So, I've been incredibly lazy and demotivated in the last six months. As is typical for China (and, indeed, anywhere) I've been hit with the "no good deed goes unpunished" thing this year and had, thereby, my life sucked out of me. I could rant for a while on this subject, but I think it's better, given the catching up I have to do, to just give you the executive summary: three of the foreign teachers at the main campus of WUISS did such a good job and were so popular with the students that in punishment for this we were sent to the Sweathogs campus (a.k.a. "The East Lake Campus of Wuhan University International Software School, a business division of Wuhan University"). So instead of having 14 hours per week with students that were an active joy to teach, I got, last term, only six hours with students of that calibre and 10 hours with the Sweathogs. (Yes, they increased my teaching hours by two so I could have more exposre to these dullards!) These students, in particular my early Friday class, are so worthless—not just as students but in many cases as human beings—that I just found myself not wanting to think about things.
Added into this was the increasing stress of my imminent fatherhood. Joan, as can be seen in the picture next to this paragraph, was increasingly obviously going to be changing my life still further with a bouncing baby basketball child of some indeterminate gender (you're not allowed to know this in advance in China and Joan didn't want to spend the money it would take to get the answer through bribery). The nervousness I felt around this I couldn't let show because Joan was already nervous enough for about fifteen people. I instead kept it bottled inside and pretended to not be worried.
Joan, in retrospect, is a pretty incredible girl. Where most women in China won't work for three months before giving birth, Joan was working literally up to the night before the exciting series of hospital visits leading to final delivery of our child. Those hospital visits in themselves were nerve-wracking—we went three times with false labour before we finally got the real thing—and in retrospect I'm very happy that the school completely screwed up in organizing a special class (it was to have started on the 7th of January but actually started on the 14th) because I'd have been useless in the classroom while all that was going on. As it was, I didn't feel particularly useful, but at least I could be there a little bit.
(I had to keep rushing home, you see, on the off chance the school gave me the information I needed for my classes so I could plan. In the end I had three days' notice to plan for a 14-day—uninterrupted!—course where I taught over four terms of English in two weeks to a single class. Three. Days'. Notice.)
Anyway, by now anybody who actually bothers to read this blog already knows that on the 9th of January, at 12:40AM, in the city of Wuhan, Lucas Richter (a.k.a. 王森鋭 – Wang Senrui) was born to two loving, exhausted and emotionally drained parents. It was a difficult delivery, made even more difficult by the fact that he weighed 4.35kg (9.57 pounds) that finally led to delivery by caesarian section. Still, it's all over now and Joan is recovering nicely from the surgery, albeit getting a wee bit cranky at our child. (Ironically I have more experience with babies than Joan seeing as I was babysitting at about the same time she was born....)
Lucas is, as of yesterday, one month old and has already wrought massive changes to our life. Now of course some of this is because of the horrific weather we've been having—China is experiencing the worst winter in living memory right now, but I'll be saying more on that later, complete with pictures—which has crammed us all, effectively, into the only heated room in the apartment. (I have a small space heater in the office, so I can do work there, but it's not very comfortable.) This crazy weather is beginning to let up, but we're still all stuck in that one room complete with jury-rigged bed extension for Joan's mother to sleep on. Still, all that aside, Lucas is now the master of our household. When he wants to eat, he eats (or our ears bleed – our choice). When he wants to sleep (which isn't often enough...) he sleeps. And, of course, when he decides that he wants to sleep on a person, not on a pile of blankets so soft it would embarrass a cloud? He sleeps on a person. (The choice, again, is that or our eardrums bleed.)
On the whole, though, to be fair to the little tyke, he's been good. I've babysat for kids far more prone to squalling and I've heard the horror stories of not getting any sleep at night because that's when the baby is active. Lucas sleeps through most of the night without fussing, waking up only at midnight and, typically, 5AM for feeding. A minor adjustment to my sleep/wake cycle will account for those late night feedings without me getting too wiped out by lack of sleep.
Lucas, at this point, according to everybody, looks a lot like me. (This will, of course, change and already has.) He's a big-'un and he definitely has my eye shape. His nose, to me, looks more like Joan's and his eye colour....
Well, people keep asking me about the colour of his eyes. I keep having to say "I don't know". It's frankly quite embarrassing, but the truth is that, despite Lucas' eyes having opened long ago (first glimpse of them was day 3 -- by now he's looking at things and actively tracking movement) I still can't really describe his eye colour. The eyes are dark. Very dark. But not dark like Chinese eyes which reach the point of almost looking black. There's a hint of blue to them. Or something. Maybe dark hazel? I have an idea. Click on the picture next to this paragraph (I took a closeup) and decide for yourself. Maybe then you can tell me what colour the eyes are.
Anyway, that's enough catching up for today. I promise that I will restart blogging with something resembling regularity so that my mother doesn't kill me. I'll also have more pictures to show next time around (it takes a while to upload these things!) including what it looks like in Wuhan when there's more than three days of snow in a winter.
One year ago today the unfathomable occurred. A lovely, young, vivacious, otherwise-intelligent Chinese girl by the name of 王琼 (Joan Wang) consented to marry a cynical, cranky Canadian. Friends and relatives of said Canadian flew in from Canada unable to believe, without seeing it with their own eyes, that their Michael Richter was actually getting married.
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