Before Matt left for work on Tuesday, I made him take a picture so I could prep our gender reveal announcement.  I made 7 different ones, but this is the one I liked best and have shared :)

After Matt came home from work, we headed to the chiropractor for a much needed adjustment.  Then, we came home and tried to call some people.  People who were supposed to be available whenever (*cough* Dad and Curtis *cough*).  We did finally get in touch with my Dad.  Unfortunately, Dad was on his phone, not a computer, so he didn't have access to the Google Hangouts chat while in a video call.  Nor does he have WhatsApp, so we screenshared and pulled up the announcement.  We could hear them, but not see them when they first found out.  But thanks to Google, I did get some screenshots of everyone :)




Next, we had to wait like an hour for Curtis because he was practicing away from his house.  But we did eventually get him home.  The nice part about doing it this way was we actually got to chat with everyone, which we don't do often. :)  Unfortunately, Jackie and Curtis also don't have WhatsApp, and apparently I needed to give them permission to view the file....which was titled Boy Announcement2..... ah well.



After those two, we had to wait many hours because the rest of the family apparently is busy.  Also, time difference.  However, we lucked out because Michelle's class was cancelled, so we got to call her a little earlier than we anticipated.  Now, she does have WhatsApp, but she was talking to us via her phone, so we still couldn't see her reaction. (If you look at something else on your phone, it shuts the camera off on Google Hangouts.)  We did get to hear her say "Yay!" though. haha



Then, it was time to call Devan.  Unfortunately, he wasn't quite ready and Mom swooped in with her call lol.  She told us, "Dad isn't home yet, but we can't wait!" lol  Fortunately, Mom was on her computer and has WhatsApp.  We were able to send the picture to her phone and watch her reaction.  We told her we needed to see McKade too, but he didn't hold still very well :)  However, we did hear him say, "Yes!"  He totally predicted it would be a boy...because it will be born outside of Utah.  So far, all of the children born in Utah have been girls, and the only boys were or will be born outside of Utah lol




After Mom, we had to hop over to Devan since there was like an hour that he and Kayla were both home.  Unfortunately, they had some technical difficulties, but they did finally get them worked out :)  Apparently we've never video chatted with them and Kayla needed to download something, plus their internet was a bit slow.  Eventually, it all worked out, though :)  Again, we sent a WhatsApp to accurately maintain surprise and see their reactions :)


Then it was off for another call to Jason and Camile, because Jason was also only home for like an hour between work and church stuff.  Another WhatsApp success story :)



And that was that.  I did let my aunt Caleen in on the secret via FB chat, but no video call for that :)  After that, we went ahead and posted it on the Facebook.  At the moment, the initial announcement photo has 138 likes.  I also made it my cover photo, and while some of those are duplicate likes, it has 48 likes.  I guess everyone is pretty excited to know what we're having.  After all, I did make them wait like a whole day to find out lol

Here are pictures I captured from our ultrasound video.

BABY! haha, sorry. Anyway, before we get to that exciting little tidbit, let's chat about things, shall we?

At 20 weeks, Matt finally called Pakarii, the midwife house I'd found online, for me. You know, in case they didn't have anyone who spoke English :)  Good news, they have a doula from Australia who speaks English and the doctora who started Pakarii (who is from Germany) also speaks English.  We made an appointment for the next week and were told Dra. Angela likes everyone to attend a general info session that they hold on Thursday nights at 7pm.

So, Thursday, we made arrangements for our friends from the ward to watch Henlie so we could go to the information session.  Matt did okay at translating for about half of the time lol.  Peruvians talk a lot.  Oh, and while it naturally didn't start on time, it was only like 7:30pm before it got going.  Dra. Angela talked about the history of Pakarii and about standards of OBs in Peru (like, you're 30 or older? Automatic C-section!).  We all had to introduce ourselves.  I made Matt translate for me :)  We got a tour of the house by one of the other doulas, Luna.  At this point, I lost my translator :)  It was fine, though, because I recognized just about everything in the birthing room and it's not like I had questions :)  When we got back to the main room, Matt still mostly gave up translating, because he was also tired and mostly stopped listening :)

The next day, Friday Jan. 23rd, we had our appointment with Dra. Angela.  We took Henlie with us this time.  I was very comfortable with her, which was nice.  She took my history and gave me a small check-up.  We also listened to the baby's heartbeat on the Doppler.  She picked up both my and the baby's heartbeats at the same time.  It's always a fun comparison to hear how much faster their little hearts beat :)  We talked about breastfeeding and diet.  I'm sorry, I'm not hippie enough to completely give up sugar :)  But she did tell us about a fun farmer's market type thing they have in a park near there on Saturdays.  We also talked about exercise and how they have a yoga class on Saturdays there.  She also gave us a paper to get lab work done and told us we could either get an ultrasound there (at Suiza Lab) or for a bit more money, there was another doctor that was nicer.  In fact, she said he was the best.  So we concluded our visit, made an appointment for next month, and went on our way.

Since Matt's company has offered to reimburse us for maternity and birthing expenses in lieu of international insurance which wouldn't cover the pregnancy anyway.... we went to ILSAR for the nicer ultrasound with Dr. Huamán on Monday morning.  Can I just tell you - best.ultrasound.experience.EVER! I think we were the first appointment of the day, because we had no wait.  The table and pillow were comfy.  The ultrasound machine was fancy with a nice big screen.  They project everything onto a nice TV facing you so you can see what's going on.  

And let's just talk about this most awesome ultrasound machine, shall we?  It does 2D, 3D, and 4D.  It will show blood flow in red and blue.  It has a built in Doppler.  It is seriously so cool.  While I didn't understand everything Dr. Huamán was saying, I did catch after every measurement and whatnot "normal."  He even threw in a few "perfectos."  Then, after the ultrasound, they give you this nice folder with all of the info (in Peru, patients are responsible for their own medical records), unfortunately for me, it's all in Spanish lol.  Just like back home, they have printouts of some of the stills from the ultrasound.  And, BONUS!, you get the whole ultrasound on a DVD.  So awesome.  And, even though it was more expensive, it only cost S/.350, which is currently about $117.  Not bad for no insurance, I think.

Anyway, after that, we headed to Suiza Lab for my lab work. Unfortunately, Dra. Angela didn't mention that the blood work needed to be done fasting.  So we did the urine sample and had to go back Tuesday morning, because they require at least 10 hours fasting.  Another nice thing about Peru, if you're pregnant and/or have children with you, they expedite you.  Less lines :)  So we got like 3 vials of blood drawn.  Now we just need to pick up the results and send them to Dra. Angela so she has them for our next appointment.

Anyway, Tuesday we also worked on our gender reveal, and set up times to call family members to tell them.  I'm guessing I'll have some screen shots or something to share from our video calls, so maybe I'll just make you suffer and wait another post to see what we're having.  Hmm, it's kind of fun torturing everybody :)

We pretty much do two things ever - watch a lot of TV (in Henlie's case, for Matt and me, it's more computer games or internet surfing) and go to parks.  We need new entertainment :)

Matt is better about getting us out to a park than I am.  On this day, we took Henlie to the park in Lince.  Unfortunately, this (rather large) park is awfully crowded on Saturdays.  We walked to the playground, but it was packed.  We should have still had about an hour of story time at the library, so we headed over there instead.

Fun story, instead of the usual books and coloring stuff they have out, they had a dog adoption...that was just finishing as we got there.  So, we crossed the road to the other half of the park that is basically just grass and trees and stuff.  

Henlie had a blast playing her favorite game, Pigeon Chase.  We also saw a squirrel akin to the one we see sometimes on the power lines by our house.  Then we had a we cookie snack, and Henlie played with the thousands of little yellow flowers that fall off the trees.

We have one friend from church who lives relatively near us. (Yay!) And so sometimes we meet at Parque El Olivar to hang out and let the kids play.  This day, we decided to do lunch.  Sometimes we meet up with Matt for lunch too, so we picked him up from work, picked up some lunch from his favorite ladies in the market downstairs next door, and walked to the duck pond to eat.

Eventually, Christina and the kids also came and had some lunch, and Henlie woke up from her nap to have some lunch.  (This day, I got soup and some yummy noodles in a meat sauce.)  Matt went back to work, and we hung out. 

After lunch, we bought some fish food to feed the koi.  You'd think they were starved.  Also, I'm not sure any of the pictures I took could really do it justice, but those fish are packed, like some of them half out of the water trying to get food!

After we all emptied our baggies of food (which apparently are S/.1 a piece!), we walked around to the other side of the pond to see the ducks.  The ducks had more babies!  They were sure squeaky, which is funny because the adult ducks either hiss or make a really faint trill.  The babies weren't out, however, but we could see them in the bars of the mew they were in.

After the ducks, we headed over to the grass to let the kids play.  Nigel contentedly hung out in the dirt at the base of one olive tree, while Henlie and Sienna were holy terrors running all over the place.  Once, Christina went after them because they were getting near the road on the other side of the field.  Once, I had to book it after Henlie because she ran back to the ducks.  Those kids...

They made some new friends, though.  Norah and I don't know what the little boy's name is.  They spoke English (oh, while they weren't white, there were TONS of gringos in the park this day.  It was a little weird.), as did their mother.  They played with our girls.  The mom let Henlie play with her phone for a couple minutes, even.  Sienna managed to get ahold of their bubbles and then let Henlie have a turn.  They were still playing with the bubbles when it was time for them to go.  lol  We also left shortly after that.  Matt had a meeting at 3pm, so I called (it was close to 4pm by this point) using Christina's phone, and he was all done.  We walked back to his work and walked home with him.  It was a fun day just hanging at the park for a few hours, letting the kids play, and talking to an adult! lol I miss that.