Glucose

Very happy today.  The doc's office called and announced that my glucose test came back a-okay, so I passed.  Yay!  That means no four hours of sitting in the blood lab so they can poke me once every hour.  Even better, it means I probably won't be getting gestational diabetes.  HURRAY!  I was so worried about that when I first got pregnant.  It's humongously relieving to know I don't need to worry anymore. :D  At least, about that.  I'm still minorly worried about pre-eclampsia, but there's nothing I can do about that.  It either happens or it doesn't.

We've narrowed down our boy names to four or five choices, so we're almost settled on the two we're going to use (pairs, that is, first and middle).  We decided to pick two names sets of names we like best, and then see which one fits the baby.  Once we settle on boy names, we have to move on to girl names.  I dread finding a girl's name.  All the ones I like are either taken (a la Isabelleberry, whose variant Isabellaberry is ranked #1, partially thanks to stupid Twilight) or people laugh at them.  I thought about Rosefruit as a middle name because it was my grandmother's and it follows my Laurelfruit nicely.  But not only is it incredibly popular (along with Gracefruit, dang it), there's another unutterable reason I refuse to use it.  I like Charlotteberry, too, and have for a loooong time (it's a variant of Charlesberry, the name of both my grandfather and the Jeremelon's, and it's a prettier name that shares syllable sounds with my grandmother's Shirleberry), but it's also really popular.  So we're starting from scratch.  Which...doesn't sound like fun.  Naming berrykins is hard!

I need more to do with my time.  I started baking more - I made one awesomely tasty loaf of bread that vanished really fast.  And I made the Jeremelon some oatmeal craisin cookies yesterday, among other things.  But standing in the kitchen hurts.  I threw out my old slippers a year ago, and I'm really missing their inch-high spongy soles.  By the time I'm done, my ankles and feet are not only a bit swollen, but they ache like they've never ached before.  Of course, sitting too long - what I normally do with my day - eventually causes my lower back/sacrum area to get all stiff and stubbornly immobile.  So I've added a mile walk on the treadmill to my day, and I'm actually kind of excited about it.  Mostly because it gives me something to do that's outside of the house (hurrah for apartment exercise rooms), but also because it wears me out and helps me sleep.  Any other physical benefits are icing. :)  Of course, it's also slight torture, as the treadmills all face the uncovered but not-yet-"open" pool.  I want to go swimming sooooo badly!!  Not that I could given the recent weather.  The wind has been awful!  Normally I like wind, but the juniper pollen count is still somewhat high, and the wind carries it along like a trustworthy crop duster.  Blah.  (Seriously, the wind is bad enough that I feel like I'm back in Albuquerque, where it never stopped.  I had to sweep along the front door every week or two, or we'd get a mound of dirt behind it.  And the other day, the wind actually woke me up.  Of course, that briefly made me think I was back in Florida and we had been hit by a tropical storm.  It's crazy.  It also means I have to limit my out-of-doors activities to, say, walking the two minutes to the exercise room.  Sigh.)

28 Weeks

Had my 28 week appointment today.  I got my Rhogam shot because I'm Rh negative and don't want to reject future babies if this one is Rh positive.  That would make me very sad. :(  The shot was actually kind of painful.  They stuck it in my hip and proceeded to fill my backside with fluid.  Or at least, that's what it felt like.  It was a good sized syringe, too.  Oh, and of course I made the mistake of telling them I was easy to take blood from, so rather than sending me to the lab like they usually do, they took my blood there because I was early.  Oy.  I am NOT apparently an easy draw.  It took two nurses three tries between them to find a vein.  I don't know if that's going to mess up my glucose test results or not.  :T  Other than that, all was well.  The berrykin kicked the doppler when the doc was listening for the heartbeat. :)  She said Berrykin was sitting really low...which I could have told her.  Berrykin frequently snuggles in next to/on top of my bladder and won't move.  It hurts sometimes, in a high-pressure sort of way.  Kind of like the bladder being insanely full, only not the bladder.  Sometimes I can push the berrykin out of the way, but sometimes not. Silly Berrykin.

We toured the hospital yesterday and got the lowdown on check-in procedures and such.  It's a whole five minutes away, and it was built to resemble a hotel more than a hospital.  Having seen the labor & delivery room and a postpartum room...oh my gosh.  It totally does.  The waiting room on the maternity floor has a fireplace.  All the furniture looks like it belongs in a hotel.  It's awesome.  There's a bed for the Jeremelon in all of the rooms I'll be in, plus giant bathrooms.  All of it is private, single occupancy.  They have tubs for pain relief and birthing balls, as well as bars in the  L&D beds in case a girl doesn't want to lie flat on her back to give birth.  They even have room service for guests and theatrical movies to order for free on tv.

I also got my final grades today.  Two As and two Bs, which makes for a nice 3.5 GPA.  Woohoo!  I got an A in Interpersonal Communications, which still has me in shock.  According to my numbers, I should have a B.  I have no clue where the A came from, but I'm totally happy to take it!  I think my overall GPA is at something like a 2.78, given that one semester waaaaaay back when I was more interested in working than in school.  I'll be lucky if I graduate with a 3.0.  I'd like the best GPA I can get, of course, but it's my own dumb fault if I don't.  Right now, I just want to graduate!

Restlessness

One of the many reasons I both love pregnancy and wish it were over already is the need to Do Something.  At first, I could chalk it up to the season change - from the first moment I start feeling the approach of spring in the slant of the sun, I get restless.  I have sudden, desperate urges to go out and be social, to rearrange the living room, to write the next smash hit, to move to a new state, to totally redefine my self.  Except my spring fever always goes away by April.  By then, spring is here (at least as far as sunlight is concerned) and I no longer feel cramped by winter or my stupid Seasonal Affective Disorder.  This time, though, here we are halfway through May and it's getting more intense as time goes on.  I've been tasting summer on the wind, and oh my gosh, but that need to go swimming won't go away!  The apartment pool opens in ten days, and I lament multiple times every day that I don't have the extra funds to buy myself a pregnancy bathing suit.  Argh!

I don't know if this is nesting.  I don't know if it's based on the forward motion of my life.  I'm taking 12 credits this summer which end 9 days before my due date, and I can't wait!  I even hope it's hard.  I'm a little more trepidatious (blogger is telling me that's not a word, but I've heard it in something before and I like it, so I'm gonna use it) about fall semester, what with my hopefully 19 credits, a new baby, and a husband with a demanding full-time job.  (And whether or not it might be better to graduate in May, instead, simply so we have guaranteed insurance until then...but the thought of that makes something inside me scream in frustration, so I'm gonna lean toward not...)  I just finished a semester wherein I actually raced to get my work done instead of procrastinating, and then got annoyed there wasn't more to do.  Part of it, I know, is the pregnancy, be it hormones or the simple act of getting a part of my life on the track I want it.  But all of it?  I don't know.  I would like to think I'm finally fed up with things enough to change them.  I guess I won't really know until after the berrykin's born.

My classes don't start until 6/7.  When I discovered that yesterday, I got rather annoyed.  I thought they started this coming Monday, but no.  Now I have to find something else to do with those intervening two weeks.  Gag!  I think I unconsciously decided to bake.  Or cook.  Or...something quaintly domestic.  I made pizza from scratch last night.  My dough was totally not enough for a whole pizza, but oh well.  It tasted yummy.  I'm currently listening to the whir of my breadmaker for the first time ever, despite having owned it for, you know, ten years or so.  (Word to the wise: If you move to a humid climate, make sure you open up all covered appliances from time to time.  Otherwise, they get to smelling REALLY NASTY.)  I would really like to take up breadmaking by hand at some point in the future; it seems like it would be a lovely stress reliever, plus add a sense of accomplishment to one's day.  But my feet and ankles hurt enough from standing in the kitchen figuring out how to use the breadmaker that I think the sort of standing involved in actual kneading is probably best left until after Berrykin and after a bit of weight loss.  I dream of a day when we eat as close to self-sufficiently as possible.  I don't know that I will go so far as to kill and pluck my own chickens (though women who do are brave souls indeed), but I was raised with my dad's big veggie garden in the backyard by a mom who majored in Home Ec, made a good chunk of our clothes, cooked a lot (while she still only had a couple kids to worry about, anyway), made jelly, and generally filled me with a great admiration for all things homemade.  (Maybe that's why Girl Scouts was so boring while I found Chazberry's Cub Scouts so much more fun.  *They* got to make birdhouses.  We just talked about how to be good "girls" and proselytized the Way of the Cookie, neither of which I was ever very good at.)  I'm making cookies on Friday, after my glucose test.

Which reminds me...no more fruit, juice, or sugar from now until then.  Boo.  I was only four points high on my 1-hour last time, which was lame.  So my doc told me to watch the sugar in my diet for two or three days prior to the test.  Not cut it out entirely, obviously, as that would skew the results, but to make sure to hold off on those sugariest delights (look at me, I'm making up all kinds of words today!) until after the test.  So I had strawberries with lunch, and those shall be my last excessive sugar until the test.  I don't mind cutting it out...I DO hate figuring out what to eat that isn't sweet.  (For instance, I've made this delightful bread, and I just realized I'm not going to be able to eat it.  Crap!  It's molasses honey oat.  I've been wanting to make it for weeks, so I didn't even think about it.  Major boo on my pregnant brain!)

And now that I have posted long-windedly, I need to find something else to do for 45 minutes until the Jeremelon comes home.  His brother is treating us to dinner at the bestest Chinese restaurant ever (looks like egg drop soup and sesame chicken, since I can't have sweet.  Oh crap!  I can't dunk my Divine Cheese Wantons in their partner Ambrosia Sweet and Sour Sauce.  Noooooooooo!).  Which is nice, because I don't have to figure out what to feed us (it's nice in other ways, too, but that's the dominant reason right now.  Hee).  Perhaps I shall attempt to work on my Soopr Sekrit Facebook Project, my endeavor to put Facebook to work for my interests, rather than t'other way 'round.  Or maybe I'll read.  Or spy on my bread.  Or clean.  Bleh.  So many choices, so little enthusiasm...

Final Grades

I'll be updating this as they come in. :)

Nutrition: 96%
Graphics: 87% (Got 100% on my portfolio!  Woohoo!)
Meteorology: ??
Communication: 86% (I got...a B??  Extra snazzy!)

Third Trimester

Today marks my third trimester!  2/3 down, 1/3 left!  88 days.  There's a lot of differing opinion about when trimesters start; do you count from 40 weeks or 38?  Do you go by days or weeks?  Mommy time or baby time?  I'm sticking it here at 88 days, because that's when I feel like it. :)  I'll be 28 weeks on Monday, which means I only have 12 left.  Huzzah!

I week from today I go in for my Rhogam shot to make sure I don't build up an immunity to future baby blood, in case Jeremelon's type is positive.  (BIGGEST run-around EVER.  Seriously.  We spent weeks trying to get a doctor/lab to run his blood type, but nobody would do it!  They told him to go give blood instead.  It drives him crazy to have needles under his skin, and we highly doubt he would be able to sit there like that for 15 minutes.)  I also have to have another 1-hour glucose test run to make sure I haven't now developed gestational diabetes.  Fun fun.  And we're taking a tour of the birth area at the hospital next Wednesday.  Looking forward to that, 'cause I like to know where I'll be and it should give me an idea of their basic allowances.

Being pregnant is a whole lot of fun.  I get such a kick out of being so round.  Why?  Because I'm weird.  I look in the bathroom mirror, admiring the red parts of my stretch marks as badges of honor and indicators of Berrykin's growth.  (Berrykin is, as I type, kicking me all over the place.)  I have to grunt and groan to get up from any but the most stable seats, and yesterday I needed help to roll out of bed because I got stuck like a turtle on its back.  I laughed and laughed.  Granted, the exhaustion isn't so nice.  Or the need to go to the bathroom like three times an hour.  And omigosh, the HUNGER!  Jeremelon thought I was joking last weekend when, literally an hour after we'd eaten, I said, "I'm hungry."  He laughed at me then.  He doesn't laugh now.  I feel like a teenage boy.  I Can't Stop Eating.  I may be quite overweight, but most of that was not eating my way up.  I might binge on baked goods from time to time, but I've never had a huge appetite or massive appreciation for food.  Most of the time now I still have no appreciation for food, I just want it.  NOW.  Before I starve to death.  And, you know, in an hour, before I starve to death then, too...

Revised School List

I forgot a final on my last list.  Oops!  Here's the updated one for this week, having done half of my work in an hour and a half. :)

This Week:
- Communication Assignment
- Graphics Portfolio

Next Week:
- Communication Final
- Nutrition Final
- Meteorology Final
- Graphics Final

Miscellany
- Call student accounts about insurance charge.
- Sell back books.

The Writer Berry and the Art Final

Here's my final graphics project.  I spent...crinklesticks.  I don't even know how many hours!  The text took about four, between finding the right fonts and everything.  Finding the images was probably half an hour.  I finished at 4:30am, and started...uh...sometime around 4pm yesterday afternoon.  I took a break to get food for dinner around 8:30, and took two hours or so before getting back.  I took an hour to review finances, too, so altogether today I think I spent 9.5 hours on it.  Geesh!  But it was fun. :D  For your giggle and viewing pleasure:

This is five ruins pictures (Petra, a Roman road, the Roman Forum, an Indian temple (I think), and a temple from somewhere around Phnom Pen), four or five reef pics, a water background, the cliffs in the back, and of course Indiana Jane with Hollyberry's head attached. :)  Very silly, but the assignment was to make a self-portrait attached to a magazine cover involving a dream of ours.  So here it is, the Hollyberry as the world famous archaeologist who discovered Atlantis.  Silly, silly, silly.  But a whole lotta fun!  I wanted to add a gradient effect to make the picture progressively light from bottom to top, but I couldn't figure out how to make it work.  :T  I never got around to buying the flipping expensive PhotoShop Bible, so I've been doing this all based on videos and trial and error.  Whew!

Quite pleased with myself.  Off to gloat.  Hee.

(Oh, yes.  This means all my projects are done for the semester.  Now I just have to worry about the little things next week, and finals.  Hurray!)