Harder Than I Thought

Geez, it's harder than I thought to CONSCIOUSLY eat enough calories and fat every day to grow a baby! Well, it wouldn't be that hard if I was eating crap all day, which is what I was doing up until recently... Good thing Peep is taking from me what s/he needs so I'm the only one suffering for all those burgers, pizza slices, *fried* french fries, and other yummy but bad for you stuff. Of course, I *could* argue that you can get every food group in pizza...and burgers, if you do it right. :) But we all know that grease is not an essential part of growing a baby. So, how do you get enough fat and calories in a day when you're eating healthy? Don't we all pretty much cheat on a daily basis, thereby making it easier to get to that goal? But if you really did go by the food pyramid (which I hear is under major revamping...more on that later), you would be stuffed full of veggies and fruits (which have almost no calories or fat), grains (cereal, bread, pasta, and other stuff that tends not to have much fat either), and a bit of dairy and meat thrown in to balance it all out. Since the pyramid says we're supposed to limit our fat, that would mean lean meats and low-fat/fat-free dairy. In a perfect world, we could eat all waking hours of the day before achieving that ideal total of calories and whatnot for the day... But to be honest, I'm a picky eater...there are only so many veggies I will eat, and fruits give me problems if I eat too many of them. Plus, fruits tend to make me *hungrier* instead of satisfying that hunger. I could eat bread and pasta all the time...it would make me happy. But since I have PCOS, I'm supposed to be careful about that, too. And since I got pregnant, I haven't been able to stand the smell of ground turkey, one of the major staples of my pre-pregnancy diet. I'm also getting sick of chicken, and I only like steak medium-rare, which is a no-no while pregnant. So what's a girl to do? Well, I'm doing the best I can... If I can't get to those goals consistently, I'll just have to add in some crap to balance it all out. :)

Oh yeah, food pyramid. I heard that the new guideline for exercise is 90 minutes a day, EVERY DAY. Are these people on crack? Do they really think people have an hour and a half to spare *every day*??? It's insane! And unreasonable, and setting people up for failure which makes them give up entirely. I know, I've been there..setting goals too high is bad news. My endocrinologist told me he wanted me to exercise about 30 minutes for 6 days a week (or was it 5?). That would be 3 hours total a week... he did say I could sum it up, too, which was usually how I managed to fit it in. A lot of exercise on Sundays with a little during the week. 3 hours is manageable. I just finished 3 hours for this week when I did my new exercise DVD tonight. I can't imagine finding the time for 10.5 hours of exercise! Especially when Peep joins us this summer!! But I'm no expert so I guess I don't know what I'm talking about...

Good Start!

In line with my resolution yesterday, I went back to keeping track of everything I eat. Yes, it's neurotic. But it worked before. This was the biggest part of my being able to lose 35 pounds in the year before we started trying to conceive, even more so than exercise (especially since I had a habit of only exercising one day a week at times). I use this website, Fit Day and it calculates everything for you-all you have to do is remember to enter it into the daily journal. Yes, it's cumbersome, but right now I need to do it again. I've realized that I only know two ways to eat-junk or restricted. In that year that I lost that weight, I was restricting my fat (at first to less than 30g/day, later to less than 40g/day). As soon as I got my BFP and was told I was not supposed to be dieting or restricting fat, I kind of went haywire and drifted back to my old ways. The holidays didn't help, but I'm the one to blame. And it's time to take control again. The funny thing is, when keeping track of what I'm eating, I found it's very hard for me to eat a normal amount of fat and calories. It's almost 6PM and with dinner included, my totals for today are 1308 calories and 25g fat. Not good. One day won't kill me, and it might do some damage control for my Big Mac attack yesterday, but I have to find a happy medium.

Oh yeah, and I did Zen Mama again today. :) My goal was to do that at least twice a week and I've already achieved that goal for this week, with 2 more days that I plan on doing it since Brian won't be home to poke fun at me. :)

Zen Mama

As the snow falls outside tonight, I took the plunge and weighed myself. I knew it wasn't going to be good news... I've been eating a TON of junk lately since that's all I've been craving and I haven't exercised since October. It was only a matter of time before this would start to catch up to me. 10 lbs gained overall. 2 lbs since my appointment only a week ago!! Okay, so it could be part of that normal fluctuation...I weighed myself right after eating dinner (and then prompty drowned my sorrows in a piece of Jubilee Roll) but the fact remains - if I continue on this path, I'll be as big as a house come the end of June. I needed to do something, and walking in the cold snow without the benefit of all my layering pieces (which are now too small) was not appealing. So I pulled out Zen Mama.

I can't remember if I bought it when I was pregnant with Arabella, or afterwards when I was planning for my next pregnancy (or at least, hoping for the next one), but I wanted to get a prenatal yoga DVD. There actually is a yoga studio in our town, but they don't offer prenatal yoga. The nerve! In fact, nobody does. The closest place that offers it is in Canton/Avon, which is about 20-30 minutes away from my house. I refuse to trudge that far away to go to any sort of "exercise" class. Of course, I've had this DVD for months now and haven't used it either. I also have a nice YMCA membership that's going completely to waste...but that's not the topic. So I popped Zen Mama into the DVD player, unrolled the sticky mat, and got to work. It was a little difficult doing the poses with my dog licking my feet or face, whichever she could get at, but at least I can feel like I accomplished something. 1 hour of yoga counts, right? If nothing else, it's taught me that my muscles have tightened up immensely... I suppose I better be a Zen Mama at least a couple times a week between now and the day Peep comes into this world if I have any hope of 1) having a somewhat easier birth (or so the legend goes) and 2) fitting into a matron-of-honor dress for my sister's wedding in early October. I can do this, I swear! In the meantime, I should probably lay off the McDonald's as well...

Ouch!

Okay, who thought it was a great idea to sleep on your side during pregnancy? My hips have been hurting me as it is, but sleeping exclusively on them has been pure torture. I should say laying on them since I'm not getting much sleep these days. I want to sleep on my stomach, but my belly ligaments hurt when I do, and I'm supposed to be getting myself out of the habit of sleeping on my back. Every time I slide over onto my back, Brian reminds me in his so helpful way, "You're not supposed to be lying on your back!" I managed to get some sleep in a weird modified side/stomach sleep, but it made my arm fall asleep pretty fast, too. And I hate the body pillow I bought-it's useless for me. I know I've said this before, but I can't believe how much my hips hurt so early on! What the heck? Is my body getting ready to deliver a 12 lb baby?? They were pretty wide to begin with...I can't imagine them needing to get any wider!

More Stuff

Hormonal rant is over... We talked yesterday. A case of misunderstandings. I don't know if it will stay all better, but at least I got it off my chest and we talked things over. Of course, he wasn't too happy to hear that I had posted about it in my blog, but I told him I needed to get it out and would he prefer I share it with a bunch of people who know him or don't know him. :)

So we spent most of the day hanging out on the couch watching TV. I did that most of the weekend acutally, aside from taking down the Christmas tree and decorations yesterday. Might as well do it while we can; there soon will be no rest for the weary. In the late afternoon we drove over an hour to Babies 'R Us to update the registry. I had been having second thoughts about the crib we originally registered for so I wanted to have another look at our options. It was BUSY in there. The woman said they had 34 new registries today, plus all the women who were there to update existing ones! So we were in and out as quickly as possible, even though it takes nearly an hour to get there so I normally would have preferred spending some time browsing around. We decided on a set with a bit of a darker finish since it will fit in better with everything else we own. The new crib is also $70 cheaper than the old one we picked out, so maybe we'll have a better chance of getting it. Here it is:

Dark Pine Olympia Crib

Oh yeah, and my sister called me a dork for putting up a belly shot on our family webpage. She'll understand someday when she has babies - she's only 23 years old.

Hormonal Rant

I apologize in advance to all of you with perfect spouses/partners out there. I just need to get this off of my chest...

The thing that irritates me the most about pregnancy is the advice to let others help you get done what you can't anymore. In theory, this works...as long as someone offers to help. My husband is not one of those people. I can't get him to lift a finger around the house normally, unless it's to feed himself or clear the table. Now it's worse. I can't get everything done and it just sits and sits and sits until I get so sick of seeing it, I go into a hormonal craze and do it all in one night and flip out the entire time because I didn't get any help. It's not fair to either of us. A great example: Thursday it snowed and then we had freezing rain and sleet. Brian stayed home from work to go skiing in the morning and was home all afternoon. I had to work 8:30AM to 6:30PM. He played video games all afternoon. Not a single dish was washed, nothing was picked up, and the front walkway to our mailbox wasn't shoveled. I asked him at lunchtime to make dinner so it would be ready when I got home from work. I called him at 6:30 to let him know I was on my way home (as requested) and was asked "What do you want for dinner?" I live 3-5 minutes away from work... He hadn't even started anything and I was on my way home. How hard would it have been to take the initiative and just get it done, especially since I explicitly asked that he do it? My reply: "Do I call you at work every day and ask you what you want for dinner?" Click. Yesterday, the mailman didn't deliver our mail because the walkway wasn't cleared. I brought this up to my husband who replied "It's not my job. Call the landlord." The landlord lives 1 hour away. It's 8 feet of walkway. And we're already on shaky ground with the landlord. Seems like an easy one to figure out to me; why bother him (and risk further problems since he obviously doesn't want us here anymore) when it would take 5 minutes to do it. But I'm not supposed to be shoveling, especially this extremely saturated and crusty (therefore heavy) snow. I reminded him that we won't get any more mail until this is done. He refused and then went to work this morning, leaving it unshoveled. So I had to do it in the cold rain. I'm not supposed to shovel anyway because of my asthma, but even more so because of the pregnancy and the fact that I've already had one miscarriage. But there I was, shoveling away and praying to whomever the entire time that I wouldn't lose Peep over this. I return to our apartment full of clutter, reminded once again of how Brian doesn't help with anything. I asked him 2 weeks ago to clean the bathroom for me since I'm having a hard time with the tub now...he said he would. It still hasn't been done. I don't think I'm being unreasonable... It's just so hard to sit back and rest when I'm supposed to (even when he tells me to) if he doesn't help pick up *ANY* of the slack. I am not exaggerating. He does absolutely no housework, and even though he keeps telling me I shouldn't be doing this or that, he never steps in to do it instead. This is only going to get worse...

So what's the answer? Hire help and make him pay for it? I've threatened that before when he wouldn't help and he flipped out. I don't have anyone else who can help... My mother still has 6 people living in her house; she has more than enough to do at her own home. My MIL lives several towns away; I'm not going to beg her to come here and help because her son won't. But I'm at wit's end... I can't do it all, but it must get done eventually! And the things I'm not supposed to do at all still have to get done, even if he refuses to help. I don't know what the answer is... But I'm sick of being irritated and grouchy because of this.

My First Belly Shot

Okay, here's my first belly shot! Sorry it's such a horrible photo...I had to use the timer on the camera since I haven't been able to get Brian to take a picture for me. I also wasn't very awake yet. :) Of course, I had a bit of a belly before getting pregnant so I just look more pregnant than I am, but that's okay. A maternity shirt makes it all better. :)


Me at 16 weeks