Melbourne Cup Day, 37.5 weeks

Still here - 36.5 weeks

For some reason I cannot get into twitter, on my computer or my phone, and haven't been able to since late last week. This has led to a somewhat heightened productivity on my part about which I can't complain, but it has also led to a few emails asking if everything is, um...okay?

Things are fine. I have not fallen down a mine shaft, I am not giving birth on some remote hill, or wandering the bush clutching a baby with wildflowers knotted in my hair nor am I in hospital under surgeon's lights, the baby is firmly within.

We had a scan last week to check out the size of the baby. They are notoriously unreliable, but we decided to believe her when she said it looked like he was about 6lb10oz or just on 3kg. Even factoring in an average growth pattern, he will be smaller than Una by their estimates, and I feel sure that is the case too. It was exciting to see him again, I am looking forward to meeting him. We got a good look at his face with the 3D, which was kinda amazing. And she pointed out the scrotum and penis, so no surprises there! Una was more patient this time, I think she understood more of what she was looking at.

The gestational diabetes has been getting me down a bit. Sometimes I'd like to sit and read after dinner, or loll about watching tellie instead of finding a new hill to march up. Sometimes I think I've eaten the right things, thrashed up and down hills only to be disappointed when the monitor beeps and tells me my blood sugar is higher than I thought, and I think dammit, I may as well have had a bowl of icecream for dinner. The tips of my fingers hurt all over (chopping pineapple the other day was so much not fun). But being told the baby is a good weight, and being fitted for a bra and finding out the size across my back is the same as it was before I was pregnant with Frederique, and being able to honestly tell people I feel fit and well and I am genuinely enjoying the being pregnant part...well, it's a good pay off. And having the occasional person say 'You look GREAT!' (instead of 'Oh my god, you're enormous, it's going to be a big baby, is it twins, are you overdue, blah blah') has been nice too.

Apart from all that I am: teaching my last class on Thursday, marking two theses, soon to get stuck into what is hopefully the last structural round of rewrites on Only Ever Always (and still basking in the glow of a rave reader's report from one of my favourite editors). I am doing bits and pieces of Christmas shopping, knowing that it might not be so easy later on. I am reading a little between walks - Bye Beautiful by Julia Lawrinson which was SO SAD and I adored it and When You Reach Me by Rebecca Stead, which was very very good but I was puzzled about what made it YA. To me it was very much sophisticated middle fiction, and all the better for it. I wonder if that category is an endangered species...

Also we went to an alternative technologies festival on the weekend called Practically Green and got very very excited about worm filled septic tanks. Such is our strange little world. Actually, I am still rather enthused.

35 and a bit weeks update

I know, I know, long time no post.
I am 35 and a half weeks pregnant, which apparently means sometime in the next month or so, I am going to have a baby. Uh huh. Today we bought our first baby thing - a pram for home (we are going to have a big solid home pram and a little car pram). It's funny because it seems too soon to be buying stuff and yet with the other two we were (more or less) completely sorted by this stage.

Mostly my brain has been tied up with the gestational diabetes. I am on a steep learning curve and rapidly getting better at it. My levels started climbing, so I have been diligent with my eating and my exercise. I've had to cut out rice and pasta, which is quite complicated when you need a carb serve every meal. But no matter how far I walk or how much I bounce around on my fitball my levels just seemed to climb too close to the cut off mark (my blood sugar needs to be under 5.5 in the mornings and under 6.5 two hours after eating). So I have started experimenting with other carbs: quinoa, burghul, barley and of course there is the good old lentil (how I love thee). I am even eating the occasional piece of corn on the cob, and anyone who knows me will know that I am of the firm belief that corn is evil. Obviously my body needs the variety because I am not minding the (cloying) sweetness. I have worked out the best way to cook it - peel back the husks (don't remove them), remove the silks, rinse gently in water to moisten, pull the husks back up and back in mod oven for half an hour. Sweet, tender and doesn't need butter.

For weeks my breakfast was peanut butter on a slice of grainy toast, but I got a bit sick of that (it's very easy to just keep eating the same thing once you find something that works), and have recently come up with this instead:
I make it the night before. It is a strata of rhubarb, yoghurt, puffed quinoa and a sprinkling of muesli, then repeated with another layer of each. My blood sugar readings on this are consistently in the high 5s and it fills me up. The rhubarb is stewed with about a teaspoon of low gi honey (which I procured on a shopping trip to Leos in Heidelberg, near the hospital) and still very sour, but oddly refreshing - I don't have a sweet tooth in the mornings.

Speaking of quinoa and refreshing, my first experiment with cooking with quinoa produced this:
It's a black quinoa, Macro brand, which I picked up at a boutique grocer in Richmond, but I have seen the Macro brand in Woollies. I made a salad for Martin and I (this is the leftovers that I had for lunch the next day, so the salad would have fed four as a side). I cooked the quinoa first - half a cup of quinoa to a cup of water, simmered for 15 minutes till all the water was absorbed (I had to add an extra splash of water during the cooking time, so it might have been better to do a cup and a quarter of water). I fluffed it with a fork, then added it to the salad I'd already prepared: one avocado diced, one grapefruit diced and a generous quantity of chopped coriander from the garden. I didn't dress it because the grapefruit provided enough sour, but I did splash a little olive oil in. I cannot tell you how utterly fabulous this was. You must try it. We had it with simple marinated pork porterhouse steaks. My reading after this was about 5.7, quinoa rocks! Similar readings after a simple barley salad (loosely based on this one) with cherry tomatoes, grapes, feta and mint (I didn't dress it but it was quite moist and flavourful. I forgot the olives.). I served it with fried tempeh. The girls had sausages and shunned the barley and feta, picking out the tomatoes and grapes.

The exercise sometimes gets to me...I really have to do a lot of walking and bouncing and yoga to keep my levels down and some nights I am so tired before I begin (though I always perk up once I get going). And I love the walks too, setting out just before twilight into the bush, which is filled with wildflowers, or up the dirt roads, where the only other person I might see is a 12 year old girl on a horse. The sun is long and golden, rich as honey, and the birds are still busy and noisy: parrots, rosellas black cockatoos, kookaburras, flashes of colour moving in the trees. The other nice thing about all the walking is the treasures you can find:
The wild wind and rain must have buffetted it out of a tree, leaving it on the dirt road for me to find. Most of the fibres in it are artificial except for the dry grass. It is an amazing piece of workmanship. Imagine doing this with just a beak! I have my handy dandy opposable thumbs and my apparently superior intellect, and I could never pull it off.

Anyway, my levels are improving and the diabetes educator was impressed - apparently most people with even one type 2 diabetic in the family end up on insulin. 35 weeks is the peak of the bad hormonal mojo that causes gestational diabetes, so it shouldn't get any harder. And because I'm not hungry, and because I am enjoying how healthy and strong I feel, I am confident (and determined) I can keep it up until D Day...whenever that might be.

On Friday, I am off for a big baby scan (notoriously unreliable). But I'm not really worried about the size of the baby. I have a strong feeling he will not be as big as Una (4.55kg, or just over 10lb and posterior, which meant her head came out the big way). For no real reason, just intuition/positive thinking. And a few weeks ago Martin and I did a hypnobirthing course, and I can see where I could have used some of the techniques birthing Una to make it easier. Where I was quite nervous about the birth before, I now feel reasonably Zen about it. I am not exactly looking forward to it (which I was with Fred), more willing to surrender myself to the process and allow it to play out as it does.

Una Pearl: 5 year old girl (tomorrow)

Hair

1. When I was eighteen I shaved my head.
At first I just shaved the back (you can just see it in the above photo) and kept the fringe*. A few months later I shaved it all off and repeated this pattern every so often throughout my twenties. Below I am about 21 or 22.
The first time I did it I rang my mum from a phone box on the lawn at Salamanca, Hobart, at dusk and told her (I was living in a townhouse in North Hobart, having moved out a few days before my 18th birthday). After a moment of silent anguish she said "At least you haven't got cancer."
Later she told me she'd gone downstairs and said to Dad, "What's the worse thing you can imagine Penni doing?"
Dad replied, "She's pregnant."
"Second worse."
"She's shaved her head."
Number two. Not drugs, or a cult, or elopement (well, ahem, at least I never joined a cult), or... well a million worse things. No. Second worse: shaving my head.
Why did I do it? Well, because of her of course.
I had taped the song off Rage and watched it over and over again. And then I went on to discover more of her, song by song - Three Babies, Last Days of Our Acquaintance, Troy (in which she referenced my favourite Yeats poem*), and she ruled benevolently over my identity until I discovered The Waifs (in a pub, in Melbourne, *cough*, before they were famous).
Also it made me feel brave and free - I'd had awful haircuts as a teenager and was really quite frightened of hairdressers and the power they wielded, the ugliness they could inflict upon me (ugliness thy name is perm. And sometimes bob.). There was enormous self-empowerment in going the shave. I also quite often got around in a black petticoat and Doc Martens and fishnet tights. Black was my signature colour*.
Also it felt great, the breeze on my head was a natural endorphin kick, like the tickly scratch on her back which has never failed to calm Una down, like the light touch massage we were taught on Sunday in my hypnobirthing class.
*(x3) The word emo had not been invented yet.

2. A month or two back now, my mother was diagnosed with breast cancer. She has just undergone her first bout of chemo, and last week, over the course of a day, she lost most of her hair. (She was getting the rest shaved off yesterday). Not without some sense of irony, we've both been taken back to this old story that exists between us. It is a gift, in a way, that something so sombre can also have an air of lightness.

3. I did a workshop recently with a group of teenagers (about the relationship between character and parts of the body), and one of them wrote: 'Her identity was in her hair.' Hair is a huge part of our self image, so much of how we perceive ourselves is tangled up in that mass of colour and coif atop our skulls. After I shaved my head, my hair grew back thicker and more lustrous and for the first time in my life - and to this day - I had natural curls (there had been weather-affected frizz and several disagreeable kinks and cowlicks, but this was the first time I had honest to goodness curl).
Some years ago (somewhere between five and ten) my mother stopped dying her hair and let it grow in completely white. She used to have curls too, big fat ones as a child and teenager, but her hair had become quite straight. She had it done fairly often and usually had a hairdresser that she would stay loyal to - in the eighties it was a man called Ken, and she followed him from salon to salon, along with my best friend's mother. Ken must have been quite something. I remember one salon he worked in (perhaps he cut my hair once or twice), in Sandy Bay, next to a drycleaner, in an odd spot without any other shops around. Almost like a service station or a bottle shop, it had a "drive through" in front, probably for quick pick up of drycleaning.
I may be making all this up. About the drycleaner. I am quite sure about the hair.

4. Our first First Gentleman is a hairdresser.

5. Just before I fell pregnant I dyed my hair for the first time in years.
There is still residual colour. My hair has always taken colour well, probably because it tends to be a little dry and there is quite a bit of red pigment (I was a very gingery kid). It has been many colours: blue, blonde, black (yeah, that didn't work out so well), and accidentally greenish which it turns out is what happens when you put black henna over red bottle dye. I first got tips at 11 on a family holiday at the Gold Coast (Mum says Dad was in charge and she came back to find my hair dyed and Kylie's permed). They put a rubber cap on me and pulled strands of hair through little holes. I asked for strawberry blonde because that's what colour girls hair was in the American romance books I was addicted to (Sweet Dreams and Sweet Valley High). They were perplexed but came up with something. When I went back to school I said I'd been to the Gold Coast over the holidays and she said, "I can see the sun has lightened your hair."
"I had it dyed," I told her.
She gave me a withering stare and said archly, "I am sure some of it was the sun."
And hastily I agreed (she was that sort of teacher). She had two hair styles herself, a giant Barbie perm and a very tight ponytail with all her hair scraped back. She cultivated an alarming look, her eyebrows were also quite something, all four of them. She came back from holidays herself with the second style and all the girls in the class walked in, and then instantly stepped back into the hallway to claw at each other and gasp, "Did you see her hair?"

6. Sometimes I still think about shaving my head. Martin does a number Number Two fairly regularly, and as I neaten up the back I think how easy it would be, how lovely the air would feel swirling around my scalp. But somehow I doubt I will ever shave my head again.

Not by choice anyway.

Gestational Diabetes

I'm 30 weeks. A couple of weeks ago I found out I have gestational diabetes. I had a lesson yesterday in monitoring my blood sugar, and now I have to prick my finger four times a day (but I don't get to sleep for a hundred years). I have occasionally modified my diet to lose weight - after I gave up smoking which was a year or so before I got pregnant with Fred I allowed myself four tablespoons of fat a day (mostly peanut butter or olive oil) and swam nearly every day, and last year or the year before I was kinda sorta 'French' for a while, which mostly involved eating yoghurt for breakfast, smaller serving sizes and walking. After a month or so of being super-conscious about it, I just found I incorporated certain things into my daily routine (like having breakfast, I'd never been much of a morning eater before) and having smaller portions of sweets, but didn't really think about it much anymore.

I have always carefully avoided the whole concept of bad food and good food. This is the first time I've really had to think about carbs and fats and sugars. It's the first time I've had to think about what I am eating (and drinking) when, staging all these small meals throughout the day, carrying carrot sticks and vita-wheats in my handbag, and a spare muesli bar in case I get caught out.

Last night, after avgolemono soup with toasted feta and silverbeet grainy flatbread sandwiches, and then my usual yoga make-the-baby-come-out-easier exercises, my reading was low and I felt smug and clever. This morning's reading, two hours after a bowl of low GI muesli and 2 strawberries my blood sugar reading was quite high. I'd forgotten my iron pill so took it about half an hour before testing and I have a cold and I had a cup of tea sometime after breakfast... Can this stuff affect the reading? How can I hold all this stuff in my head for ten weeks? Ten weeks isn't long to adapt to a condition but it's a long time to fret about the possibility of things going wrong. Not that I'm worried really... or I wasn't till I started monitoring my blood sugar. That pass/fail mentality that dogged me in high school is hard to shake, I feel like I am being graded on my meals (and like Lisa Simpson* my attitude towards grading is far more unhealthy than my attitude to food). I've been doing the diet for a few weeks (I have a very clever friend who also had gestational diabetes and she gave me lots of great advice) and on the whole feeling much better for it.

I met a lovely mum (also pregnant with her third) at the diabetes class and we were talking about the sense of guilt and failure associated with this diagnosis. The conscious, critical feminist in me (with two type 2 parents) knows that it's not my fault and more luck of the genes. But mothers are held so accountable for every morsel of food that passes their lips (as though their pregnant body belongs to the state while housing the innocent, vulnerable infant that needs protection as all children do by default). And there is a sense that "the rise of gestational diabetes" is invariably associated with "society today" and the overabundant supply of fast food and obesity. Perhaps the "rise of gestational diabetes" is at least partly related to the number of cases diagnosed now that nearly every pregnancy is screened for it. I am hoping I get used to the testing, at the moment the whole thing seems so obsessive. I hate thinking about food so much. The gestational diabetes will go away when the baby is born, but I'll always have to be a little careful - it's not uncommon for people with gestational diabetes to develop type 2 and with my family history my doctor says it's almost inevitable.

On the upside the diet changes have been mostly interesting and not difficult to adjust to. I am not craving the things I can't have (potatoes, butter, cake, chocolate etc), perhaps because I am eating so frequently I am never getting really hungry. I am enjoying the challenge of keeping food interesting for myself and incorporating foods that are healthy for me into our family meals. The girls have adjusted quickly to grainy bread (which is what we used to eat all the time, I am not sure when soft brown bread began to take over). They understand that I am foregoing sugar. They are not so keen on the idea of finger pricking and run and hide when I do it, though it is utterly unspectacular. The diet only feels restrictive when I go out to eat or when I go to a party or something.

Anyway, in case you have stumbled here by accident because you have been diagnosed with GDM too a daily meal plan for me might consist of:

Breakfast:
Plain low fat yoghurt with a handful of toasted oats, plus sesame seeds and flaked almonds and a kiwi fruit or a third of a banana or some strawberries. (Which I think is kinder on me that the bowl of muesli I had this morning).
OR a piece of toast with vegemite and a low fat latte

Morning tea:
An oat biscuit OR four vitawheats spread with peanut butter and dotted with about 8 raisins or topped with sliced banana OR a slice of toasted raisin bread with peanut butter OR vitawheats and low fat cheese. With any of these I might have a piece of fruit.
Cup of tea or low fat latte (I only have one latte a day and some days none).

Lunch:
Varies but today it was leftover avgolemono (made with orzo pasta instead of rice). Yesterday I had two nori rolls with avocado and half a very uninspiring apple - the rest of which I chucked. Salads with tuna and a piece of grainy bread with avocado spread or minestrone with beans and pasta are two other mainstays.

Afternoon tea:
Pretty similar to morning tea.

Dinner:
Tonight we are having a veggie lasagne. If we have pasta we have small amount of pasta on the side of, say, a meat dish, or two different kinds of veggie sides (the other day it was spaghetti with wilted silverbeet with lemon and nuts, and a tomato based tuna sauce). Often I make some kind of hearty salad, making sure to include a grain like burghul or barley and a good sauce of protein, like meat or nuts. A quick popular meat dish (served with many veggies on the side) in this house is: veal (schnitzel type) steaks, put in a pan (you don't have to brown them but you can), with tomato pasta sauce thinned with a bit of water and the lot sprinkled with grated low fat mozzarella or parmesan and baked in a mod-hot oven for about 15, 20 minutes (till cheese is the way you like it). You can accidentally forget about it for a while because the veal doesn't overcook easily. We would eat this with pasta on the side and a big green salad (on the side I like pretty simple salads, which I usually dress with a squeeze of fresh lemon juice - salad might be spinach leaves with sunflower seeds and pear, or diced cucumber, tomato, red capsicum, spinach and parsley).

*Look at me! Grade me! Evaluate and rank me! I'm good, good, good and oh so smart! Grade meeeeee!!

30 weeks