New Furniture! 36 weeks 6 days in utero

Yesterday and today were busy days. First things first: I got a call from my sister where she told me about some really good photography techniques for taking pictures of people. She very politely did not say "Rob, your pictures are awful!" That's the way I best take criticism - by being shown a better way, and past ... mistakes ... (See Pui's picture in the Feb. 14th entry) can be left in the past.

So I did what older brothers are never supposed to do, and followed my little sister's advice. I did the B&W thing on my own, but I think it worked. The result is a much nicer picture, and much closer to the actual person I see every day - and still can't get enough of.

Our main activity over the last two days has been putting furniture together. We got a crib from the couple across the street - Peter and Elizabeth, whose two very cute kids have outgrown it. Plus a changing table (which we bought almost as much for the shelf space as a place to change diapers), and a rocking chair billed as great for nursing mothers.

Construction was done by Yours Truly ... with a little help from my mother. OK, a lot of help from my mother. And my Dad. And Peter from across the street. And Pui. But except for that help I did it all by myself.

As You can see from the first two pictures, they all had some piecing together to do. But as the last two photos show, we got everything together, and built correctly. No need to sell Pui on the benefits of a crib with uneven legs (It's like a rocker AND a crib!) or that having a changing table that wobbles unsteadily is a good upper-body workout for the person trying to both change the baby and keep the table from falling over, or that the rocking chair wasn't meant to actually, you know, rock. It's all stable, firm, and the only parts that move are the ones that are supposed to. Better yet, there was no blood shed or pieces broken.

Tomorrow we have a visit from my cousin (that we are looking forward to) and a visit to the doctor (that we are not looking forward to so much.) We need to see the doctor as part of the immigration process, to verify that Pui has no chronic horrible diseases. Having seen as many doctors as we have recently, this should be mostly just boring - and expensive. Nothing to be done about it though, so we'll go and get the required boxes ticked off our application and then go back to focusing on the baby.

We are now both reading about how to raise bilingual children. Here in the Seattle area, that usually means English and Computer, but we are going to try to raise Pat bilingual in English and Thai. There's always time to learn Computer later. ;-)