Beetus.

You guys.

Hey, you guys.

I failed my one-hour glucose tolerance test so hard on Tuesday. I have to take the three-hour test--I'll probably go in on Monday and do it--but at this point I'm really kind of wondering why my doctor wants to bother.

Here is my reasoning:

1. I've packed on 25+ pounds in three months regardless of diet.

2. I was 40+ points over the threshold for the one-hour glucose tolerance test.

3. All of my female relatives were/are diabetic and I've always known it was just a matter of time before I earned my insulin pen.

Just hand me a glucose monitor and a prescription for Metformin and we'll call it even, right? I mean, I'm all for wasting Medical Mutual's money (it's not like I'm really paying for all this), but is drawing my blood three times in three hours really worth it? I think I may come out psychologically damaged. I mean, more psychologically damaged.

My eastern-European angel did a number on my arm yesterday, for the record. I don't know if maybe she had an off-day or what, but I've got a funny-looking bruise now. Frowny-face. :(

That's another thing--where the heck are they going to get all this blood from? I only have one viable vein and now it's bruised. Can they get blood through a bruise? Won't it just bruise more? Are they going to have to root around in the crook of my arm with one of those giant needles? If they do, then it's going to bruise up and then were are they going to get draw #2 and #3? Can they just leave the needle in and draw out of it three time? Is that possible? Do I even want to think about that being possible? Could I sit for three hours with a needle in my arm without having hysterics? I'm pretty sure the answer is "no".

There's always the slight chance of my passing the three-hour tolerance test, in which case I will probably be very pissed off.

I am, quite possibly, the only person alive who would be excited to have gestational diabetes.

GD would be a handy scapegoat for the... dare I say it? The 30+ pounds I've gained while pregnant. You know, the 30+ pounds I've gained while starving myself. (NOTE: You will never get to hear an actual number. 20+, 30+, probably even 40+ by the end of all this, but no actual numbers, ever. It's just too sad.) I'm willing to bet that, once medicated, my exponential gain will stop, maybe even reverse.

If my doctor suggests trying to control this with diet, I am going to turn into a feral, rabid animal and claw her face off. What does she think I've been doing for the past three months, laying on the couch eating bon-bons? Just give me the pills/pen and no one will get hurt...

And now for something more positive.

I had my glucose tolerance test today. The one-hour blood test is basically a candidacy screening for the three-hour test, so... we'll see how it goes. I hope I pass, if for no other reason than that I don't want to sit around the Cleveland Clinic for three hours.

I got my eastern-European lab tech with her lifesaving butterfly needle again. High point of my day, right there. I kind of want to tell her that she looks like a Russian mail-order bride, but I think she might take that the wrong way. What I mean to say is that's she's pretty, in an interesting, foreign sort of way.

I kind of did my OB/GYN appointment today ass backwards. Everyone and their mom was at the Clinic this morning, so I went in, used the bathroom, and immediately realized that I was supposed to pee in a cup in the next ten minutes. Oops. No pee in the cup for me!

I headed over to the lab, waited around for a few minutes, drank my glucola, hit the button on the little timer they gave me, and walked back to the OB/GYN area for my appointment. I sheepishly admitted to having peed only a few minutes before and was (thankfully) told that it didn't matter so long as I somehow left some pee behind before I went home.

By the way, glucola is tasty. I don't see what the big deal is. It's orange pop with a couple extra sugar packets, and it's not like you have to drink a two-liter. Seriously, who has problems drinking half a pint of orange pop? I don't even like sugary drinks and I didn't gag on the stuff.

Anyway, after my (embarrassing) weigh-in, I was left in the exam room for over half an hour. My OB decided to be late to work, apparently. I then had a hurried appointment, got chastised for my weight gain (see previous entry, with f-bombs), and went back to the lab, where I was told I had seven minutes and thirty-three seconds to kill before my blood draw.

I then went back to the OB/GYN area, booked by next appointment, went back to the lab (again), had my blood drawn, and went back--again--to the OB/GYN area, where I let myself in the back and waited in line for the restroom so that I could finally pee in my cup.

And then I went home and cried about being a whale.

The end.

Screw this, I'm just going to stop eating.

WARNING: This post contains gratitious f-bombs, because I am a pissy, pissy whale today.

Another day, another OB/GYN appointment that leaves me feeling like a fat fucking failure.

I gained six pounds in three weeks on a 2,200 calorie, low-carb, low-sugar diet.

Such a thing is, apparently, impossible. But it can't be that impossible, because I did it. My body is somehow making something out of nothing.

The next thing to go is fat. I am now on a low-carb, low-sugar, low-fat diet. Basically? I am not allowed to be in the same room as food that tastes good. I might as well start eating all of these cardboard moving boxes we've got hanging around. Hell, you know what? I might as well just stop eating altogether, because my body doesn't need things like calories and carbohydrates and all that. It just makes fat all on its own! Maybe, if I took away everything it was making fat out of, I'd stop gaining two pounds a fucking week, except my body is making fat out of fucking air and water.

I was doing really well for a little bit, and then I let myself have some cookies and chocolate. My husband and I had chocolate fondue for Valentine's Day, and now I'm kicking myself because it probably made me gain three pounds. I am just simply not meant to fucking enjoy eating anything, apparently.

I'm about ready to tell my OB/GYN that she can shove it. I want some fucking potatoes and candy and I'm pretty sure I will die if I stop eating cheeseburgers. I am not cut out for carrots and lettuce. I fucking hate vegetables. I am reaching the end of my goddamn rope with this food thing.

Can I somehow get my insurance to cover liposuction as reconstructive surgery? Because I have gained an obscene amount of poundage while actively trying to not gain any weight at all, and my body is ruined. Completely and totally ruined. I'll need a boob job and some laser peels for the scar tissue as well, okay, Medical Mutual? Just put everything back the way it was...

Ms. Tired McCrankypants.

The more pregnant I get, the more annoyed/frustrated I am that I can't physically do everything I want to do.

If you've ever met me in real life, you'll know that I don't like taking "no" for an answer. If I get it in my head that I want to do something, there is very little in the world that will keep me from doing it. I once drank an entire bottle of Johnnie Walker by myself because someone told me they didn't think I could.

...Hey, I never said that all of my choices were good choices. (For the record, I didn't get violently ill until at least an hour after I finished the bottle, and I wasn't hungover the next morning. I was also 21 and invincible.)

Packing up and moving house has been taking a lot of me. (I promise I will stop blogging about moving soon.) The most frustrating thing is that, for the past two weeks, my husband and I have been using my dad's pickup truck to haul things back and forth between houses... every night. I pick the hubsters up from work, we get the truck, go to the old house, put things in storage totes or garbage bags, load up the truck, bring it to the new house, bring the things in, unpack the storage totes, put them back in the truck, and drop the truck off. In the past couple of days, we've added "clean the old house" to that routine.

I can't help but feel as though we'd be done with all of this by now if I could just lift heavier boxes and keep at it for longer than an hour or two. It is extremely frustrating to have to holler at my husband because I can't move something by myself or because I get stuck on the floor and need help getting upright. That's right, I am now such a whale-cow that I sometimes get stuck sitting on the floor and need help getting up. That's not embarrassing or anything.

...and then there are the naps. I'm convinced that, if left to my own devices, my body would attempt to sleep away the next 12 weeks. Very little sleeping actually gets done during these "naps"--I think I'm too exhausted to sleep. I can't have enough caffeine to drug myself into productivity, and I've been entirely unsuccessful at sleeping enough to feel rested.

I was actually talking to my husband about this the the other day, in Best Buy (of all places), while buying tax software (of all things). Lots of pregnant women complain about being tired--even exhausted. I don't like to complain too much about being tired. For starters, it's a sign of weakness and that whole argument goes back to my previous don't-tell-me-I-can't thing. For another thing, I've been exhausted, and compared to that, this tiredness is a cakewalk.

If you've been reading for awhile, you're already aware that I'm completely charmingly neurotic. What you probably don't know is that I've previously had episodes where it's taken me ten minutes to get out of bed and walk across the hallway to the bathroom because I've been physically incapable of getting my legs to move correctly. That's exhaustion. It's a place that you really don't want to visit, and it can't compare to simply wanting to nap your day away. Melancholic depression makes you want to nap forever, which at that point is totally okay by you because none of your limbs work anyway and you kind of just want to die but can't be bothered to actually put any effort into killing yourself. It's not a fun time.

Still, even if this isn't the most exhausted I've been in my entire life, I'd kill for my old coffee-and-Xanax diet. I'd settle for one of the two, even--if I could just have an entire pot of coffee in the morning to wake me up, or a couple doses of Xanax at night to knock me out, this would be okay. This in-between feeling of being tired and worthless is really doing nothing for me...

Nesting: Part III (I hate wallpaper)

We took possession of our new house on January 28th. I don't think I've sat down since, except maybe to sleep.

The official verdict: moving in your late second/early third trimester of pregnancy sucks ass. So, so much ass. I made the switch to the third trimester on Monday, and we're still involved in the moving process (e.g. we have stuff in two houses still), so I'm moving in my third trimester. Ugh.

By the way, I informed my OB/GYN that I would be moving "soon" way back in... I think it was October? She told me that I could sit, wrap up glasses and plates and put them in boxes, but not to lift anything. She'd be appalled at what I've spent the past month doing--packing storage totes, unpacking storage totes, getting up on ladders, painting walls (with cheap, VOC-laden paint), tearing down wallpaper, covering myself in joint compound and operating an orbital sander on a wall covered with I-guess-it-could've-possibly-been-lead-based paint.

Hey, if I don't do it... it won't get done. My husband works from 8 AM to 5 PM, Monday through Friday, and I'm not going to sit on the couch and eat cookies when I could be accomplishing things (although sitting down and eating cookies is really tempting). So... try not to judge me too much, okay? I wore a respirator mask for the sanding and tried to take some breaks in between inhaling volatile organic compounds. I'm still being kicked at, so I doubt I did too much damage to Pax's tiny little baby brain.

So far, about 90% of our possessions occupy the new house. This is after the epic mess that was the rental of the U-Haul truck last Saturday. The bedroom dresser is still at the old house, but the dresser we're trying to sell is at the new house. Why? I don't know. We've been borrowing my dad's pick-up truck every night to move things back and forth.

We've also been sleeping on a futon. My husband hates sleeping on futons because they hurt his back, and although I actually like futon mattresses, I keep whacking my head on the frame and there really isn't enough room for the two of us on the futon, especially since our pets like to sleep with us. The first couple nights we stayed here, the futon mattress was just on the floor of the living room--we basically got snowed in here while we were working, and luckily my husband had shoved the mattress into a friend's truck earlier the day and brought it over. Once we got the frame, my husband put it together so we'd have a place to sleep while we worked on the master bedroom.

Let me tell you all about the master bedroom. This is what it looked like under the regime of the house's previous owner, an old lady with questionable taste:

I refused to sleep in the bedroom while it was covered with that wallpaper. You can't really see how horrible the carpet is in this photo, but please trust me--it's pretty horrible. The wallpaper was improperly sized and you can see where it is starting to peel away from the wall. Everything in the house was covered with a fine layer of dirt and some yellow spots that look suspiciously like mildew of some kind. The lace curtains are just overkill on the old-lady look that permeates the entire house.

I'd never taken down wallpaper before, but I did have a vague idea of how to go about it. I asked my dad for advice, and he gave us a wallpaper perforator and a bottle of DIF. So my darling husband ran the perforator over the wall and sprayed it down with the DIF, and we tried to peel the paper up. It didn't budge, so he scrubbed the wall down with the perforator again and used the entire bottle.

The wallpaper was not coming off, so we began to use a handheld steamer. The steamer did the trick, but now the wallpaper was coming off in awkward bits and pieces, thanks to overuse of the perforator. Also, the perforator had gone straight through the paper and into the wallboard, making lots of neat little holes.

After peeling the paper off of one wall, we made a discovery: the wallpaper was not properly sized to the wall when it was applied, and whoever was responsible put stripes of blue paint on the wall the hide the mistake. When steamed, the blue paint peeled up with wallpaper, taking little chunks of wallboard with it. We were basically making holes in the wall by removing the paper.

This is where I come in with a tub of joint compound, a putty knife and an orbital sander. I had to repair massive pieces of wall. I was helped out by an N95 respirator mask--my one claim to safety--and spent an entire day spackling and sanding. At one point, I had the realized that I should probably not be holding an orbital sander next to my stomach. Luckily, some research showed that orbital sanders operate at about 70-90 decibels, and so it is unlikely that Paxton is going to come out deaf because mommy got a little happy with the power tools.

After repairing the wall, we spent an extraordinary amount of money (do not ask how much we've spent so far on moving, you will die) on paint. I feel like I've been painting forever. I'm still not technically done painting, as I need to touch up a few places around the closet.

However... tonight, we will be sleeping in our own bed. It may only be the mattress and box spring on the floor, but we will be in a bed, in the bedroom, and not on the futon. There will be adequate room for myself, my husband, and whatever animals care to join us, my husband's back will not hurt, and I will not injure myself on a railing. We are going to purchase bed rails this weekend, place the bed in it's final location (under the window on the right) and move the dresser and nightstands in. My mom also wants to buy us a cream/brown reversible comforter for our anniversary--that's okay with me! Our old bed linens don't match the new color scheme, haha.

I'm so excited to sleep in a real bed tonight. Between moving, the waddlimp, general pregnancy aches, and sleeping on the futon... my everything hurts. It's time to get some relief!

Waddlimp.

I've started doing a little maneuver I call the "waddlimp". It is a sexy combination of a waddle and a limp.

The waddlimp comes and goes throughout the day. Generally, I need to waddlimp less in the morning, and I waddlimp all the time at night. (By the way, I've decided that "waddlimp" is both a noun and a verb--I'm allowed to do that since I made it up.)

I'm not even especially huge (unless you count my ass), so the waddlimp is not a byproduct of belly size. Rather, the waddlimp is due to the excruciating amount of pain radiating from my right hip. As the day goes on, it becomes critically important to keep as much weight as possible off of my right leg, hence the waddlimp.

Hormones are responsible for every single crap pregnancy symptom. The hormone in question today is relaxin, which is responsible for making your previously-Victoria's-Secret-model-worthy hips wide enough to fit a baby through. Everyone knows that your hips separate during pregnancy, what no one tells you is that it hurts like fuck and that it can make your thighbone not fit in the joint properly.

Yeah, it's painful enough to make me drop the f-bomb. I'm sorry if that offended anyone (am I, really?) but I cannot stress how badly my ass hurts. My husband seems to think I'm milking it, but last night, getting into bed, my hip popped and made a noise like a pepper grinder. I think he believed that one.

If the waddlimp doesn't improve by my next OB appointment, I think I'm going to march waddlimp into the office and announce that I will not leave until I get painkillers or physical therapy. My OB is a big fan of extra strength Tylenol--I think she honestly believes it works. Extra strength Tylenol has got nothing on the waddlimp--I would know, I've been popping it every night in an effort to, you know, be able to use my legs. I'm really glad I spent the $5 to buy a foot-tall container of Tylenol at the wholesale club last month--I thought that maybe that the container would be enough to last me through two pregnancies and then I could give the rest away to homeless orphans or something, but it looks like I might just use it all now.

Oh hey, I just found this awesome Wikipedia article on Pelvic Girdle Pain, which is totally the cause of the waddlimp.

"In some cases women with PGP may also experience emotional problems such as anxiety over the cause of pain, resentment, anger, lack of self-esteem, frustration and depression; she is three times more likely to suffer postpartum depressive symptoms."

Oh yes, this is just what a neurotic basket-case like me needs to hear. I am already completely obsessed with my mood issues, I very much need an excuse to have more of them, and I absolutely must have that added x3 modifier to my PPD risk (which is already through the roof).

May 9th is 14 weeks away. The Xanax can't come soon enough.