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Thursday, April 26th
They work!!
From the Department of Too Much Information:
Last night I was showering and noticed something that delights me far more than it should. I found that with a little pressure (ok, sort of a lot of pressure), the tiniest bit of colostrum would leak from... the chestal region. It's not much. It's not enough to feed, say, a gnat. In fact, one sort of has to squint and believe Very Hard to recognize it... but it's there. It's not anything that's ever happened before so I'm not mistaking some sort of horrible infection for lactation. It has begun. A little tiny itty bitty bit.
I am inordinately excited about this. After lugging around these boobs for 23 years, never being able to wear a halter top, putting up with backaches and strap marks digging into my shouldres, and having altogether too many idiotic men talk to my chest instead of me I have actual tangible proof that these F cups are good for something other than entertainment!
Probably this is hormone induced insanity, but I'm thrilled that my boobs work.
Posted by GoddessKristin on 04/26/07 at 02:24 PM [link]
Friday, April 20th
The Way It Is
6:00 am: Radio comes on. NPR news gently wakes you with some sort of horrifying report from Darfur, Virginia, or your own neighborhood. Press snooze bar.
6:08 am: Press snooze bar.
6:16 am: Press snooze bar.
6:24 am: Snooze, snooze, snooze.
6:31 am: Alright, alright. I'll get up. You don't have to be pushy about it.
6:32 am: Step on dog, who is loyally spread out at side of bed. Apologize profusely and point out to dog that we've been doing this for some time now and that lately he's not been getting out of the way during endless nightly potty runs and other stumbling in the dark ventures. An improvement in this area would be nice.
6:35 am: After running brush through lovely new haircut that stands up to several nights sleep, washing face and hands, brushing teeth, and ninety-fourth potty run since midnight, get dressed. Options include maternity shirt with long sleeves, maternity shirt with short sleeves, maternity shirt that might show too much cleaveage and maternity shirt that you wore once but which has a stain on it already, of fucking course. Because of limited selection, make it out of bedroom in 5 minutes flat.
6:40 am: Bleed self to find out fasting blood sugar number. Thank goodness it's in range.
6:41 am: Set up to measure out insulin. Roll bottle between palms and begin to stick needle through rubber stopper.
6:42 am: Get the right kind of insulin. Wonder why the daytime insulin and the nighttime insulin need to look identical. What is the point of making this harder than it already is?
6:43 am: Make breakfast. 2 eggs and half a toasted English muffin. Also some diet root beer because milk is off limits and straight water first thing in the morning is gross.
6:52 am: Finish breakfast and pack lunch. More eggs anyone?
6:55 am: Go to bathroom. Again.
7:00 am: Kiss Dave goodbye, pat dog on head. Head out the door.
7:01 am: Return for blood sugar test kit that was left on kitchen counter. Head out the door.
7:02 am: Return for lunch that you just packed. Head out the door.
7:03 am: Return for sunglasses. Blame the baby for this lack of brain cells. Head out the door.
7:20 am: Arrive at work. Putter around getting room ready and making last minute changes to lesson plans.
7:45 am: Test blood sugar.
8:02 am: Go to bathroom. Again.
8:25 am: Students arrive. Corral them and instruct them for the 142nd time on how to start the day ("Mouths closed, books out, listening to announcements please"). Know that it is the 142nd time you've said this because it is the 142nd day of school.
8:28 am to 9:58 am: Teach, teach, teach. Wonder if anyone is learning anything because of glazed looks. Teach harder. Need to go to bathrooom from 8:32 am on.
9:59 am - 10:47 am: Prep period. Eat snacks. Wish you could go to sleep because exhaustion is really getting to you. Go to bathroom. Again. And again. Try to fit in all bathroom runs for the day during prep. Know you will fail.
10:53 am - 12:25 pm: Teach more. Try to remember everything you said the first time around and say it again to this second class. Wonder why you don't just videotape your morning lesson and use the VCR as a technological aid.
12:25 pm - 1:01 pm: Go to bathroom. Eat lunch, under duress. Hate eggs more by the second.
1:06 pm - 2:35 pm: More teaching. Did you ever think you had so much wisdom to impart? Sadly, you do not, but you have to fake it. Need to go to bathroom. Try to ignore it. Fail.
1:52 pm: Realize you forgot to take your post-lunch blood sugar. Try not to swear out loud. Succeed.
2:25 pm: Interrupt great classroom discussion about slavery to take goddamn blood sugar. Try to be nonchalant about this. Give students a paragraph of notes to copy before sticking yourself. Fail to be discrete enough and suffer through blood test with 32 sets of eyes on your bleeding digits. Avoid sarcasm when class smart-aleck asks your number (he doesn't have any idea what it means, he just wants to distract everyone). Do not give evil eye to squeamish girl who "Ewwwwww"s loudly when you put your blood soaked thumb in your mouth.
2:35 pm: Resist urge to physically throw students out of classroom when the bell rings. Particularly nice student who needs to use phone and sweet student who is interested in your weekend plans. Go to bathroom. Again.
2:36 pm - 2:44 pm: Wait impatiently for it to be 2:45 pm so you can leave.
2:45 pm: Leave.
3:00 pm: Return home. Wonder whether to collapse on couch or get afternoon snack first. Try to do both at once. Fail. Eat snack (hello, pita bread! Long time, no see. Except for the long time part). Go to bathroom.
3:04 pm: Collapse on couch. Stare at television with glassy eyes. Mumble something about your day to husband who is trying to reach out and connect to you. This is a nice thing, do not shut him down.
3:06 pm: "STOP TRYING TO TALK TO ME! I AM EXHAUSTED!"
3:07 pm: "I am soooooo sorry. That was hormones."
3:10 pm: Snnnnoooooorrre
5:30 pm - 5:45 pm: Wake up. Go to bathroom. Eat protein laden dinner. Ponder an after-dinner walk, which would be good for you and for your numbers.
5:46 pm: Screw walk. Sit on couch.
6:30 pm: Take blood sugar. Pray that missed walk will not be your downfall tonight. Breathe sigh of relief when number is within range. (Alternate: Curse self when number is above range.)
6:31 pm - 9:30 pm: Watch TV. Work hard to follow plots. Fail several times. Wonder how many brain cells you really have lost because this is not the most complicated "My Name is Earl" you've ever seen. Go to... oh you know.
9:31 pm: Eat. Another. Egg. Or maybe a slice of cheese. Nothing with carbs shall pass this way again. Try not to sigh dejectedly.
9:35 pm: Measure out nighttime insulin and give self injection. Nick a vein this time for good measure. Bleed a little. Watch, fascinated, as bruise immediately begins. Think of self as delicate flower. Feel a little sorry for your poor bruised, stretch-marked abdomen.
9:36 pm: Yank t-shirt over messy abdomen because husband appears to be watching you. Feel stupid that husband's attention on abdomen makes you feel self-conscious. Justify self by remembering that although abdomen has never been a work of art, these days it looks more like the work of a madman. Nobody should be subjected to that.
9:40 pm: Brush teeth, take shower. have several Braxton-Hicks contractions in shower which make leg-shaving a laughable thought. Consider asking husband to shave your legs.
9:41 pm: Recover from laughing fit. Husband and you in shower! At same time! HHHAhahahahahaaaa! That would never work! Too much messy abdomen for that!
9:42 pm: Damn abdomen.
9:52 pm: Fall into bed. Watch DVD for a while. Assume sleep will come soon.
10:12 pm: Toss and turn. Feel baby begin aerobics class. Assume sleep will come... soonish.
10:22 pm: Wonder if baby is the next Jane Fonda. Stop moving, baby!
10:31 pm: Wheeeen wiiiilll the baaaaby stooooop daaancing? Go to bathroom since you're awake anyway.
10:45 pm: Roll onto back. Know that this is not best for baby but also know that it generally quiets her down.
10:47 pm: Feel guilty about being on back. Roll onto side. Baby resumes Flashdance routine.
10:50 pm: Baby is a maniac, maniac on the floor. And she's dancing like she's never danced before.
10:55 pm: Fall asleep.
11:20 pm: Fattest cat in house joins you in bed. Know this because he wants to cuddle. RIGHT NOW.
1:22 am: Wake up to go to the bathroom.
3:10 am: Wake up to go to the bathroom.
5:20 am: Wake up to go to the bathroom.
6:00 am: Radio comes on. Pick yourself up, dust yourself off and do it all over again.
Posted by GoddessKristin on 04/20/07 at 03:07 PM [link]
Wednesday, April 18th
20 Things I Will Do After the Baby Comes
1. Eat some pizza. The lack of pizza is killin' me over here!
2. Drink a glass of champagne. Possibly I will do this first. After I breastfeed the child, of course. And just one glass because now? I am a lightweight.
3. Take a steaming hot bath. Probably I will last 5 minutes in said bath before the baby starts crying but goddamn it, I will enjoy those 5 minutes. Perhaps I will bring the champagne with me. And the pizza.
4. Have dessert. I have not yet settled on what type of dessert I shall have. Probably several. No. Definitely several.
5. Stuff all my gestational diabetes supplies in the deep dark dank back of my linen closet where they belong because if I never see a test strip or a lancet again it'll be too soon.
6. Stand on a ladder. I have been strictly forbidden from ladders since day 1 of the pregnancy by my mother. In fact, last week I was using a step stool to hang some curtain rods and Dave answered a phone call from Mom and handed it over to me saying, "Kristin, come down from that ladder and talk to your mother" and I think Mom lost 6 years off her life. It took far too long to explain that I wasn't on a ladder and that Dave is just a jerk.
7. Go out for dinner. There is precious little reason to go out to eat these days - everything is bad for me. Unless perhaps you know an eggs and pita bread restaurant? But why pay for what I can so easily access at home?
8. Wear shoes with laces. I cannot bend over to tie laces anymore and while this isn't an everyday requirement, I'd like to wear something other than slip-ons again.
9. Sleep on my stomach. 'Nuff said.
10. Fold laundry without searing pain in my back. It would seem like this is a gimme, but the lean down-twist-turn-fold pattern of laundry folding makes my sciatica act up something bad. In fact, just about any activity makes the sciatica act up. I hate my sciatica.
11. Avoid eggs like the plague. I have vowed not to eat a straight egg for 6 months after Dessa arrives. I do not think this is unrealistic.
12. Have a glass of fruit juice. I have 5 lovely bottles of grape juice that Dave bought me for Valentine's Day that I cannot touch because of the GD. They mock me from the wine rack. They will be mine again.
13. Get through one night without having to get up to pee. I realize that I'll be trading my pee time for feeding and diaper changing time, but it is a sacrifice I'm willing to make. It's humiliating to have to roll out of bed and rush to the bathroom for the trickles that I wind up with.
14. Stay up past 10 pm, like a real grown up. Eventually. Again, I realize that Baby Schedule might necessitate odd bedtimes for a while but someday I hope to actually watch The Daily Show in it's real timeslot instead on the next day on TiVo. It'll be a sign of womanhood.
15. Have a chocolate raspberry martini. Between the alchohol and the sugar? That's one drink that has been so strictly forbidden to me that I suspect it'll be like a hit of crack when I finally get one. Yuuuuum (the drink, not the crack)!
16. Lie on my back. It won't hurt anymore and I won't constantly wonder if I'm depriving my baby of essential oxygen. I worry like that, doncha know.
17. Have enough dinner that I feel actually full. These days I eat a bit, feel done and then 10 minutes later I'm hungry again because I couldn't really eat enough the first time. But by the time I'm hungry again I have to eat just protein because I've already exhausted my meager carb quota and there are only so many chicken legs and eggs you can stomach. It's a vicious cycle. Some filler like bread, pasta or rice would be heavenly. Especially bread, which I miss viciously.
18. Have something - ANYTHING - but scrambled eggs and half a whole wheat muffin for breakfast. I'm sick to death of it but it works for my numbers and I'm scared to start messing with what works. French toast will probably be first on the list and then I may branch out to daring things like oatmeal and cold cereal. Speaking of which...
19. Drink a glass of milk! How I miss my ice cold milk! Mayhaps I shall add a cookie to the side and really go hog wild.
20. Hold that baby until someone pries her outta my arms with a crowbar. After all this? I'll have earned the right.
Posted by GoddessKristin on 04/18/07 at 10:50 AM [link]
Sunday, April 15th
VisualDNA
This was sort of fun, and a different way to be introspective. Turns out that most of my picks weren't the popular ones, which was interesting. I've always been different...
Posted by GoddessKristin on 04/15/07 at 09:34 PM [ link]
Thursday, April 5th
I attract 'em like ants to a picnic
Mindnumbingly stupid situations, that is. I suspect that some of it has to do with my ongoing short temper, but when I ask other people, they see my point. Let me try one out on you and see what you think.
Yesterday I went to my OB, who wrote me a prescription for AM insulin - a 50-50 mix of regular and long lasting. Now I'll be taking insulin first thing in the morning and last thing at night (as a side note, it appears that a third, dinner-time dose is imminent but we will cross that bridge when we get to it. Namely when the OB comes back from vacation in 2 weeks). In any case, he set up the prescription via computer and sent it to the pharmacy, where it would be waiting for me. That was at about 4:10 pm.
When I got to the pharmacy at 4:25 pm (pay attention to these times, they will become important momentarily), I got in line, waiting a few minutes and then surrendered my Kaiser card to the clerk. She glanced at it, typed for a second, handed it back and said, "Wait for your name to show on the board."
Which means my prescription wasn't yet filled. Fine. I have a seat and wait another 15 minutes. It's only supposed to take 15 minutes to fill a prescription. There are signs everywhere that tell you that if it's been more than 15 minutes, ask what's going on. This is due, I know for a fact, to people who would sit for hours waiting for their names to come up only to find out that their name was forgotten or the prescription was backordered or ... whatever. So when the 15 minutes were up (in addition to the 15 - 20 minutes from the time the doctor sent in the order), I got back in line to talk to someone.
At 4:45 I again surrendered my card to a clerk and explained that I'd waited for 15 minutes as instructed but my name wasn't on the board.
"We called you at 4:21," said Little Miss Helpful (title mine).
"I wasn't here at 4:21. I was still walking here from the doctor's."
"Well, we called you at 4:21. This prescription has to be special ordered. It won't be here until Friday morning."
It may have been at this point that I felt my blood pressure rise. "So... why did that clerk over there tell me at 4:25 to have a seat and wait if 4 minutes earlier you planned to tell me that the medicine wasn't here? Was I supposed to wait here until Friday?"
"We called you."
"I understand that. You called me at 4:21." I spoke slowly, for her sake. "I arrived here at 4:25 and talked to the clerk then. And she told me to wait. Which I would have had to do until Friday."
"Yes. The prescription has to be special ordered."
Do not boil over, Kristin. It's not worth it. "My point here... and I do have one...," I continued, "is that I'm curious to know why I was told to have a seat AFTER the computer knew that the prescription was never going to be here today."
You know what she said, right? "Well, we called you."
It was at this point that I ripped my card out of Little Miss Helpful's hands and demanded to talk to a supervisor who understood my issue completely, apologized profusely and instructed both clerks immediately in the proper way to 1) read a computer screen and 2) assist customers.
Ha ha! That's not what happened at all! Did you believe me? You are silly!
What actually happened is that I sighed deeply, took my card and left, grumbling to myself about the futility of it all on the drive home. It's not so much that this was a huge deal, it's just the frustration of trying to point out any sort of inconsistancy. She was never going to get it and it stopped being worth it at about the second "We called you."
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Try this one on for size.
I got a jury duty summons for last Thursday. When I called the night before, the recorded message told me to call back at 11 am to see if they wanted me to report to the courtroom. I hate this. It's a total wasted morning and I think it's rude. However, my sense of manners is not consulted in these matters, so I dutifully called for a substitute because if I had to run out to Oakland on a moment's notice in the middle of the morning, I didn't want to leave people scrambling to cover my classes.
Responsible, no? Reasonable, no? The logical thing to do, no?
No.
I got an email yesterday requesting me to submit my jury duty papers from the courthouse. I responded that I did submit my summons. I was told that no, they need papers from the actual courthouse from that day. I explained that I was on-call and was released at 11 am so, you know, never went to the courthouse. Then it got interesting.
Would you like me to change this to a personal necessity day in that case? queried payroll.
Not so much I replied but in more businesslike tones. I was summoned as you can see, and when I called at 11 am they told me I was excused and that "this completes your jury duty service". That phrasing indicates to me that I did serve jury duty and therefore should be granted jury duty coverage. This was not a personal day, it was mandated by the county of Alameda.
When you're on call you need to report to work and then if at 11 am they require you to report to the courthouse you need to call for a sub then.
Despite the fact that finding a substitute in the middle of a workday is impossible and that, had I been required to report this would have left the office staff scrambling to cover my afternoon classes?
Yes
Does this make sense to you? I suppose it does on one level but on the other, far more responsible level it blows my mind. If I had a job where I only had to worry about my own productivity it makes good sense - when I was in high tech it mattered more what I produced than when precisely I was in the office to produce it. Go to work, work until you're called, leave if you need to. But as a teacher I have to be present at certain times. I can't just run off to Oakland at the drop of a court's hat. I would expect my employer to know, respect and understand that. In fact, I sort of would expect that my employer would encourage me to ensure coverage for my classes so that undue hassles could be avoided.
But, apparently not. So, because the court couldn't make up their goddamned minds about whether they actually needed me or not, I had to take a personal day out of my rapidly dwindling reserve.
I'm trying to blow off the whole thing because it does me no good to get upset about it. But it does bug me and my Libra sense of justice. I think before this baby arrives I will have gotten to the point of simply crawling into a cave so I don't have to deal with people anymore.
Call me when the world makes more sense.
Posted by GoddessKristin on 04/05/07 at 11:36 AM [link]
Monday, April 2nd
Creeping ever onward
I'm up to 12 units of insulin with no response at all. My fasting numbers are exactly the same as before I started stabbing myself of an evening and now my daytime numbers are beginning to creep upwards. Not alarmingly, but there it is. This is a frustrating and annoying condition to say the least. While I know that the perinatal NPs are doing their job, I find it irritating to have to recite everything I ate each time I got a high reading.
"And what was your evening snack the night before you got a fasting 94?"
"Slice of toast and teaspoon of peanut butter."
"And the night before you had the fasting 112?"
"Same thing."
That stops 'em every time. They really want me to be able to control this with diet, but it seems that I can only do that during the day, and in order to do even that I can only eat from the following delightful list: an egg, some lean meat, a half a whole wheat english muffin or a half a whole wheat pita or one slice of "sawdust" toast, half a cup of beans, a salad, the occasional apple, an extremely small potato (on a good day), a quarter cup of cottage cheese, plain vegetables like zucchini or chard... I'm trying to think of other things I have eaten but almost all of them have resulted in unfavorable numbers. It is a short list, and a boring one.
And yet... as often as I sigh at the thought of another half pita and turkey snack, I'm not tempted to cheat. Well, I'm tempted but only in the theoretical "Wow wouldn't it be nice to have some pineapple with lunch" sort of way. The flash of desire for a tall glass of milk at breakfast passes quickly when I feel Dessa punch me in the kidneys. I know who this is for and since it isn't me, it's an easy thing to wipe the slate and eat my damn pita.
Things are starting to come together and become more real. It's still unthinkable to me that within a matter of weeks there will be a baby in my house that isn't going home with anyone else, but I act as if I believe it and continue setting up. The nursery is painted now, with the exception of the doorframe and windowsill, and the blinds are up. There is a large packet of diapers on the landing and a box containing 704 baby wipes (I don't understand the weird number either). A diaper bag lays nonchalantly on the arm of the sofa. There is a crib and dresser in the living room waiting for the nursery to be ready.
Everywhere I look there are tangible reminders of the baby that is coming. And, of course, there are the physical jabs, kicks, rolls and pokes of said baby. But I can't really say that I believe it. I don't know what that would mean.
Posted by GoddessKristin on 04/02/07 at 09:50 AM [link]
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Notes from a Yarn Hacker
