#gratefulformybodyNOV

My friend at Biceps After Babies recently wrote a post with this hashtag asking followers to comment with one thing they love about their body.

I've been thinking about it since then trying to figure out what I love about my body. It was interesting because I do love my body and generally have pretty positive feelings about it, but every time I thought of something I love my critical side added a, "Yeah, but..."

I have pretty healthy skin. "Yeah, but right now you keep breaking out."

I have nice eyes. "Yeah, but you have to wear contacts."

My brain works great. "Your brain has been tired and slow ever since you had kids."

My body has made some adorable, healthy babies. "Yeah, but you know that first trimester depression you always get? And how about the miscarriage you had last March? And your belly button is doing that weird folding at the top thing." (I know about the belly button thing, critical side, and nobody cares.)

I haven't really been able to think of any part of my body that has served me perfectly. Maybe my kidneys or my appendix? But you know, that's not the point. I honestly believe that our bodies are a gift from our Heavenly Father, and He gave them to us to help us learn and become what He wants us to be. I think our spirits in the premortal life had about reached their limit of development and we needed bodies so we could continue to progress. And we shouted for joy at the chance to be given these bodies with all their flaws. The flaws are all part of the learning process too. My body does exactly what it's supposed to. It functions really well and it makes it so I can live and learn so many things that will help me return to Heavenly Father.

My body doesn't have to be perfect for me to love it.

So here are some things about my body that I love:

My eyes: Yes, I have to wear contacts, but only if I drive, because otherwise I don't notice the difference. My eyes see the entire spectrum of colors, easily read words on a page or notes in a piece of music, and adjust to the amount of light that is reaching them. And they're a great color too.

My hands: They've seen me through nearly 25 years of playing the piano, changed hundreds of diapers, turned thousands of pages, carried my babies, and made a lot of awesome bread and cookies.

My brain: I'm convinced that with enough work this brain can learn anything I want it to. My brain got me through Calc 3, geochemistry, War and Peace, and a senior thesis. My brain is flexible. It looks for the truth and tries to understand things through other perspectives. My brain sends and receives messages from my entire body and processes most of it effortlessly so I can focus on living life without being distracted by the hum of the refrigerator or having to consciously think about the movement of each individual finger to pick something up.

My immune system: I'm possibly developing a cold right now, and as icky as that is, my body is fighting it. How awesome is it that our bodies can heal? I've had my share of cuts and burns, and I can't see or feel any of them anymore because they've all healed. I even had a pretty bad broken bone when I was eleven, and you can't even tell anymore!

And right now my body is doing a great job at growing another little body.

almost 7 months

Miraculously, I cleaned the bathroom and got dressed nicely on the same day, which means I could take an awkward mirror selfie without being embarrassed about the state of my bathroom or being in exercise clothes.

Our little monkey still seems to be doing well and is enjoying plucking my ribs just like Kevin did. The pubic symphysis dysfunction has also let up somewhat recently, which has been a relief.

How are you FEELING?

"How are you feeling?" is the question I seem to be getting the most these days, and it's a tough one to answer. Aside from the physical symptoms, there are all the emotional and spiritual effects as well that are hard to put into words. So most of the time I just end up saying, "Fine," which doesn't describe it at all.

My friend pubic symphysis dysfunction has returned. It's happened pretty suddenly, within the past couple of weeks. I think I first noticed it when I was exactly 6 months pregnant. I dealt with this when I was pregnant with Heidi too, and I was really hoping it wouldn't happen again, but I guess I'm not too surprised. Basically it means that my body is making a hormone called relaxin that makes my pelvis get nice and loose so a baby can fit out of there in a few months. But unfortunately that means that where the bones connect in front there is too much movement, and it HURTS. I'm pretty sure you could describe my slow walking as waddling at this point. I'm coming to grips with the fact that it's time to call the chiropractor and start making regular visits, which made a big difference last time. I've just been dreading getting to this point because I really don't have time for more appointments. Then again, I really need to be able to walk, so maybe I can't afford to not go.

Most of the time I think I've been a lot more laid back about this pregnancy. There's a lot of other stuff that has to happen before Baby comes (i.e. homework, honors thesis, taking care of the kids), so that's serving as a distraction.

On Wednesday I was in a meeting (I meet weekly with my advisor and three other students where we talk about our progress with our research and questions that we have), and one of the other students asked if I'm scared. I shrugged and said not really since I've done it two times before. It wasn't completely true since there's actually a lot to worry about, but I haven't thought much about the whole labor and delivery part. I do know that I worry a lot less because I am confident in my midwives and I feel like for the most part their policies/practices match my preferences. So most of the time when I think about it I envision it being a happy and exciting time. I'm also not harboring any kind of hope that the baby will come on/before the due date, because I see no reason to get disappointed when it doesn't happen.

I failed my one-hour glucose test a couple of weeks ago. I'll be honest, I cried the rest of the evening after they called me. I knew I probably shouldn't let the worry get to me too much since I only failed it by two points, but I still worried a lot. I did get a lot of reassurance and promises of prayers from my family, which helped a lot. On Tuesday I had to go back in for the three-hour glucose test. You have to go in fasting in the morning, and they take your blood before you drink the drink, and then they take your blood again every hour for the next three hours, so I had to stay there the entire time. I brought two books and my laptop so I could work on my senior thesis, and I did end up getting some things done. They had to try three times to get the needle in for the last blood draw because my veins just weren't cooperating, which was pretty awful. I don't have great veins. But the next day they called and said my results were normal, so fortunately I don't have gestational diabetes, which is a relief.

I'm feeling Baby's movements more and more, and I think we have a little monkey on our hands. I really have no idea how this child can move so fast. It's a really odd sensation. But of course it's also always a relief to feel healthy baby movements.

The kids are very excited about the baby and they are very curious about everything. They love to come hug my belly and say they are hugging the baby. They've also been really good when they come with me to my appointments and they keep talking about getting to hear the baby's "heart beep." (They also watched when I got blood drawn for the one-hour glucose test and barely batted an eye.) Kevin is convinced that the only way the baby will be able to get out is through my mouth. He also said that when the baby comes my skeleton is going to come out and they will have to put it back in and fix it. I hope not. : ) It's kind of a new experience for me because last time Kevin had absolutely no idea what was going on, so I didn't get these kinds of questions before. I'm really glad we waited another year to have this baby because the kids are both much more emotionally and mentally prepared to have a younger sibling than they were a year ago.

update

Kevin has started doing basketball with the YMCA this month and is really enjoying it. He is participating with his team a lot better than he did with soccer. I think it's partly because he has developed and is better at participating in a group and also partly because basketball is a better fit for him. Sometimes his mind wanders and he loses his focus, but that happens with all the other kids too. He always has a grin on his face throughout the entire practice. He is improving with his dribbling and he does a great job with his bounce passes.

His favorite things to draw lately are electricity and a jiggly-jiggly. Don't ask me what a jiggly-jiggly is, but whatever it is it must be something absolutely hilarious. It has something to do with grabbing the unused seat belts and tying them around the car seats. He draws zig-zags for electricity (inspired by the warning pictures on the big green electrical boxes).

All of a sudden Kevin has an opinion about how his hair should be fixed. After we comb his hair down flat he will spike up just the bangs in front. It actually looks pretty cute. I suspect that he likes the bangs spiked up because then they're not touching his forehead.

Recently we checked out Castle in the Sky from the library. I had seen the commercial many years ago and always wanted to see it, and I was not disappointed. We are pretty big Hayao Miyazaki fans in this house. The kids loved it and have asked to see it several times. I'm amazed at the little details they noticed. Yesterday (1/28) Kevin asked me to roll up his long sleeves "like Pazu," and later he told me he was drawing airships. They also build airships with the duplos and run around acting like characters from the movie.

Heidi is obsessed with favorite colors. Her favorite colors are pink and purple. And if you ask her what her favorite anything is, she will still respond that it is pink or purple. Favorite food? Pink. Favorite book? Purple. Favorite movie? Purple.

Heidi loves to learn little songs and poems. Some of her recent favorites are Where is Thumbkin? and Popcorn Popping. She does a pretty good job of quoting the nursery rhyme Ladybug, Ladybug from memory and does so every time she sees a ladybug or a picture of one. I keep trying to get a video of it, but she won't do it for the camera.

Ryan enjoys the Asterix and Obelix comic books and he's been checking out 2-4 of them every time he takes the kids to the library. The kids enjoy looking at them too. However, I do not like reading comic books out loud and pretty soon I started refusing to read the books to them. (I read a lot of books to the kids, but I reserve the right to refuse to read them books that drive me nuts. Mainly this applies to dumb children's books that have an average of two words per page and should never have been published, but comic books are just awkward to read aloud.) As a result of this, I have this conversation with Heidi at least once a day:

H: Mom, you not like Ashes? (Asterix)
M: I have no objection to Asterix, but I don't like reading comic books out loud.
H: Oh. Well, I like Ashes.
M: I know.
H: Daddy like Ashes.
M: Yep.
H: Kevin like Ashes.
M: Mm-hmm.
H: You not like Ashes?

Ryan has needy students who would happily keep asking him questions until midnight.

We've all had a cold except Kevin. I was the last to get it, and I'm really bummed because I was being really diligent about handwashing and hoping it would pass me by. And just as I thought it was going away after about a week, I seem to be either getting a relapse or a different cold. I hate having a sore throat. Now I have a tickle in my throat that makes me hack and cough. In the morning I wake up with a really dry throat and I have to drink copious amounts of water to eventually get it bearably moist. I was trying to take a break from sugary things for a week so I could reset after all the Christmas treats, and now I'm having to eat lots of cough drops, although I wouldn't call cough drops a treat no matter how sweet they are. Maybe sometime I can get my sugar back into a normal balance again.

I am blessed to have fairly good pregnancies, but I'm ready to just be done, and considering that Baby will probably be two weeks late like Kevin and Heidi, it feels like there's still so much time left. I just want to meet the baby. Oh, and maybe I also want to be done with all the homework and quizzes and have my honors thesis all finished, which all has to be done before Baby comes. Since we have all the kids' clothes and infant cloth diapers stored in their closet and we have the crib and a swing, I feel like there isn't really anything to do to prepare. On Saturday we got a bigger car seat for Heidi so we can pass her convertible car seat down to the baby (and we saved 25% because of the Babies R Us Great Trade-in Event), so that's taken care of too. Mainly I am trying to get rid of stuff so that we can find a place to put the crib. And of course the apartment office has been so helpful by deciding to tell us we can't keep bikes and strollers outside our door anymore, which means I have to find a place inside the apartment for those too. I keep telling myself we can deal with apartment living for a little longer. We have been very blessed to live in clean and affordable housing close to campus, but we're looking forward to the time when we can get a place with a garage and an extra bedroom.

Speaking of getting rid of stuff, I got rid of an incomplete travel chess set after it took a dive out of the hall closet and landed on my toe. My foot was throbbing in pain and I was desperately trying to get all the pieces picked up while trying to cope with the pain, but I couldn't seem to get the box to close, and finally I just got so mad at the thing that I threw it in the trash. It felt awesome. It would have been nice if I didn't have to hurt my toe to decide it was time to get rid of the chess set, though. Something similar was the motivation for selling five dozen of my Mason jars a couple of weeks ago. I was trying to rearrange things in our closet and a box of jars fell in such a way that all of them broke all over the floor. I had to call out the door and ask Kevin to bring me the vacuum because I was stuck inside behind all the glass. When I realized that I hardly cared about the jars and was only upset because I had to clean up so much glass while the kids were terrorizing the rest of the house, I decided it was time to admit that I will not be canning for the next two years and it's not worth it to store all those empty jars and risk breaking them when we move. It has definitely made our closet less crowded, although Project Reclaim My Closet still has a lot of work left.

Oh, and apparently some cool person taught Kevin how to play Button, Button, Who's Got the Button? because while I was icing my toe he wanted to play it. He didn't seem to have a problem with the fact that the game doesn't really work with only three players, because to him and Heidi it was still just as fun to find out who had the button every time. At any rate, it makes me wonder why we have any toys when we were able to get an hour of fun with nothing but a button.

I like my midwives.

I just got back from an appointment with one of my midwives. (Baby Girl is doing great.) On Monday I remembered that I was supposed to bring a 3-day nutrition diary to my appointment, so I started keeping one. And today I got a lecture (not mean). It's not that I'm living on chips and cake, it's just that for some reason I tend to neglect eating vegetables. Driving home, I was thinking about it, and I realized that nobody ever asked me about my diet when I was pregnant with Kevin, except maybe once or twice I might have been casually asked if I try to eat from all the food groups and drink plenty of water. So I appreciated that this midwife actually cared to take the time to talk to me about what I eat and help me eat a healthier diet, instead of just saying in passing that it's a good idea. It's so much better to take care of myself now and avoid problems like preeclamsia and hypertension, rather than dealing with them if they show up, and I think it makes a lot more sense for healthcare to be focused on healthy lifestyle rather than waiting until people are actually sick. That is why I like my midwives, because they are willing to take the time to help me have a healthy pregnancy.

pregnancy thoughts

We aren't technically in a student ward, but our ward is still largely composed of married students and their children, which means that we have several nurseries, a very large sunbeam class, and lots of babies and pregnant women. During our first winter, the birth of a new baby was announced almost every Sunday--and the bishopric members felt weird if they didn't have one to announce.

I remember being really confused as I got to know women and hear them talk about the woes of pregnancy. I remember my mom's pregnancies pretty well, and although I knew she was uncomfortable at the end, I wasn't really aware of most of the complaints my friends had. I had never even heard of morning sickness (which apparently my mom didn't have much of a problem with). I sure appreciate my mom passing on some good genes for pregnancy, because several of my aunts have very difficult pregnancies.

The complaint that surprised me the most was about being so huge. I thought all of these women were so beautiful, and pretty much everyone seemed to resent being so huge. I had always admired my mother when she was pregnant. I remember a particular time when she came to volunteer at my school, and she was probably 8 1/2 months pregnant, and I thought she was so beautiful and I wanted everyone to know that she was my mom because I had the special mom who was going to have a baby. My entire life, I grew up looking forward to being pregnant because I was so excited to get to look like that. It wasn't just the cute pregnant look--it was also the special look pregnant women had because they were helping God in creating life. So at first it kind of surprised me when many of my pregnant friends lamented how huge they were getting. Wasn't it fun to look pregnant and to be getting so big because there was a baby growing inside of them?

Now I understand the hugeness complaint better. I remember the last few months of pregnancy when rolling over was more like launching a rocket. I remember the last few weeks when I was outgrowing my maternity clothes and shaving my legs made me feel like I had become a contortionist. I remember going to my midwife appointments twice a week, and learning at every appointment that I had somehow gained two pounds in three days. Besides that, I saw my body every day and had plenty of time to note the stretch marks and the funny lumps and the way my belly looked from my perspective. Honestly, I was a pretty average-sized pregnant woman, but just like everyone else, I was pretty aware of my size. A friend of mine told me that she has concluded that we all compare the way we feel to how all the other pregnant women look, which of course is not a fair comparison.

I know I complained about my size sometimes when I was pregnant with Kevin. I remember in particular that I wrote in a blog post that I didn't want to take any more belly pictures because I didn't like the way they looked, and my sister told me that it would be a shame if I didn't take any more pictures. But right now I'm not huge. I'm just starting to show, and I am enjoying it. For one thing, I get to change my wardrobe. And I don't have to worry about sucking in my not-so-flat tummy, because right now it's supposed to stick out. I feel really healthy and happy, and I am enjoying the miracle of pregnancy. I want to enjoy that more this time, to realize a little better what a privilege it is to play this special part in God's plan, to nurture a new life. To me, that is why pregnancy is such a beautiful thing. I often try to imagine Baby Girl spending her last months with Heavenly Father, learning the last few things from him before being entrusted to my care. I feel that she is very excited to finally begin her life, after preparing for a really long time.

What sparked these thoughts was a blog post about breastfeeding that I read recently. If you're interested, it is here. I will warn you, at the top of the post there is a picture of a woman breastfeeding a baby, and she isn't using any cover, so if that kind of picture is offensive to you or makes you uncomfortable, I would skip this link. I don't see these pictures as sexual, so they are not offensive to me, but I realize that other people may be uncomfortable about that and I don't want to direct you there without a warning. The main point of the article is that the author realized that nursing her children was one way that she could help her daughters develop a healthy image of what women's bodies are supposed to be like. She grew up with the insecurities that result from the pressure we get from the media to want to look like Barbie or Britney Spears, and she wanted to help her daughters not have that problem as much. She realized that having children and breastfeeding them would be a good way to initiate conversations where she could help her daughters see our bodies as a gift. Her daughters were very impressed and amazed when she explained to them that there was a baby growing inside her and that she would be able to make food for the baby to eat. I appreciated the author's thoughts because it changed my perspective about my body and reminded me that my body was created by God and is capable of amazing things. I'm not skinny like the celebrities (and don't care to look like that--partly because I realize that a lot of the time their pictures are photoshopped and therefore trying to look like that is a hopeless ideal), but I know that I have a beautiful body created in the image of God. I was made to be able to carry children and to produce all the food they will need for the first several months of their lives. That is a wonderful gift and blessing, and I hope that I can help my own children understand that concept too.

Yesterday Kevin was snuggling with me on the couch (which doesn't happen too often), and he was very insistent on sucking his left thumb (the only one that is suckable, of course) and putting his other hand on my tummy. It was such a sweet gesture, and it got me wondering if he understands better than I thought he did that Baby Sister is there. I often wonder how he will react when she arrives.

For some reason one of my biggest worries is that I will have to be induced again. I really want the birth to be more intervention-free this time. But since my only experience with labor is with pitocin, it's hard to imagine what it will be like to go into labor naturally and not be tangled up in tubes and monitors while trying to cope. There were so many coping techniques that weren't an option because the needle in my hand got in the way so I couldn't lean on my hand at all. It's hard to imagine spending early labor at home when I was in the hospital for a day and a half before I was even having contractions. I'm trying not to let myself be convinced that my body just doesn't know how to go into labor and that it will never happen without intervention, although I know that chances are pretty good that I would have gone into labor if I had not needed to be induced for low amniotic fluid. I'm hoping that things will go a little more like I'm hoping for this time and that my faith in my body's capabilities will increase. This evening I was able to spend some time talking with a friend who is having a baby in a few weeks. She also had Pitocin with her first baby and is also struggling to conjure up positive images after the difficult experience she had last time, and it was very helpful and comforting for me to talk with her about it because we share many of the same fears about what our next birth experiences will be like.