Merry Christmas

We hope you all had a great Christmas. We had a great one. I got an awesome gift from Gerald and my family, more in a separate post.

Hello World

Mona Sophia Friedland was born on November 26, 2010 at 1:26pm in San Francisco CA with a weight of 7 lbs 3 oz (3260g) and length of 21.5 inches (52 cm).



The first contraction I had at 2pm on Thanksgiving. But at the beginning I wasn't sure if this is the real deal, so we continued watching the Macy's Thanksgiving day parade, which we had recorded that morning. After that I was pretty sure it started, so we called our doula Conny to let her know that we will need her soon. We decided to spend the time like every Thanksgiving, which means going to our little movie theater watch a movie and have a pizza.
We watched Burlesque. It was the perfect movie, easy to follow even when you are in pain.
After the movie it was time to call Conny again and tell her to come by. Around midnight we decided to drive to the hospital. There was no traffic so my biggest fear having the baby on the Bay bridge didn't come true.
Also the hospital was very quite, we got a huge room which even had a jacuzzi tub. From that moment on my memory is a little bit blurry, but I spend my time in this room somehow and then gave birth at 1:26pm to a healthy super cute little girl. I did all natural, meaning no pain medication or intervention.
Gerald and Conny were the whole time with me and helped a lot.
The rest of the day Mona slept almost all the time:



But every now and then she was awake:



The second day was busy with a lot of feeding. I guess that's how it will be for the next weeks.
In the evening we had our celebration dinner in the hospital: Filet Mignon:



Right now it's 2:26am and I'm feeding her with one hand and typing this post with the other hand on my phone.
Here's a last picture:

Maternity leave

I'm in the third week of my maternity leave. And more then ready for our little girl. It's only 8 days until the due date, but we really hope she decides to come early.

On my first day home I met with my friend Allison. She's doing professional photos of people. We took a lot of photos and they worked out great. You can see all of them on our website.


I was also busy preparing the nursery, washing all the baby cloth, etc. I think the wall stickers are really cute.



I also met with friends and yesterday I went back to the office, to be in the staff photos, they took for the holiday card. It was nice to see everybody.

And the rest of the time I'm relaxing :-)

Halloween

A little bit late, but finally here is my Halloween entry.
Like I told you in the last blog entry Gerald went to Italy the week before Halloween, so I had a lot of time to carve some pumpkins. Here are the results:



The Friday was my last day at work before my maternity leave and also a Halloween party in our office. I dressed up as a white cat which had a fish bowl in her hands:



Margaret, our office manager, had decorate the kitchen with spider webs, pumpkins and homemade spider, mumie and ghost cupcakes.



Saturday evening I went to a Halloween party at Rob's and Emily's place. The theme of the party was black and white ghouls. My cat wasn't very ghoulish but at least white. I had to leave the party at 10pm to pick up gerald from the airport. People looked a little bit strange at me, I guess because of the costume ?!?



Sunday was really Halloween and we prepared during the day for all the trick and treaters.
We didn't have as many kids coming over this year as last year, probably because of the World Series.

Pumpkin carving ideas?

It's already October, which means at the end of the month is Halloween, one of my favorite holidays of the year. And I love to carve pumpkins. This year the last 9 days before Halloween Gerald will be in Italy, which means I have a lot of time for my pumpkins. I think I will carve 3 different ones. But I need some inspiration. Any ideas? Here are some pictures of the pumpkins I made in the last years.

Birthday weekend

I started the weekend early by taking a day off. But I still had to get up early because I picked up Gerald from the airport.
When we got home we unpacked his luggage and then we had a nap. Gerald was so jetlagged and I'm tired all the time. The rest of the day was very slow but so nice just spending some time together.
Saturday we had to get up early again because we had a newborn care class in the morning and a infant CPR class in the afternoon.
We learned how to put on a diaper and how to swaddle a baby. I have to say Gerald did a pretty good job, this is his swaddle doll.


Sunday was my 30th birthday, I had decided that I don't want a big party because I'm just not in the mood for it.
But I was very happy that Gerald organized a very nice breakfast for me with music, flowers, decoration and a cake with 5 candles. He only lit 4 candles so it showed a 30 in the binary system.
After 3 hours of video conferencing with our families and lunch at CPK we went to Ikea. Gerald was very patient while I checked out all of the show rooms to get ideas for the baby's room, the au pair bedroom and our new bedroom.
The next day was Gerald's birthday. I decorated his birthday table with gummy bears and I stole his candle idea, but I had to lit only 1 of 6 candles.

At 12 we had our second 4D ultrasound and this time we focused on facial expressions. We have a few pictures showing her smiling

The "stuff" on the right is a knee, a foot, and a hand. Here is a video of all the 137 pictures we got. We also got a 25 minutes video of the whole ultrasound session.
After that we had lunch at Olive Garden and went back home, just in time for me to meet with a friend who had a baby 2.5 weeks ago. I held him for a while, what a cute little boy. And he was so soft. Babies are such a miracle.
Only 7 weeks 2 days (+/- 2 weeks) to go.

Weekend without hubby

The weekend started early again with a baby shower for me at the office. It wasn't a traditional baby shower, it was more of a get together, have some drinks and food and presents for me :-)
I got a tiara to wear saying "Mother to be".



And here are all the presents


Friday afternoon Gerald came back from his trip to Pittsburg. We spend the evening preparing his next trip to Japan which started Saturday morning.
After French Toast breakfast at the airport and saying good-bye again I met with a friend in San Mateo. We walked through downtown San Mateo did some shopping and lunch together and walked back to her place. It was a very hot day and I was so tired that I had to take a nap in her guest room. After that I drove back to Berkeley for a birthday/housewarming party. It was a fun party half of the people were coworkers of Gerald. I even stayed for another hour after everybody else had left and talked with the hosts about pregnancy and babies, because they are also expecting.
Sunday morning I met with Emily. We went to the Aquarium by the bay. It's a little aquarium but still fun.

After that we went downtown and did some shopping: baby clothes, maternity clothes, thank you cards, ...
Back at home I tried to fix Gerald's bike which had a flat, but I wasn't able to unscrew the screws and get the wheel out, I'm to weak. That's too bad it would have been a nice birthday surprise. He's in Tokyo until Friday. That's way too long, I miss him already.

W00tstock 2.5.1

The weekend started early with a party at the office because our data center move is over, finally. We had champagne, beer, apple cider, cheese, grapes and ice cream sandwiches.


At 5pm Gerald picked me up for dinner with two friends at the House of Prime Rib. That was very yummy. Too bad I can't eat a lot at the moment.
After that we went to the Great American Music Hall for W00tstock 2.5.1. The hosts are Adam Savage, one of the Mythbusters, Wil Wheaton, known for his role as Wesley Crusher in Star Trek: The Next Generation and the musical duo Paul&Storm. It was a fun 4 hour show presenting geeky music, stand up comedy, some sciency talking and even some magic.



I will go again to the next SF version but the next time we will be earlier. Even though we arrived 30 minutes before the show started all the good seats were gone. Fortunately there were some great seats for disabled persons and with being 7.5 months pregnant I counted as one. So we where very close to the stage entrance and could say hello to Adam Savage


He also remembered Gerald as on the scientists who worked on geotagging and were mentioned together with him in the New York Times and at Good Morning America. That made Gerald very happy ;-)

Day off

On Wednesday I had a day off, which was very much needed.
I treated myself to a day of beauty and relaxation. It first started with sleeping in, which worked out very well because Gerald had worked until 4am that night so he was tired too.
At 11 I had a two hour facial, I even got some special packages for my hands and feet for free.
Next step was a pedicure and manicure. The salon has awesome massage chairs which are the money worth just by themselves.
Quick lunch after that and then to the hair salon. Not a big change, just a trim. I had a very fun talk with the hair stylist about Star Wars and vampire books. And she even manage to get some curls in the ends of my hair, which isn't easy because it just likes to be straight.
After that I had 1.5h time playing Sims3 before Gerald picked me up to meet a friend, who is visiting from Michigan. We had dinner at a Peruvian restaurant, which I liked a lot. It's tiny and it wasn't very crowed but the food was good and the noise level was pretty low which made it easy to talk. Of course one of the main topics was pregnancy and babies, because he and his wife are also expecting.
All together a very great day. Decide for yourself if all this beauty treatment was helpful:

Baby updates

We are all very well and also the 3 hour glucose tolerance test was negative, meaning I don't have gestational diabetes, which makes me very happy. But the doctor still recommends continuing my diet like the last two weeks, because she doesn't want me to gain too much. Oh well, no cookies at work for me.
Our little one is now around 15 inches (38cm) and 2 pounds 11 ounces (1,2kg). She's moving a lot. I'm supposed to measure how long it takes to feel 10 movements, but right now that's not really necessary because most of the time that happens in only 2-5 minutes.
In addition to everything going well she's also super cute (at least I think so) and I think she looks a little bit like me ;-)

Labor day weekend

We had a wonderful 3-day weekend. It started with sleeping in on Saturday. Then a stroll over the farmers market and some more grocery shopping. In the early afternoon I baked a banana bread and made lemonade. Both was for the neighborhood block party we went to at 5pm. It was really nice to meet some of our neighbors and even better learning that we have a midwife and a post partum nurse in our block (just in case). For the kids some people had organize a bouncy house.

Sunday started again with sleeping in. During the day there wasn't much to do other than laundry. So I played Sims3. I hadn't played it for a long time. It's still fun.
Around 4pm we had a another party to go to. A BBQ at a friends house. We met people we know and new people, a lot of fun and talking and awesome food.

Monday was planned as another day of sleeping in but our alarm clock thought it's Monday so it has to wake us at 6:30. Of course we still manage to fall back to sleep.
Around 10:30 we left for Calistoga. It is a beautiful drive along the vineyards and wineries. There wasn't to much traffic so we arrived after 1.5h. First we had lunch at a very cute family owned Mexican restaurant and I had a pepper stuffed with rice, corn and raisins, topped with a pomegranate sauce. Very yummy.

Some more shopping after lunch and then we went to the Old Faithful Geyser of California. We had to wait around 20 minutes until it started. Here's a short video:



After that we went to the petrified forest. There are a few large trees which became stone because of volcanic activity.

It was great day but very, very hot. I needed a nap right after we arrived at home.

What a day

Unfortunately not a fun one. In a meeting I learned that almost everything I worked on in the last two weeks was good for nothing. But we are still releasing on Wednesday and I have to fix it somehow. I was close to crying in this meeting, but I'm tearing up very easily at the moment.
Friday I learned that my blood sugar level in the first glucose tolerance test was too high, so I have to do another one. That one will be 4 hours, I will have to give blood 4 times and I'm not allowed to eat or drink (other than water) for 12 hours before the test. I really hope I don't have gestational diabetes, but if so it's only for three month. I should be able to handle that.
Now a few nice things: we went to a child birth preparation class. It was very interesting to meet other parents-to-be. I hope the exercises we learned will help us in 3 months.
Also I put together the bassinet for our daughter. Here's a picture:


And right now I'm on my way to a prenatal water exercise class and hopefully I will meet there a woman I met at my sewing class. Yes I'm writing my blog in the BART on my iPhone, that's when I have a lot of unused time.

And again a new picture of me (I have never taken so many pictures of me before)

My first quilt

The top layer is done:


The next step is putting it together with the batting and the back fabric and then quilt it.
I do a technique called "stitch in the ditch", which means it follows existing sewing lines.
Here you can see how it looks in my sewing machine:


Yesterday night I finished the middle part:


Zoom in:


And here's a non quilted part for comparison:


I guess I will be busy for a few more days with quilting and then I have to finish it by adding a binding.
I really hope our baby girl will like it, at least our cat Candy does ;-)