You want me to bring what?!

So the hospital has a list on their website as to what expectant mothers need to bring to the hospital when they give birth. Google Translate is our friend in this household..but some words just don't translate. The 4th line down says that I need to bring 3 or 4 "ositos"....now apparently that comes across as "little bears"...which perplexed the rest of my expat friends over here..because surely they don't expect me to bring teddy bears to the hospital. I was thinking that I could modify some scrubs for Major and Molly and have them pose as the "little bears" that I'm supposed to bring with me. Apparently, ositos are the sleepers for the baby. I figured this out when I met with my midwife for the first time and things were getting lost in translation and so she did a good job of drawing the items on a piece of paper..until I was like "Oooh...you mean a onesie.." Lucky for her, I was good at Pictionary and she didn't have to go into too much detail before I caught on. Loretto (my midwife) may be asking for a raise by the time Wyatt gets here.

Baby Update - (Look at those cheeks!)

So this is the sonogram that we had on August 19th and I was excited to see that Wyatt was still enough to get some good pics. A direct quote from Dr. Carrillo -..."Well, we can definitely see that you don't have a skinny baby." Wyatt is probably still on US time and is thinking that he needs to store his food for the winter. I still get confused too, little man.
We have our next checkup with the doctor this Friday..and I realize that I need to fill in on how things are different here as opposed to the States in regards to having a baby. I'll be staying for 3 nights at the hospital where they'll give extra instruction on how to breastfeed, etc. Everyone says you get a completely pampered experience here..which is great. The language barrier is a slight issue..but I'm not really worried about it. My midwife doesn't speak English and my Spanish is a constant work in progress...but when I met with her by myself, we were both able to communicate what needed to be said. My doctor and my anesthesiologist both speak English so I won't be having to be having to act what I'm trying to say in the middle of labor.
One thing that I know is going to be difficult here is making sure that the names are written correctly on the birth certificate. People are used to hearing the same names down here..and unusual names are few and far between. You don't know how many times people have asked my name..and I've pulled out my ID card to show them that 'Yes, Kipley is my name..not the model of my car."....and they still call me by my middle name..Elizabeth. I even repeat the order of my name..but it's no use. I give myself a fake name at Starbucks (yes..they are everywhere here!) because I am tired of the confused looks. Sometimes I feel like being Claudia..the other day I was Maria.

New baby? Wake us when it gets here,,,,,,

It's true. While I'm scrambling to get stuff ready for the baby, our pups spend much of their time taking it easy and show not the least bit concern that things are going to be changing around here. Major is the white one and Molly is black. They are brother and sister Akita/Lab mix and will be turning 5 in December. So I don't know what age that makes them in people years...but I definitely feel that I live with a middle aged bachelor and his sister who are set in their routines. They can't keep their eyes open past 7:30pm and don't get up till 7am the next morning. They have a look of annoyance if you keep them up late and take big exaggerated sighs to let you know that they are not impressed. Those peaceful nights are about to change!

Paranal

I work at the Paranal Observatory in northern Chile. It's about 75 or 80 miles south of a little city called Antofagasta; it's in the middle of the Atacama Desert, the driest desert in the world. The observatory was built here because it's really far away from any sources of light pollution, and also because the atmospheric conditions here make for the best observing on earth. The downside to the remote location, of course, is that I'm up here for eight days at a time. But then I get six days off in Santiago with Kipley and our soon-to-be baby. The observatory is pretty amazing. We have a total of 10 telescopes at Paranal. There are four big telescopes called Unit Telecopes (UTs), four smaller mobile ones called Auxiliary Telescopes (ATs), and two other telescopes (VST and VISTA) that are used for making wide field of view surveys of the sky. The interesting thing about the UTs and the ATs is that they can be used together in ways that effectively make it like there's one gigantic telescope with a main mirror as big as the distance between the most distant telescopes. When they're used like that, they system is called the Very Large Telescope Interferometer, or VLTI. So anyway, the picture shows two of the UTs open at sunset, with a couple of the smaller ATs to the left.



The ATs look pretty small in that picture, but here's another picture that gives you an idea of how big they really are. That's me with the hard hat on learning how to move the telescope.