Urgent: Enhance my vocabulary now!

The need to acquire topic-specific Vietnamese vocabulary has reached a fever pitch here in the paddy.  Our next door neighbour is about to have a baby, and the pantomimed conversations are starting to make me very uncomfortable.  First you must imagine her - nine months pregnant in a tiny nightgown on my front patio.  I try to be friendly and ask how she is feeling.  I admit that I occasionally pat my tummy in an effort to ask how the baby is doing.  Perhaps she is encouraged by my curiosity, but it is time to cut her off before there are more details than I would like to see communicated in sign language.

I have already determined that she is going to have a C-section based upon the uncomfortably low abdominal sawing motion she demonstrated the other day.  I understand that the baby is breech.  She said, "This baby not going down (with an accompanying gesture to the nether regions) like Mr. Ti (that would be the six-year-old son who I believe came from the aforementioned region - not her husband)."  I'm sweating just imagining the post-partum conversations.

We all know how childbirth war stories bring women together.  I'm all for the sisterly-bonding thing, but I am more of a verbal communicator.  The thought that I may get the whole story in pantomime terrifies me.  I fear that the tiny bit of modesty imposed by the diminutive nightie may be abandoned in a fury of post-partum hormones in an effort to share the universal experience of childbirth.

I have a plan.  While she recuperates at the hospital, I will take a crash course in Vietnamese pregnancy and childbirth vocabulary.  When she arrives back home, I will surprise her by inquiring about her experience in gesture-free Vietnamese.  I will then nod knowingly about whatever she tells me and lock myself in the house until she goes back to work.