The Hero

While Mom and Teri were here we had a bit of car trouble. The roads here aren't always kept up the best and we hit a few major pot holes. The kind that you can't avoid because there's other traffic on the road but that can cause fun things like flat tires.

On Wednesday night we were driving home from another town up north a bit and we hit one of these fun pot holes and got a flat tire. It was dark and we were outside of town on a little two lane country road.

So there was my wonderful husband. He donned the required reflector vest and put out the required orange reflector triangle and quickly changed the tire. What a guy!

I bet we were quite a sight. A pregnant lady, a lady in a wheelchair, my cute sister, and a flat tire. So fun! :-)

More Pictures with Mom and Teri

At the airport - Welcome to Portugal!

Wheeling Mom around. Even though I'm the one pushing in the picture, Jonathan and Teri did most of the work during the week. A great team! And major son-in-law points! :-)

In front of a munument. A beautiful day!
Me and Jonathan in Fatima

Eating yummy pastries

A couple of sister pics.

Yes, my tummy is bigger. :-)

Thanks for coming Mom, Teri, and Nancy!

A Visit From Mom and Teri

My mom and Teri are visiting this week! Our good family friend Nancy came too for a couple of days and left Tuesday (amidst an airline pilots strike!).

We started their visit with a great birthday dinner for Matthew at the Davis's.
Here's a group picture. Here's Mom and Nancy eating barnacles and shrimp. Yum!

Here's Teri and Nancy doing some sightseeing.

On Sunday afternoon we stumbled on a cultural festival. It was really cool! This is a girl dressed in traditional clothes. The next is a video I took of some of the traditional dancing. I especially love the singing in the background. It was live music!

Baby stuff

We bought a crib! It's from Ikea like most of the rest of our furniture! Here's Jonathan putting it together. I'll post more pictures as we get the baby's room more set up.


Here's me at 31 weeks! The tummy is feeling very big right now. This picture doesn't look as big as I feel... :-) That means the baby's growing! She's moving around a lot too.

My mom and Teri are coming to visit next week! They'll be here for a week to be tourists and see the city. Our plans have changed a bit though because my mom broke her foot on Sunday! She's in a cast and can't put any weight on it for at least two weeks. Oh my. Lisbon and Europe in general are NOT wheelchair friendly! So we're going to have to be creative!

Cultural Differences

In our pregnancy class they said if you're smoking, you really should try to stop. But, we know it's really hard so, if you can't quit, no more than 5 cigarettes a day is ok. What!?! We'd heard from a friend who lived in Spain for 10 years and had two babies there that her doctor told her the same thing. But that was 13 years ago! Hmmm...

We think we saw on the news today that Schwarzenegger passed a law (or maybe is trying to pass a law) in California that bans smoking in cars when there are kids inside. Is that true? We were in a restaurant just reading Portuguese sub titles because we couldn't hear the report so we may not have understood correctly.

That's quite a cultural difference!

My Kitchen Window

Can you tell what that is? It's an airplane about to land. No, it's not about to hit those buildings, even though it looks like it. The airport is just right in the city.

This is the view out my kitchen window. We're really close to the airport so we see (and hear) planes landing everyday. It's fun when visitors come. We think we've actually seen the planes with people we know on them.

Something else about my kitchen window - we hang our laundry outside to dry on the line. My belly is getting bigger so I'm getting to where I can't quite reach. Jonathan's going to have to start doing it for me! :-)

Learning...

Tonight we did something I bet you've never done before.

We went to our first birth preparation class. In Portuguese! Yikes!

You know, when I thought about having children I didn't picture giving birth in a language other than English. Well, our doctor speaks English but there's no guarantee she'll be there for sure when I deliver - doctors do go on vacation and that kind of thing - and there's no way of knowing if anyone else like the nurses or other staff will speak English either. So, I guess it's a good thing we're learning the words for this in Portuguese! What an adventure!

It went well. There's only four other couples and the instructor was really nice. And it's right down the street from our apartment!

I'll keep you posted on how it goes...