Bump!

I thought I would show you guys my ever expanding abdomen. I took this picture yesterday because it was the first time that I actually looked pregnant. I haven't totally grown out of my clothes yet, so that's encouraging. I actually haven't gained any weight yet. I lost about 5 pounds due to morning sickness and had already lost a few pounds since moving here, so I still have a few pounds to go before I'm at the weight I was at when we moved here. I'm feeling considerably better than I was and my appetite has returned - not full force yet, but I'm sure it is only a matter of time. Here's the first belly picture I took at 9 weeks



And 2.5 weeks later, here's the bump again



My mom just sent me some maternity clothes... and I'm not going to lie, they kind of scare me. I'm holding them up thinking....this is going to fit me?!

A day in the life of...

I was tagged by Kasey and now I'm gonna tell you what my typical day looks like. Take note that my typical day did not look much like this before I became so closely acquainted with constant nausea.

My day doesn't start with an alarm clock, but I couldn't think of a better picture. My day starts around 2 AM when I wake up hungry and have to eat something


So, I roll over and grab whatever I can find to eat...yes, I sleep with food in my bed now.


Then I wake up again around 4:30 because I'm hungry again.

munch.munch.munch. back to sleep

Then I finally wake up around 6:30 and usually try to wait until 7:00 to wake up my sweet husband so that he can bring me breakfast. I eat grapefruit every morning and see what I can manage to eat after that.

Roll over, back to sleep.

Then I finally wake up around 11 AM and make myself get out of bed.

And head to the kitchen to make myself some lunch.


This is about the only thing I can almost always eat no matter how bad I am feeling. Fortunately, my wonderful family sent me many boxes of this soup!

Then I usually spend some time studying Kurdish or meeting with my language helper

This is Sorani, the language we are learning. Nope, I don't know what this says. I can read some of the letters, but that's about it.

Then I usually head to the office to get some work done. Here's a pic of our office


Then its time to go home and start dinner. I've just regained the ability to spend time in the kitchen without being sick. So, that's an improvement. Fortunately, my sweet husband is a great help in the kitchen.


After dinner we usually watch a movie or some DVD on TV or hang out with some of our teammates. I will probably eat a few more snacks before actually going to bed.

Then we start winding down for the night and read in bed.


Then it's lights out sometime around 11ish and then it starts all over again.

Halabja

This is a post I've been meaning to write for a long time. Jeff and I have both been to Halabja a few times and got some great pictures. It is a village a couple hours away from us that is infamous for the terrible atrocity that happened there on March 16, 1988. The 21st anniversary just happened last month and it was all the television stations were covering. Quoting from Wikipedia, "Chemical weapons (CW) were used by the Iraqi government forces in the Iraqi Kurdish town of Halabja, killing thousands of people, most of them civilians (3,200-5,000 dead on the spot and 7,000-10,000 injured[1]). Thousands more died of horrific complications, diseases, and birth defects in the years after the attack.[2]

The incident, which Human Rights Watch (HRW) defined as an act of genocide, was as of 2008 the largest-scale chemical weapons attack directed against a civilian-populated area in history."

The story we've heard here is that Sadaam flew a plane over the city and released an apple smelling gas over the city which caused people to come out of their homes and breathe in deeply because it smelled good. While people were out of their homes he flew a second plane over and released a chemical weapon that instantly killed thousands and wounded thousands more. The pictures we've seen of the destruction, which I will not post here but you can google the images, are so horrific.

This is a graveyard in Halabja. The number of lines on the stones tell you the number of bodies buried in that grave. Most families were buried together.


This is the largest mass grave in the area. They recently uncovered another mass grave that had several thousand bodies in it.


This is a close up of the headstone.


Halabja is also the birthplace of Klash, the shoes that we have been selling here to help fund heart surgeries.

Before we got involved with PLC, I didn't know much about the Kurds and I certainly had never heard about all of the terrible crimes that were committed against them in the 80's. It's not pretty, but I think it is important for everyone to know about the Kurds and about their history. They are some pretty incredible people, at least we think so! Our next door neighbor has been making bland Kurdish food for me since she found out I was pregnant and keeps bringing food to us. She calls me her daughter and is always wanting to take care of us.

Homesick

I'm not one to get homesick easily. But man, these last few weeks I've been so homesick. Just about every night I dream about someone in my family, my friends, or some kind of food from America.... usually it is a combination of the 3. I had a dream about my mom and sister last night and was so sad when I woke up.
I'm sure the pregnancy hormones and being sick all the time only compound the problem, but I guess I just keep expecting the swell of homesickness to pass, and it doesn't.
I feel like we haven't even been here long enough for me to miss everything so much, but I do. I guess the difference between here and the other places I have been overseas is that it doesn't feel like home at all. There is little to nothing that resembles America here. In some ways I'm really grateful for that and can really appreciate it. In other ways, I just wish there was a McDonald's here or something. It's weird the things that make me feel at home. Even when I lived in Istanbul I didn't go to the American restaurants like McD's or Burger King, Pizza Hut, Subway etc that often, but it majorly made a difference that they were there. I don't like to think and certainly don't want to admit that my heart can be so tied to worldly things like food....but seriously, right now I feel like some bacon, guacamole, and a good cheeseburger could totally affect my happiness. I'm laughing at myself as I write this and at the same time holding back tears because it is really true. I just needed to confess that the world still has me in its grips, and even though Jesus is worth far more than the sacrifice of these small things - some days it is really hard.
I don't know that I will ever feel at 'home' here the way that I did in Turkey, but what I'm learning is that our home isn't anywhere in the world. I can get on a plane and go back to America and probably gain 20 pounds, but my heart would not be full. Ultimately, our home isn't here or anywhere in this Earth but in God's kingdom, and I'm sure it won't be defiled by the presence of a Mc Donald's... and I'm also sure that I won't mind at all if I spend eternity without those things. I don't know if I will miss you guys any less as time passes, but I am confident that God's grace is sufficient for me today.

Randomness in the mind of Jeff Part who knows!

I am going to be a father. This is on my mind a lot. I tried to read about called What to Expect when your Wife is Expanding. It was terrible, I don’t know enough about babies or pregnancy to distinguish what was for real and what they were joking about. Knowing me I would think something was a joke and it would have been really important. So to remedy this I found two books on Amazon to read. I also found a manly green diaper bag. HA!

When I googled babies there were 112,000,000 hits that came up hence the reason I went to Amazon. =)

Amazon still wasn’t as much help but at least they have a baby section.

I am really excited about being a dad if you hadn’t picked up that!

I don’t know how to baby proof a house. Well I know not to leave sharp objects or cleaning supplies laying around. I always told Erin I would get a gun safe when we had kids. The one I want is at Cabalas, it’s green and I can’t afford it. =(
I just looked at babies r us at safety stuff. You can get stuff to put on corners of tables, baby gates, and outlet covers (in Iraq all the outlets are up high at my house so I don’t have to worry about that one for a couple years.

A couple of days ago I saw a little kid carrying a chicken and thought, oh he is taking it home for dinner. I decided it was his pet when he opened his water bottle and tried to let it drink some of his water.

I saw a taxi trying to get out a mud filled parking lot today on my way home for lunch. I stood and watched and thought to myself. We drive a patrol (it is a beast of car that can handle just about anything) and I am not sure I would park in this lot. Primarily because once I stop the vehicle I have to get out and walk through the mud into my office. But as I stood there and laughed to myself with a huge smile on my face I thought about going and getting our patrol to pull him out then realized I didn’t have any chains and then realized even if I were to offer to help I might not be able to clearly communicate I was willing to help. So, as I continue to watch him spray mud everywhere and his tires spin and his taxi go nowhere. I couldn’t stop thinking about why you would drive into this parking lot in a 2-wheel drive vehicle. I still don’t have an answer but this thought has not left my head all day.

OK, I made it home from watching the taxi get unstuck and Erin and I are talking and I tell her I hear someone on the roof splashing around in water. (It has been raining) She says its probably the neighbors. I decide to go look and sure enough there is a neighbor on my roof standing in water up to his calves. I feel bad cause he is trying to get the water off my roof. Then it dawns on me. Crap is my roof somehow flooding his house? Of course I don’t know how to say this so I just say I’m sorry repeatedly. I call my friend who comes over and offers to help, he reassures me this is not my fault but that is the fault of the owner of the house. I say, “I know its not my fault but my neighbors are very nice to us and I want to make sure there house is ok, lets go talk to them.” We go over there and while I think the inside of their house is flooding they were worried about us because they just say the water running down the side of the house and not the drain. They were trying to help us out. It was very thoughtful. They made us tea and told us they were there to help us no matter what time it was all we had to do was knock. I always thought our neighbors liked us a lot but today with the help of my friend who speaks the language I found out how much they like us. A lot!

Today, as I am seeing my neighbor standing in ice cold water up to his calves and I am standing right outside the door in no water I learned how sloped our house is. (Don’t worry I didn’t make him stand in the cold water by himself. I ran over there and stood with him and said I’m sorry. My feet just warmed up. I hope I don’t get sick tomorrow.

We got a blender and make milkshakes now! =)

I think I found a bbq pit that will work for me =) =) =)

I’m sure there has been more funny stuff like me blowing our electricity twice trying to change light bulbs and the huge flies here that are so big they are slow and fairly easy to kill but I can’t think of anything else right now except for the huge pile of work I need to get done in the next hour. Enjoy!!

Miracle

We saw our baby’s strong little heartbeat last night on the ultrasound screen and I just couldn’t believe it. Last week we went to get an ultrasound done to see if the miscarriage was complete and instead we found that the gestational sac was growing but the nurse couldn’t be sure there was a healthy fetus inside because it was so small. So, I went to see a doctor at a private hospital here…that was an experience in itself…. I’ll spare you the details, but it involved me getting naked in a room full of women and lying on a bed right next to another woman who was in the middle of giving birth. The doctor was concerned about the bleeding but agreed that we could not be sure there was not still a baby. So we were told to wait 6 days to find out if I was still pregnant. During this time the nurse who had been doing the ultrasounds called and asked if I had any twins in my family and when she found out that I was in fact a twin she proceeded to tell us that the only explanation she could come up with for what happened was Vanishing Twin Syndrome. It is where there are multiple fetuses but one of them isn’t healthy and it miscarries. The living twin then absorbs all of the fetal material that didn’t get passed and there is only one baby remaining. So, I did have a miscarriage of one baby, but we still have another baby and its heartbeat is strong and it is growing. We are so relieved and grateful to God for this gift. These have been difficult weeks for us, but God has been so faithful to give us peace and assurance of his everlasting goodness despite our circumstances. I have one more week that I have to spend at home taking it easy and resting and then we will go get another ultrasound done and if everything still looks good I will be able to return to life as normal. I’ve already been home for 1 week and I’m going a little bit crazy, but now that I know there is a baby growing inside me it seems a lot more worth it. If we have learned anything through this whole experience it is that God is completely sovereign over life and death and there is nothing we can do except trust Him. So, that’s what we’re gonna do now – Praise Him for this Miracle and trust Him for whatever the future holds.