End of 2nd Trimester

This week marks the end of the 2nd trimester. How time flies! David and I finally picked the name for our baby - Emily Mae Woodward. Both Emily and Mae are easy pronunciations for my folks in China. Mae is David's grandma's name. It's also used in my dad's name. In Chinese, it sounds like the character Mei which means beautiful. It also sounds like another Chinese character which symbolizes the strength to prosper in a hash environment. According to the information on the website, Emily weighs almost 2 pounds (like a head of cauliflower) and is about 14 1/2 inches long with her legs extended. She's sleeping and waking at regular intervals, opening and closing her eyes, and perhaps even sucking her fingers. While her lungs are still immature, they would be capable of functioning — with a lot of medical help — if she were to be born now. She kicked and moved from 5:15am to 6:00am this morning. David said she doesn't know the concept of the day and night yet. Otherwise she wouldn't do that to keep her mom awake. I didn't mind about her moving at all. Actually I thought it was me who kept her awake because I constantly tossed and turned through the night to relief the sourness of my sides. Her moves reassured me that she was there OK and made me to worry less about the ambilical cord.

David is really catching up with his Chinese. Last night, we went to Friendspeak. Cloudia invited us to have icecream with our readers afterwards. Maggie rode with me and David. We began to talk in Chinese. David listened all the way and he understood most of our conversation. Sometimes I blurted out some Chinese when I talked to him at home. I didn't realize it. But he caught what I said right away. It was so encouraging! We were happy to see the girl we met at the airport last week came to Friendspeak - She's only been to American for one week!

We were so glad that Syed volunteered to host an Indian student who arrives today to attend UTD. It happened to be Kannan's birthday lunch. When my co-workers asked Syed why he couldn't attend the birthday lunch. He joked that he had a date. He got a phone call and left at around 11:00pm to open his apartment for the Indian guy. My co-workers winked: "It must be his girl-friend!"