Pregnancy and what I don't want to forget

Not too much longer now, and unlike with Del's pregnancy, we know the plan is to not get pregnant again. (With Del, we didn't have an opinion either way about whether that would be the last pregnancy or not ... until after she was born).
I always tell photography clients who are seeking a maternity shoot that this time is so relatively short in comparison to life. It's hard to remember looking back that you actually had that baby inside of you and your belly grew to accommodate your baby. It feels long in the present, but it's just not. Pregnancy is fast.
So I'm trying even more so to live in the moment, relishing every pregnant detail.
This time I'm waddling. A first. And it started around 20 weeks gestation. I've realized this has nothing to do with how small or big I am, just how loose my pelvis is.
Everyone comments on how tiny I am. And to be fair, I have a hard time gaining weight (this is largely due to a restricted diet that comes with gestational diabetes. At least, that's my theory. I think of oreos, doritoes, tacos, pasta, etc were part of my diet, it wouldn't be so hard to gain and keep weight on.).
I want to wear a shirt that says: "I'm 8mos pregnant. Yes, really."
And even when people are saying: "you're so small!" - I feel like I look huge. I know "huge" is culturally a negative thing, but not in this case. I can't believe how much my stomach has stretched. I keep feeling amazed that my body has done this!
I can't walk as fast. And I'm often out of breath more quickly.
But I also don't realize how much I'm doing until I sit down and realize my body is tired!
It's harder to squat than last time (say for milking - although I wasn't milking last time, I was faithfully squatting to prepare for birth).
When pregnant, it seems the rest of my body gets smaller, my muscles become more defined, and my belly grows.

This baby seems to be the most active of the three pregnancies.
I try to keep this in perspective - I'm experiencing this pregnancy now, and memories fade. So maybe I'm exaggerating? But I don't think so. They say that babies form a routine in utero and take naps.
I don't think this one naps at all.
Ever.
It's constantly constantly on the move.
You can see it bump, nudge, and rub my belly as my skin moves across my uterus.
And it can be intense. This is a strong person and I'm seeing a lot of heel pushed up against me, I'm guessing.
Even intense movement, I want to remember. How amazing to think there is a person inside of me!

Braxton Hicks are real. This time. And all the books/websites say Braxton Hicks are "mildly noticeable" at worst. That's a lie. They are most definitely noticeable. And if this was a first baby, I'd have been the mom who cried labor multiple times already. The pressure from these contractions wakes me in the night. That's not "mildly noticeable". And if there isn't a bathroom nearby - watch out! The contracting uterus puts intense pressure on my bladder. When we're out and about (say, in the car), this can be awful. I take a deep breath, shocked by the sudden need to empty my bladder, while trying to relax through a Braxton Hicks.
The children find this incredibly funny ... after Ren Man told them the baby finds my bladder and squeezes it and says: "oooh, this is squishy squishy!" So now the children will randomly say to me: "squishy, squishy" in a sing-song voice. As a side note: laughing while trying not to pee is really hard.

This baby has been head down with its back to my right, and feet and hands pushing on my left side. It's not uncommon to get a jab to my bladder, or a head (I presume) rolling across my bladder. Hiccups happen occasionally - maybe once or twice a day. I remember Noah having hiccups and it was painful because it was right under my ribs.

Physically, I feel great overall. Yeah, it's harder to breathe and I'm starving one minute and two bites later feel super full ... only to be starving 20 minutes later. And the gag reflex is still intense at times.

Colostrum happens before the baby comes. I can't believe how full and ready these milk makers look and feel!

The hardest thing about this pregnancy has been diabetes. I'm so so relieved that my numbers have been fine after some weeks where they kept creeping up. I think what made a difference was increasing veggie intake significantly (a large salad a day). I'm sure experience has also helped, I know what works and what doesn't and just hammering that out has been huge. For example, conventional gestational diabetes advice includes a night-time snack - as in, right-before-bed, to decrease the risk of "dawn phenomenon" where your number spikes in the morning. I found that a night time snack doesn't help, and seems to increase my fasting number. So if I'm hungry before bed, I'll eat something small, but my number is lower if I skip the night-time snack.

Diabetes has been so stressful because it limits my diet, making food an obsession. You have to think about every.single.bite and its potential effect. For a few stressful (and tearful) weeks when those numbers kept inching up, it was very frustrating. What more could I do?! If my numbers didn't come back down, insulin talk would begin. If insulin was started, then the homebirth was off the table. And that was very discouraging.
Ren Man started doing (even more) research and found that people on low carb diets will have a sugar numbers without huge swings post-meal. What this means for fasting numbers is that they tend to be higher than the conventional norm. This doesn't mean it's HIGH though, in comparison to the conventionally recommended diabetes diet (that includes carbs).
After seeing this, suddenly my numbers weren't so scary and even started declining into that conventionally expected range (this all refers to fasting numbers as post-meal numbers were always more than okay - they need to be below 140, and were typically below 100). Which speaks highly of the effect stress can have on those numbers!

In light of gestational diabetes, the midwife asked that I see an OB she trusts for a second opinion. I was nervous. An OB!! She ended up being really authentic and as mellow an OB as can be, I'm thinking. She did say she wanted an ultrasound. My feeling is - it shouldn't just be done to be done, there should be a purpose. And the big concern with diabetes is a big baby. I'm measuring over 2 weeks small based on fundal height. But that has wiggle room for inaccuracy - as does everything. Ultrasounds are no different - I've read they can be up to two pounds off. So telling someone they are having a 10lb baby, could really be an 8lb baby ... or a TWELVE lb baby!
The ultrasound happened at 32weeks when the average baby is 3.75lbs. This baby was 3.5lbs. Well, inaccurate or not, it was nice to have an ultrasound show a smaller reading rather than a larger one.

So here are my baby predictions: I think it's a girl, lots of dark hair, hoping for blue eyes, she'll come early (I'm guessing June 13 - the day after our last wedding, or June 21 - the day after our annual solstice party) .... but this baby has been a surprise all along and if it's small then maybe this is the baby that will go past my due date?, she'll be 7.5lbs (smallest baby yet). I'm nervous about how active this baby is! We'll see how that plays out after birth :)

I'm so relieved that we're homebirthing. No matter what, there will be a baby. I know. But the thought of just birthing without having to over think anything (is this it? Or not yet?) or stay on guard to be sure silly things like wearing your own clothes or eating when you're hungry can happen.

Is there anything else I'm going to forget about pregnancy? It's hard (and I had forgotten that) and it also feels so empowering. I'm growing a person. I'm going to birth a person. Our family will grow. And my diabetes sugar numbers are awesome.

hot men

I've never found men attractive physically. It's not that I don't like how men look or that I like how women look more, I just saw most people as neutral. I could say: "yeah, he's cute" but it wasn't like I was overwhelmed by any hottness as it appeared some of my peers were. I could see a cute guy, start talking to him, and realize his nose was a little big, his hair greasy, his views annoying. Or I could see a non-intimidatingly-cute-guy, start talking to him, and realize how adorable his 5 o'clock shadow is, or how he hooks his fingers in to the pocket of his jeans and smiles big, or how his voice is low and warm - and suddenly he's super cute.
Personality.
That's what mattered.
And it still does.
But I've noticed lately that I notice hot men. It's not movie stars, because who are we kidding? I have no time for tv-watching, star gazing, or cinema outings. (Side note: Although the main guy from Glee, I'm embarrassed to say, is - wow! I was mortified to be crushing on a high schooler, then learned he's in his late 20's. Then recently learned he od'd, which was devastating.)
It's men I know in real life!
Hot! Hot!
Seriously.
Why did I not notice before?
Have men suddenly become more physically attractive?
Maybe I'm old enough that "men" are actually men?

I run home and tell my best friend (because an extrovert really can't keep this stuff in): "so-and-so is really hot! Don't you think?"
"Yeah," my best friend says with a smile, "I can see that he's attractive."
"I wanted to tell him," I confess, "but I shouldn't, right? That would be weird."
"Yeah," he agrees, "it would be awkward."
"But it would be more awkward if you told someone they were attractive, don't you think?" I ask.
"Yeah, definitely," he agrees.

And even with my hot-guy-radar at high alert, it's this guy I'm excited to see after a long day, thankful to call my best friend, and the only one I really want to do life with. I recently stopped by his workplace unexpectedly. The butterflies started as I knew I was about to round the corner and he would spot them. We call those butterflies the "over-the-hill-feeling". You know, when you drive over a hill unexpectedly and your belly goes funny? That's what it feels like. And it still happens - even after 13 years. And he agrees. He gets that giddy over-the-hill-feeling too. And we smile shyly at each other, surprised at our own relationship and how it's all still flowing.

 

ps full disclosure: Best friend, life partner, husband, business partner, and more .... but he's not a Mommy Do It! blog reader. This is not for him. He's welcome to read, but he doesn't like my writing (part of our relationship is honesty, for better or worse ;) ). We specifically don't write messages to each other on facebook, generally, or another public realm (such as this blog). If we want to say something like: "Happy Anniversary - you're awesome!" or whatever, we roll over in bed in the morning and say it. Because otherwise we're not saying it for each other, we're saying it to get response from the world. All that to say, this was written for you (blog reader) and for me, not for Ren Man - but if he sees it, I don't care. That whole extrovert thing. You should see me at Christmas and birthdays. It's very near impossible for me to keep a secret from this man - although I'm pretty good about holding secrets from other people when asked.

Married: 9 years

 

Back in May we were amazed to realize we were standing right on the date when we celebrated our wedding NINE years before. NINE years is a long time - and that makes us feel pretty old - or we were just super young when we got married - or both, I guess.

But that was a month after we'd suddenly become a family of six and with a brief: "wow, can you believe it's been NINE years?!? I love you", we felt satisfied in our "celebrating".

Because you tend to hang out with people who have kids similarly aged to yours instead of similarly aged to yourself and because people tend to have kids a few years after they get married our friends tend to be married around the same length of time as us.

It hit me on reflecting on this that many have divorced (more proof that we're old, quite frankly) and many have had marriage challenges.

But we haven't. There's never been a time in our marriage that I couldn't stand my husband. There's never been a time where I wanted to have a break from him.

Here's the difference in our relationship and our comparable friends relationships: we've always created a life where we maximize our time with each other. Things have come secondary to time together. In most relationships couples are separated for 40+ hours a week by the necessities of a job. We always say: we didn't get married to spend so much time apart! We want to be doing life together.

There have been short times in our marriage where we worked separately but it's always been relatively short term for this reason or that.

Everything has its pros and cons, right? And this is one of those things. But a big pro of working together is that we spend a lot of time together, we have common goals, we have a pretty clear understanding of what the other person is experiencing.

Lately Ren Man has been working 40 hours with a 45 minute commute. I've been farming. I've been doing most of the photography. I've been parenting. How do people do this long term? It helps that Ren Man knows exactly what the intensity of my workload feels like. And I get what it's like to feel the pull of work and the pull of home (he says he doesn't actually have this problem because both are so demanding he doesn't have time to think of the other while at the opposite - did you follow that?). I do not imagine him standing around shooting the breeze with colleagues while sipping cocktails as clients pat him on the back and thank him for his wonderful work. He does not imagine me sitting in bed, getting pedicures, and blogging while the children watch movies and eat chocolate.

And this summer has been probably the hardest on our marriage - even knowing what we know about the others life right now - just because we don't often see each other! This is way harder on our marriage than the heartache over Vermont because in Vermont we were mostly on the same page. Now we sometimes don't even know what book the other person is in because we're not in the same library any more - am I taking this analogy too far? ;) But here's the thing: even if we're not as in sync with each other, we're still pretty knowledgable about the other, we both miss each other like crazy, we're both trusting that the other is doing their 100% in all this crazy life, and we both know this isn't our forever. There's a TON we're doing right now to build the farm - and the farm is the primary stressor, I think, just because the demands are so great and the profit is impossible right now as we build the infrastructure for the farm. But it's coming and it's exciting and we're committed - to the farm and each other.

So the secret to our marriage that has included disagreements but has been smooth sailing? Time. We just spend a lot of time together. If someone asked what we had in common when we first got married I wouldn't have been able to answer. We just really like being together. Now I would say we have similar values. It was true back then, but I didn't know how to say it.

I really love this guy - the one I never would have picked - and I'm so proud of our relationship. We often say to each other: "I really love us". What we mean is: this is exactly the relationship I want.