Yesterday Simon was 2 weeks here already! At 1 week he was up to 7lb 3 oz, just,  and ounce shy of hannah’s birth weight.  Yesterday he weighted in at 7 # 12 oz.  I am impressed and proud especially  considering his milk comes from good timor food.  No pizza milk, steak milk or icecream milk for him! 

The past two weeks have been the expected rollercoaster of emotions.  And, I have experienced minor setbacks physically as I haven’t followed my own good advice that I give to all my new moms in Duluth – rest, rest, rest that first week!  Get someone besides your husband to help you that first week.  Anyway, I am on the mend and laying around far more than I want to.

Did I mention dipers?  We used disposables (even found huggies in dili at the sky high price of 14$ for 44, completely too expensive for most folks here) for the first week.  But in the first week babies hardly pee or poop.  My baby is I think, unusualy hydrated for Timor.  I can qualify this as I have checked a lot of urine here in the clinic, as wel as asking patients about bathroom habit, and I would say that everyone is rather dehydrated.  When we began using cloth diapers at one wek, it took us about 5 hours to feel like the diper system used by locals is less than ideal.  People use these bib-like little units that actually do a good job of catching the poop but get soaked as soon as the baby pees.  Blankets also get soaked quickley and parents peed on alot.  Tom soon reminded me that Timor women who have babies stay at home, so getting peed on constantly is not a big deal.

But Tom and I are both going to be working again soon.  We don’t want to walk around with wet spots all over our clothes really.  I put out a desperate call to Libby on the first night of cloth dipering and have texted Deb and the Grandma’s hoping that we can soon get some hand down diper covers (mom already sent some dipers).

Now use your imagination for this one: buckets of dirty dipers, Tom washing off the poop by candlelight at 9pm after cooking dinner, cleaning up the kitchen and putting hannah to bed, and setting me up in bed with Simon.

Its march 2 and if the one computer in Timor telecom works and we’re able to get there hopefully we can post this this week.  Martin, we still need some advice on why our laptop won’t work here.  All the pc’s do!! I love to hear from you all and appreciate the prayers and thoughts.  Keep it up!!  Monica