Wednesday, January 15, 2014

well shoot

I am not fat enough! I have gained about half a pound in a month and am just back to my pre-pregnancy weight. (I lost about five pounds during the first trimester.) Don't worry, the baby has grown just fine based on the size of my uterus. The heartbeat is strong and I feel the baby moving all the time. It's just that I haven't been growing fast enough to catch up! I thought I was doing such a good job eating over the break but apparently not. (Now I did get a stomach bug and throw up a bunch for a few days, so that might have set me back a bit.) When I sat down today to stuff myself with sausage and cheese and crackers I realized the difference between my old kind of snacking, which was governed by taste and frugality, and snacking for baby making... in number of cheese-cracker-sausage sandwiches, the difference is about five fold. I haven't eaten that much summer sausage at one go since I was an immoderate teenager.

We aren't really worried about the baby so far, because I was well nourished before pregnancy, and the baby probably easily got most of what it needed from my reserves. What I was able to eat in the first four months was usually quite nutrient dense. And like I keep telling myself, the baby IS big enough right now. But it's time to get real. My only job is eating. How dull!

I suppose I should get a scale. I've never kept one around because I always thought that was kind of a negative way to monitor your health (at my age anyway,) but weighing myself every day would definitely be easier than keeping track of calories.

Well, it's time to take a post-snack/pre-dinner nap. That's all for today, folks.

2 comments:

  1. Now clearly I've never been pregnant, so I have precisely no idea what I'm talking about, but as one scale-not-owner to another, my instinct is to tell you, "For heaven's sake don't start weighing yourself every day now!"
    Elaborating on that instinct: don't stress <= Cook nice food, get your husband to cook nice food and bring you muffins, expand your food budget, make nice chunks of time available for sitting down and eating together, experiment with french or russian cooking…. I assume that if your body starts stressing itself in baby-building it will ask for support and you will happily provide sausage. ,<= All will be well!
    (I know a woman here who lost like 20lbs in her first trimester! golly.)
    And if you feel that you need to track the baby building process more often than you go to visit a Dr type with a scale, I suppose you could buy one. But at the very least put it in a closet and pull it out for a weekly baby ritual. <=)
    I guess the moral of this story is something like "your job isn't eating, it's being a happy person and making of your life a good environment for being yourself and pleasant baby-growing?"
    ??

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  2. Well, my midwife prescribed 2600 calories a day. I don't know how much I was getting before because I've never really counted calories, but I bet it wasn't much more than 2000. It does take a lot of conscious effort to eat 600 calories more than you usually do, just like it would take a lot of thought to eat that much less than usual... I guess one has to make new habits (such as getting up earlier to eat breakfast before church!!) and that takes concentration.

    But I think that your moral is correct!

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