Coming Soon and an Anecdote

I just got home from the library with a new armload of books.  As I look through them in the next week or so, I'll put up quick reviews about them.  I'm still looking for the golden goose: a book that contains practical advice for how to exercise like a normal person even when you're pregnant.  I think what I have ended up with instead is a lot of How To Get Your Body Back After The Baby (cuz look out, the baby is about to hijack it).  Not exactly what I wanted, but maybe there will be some helpful information in there somewhere.

But first, an anecdote:

I hate needles.  When I have to have my blood drawn, I always warn the nurse that I HATE having a needle in my arm and I promise to try not to freak out.  It takes concentration to keep myself calm.  When I was in high school, I had to get my wisdom teeth taken out by surgery -- all four of them were impacted up in my jaw, so I couldn't just have them pulled like most of my friends -- and I know for a fact that this is where my fear and hatred of needles of comes from.

That day, I went to a new dentist's office, one better equipped to handle the surgery than my normal dentist.  The man in charge, whom I had never met before, had a huge red nose like an old cartoon of a drunk.  He didn't say much to me as I sat down in the chair.  Soon, we were joined by about five nurses or assistants.  They each had a different job to do and they didn't say anything to me as they got started, either, but they talked amongst themselves about medical things I didn't understand.  The dentist was tying a rubber hose to my right arm so he could put in the IV of drugs.  He didn't say what he was up to, so when I looked down to watch him, I was really surprised when he grabbed the lower half of my arm and slapped the inner side of my elbow hard.  A giant vein popped right up from the skin; it really frightened me.  That's when an angry nurse who was doing something on the other side of me shouted, "You better calm down, you're messing up your blood pressure."  The tone of her voice was along the lines of "Hey, stupid, quit ruining everything."

I was about ready to cry at this point.  I couldn't calm down.  I was really scared.  When I looked over to see what was happening to the poor vein in my right arm, I saw the dentist take a giant needle and shove it in with a hard jab.  I opened my mouth to scream, but before I could finish drawing a breath, I passed right out from the medication.

I woke up after the surgery several hours later in extreme pain and I had big purple bruises up and down my chin for the next two months.  You can see them in my school pictures from that year, even though I had my wisdom teeth taken out in the middle of summer vacation.

This memory has been coming back to me lately.  I thought it was just that I've had to get my blood drawn more times in the last five months than in the last five (or maybe more likely fifteen) years put together (my favorite was when the lab admitted they dropped my first sample and I had to go back another day to do it over).  Every time I see that needle approaching, I have to mentally coach myself through it.  I feel like a baby.

But this week, after delving into the first of my library books -- Ina May's Guide to Childbirth by Ina May Gaskin -- I've decided that in my mind, when I imagine going to the hospital to have a baby, the whole scene from that dentist is what goes through my mind: bright lights, surrounded by people I don't know or trust, a million things going on that I don't understand and can't control, a nurse who might be having a bad day telling me I'm doing something wrong, and the feeling that everyone is really just waiting for the drugs to take over so they can do their jobs without any more interference from me.  After I saw a picture of what happens when you get an epidural, I couldn't even THINK about it anymore without getting bad chills, and it was just a drawing, not a photograph.  My mom thinks I'm obsessing over it, but I've gone through most of my life with little or no illnesses or injury.  I never broke a bone as a kid and my worst sickness as an adult was a misdiagnosed yeast infection I had for a few months.  Sure, it sucked, but most of my emotions about it were simply anger at the doctor who kept misdiagnosing it every month.  So, when I start thinking about hospitals and medical procedures, my mind only has that one surgery experience to draw on.

I'm relating this anecdote as an explanation because Ina May's Guide to Childbirth will probably be one my first quick reviews.  Of all the pregnancy books I brought home from the library this time around, this is the one that stuck out, and once I started reading it I couldn't put it down.

Baby Update

I've been struggling with how much of the baby to include here.  Pictures?  Funny stories?  Embarrassing stuff that will be here forever?

I haven't decided on most of it, but I can at least give a few updates here and there.  My husband and I went for our ultrasound last month where we discovered that the baby is going to be a boy and that he seems to be healthy.  I can feel him moving around now.  He really loves to roll around inside when I am sitting at the computer or the kitchen table.  Sometimes it's cute and sometimes it feel like that bottom-dropping-out-of-your-stomach feeling you get on a roller coaster.

Forms Class

Class last week was devoted to forms.  I had a great time, even though I can really feel the difference in my lung capacity now.  I tried to do everything a little slower than normal and paid extra attention to my breathing.  But I was still panting at the end of the longer forms.

The method for learning forms at my school is that you have to do ten push-ups every time you make a mistake. I think it is supposed to encourage upper body strength, since almost everyone messes up here and there.  But I hate doing push-ups so much that I always make it a huge priority to memorize my form as quickly as possible, just so I can avoid them.  It's probably why I can still hardly do ten push-ups.

At the end of class, the black belts did Kum Gong form.  I love this form.  It contains no kicks, but it manages to be very powerful all the same.

You can see a video of a black belt doing it here:
Kum Gang Video

The part where I'm supposed to balance on one leg?  Not really going so well.  I'm kind of tipping over a lot.  Let's blame the baby.

Insomnia

Last summer, before I was pregnant, I went for my annual check up and asked my doctor about my insomnia.  I was having trouble sleeping about one week out of every month and, after paying attention to it for about six months, I noticed that it usually coincided with a certain anxious, energetic feeling I got around the time when I would have PMS.  One month, this nervous feeling was so bad that I actually had to ask my friends if maybe I could be bipolar and not know it (they told me that, duh, you're not bipolar just from a few night of insomnia).

But it still didn't seem normal.  I could fall asleep normally, but then I would wake up from bad dreams around two or three in the morning completely unable to get back to sleep.  Sometimes I would wake up around midnight with an idea for a story or an essay in my head that just needed to get written down as soon as possible.  I'd sit in front of the computer for a few hours, pounding it out, and then collapse back to sleep.  And yet, on other nights, I would wake up for no real reason I could put my finger on, and I'd watch TV for hours, trying to lull myself back into something resembling sleepiness.  There were days when nothing worked.

When I asked my doctor, she told me she didn't like to recommend drugs to solve problems.  Fine, I thought, I didn't really like to take them to solve my problems, either.  Then, she told me therapy was probably my only course of action.  When I asked if there was something else we could try, she said maybe I could cut back on my caffeine.  And that was end of her suggestions.  I brought up the fact that it ALWAYS happened at the same time every month and was there any way it could be hormone related?  Could changing my birth control help?  Anything?  But, no, my doctor just told me I needed to talk to someone about my anxiety issues.  The end.

I still have insomnia.  Except now, instead of it coming once or twice a month, I have it every single night.  And guess what?  It's totally related to my hormones.  I guess pregnant ladies get insomnia all the time, mostly because their hormones are out of whack.

There's still nothing I can really do about it.  I get up around two or three in the morning, the cat follows me out of the bedroom and into the living room, and we watch old reruns of Arrested Development or Buffy the Vampire Slayer until it's close to five, and then I can usually fall back asleep (the cat usually follows me back to bed and sleeps next to me on the pillow).  I still think it's a little unfair, though. I have to get up and do stuff during the day, but the cat can just go back to sleep.

Simple Solutions to New Problems

It's getting harder to and harder to fit into my poor clothes.  I do have maternity clothes now, and they almost kinda fit, too (if they are big enough for me to breathe in and they aren't so big that they fall right off, I'm counting them).

But my workout wardrobe ... it has turned sad, my friends.  My largest yoga pants now have to go under my belly.  They are the ones I wear for taekwondo class, so now I go to class with my gut hanging over the edge.  I look real nice.  At least I've escaped without having to buy more workout clothes.  I'm getting tired of having to buy more clothes every time I turn around.

Another simple solution I discovered?  These bra extenders from the fabric store.

For $2, I have saved my bras for a few more weeks at least.  I'm rather dreading trying to find a good nursing bra, so I'm trying to put it off for as long as possible.

The Baby Books My Husband Actually Read

I got a little nervous when I realized my husband wasn't reading "What To Expect When You're Expecting" along with me.  I'd leave it out on the coffee table, waiting for him to pick it up, and there it would stay, completely ignored.  If I read him things from it, he'd scoff or laugh or suggest that the book was wrong.  Not a good thing to say to the first time pregnant lady who's had morning sickness for a month.  And can't sleep anymore.  And who just wants someone to pick her up some french fries.  And freaking read a baby book now and then.

Needless to say, this is not what I wanted and hoped for from my baby's dad.  My friends offered to yell at him when I refused to do it.  (OK, let's be honest -- I did yell at him, I yelled a few times.  It just didn't do any good, so I stopped.)  I even asked him once if he would tell me the difference between me reminding him to read the book or me nagging him to do it (because who wants to be a nag?).  He said it was reminding if I did it one time before breakfast on the weekends; other than that, he considered it nagging.  Come on, though, he probably belived it was nagging no matter when I did it.

It's not like he's not supportive of me being pregnant.  He helpfully says no to all the baby names I come up with and talks about what colors to paint the baby's room (so far, he's picked out brown, so I'm helpfully rejecting to his choices, too).  He's come with me to all my doctor appointments so far.  It's just the matter of the dang books.

So I got a bunch of them from the library (because I am cheap) and, thank God, he atually looked at a few of them.  I think it helped that they had due dates and therefore we had to read them pretty quickly -- easier to nag about something for a few weeks than for a few months, I guess.  These are the books we got and the ones he actually liked:

A Child is Born by Lennart Nilsson and Lars Hamberger.  This one is mostly pictures of developing fetuses, so he could flip through it while the Spurs were on.

Complete Book of Pregnancy and Childbirth by Sheila Kitzinger.  This was light on the pregnancy part and heavy on the labor/delivery and first months of living with the baby parts.  Maybe that made it a little less abstract or something.  I really liked it, too.  It has less "eating this will make your baby stupid" stuff in it than "What To Expect."  I don't think my husband actually read the whole thing, but I caught him looking at it, so I'm counting it.

Planning for Pregnancy, Birth and Beyond from the American College of Obstetrics and Gynecology.  We didn't like this one.  It was like talking to a doctor for hundreds of pages.  An old doctor.  There weren't even any pictures.  BORING.

The Thinking Woman's Guide to Better Birth by Henci Goer.  Whenever I accuse my husband of not reading anything about the baby, he falls back on this one because he really did read it all the way through.  This is not a book about being pregnant, but more about things that happen at the hospital during labor.  It's probably why we're not having the baby at the hospital if we can help it, since hospitals don't come off very well.  But he read it -- the whole thing!

What To Expect When You're Expecting by Heidi Murkoff.  My husband hates this book and as time goes by, the more I'm starting to agree with him.  I use it as a reference -- have you ever looked at your lunch and wondered if bean sprouts were dangerous to the baby?  Check the book, they are! -- but sitting and reading it through is pretty tedious.  I'm starting to see it as a catolog of crap I'm not allowed to do anymore.

Free Range Kids by Lenore Skenazy.  Technically, this is more of a parenting book for people who have kids -- older kids, even, like older than seven or eight years old.  But this is one my husband picked out all by himself and gave to me as a gift, so I'm going to count it anyway.  The book is based on a lovely idea: wouldn't it be great if kids had a little more freedom and parents didn't have to stand over them all the time making sure they did everything just right?  Not really having any experience as a parent, it's hard for me to say just yet if the advice in this book is actually doable.  But I love the concept and I'm going to see if I can implement it when the time is right.  I'm not looking foward to driving my kid to school every single day when it's less than a mile's walk (through a neighborhood no less) from the house.

Now, if you'll excuse me, I have to return to my new hobby: making sure my child doesn't end named for the Spurs starting line up.

The end of morning sickness? Do I dare hope?

I had a relapse over Christmas that probably came from eating too much and laying down too soon after I ate.  But since then, I've felt consistently good and I've even started to have more energy (I thought this was all supposed to happen a month ago, but I guess it's bette late than never).

On Friday, I felt great until I had some Chex Mix and last night I noticed the queasiness returned after I had a handful of tortilla chips, so I'm going on the path of the very heathy eater.  But if it can make me feel better, I don't care what I have to do.