Heavy Topic: baby weight gain.

In the spirit of being completely honest, I am going to tell you my weight and that only because while I may not always be doing things right, today I am proud of this little win.

I am 25 weeks pregnant and from week 20 til now, I have only gained 1 pound. I went from 210 to 211 in the last 5 weeks and that's pretty great. I've gained a total of 12 pounds this pregnancy and if I stay in the healthy range of 25-30 lbs gained, I will also count that as a win. My blood pressure is good, my labs came back normal and in a few weeks I'll be doing the glucose screening to make sure that Twitch hasn't sent us into gestational diabetes hell. I'm healthy as a 30 year old pregnant chick can be.

If I gain 13-18 more pounds I will be right back where I started in 2010, too big for my own good and not at all happy with life.

But, and it's a big butt (no, i'm not just talking about my own) I will have had two babies in less than 3 years and managed to not have any complications aside from sciatica as a result. I hope to be able to lose the weight again, we will have to see when the time comes. Now is not the time to be thinking about weight loss, i realize that, but it's hovering in the back of my mind and I wish it didn't bug me, but it does.

Toddler + Pregnancy = Problems

I'm baking a tiny, and I have a little dude. This translates into a few situations that I didn't remember from 5 years ago when I was last pregnant and had a toddler in the house.

First: Doodle does not understand that mommy is a gestating monster and sometimes the hormonal strain on my psyche cause me to want NO ONE TO TOUCH ME EVAR!!!!!. He loves me and wants the assurance of being able to run up get a quick snuggle and then make tracks toward his sisters' room because they've left the door open again. I'm trying to keep it together but there have been a few times when I've totally hid in the laundry room listening to the rumble of his tiny feet as he searches the house for me. And then, and then, when he puts his sharp little elbows of death in my abdomen I almost hurl. He is getting more and more emotionally injured every time I have to more his arms/elbows/knees/feet quickly away from the developing fetus in my midsection. I can see the despair on his face, "Mommy, why don't you love me?"

Second: Toddlers cannot feed themselves. My girls are old enough that occasionally Pumpkin has learned to use the microwave with some shouted instructions. She can nuke leftovers, mac and cheese and hot dogs for her self and Sunshine when I'm not in the "sure I'll play short order cook...what do you mean you want lasagna?" mood. Doodle just lays on the floor and cries until I figure out that hungry is the problem and have to get up and make food because he's little and all of his calories matter, and I can't in good conscience feed the kid snack packs for breakfast and lunch, that would be wrong.

Third: Carrying around a toddler is hard on your back when you aren't fighting the center of gravity problems that come along with pregnancy. Toddlers get heavy after a few minutes and it's easy to turn wrong, bend funny or just move too quickly and then you try not to drop the little dude while you also try to catch yourself to keep from crumpling to the floor in a sciatica induced daze of pain. Also, he cannot walk to the car independently yet, so sometimes just getting out of the house is a trial. I vaguely remember having a little trouble with this when Pumpkin was tiny, but I didn't start having "help! I've just been shot in the ass!" pain until about three weeks before Sunshine came along, so it wasn't like I spent months in pain.

Fourth: Sleeping is hard enough during pregnancy without adding in the bi-polar nature of toddler sleeping patterns. I've developed insomnia for the first time ever and it seems that Doodle has a mommy sleeping radar. When I'm awake he usually sleeps fitfully and if I'm not in the room, breathing calmly he will pop up and think it's time to boogie (not cool dude) So when I'm finally ready to fall back asleep (damn prenatal insomnia) he's all thrown out of whack and not ready to settle down and sleep.

Fifth: (and really only for your giggle factor) the singular weirdness of lying in bed with my toddler and being kicked from both the inside and the outside of my body is to say the least: disconcerting. I think they are all ready communicating with one another trying to find ways to make life crazy next year when infant twitch turns into Tasmanian devil number two and they begin leaving a trail of destruction through my life.

Of Mice and Women

Last weekend's plans started out with such promise. I was going to the lake, with my girl friends, sans kids for 3 whole days. 

delicious. 

Then I got a cough which never really developed into anything but stuck around all week, nagging and irritating and almost pant wetting for a few days. 

suck town. 

Then I spent all of Thursday night awake and coughing, hacking, sputtering and spazzing. It was not a fun way to spend the evening, BUT! I was going on vacation (sing that, it sounds better)

I get up to shower and then head out for the weekend and suddenly my chest hurts, and I can't catch my breath and I nearly black out in the shower. Whoa, wait, what?

Change of Plans: Preggo goes to the ER instead of the lake with the besties Friday morning. 

After a few hours in the ER, verdict: I have an upper respiratory infection aggravated by allergies and take some mucinex, you're not going to die, Huzzah! plans back on. 

So, I hitch a ride with Red who had to work Friday and we get to the lack around 11:30 at night, after a harrowing drive through the hanging gardens of Babylon, the land before time, and the Shire. Seriously our directions had us wondering if we were going to end up driving off the edge of the world for a little bit.

Saturday we spend relaxing, laying out in the most excellent sun and swimming in the slightly brown lake. Super awesome. good food, good time with the ladies who make me laugh, a trip to Hoosier wal-mart, and the day passed with relative ease and enjoyment. 

excellent

We stayed up late and at around 2 pm I made my fort of pillows, climbed in and settled down to enjoy the bed which contained no one but me. 

 

HOLY CRAP!!!

at about 4 am I woke up feeling like Thor had been hammering into my right arm for the last two hours! It hurt to think about moving my arm. I worked out that nothing was broken and then propped it up on some pillows and willed myself to go back to sleep because perhaps this was all just a bad dream....

HOLY CRAP!!!

45 minutes later I'm awake again, and it still hurts, what the hell, try to get back to sleep.....

and repeat until around 10 am, when i gave up on sleeping well and got up. Ice only helped a little, Tylenol not at all and finally against doctors orders I grabbed some ibuprofen and swallowed that as well. I tucked my angry arm inside my bra and shirt immobilizing it against my body and getting real familiar with my left boob and when that seemed to help I decided a sling was in order. 

After another trip to the Hoosier Walmart I came out with a sling and a wrap for my CTS prone right wrist, got everything wrapped up and spent the rest of the day in "relative" comfort. We shopped at the outlet mall and I picked up things for my family, who I was starting to miss, and got myself some fun lotion things and the Bath and Body Works. 

I get home around 9 on Sunday night and head to bed with a muscle relaxer and hot sock to ease away the last of whatever the frack was wrong with my shoulder and wake to only slightly less intense pain, stay home from work, putter around the house all day, and then get ready for bed along with the munches. 

Then it happened. 

THE ITCHING!!!!

Apparently I had gotten a sunburn on the most excellent laying out in the sun portion of Saturday. It didn't even register on the pain scale so I hadn't been to concerned about it. I should have been. 

I felt like a drug addict having a bad trip, I was convulsing and yelling and crying and rubbing my itchy back on everything I could think of that would provide relief. 

nothing worked. 

I took Benadryl and Tylenol and a muscle relaxer and had Jeeves slathering inches of aloe goo on my back and nothing was helping. Finally we consulted the Google machine and someone recommended ice packs ...numb the skin?

GENIUS

So, I sat with frozen hot dog buns, vegetables and other assorted grocery items pressed against my back while the last of the twitches faded, the muscle relaxer kicked in and I felt tired enough to not care about the itching and went to bed. 

My relaxing weekend turned into an exercise in sick, pain and crazy. 

To their credit, none of the awesome group I was traveling with got sick of me and threw me in the lake, so thanks for that guys, I hope I didn't dampen your fun this weekend. 

Lets do it again soon!

Ha!

Crafting, Sorting, Listing, Trashing, Etc

The past few weeks I have been hanging at home for the most part because I'm on a bit of a budget lock down and need to save money for the things happening in the next week. In case you've never met me I can justify just about any purchase under the sun especially craft supplies and baby shit. So in light of my sequestration (< is that a word?) I've been doing some work.

I have been crocheting like a mad woman, including several baby items, a blanket, a sweater, some washcloths, and various other things that strike my fancy. I sort of figured out that baking, cooking and crafting are the outlets my body chooses for nesting and now that I've hit 23 weeks and have between 15-17 weeks to go, I'm starting to feel it.

I've also been sorting. the baby clothes had been overtaking my closet and with the new addition on the way I'm actually going to create a nursery and so I needed to move shit back and forth between two rooms.In the past 12 months there has been a sort of musical bedroom activity happening in our home. Currently Doodle and I are sleeping in one room, a giant pile of assorted whatnot resides in the soon to be baby room and the girls room had become a pigsty. Shit needs to be worked out.

Lists make me happy so when I'm in asinine meetings I make and remake lists and then when I have 2 or more of the same list made I compare them, re-write them, dispose of the extra papers, and put the uber lists I my purse to forget about until I go through the process again and realize I have 2 uber lists and have to create a supreme list. Yes I realize this borders on madness, at least I'm not doing drugs.

During the purge of the crap in my daughters' room I rounded up two trash bags worth of broken crap, McDonald's toys, paper scraps, dried out markers, bills that hadn't been paid, and a lunch box that smelled odd enough I didn't open it to figure out what was inside. I also rounded up a whole trash bag full of toys to donate to charity and we still haven't gone through the pile of crap in the playroom/spare room of death. Good lord.

So this is week 23, shit is getting done, I've been married for 9 years, and I'm ready for the weekend during which I will be at the lake, with my girl freinds, swimming and eating, and not changing diapers or getting anyone anything to drink. Bliss.