Don't hard boil your baby.
I've been wanting to blog much more often, but I did something kind of dumb. I changed my laptop password so that one of my employees could easily log on when she was working out of our home office. Dummy me "forgot" the password I created, or misspelled it, and I locked myself out of my brand new laptop. Seriously. Husband gave me the opportunity to fix it myself since I "broke" it all by myself. After searching Google and praying that the blogs I was reading weren't virus-laden lies, I pushed a few buttons, typed in some html code, and voila! I broke into my own computer. I felt like such a powerful, nerdy wife and bragged of my success to my nerdy husband who was extremely pleased with my IT work. All that to say, I'm back!
Can I just say that at 13 1/2 weeks pregnant, I thought I'd be in better shape by now? Two weeks ago, I was surprised by severe hip pain. I scheduled an appointment with a chiropractor thinking it was a pinched nerve. A few days later, I got the cutest bug bites on my back. No really, they looked cute! They were clustered in the shape of a Clemson paw. Go Tigers! Needless to say, the paw morphed into a family of red bumps and a doctor confirmed that I had shingles. The highlight of that appointment was hearing the baby's sweet little heartbeat. Pregnancy hormones hit their peak, and tears streamed down my face. I think I often forget that I have a real live baby living in my uterus and not just a prolonged virus that makes me feel pretty blah most days. Anyway, I am trying to let the virus run its course and am getting by with calamine lotion and aloe vera gel. I figure this is good training for labor. I have no intention of taking drugs during labor, so if I can press through weeks of shingles and headaches and not take a single thing, I figure I'm building my pain tolerance. :)
If I wasn't dealing with morning and evening sickness and fatigue, then my beloved husband was working extra hard to take on some of my work load, pulling his back out, and then he came down with cold chills and a high fever last night. Bless his heart...and mine! I hope it's not the flu...and I certainly hope I don't have to add that to my pain tolerance training. ;) Needless to say, the Tanner house is a den of plagues.
--------------------------
I'm learning all kinds of things in PregnancyLand. These days, you can find many, many do's and don't lists on the internet. For your curiosity, here are a few don'ts. Just so you know, they are usually accompanied by an "unless."
1. no cold deli meat
2. no caffeine (unless maybe you need 1 cup a day)
3. no soft cheese like feta or goat (unless it says pasteurized on the label)
4. no shellfish (what??? no crab!!!)
5. no sushi (RA's Las Vegas roll, how I miss you so!)
6. no exercise that gets your heart rate too high (see you later, Zumba)
7. no hot baths!
Number seven was the most devastating for me. Hot baths are my safe haven of comfort. I probably moved 10 times in the past 4 1/2 years, and the one comfort I could count on was my hot bath...my own private sanctuary. Jenny McCarthy learned not to use a hot tub after a woman learned she was pregnant and scolded her out of the scalding jacuzzi. Jenny expressed her fears in this way, "I was so afraid I hard boiled my baby!!!!" I most certainly did not want to hard boil my baby, and suddenly found sacrificing this treasured routine to be the greatest act of love I'd ever done...especially for a precious nugget that I don't even know, can't even feel yet, and who makes me sick all the time.
One day, I decided to re-visit my old college routine of soaking my feet in hot water. (We didn't have tubs and we had a curfew of 10pm as freshmen, so I'd hide away in the bathroom, prop myself up on the counter, soak my feet in the sink, and read my Bible every night. I often would get caught and sent back to bed. Wild Abby at Bible school, oh my.) Though I couldn't have a real bath, I could feel the tiniest glory of a foot bath. I ran the water and filled up the tub an inch or so. I grabbed my long dress and picked it up, so I could rest my feet in the water. Oh, it felt so good! The heat melted away any stress in my feet and I wanted more. I gathered my dress around my waist and decided to squat in the tub. At least I could pretend that I was fully immersed though, in reality, only my feet found solace in the water. Now picture the look on Jt's face when he came around the corner and saw me squatting, fully dressed, in an inch of water. ;)
A few days later, I was still really coveting a hot bath. I did some more research and read that water below 100 degrees is perfectly fine for mommy and baby, so I ran to the bathroom and turned the water on full blast. Maybe, just maybe, today would be my day! I needed a way to test the temperature of the water and I hadn't a clue what 100 degrees felt like. Then a moment of brilliance hit me. I reached for our thermometer and held it in the bath water. It read over 100 degrees, so I determined it was wrong and that I'd need to find another method. Then another genius solution came to me. I ran to the kitchen, found my meat thermometer, and plunged it into my bath water. It read that my steak was overcooked and was reading too high, so I also determined that these kind of thermometers were not intended to measure bath water and my experiment was a bust. My hope of a hot bath was not though. Thankfully, at 10 weeks, my midwife reassured me that I was perfectly safe to take hot baths. I was released! I was free! I finally bought myself a cushy bath pillow today and can think of no better way to celebrate my lil babe.
Can I just say that at 13 1/2 weeks pregnant, I thought I'd be in better shape by now? Two weeks ago, I was surprised by severe hip pain. I scheduled an appointment with a chiropractor thinking it was a pinched nerve. A few days later, I got the cutest bug bites on my back. No really, they looked cute! They were clustered in the shape of a Clemson paw. Go Tigers! Needless to say, the paw morphed into a family of red bumps and a doctor confirmed that I had shingles. The highlight of that appointment was hearing the baby's sweet little heartbeat. Pregnancy hormones hit their peak, and tears streamed down my face. I think I often forget that I have a real live baby living in my uterus and not just a prolonged virus that makes me feel pretty blah most days. Anyway, I am trying to let the virus run its course and am getting by with calamine lotion and aloe vera gel. I figure this is good training for labor. I have no intention of taking drugs during labor, so if I can press through weeks of shingles and headaches and not take a single thing, I figure I'm building my pain tolerance. :)
If I wasn't dealing with morning and evening sickness and fatigue, then my beloved husband was working extra hard to take on some of my work load, pulling his back out, and then he came down with cold chills and a high fever last night. Bless his heart...and mine! I hope it's not the flu...and I certainly hope I don't have to add that to my pain tolerance training. ;) Needless to say, the Tanner house is a den of plagues.
--------------------------
I'm learning all kinds of things in PregnancyLand. These days, you can find many, many do's and don't lists on the internet. For your curiosity, here are a few don'ts. Just so you know, they are usually accompanied by an "unless."
1. no cold deli meat
2. no caffeine (unless maybe you need 1 cup a day)
3. no soft cheese like feta or goat (unless it says pasteurized on the label)
4. no shellfish (what??? no crab!!!)
5. no sushi (RA's Las Vegas roll, how I miss you so!)
6. no exercise that gets your heart rate too high (see you later, Zumba)
7. no hot baths!
Number seven was the most devastating for me. Hot baths are my safe haven of comfort. I probably moved 10 times in the past 4 1/2 years, and the one comfort I could count on was my hot bath...my own private sanctuary. Jenny McCarthy learned not to use a hot tub after a woman learned she was pregnant and scolded her out of the scalding jacuzzi. Jenny expressed her fears in this way, "I was so afraid I hard boiled my baby!!!!" I most certainly did not want to hard boil my baby, and suddenly found sacrificing this treasured routine to be the greatest act of love I'd ever done...especially for a precious nugget that I don't even know, can't even feel yet, and who makes me sick all the time.
One day, I decided to re-visit my old college routine of soaking my feet in hot water. (We didn't have tubs and we had a curfew of 10pm as freshmen, so I'd hide away in the bathroom, prop myself up on the counter, soak my feet in the sink, and read my Bible every night. I often would get caught and sent back to bed. Wild Abby at Bible school, oh my.) Though I couldn't have a real bath, I could feel the tiniest glory of a foot bath. I ran the water and filled up the tub an inch or so. I grabbed my long dress and picked it up, so I could rest my feet in the water. Oh, it felt so good! The heat melted away any stress in my feet and I wanted more. I gathered my dress around my waist and decided to squat in the tub. At least I could pretend that I was fully immersed though, in reality, only my feet found solace in the water. Now picture the look on Jt's face when he came around the corner and saw me squatting, fully dressed, in an inch of water. ;)
A few days later, I was still really coveting a hot bath. I did some more research and read that water below 100 degrees is perfectly fine for mommy and baby, so I ran to the bathroom and turned the water on full blast. Maybe, just maybe, today would be my day! I needed a way to test the temperature of the water and I hadn't a clue what 100 degrees felt like. Then a moment of brilliance hit me. I reached for our thermometer and held it in the bath water. It read over 100 degrees, so I determined it was wrong and that I'd need to find another method. Then another genius solution came to me. I ran to the kitchen, found my meat thermometer, and plunged it into my bath water. It read that my steak was overcooked and was reading too high, so I also determined that these kind of thermometers were not intended to measure bath water and my experiment was a bust. My hope of a hot bath was not though. Thankfully, at 10 weeks, my midwife reassured me that I was perfectly safe to take hot baths. I was released! I was free! I finally bought myself a cushy bath pillow today and can think of no better way to celebrate my lil babe.
Comments
Post a Comment