Maybe many of you have already guessed from the title of the last entry that we’ve decided to nickname our baby Kima, but I forgot to explain why. Here’s the etymology. My favourite flower is camellia, and that’s also a girl’s name, so I’ve always wanted to name my daughter (if there will be one, you can never know for sure by the look of the recent Carter genes) Camellia. Ben has no objection to that, so Camellia (in short, Kimi) for a girl it is. As for a boy (if there will be one), Ben and I both like the name Matthew very much, so Matthew for a boy it is. Since we don’t know the sex of the baby yet, and it is illegal for the scan doctors to tell the parents-to-be the result (if you’re interested to know the reason why, look it up), we combined the two names. We are left with the options of Maki and Kima, and Ben said Kima is better, because then I can be Kimama; he can be Kimapa.
We (or I) are parents-to-be who think way ahead of things. Before I got pregnant (ok, before we got married) we have started to think about and finalise our children’s names. I have always wanted Ben’s eldest younger brother John-Joseph to be the Godfather (from the English side) of our first-born, so we have decided to middle-name our eldest son Joseph. We also want a second middle name – I learnt that English people can have as many as they want –, something exotic for his/her colourful bloodline, and I’m not an expert in non-Chinese names, so Ben was left to do the creative work. He wants to use Ulysses, the Romanised name of the hero, Odysseus, who came up with the Trojan plan. Therefore our first son’s full English name is 99% decided, a syllabic and rhythmic Matthew Joseph Ulysses Carter.
However, we are still stuck on our girl’s name. Ben is from a Catholic family and it’s best for our children to have Saints’ names. Matthew is but Camellia isn’t, so we need at least one Saint’s name to put in her middle names. Ben’s mother’s name is Nicola, which is a Saint’s name and naming the granddaughter after her grandmother is sweet. Therefore we decided to use Nicole to be Camellia’s first middle name. Ben said I could choose the second middle name. My favourite female fictional character is Eponine from Les Misérables, but the character’s fate is too sad. No mother, when naming her daughter, is thinking of letting her die for somebody who doesn’t love her. If I choose a name to match with Ulysses, I need to choose from all the Greek/Roman Goddesses. My mother-in-law kindly read out loud all their names for me and I liked the sound of Persephone. When finding out she was actually Hades’ bride and had children not with her husband but with her father, Zeus, I got put off. My favourite Goddess, the Goddess of Hope, Elpis, sounds anything but appealing to me, so we are still stuck – well, at least I’ve got something to occupy my mind during labour.
Oh, by the way, we (ok, it’s me again) want 7 children, 5 biological and 2 adopted. My dream order is this: a boy first, then twin boys, then twin boy and girl, the youngest being a girl. When our children are old enough and we have won a lottery of several million pounds, I would like to adopt a boy and a girl with slight disability from China, because children like them usually end up in an orphanage rather than being adopted by other parents. Of course, this is only a dream, and sometimes it’s healthy to have lovely day-dreams. However, it doesn’t mean that I want a son this time; it really doesn’t matter. Whatever God gives is the best.
I should have posted them before, the future baby (2 boys & 2 girls) pictures I did with MorphThing. Ben finds them very scary.
It’s better with our real baby pictures.
I have written so much about names that I nearly forgot to write what happened on the morning of 9th October. I woke up at 6am on the dot – something which hadn’t happened for a long time, and rushed into the bathroom. I was very, very anxious. I still remember how I witnessed the two bars appear little by little. I was 90% sure that was it, so I woke Ben up and told him the double-confirmation.
After a night’s sleep, Ben wasn’t as calm as the night before; he started to become serious about it. We had to decide if we should go to the hospital or let our parents know first. At that time I was preparing to apply for a visa to go back to England, and we didn’t know if pregnancy would affect the application. We had already bought the tickets (14th to 28th December) and going back for Christmas every year has always been our plan. If I was really pregnant, would the long flight and jet-lag affect the foetus which might only be 3 months old? We first checked the visa application regulations and found that I didn’t have to tell the immigration officer that I was pregnant (it didn’t seem practical anyway), so we decided to go to the hospital at the weekend first and then tell our parents.
We have a lot of nice young mums in our office and I find myself very lucky. I asked two colleagues at lunch for their advice; they were very happy for me. They said I didn’t have to wait till the weekend. There was a nearby hospital and I could go have a check-up during the lunch break. I didn’t think it was that easy, so I asked Ben’s advice and walked to the hospital, panicking.
There were a lot of people at the gynaecology department of the hospital that day and I queued for nearly an hour. I don’t play games on my phone and I didn’t have a book with me, so I spent most of the hour panicking. I told the doctor that I thought I was pregnant. She asked me for some basic information (if I was married and if I’d already had children) and my last period date. I record all my cycles so I remembered it very clearly; I didn’t realise it was 50 days ago… She said if the stick showed the pregnancy twice and I already felt sick and missed my period for so long, it looked very likely that I was actually pregnant. She suggested I do a blood test.
Blood test report with hCG at 41647.00 mIU/ml
Holding solid medical proof in my hand, I rang Ben up, “it’s medically confirmed. We’re gonna have a baby. You’ll see its first scan tomorrow!”
Although I was a lot calmer than I thought, my eyes were still welling up. Finally, after 13 years of waiting (I have wanted to have a child since I was 14), I’m going to be a mother.
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♥The Flashback Corner♥
I was embarrassed to find that the two “Flashback Corners” from the last two entries were the same… It looks like I really have to take DHA-related stuff… This time I’m going to write about how we started to like each other. Actually we liked each other the first time we met, but because we were in the same friend group and he was one year my senior, plus we lived very far away from each other, we didn’t spend much time alone. I wasn’t looking for a boyfriend at that time because I’d decided to go back to China after I finished my degree, and having a relationship in England wouldn’t make much sense. Maybe because of that I was very relaxed in making friends and showed my true character, which attracted him (as he told me later). We met in September and soon it was December. I knew he was going to China with his Wushu class (which was also a reason for me to like him) that Christmas holiday and would leave before term ended, so I went to say goodbye to him. We still met up in the dining/study area. He was very happy to see me and gave me a Christmas card, but he told me not to open it in front of him. It was still early December and I didn’t think he would give me a present so I was unprepared. I was very embarrassed. On the train back home I opened the card. He wrote “Happy Christmas” very neatly in pencil in Chinese. It was obvious that he made a lot of effort but he still got some strokes slightly wrong. It was very cute and sweet. That was the first present a foreigner gave me carefully using my mother-tongue; I burst into tears.
Ben’s version: Once upon a time I gave a girl a Christmas card and she cried, nice.
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