making diapers

the past few days have been a little uneventful. martinelli, one of the moms who is in the clinic while her baby receives phototherapy for jaundice, taught us how to fold diapers from thin cloth blankets. very useful when disposable diapers are so expensive. she also sent us out with a list of ingredients to make mango float... it is nothing like a root beer float, but it is a favorite dessert around here. you basically put graham crackers in the bottom a tub then pour on a mixture of chopped up mango (the manila mangoes from here - best in the world), condensed milk and all purpose creamer - so healthy! :) then once the grahams are covered you do another layer of them and add more of the cream mixture and so on until you have many layers, then you decorate the top with graham cracker crumbs and mangoes and let it freeze. sounds kinda weird but seriously it is the most delicious dessert ever!! i will make it for everyone when i get home :)

we have a fourth kitten now. this one is a little girl and she is a tiny white ball of fluff... we first named her tweety to go with the theme of the other cats but when giving her a bath (she was covered in fleas) we decided cotton might be more appropriate, but then we settled on bunny since Easter is coming up and we're debating giving her away as a prize at the Easter party on saturday... no one wants the kittens, surprise surprise, an extra mouth to feed, just what everyone around here needs. so for now our apt is turning into more of an animal shelter than anything else, good thing they're all friendly!

yesterday was the baby party! all babies born in march are brought in with their moms to eat cake and learn about family planning and get their babies vaccinated for TB. the TB vaccine is a little challenging to give because it is subdural, and if it is not given just beneath the surface of the skin it is ineffective - talk about high stakes. so lo and i practiced on each other before the babies came in. it wasnt too painful until the sterile water was injected to make a bubble under the skin, that stung a lot!! but after practicing it was fairly easy to do it on the babies (though they squirm a lot more than we did).

In the evening we had a masseuse come to the clinic, actually two, to give Lo and myself massages. These people give the best massages in Cebu according to Hilary and Gina and we were not disappointed!! 90 minute full body massage and it was sooo nice. After than we were pretty useless. hung out in the clinic, had some tuna (not much dinner variety around here... lunch is the biggest meal of the day and dinner is always small and boring), big fire late in a neighborhood nearby, you could see the smoke billowing up above the houses... hilary says a lot of people usually die when there's a fire because it travels so fast (the houses are built on top of each other practically, no buffer zone between them). as we were out watching the smoke and debating whether we should drive over to see it up close i spotted a rat (well, either a huge mouse or a small rate) on the telephone wire above the clinic. sick! im used to seeing squirrels on telephone wires, not rats!! one of the women looked up and said "only in cebu" shaking her head... haha. gross!!

ok, Cebu City tour today, should be fun. sorry for the boring post today, im looking forward to friday when i think we'll be spending the day at http://www.shangri-la.com/en/property/cebu/mactanresort. go ahead, be jealous :) hopefully ill have some new birth stories to tell you in my next blog!!