It's a beautiful day here in Freddy beach: 10C. A regular spring maritime heatwave!
The past two days have been eventful in Bray-by land.
Last night we found ourselves back visiting our pals in the ER because I was having fierce pains in my right-kidney area.
This has been a pregnancy of firsts thus far: car accident, Fifth disease outbreaks. Why not add kidney stones to the list?
The gut-wrenching pain seemed to come in waves and my obvious discomfort got me looked at in swift time. A shot of morphine allowed me to come to my senses. We were home by 1:30am, which is pretty good by ER standards.
This morning I went back for a renal ultrasound and no kidney stones were found. This doesn't mean there isn't/wasn't one. It just wasn't detected via ultrasound.
Later in the morning we went to our appointment with the specialist. We learned that our little girl is weighing in at 3lbs 15oz today. That puts her in the 65th percentile.
She's breech, facing my right side (my kidneys! hmmm....) with her ankles up around her shoulders. It's called the "frank breech" position and it's the exact way that I came into this world. However these days it is standard to do a c-section - so I'm really hoping that she flips around so we can go with a natural birth.
While the baby is developing completely normally, the doctor found that my amniotic fluid levels were at the low end of normal. So we're going to go back in two weeks to keep an eye on things. Selfishly I find that pretty exciting because it means we'll get to see this little elf again. The ultrasound pictures are from today. The top on is face-on. The skeletor shot, I like to call it. The second picture is a profile shot and you can see her little arm above her face. The third photo is also a profile shot and it is my favourite because you can really make out the details of her features. Those are quite the lips, eh? Angelina look out!
As gorgeous as it is today, you can see that our front steps are still completely snow covered. I hoping for a good ol' spring meltdown the next few days.
One of the shining highlights of the entire trip was seeing the Cirque Du Soleil. There are four permanent shows in Las Vegas and we had a hard time picking just one. Tickets are not cheap. The most talked-about show in town is "LOVE." We lucked out and got tickets. We bought the thriftiest ones and the total came to $300 cdn. It was worth every penny though. The venue is built specifically for the show and it's the only "Beatles sanctioned" show ever to be created. I'm not even going to try to describe what a great experience it was because I will only sabotage it.
One of the more bizarre fixtures in Vegas are the oxygen bars. If you click on the photo above you'll notice that this guy has oxygen tubes up his nose and the blonde employee is massaging his scalp with a vibrating wire-type thing. For 15 minutes and $15 you can select an oxygen frangrance and, well, just sit there and breathe. The massages are extra.
The tacky tourist gift shops were mostly filled with absurd trash. I did, however, get a kick out of this skeletal Star Wars statue.
One thing about Vegas is that they go out of their way to have you forget what time of day it really is. This gondola picture was taking inside a mall in the Venetian hotel-mega complex. Notice how the sky is perma-blue? This picture was taken long after sun down. Stores line the faux-Venice waterways. 
Meerkats at the Grand Canyon.
Here we are at the Hoover Dam. What a majestic feat of engineering, especially when you consider that it was built in the 1930s!
Who knew that jackalopes were native to Nevada? Last summer we got a picture of one at the coffee shop in Bella Coola in BC. They must be hardy little buggers to thrive in so many different climates. Heh heh.
