In which I resurrect my LJ and bring big news...
Hello, yes, I’m alive. I hope you've all been doing well, those of you I can't follow on Facebook. A friend told me I should come back to LJ a while back, and I finally got around to listening to her! You know who you are :-) At least this time I haven’t let a full year got by between updates!
The biggest thing going on in my life right now is that I am pregnant, yes, with a little girl, almost 6 months now. Actually, my birthday in a week and a half is exactly three months to my due date. It’s the most amazing experience of my life. It went really well at first - I didn’t have any nausea, very few aches and pains, managed to get an extremely rare spot in my local birth centre, didn’t develop any weird food cravings or aversions... And then two weeks ago, I tested positive for gestational diabetes.
For now, we are trying to see if I can control it by making some (rather extreme) changes to my diet. I’ve been going to appointments at the high-risk pregnancy clinic at the hospital and meeting with various nurses and nutritionists... I have to check my blood sugar four times a day; my readings were bad the first two days, got better almost magically after that, and today they went bad again.
If dietary changes are not enough to keep my blood sugar levels down, it means the diabetes is hormone-related and that I have to start taking insulin, which gives me a high-risk pregnancy status (I’m somewhat borderline now) and means even more trouble. Among other things, I’d have to give up my spot at the birth centre, because they don’t do high-risk pregnancies, and gestational diabetes can bring on some complications that only a hospital is prepared to deal with.
But I’m trying to be optimistic. My energy levels went up when I changed my diet, and one of the symptoms of gestational diabetes is extreme tiredness, so this can only be a good thing. The baby seems healthy so far; I can feel her kicking every day. Sometimes she kicks so hard I can see my stomach move! I’m told a time will come when I’ll be wishing she would just stay still, but right now there is nothing I love more than feeling her kick. The last time I saw my midwife, she couldn’t find her heart with the ultrasound wand because she was moving too much! And she was following the wand on my belly, too. I guess she felt the ultrasound vibrations...
So all in all, three months seems like an agonizingly long time to wait before meeting this little person, and a frighteningly short time to get everything ready for her arrival!