I Made It!!

I was going to post a triumphal blog entry on the fateful Day 28, but I'm (as usual) a bit late. So here I am, on Day 31 (or thereabouts)! I finished the initial part of Phase II! (This is the very-low-carb diet which supposedly helps with NVP/HG issues.)

I had hoped that I would feel different..... possibly invincible. I don't! I feel just fine, but not really different. Too bad..... That makes me nervous.

At this stage of the game, I have two options: (1) I can progress to the easier Phase III, or (2) I can stay in Phase II indefinitely (with now having the boon of one cheat meal per week). For now, I'm staying in Phase II, because (1) I have more baby weight that I'd like to lose, and (2) I feel safer there!!!

I'd feel a lot better about this diet for pregnancy if I actually knew that it was fail-safe for HG mothers. But I don't know that. I just know that it reduces NVP in normal mothers, and that it's worked for at least one HG mother. But HG is a nasty thing, and it's so unpredictable. There are no guarantees.

I have decided that I'd like to introduce an alteration into the human genome - I want to add a "pregnancy simulator button" to the female form! Upon being pressed, it would release about 24 hours of full-fledged pregnancy hormones into the bloodstream, so that one could test how well one's pregnancy preparations were working. "Oops, not yet, better do some more work" or "Oh yeah, I've finally got it down!" Wouldn't that be fun?

But in the meantime, there are no guarantees. Just human guinea pigs.

A couple of positive things about the VLC diet that I've noticed:

(1) It's forcing me to eat more vegetables! Hurray!

(2) It's been an adventure in getting to know different types of food and different types of cooking.

(3) It's actually easier to feed to the 4-year-old. Not that I'm making him do a VLC diet - far from it - but the dinners that I make now are more along the lines of meat and two vegetables, rather than my beloved casseroles, and I have found that any meal where foods are distinct and separate is much more well-received than those in which foods are mixed or touching (oh, the horror!). (I thought I'd done such a good job with serving a wide variety of baby food that we'd skip the picky stage, but noooooooooo. It's not that easy!)

It's been fun! And not that difficult - thanking God for His grace in helping with that, though! Some of the tougher parts have been getting through Easter - and even worse, a visit to my in-laws' house - completely grain and sugar-free. Yikes!!

Moving on....

Other than that, it's been a busy month! I am up to my ears in lots of music - wonderful! This past weekend I played for a Lutheran church where I occasionally work, and next weekend I am playing for a wedding. So much fun!! I'm currently also getting over a cold, thankfully a minor one - though I like to think that my vigilant use of vitamin C therapy also helped. (Don't ask how much I took.... it was probably a near-lethal dose. Let me just say that if you guessed a number in the thousands of milligrams, you'd be off by at least a factor of ten.) Thankfully I'm on the tail-end of that now, and hoping it's the last for the season!

I have had a blog entry titled "We finally found a church!" ready in my head for quite some time, but I guess it's a good thing I didn't write it yet, because..... we're now again in the "not sure" phase. We originally had let one issue of difference that we had with the church slide, deeming it workable to "agree to disagree," but it has come to our attention that it's a fairly major church doctrine, and we're not sure that disagreement is compatible with membership. Time will tell. May I say that long-term church hunting is not fun? We're now going on a year and a half, and it's very discouraging. Hopefully soon, one way or the other!

I will check in more later - right now I am exhausted, with an early-morning therapy session tomorrow to look forward to for the Chublet, so it's off to bed for me! Night, all!