Vienna Still Life

I stayed at the Le Meridien Vienna, and despite its overly modern decor, it was a good choice. There was free in room internet and a mini fridge filled with juice, water, soda. The hotel even placed a welcome apple (if there is such a thing) on my nightstand. I couldn't decide whether the severed hand was supposed to be inviting or frightening.



I loved the statues. Vienna has a really unique flavor, as far as cities go. Old and modern seamlessly meld, and around every corner there was something interesting, surprising, or beautiful.


Rhapsody on a kasekrainer.



St. Stephen's church, the architectural heart of the city.


Well behaved cherubs.


Naughty child stuck atop a lamppost.


Peace.

Spoiled

I guess that I should be grateful that the U.S. government has flown me to Vienna to have an amniocentesis, but I'm not.

I have been so worried and upset for the past week, when a routine prenatal test came back with an elevated risk for my baby having a disability. The test showed a one in fifty risk. Statistically that is very small, and compounded by the fact that the test used in Romania is notoriously unreliable. The more reliable one, commonly administered in the U.S., is not available there.

This week has been my crucible, my shadow in the valley, my sleepless night, because while I am having this baby no matter what, I am terrified that my child could be sick. It's stupid really, when you think about it rationally, my child could, God forbid, contract a disease or a have an accident at any time in his or her life. It's fate ya know, so why worry? However we mothers are not rational creatures. Now that the procedure is over though, I somehow feel calmer, as if the test itself was all I needed to heal anything that could potentially harm my baby.

I took heart in the obstetrician's careful fetal assessment during the ultrasound. She said she thought that everything looked normal. This evening she came by the hospital to check on me (they are very conservative in Vienna and have women stay overnight in this hospital after an amniocentesis) and brought pictures of the baby; she had even taken the time to enlarge the best one. A souvenir.

A better souvenir would have been to let me keep the six inch long needle that she stuck into my stomach. She actually did the procedure twice, because the first time the baby moved too close. The second time was worse than the first. (It reminded me of when I was in labor with Bee and had to have the epidural catheter inserted twice, because the first time it was too low. What is it about me and my bad luck with needles?)

So now I am faced with waiting--waiting to get out of the hospital and go back to the nice hotel in the center of Vienna--waiting for my Mom, sister, and sister's boyfriend to arrive from Munich tomorrow (my knights in shining armor coming to save me from my tendency to worry far more than is good for me), and waiting for the preliminary results, which I hope and pray will alleviate my fears.

-*-*-
Monday
-*-*-

After four long nights filled with tossing and turning, far too many pastries and strudels, numerous phone calls back and forth with my doctor in Vienna, one achingly frustrating plane ride back to Bucharest with no news (I listened to Christmas carols the whole way because it was the only way I could manage to calm down), my preliminary test results are back. The ignominiously named yet very reliable FISH test says that my baby is just fine. Now I know just how I'll feel on resurrection morning.

(It's a girl!)

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A mother's joy

Add this to the list of chores a toddler enjoys!

In the napping house

Where everyone is sleeping, even the dog. There is only the rustle of the noisy neighbors upstairs, the hum of the refrigerator, and the faint smell of recently baked chocolate chip cookies.

I am full and fat from lunch with my husband and several of the aforementioned cookies. I am virtuous because I have washed three loads of laundry and the kitchen is clean (although for the latter I have my mother to thank).

Nothing to do tonight except make dinner and maybe read for a bit. To relax and try not to worry about life's latest roadblocks.

This is the perfect stay at home vacation.

What I like about Sibiu

Sibiu is the the anti-Bucharest, what with its orderly city center, restored historic churches and restaurants, and unique architecture. Plus, the buildings are always watching you.


I quite liked our hotel, Casa Luxemberg. It's the pink building on the far right and it has the honor of being dubbed the cleanest and most spacious three star hotel I have ever stayed in.


The best part of Sibiu, however, is the chance to stroll from one cafe to another and eat pizza and gelato and other sweets until you can't walk anymore. In the photo below, my dear husband and sweet Bee are moving with purpose toward our pizza lunch.


It being a Saturday, the square was filled with brides taking their wedding photographs. There were young and pretty ones, and others not so much of either, but all (with the exception of one angry smoking bride) happy and smiling. The grooms mostly trailed behind their new wives looking slightly stunned.


Unfortunately, I could have also titled this post "plague and flood" because we all had terrible colds and it rained on and off Saturday and all of Sunday. But despite these slightly negative factors, I can still taste the walnut chocolate gelato and would do it all again just to have another plate of perfectly fried calamari.

Books #36 and #37

"Florence Nightingale" by Mark Bostridge: I am so happy to have finished this book. It has been my nightly punishment, my bedtime purgatory, as I have dutifully scanned my way through 500 endless pages documenting Ms. Nightingale's not so interesting life. The author lost me somewhere around page 200. I have never been so happy to discover that the last 100 pages of a book consisted of notes and a lengthy index. If it had been any longer, I never would have finished.

"The Summer Garden" by Paullina Simons: This book brought the emotionally exhausting Tatiana and Alexander trilogy to a most satisfying conclusion. While I was glad to finish the story so that I could return to the rest of my life, I was sad to leave the characters behind.

Cornhusker

Add shucking corn to the list of things that will keep a preschooler occupied for at least five minutes. . .

Overthinking it

I received my weekly pregnancy email from babycenter.com which happily informed me that my baby, in the 16th week of pregnancy, was now the approximate size and weight of an avocado.

That information is certainly all well and good, I can much more easily envision an avocado as opposed to earlier weeks, when my baby was compared to a lentil.

However, what my email service did not know, and could not have known, was that guacamole was on tonight's dinner menu. I had to eat my baby!

And that was very traumatizing.

Books #33-35

I am too busy to post on my blog because I have been swallowed whole into the extremely melodramatic, but can't tear myself away from it, melodrama that is Paullina Simons' Tatiana and Alexander trilogy. I must find out if there will be a happily ever after. I hope after nearly 2,100 pages of drama and three books that this is a remote possiblility.

"The Bronze Horseman," by Paullina Simons: book one in the Tatiana and Alexander saga. It's the oldest story line out there: two people fall in love but cannot be together but are forced to see eachother all the time. Oh, the yearning! It's Leningrad and WWII, so there is a lot of horrible starvation and other deprivation to add to their troubles. But it's worth reading if only to experience the suspense in book two, the very literally titled, "Tatiana and Alexander." These books are great, but they are eating up my life. I need to finish them and do other things.

"A Peacock or a Crow," by Victor Groza: a very strange book about foreign adoptions in Romania. As there has been a moratorium on Romanian adoptions by foreigners for the past several years, this book is of little interest to 99.99% of the entire world. I guess I fall into that remaining .01%.

"A Girl's Guide to Kissing Frogs" by Victoria Clayton: Reading this book is the literary equivalent of drinking an bottomless glass of Coca Cola with lots of ice. And maybe throw in a plateful of hot french fries on the side, with lots of ketchup. Fast reading, but a superbly fat-free indulgence.

Happy 4th of July!

Hope you get to eat as much cake as I did! (And that was a lot. . .)

Generosity

My dear colleague at work brought me 20 fresh eggs from her grandmother's chickens today.

I have been singing "Omelette. . . " to the tune of "Alouette" ever since.