Pregnant Lady Duty

So, Mike and Sarah had some exciting news when they got to our house last week. They're having a baby in November! Charles and I were actually pretty relieved to hear this, because as their tour guides, it meant we would now be moving the pace of a pregnant woman. We could take it easier, we thought. Nope. We have now learned that a pregnant woman's pace is about two hundred miles per hour more than our usual pace. Those two have lots of energy. We do not.

We started things off on the wrong foot by picking them up at the wrong airport. Rather, Charles got to the wrong airport, and began to suspect something was wrong because their flight wasn't listed on the incoming flights. Meanwhile, Mike and Sarah found an internet cafe in their airport, and I was able to let them know to stay put, because Charles had figured out his mistake and was on his way. If anyone else wants to come visit us, I promise we'll go to the right airport this time.

We gave Mike and Sarah our bed, and we moved our bedding to the balcony. That was a very smart move at first, because it's the coolest place in the apartment at night. But then the sun comes up at 4:00 am, and changes everything. It's a really good view, though! This is the sunrise from our balcony.

The next morning we headed to Red Square, of course! That's where you have to start when you come here, I've decided. St. Basil's Cathedral, right outside the Kremlin and Lenin's Tomb.

Russia's National History Museum, which was closed while we were there, but still really cool to look at. It's made all of brick, even with all the intricate designs on the outside.

The Kremlin wall. We got to go inside and see all the churches, and one of them even had the Romanov's pew in it and stuff.

The fanciest shopping mall I've ever seen. We couldn't afford to buy gum there. But we could afford to use the "toilet," which is where the rest of the story begins. While we were at Red Square, Sarah started having some pain in her kidney, and was worried that her kidney infection was back. We took her home, called her doctor, and bought the antibioitics they told us to buy. Russian pharmacies don't require prescriptions for anything. It's kind of weird. Especially since you can't just self medicate with antibiotics. But we weren't, because we were following Sarah's doctor's instructions. Meanwhile, we started having to carry toilet paper with us, and make sure to find bathrooms in every place we visited, because a pregnant woman with a kidney infection= a tour of Russia's bathrooms. This is how the tour started to look:This is the boys reading their map books outside the lady's room in the Pushkin art museum. If I'd known how attached they were going to get to these books, I'd have taken over touring duties. These boys loved those map books. We were sitting in the middle of a really cool art museum, and they both had their noses in their books. Silly boys. However, Mike's sense of direction was pretty obvious. He was helping us figure out what metro exits we needed to take by the end of the trip. He's got me beat. Pretty good for someone who doesn't even read Cyrillic!

This is the Russian Orthodox Temple, which we took Mike and Sarah to. Charles couldn't go inside because he wore shorts that day, but he's seen it several times, so he sat outside and read his map book while I took them inside. I love that temple. It's really cool. It's got a museum in the bottom that shows exhibits about how the temple was built, and stuff. It was destroyed during communism, and when Stalin tried to build a giant statue of Lenin there, they discovered that nothing could be built on the foundation. Not even a one story house. The water table was too high, or something. So they turned it into the world's largest public swimming pool, and called it good. Then in 1995 the government decided to rebuild the temple, and strangely enough, didn't encounter any problems with the foundation. Mike didn't seem too impressed, though.

Eventually Sarah's pain became very severe, and we ended up rushing her to the American hospital on the other side of town at two in the morning, where we were told that she could only take tylenol and continue taking her antibiotics. And they upped her dosage of antibiotics. They told us to watch her over the course of the day, and if she worsened or didn't improve, to bring her back, and she'd have an ultrasound. We got her home, and put her to bed, but could not get her comfortable. She was in an unreal amount of pain. I was afraid it was early labor or something, because I've never seen anyone in that much pain when they weren't about to deliver a baby. So we took her back in, and this time they were able to tell us that she not only had a kidney infection, but a kidney stone. So, I wasn't too far off. I've heard kidney stones can be compared to labor, anyway.

Charles and I took off to get some food for all of us while they were busy with doctors, and found a really good shashlik place pretty close to the hospital. There was a tree growing in the middle of the restaurant, but nobody else seemed to notice it. It was raining buckets outside, so it was nice to get inside and smell good shashlik smells. We remembered at that point that we hadn't eaten or slept since dinner the night before, and it was now close to bedtime again!

They wanted to check her into a women's hospital for a week, but Sarah would have none of it. They upped her dosage, and gave her extra strength tylenol (remind me never to have any kind of pain while I'm pregnant. Tylenol is a joke.) and sent her home for some rest. Mike wanted to get her on a plane the next morning, but Sarah told him that she was not going home until we took her to the market we'd been telling her so much about. Oops. The antibiotics and Tylenol seemed to be doing their job, though, so we agreed to take her if she promised to take it easy. She loved the market so much that we went back the next day, and I just have to tell you that Charles is going to get a really cool Christmas present this year! But I won't tell you what it is. We did get some really cool mittens, a faberge egg, and a wooden santa that I've been wanting to buy since I saw it weeks ago at the market. I LOVE my santa! Mike and Sarah left yesterday morning, and we took the rest of the day to just chillax and recuperate from an exhausting week!