The Texture Of Things

Click here to find out what “Dos” means.

For those who are not in the know, pregnant chicks get subjected to a certain kind of torture, right around 24 weeks* along (*out of 40, which, if you’re me, HA HA HA HA HA HA!). That torture is the glucose testing.

For the first test, you (and here, “you” reads as “amy”) go in and drink this dense, mostly flat, nasty-ass orange soda. If you are lucky, it will very, very cold. You score extra points (with yourself only) if you are a normally a diet soda drinker and can choke this stuff down without wishing you were either unconscious or, worse, a fan of orange soda. You then sit in the waiting room for an hour, get blood drawn, and go home, where you will wait for the call telling you that you flunked the test and must undergo the second leg of this wretched journey.

The second test is a three-hour glucose test, where you (and again, here “you” reads as “amy”) are instructed to follow a “special” diet for three days, ending with fasting for the night before the test. The diet is a best described as a trap.

It’s a trap!

This “diet” is basically three days of carb loading.

Then you (and this is where it gets hypothetical and I’m drawing on my memory of being pregnancy with the tot and recent instructions from the nurse) go in, have 7 pints of blood drawn, and then drink a dense, mostly flat, nasty-ass lemon-lime soda. If you are lucky, it will be very, very, very, very cold, but let’s be honest here - dry ice couldn’t get this stuff cold enough. Then once an hour for three hours, you have another 15 pints of blood drawn, and then you go home and wait for the nurse to call you and tell you that you flunked this test too, you failure of failures.

Or so I’ve heard.

This time, it started much earlier for me. At nine weeks, I got to do the one-hour test because I had Gestational Diabetes with the tot. I barely passed it, but then, I hadn’t kept down anything to eat or drink in, like, a week or more, and that can mess with how your body processes sugars. Still, my OB told me she was fine with the numbers and I could expect to repeat the test later. My perinatologist told me she wasn’t fine with the numbers and I could expect to fail the test later and require insulin.

Quite a vote of confidence, wouldn’t you say?

At nineteen weeks, I saw the dietitian, who was perplexed because technically I hadn’t received a diagnosis of GD but who gave me a glucometer and a GD diet anyway and sent me on my way.

At twenty-four weeks, I flunked the one-hour test, right on time, albeit barely.

At twenty-five weeks, I did my three-day carb-fest, arranged for babysitting, packed up my billion and four papers to grade while I sat in the waiting room waiting to donate more blood to the sweet tooth vampires that live in the OB’s lab, and happily (HA HA HA HA HA HA!) marched my butt to the OB’s office to drink the world’s worst limeade.

And I flunked the test without even trying. My fasting sugar level (the one before you drink the nasty) was already capital-F Flunking.

Sing it with me: Flunking!

So I got sent home to eat exactly the prescribed number of carbs at exactly the prescribed times, track my blood sugars, and call back, um, yesterday (I should really do that today) so they can tell me if I need insulin yet. (Short answer is no, I don’t, and that’s why I haven’t made it a priority to call: my numbers are fine now that I’m out of carb-loading hell.)

None of this exceptionally crappy. I did the GD diet with the tot and I can do it again, but it is generally a drag. Fortunately I am not typically driven by pregnancy cravings, so that helps. Where the experience goes solidly south will be when my fasting numbers, which cannot be controlled by diet, go high and insulin is my only recourse. Oral meds are out because of my sulfa allergy. The mere thought of sticking a needle in anything other than a pincushion makes the panic vomit rise in my throat.

So, yeah. It’s gonna be a long ride from here ’til the end.

There had better be a kick-ass prize at the bottom of this cereal box, is all I’m sayin’.

We are gutting our house of months and months of filth and years and years of disorganization, and hopefully when we are done, the tot will have her own room and Dos will have a room and those rooms will be clean.

Shut up. A girl can dream.

Along the way to utopia, we decided to buy the tot a new chest of drawers, except we can’t find anything we like that is not made of fiberboard, which I do not (NOT!) want. So, the old dresser needed to go into the new room (yellow) until we can find something and until HG gets Dos’ room painted.

And because I can’t just move a dresser without cleaning and rearranging the drawer contents (Hey - I’m nesting. Back off.), I found a lovely little prize in the back of the sock drawer. It was the page of notes that I put together to take to the doctor for the tot’s 12-months well-child check up.

Seeing as how I don’t really keep a baby book, like, at all, I thought I’d put the info here. As I find more of these gems, I’ll add them as well. Hidden gems, because this is exactly how I kept all my notes about the tot - jot them down, shove the paper somewhere where I won’t lose it.
A ha ha, ha ha, hm.

On this page of notes, I had included a blended list of gross motor, fine motor, and social skills to date; the list of words the tot could say; a layout of her ideal/daily diet; and questions I’m sure I didn’t ask because there are no answers listed.

“cruises, crawls, points, pulls self to standing, wants to climb higher, tantrums, walks with your hands for balance, claps hands, can sit down from standing, stands briefly, has taken steps.”

What’s interesting to me is that I could swear up and down that the tot never crawled until after she walked, and we certainly don’t have any video of her crawling, but I wouldn’t have written that if she didn’t ever do it. Also, tantrums? That’s adorable. She’s four now - whatever I thought when she was putting up her miniature protests at 12 months, I don’t know, but my definition of “tantrum” is seriously different now.

“Hi
Duck
Dada
Wow
Mama
So
Bal. ([for] Balloon)
No
Sock ([pronunciation] ~sahz or ~sha)
Baby ([pronunciation] ~bebe)
Shoe ([pronunciation] ~shets or ~sha)
That ([pronunciation] ~dat)
Got it
Did it”

As soon as I saw this list, I remembered two things.
1. Although the list is in no particular order, “Hi” was her first word and “Duck” was her second. For a while, “Duck” meant “Toy” and gradually became just “duck”.
2. When she said “Wow”, she used her whole face. It was a big sound and her face matched the connotation. “WOW.”

“Bfast bottle 6 oz.
Bfast II:
1/2 serving cereal
1/2 jar fruit (incl. iron)
follow-up bottle 4 oz.

Lunch:
1 - 1.5 jars veggies
follow-up bottle 4 oz.

*occasionally a snack 1/2 serv. cereal

Dinner:
1/2 - 1 jar veggie
1/2 - 1 jar fruit (incl. iron)
follow-up bottle 4 oz.

*occasionally a snack 1/2 serv. cereal

Bedtime bottle 6 oz.

**Doesn’t take all the milk I offer in a day”

And I’m sure that, like the milk, the food amounts shown were what I offered - not necessarily what she consumed.

What I want to remember from this is that at 12 months, she was still on iron supplements twice a day, and I thought by 12 months she was down to once a day. I guess that wasn’t until 15 months. The iron supplements were in response to her severe anemia, discovered at her 9-month well-child check up. When they do a CBC, the hemoglobin number should be between either 9 and 11 or 10 and 12 - I can’t remember. The tot’s was 6.4. The specialists said if it had been 6 even or below, they’d have transfused her instead of putting her on oral supplements.

While no parents wish for their child to be sicker than s/he actually is, I do wish that I would have asked them to consider a transfusion anyway. I know, though, that I never would have pressed for a transfusion because it sounded too scary to me at the time. I couldn’t allow myself to think of my wee baby going through something that I imagined would be like the vivisection scenes from The Island of Dr. Moreau.

And, of course, I couldn’t know at the time how trying months and months of delivering and coercing the consumption of supplements that taste like a mouthful of rusty nails would be, nor could I know at the time what potential influence those iron supplements at the same time we were finally getting somewhere with the introduction of solid foods would be. In short, if it happens with Dos, I am determined to research transfusions before just jumping in with oral supplements.

Srsly.

I’m going to leave off the questions, mostly because they are cryptic, but I will add that the other day I was going through baby clothes, and I found the outfit the tot wore on her first birthday. I mis-remembered that as well. Whereas I had thought it was a size 9-12 months outfit, it was not. It was a size 6-9 months, and it was baggy. Size 6-9 months. Thinking about it now, that sounds about right.

That is the number of things that I need to write but do not have the time to write. I have been capital-B Busy and capital-WTSS Working Through Some Stuff lately, but on the whole, all is well.

I am:
still gestating (24 weeks and change today)
still teaching (holy gad, i hate accelerated courses)
still helping my mother (who is recovering from a slip and fall)
still procrastinating the housework (whoever is shocked by this can leave now)
still reading other blogs and sometimes commenting (sometimes)

So, I have been compiling a list of things I want to write, but I know me, and the only way I’ll get started on said things is if I put my intentions in writing.

Things to write (titles are tentative):
Tot’s Feeding and Development Evaluation
Tot’s Well-Child Check Up (a Baby Book Entry)
Tot’s Occupational Therapy (maybe a weekly summary so I can track progress?)
Dos: Pregnancy sucks. And is dumm.
Dos: Guess who’s excited?
Dos: We know what kind of Junk this kid has
Dos: Getting Ready
More Thoughts on the American Wedding: Showers

And who knows. Maybe some of the Dos entries will merge into one, as might the Tot entries.

Okay. I have to go grade papers now, before the semester ends and I’ve done nothing to prepare.

Am… So… Tired…

smooches,
amy.

I’m sitting here, not doing what I need to be doing.

Things I should be doing, in no particular order:
*cleaning any part of my house (truly - the entire thing needs a good mucking out)
*showering
*getting an oil change and new wipers for the daily driver
*wrapping a bday present for our neighbor girl, whose party the tot will attend this evening
*laundry
*changing the linens on my bed
*class prep
*bringing up from the basement and going through maternity clothes, newborn-wear
*restoring order to the garage, post-garage sale
*playing with my daughter (although I did feed her)
*going to pick up my prescription for thyroid meds, the dosage of which has gone up AGAIN because my body just can’t seem to cooperate, like, ever
*everything else

What I’m preoccupied with (ergo, what’s keeping me from doing any one thing):
*I am hungry, but lunchtime is a solid 30 minutes away
*I have heartburn, but I took the maximum dosage of z@nt@c hours ago

This is going to be a long day.

more song chart memes

Click here to find out what “Dos” means.

So, seriously. My brain is teh swiss cheese lately. Stuff goes straight through. Common sense stuff, too - not just unusual things that anyone could forget. Stuff like driving skills.

OMG, I cannot believe I’m about to admit this.

Yesterday I needed to move a car in the driveway. I told HG before he left in the morning, and we hit on the genius idea of me putting it neutral and rolling it down a bit instead of starting it up just to move it 10-20 feet.

Genius!

And yes, for those of you thinking it already, our driveway is on slight incline, so it wouldn’t take much than a gentle push-off or a mild to vigorous side-to-side steer to get it rolling. I opted for the one-foot-out-the-driver-door push-off.

Except it didn’t work. I pushed and I pushed and I went nowhere, not even an inch. I pushed harder, I grunted I pushed so hard. Nothing. WTF?

I added steering, to no avail.

And then I realized I had my foot on the brake.

This week, the tot has gone from not pedaling her trike to pedaling her trike everywhere. She has had this trike for over a year - what the hell happened this week that triggered the change?

In the beginning I thought she didn’t pedal because she didn’t get how it worked and/or her legs were too short to reach. In some ways that was true, but she grew and still she didn’t pedal.

A couple of weeks ago, HG chased us outside, put the tot on her trike (complete with parent handle bar), and we went for a walk around the neighborhood. The tot was clearly excited, so I blew off the fact that she cannot steer. She just does not get it, which surprised me since she knows left from right. Watching her that day, I thought the missing piece of that puzzle seemed to be hand-eye coordination.

The next week, I took her with me to a local camping and hiking store so that I could buy into the hysteria. We were just barely through the door when the tot saw the bicycles and insisted on riding one. I took her to a miniature bike (12″ wheel, with training wheels), and she climbed on. She desparately wanted to ride this bike, but she could barely get the pedals to turn. She simply didn’t have enough mass or strength to make it move, so I pushed her around the aisle, much to her delight. In that moment, I thought maybe the missing piece was not hand-eye, but power, and perhaps the struggle for forward motion interfered with her ability to steer.

BTW, she had her first in-store, public crying tantrum fit when I told her (for the fiftieth time, as we were leaving) that no, we were not taking the bike home with us, but maybe she’ll get one for her birthday. She really wanted that bike. She still reminds me of it any time we talk about bikes.

So then yesterday, actually, the day before yesterday, I took her for a short walk and on the way up the driveway, she started pedaling - really pedaling. What she figured out that day escapes me. Was it the coordination or simply the knowledge that she can do it - she can make her body do it?

Whatever it was, yesterday something clicked in both her head and body. We were at the Occupational Therapy Center for an evaluation (more on that in another post), and at the start of the session, she was encouraged to play in the indoor playground. One of the things they offer there is a path and a huge choice of wheeled things to ride on. The tot hopped on and tooled through the place like she’s been doing it for a year. First a strange two-footed pedaling device, then a trike, then a two-wheeler with training wheels. What’s more is she steered. Accurately. Without crashing.

WTF? Where is my daughter and what have you done with the pod?

We got home, and she started up on her trike like she’s preparing for a cross-county ride. The transformation is amazing and awesome, but weird.

I foresee a lot of outdoor time this summer, don’t you?

At the very least, this experience is a good reminder that whenever I get frustrated with the tot being stuck at a level of competence in something, or when I completely give up and say something like “So she’ll go to college in pull ups - I’m fine with that”, she bursts through it. Her pace is not my pace, and I need to remember that. She’ll get it, by and by.

I’m pretty sure I don’t know how to cook, and to make matters worse, I just bought myself a spankin’ new slow cooker, which I don’t know how to use. I just put a roast in, and I hope I’m not screwing it up too much.

The recipe is a 4 pound roast in the slow cooker on low for 5 hours, with 1 Cup red wine, 1 Cup water, and a packet of onion soup mix. The reviews said to skip the water and use beef broth, but that sounded too salty to me, so I just doubled the wine (which other reviewers suggested - I’m using Cabernet) and skipped the water. Except then the roast (which I browned first) is too big for the cooker, so I cut a chunk off. The roast didn’t rest all evenly in the liquid, and I was worried it would dry out up there like a little sandbar, so I added a Cup of water. Now the major part of the roast is submerged.

How bad is this gonna turn out? Egad, I’m afraid to think about it.

I guess I should just be glad there’s food in this house today. And we can always get take out, if it’s that bad.

Update!!
I just got home and it has, like, 20 minutes left on the timer, and it smells SO GOOOD.
Will report back on turnout.

For background: this post follows this post.

A wedding for me was more about the rite of passage than any religious meaning. In fact, I didn’t have any need or want for a religious ceremony - I just wanted to publicly acknowledged transition from child to adult, from dependent to independent. And I wanted to be married, meaning joined, with Boyfriend Guy (now Husband Guy).

At least, that’s what I think I thought I wanted, but now I know there was another critical, secret aspect to it: if I simply moved in with BG and chose not to marry him, I would be disowned by my family. Who knows if that was merely a threat or not, but at the time, I tended to cave to family threats.

Anyway, so my thoughts on a wedding today is about Rite of Passage.

A wedding is a ritual, complete with symbolic gestures (rings, for instance, as a symbol of love and promise - or, if you prefer, ownership). A woman walks in alone or accompanied by someone “giving her away”, and she walks out with her partner. Because growing up I always felt like my family owned me, I craved the public nature of the wedding that essentially shouts to the world through invitations, announcements, ceremony, and party, “Hey - I am not theirs anymore! Huzzah!”

The fact that I was walking out with another person, rather than on my own, is/was not important because I chose him. I controlled that choice and I was happy with it.

So I needed the whole business in order to feel like the transition was legitimate, real, solid, whole. The wedding ceremony fed some part of my mind and heart that needed the validation of the world.

Where did that need come from? Culture and family are my guesses. Sure, I had seen the Disney princess movies (Cinderella and Beauty and the Beast were the most influential) where a huge wedding and being married to a handsome prince are the goals, the ideal life for a young woman, but I actually think the intersection between culture and family was where the strongest messages were sent. There were always weddings in my extended family, and they were a big damn deal. Joyful, to be sure, but serious, as in - there are rules that must be followed, even to the extent that a participant might not get exactly what s/he wants.

For instance, my aunt and uncle who got married in our family church in the 1980s were told they could not alter or amend their vows because that’s just not how it’s done. This same aunt begged and begged our pastor to at least adjust how he asked them for their commitment to each other so that she could answer “I do” instead of “I will”. All the woman wanted was to say “I do” to the love of her life. That’s it. But no, the pastor promised her he would allow that and then didn’t deliver during the actual ceremony. Did he lie? Did he forget?* We will never truly know.

HG and I took control of our wedding. On the recommendation of a friend, we got this book and tore into it. We took apart the ritual of wedding ceremony and built one that suited us. We kept the overall shape and structure of a wedding, but we gutted it. Out with the traditional material and in with a message of union, of co-independence.

Looking back on it, this was the first step I truly took in taking control of my life, and this was a silent need I could never have predicted a wedding would fulfill.

I don’t mean to make it sound like the whole thing came off without a hitch, because there were many hitches, but they were only superficial things. (Heat index of 104 degrees; shortage of shade for an outdoor wedding; shortage of beer and water for such a hot day; less-than-planned entrances, toasts, songs, and dances all spring to mind.) On a deeper level, everything was perfect even in its imperfections because it was ours. It was our passage from one life to another. The after-party was secondary.

This is on my mind lately because of the weddings being planned around me. They seem so different to me. For instance, my next door neighbor’s mother in law is getting married this year. She’s a widow and she has found someone to spend the rest of her life with. I love that, and even though I don’t know the lady, I wish her all the happiness possible. The part that perplexes me is that they’re preparing to throw a huge wedding ceremony and reception. But they’ve both been married before. That seems foreign to me, so it makes me wonder what needs (silent or otherwise) does the wedding ceremony and reception fulfill for other people.

My only guess at this time, based on the little to no information I have, is that it’s really all about the party. There is something about the celebration that attracts others to the giant and expensive affair. Heck, maybe that’s the key: expensive. Maybe in America these days, is a wedding made more legitimate somehow by costing a lot of money? Or are we so convinced that we always, always, always have to feel like we’re super-special, and the way to accomplish that is through a super-huge wedding?

Or maybe it is about money, but from the other side – the getting side. I know HG and I have been invited to weddings of people we barely know, and my thought each time was, “I don’t even know these people, we’re not even going, but now I have to give them something.” Because the proper thing to do is to send a gift when you’ve been invited. Gah!

But I know I’m guilty of this, too. A couple of weeks ago, a friend asked if she and another friend could throw me a baby shower. This is my second kid, so honestly, I’m pretty much set (unless it’s a boy – then I’ll need clothes eventually), and I told my friend this, but ultimately my response went something more like this:
“Hell Yeah. Cash and prizes, baby. Cash and prizes.”

So, I’m as guilty as the next person.

I have strayed from my point, if I ever had one – other than the fact I’m just trying to get my head around this. I wish I understood it better, because I think if I did, I could be a better friend to my friend who is planning a gala herself. When she tells me, excitedly, about engraved this and calligraphied that, I often find I am lost for how to respond. I smile, I validate, I clap and squee, and I hope it’s enough for her.

*He was kind of an ass, so I would not put it past him to imagine he would have lied to my aunt. This is the same pastor who a few years later would not allow my brother’s funeral to be held in the church because my brother and he had one hell of an argument a couple of years before my brother entered the military. The fallout of that argument was an unspoken unofficial understanding that my brother was not welcome back in that church. The entire family left that church after that.

Right now I should be:
*putting together final grades for my students
*showering
*making a doctor’s appointment
*doing something about my heartburn
*grocery shopping, including taking our mountain of coins to the C0in St@r
*finishing the cleaning of the tot’s room (a task started yesterday at 11 a.m., if that gives you any freakin’ idea how bad it was)
*mounting a large-scale revolt against The Wonder Pets
*drinking water
*writing a better blog post

…but I’m not.

Stuff going on right now/these days:
*17 weeks yesterday.
*We have been cleaning house to make up for all those weeks when I was lying on the sofa instead of doing, say, anything. (Thanks, Nausea!)
*It got warm and now it’s chilly again, so in less than 18 hours, I’ve spotted two little, yellow, house spiders. (HG evicted one last night, but I couldn’t reach this morning’s interloper.)
*I got a new laptop. (woo hoo!)
*I’m getting ready to have a garage sale this weekend, and as usual, I have no idea how to price anything, particularly the furniture.
*I have pulled the tot out of the preschool daycare in favor of the home-based daycare, and she seems happy overall.
*The tot is having pee accidents like crazy lately, though, so what’s up with that?
*On the topic of “what’s up with that?”, two weeks ago, she had her first poop accident ever - out of the house, of course, and I had no back up clothes.
*The tot continues to act excited about numero dos, but how much of that is an act?
*I’ve been shopping for a dress for the wedding I’m reading in this summer. In short, shopping for clothes is dumb, and I hate it.
*Okay, I don’t hate it, but I am mad at it. Shopping for plus-size dresses that are wedding-appropriate is one thing, shopping for maternity dresses that are wedding-appropriate is one thing, shopping for plus-size maternity dresses that are wedding-appropriate is another thing entirely. I’m such a stingy, cheap old lady that it pains me to have to order several dresses online, knowing I’ll have to pay to ship some or all back after trying them on, but there are no brick-mortar stores anywhere near me for plus-size maternity gear.
*Sporadic insomnia sucks as much as regular insomnia.
*I’m staring down the barrel of Gestational Diabetes again, this time complete with insulin, and that sucks.
*We finished our meetings with S., our Food Friend. She took another job, and since the tot was getting ready to graduate out of the program due to age, we opted not to take a new clinician.
*In a week, I’m taking the tot to an Occupational Therapist’s office (one we’ve been seen at before, when she was evaluated for Sensory Integration Dysfunction - have I written about that? Not sure.)
*Anyway, I think we exhausted about everything we could do with S., so we’ll give this a shot for a bit to see if there’s any progress to be made there. If there is, great; if not, I guess we’re on our own.
*I bought a new slow cooker, and I’m itching to try it, but we haven’t had a good day for it yet. It might be Thursday this week before I get a chance.

Um, I think that’s about it. Yeah, that looks about right.