We stared this discussion in a previous post. Our second post in this sequel covers the "after childbirth" part. Before I continue with this episode related to the “after” part of childbirth, here are a few more items that I should have mentioned in the previous episode: 🙂 Mom needs enough calcium during pregnancy. Calcium is necessary for building bones of the baby. If mom does not get enough calcium from food sources, calcium will flow to the baby from the mother’s bone. Therefore, calcium is very crucial. Sources of calcium include milk, yogurt, broccoli, orange, sardine, etc. The duration of pregnancy is 40 weeks. Somewhere from week 24 to 27, the fetus is considered viable, meaning the baby can survive outside the uterus. It is a good idea to feel and notice the baby movement carefully at this time. There are some numbers for usual movements (for example, ten kicks in two hours based on countthekicks.org/faq/ ) Please keep in mind that every baby is different and there are periods of no activity. If you really want to check the baby movement ...

The address of Sierra Vista Growers is 2800 NM Highway 28, Anthony, New Mexico 88021. The website of the growers states that the city name is La Union. It does not quite matter what the city name is. The latitude is 31°57'4.00"N and Longitude is 106°38'28.71"W, which will never change despite any redistricting. It was a Saturday morning this summer (2016). We reached there a little before 10 am. We went there last year but memory is becoming a bit blur about the visit last year. We took enough pictures this time, some of which are shared in this post. Although Sierra Vista Growers is in New Mexico, it takes only twenty to twenty five minutes to Sierra Vista from the Westside Walmart on North Mesa Street. We saw many exciting scenes on our way to Sierra Vista, which includes motorcycle riding, horse riding, bicycling teams, horse farms, cranes drinking water, windmills, and of course all the green crops in the fields. The driving time was quite cheerful for our son! The big sign in front of the Sierra Vista Growers retail store is ...

I was taking driving lessons a long time ago. Let’s just say the person giving me the lesson was the instructor. Instructor: Before changing a lane, you need to look at the rear view mirror. Now, look at the mirror. Me: Ok. I did. After a while, Instructor: Sooo, what did you see? Me: A nice mirror. Instructor: Can you see the road behind you? Me: Yes I do. It’s a good working mirror. Sometimes instructions are difficult to follow, especially when the instructions are provided with an assumption that the listeners have a certain level of common sense in the topic area. Childrearing is a lot of listening to instinct. Instinct develops from being exposed to certain situations and from the experience that accumulates through the exposure. By the time we were expecting or Dear Son (DS), neither of us has been to close proximity of an infant for a reasonable amount of time. By reasonable amount of time, I mean decades. It has been decades since we saw our siblings or cousins as infants. Yes, decades! By the ...

Update: An update to this article has been made on June 26 2017. A previous update was made on July 11 2016 based on feedback from a reader. Thanks to all our readers for their valuable comments and feedback. We are planning on writing so many things that we are getting confused about what to write first. For example, we said in Reddit that we will write our stories on house shopping but we have not published much regarding house hunting yet. Before we start writing those stories, we feel that we should explain the geography of El Paso, TX first so that readers have a clear idea about the jargons we will use. Of course, every town has its own jargons! Everyone, who has lived in El Paso even for for a day or two, must have heard about the east side and the west side terms. In my first year in El Paso, I got confused about which side was east and which side was west. I came up with two terms: industrial east (IE) and residential west (RW). IE and RW are not correct terms since both sides have residential areas ...

This year it was on July 1, Friday. I am not sure if it is held on the same day every year. The full name of the event is Splash ‘n’ Sparks Appreciation Extravaganza. UTEP has arranged this event for the 18th time this year; that is, it has been 17 years since the first Splash 'n' Sparks was held. Kudos to everyone who arranged the event year after year. The event is like a fair except that there is not much business aspect of it. This is a big family event. We got a chance to attend two years in a row including this year. I think, only employees of UTEP, their families, relatives, and friends can attend. Employees receive complimentary tickets for their immediate family members. The tickets include entrance and food coupons. Tickets need to be purchased on site for relatives and friends who are not living under the same roof as the employee. We are not telling the reader whether we attended the  Splash 'n' Sparks as UTEP employees or as relatives/friends of an employee. Either way, the experience will remain as exciting ...

The next day was more exciting. We already brought breakfast the night before. After a simple breakfast, we decided to go to some nearby places and then go to the most exciting one. We will describe the exciting part soon. We should mention that we did not take enough pictures on the second day. A reason is that we forgot about taking enough pictures due to excitement. The second reason is that we had not yet planned on writing a public article regarding this trip at that time. Most of the pictures cannot be made public because we are present in those pictures. Anyway, we will try to provide as many pictures possible keeping our privacy intact. ? Our first stop on the second day was a nearby lake: Grindstone Lake (Latitude: 33°19'20.35"N, Longitude: 105°41'8.17"W ). Google Maps app marks it as Lake Ella Rose, as well. The reason we have provided the latitude and longitude is that we forgot the name of the lake and it took us some effort to find it out using Google Earth. We are providing the latitude and longitude so that the ...

Like any town of this country, when you are in El Paso you can easily plan a short vacation within four/five hours drive. We planned a trip to Ruidoso, New Mexico in the Spring of 2016. If you are not familiar with El Paso or Ruidoso, you probably do not know how different the climate of these two places can be. The difference is like wearing t-shirt/shorts to wearing a Eskimo Jacket. Like many major projects, my wife was the brain of this trip. She planned the entire trip and definitely, I did the hard work of enjoying it! The trip plan is shown in the figure above. From the picture you can see that we did not directly go to Ruidoso from El Paso. We stopped at a town called Mesilla, New Mexico. Mesilla is less than an hour drive from El Paso. Mesilla was the capital of the Confederate Territory of Arizona briefly during the Civil War. The town has a fascinating history, which grew over time, and definitely which is not the subject of today's web log. If you stop by Mesilla, I would suggest that you ...

We moved from another state to El Paso, Texas, a few years ago. As anyone who has done a cross-country move knows, it is never easy—especially when you have a one-year-old. Your brain feels overloaded, but the excitement of a new job, the reassuring smiles of your family, and some logistical help from movers (thankfully, partially covered by the new employer) make the transition manageable. One thing quickly became clear: transporting our thirteen-year-old car across the country would cost more than the car itself. It was time to part ways with an old and loyal friend. We weren’t proud of it, but we sold it for $1,550. Craigslist came through. Letting go was bittersweet, but practical. Should We Buy a Car Before the Move—or After? That decision led to our next dilemma:Should we buy a car on the East Coast and drive it to Texas, or wait until we arrived in El Paso? Buying a car is challenging under normal circumstances. Doing so during a relocation amplifies every frustration. As most people know, the first step is research—before ever setting ...