I’ve read this in at least five blogs recently, so I’m not sure which one to give credit to. You’re all tagged too.

1. Grab the nearest book.
2. Open the book to page 56.
3. Find the fifth sentence.
4. Post the text of the next seven sentences in your journal along with these instructions.
5. Don't dig for your favorite book, the cool book, or the intellectual one: pick the CLOSEST.

Prolonged maternal body temperature of 102° F or higher is suspect.
Suppose you just love relaxing in a warm bath and were accustomed to doing so before you realized you were pregnant. Don’t worry – most women automatically get out of hot water as soon as they become uncomfortably hot and long before their body temperature reaches 102° F, Recent studies have shown that a pregnant woman can stay in a bath with a water temperature of 102° F for fifteen minutes without her body temperature rising to harmful levels. Other studies show that during vigorous exercise, a pregnant woman’s body temperature is unlikely to reach 102° F for at least forty-five minutes (an unlikely length of time for a pregnant woman to exercise vigorously). These studies are the basis of the recommendation that pregnant women limit their exercise to a maximum of thirty minutes, especially in hot, humid weather.
Saunas also seem to be safe if used wisely.

AWC had a bazaar, and we went with our friends Lars and Suchi, and their son Ro. Our awesome finds:

• Reese peanut butter cups (pack of 3) - 20 kr.
• swaddling blanket with Velcro closure - 5 kr.
• Barrel of Monkeys game - 10 kr.
• Cthulu hand puppet - 10 kr.

We discovered that the people selling the peanut butter cups were actually just people from SuperBest, a supermarket chain. The SuperBest in Hellerup, we soon learned, has an American/British import section. After the bazaar, we checked it out and spent another 500 kr. or so on Oreos, root beer, Hamburger Helper, and other items that are way more exciting when you live in Denmark than they ever were in the States.

The swaddling blanket looked small, but at 5 kr. I didn’t care too much. It was indeed too small for Dagmar, but I worked out a way to combine it with another blanket to make it stay on better than the one blanket alone. And, more importantly, it is serving as a pattern for my mother-in-law to make a larger one. Woo hoo!

The monkeys are for Thomas. I never had them as a kid and have no idea how to play, but he was excited.

The puppet was a bit of a surprise. Is that Cthulu over in the kids’ section? Why yes it is! And in nearly new condition for a fraction of the retail price. We snapped it up. Shortly thereafter, a woman came over and gushed about how cute it was, saying she wanted to buy it but decided to eat lunch first, and she was disappointed (in a good-natured way) that we got it during her meal. She picked up a blue octopus plushie and asked if we wouldn’t be interested in that one instead. She clearly thought Cthulu was an octopus. With wings and feet. Guess she wasn’t looking very hard.

It made no sense to me why she decided not to buy it when she decided she wanted it, but I was quite glad it didn’t go to someone who thought it was just a cute octopus.

The bazaar was at Copenhagen International School, which apparently has a high-tech playground. Back in my day, kids amused themselves without needing such devices. I’ll need to blog more on that when I upload the pictures.

I know I’ve gone longer stretches without posting but for some reason, it feels like it’s been forever. Maybe because there were a couple times I wanted to blog, I was actually here in front of my computer, but I didn’t. Why?

Last week, I had a blog disaster. I don’t know exactly when it happened, and I have no clue how, but I went to The Dagmar Diary and noticed that, though there were titles for all my entries, the actual content was not published. Once before, this happened with this site, but the entries were still happily stored in RapidWeaver. It was just a publishing bug that I managed to figure out. So I fired up RapidWeaver to fix the publishing error, and discovered the entries were actually missing.

Maybe you heard about the recent Motrin babywearing ad debacle. You know what’s worse than being condescending about a mom’s parenting decisions? Deleting a mom’s blog entries chronicling the life and times of her child. I’ll just say I was not in my happy place. Thomas helped me recover the vast majority of the entries via Google and Yahoo! caches. After desperate attempts to recover the entirety of my birthing story, I remembered that I copy-pasted it into an iPhoto book. Whew! I had to rewrite the most recent two entries, but otherwise got everything back. Hallelujah, praise my husband!

I do not know if this was a problem with RapidWeaver, or if the files got corrupted somehow externally, or what. So, I was scared to open this site in RapidWeaver, in case it would delete all my entries. These aren’t my mommy entries, and I might not cry as much if I lost them, but I still have no desire to do so. I felt ok about opening up to blog this morning only because my entire site has been wgotten as a back-up. Now I get to try to remember what I wanted to blog about before.

As an American with a blog, I suppose I’m expected to say something about the election. Here is a sign I saw Tuesday morning outside a 7-11. It says, “Mr. President” across the top, and the subtitle is (in Danish), “a few hours from the White House.” I thought that was pretty brave to print a full day before the results were announced. I mean, we all knew it was coming, but you can’t really know until it’s over.

Fortunately for BT, and (IMO) for my country, they were right. I voted for Obama. I’m definitely glad he won. I even had a nightmare Tuesday night that McCain won, and I woke up in a panic to check the news and make sure it wasn’t real. But I don’t think the next four years will suddenly be all sunshine and puppies.
But wait! There's more!

You may know that I have a special, fiery-passion kinda pet peeve for people who abuse apostrophes. (Did you know they are never used in plurals? Ever? In any case whatsoever? It’s true!) Danes do it too.

Not that it isn’t still annoying, but I can understand a little bit when Danes abuse apostrophes in possessives. They’re exposed to a lot of English, and in English, we do use apostrophes with non-pronoun plurals.

RIGHT: Dagmar’s smile is wonderful.
WRONG: Dagmar’s smil er vidunderligt.
RIGHT: Dagmars smil er vidunderligt.

I guess that could be confusing, especially if you switch to English a lot. Thomas and I encountered a truly unforgivable apostrophe violation yesterday while having some keys copied. Our local heel and key* promises, right on their big main sign, to copy keys “men’s du venter.” For my Danish-impaired readers, that translates to “whil’e you wait.” Yes, friends. You read that correctly. The word for while is mens. It’s not some longer word that gets shortened to mens. It’s not somehow possessive. That’s just the word for it. Putting an apostrophe there would be like putting one in, say, circus. Actually, I think it’s worse because mens isn’t even a noun. It’s not even a verb! The presence of an s at the end of a word is not a reason to use an apostrophe, people! That goes for both Danish and English!

* Don’t ask me why Danish key copiers always do heel repair as well. It’s probably the same reason that groceries always have a “napkins & candles” section.