Banana

Today I am 20w1d pregnant with Kermit. (Now that we know it's a boy, we've given the Frog an official pre-birth name. Not enough kids named Kermit these days, don't ya think?) (No, we're not really going to name him Kermit.) (Though we haven't yet found any names that we like, so you never know.) (And Kermi is a cute nickname.) (S and I have a bet going to see how many of our friends we can convince that we're really naming the baby Kermit.) (We apparently have very gullible friends.) (But I digress.)

I am now officially more than halfway done. And I've resorted to the produce comparisons that I loved during my last pregnancy, to let everyone know that Kermit is already the size of a banana. Yikes. Way too much stuff that I still want to do before Kermit is born. Little things, like finish my dissertation and get a job and "fix" LL's bedtime routine and buy a new house. Complicating things a bit is the fact that pregnancy brain has officially set in, and I am a mess. I remember being a bit scatterbrained while pregnant with LL, but Kermit has brought me to a whole new level. Quick story from this weekend:

We were invited to a birthday party at a friend's house on Saturday. I asked her if there was anything that we should bring, and she said YES, bring a booster seat for LL to sit in during dinner. It was the only thing that she asked us to bring, and she actually reminded me about it several times. Fine. Saturday afternoon, I packed up LL's diaper bag for the evening, got everyone ready to go, locked up the house, got in the car... and halfway there, I realized that I forgot the booster seat. We turned around and drove all the way back home. S stayed in the car with LL while I ran in for the booster seat, locked up again, and we were on our way (again). We got to the friend's house, and I reached down to pick up LL's diaper bag, only to realize that when I walked out the house, I grabbed my work bag instead of LL's diaper bag. So, instead of diapers and pajamas and food for LL, I had research papers and computer cords. Great. S told me to just go to the party with LL, he would drive home (again) and swap bags. Fifteen minutes later, my cell phone rang. It was S. When I locked up the house the second time, I used S's house keys... and never gave them back. He was locked out of the house. He had to turn around, come back to our friend's house (again), get the keys from me, drive home (again) to switch bags, then drive back to our friend's house (again). All because I'm a blathering idiot.

In other news, I am constantly hungry these days. After not gaining any pregnancy weight at all for so long, even though Kermit was growing normally, my body finally realized that it was sort of cannibalizing itself to make it all happen, so consuming extra external calories would be a good thing. Here at the halfway point, I am now up 2 pounds. Which is perfect, since it allows me to gain the recommended one-pound-a-week for the rest of the pregnancy without making my overall gain too out-of-whack. My weight gain goal with LL was 25 pounds, but I kind of assumed that I'd go way over that. (All of my friends, every single one of them, gained more than 45 pounds with their pregnancies, and I figured I was doomed to follow in their footsteps.) Instead, I gained 28 pounds, which I considered an unqualified success. Thus, my goal this time around was a repeat of last time, which looks doable.

On the gestational diabetes front: I'm still meeting with the nurse once a month or so, despite everyone's belief that I don't actually have gestational diabetes. (As I suspected, my blood sugar goes up only in response to stress, regardless of what I eat. If I'm relaxed and I eat a big 'ole slice of cake, my blood sugar stays nice and low. If I have a "bad dissertation day" and eat half a bagel, my blood sugar goes up. It's weird, but wonderfully predictable.) I'm following a few GD guidelines for food, but I bend the rules a whole lot. I'm not drinking any beverages with carbs in them, so no soda or juice or sweetened tea in the past 2+ months. And I've definitely decreased portion sizes for rice and pasta and bread. But I'm not doing anything even approximating counting carbs. I just make choices, usually, for foods with more protein and vegetables and fewer standalone starches. But then I just follow my hunger in determining when and how much to eat. And I'm still eating desserts fairly regularly. Every once in a while, when nutrition information is available, I look up how many carbs are in my meal (yeah, I tend to look it up after the fact). Leading to a lot of conversations with S where I say things like, "You know how I'm supposed to eat 45g of carbs at dinner? I just ate 95g instead. Think it will matter?" And then I test my blood sugar and nope, it didn't matter, I'm still normal. I've been warned that insulin resistance can change dramatically after 20 weeks, so I'm still testing myself multiple times a day so that I'll know if I need to start being more diligent, but for now, I'm rather enjoying getting a pat on the back from a professional every month who looks at my food charts and validates my level of nutrition. So, yay.

One other piece of random information. At last week's ultrasound, we discovered that Kermit's placenta is at the front (so, towards my stomach instead of my spine). Front placental placement is a bit rare, but apparently has zero medical significance. It does, however, provide me with a bunch of practical information that I had been wondering about. It explains why I felt Kermit kicking so much later than I felt LL, since the placenta cushions those early movements. It explains why Dr. M kept having a harder time than normal finding Kermit's heartbeat, since the placenta muffles sound a bit. And it explains why I kept complaining that the ultrasound pictures we were getting of Kermit looked so much "fuzzier" than LL's had, since we were seeing the images through an extra layer of tissue. Mystery solved!