Pregnancy update

I saw a nurse practitioner today, so I have a small update on the pregnancy. I'm at 12 weeks so the first trimester is ending. I heard the baby's heartbeat, which is reassuring. In the last month I've been poked with needles several times to determine whether or not I have diabetes. The multiple pokes are a result of failing the one hour glucose test (1st poke), then I had to take the 3 hour fasting glucose test (4 more pokes), and finally a final fasting test minus the glucose (6th poke). I only had one number off on my 3 hour test. My fasting blood sugar seems to run a bit higher than normal. My reasoning is that it was caused because they wanted me to have a half sandwich and milk snack at a time when I would normally be going to bed instead of eating. Of course my level was slightly high. So I tried to counteract the effects of the late snack by taking a brisk walk around the neighborhood the morning of my final test. It worked. Now I only have to get exercise and healthful meals to keep myself as healthy as I appear to be now.

I am happy to say that I've been better about the healthful meals this pregnancy. I have only gained about five or six pounds so far and haven't got out the maternity clothes yet (although I am in a size larger pair of pants). In my former pregnancies I would have gained about 15 pounds by now. I've decided that my body reacts to hunger differently when I'm pregnant. It just skips the "hmm... I'm starting to get a little hungry" phase and jumps straight to "I'm starving." As a result, I would tend to eat much more than usual since I listened to what my body was telling me. This time around I'm wise to the problem. I consciously eat normal portions and then wait a few minutes to give my body time to realize that it's had some food before I start to decide if I should have seconds or dessert. I also have been snacking on protein or veggies instead of sweets and breads (I love my carbs!). As a result my weight gain has been moderate. Though I think about food a lot more. Tim says that he eats better when I'm pregnant.

Unfortunately, I haven't been doing as well on exercise. This has been a very wet, dreary winter and spring keeps turning wet and cold. I haven't gone walking much. Then those times that I put it in the schedule, I have to deal with either three kids competing to be first or pull two of them in a wagon behind me. If the Pillowfight Fairy is walking, she tends to walk at a decent pace and I'm only pulling about 70 pounds of kids in the wagon. If the Adrenaline Junkie is walking, she tends to walk right in front of me and too slowly, talks so much that she isn't paying attention to where she is going and I'm pulling about 80 pounds of kids in the wagon. If the Happy Boy is walking (well... actually running) he has to be watched like a hawk to make sure he stops before crossing streets and stops to wait for us and stops when a neighbor wants to talk and no he may not pick the neighbor's flowers, all the while I'm pulling about 90 pounds of kids in the wagon. Under such circumstances, it is no wonder I haven't been all that enthused about going for walks. As the school year winds down, I am going to make it more of a priority.

In the meantime, we've finally started potty training with the Happy Boy. We know we should have started much earlier with all of our kids, but every time the timing seemed right to do it, I was having another baby and was beat. So all of our kids have been late potty-trainers. With the Happy Boy, we used cloth diapers at first, and he seemed to have the concept of being wet and not liking it. But when he was too big for a changing table, we switched to pull ups and we were lazy, so he learned a bad habit. Now we are trying to change the bad habit and we know it will probably take a long time. I will say it now, to commit myself to an audience who can keep me accountable, that I have no intention of using pull-ups with my next child. I intend to follow a majority cloth diaper regimen straight into potty-training.

Oh yes... our girls have decided that we don't have enough girls in the family and they are lobbying for this new baby to be a girl and keep trying to get us to agree to their favorite girl names. I know that they can count, so I'm considering them just a bit biased on this issue. Though to be fair, the Happy Boy could probably hold his own just fine either way.

So that's our latest news, such as it is.

Diapers and bodily functions

The title of this post should be fair warning to those of you who don't want to hear about bodily functions. I have a four year old, a two year old and a not quite three month old baby. My life is filled with bodily functions and I am not going to be apologetic about it.

I thought that I ought to give an update about the cloth diaper situation. I have started using cloth diapers finally. We decided to use disposables until child number three grew into his 3-6 month clothes. This saved me from washing out huge numbers of poopy diapers for my newborn. Now that he is pooping only once or twice a day, that is a much more manageable amount. All is going well. It isn't nearly as convenient as disposables, but not as inconvenient as I first imagined. I went for prefold diapers and diaper covers. I can see why people would like to go for "All-in-ones" (which is as convenient as a disposable), since replacing the diaper inside the cover is sometimes annoying. the nice thick diapers that I use are a little difficult to dry thoroughly in my dryer, so I have to run them through twice. We use the disposables when we go out, but even then, I will leave the cloth diapers on if we go out for a short errand. I suspect that I will go back to disposables briefly when he hits the teething diarhea stage. We are doing the cloth diapers more to stretch our finances than to make an environmental statement.

This summer I plan to work with child number two a little more with potty training this summer. She currently uses pull ups and sometimes tells me "I got poop." Sometimes she does sometimes she doesn't. She is aware of what is going on in her pants, so she might be receptive to some extra attention to get it in the potty.

Child number one has been my tough to potty train child. I think that I can confidently say that she is now potty trained. She takes herself to the bathroom when she needs to and does the whole process herself. I have to remind her that it has been a long time occasionally or insist she use the toilet before we go somewhere. But, otherwise it has been all her responsibility and she does it. She hasn't had an accident in a long time. The last time was when we were visiting grandparents and she hated stopping the play long enough to use the toilet. She was just over excited and distracted with extra fun. I think what finally did the trick was her own desire to do things herself. She hit an age where she wants to do everything that she possibly can, on her own. She was getting annoyed by being told when to use the potty and wanted to do it herself. So we finally gave it a trial after she was consistent enough and it worked. She also had incentive from earning rewards for long term success. She is extremely independent minded and it shows in the potty training, too. Now if we can get her to stop coming out of the bathroom with her pants down.

Well, baby is crying so I need to stop here. I'll do a homeschool update soon.