My poor husband was lied to. Many helpful people told Rich that I was going to puke for the first three months and I would be huge and miserable for the last three months of this pregnancy. And several folks warned that once the baby is here, we’ll barely interact with each other. Mixed in with all these gloomy premonitions was the consolation of the second trimester.
Men would waggle their eyebrows at my husband, grin and tell him “wait until the second trimester.”
Well, dear readers, we are smack dab in the midst of the second trimester and were I Rich I would call bullshit.
I sailed through the first trimester without hardly any nausea. And thanks to my height, I’m really not very large by most standards. But there isn’t a lot of eyebrow waggling going on around here. Frankly, I’m pissed about it.
The last two weeks or so have been hard in general. My blood sugar has been all over the place. I wrestled them down all last week with ridiculous amounts of insulin only to have them hit rock bottom on Saturday. My own personal lowest moment was lying down for a nap with a blood sugar of 158 and waking up in a full panic a little over an hour later with a blood sugar of 33. So the exact time when we should have been having a quickie upstairs while our house guests were downstairs, Rich found me sitting on the toilet sobbing uncontrollably and blubbering about orange juice. Good times.
It’s not that I feel unattractive or am worried about the baby, despite what BabyCenter.com may hypothesize. My skin is incredibly sensitive so that I go from “that feels kinda nice” to “don’t touch there ever again, are those your hands or blocks of sand paper?”. If I lie on my back for more than a few minutes, I feel nauseated. If I tighten my stomach muscles for too long, I get really nauseated. And then there’s the lightheadedness or the chance that all these symptoms mimic my low blood sugar. Sexy, huh?
No one promises that a relationship will be consistant, emotionally or physically, over time. I suppose it’s part of the adventure we embark on together. And I don’t expect us to have everything stay the same … gosh, that would be boring. But I take solace that even though things are changing a lot these days, one thing and one person remains constant. And I wouldn’t want to figure all this out with anyone else.
I woke up at 4:10am from a nightmare (no more cop shows for me!) and had a hard time going back to bed. This is pretty par for the course these days that something will wake me up between 3 and 4am and I lie there for about an hour. At least I have Peggle!
In my fuzzy headedness this morning, I considered staying home today (and under the covers for most of it). I managed to rally, so I present a few things I accomplished by getting out of bed today, if for no other reason than to justify to myself that it was a solid decision.
I snagged another great OV license plate in my morning commute for my growing collection. I think warm weather brings them all out.
I received a bunch of new maternity clothes in the mail (crazy Old Navy sale! $4 tank tops!) and all of them fit. They will greatly help in my quest to have clean clothes each morning that don’t squeeze my bladder or look like a tent.
Rich and I went swimming after work in the incredibly warm and conveniently located pool in our back yard. I love that pool!
I convinced Rich to stand with me for a photo, but as usual, this was the best one from the entire set.
Finally, the most productive thing I did today was create a mix for you. I have been mulling this over in my skull for months and Pet Shop Boys inspired me on the way home. So I present to you a compilation of several unique covers for classic and/or familiar songs. A few have sprinklings of naughty words in them (Gin and Juice and I Will Survive, as far as I recall), so be warned.
Our neighbor used to make her son go in the basement whenever there was a thunderstorm. My mother didn’t like me to be on the phone or take a shower because I may be electrocuted.
And tonight, Rich is out at his ridiculously late hockey game, I’ve already read all my RSS feeds and the weather is screwing up DirecTV so I have no choice but to go out on the porch and enjoy the storm.
I read once that some areas of the world don’t have thunderstorms. I don’t want to live there.
I have changed my diabetic basal rates, bolus ratios and correction numbers as of yesterday. As a reminder, the basal rates I take are the insulin I need for just walking around. The extra insulin I take to counteract food is a bolus. And if my blood sugar is too high, I need to know how much my blood sugar will lower for each unit of insulin I take.
All these settings are stored in my insulin pump but I have to set them up in the first place. I also have to tell them all to my doctors with each visit (which most of the time involves my stammering and looking them up in the pump, particularly now as they change over time).
Since this little guy in my belly has been making my blood sugars crazy for about a week, I had enough data to try to fix them. I’ve changed my basal from 1 unit of insulin per hour to 1.3 units of insulin per hour. I changed my bolus ratio from one unit for every 13 grams to one unit for every 10 grams of carbohydrates. And I changed my correction settings to give one unit for each 40mg/dL I want my sugar to drop down from 50. It’s a lot of changes and I’m a bit tentative I may have overdone it. But those numbers were conservative considering how many corrections I was having to take all day.
So far my sugars have been much better today. It’s barely crested 150 all day and only a smidge low after a huge dinner. It was a little creepy, though, to dial up what seemed like a huge amount of insulin compared to yesterday. Sometimes I have a hard time trusting the technology.
This afternoon, my sensor alarmed in a meeting, telling me I was at 204 and climbing. I checked my blood and it said I was only 130. Hmm. I calibrated the sensor and went about my business. An hour later, I felt a little fuzzy headed and the sensor said my sugar was 120 and dropping. Figuring it was off earlier, I wondered if I was low. I checked my blood at it was 183. Hunh?! I checked immediately again (using blood from the same finger and needle prick) and it said 153. Oh for Pete’s sake!
I just put the meter away and told the sensor to shut up and trusted how I felt. And today, I feel pretty okay.
Food and I have had a tough relationship lately. There are some things I eat that taste so good, I feel like I’m experiencing them for the very first time every time. And other things I eat just to put nutrients in my system. I waffle between starving and completely uninterested in anything.
One of those things that wasn’t necessarily in the pregnancy brochure is the need for extra fiber to keep ones system from shutting down. However, my dietitian harps on protein and ignores anything I say about fiber. If I eat nothing but steak and cheese for the protein, though, I may not survive. (Side note: I’ve always figured that those people who eat nothing but cheese must have bowel movements that are more like a menstrual cycle where they get all bloated and cranky beforehand but only poop once a month or so.)
So since I had to go to the grocery store anyways, I decided to share some of my favorite high fiber and protein foods of late. As always, I’m open to suggestions.
Quaker High Fiber oatmeal
I eat this every morning for breakfast with a hard-boiled egg. It has 10g of fiber in it! It’s also got 4g of protein, so add that to the 6g for my egg and it’s not too shabby.
Kashi Go Lean bars
I stumbled upon these in the Power Bar aisle and they’re way tastier. They hold up well to living in ones purse or laptop bag for weeks at a time and they have enough protein and fiber to make the pretty versatile (8g of protein and 5g of fiber). They make a good breakfast on the go or snack. The blue box of cinnamon coffee cake is THE BOMB but they’re really hard to find.
Fiber Plus and Active Lifestyle chewy bars
I first found the Fiber Plus bars and they’re pretty tasty. Then I stumbled upon the Active Lifestyle bars in Kroger and they’re a bit more tasty and less heavy. Both brands have a whopping 9g of fiber in them but only 2g of protein.
Frosted Mini Wheats and Fiber One raisin bran clusters
These are my two favorite cereals of late. The mini wheats have 5g of fiber per serving and a respectable 5g of protein, while the Fiber One earns its name with 11g of fiber (!) and 4g of protein. I had low blood sugar last night (31mg/dL) and ate three servings of Fiber One cereal to fix it. It was delicious.
Other random snacks to mix and match
Pretty much every day I have something from this photo. The apple and fiber selects have a decent amount of fiber in them (5g per serving) and the peanut butter, cheese and yogurt all have good levels of protein (7g, 5g and 6g respectively). After some of those high fiber things I’ve listed before, I can manage a bit of cheddar cheese and live to tell the tale. Oh, and fuji apples are the best, hands down. Our child’s middle name may be Fuji.
