Monday 10 February 2014

Baby Kima on the way!

Even I cannot stand not updating my blog any more. I’m afraid if I don’t start doing it now I’ll end up spending the rest of my life regretting it (and Ben has already started making fun about the obvious setback in my English, sometimes correcting my Chinese at the same time).

  Following the topic from 3rd August two years ago (if you are interested please click here), Ben and I were buzzing with the preparation of our wedding in England. Then we smoothly got married on 28th December! It feels like ages ago now, but that was definitely the happiest day of our lives. Straight after the wedding we flew back to Shanghai to start preparing for our Chinese wedding which was on 11th February last year. Again there was a lot of stress and sleepless nights, but the outcome was more than satisfactory.

  For a person with an ordering obsession (putting things in order), I have found that the problem with having so many great photographers at weddings is that I want to go through all the hundreds of pictures to choose the best ones, rename and comment on them then share them. Also I’m quite lazy, so this big project is still ongoing…

  As a result the videographers became invaluable to me in terms of sharing the best moments of the weddings. We had Peartree Pictures in England and Shanghai My Young in China, both provided high quality and wonderful service. I highly recommend them. Through their effort we are very lucky to have 2 very different but equally sweet wedding videos: UK wedding highlights / UK wedding full (password Carter2812), China wedding highlights / China wedding full (password Zhang0211). You can also find some pictures in my Facebook albums (UK/China).


  We’ve found that married life really suits us. Our relationship has stayed as fresh as ever and there have hardly been any changes; if there have, they are for the better, thanks to the marriage preparation course we had. We understand each other more and more and quarrel less and less. We decided to wait a year to have children because we wanted to experience the four seasons first, just the two of us. Also we don’t believe in the Chinese Zodiac or the Western Horoscope, so we wanted to try for a baby in summer 2014, hoping for a more comfortable birth the next spring.


  Catholics cannot use physical or chemical contraception, so we did natural family planning. I had recorded my menstrual cycles for 6 months before the wedding. If the records are done correctly, natural planning does work 97% of the time. More than 10 months passed. During the last days of the golden week of the Chinese National holiday, I started to feel sick. At first I thought it was just because of the irregular diet I had during the holidays, and I didn’t even pay attention to the lateness of my period (which wasn’t news to me anyway). On the morning of 8th October I woke up feeling like throwing up, and the night before I didn’t sleep well at all. Still I thought it might just be a body-clock problem. When the symptoms lasted until the evening, I started to feel something was odd, so I peed on a stick.


  That wasn’t the first time I peed on a stick, and I came “clean” all the previous times, so I didn’t really care and wasn’t nervous at all. When I clearly saw the double bars on the tube, I started boiling. With heart beating fast and hands trembling, I shouted out to Ben to come into the bathroom to see the miracle.

  I said Ben, Ben I’m pregnant!!! The shock on his face lasted about 2 seconds, and then he looked at the stick and asked, “how much did you pay for this?” “About £1.50.” “Oh, it might be wrong.” “Shall I do it again tomorrow morning?” “Ok, now go to sleep and stop thinking about it.”

  How could I fall asleep?! Ben was unbelievably calm and started snoring within 2 minutes. I knew he wasn’t pretending not to care. There had been several false alarms which already made me a bit paranoid. We did things according to my cycle and I had signs of another period 2 weeks ago, so it was unlikely for me to get pregnant. However, I’d never experienced such sickness before. Anyway I couldn’t fall asleep until 2am.

Ben’s version: Wow, this is sudden. I haven’t written anything here in quite a while. Everything’s more or less as Miki tells it. Weddings are great fun wherever you hold them; honeymoon periods are romantic and very enjoyable and pregnancy scares are… scary. Well, I got over the scare quickly enough by rationalising that cheap Chinese made pregnancy sticks won’t necessarily be accurate but since then I’ve had to eat my words somewhat.

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♥The Flashback Corner♥

How did we become friends? The second time I saw Ben he was doing Chinese homework in the study area alone. I walked up to him and started chatting. I found him very hard-working and shy, despite his long hair. I like hard-working people. English people didn’t give me an impression of hard-working but this boy was different (I already knew he was 2 years younger than me). I started to think, oh, it would be nice to have a son like him.

Ben’s version: Hard-working?? First impressions can be ever so misleading! And ‘shy’ is not the word I’d use; ‘disinterested’ is better. I was in uni with a sole aim of learning Chinese and getting out of there. I was rather distracted by the lovely girl from Shanghai who came and helped me with my homework, though.

1 comment:

  1. (Or rather English Mum) Lovely blog - great to hear how it all started and am so excited to see baby when he/she arrives.

    ReplyDelete