Tired.

For the first time, I'm feeling quite 7 1/2 months pregnant.

We had a very busy weekend. A late drive to Anderson, an early drive to Fort Wayne, and a late drive home; a wedding and reception with dancing; an un-air-conditioned church service; and an afternoon spent swimming, followed by a freak noodle water-cannon accident and near-drowning (on my part) was all enough to make me feel utterly exhausted. Add in that Helen has discovered that she can press on my ribs and my bladder, AND kick my kidneys all at the same time, and you'll understand why I'm not wanting to do more than lay around, watching movies today. Knowing that the air outside is humid and almost 90 and that we're expecting/hoping for storms isn't giving me any incentive to leave the apartment. Blah.

EDIT: I take it back. There is something that I want to do besides lay around, watching movies. I want to eat ice-cream, which is very much not allowed. Dangit.

You're welcome?

On my way home from the pharmacy this morning, some guy came up and thanked me for keeping my baby.

I may have given him a slightly blank stare. Not because I was a little surprised and alarmed at having a strange man approach me (I was), and not because he had a phenomenal mustache and was wearing a crazy Hawaiian shirt (he was). It was simply for the reason that, as a simple day to day matter, I often forget there is any option other than keeping a baby. I keep my Helen like I keep my husband and my parents. You might as well thank me for keeping my little brothers (although, come to think of it, maybe my mother should thank me for keeping them).

I have to admit to a bit of intellectual cowardice, here, in that I try not to think about the reality of abortion. Ever since we found out about our baby, and particularly as she has gotten more and more active and assertive, I just can't think about it. It makes me feel physically ill and more than a little overly emotional and upset. Blame the hormones, but I just can't take it, for now.

Come to think of it, the guy with the mustache should be relieved that a blank stare was all he got. The alternative was crazy pregnant-lady tears.

Truths Discovered While Moving

I'm just now recovering from one very intense weekend.

1) Moving is crazy and takes far longer than it should.
Seriously. Even having taken three very full carloads of stuff to the new apartment a couple weeks back, we had too much left to move. I had no idea our nice, uncluttered two-bedroom apartment could hold so much crap. Apparently the people at UHaul didn't know either, because the truck size they suggested was slightly inadequate. In addition, the aforementioned crap took much longer to load than expected. Hours more. Exhausting hours more.

2) Last-minute helpers are WONDERFUL people.
When we realized that the two of us were not going to be able to finish loading in a timely manner, and that not all of our things were going to fit into our 14' truck, Evan's brother Peter (and his van) came to our rescue. Besides being another non-pregnant pair of hands, he provided a definite morale boost. Even with his help, however, as late-afternoon wore away, we were running short on time to make the drive to the storage unit in Waukesha, unload there, drive to Milwaukee, and unload the rest of our things. Peter called his wife, Marsha, to come help. I had the idea of calling our dear friends, the Gehlbachs, to see if their son Andrew was available to help with the unloading. He wasn't, but we got Pastor, Susan, Maggie, and a friend instead. They helped us completely fill our storage unit, and Pastor Gehlbach, Susan, Peter, and Marsha stuck around until 11:00 p.m. to finish unloading at the apartment downtown. There aren't enough ways to say thank you to them.

3) "You're not a Russian peasant woman, giving birth out in the fields. You need to take it easy."
I'm not good at taking it easy or holding back when other people are hard at work. Right or wrong, it makes me feel uncomfortably guilty. It happened last Summer when my family was working on destruction and remodeling at the new house; as long as my brothers were going, I was going to keep going, too. That's great when you're just a twenty-something girl in fairly good shape who can deal with waking up with sore muscles. When you're that same twenty-something girl AND seven months pregnant, however.... Let me just say that getting up for church Sunday morning was one of the more difficult things I've done in a long time, matched only by pulling myself out of bed Monday morning. Swollen and sore feet, back ache, arms 3x heavier than they should be, and general crabbiness and shortness of temper are just a few of the delightful side-effects from which I'm finally recovering. And we get to do it all again in just over two months. Two weeks before my due date. But that's what my brothers are for.

Thursday Night Fun

During the school year, every Thursday evening was set aside for the MBA students (and hangers-on) to meet up at a set location for drinks and visiting. Evan and I almost never missed, even after we found out about baby Helen. (Matching a bunch of grad students drink-for-drink with water is a good way to stay fully hydrated. Or die of water poisoning.) This being Wisconsin, no one looks twice at a visibly pregnant woman in a bar, although Evan's classmates were constantly congratulating me on being "a trooper" and "such a good sport." Apparently, the ability to socialize without drinking makes me some sort of Superwoman. It was a great opportunity, though, to get to know the MBAs, particularly since I didn't have any acquaintances of my own in Madison.

Because there's a fairly good-sized group of MBA graduates, Summer interns, and incoming students in the downtown Milwaukee area, they decided to keep up the Thursday evening meet-ups. It's been nice to be able to just relax with the smaller group. Last night we ended up at the bar "Karma," which, as Evan said, looks like the sort of place favored by men wearing Ed Hardy shirts. It turned out to be a pretty dingy, cheesy place with a wait-staff apparently made of of young ladies chosen more for their looks than their ability to 1) remember what beers they have on tap, 2) take orders, 3) fulfill orders correctly, 4) divide up bills amongst a party, or 5) comprehend that this pregnant woman genuinely does not want a free absinthe shot and no amount of cajoling is going to make me take it. Now put on a real shirt, you floozie.

On the other hand, their menu looked really interesting. And it was only 4 blocks from our apartment. And they had trivia going on.

Visits with Vampires

Yesterday had much more going for it than discovering creepy-crawlies on my living room ceiling. I woke up early after a 12 hour fast to have 3 hours of blood work done.

Oh, that makes it sound so dreadful. The day got off to a really nice start with my walk to the hospital. It's a little over a mile from here, just up The Lake. The air was cool, the sun was shining, and the walk didn't involve any hills and relatively few regulated intersections. I got to the hospital right at 9:00, only to discover that the lab had never received the orders from my doctor. The nice lady at the outpatient center went ahead and got me checked in while they contacted the doctor in Madison and got the orders refaxed. In all, the blood work only got started an hour and a half late. Frankly, that seemed like an eternity to sit around a hospital lobby for someone who (admittedly) eats when bored.

They did eventually get around to starting the blood work. I'm still more than a little proud of how I handled it. I'm the girl who nearly passed out last time she had an immunization. When I had my wisdom teeth out, I had to be sedated to be sedated, just because the sight of the needle made my pulse race like crazy. The first time my OB ordered blood work, the poor lady working in the lab had to focus every bit as much on keeping me upright and awake as she did on drawing the blood. This time around, however, I was a trooper. Really. Four separate draws, four separate times being poked in the arm with a scary needle-like device, four times staring REALLY hard at that, "How to Scrub Your Hands" poster over the lab sink. One of the technicians told me that she could tell it was my first baby because I still flinched every time they stuck me. Apparently, pregnancy involves a lot of needles. (Adoption begins to look promising....) But I stayed awake.

This being a blood glucose test, I had to drink the gross glucola drink, then wait an hour...then another hour...then another hour. In between tests, I just hung out in the lobby and read about cowboys and evil Mormon posses (really).

Last night, we had french toast with plenty of maple syrup for dinner, just out of perversity. It was a last hurrah, of sorts.

So, this morning, my doctor's office called with the results. Gestational diabetes it is. I'm going to have to do some adjusting of my cooking parameters--oh pasta! oh cookies!--but my husband is being completely sweet about it. He says he's been thinking of going low-carb for a while, but didn't want to make me feel like I had to give up my baked goods, too. The doctor has done that for him, now, and we're going to be eating much more thoughtfully and (hopefully) healthily. We'll probably end up looking like we're eating a sort of primal diet, but you CANNOT make either of us say that that's what it we're doing.

"Moths gotta live, too. Out there."

I've decided to resurrect the blog for the Summer, because I need something to do besides spending money on food and fancy espresso drinks. I'm really good at that and enjoy it entirely too much. Also, every time I talk to my youngest brother, he works in a complaint about how tired he is of seeing recipes when he opens my blog. The clear answer is for him to stop checking, but he asks so nicely.

If I do post regularly, chances are I'll talk a lot about pregnancy-stuff, so reader beware. (That assumes anyone besides my brothers still check this. And if I start posting any gory details, they'll be driven away soon enough.)

For this non-pregnancy-related story, I need to go back a few days. Last Thursday, a spot showed up on our freshly painted white ceiling. (You'd have to see our apartment to know how notable this was. Between tenants, they went over everything with a layer of white latex paint.) This spot was approximately the size of a quarter, kinda orange-colored, and looked exactly like damp drywall. We don't have a step ladder or anything more stable than a canvas camp chair, so close examination was out of the question. I checked later in the day and ascertained that the blotch wasn't growing. Friday came, and there was no change, so I assumed that whatever it was--leak from above or splash from beneath--it was stable and nothing to worry about at the moment. Fast forward through our weekend in Indiana.... We came home Sunday evening and the spot had turned black, but hadn't grown or changed otherwise.  Neither one of us was concerned.

You can imagine my reaction, then, when I came out this morning and the spot--formerly quarter-sized and solid black--was now the size of a $.50 piece and swarming. That's right: our ceiling spot had turned into hundreds of tiny larvae. After I had overcome my initial horror and revulsion, I did some checking online and found that 1) it was likely moth larvae and 2) they weren't likely to go crawling all over the apartment over the course of the morning. So, I called up the building manager and left him a message asking if he could come clean the moth larvae off my ceiling. When he showed up later this afternoon, our conversation went like this:   

G: Hey there, I got your message this morning. What?!
B: Come on in and look. (pointing to ceiling)
G: That's the weirdest $%@# thing I've ever seen.

After talking a little bit about how bugs have to live too, provided they do it OUTSIDE OF HIS BUILDING(!!!), he pulled out a spray bottle of bleach and let them have it. With extreme prejudice. This was a great relief to me.