KL, you will get them in a metal bowl. We turned the bowl upside down to loosen the rice and eat it with chili sauce. It is a very popular dim sum that you can buy from any coffee shop that sells pau (steamed buns). I remembered my dad and I used to share one big lo mai kai early morning with coffee as breakfast.

Lo Mai Kai sold in the HK restaurant in The Hague is different from what we have in KL. Here they wrapped them up in pandan leaves and there isn't much ingredients inside.

So I decided to look up on the net and found a long and detailed lo mai kai recipe which I am very tempted to try. It seems that it takes lots of effort to make one. I have all the ingredients, except the glutinous rice... so that goes into my Chinatown shopping list next round.

After years of no TV

People always look at us weird when we told them that we don't watch TV programmes.
It was a habit that was formed for years. In fact, we seldom watch movies nowadays. Yeah, we are probably one of those bunch who don't subscribe to the idea that you need to gain general knowledge by keeping ourselves updated with what is happening around the world. I feel that those news channels have too much of negativity going on that I feel happier by not listening to them.

However, hubby now thinks that it is a good idea to have one TV back in our house because we have guests later this year and we don't want them to feel bored. And, he is afraid that I'll get too bored after giving birth. One thing that I like most, if I have TV at home, is that I get to watch Animal Planet, Discovery and National Geographic again! Plus these channels are in English. This is the good practice that the Dutch has about foreign TV programmes because they leave them as it is and add in Dutch subtitles, so I get to listen to the original audio and learn Dutch along the way!

So we went around looking for a second-hand TV and bought ourselves one! A 10-year old Sony Trinitron 26". We love it!

Childbirth Class

Finally, the childbirth class is here.
I've been looking forward to attend this class. Not only because I get to learn more about childbirth through a teacher (not books), it's also because it is time to get hubby to learn more!
Err... it is not true that he is not learning. He did read up books like Bloke's Guide to Pregnancy, Happiest Baby on the Block etc... It's just that there are not many books that are catered for father-to-be and he has been asking me to teach him more. But I don't know what to teach. So, a childbirth class is perfect to fill in the necessary gaps.

Initially I thought it will be conducted in a classroom environment. But to my surprise, when we arrived, it is a living hall environment! There are nice couch and comfortable pillows everywhere! Perfect for expecting mothers! Plus, coffee and tea free flow with delicious chocholate cookies! Yum yum.... :)

The first session kicked off well. There are about 8 couples in the room. All of them are either foreigners staying in The Hague, or they have a partner who is not Dutch. This first session is an overview session. We introduced ourselves, and raised our concerns and worries (if there is any) through group discussion.

I thoroughly enjoyed it. And I can see that hubby enjoyed himself too!

More Photos...

This is our kitchen. I can't remember, but I think I took it on the day before we officially moved in. Noticed the sandwiches that I packed in the paper bag and the Nescafe bottle? It was also the day when the Ikea guys came and moved our purchases to the first floor.

Ikea charged extra for moving the stuff to the first floor. The most basic delivery charge is the one where they come and leave everything next to the street, and we have to carry them up. Since we ordered so many and we won't be able to carry them all upstairs, we decided to pay them to do the job.

Next is our laundry area. Huge! Compared to what we used to have in the serviced apartment. So I decided to put the iron board here as well. As usual the washer and dryer are all in Dutch and the user manuals have most languages except English. The models are so old that I couldn't find any downloaded manual on Siemens's website. The door in this laundry area is opened to our third balcony. Yes, we have three balconies in this apartment.

So as you can see all the Ikea stuff are everywhere in the apartment. This is our dining area.
After hubby started disassembling the chairs and table, we got something more proper to sit and put things around.



Not bad for a 2 hour work :)

Home under construction

We moved to a new place recently and I promised to share some photos. We are still in the process to setting it up although most parts of the apartment are done, there are still some little tweaks here and there that I would like to do.

So I'm putting up some photos which show the apartment's surrounding and when it was in its original state.

This is the view from the living hall. It is summer, so the trees and grasses are very green. This is considered a very good day because you get very bright sunshine and cooling breeze at the same time.

Just below the windows outside of the living hall, is this patch of garden which belongs to my neighbours. The occupants downstairs own the front and the back garden. The Dutch just loooovvveeeeee gardens! Their houses have very big garden but little living space. It is so different from our culture because we would rather want more living space and less garden. We will even go to the extend of cementing the garden into a concrete floor so that it is easier to maintain!


This is the backyard view from our dining hall.




Since it's 2 apartments combined into one. One of the living halls (now our bedroom) has a fireplace. I don't know whether it's still functional. But I personally love fireplace and chimney! However, nowadays there are digital fireplace (electronic), so you don't really need a real fireplace to keep yourself warm.

More photos in the process... stay tune!

Leg cramp...

Geez... it was painful! It has happened twice this week in the middle of the night.

As I said, I am not big size for a 7th month. But I can really feel the stress on the leg lately, and I'm sure I haven't really put on much weight yet. I can't imagine how uncomfortable it is when the belly is so big until I can't see my feet!

So my solution is: While I sleep, I put a pillow to lift my legs up and put another pillow behind my back so that it supports my back. I'm sleeping on my side, since that is the recommended way. I also bought a footstool from Ikea so when I am working in front of my computer, I put my legs up on the footstool. While I stand, I distribute my weight on my feet instead of relying on one side or the other. Hopefully it will help a bit.

Baby name

Thinking of a suitable baby name with my hubby's surname/last name is quite challenging, in mandarin.

No matter what I suffix it with, it sounds odd. Plus, you need to pronounce the name in mandarin, cantonese, hokkien, hakka or whatever other dialects that you can think of, because trust me, it can sound so normal in one language, but it can means something else in these dialects. These dialects: cantonese, hokkien and hakka are pretty common dialects that most Chinese can understand. If you give a name that carries funny meaning in these dialects, that poor child will suffer for life.

So I have call upon help from my parents and in-laws.

This is one to do that I personally felt more challenging than buying baby carrier.

Baby packmule society

Hubby's colleagues from US are visiting in October and due to the lower US exchange rate, buying baby stuff from US makes more sense than buying them here. Most pricing in Holland is priced at the same rate (just different currency symbol in front). So you can imagine, how much more extra we need to pay for a same item if we buy locally, plus some, we can't find them locally either. There is only one word to describe the pricing here, ridiculous.

One of the colleagues jokingly said that they are the baby packmule society for us :)
And I really appreciate their help because it's not easy to find colleagues who are willing to help us carry so many things (like baby carrier, stroller etc...) especially when these are 'baby' items, not some cool electronics gadgets. Each of them have to work out how to spread the load. Some lighter items have already been offloaded to colleagues who return to Holland earlier. We are expecting to receive our baby stroller in October, and I can't wait to see it!!

Usual checkup

3 days after we moved into our new place, I have my monthly midwife visit. I took approximately 5 minutes to walk to the hospital under a cold cold weather. It started drizzling since early morning.

The checkup is short and sweet. As usual, the weight, blood pressure, fundal height and the remaining time is for me to ask questions. I was particularly concerned about the size of my tummy. I'm in the middle of 6th months now, and I'm still not really showing. I'm concerned whether I'm not eating right, or the baby is too small. The midwife told me that for my size, everything is normal (they all said that don't they...), but she said, she does expect me to grow bigger when I hit my last trimester.

She also asked me to do a glucose test. All in all, the whole checkup and the visit to the lab took about 1 hour.

Oh, and by the way, I forgot to let you all know, it's a boy :)

I'm back!

I have not been online for the past 1 week, due to our move :)

Finally, the technician came and installed the internet service yesterday! You can't imagine how happy I was!

We have finally settled down in our new apartment after one full day of crazy move. 2 of our friends volunteered to help! Thank God, or else we won't have made it within the the limited time! They commanded me to stay at home so I was basically stationed in the apartment, busy cleaning and vacuuming.

The new place is so close to hubby's office, cycling is only 2m away. Plus, my hospital is within walking distance! Hubby plans to rent a wheelchair and he can literally push me to the hospital in case anything happen during these last few months. It's an amazingly quiet and peaceful area and it's only about 15m away from the city centre, 1 street away from the main street. Lots of senior citizens I would say... most probably because that it is a very old neighbourhood. All houses here were built around 1930's. The apartment is simple, and yet has beautiful characteristics. I will describe it as charming! I'll post some photos later.

The sweetest thing that happened during the move was a friendly gesture from our neighbour downstairs. She picked her flowers from her garden and gave me a stalk of them to welcome us into the apartment. It was soooo heart warming because that is exactly what you need when you're new in a place!