Tummy ache

Well, I was going to write earlier this week, but during my opportunity WordPress wasn’t working for some reason – the server would just time out when I tried to go to the site. Bummer.

I saw my midwife Tiffany last Wednesday, and she is really really awesome. I look forward to working with her. During our conversation, I found out something interesting – Massachusetts is not a very midwife-friendly state. If you are a Certified Nurse-Midwife, you can’t keep your license and attend home births, so midwives who attend home births have a different credential – they are mostly Certified Professional Midwives.

Last Thursday or Friday, I got that twinge that signals an oncoming urinary tract infection, so Kelly and I ran out to Whole Foods and got a ton of unsweetened cranberry juice. I cleared the infection and am now symptom-free! Yay.

New things I have cooked in the last week: bean and veggie crumble, “hamburger helper” vegan style, raspberry muffins. Plans for upcoming cooking: sugar cookies with frosting, Pennsylvania German apple dumplings, spicy curry lentil-potato casserole. Also, a ton of kale, which it turns out is very easy to cook.

Kelly and I have been very romantic lately, doing lots of “hanky panky” of various sorts, as Zach would say. And I have finally been getting hungry and not been nauseous. This is what I imagined pregnancy would be like: having energy, bring horny, and being hungry. It’s great!

I went to a Country Western Line Dance class on Tuesday night, but I was disappointed that the class was very casual, and they didn’t dance the whole time. As soon as I would begin to get my heart rate up, the song would be over and everyone would sit down to chat for 10 minutes. Ugh! Got to find another way to exercise. I am going to take another dance class this weekend through the MIT ballroom dance club. I am also going to go to the Tufts gym next Tuesday and do some running on the elliptical. Got to buy some tennis shoes!

I sure am tired. I have not been sleepy at my normal bedtime, and then I wake up early, making it so I am overall getting about an hour less of sleep a night (and Kelly, too!). I guess this is to prepare us for life with baby, but being tired makes me feel spaced out and distracted.

Oh, and I had a tummy ache last night that I woke up with this morning, hence the post title, but it is gone now.

I can’t believe it…I am a picky eater!

Okay, okay, I know. Some of you are like “Of course you are picky, you are vegan!!” But the truth is, I am willing to eat almost everything in the plant-based world. I am even eating ginger now a little bit (something I have always hated). The only food I really don’t like is cilantro/coriander, but I am willing to pick it out of my food if I can.

But pour oil on my food? Gross! Use iodized salt? Nah! Vegetable smoothie with ice? Wha?

I appreciate the suggestions that people have been giving me, and your gentle nudges have made me realize that I need a total diet makeover. I mean, I “hear” from the ambient noise that is the media that fats and sweets and salts are bad for you and should be used sparingly. But it turns out that you actually need some of those things – like iodized salt so you don’t get a goiter. So my healthy diet – while still healthier than the average American diet – is lacking in some of the things it probably should have, especially in the fats category.

What I need is not a new dish I can add to my current diet. What I need is a new way to cook and prepare food that is less processed, includes greater variety of grains and beans/legumes, is higher in protein, includes more yellow and green vegetables, and contains some essential supplements needed for a vegan diet (like B12 from nutritional yeast and omega-3 fatty acids from walnuts, flax, and algae).

This isn’t just a diet modification, it’s a lifestyle change – I need to spend more time cooking (an increase from zero minutes a week), and I need to learn how to freeze foods (as opposed to the Weisman family tradition: “the freezer is the place that food goes to die”).  And I need to buy some decent glass or pyrex containers to freeze and microwave stuff in, because reheating stuff in plastic containers is gross.  Kelly had this idea a year ago that we spend Sunday afternoons cooking for the week.  We may need to try that out.

I know Suya used to do that.  Does anyone else cook for the week, or cook to freeze a meal?  Do you bake 2 casseroles instead of one and freeze one?  Do you freeze the whole thing together, or do you cut it into servings?  Or is your freezer a purgatory between edible food and the garbage?

15 weeks, 1 day

I can’t comfortably button my pants anymore, although I can still wear them for now.  I am expanding a bit, and I think it is even visible when I am naked.  (Ask Kelly.)

My nausea is less, but not gone.  But it is less!  It is better than it has been since before I found out I was pregnant.  I have stopped barfing for the moment, although I am wary of saying it won’t happen again.  And I am getting a little bit hungrier.

For the first time in a while, I have some energy and want to move around.  I think I will try my Buff Moms To Be video again, and take up walking when the weather doesn’t completely suck.  Unfortunately, the weather looks like it is going to mostly suck.  I was thinking for a while that I would do some kind of dance class (Country Western Line Dancing, for instance), but then I read that I am not supposed to do anything with bouncing or that gets my heartrate up too high.  So I am going to ask my midwife about it tomorrow when I see her.

I got these ultrasounds a few weeks ago that were supposed to be part of the “ultrascreening” process – in combination with a blood test, they would determine the odds of having a child with chromosomal abnormalities or neural tube defects.  The ultrasounds have to be done by the end of the 13th week, and I went twice but neither time the fetus was cooperating so I couldn’t get the test done.  After all that, missing work and all, I found out that what Kelly and I are actually interested in testing for (neural tube defects because I was not taking folic acid in preparation for pregnancy) does not require ultrascreening at all, but is testing for as part of a standard blood workup around the 18th week.  I wish my midwife had let me know that there were multiple testing options and what each one tested for before sending me off on that wild goose chase.  On the other hand, that was the bad midwife who I am not seeing any more.

But Kelly and I did get to see the images on the ultrasound, which was pretty special.  The technician kept referring to the fetus as “he” rather than “it” or alternating between he and she.  I was worried that the tech could tell the sex of the child and was sort of letting us know indirectly, but the internet tells me it would be very hard to determine the sex at 13 weeks, and also the fetus was turned away from the “camera” (wand?) most of the time, which was the whole problem, so it seems like it would have been hard for them to see.   I don’t want to know the sex of the baby.  It seems like just another thing to stress about.  By not knowing, I can reserve thinking about what it means to have a girl or a boy until reality becomes apparent.

I am going to try to cook something new tonight from The Vegetarian Mother’s Cookbook by Cathe Olson.  There are a lot of good-looking recipes.

I  am taking the day off from work tomorrow, but the weather is supposed to SUUUUCK.  In other news, I finally bought a laptop and it should arrive by Friday.  Rock!  Thanks, parents!!