Monthly Archives: September 2011

Long Week Links

Insert random cute picture of Peanut? Why yes, I will.

As you all know, I’m once again up to my eyeballs in school, my school club, homework, keeping my house clean, and blah blah blah. Let alone being pregnant and having a toddler. Sometimes I wonder what I was thinking deciding to take so much onto my plate. Regardless, I decided that while I may not be the best at writing my own attachment parenting related blog posts lately, I certainly can do some good by posting ones I’ve read (while I should have been doing other things) here for you all to get your fill of wondrous information (thanks Hobo Mama, from whom I got this idea). So here we go!

Myths about Circumcision You Likely Believe: This is the first part of a wonderful series at Psychology Today. I was happy enough to stumble upon this on a friend’s Facebook page (e.g. mindlessly looking at Facebook when I should have been writing a lab report or something) at the perfect timing. Since we’re not finding out the sex of our baby, I am trying to make a decision about circumcision (and get my husband on board) before the baby comes so it’s not a decision made in haste when I have 2 hours of sleep. This particular section of the series goes over surgical myths and includes my number 1 reason why I’m not planning on circumcising our maybe-boy: 100 deaths per year in the United States alone because of circumcision.

6 Reasons to Think Twice Before Circumcising Your Baby Boy: I actually found this one via Hobo Mama’s (see link above) Sunday Surf. I found the second reason particularly interesting because it has circumcision rate by state. My husband was mildly concerned that a boy may be teased in school if he weren’t circumcised, but from this I found out the circumcision rate in my state is only 39%, which is obviously a minority. Maybe the teasing will go the other way? Or hopefully the teasing will just be non-existent.

How to Prepare Young Children for Childbirth: I absolutely loved this post from Code Name: Mama about how she’s preparing her son for her birth. I’d really like Peanut to be at this birth (of course with the option to leave if she wants to) and since I’m soon to enter the last trimester, I figured I should start going on this. We luckily have already been doing most of the things on this list (like reading books about babies and pregnancy), but I hadn’t even though to share her birth story. We’re also starting to watch videos on birth. Peanut told me the other day “I was a baby. I cried. I came out your gina. Now I’m big sister!” So cute!

Speaking of birth videos, here’s one that I thought was particularly awesome. Love the music and love the overall peacefulness of the birth. Almost makes me want to have a videographer at my birth.

Pregnancy Exercise

24 Weeks 5 Days

I won’t lie, I’m not good at exercising. I’ve been to the gym (Which I pay a monthly fee for and cannot cancel. See: Bad with money.) twice since learning I was pregnant. The first time was to continue my regular Pilates class, which I left because I was horribly dizzy halfway through. Second time was about a month ago when I thought yoga would be a great exercise while I’m pregnant, but sadly also made me horribly dizzy.

Regardless of my obvious lack of “real” exercise, I do try to keep myself moving while I’m pregnant. Not that it’s horribly difficult to do that with a toddler and school. This week though, we started our Bradley Method class and I’ve been trying to keep up with the exercises, which I think is a good idea for any woman to do. The Bradley Method’s exercises focus on keeping your muscles that support you during pregnancy and birth strong. Here’s a brief explanation of them:

  1. Walking: Yeah, it’s good for anyone to walk regularly. Just making sure to walk for a solid 5-10 minutes a day is great exercise though. I’m not talking about the walk and stop of the grocery store or anything like that, but just make a trek around the block. For me, this is easy to get done with just walking from Peanut’s preschool to my building, which also happens to be all uphill. I often stop and rest for a minute when I’m halfway up. :-P
  2. Pelvic Rocks: I wrote more detail about these here and as I said in that post, they’re great for easing pregnancy pain. Just the act of being on all fours is nice for getting pressure off of my organs.
  3. Butterfly: Sit in a “butterfly” position (soles of your feet against each other and pull them in as close to you as comfortable) against the wall. Have someone put pressure (NOT push, just pressure) on the insides of your knees as you bring them together, then the outsides of your knees as you bring them back apart. Doing this one just a few times a day is great for your legs, which do a surprising amount of work in labor.
  4. Kegels: These are the ones that are always made fun of on TV. Here’s a better detail of how to do a kegel. These things are great because they’re easy to do and strengthen your pelvic floor, which obviously goes through a lot during labor. Doing these regularly can help with urinary incontinence. Personally, I try to do one every time I sneeze so I don’t have a Pregnant Woman Pee When You Sneeze episode.

All these things are super easy to do and can help your pregnancy and birth immensely. Exercise during pregnancy is very important indeed, but it doesn’t have to be the pain that everyone seems to think.

I am now 24 weeks and 5 days pregnant. I feel huge, but then again I think I’ve felt huge the whole time. I looked at my belly pictures from just a few weeks ago and I was amazed at how much smaller I was, but at that time I felt enormous. It’s amazing how perspective changes.

Twig is a happy little bouncer and loves to kick me straight in the stomach when I’m eating. This means I’m generally consuming less at once because of the sudden need for it to all come back up. I very much hope that Twig loses this habit before his/her kicks get super powerful in the third trimester.

One thing that’s really getting to me lately is heartburn. Wow, it’s been bad. If I eat anything more interesting than a plain piece of bread beyond maybe 6PM, I can’t sleep because of the pain. I’ve been working on sitting up for long periods before trying to go to bed and it helps a bit, but there are still nights where I have to get so punch-drunk tired that I can’t function before I can fall asleep through the pain. The other night I woke up at 3AM and the heartburn was still there.

Even with that said, I’m not taking any medication for it. I continue to not buy it (or accept it from people who are trying to give it to me) because I know that when it gets bad, I’ll take it if it’s there and I really want to avoid taking medication unless absolutely necessary. It’s not consistently bad, so if the medication isn’t there I can still avoid it, but I’m sure it’ll just get worse as the pregnancy progresses. Can anyone suggest some natural remedies for heartburn?

Freezing Shredded Zucchini

Last year at the farmers market I bought a very large zucchini for $1 with the intent to freeze it. The man at the booth told me that I could just shred it and freeze it and it would be perfect for zucchini bread all year round. Sadly, that zucchini sat in my fridge for probably months before finally getting thrown out. (I often have similar high ambitions that go to waste, but I’m working on that.) This year I decided would be different. I, again, bought a $1 huge zucchini with the intent to freeze it and this year, it has been done!

I don’t like doing things without sets of instructions, so I went online and started looking for how to preserve zucchini. I didn’t find any particular instructions I liked because they either wanted to use the zucchini for other purposes or wanted me to put way too much effort into it (Blanching? Bleh. Who has time for that?). I did, however, take tips from various places and get general ideas as I was searching. I also disliked that no one posts pictures of doing such things, so I am taking it upon myself to post an instructional pictorial on how to preserve your zucchini for next year.

Prep Time: 30 minutes or so, maybe more if you hand grate it

Total Time: Up to a day, but most of that is spent waiting for it to be frozen

You’ll need:

  1. Zucchini (however many you want to do)
  2. A knife
  3. A spoon
  4. A peeler (or you can use the knife if you don’t have one)
  5. Something to shred with (food processor, cheese grater, etc)
  6. Measuring cup
  7. Wax paper or plastic wrap
  8. Cookie sheet
  9. Freezer-worthy large ziplock bag

Cut off the ends of your zucchini(s) and cut it in half.

Scoop out the guts and peel off the outside (don't worry about getting all the green, just the tough stuff).

Shred! (In my case, this took about 2 minutes total in my food processor, a device I would highly suggest owning).

Make a strip of wax paper (you could also use plastic wrap) that's a foot long (give or take) and measure out about a cup (usually what you'll need for a recipe) of zucchini.

Put the zucchini right in the middle and try to make a nice compact square with it (or as much as possible).

Fold it up as compact as possible, but don't worry about it being air tight because that's not really possible with wax paper.

Put all your little squares on a cookie sheet and stick it in the freezer.

Leave it in the freezer for long enough for the zucchini to get nice and frozen, but not much longer than that. I’d say anywhere between a few hours and a day. After they’re no longer pliable, put them all into a large freezer-worthy ziplock and mark it with what it is (Zucchini) and the date you made it (Sept.’11) for future reference. Pop that back in the freezer and you’re done! When you’re feeling like some zucchini bread (or some other thing that calls for shredded zucchini), just pull out a square and you’re good to go! I’m going to let it stay frozen for a little while and then I’ll break some out and make bread with it and edit this post to let you know how it goes. Hope that was helpful!

Rekindled Friendships and Breastfeeding Baskets

A couple of weeks ago, a friend of mine had a baby shower. I doubt any of you read back this long and honestly I don’t want to even re-read it myself, but I once wrote a post about this friend and a big argument we had about breastfeeding. She thought I was being brash about a private subject. I thought she was being oppressive about an important part of being a mother. After not speaking for many months, we decided to put it all behind us. I’m very happy that we did and I was happily invited to her baby shower. Peanut went with me and we had a ball (even though we had to leave early because it was way past Little Miss’s nap time). I, of course, made a her a breastfeeding basket.

Since I was silly enough to forget to take a picture (it was a very long week, so I ended up actually putting the basket together the day before in a rush, thanking the world that I already had most of the supplies ready from my previous breastfeeding-basket-stock-up trips). Luckily, she took a picture and posted it to her blog, so I’m borrowing it, hopefully without offending her.

This basket included breast pads (disposables), lanolin, Mother’s Milk tea, a bottle of water, granola bars, La Leche League meeting schedule and brochure for our area, and of course info packets from La Leche League about breastfeeding in general and a bunch of possible scenarios that need extra help (e.g. breastfeeding after cesarean, producing enough milk, nipple pain, etc.) that I deemed possible enough to include (which is, as I’ve found out making these baskets, really hard to decide).

By the by, this mom-to-be also has a fantastic little blog that I’d like to point you all to. It’s worth it to follow her blog just for the cute belly pictures, but she’s also crafty and a great writer. Happy reading everyone!

Toddler Scarf Time!

It seems as though my posts as of late are lacking. My brain can function to write an eight page lab report, but sadly can’t come out with coherent thoughts for my blog. Guess I can blame it on pregnancy brain? Regardless, I’m obviously not posting a lot lately. I’m still writing a lot, but I have about 10 drafts over the last few weeks that I refuse to publish until I can make them make more sense. So I’ve decided to fill you guys in on some of the projects we’ve done lately. Peanut and I were crafty little things over the summer and I’d like to share some of it with you all. So get ready to have quite a lot of to-do’s and look-what-I-made’s coming over the next few weeks.

So here we go! I made Peanut a scarf!

I know, it’s not horribly impressive to make a scarf, but I’m proud of myself for doing it. I’ve tried to take up knitting in the past, but never really gotten anywhere. I actually started this scarf about 6 months ago and got about 4 inches in before setting it aside. I tend to do that when it comes to crafts (e.g. Peanut’s quilt that I got all the way to actually quilting it and adding the boarder before Peanut was born and have yet to finish).

My recent attempt to knitting actually came from my re-reading of the Harry Potter books. I was thinking of how neat it would be to make a Gryffindor scarf and realized “Well then why don’t I do it?” So I bought all the required materials and started on it (using YouTube videos to remind myself how to do things like cast-on). I decided I wanted a big, billowy scarf, so I made it very wide. So wide that I was feeling kind of frustrated that I had decided to do 60 stitches across. I don’t know how wide that ends up being for you, but for me it ended up being about 15 inches (which I ended up unraveling right before the first color switch and re-doing at 40 stitches).

When I bought the new materials for my scarf, I also bought a new pair of 6 needles for Peanut’s scarf as I had misplaced one of the other ones (my excuse for stopping). I figured I’d do my Gryffindor scarf and then finish hers, hopefully in time for the cold weather. Since I was feeling frustrated with my Gryffindor scarf and wanted to do something quicker, I figured I’d make Peanut’s scarf (which included unraveling the inches I had already done because I didn’t like them).

I started it last Sunday at around 4PM and finished it Tuesday at around noon. It looks far from perfect, but I’m impressed with myself at the fact that it definitely looks like a scarf. The whole time I was doing it (less than 48 hours to an adult is A. Whole. 48. Hours?!?! to a toddler), Peanut was bothering me about when it was going to be finished. She was so excited that it was going to be hers. Actually excited enough that she almost unraveled it for me a few times. When I finished it, she had to wear it that second even though it was 80 degrees outside.

All in all, it was amazingly easy to do. I’m amazed at how great of a hobby knitting is for someone with a toddler. She can play mostly independently, so I just need to keep an eye on her and pay attention. Knitting allows me to do both! Then when she wants me to come play, I can just set it down where it’s at and go play with her (as opposed to reading, where I have to at least get to a stopping point and even then I don’t want to stop). I did 20 stitches across and the same height as her (around 36 inches) and it didn’t even take a full thing of yarn. I’m actually already planning the next scarf I want to make for her and possibly a hat for Twig (of course, after I finish my Gryffindor scarf).

Picture time!

Actual scarf, inperfections and all.

A very snotty-nosed (and for once, open-eyed) Peanut wearing said scarf.

No Glucose Soda For Me, Thanks

22 Weeks 6 Days

If I were going to a regular OB, I would be doing a glucose tolerance test at my next appointment. The basic idea is that you don’t eat anything in the morning, then you go in and drink a soda-type drink that’s full of glucose, then they test your blood at whatever intervals your doctor deems necessary. I did it with Peanut and it was no fun (seriously, you expect a woman nearly in her 3rd trimester to not eat anything for 12 hours?). This time, I decided to look into whether or not it was necessary (or possibly dangerous according to some).

Yes, anyone can develop gestational diabetes, but there are risk groups. You’re at higher risk if you have problems with blood sugar before you get pregnant, a family history of diabetes, you’re overweight before you get pregnant (at least 20% above your highest healthy BMI), etc. I don’t fit into any of the risk categories.

I also looked at what happens if it turns out you have gestational diabetes, which is just sticking to a diet. This diet consists of whole grains, vegetables, drinking lots of water, and overall just basically eating healthy. For the most part, this is my regular diet. Yes, I like to have a cookie sometimes. Yes, you would have to force-feed me to get me to eat a wheat or corn tortilla. Overall though, I’m pretty good. I love my veggies. I eat whole grain bread and pasta. I carry around a big jug of water. So what would be the point of knowing that I need to stick with what I’m doing?

So at my midwife appointment Friday, I asked her what her thoughts were about the glucose tolerance test. Turns out she doesn’t even do them! At my next appointment I’ll be getting blood work done, which includes a screening that basically tells her my levels for the last 3 months (no fasting involved). She said that she may decide to do an oral test if my levels don’t look right. She also said that even if I do have gestational diabetes, it’s not the death-trap that everyone makes it out to be. She told me about a patient she had that had it and she never exhibited any symptoms (nor did the baby), likely because the placenta is an insulin-inhibitor.

Along with this test, they’ll also do a CDC (Complete Blood Count) test on my blood, which tests for anemia. She said that if this were my first pregnancy or my first with this partner (are we sure it’s not the milkman’s?), she’s have some other things tested too like my blood type. She said that if any of those things come up, she’ll just get my medical records from my previous doctor. I love how my midwife minimalizes the unnecessary tests without me even needing to ask. :-D

I am now 23 weeks and 2 days. Things are doing pretty awesome around here. Round 2 has started of round ligament pain, but it isn’t as bad as earlier in my pregnancy. Hopefully it’ll go away again rather than get worse throughout the pregnancy. There are days when I forget that I’m pregnant (until I ceremoniously smack my belly into a table in lab) and there are days that I feel So. Frickin’. Pregnant. by the end of the day.

Twig is an absolute mover and shaker. Seriously, I have about 10 times a day when I feel him/her move for at least a few minutes consistently. Some of the kicks even hurt! And I’m at that lovely stage where I’m sitting there minding my own business, then the baby kicks me straight in the bladder and I have to run to the bathroom because of the sudden urge to wet myself. My husband is also 100% sure that he’s felt the baby kick (multiple times actually) and I’ve been trying to get Peanut to feel, but she moves her hand away after about 2 seconds saying she can’t feel anything. I’m also witnessing the creepy Jurassic Park thing where you see the kick and your belly ripples with motion. Maybe Twig is less of a twig and more of a T-rex. Guess only time will tell.

Incorporating Breastfeeding Into My Schoolwork

Image Courtesy of Cave Mother

It seems silly posting an essay for my zoology class on my blog, but I thought you all might find it interesting. The assignment was to explain homology to one of our idols who wouldn’t necessarily know what it was about. Part of this was using examples that would make sense to them. I chose Dr. William Sears and, of course, used breastfeeding as my example. So here you go! We learn something new every day, right?

I would first like to say, Dr. William Sears, that I am very honored to meet you. I have read many of your parenting books and strongly believe in attachment parenting. I could not have imagined how strongly I would believe in these ideals before I had my daughter, Dea. I would also like to say that I am honored to explain homology to you. I think that you will find the adaptations of breastfeeding, a very important concept of attachment parenting, particularly interesting.

So what is homology? In the most basic terms, it is similarity between two animals based on common descent. The problem with this definition is that it does not give us a true sense of how vital it is to understand homology. Homology is a very important concept in biology and we use this knowledge to help us in many aspects of life—scientific or not. The human brain works in a way such that it can find relationships between new concepts and the ones that we already understand, these relationships allow us to better understand the new concept. This organization of thoughts is what separates us from most other animals.

This is where homology comes in. Homology is how we can relate new species to the ones we already know, thereby forming a better understanding of the new species and giving a basis to which we can make hypotheses about the new species. Oftentimes, our initial assumptions about a new species are incorrect, which is the case with dolphins.

It is a common misconception that dolphins are fish. This misconception could be attributed to the fact that both fish and dolphins have a similar body shape. Rather than a closely shared ancestor, these two types of animals share a common environment—the water. The streamlined shape of their bodies allows for the most efficient movement in their environment, therefore both types of animals have separately evolved to have this body shape. When species share a trait because of shared pressures rather than common descent, it is called convergence. The streamlined shape of both dolphins and fish is a classic example of convergence.

When we delve deeper, we find that dolphins are actually more closely related to humans than the fish that share their environment. As you know, one of the cornerstones of attachment parenting is breastfeeding. It is the way that mammals are meant to feed their young, hence the name “mammary glands.” Of all the homologous traits that define an animal as a mammal, it is the only one that does not have an exception to the rule.

Since all mammals nourish their young with milk from their mammary glands, as opposed to fish larvae who are nourished via a yolk sac they carry with them, we can say that the common ancestor did the same. When I say common ancestor, we are saying a population from which all mammals were derived. As in the case of any population, there is variation from individual to individual. Without this variation we would not have evolved into all of the varying types of animals today that are classified as mammals. Some form of variation within the species must prove to be advantageous to at least a portion of the population for many generations for a species to evolve to represent that variation. Since the trait proves to be more advantageous time and time again, it is bred into the species by the fact that the individuals with this trait are better able to reproduce. This is called natural selection. Since the trait continues to be favored, the individuals with a more advantageous form of the trait will continue to be favored reproductively and therefore the trait will evolve to become better fit to their conditions. This is called adaptation.

Back to the example of dolphins, it may not initially be apparent that dolphins breastfeed their calves because it is different than what our species does to breastfeed. This is because of the variation in the population that proved to be beneficial to what eventually evolved to be a dolphin. Dolphin breast milk has a much higher fat content than human breast milk, which is logical considering that dolphins live in an environment where milk with a high water content would easily dissipate. This high fat content also allows the calf to breastfeed less frequently, thereby not putting the mother and calf at more risk than necessary considering they must stay mostly immobile and near the surface during feeding. The percentage of fat in dolphin breast milk can be as high as 50%, depending on the species of dolphin and the stage of lactation (West et al., 2006). Dolphins also have adapted their anatomy so that they are able to breastfeed while staying streamlined by hiding the nipple inside of a slit. Both of these adaptations, along with all the other adaptations that make a dolphin different from the common mammalian ancestor, must have evolved slowly over time. Hypothetically, if the fat content of the breast milk of the common ancestor was closer to 10%, it would have slowly gone up from generation to generation, possibly only by a fraction of a percentage point. Generation over generation must have continued to favor this increase in fat content for the adaptation to persist. So as you can see, this is a very slow and deliberate process.

Without homology we would have never understood the true evolution of dolphins and how they relate to humans and other mammals. But why does it matter to understand that dolphins are more directly related to humans than fish? Homology gives us a place to start. When we are able to see the relationships between different animals, we are better able to understand them and use this to our advantage. It could be something purely altruistic, like finding out how to preserve a species, or it could be something selfish, like finding new medicines to cure human diseases, or anywhere in between. There are so many different ways that this information can benefit ourselves and others and it all starts from the simple organization of homology.

Literature Cited:

West, K. L., O. T. Oftedal, J. R. Carpenter, B. J. Krames, M. Campbell, and J. C. Sweeney (2006) Effect of lactation stage and concurrent pregnancy on milk composition in the bottlenose dolphin. Journal of Zoology 273:148-160.

Preserving Garden Tomatoes-Tomato Sauce

This year I decided to plant two tomato plants that I got for $2 each at my school’s semesterly Botany Club plant sale. Oh boy am I happy that I did.

My Beefsteak tomatoes aren’t really coming in. The plant itself is huge, but not really producing babies and according to the internet that means it’s conditions are too favorable, so I broke off a couple of limbs. Even with that plant not giving me a single tomato yet, I have had an over-supply coming from my Roma plant.

Last week I had about 15 tomatoes in my kitchen waiting to be eaten. All from one plant! And I have been eating a ton of them! Regardless, my demand couldn’t keep up with the supply and I needed to do something or I would have had to start throwing out my proudly grown little beauties.

My mom has about 10 tomato plants and spends a good part of the season making salsa (she also grow peppers) and canned diced tomatoes. Since I have plenty of both of those at my ready ability (she makes LOTS), I didn’t want to make either of those. Tomatoes aren’t exactly freezer-worthy, so I needed to come up with an idea of something that we’d use plenty of and wasn’t difficult to do. Amazingly, at the exact time that I’m pondering this, a post from The Saved Quarter (an amazing woman who doesn’t get student loans for school, but rather saves 25% of her income every month) came up on my RSS feed and gave me the solution to my problem: tomato sauce!

We eat plenty of pasta and pizza around here, so having a base sauce that I could bulk up into either of those things sounded like the perfect thing for me to do. I mostly made it by flying by the seat of my pants, but oh my it smelled good! So here’s what I did:

12 tomatoes (give or take) whole

1 onion with the peel taken off and chopped in half

3 small cloves of garlic peeled

dried oregano, dried basil, and dried “Italian seasoning” to taste

I just threw the first 3 ingredients into my Vitamix and pureed them (literally, I put in whole tomatoes with their skins and everything and you wouldn’t even know). If you don’t have as powerful of a blender, you may want to chop them up more first or possibly remove the skins of the tomatoes first. I poured the tomato-y substance into my biggest pot and added seasoning until it tasted good, then simmered it for an hour. Of course I put it into cans as shown in the picture, but you could also freeze it like mentioned in Penny Saver’s post. It smelled so good that it was hard to not just eat it on the spot. As you can see, this recipe made me four small jars of delicious goodness. Yum.

Childbirth Classes Required

21 Weeks 4 Days

You will not get through natural childbirth without having taken some sort of class.

I know there are exceptions to the rule, but for the most part that is true. I’ve talked to many moms who “want to try to do it naturally, but still have the option of the epidural” and they never actually do it. The hospital system works against you by giving you things like pitocin that make your labor much, much more difficult and making you lay on your bed for monitoring rather than walk around like you should be doing. All of the things that a woman could use for comfort during labor aren’t likely to be present in a hospital. You and your partner won’t know all the things you can do to decrease pain if you haven’t been told. It just simply doesn’t work without a lot of preparation and a bit of hardheadedness.

If I wouldn’t have known what to do from my Bradley Method class, I’m sure that I wouldn’t have had a natural childbirth. We are told all of our lives that “nothing hurts worse than childbirth” and not told all the ways to make it less so. Even knowing the right things to do, I still had to remind myself over and over the right things to do. When the contractions came, I would feel myself tensing up and have to actually remind myself to relax through them. Relaxing immediately made them better and luckily I knew to do that before the contraction got to its height.

My husband also know how to do counter-pressure, which was a life-saver in a posterior birth. I knew that I should listen to my body and rest between contractions. I knew that I could use something like a shower to help ease the pain (if we would have made it to the hospital, we would have been lucky to get a bath and those showers were not large enough for me to get on all fours like I needed to). This all knowledge was passed onto us by our Bradley teacher, just liked it used to be passed on from mother to daughter when natural childbirth was the norm. I’ve heard moms say that they don’t need childbirth classes because moms did it all of the time before Hypobirth and the Bradley Method were around, but they were able to do that because the information was common knowledge. The community taught a pregnant mother what to expect and what to do in birth, just like it did in breastfeeding. Both of these things are something that women used to be able to do without classes and lactation consultants and support groups, but now that it is not the norm in our society and it’s likely that your mother didn’t do them or can’t remember because it was 30 years ago, you need someone who can pass the knowledge to you.

So I am happy to say that we start our Bradley classes again with our same instructor as last time in a couple of weeks. While I’m sure I could do it again with just my memory and re-reading my materials from last time, I would rather go and learn it again. There will be new questions and new knowledge and new moms to connect with in this class. I am happy to return.

I am now 21 weeks and 6 days pregnant, though my picture I took is from a few days ago. Things are obviously busy around here and honestly I’ve written multiple posts, but I’m feeling like they’re not coming out coherently and so I’m not posting them.

The round ligament pain is luckily subsiding it seems. I’m certainly knocking on wood though. Maybe it’s all the exercise I get walking from Peanut’s preschool to my building multiple times every day, which is all uphill. Regardless, I’m certainly not complaining even if it does come back. It’s very nice to not be stuck to the couch/bed all evening.

Something that’s getting worse is my acne. Bleh. I never had acne as a teenager, but pregnant really sets my body into acne-mode. It’s all over my face and even some on my back. I am just continuing to wash my face daily in the shower and not changing soaps or anything. No matter how annoying it is, I realize it is temporary and I doubt anyone really notices as much as I do. Possibly it’s a good thing because it’s got me to start wearing makeup on a regular basis again.

Lastly, Twig is a little dancer in there. If I put my belly up against my desk in class, Twig kicks it. When I’m sitting studying, Twig is wiggling up a storm. My husband even thinks that he felt Twig the other day maybe. I’m in that nice in between stage when I can feel the kicks really thoroughly, but they have yet to start hurting.