Friday, November 25, 2022

Breech tour du monde, day 16: Palmerston North workshop & an unexpected American Thanksgiving gathering

Another fantastic workshop day with 24 people (3 OB residents or "registrars," several student midwives, and lots of midwives midwives). We also had a cute 5-month-old baby in attendance for part of the morning.

There were two French midwives in attendance, so I had a nice conversation with them about living in France and raising our kids bilingually (en français bien sûr!).

I talked to Eric and the kids during lunch. Everyone ran in the Turkey Trot 5k and we had some very fast children.



During Thanksgiving dinner, they followed a Freeze sibling tradition of passing around the Thanksgiving grouse. Each person has to say, "On this Thanksgiving day, as I hold this Thanksgiving grouse, I am thankful for ____." It began as a sort of joke among several of the siblings who had these handblown glass birds. And now it's a favorite silly tradition.



This evening we ate dinner at the house of someone we knew during Eric's PhD program and my Master's program. He and his wife had just had their first baby (a home birth), and they called us to help fix a leaking roof. I remember that it was raining outside and that we had loaded up our extension ladder in our little Ford Ranger truck.

She had a tiny newborn and they told us the story of their home birth, which involved a postpartum transfer for hemorrhage. I remember thinking, "Why on earth would they do a HOME BIRTH when they could have gone to a hospital?"

Joke's on me...four home births later!

Anyway, this family moved to New Zealand a few years afterward and Eric has kept in touch with him over the years. Just a few days ago, he and Eric made the connection that not only would I be in Z, I would be in the same town where they live! And one of their very close friends is a midwife who attended our workshop today!

So David and I got invited over for dinner right after the workshopl along with the midwife and her family. We had homemade kombucha, homemade pizza, and homemade lemon poppyseed cake. As we were finishing dinner, we realized that it was technically still Thanksgiving Day, at least in some parts of the US.

So there you go--we managed to have an American Thanksgiving dinner entirely by happenstance.

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