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April 21, 2003
24 Weeks
Oh my, what a busy week we have had! I’ll just jump right into things here. I had another Dr. appointment last week, it was quite quick. We talked about the results from the ultrasound that I had, I didn’t really get much more information from the Dr than I did from the ultrasound tech, but I am fine with that. I considered that no news is good news. We discussed briefly that I may have another scheduled for 32 weeks as the tech inferenced because of my lower lying placenta at 20 Weeks, we’ll see in a few weeks. My blood pressure is still really low, which is great, and I have gained only 13 pounds so far for the pregnancy – right in line with how much I would like to gain. We did talk briefly about my risk for Gestational Diabetes, because I am what doctors consider a large person. However, my Dr, when we were talking kept mentioning that if she didn’t look down at my chart to see how much I weighed that she would have never guessed that I weigh as much as I do, so that’s good! She was also saying that because I was so healthy and fit and that my blood pressure was so low that it also decreases my risk quite a bit. I did mention to her that my Mum had told me that I was an 8 lb baby, but that my Mum didn’t have any troubles with me. I am not sure how much impact something like that has on my own risk, but both my parents are very large boned, my Dad is a pretty big guy at 6’4” and my Mum is about 5’8” and we carry weight really well. We heard the heartbeat again, beating nice, loud and strong at 150, the Little One was quite active to have a heartrate in that range :-)
I went to my first Aquafit class this week as well. We had gone out and bought a brand spankin’ new maternity bathing suit for me for this sole purpose and I had really been looking forward to using it! The suit selection was interesting though, I must say. I was surprised at how many of the suits were so clearly not made for swimming or doing activities in. Although I do suppose that women who are not as pregnant as I will be at the height of summer could wear some of the suits with more comfort, some of them I was surprised at their uncomfortable-ness… Ah well, no matter, my suit is perfect for me and my needs right now. As for the class, I really didn’t quite know what to expect, these classes can be so different, depending on the instructor and the people in the class. I was by a long way the youngest in the class, and the only pregnant lady. When I stepped into the pool, it was the most amazing sensation for my belly, it really felt as if it was just floating in the water – I can really see how it’s going to be a wonderful in the later months when I start to get *really* big :-)
My only problem with the class was that it wasn’t very challenging for me. I found that I wasn’t breathing any more heavily except for a brief period of less than five minutes right at the end of the hour long class, and then I quickly returned to a normal heartrate. While I would love to be able to do laps for my exercise, the pools around here keep the temperature far too warm to effectively do this exercise – I tested it out for a few laps after the class just to double check, but my first impressions of the temperature were correct. The pool temp should be at least 3 degrees cooler for effective lap swimming, otherwise it is literally too warm to exercise in. Those of you who have some competitive swimming under your belt I think would completely understand this comment. For those readers who have not, I hope you understand what I’m trying to say here – the pool was simply far too hot! I will go for a few more weeks, but if I find that it’s just not enough of a workout, I will stop. It is just not worth the time and effort of taking two hours of productive writing time out of my day to go and NOT get a workout.
On Friday, we arose nice and early despite it being a holiday. We had a massive undertaking to accomplish that day: a baking marathon. I am now divulging another odd activity that we engage in with regularity: baking or cooking marathons. One of our first purchases together as a couple (literally, I think it was the third thing we bought for our new apartment when we moved out of university residence) was a deep freezer. Since then we have had many many marathons, we work as a team in the kitchen performing one task or another to get an ingredient ready and then into the mixer it goes. For almost two months we had been completely out of any home-baked muffins and loaves and Simon was getting increasingly frustrated and bored just eating toast for breakfast, for myself, there was nothing to have as a mid-afternoon snack. Well, besides toast, which, is really rather boring to have as a snack. So, we unloaded the entire freezer last weekend along with the Spring Clean and took stock of what we could use for ingredients. Then, my favourite part: I get to look through my various recipe cards (I type all my favourite recipes into the computer and then print it out on post-card sized recipe cards for my recipe box) and cookbooks to come up with ideas for what we could bake.
I run the ideas by Simon, we decided on two different kinds of muffins (our kitchen sink ones, appropriately named with carrots, apples, craisons and coconut and citrus berry), three different kinds of loaves (banana blueberry, zucchini-orange and zucchini-craison), one type of bar (cranberry-lemon) and one kind of coffee cake (cinnamon). Shopping was interesting, we were getting some very odd looks as we cruised the aisles, our cart laden with 8 dozen eggs and 10 bricks of butter along with various other baking sundry goods. The best advice I can give if someone is embarking upon this type of work is organization is the absolute key – organization of everything like the ingredients, but also the order you are going to bake things so that you aren’t waiting an hour for a loaf to finish baking when you can also put in some muffins because they bake at the same temperature. That is the only reason how we can bake so much in one day. The other thing that made this day run really quickly and smoothly was that when we were making the decision on what kind of stove and oven to buy, we quickly determined that a convection oven was going to be the best choice for us, given our propensity for this type of activity :-) We had three oven racks in and things baking on every one for almost the entire day – we literally were baking for 10 hours, straight.
By the end of the day, the patio table, which we used to cool all the baking and is quite large at 5’x 3.5’, was completely covered with goodies, and most of them were stacked because we had run out of room! We baked 14 dozen muffins, 16 loaves, 3 square coffee cakes and 1 large pan of bars. We were totally exhausted, but the kitchen smelled absolutely wonderful for the next couple of days ;-) The only thing that I don’t particularly enjoy about the whole process is when we have to package up all the goodies, something that is somewhat tedious and usually a little frustrating as something doesn’t fit into a container and so on. Our freezer right now is literally so full that we had to move some items up into the freezer in the fridge, the lid wasn’t closing! Now I don’t have to worry about doing any baking for a long time, which was the secondary point of doing this now. I didn’t really want to worry about trying to do any baking with a newborn and myself to care for – the most I wanted to do was to have to take something out of the freezer to defrost :-)
And if all that work wasn’t enough for the whole weekend, because it was so nice out, and the first time it has actually been enjoyable on a weekend yet here, we decided to get started on our yard work for the year… I can not recall if I have talked yet about our yard. If so, you can just skim over this paragraph. We have, as we oh-so-affectionately call it, a rock garden. No, it is not one of those uber-hip Chinese gardens, but rather a yard filled with blasted rock. Our subdivision is built on where the prison used to be, decades and decades ago, and our yard (and our immediate neighbour’s) is blessed with a part of land that had to be blasted so that it was somewhat level. So, we have an abundance of rock. Last year, the builder was going to lay down sod to about 20’ back of the deck line, and we went over the whole front, side and back digging out what we termed ‘icebergs’ because we’d only see a bit of them, and they’d turn out to be enormous rocks. We also raked the smaller sized rocks out and bought a tandem dump truck load of gravel so that we could fill in the holes and level out the slope of the yard. We knew that the builder wouldn’t bother to do any filling in or levelling, so this task was left to us.
This year, we are doing another 24’x 50’ of grass in the back so that we will have a full 54’ from the deck line out. Remember that we have a gigantic lot, the second largest at almost a 1/4 acre, with our neighbours having the largest. So, we still have a LOT of yard left even after doing this grass extension. Despite it being a smaller amount of work than last year, it was still really daunting. Simon raked while I thatched the existing lawn. This was an enormous job – the sod laid down by the builder was beyond terrible, and we have, I think, done an admirable job trying to make the best of it. When it was laid down for instance, it had weeds already in it. Also, at the end of September, we were still able to just pick up the pieces of sod, none of the roots had taken in at all. Isn’t that nice? So I used our gravel-rake first to start the process, because the grass was so matted down, and then used a regular rake. I got only a small square of the yard done this weekend, but we plan on doing more next weekend, providing it isn’t raining so that we can put down some fertilizer on this poor sod.
One good thing we have discovered about the area we are clearing this year is that there is way more dirt than the areas closer to the house, thank-goodness! We’ve still got some of the gravel left as well, so we will use that to fill in the large holes and level out the really bad areas. When Simon is done raking the rocks into piles, we are going to get the same guy who came last year to break up the yard a bit to truck away the gigantic pile of large rocks and the large pile of smaller rocks we excavated last year and the piles we have raked this year. Then, it’ll be my job to take the weeds out… mmm… fun! We’ve got one of those garden claw things, which makes it a bit easier, but the land is still so rocky that it’s hard to twist the darn thing. Lots of elbow grease I guess! The next bit of work will be getting some soil delivered and trucking it all back to rake it out before seeding, but hopefully, we will have grass by the middle or end of June… I can NOT wait! Oh, the other thing we are doing now is locating and digging holes for trees that we will be planting in the fall. If you plant in the fall, the trees concentrate their energy into digging and building roots, rather than leaves as they do in the spring. This way, all we’ll have to do is plant and fill, we won’t have to dig the holes, after all, we will have the Little One at that time, sapping all our energy :-)
We went out on Saturday to do some errands and as we were reversing out of the driveway, our neighbours in the next house over were just getting out of their car and going into their house. I know that you are all thinking, what on earth does this have to do with anything, but just hang on there, okay? Just as we were starting to drive away, the woman turned to the side and revealed a big ‘ol belly… Like she was quite pregnant big ‘ol belly. This absolutely and completely astounded us. We have not had the best relationship to date with these neighbours and in fact nicknamed them the Prisses, because they are so prissy. In addition, they have been truly inconsiderate to us a number of times over this first year in the house, and what is worse, their friends are even ruder. We have watched (on multiple occasions) the friends empty out their cars of the garbage that is accrued on a road trip onto the side yard right beside the front door, completely oblivious to the fact that the wind will just whip that garbage right onto our property. There is a nice 12’ or so wide side yard between our house and theirs, but because of the angle at which their house is located on the lot, the vast majority of the yard is ours – there just isn’t a fence to really delineate that line. We have also watch as they toss coffee, soda etc. onto the side yard, most of it lands on our side, we now have some lovely dead patches of grass where this has occurred multiple times. How disgusting is that? Then, when they park on the street, they use the spot inbetween our two driveways, which would just be large enough to park a Geo, Civic hatchback or Mini in it, it’s that small. They don’t block their friend’s driveway however, but instead block at least four or five feet of ours, making it (as you can guess by now) quite difficult for us to even reverse out of our own driveway. All in all, quite an aggravating experience living next door to these inconsiderate people.
We have also talked about how as soon as we start having kids, they are going to want to move, they appeared to be a couple who would never, ever have children, from the way that they responded to the kids who already live on the street and play on the sidewalks and the cul-de-sac. I personally could just not imagine the father even being able to pick up and deal with a baby, it just seems so completely out of character for him. So, I think you get how shocked we were when I saw her belly. I immediately said to Simon that I thought she was pregnant, to which he said, there is just no way. I didn’t think I could confuse that shape however quick my glance was, I estimated that she would be due at the end of May, possibly mid-June. Well, today as I was raking away, I confirmed on several times that she was, indeed, very pregnant. This should be quite interesting. I wonder if they are going to change their behaviour any now that they will have a little person wanting to play on the very same sidewalk that the other children play on? Time will tell, I suppose.
One of my reactions when I was certain she was pregnant was how my immediate neighbour would feel with two pregnant ladies on the cul-de-sac. I saw her pull up and went right away to tell her, but put a sort of light spin on it, saying I had just seen her and found out etc, so that she wouldn’t feel as if I was keeping information from her, although I don’t know why I even thought of it that way. I guess I was just trying to be really sensitive to her miscarriage experience a couple months ago, and also didn’t know if she and her husband were trying to conceive again yet or not, so I just tried to make it as easy a break of news as possible for her. She was surprised, as I had expected, but I think that she took it really well too, which is good.
We did our yard work on Sunday, after resting on Saturday and recovering somewhat from our baking marathon, and also as we claimed, to build up an appetite for Easter Sunday dinner with our neighbours. She had cooked up a traditional Newfoundland turkey dinner, and we had a great meal. I ate absolutely tons of food, surprising both Simon and myself in the process, as I have found that while I may be hungry, I have not nearly been able to eat as much as I once was able… There is something taking up that room now! :-) The best part about the whole evening was that afterwards, she started to talk to me about how they were trying to conceive again, which was just wonderful news. Even more wonderful was that her husband was really supportive of this effort now, whereas last time he was, not unsupportive, but perhaps just not as excited about the prospect? I talked with her a lot about her miscarriage and the feelings she has had about it and suggested a couple of books for her to read about miscarriage, knowing that they will really be able to address some of her concerns and fears.
I think our friendship is really on the mend now, which is so, so nice. I have really missed our afternoon teas and chats. She has a new job which is really up her alley, working as an assistant social worker, which really lets her put her degree to work, but keeps her much busier than she was in the fall and winter. I think the job has been really good for her in a number of ways. I hope that as my thesis work winds up we will be able to get together for those afternoon teas that we used to do last summer and fall :-)
Symptoms: This has been a really good week so far for symptoms. I’ve been able to sleep well, my belly has been growing away and I haven’t had any sciatica problems this week at all. Even my skin seems to be behaving itself for the moment! We will see if this trend continues… I do hope so! I think the only symptom that I can talk about right now is my hunger, or rather, lack of hunger. I have just NOT been hungry at all lately. I do make sure that I eat, but they are usually very small meals, as I find myself feeling quite full easily. I am not sure that this is having a negative impact upon the Little One, as I think that if I really needed the extra calories and energy that I would find myself more hungry. Simon has said a couple of times that I do look like I have lost weight in a couple of places, the Little One must be burning those reserves… You know the saying that when in the first trimester and the woman can’t keep anything down that the baby will live off the land? Well, I think that is what is happening to me, the Little One is so content living off the land that it has not required much additional input… :-) We will see how this progresses, if it is just a phase or if it continues for a while.
**Talk to Me**
If anyone wants any of my baking recipes, just let me know and I’ll post them on my TTM board
How did you find bathing suit shopping with your ‘new’ shape that pregnancy has brought? Did you buy a suit because you needed one for a aqua class, or just because?
Do you do any crazy cooking or baking marathons like us, or are we just weird?
Did you find out a neighbour or a friend was pregnant late into the pregnancy and didn’t expect it? Did your relationship change because of this common link?
Namaste, Laura and the Little One
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