Birthing babies

It's been interesting being pregnant in China. A lot of people talk to me about it, as must be true of many places. Here, though, people are often surprised that I'm having a SECOND child! "So in your country, you can have two kids?" I'm often asked. I sometimes answer that we can have as many kids as we want. I'm not sure what I expect as a reaction from that, but usually, people just shrug and say, "Hm. That's nice." I kind of get the feeling that many people just assumed the whole world had the same 1-child policy.

I ran into a lady in the park the other day. She was there with her 3-year-old daughter and 7 months pregnant with her next child. There are a lot of exceptions to the 1-child-policy (including if both parents are only children, which happens more and more these days), and she was apparently one of them. We talked about having our second children, and while she did know that other countries were allowed to have multiple children, she was surprised that we didn't have to pay a fee for the second child.

In China, in some places and in some families, there is a lot of pressure to have a boy, so some baby girls would get aborted. I think we've all heard about that before. It's horrible, and as part of the effort to combat that trend, it's against the law to find out the gender of the unborn child. Unless you're a foreigner. Or if you know someone in the hospital. Or if you pay someone. But anyway, it's generally not known. Many people ask me if it's a boy or a girl, but more often, people tell me I must be having a boy. Part of this must come from the fact that Penny's a girl (and so the next one would be a boy), but people tell me also that since you can't really tell that I'm pregnant from the back, I'm definitely having a boy. "Could be!" is how I usually respond. (It's a girl.)

In America, we have this idea that for hundreds of years, Chinese peasants have been so hard-working and down-trodden that the women would work all day, go inside to have a baby, and then return to work in the fields right afterwards. That may have happened sometimes. It definitely happened in Pearl S. Buck's The Good Earth, but times have changed. People are shocked that I'm out and about with only two weeks (then one week, then two days) before my baby's due. They say, "Woah, Chinese women wouldn't dare go out so soon before the birth!"

Most women here spend a pretty long time in the hospital-- maybe a week or two. And since like 75-80% of hospital births are by C-section, most women stay more like two weeks. Then there's a tradition of spending the first month indoors: there are things you should eat, things you shouldn't eat, rules about showering, and an expectation that you'll take it easy for the entire month. By contrast, they think we foreigners are crazy, taking the baby out after just a week or two. One taxi driver told me, "You foreigners are hard-core. You go into the hospital, have a baby, take a shower, and then go home again."

I only hope it's that easy! :)