Bliss of Life

My belly now looks like something that should have it’s own gravity field. It almost feels like it is a separate entity. Sometimes, I find my self holding the bottom of my belly as I walk, like I have to carry it in every sense of the word. I’m still feeling good, but I don’t manage to get nearly as much done as I would like. Naps are creeping into my daily schedule, again. And I swear that someone has secretly removed the foam from my pillow-top mattress and replaced it with concrete, which means I’m not able to sleep as long all at once as I have been in the past. Maybe that will change when my back starts feeling better.

We went to our second Conscious Birthing class tonight with Lanell Coultas. It was fantastic and fun. Ben surprised me by saying that he thinks we should have a doula. I’ve tossed the idea around, but I hadn’t made a final decision. I guess now is the time to decide on that. I kept thinking that I would want as few people in the birth space as possible, just so I don’t feel overwhelmed, but I do like the idea of having someone else there who is part of my “team” should we need to transport to the hospital. I don’t like thinking about that “if,” but having a doula would make me feel more secure in that situation. It’s worth thinking about.

Anyway, here are some belly pictures that Ben took today. I’ve also included the titles he assigned to the pictures in his email to me because a couple of them made me laugh.

Side shot of belly on deck

Beach ball shot

Getting ready for yoga

Front shot of leg pose (That is technical yoga language for Ben otherwise known as Utthita Hasta Padangusthasana A)

(Notice Sasha, the camouflage kitty on the left.)

White Tantric was a blast. The hardest part was getting up every 40 minutes to go to the bathroom. I kept those monitors jumping to sit in my place every time I had to pee. Every year, there seems to be at least one pregnant woman at tantric. This year, it was me. Everyone there was so gracious about making sure I was taken care of and supported. I felt like a big round queen.

It is a really special feeling to meditate with your unborn child inside of you. I never know when the Little Mung Bean is going to remind me of her/his presence in my own practice. Sometimes I’ll feel a wiggle right when I finish a meditation, sometimes it’s when I start. Yesterday, there was a moment of spontaneous group laughter when it seamed like the meditation was coming to an end and the facilitator assured us it wasn’t. While everyone was laughing, the Little Mung Bean started kicking. It reminded me that we were in it together, all six hours of it.

After yesterday’s activities, today was spent sleeping. I meant to go to gurdwara at Sat Kar and Guru Dev’s house, but my placenta brain got the time wrong by two hours. I was too uncomfortable to show up that late. So instead, Ben and I went to vote and get some lunch. Afterwards, it was time to sleep, again. I went for a walk with the dogs and worked on a hat I’m knitting for the Little Mung Bean. As I type this, Ben is working hard at untangling the slippery silk yarn so I can finish the hat. I wish I could take a picture of him patiently working away at the rat’s nest of green yarn. He just said, “Dude, this stuff is tangling itself just by sitting around!”

What a man. He brings home the veggies, fries them up in a pan, and doesn’t mind untangling yarn for his woman. Wow, do I love him!

So far, the third trimester has come with a slight drop in my energy level. As far as the aches and pains go, they are all still there just amplified, which is a little disconcerting because White Tantric is tomorrow. Ben, my usual White tantric partner, is bogged down with homework and studying, so it’s me and the Little Mung Bean. I have a good partner lined up. I hope I don’t have to let her down and bow out before the day is over. We shall see…

I went to my midwife today for another gestational diabetes test and this time I passed it. Scored a 95. My diet has had to change for that to happen. I’ve pretty much cut out grains, sugar and juices, but my midwife reassured me that if I have a bad food day once or twice a week, it’s OK. A small amount of fluctuation isn’t enough to cause any harm. That made me feel a little better. Anyway, it’s late and I’ve been so tired this week. That’s all for now.

(We don’t know if we have a boy or a girl, but our baby is just fine too.)

Since failing the gestational diabetes blood sugar test last Saturday, I have been eating mostly protein meals with carbohydrates that measure low on the glycemic index. And because we happen to have a diabetic dog in the house, Dexter, whose blood sugar we check on our own, we have all the diabetic testing supplies. So yesterday I started out my morning with two eggs (I don’t really like eggs) and two soy sausage links. That meal consisted of 21 grams of protein. (My midwife has me shooting for 100 grams of protein a day, which is about 40 more than the average pregnant woman needs.) Then I did something that needed to be done for awhile, I put aside my newly developed paranoia of cedar pollen, ignored my aching sacrum and went for a walk with Ben. We walked almost two miles, waited two hours from the time I ate and when I tested my blood sugar it was 94! I was shooting for anything between 90 – 120.

(Week 28 development.  The third trimester is here!)

Later, I checked the cedar pollen count and realized it was only 26. My house hibernation is over. Thus far in my pregnancy, physical activity has been challenging for me. Exercise during my first trimester was completely unrealistic. Since then, the added baby weight created some back pain issues that made it unwise for me to do strengthening yoga postures on a regular basis, and until now, my unexpected allergic reaction to cedar and the ridiculously high cedar count we experienced this year made walking outside impossible. That is all changing. I plan on walking everyday (weather permitting), and Ben has promised to go with me, which makes walking even more enjoyable. And though I wish I could continue my moderately challenging asana practice, everything I have read in yogic literature, western literature, and midwifing resource books says that walking is the best exercise for pregnant women. The added benefit is that the Little Mung Bean seemed to enjoy the walk too. Every time I stopped to tie my shoes or stretch my legs the baby would wiggle around as if to say, hey why are we stopping. Go Mommy go!

Today was the day that I had to take the gestational diabetes test, and unlike most tests I have taken in recent history, I did not pass this one with flying colors. In fact, I flunked it by six points. (Too bad this one isn’t graded on a curve.)

My midwife doesn’t do the traditional gestational diabetes tests. There’s no scary looking orange syrup to drink on an empty stomach. No fasting from midnight. Her test is pretty logical. She has us eat a meal two hours before our appointment, and she uses a glucometer to test our blood sugar. Because she doesn’t give the typical gestational diabetes test, which considers anything from 90 – 140 blood sugar count to be normal, she goes by more conservative numbers, 90 – 120. My blood sugar was 126. Crap.

I have another appointment on Thursday at 2:00. From now until I give birth, I’m on a high protein/low carbohydrate diet, again. This smacks of familiarity. There were years of my life that I could not eat sugar or more than a couple bites of bread or rice because of some health issues. At that time, I lived with a lot of fear about my health. I was always waiting for the other shoe to drop. It’s different now. I’m not scared about my wellbeing, even though I’m aware of the strain gestational diabetes can put on my kidneys. I know in my soul that I am and will be fine, just like I know that my baby is and will be fine. The way I see it, I have a choice. I can waste my energy thinking about the what-ifs, or I can listen to my intuition. Intuition wins. But there is one what-if I am concerned about.

What if I’m not able to get my blood sugar under control by adjusting my diet and I end up needing a hospital birth?

I choose not to think about that right now, but the thought is hovering in the back of my mind, waiting for me to give it some attention.

It needs to be said that the rest of the appointment went well. We tried to listen to the Little Mung Bean’s heartbeat, which is always a highlight of every visit, but my midwife had a hard time locating it today. It’s not that she couldn’t find it. The heartbeat was there. She just had to keep chasing it around my belly because the Little Mung Bean was all over the place, wiggling and twisting in my womb. And as of right now, the baby is head down. But my midwife said that it’s too early to concern myself with that. At this point, there is plenty of room for the baby to do somersaults. It’s not until week 32 that the position of the baby is a real concern.

After the appointment, we grabbed a bite to eat and went to the Austin Baby Store to pick up a gift that a friend of Ben’s purchased from our registry. It turned out that the Austin Baby Store was celebrating their one year anniversary. They had all sorts of delicious treats and eats and there was a sculptor displaying the clay belly “bowls” she makes from plaster casts. They were beautiful. While I took my time admiring her work, she asked me when I was due.

“In May,” I said and watched as her eye’s nearly popped off her face.

“You’re going to get BIGGER,” she said in way that made me imagine myself as the circus freak I will no doubt look like by the time this baby reaches full term.

“Yeah, I’m going to get bigger.”

I went on to justify my belly by saying that I’m petite and short waisted, blah, blah, blah. But skulking in the shadows of my mind were the worries I had just birthed. Is my baby too big because of gestational diabetes? What if I have to have my baby in a hospital?

For the first time in weeks, I felt self conscious about the size of my belly. Crap.

This is the first year that I spent Valentine’s day away from Ben, at least as far I can remember. But this year I had the Little Mung Bean to celebrate with, so we went out to dinner with my friend Amrit and her mother Sat Kar. We ate some yummy enchiladas and washed them down with a piece of slap-your-mama-good-chocolate cake.  I know it was slap-your-mama-good because I was getting slapped, kicked, kneed and elbowed by the baby the entire time I was devouring it.

Anyway, I came home and worked on getting the house a little more organized, meditated and was about to crawl into bed only to find that Meester Kitty is up to his old tricks again. Just when I let my guard down, he pees on the bed. Yeah, cat pee. Fun stuff. So off went the blankets, sheets, pillows, and mattress pad. I scrubbed and steam cleaned the mattress and slept on the couch. I don’t think I need to go into descriptive detail about how uncomfortable sleeping on the couch is when you are almost 7 months pregnant, but I will say that I finally fell asleep around the time that most of my friends get up to do their morning meditations.

Needless to say, I’m a bit grouchy today. Dexter, my diabetic dog, doesn’t want to eat this morning, which is really important if I don’t want his blood sugar to be too high and to spend the rest of the day getting up every twenty minutes to let him out to use the restroom.  My shoulders are in knots and I still have to go get some oxyclean for this mattress. Ben has been gone for almost two weeks. Until last night, I just missed him being here. Now I need some help. Thank God he gets home today.

Sun salutations are not my friend right now. I’ve been doing prenatal sun salutaions in my yoga practice, and as much as I love the way they really get my blood flowing and my joints moving, they keep irritating my sacrum, as do many many other postures, which is troubling. So after a few days of waiting for my back to fix itself, I made an appointment today with our osteopath for an adjustment. Anyway, while I was waiting in a treatment room for the doctor, I could feel a slight movement in my belly every second and half or so. It went on for about five minutes and the longer it went on the more the baby started to wiggle around. It felt to me like the Little Mung Bean had his/her very first case of the hiccups. Too cute.

(Hiccup Cure, not to be done in utero.)

Also, Ravyn, another teacher at the yoga center where I work, just gave birth last night to a little boy named Sufyan. She had a home birth, and it sounds like it was an ideal birth. Maybe it’s because I’m pregnant, but every time I hear of another woman giving birth I just start to cry.

I literally just walked in the door about 15 minutes ago to find two dogs who were so happy to see me they were the equivalent of four-legged lunatics. Right now, I have a cat trying to sit on my keyboard and crawl up my belly just to get attention. I am in bed feeling tired but wired at the same time.

The flight home was turbulent. I’m not usually afraid of flying, but today I was on edge. I think it was the late hour and the fact that the pilot looked pretty tired. I tried to sleep, but I kept waking up with a feeling of panic every time the plane dipped. I’ll admit that I actually ordered the flight meal just because I knew that the food would calm my nerves. The baby let me know that every bump was felt inside the womb, so I did my best to steady my breath and use it to calm my body. It worked, just like it always does.

It seems like our little Mung Bean is trying to wind down too. I keep feeling a light thud on my uterus. So I’m going to lay down and try to get some sleep, finally. Tomorrow will bring a whole new set of things to do, like bathe and groom Dexter, water the withering plants and spray wash the crusted bird poop off the sidewalk. It’s a glamorous I life lead.

L.A. is beautiful. The weather is perfect. It was around 80 degrees yesterday with a cool breeze by the ocean. Couldn’t ask for more.

I didn’t end up going to Gurmukh’s prenatal class because she had a sub, and we got there too late for her regular 9:30 yoga class. It worked out for the best because every time I peeked around the curtain and looked at the class they were on their stomachs. So we got a snack and some yogi tea at the cafe and took off for some sight seeing.

(This was not us.)

We went past the Ivy and got a juice at Newsroom Cafe, then we headed up to Santa Monica and checked out the promenade and the pier. After that, I was pooped.

Today, we’re going to go south and check out some beaches and who knows what else…