January 6, 2002
It's 2002, folks. Can you believe it? We're officially living in The Future. I must admit that when I was a kid I sort of thought that by the year 2000 we'd all have flying cars and Jetson-style houses with robots and stuff. Looking around my house, I can detect no noticeable signs of robots. (Well, Keith did just wake up and is lurching about the house in a rather spasmodic fashion, but that doesn't count.) I'll tell you what we do have, though: the Internet. Is the Internet not the coolest thing ever, or what? I'm serious.
I was talking about this with the fabulous Carolyn, who was just here for a brief visit over New Year's. Neither of us can remember how we did research or looked stuff up, or hell, went about our daily lives, before the Internet. We were talking about some issue in the news, and Carolyn remembered that there'd been something in Pennsylvania a few years back where the government bombed a row house or something. She had no details, though. Five minutes later, a Google search had turned up all the relevant info.
This morning, I suggested to Keith that we go to a particular restaurant for lunch. He said that sounded good, but then he couldn't remember whether or not they're open for lunch on Sundays. Two minutes later, I had the restaurant's web page open, complete with location, map, and hours of operation.
I wanted a Kandinsky print for my desktop background. I typed "Kandinsky paintings" into Google, and thirty seconds later, I was looking at a complete gallery of the artist's work, spanning his entire life, complete with interpretation.
I mean, what did we do before the Internet? I can't even remember. I think I used to go to the library a lot more often. It's just an amazing, incredible resource. Any time you forget that we are officially living in The Future now, just do a Web search on the most obscure, esoteric subject you can think of, and then sit back and marvel at the wealth of information on that obscure subject that you are now presented with.
In pregnancy news. I am nearing my due date, and am sort of wishing that Peanut would get a move on. I am officially tired of being pregnant. I go for a blood-sugar-lowering walk every day, and lately I've felt like the Goodyear Blimp under full sail as I cruise around the neighborhood. I am having trouble driving the car, because my belly runs into the steering wheel. I am huge.
According to the latest ultrasound, the baby is not so small himself, although I'm not sure how much faith to put in these late-third-trimester ultrasound readings. They are notoriously inaccurate. But if the ultrasound is to be believed, Little Mister Hyperactive currently weighs in the neighborhood of 6 pounds, 4 ounces. With four weeks to go until my due date (well, three now), that probably means he will be on the large side. Not the grotesquely large side, though, which is good, because with gestational diabetes, that's the concern. Well, that's one of the concerns anyway. Personally, I think I was just destined to have a large baby. He's been measuring ahead of schedule ever since I was 14 weeks pregnant or so, and I didn't have diabetes back then.
Speaking of the diabetes, it's going as well as could be expected. I'm managing it fairly intensively. Yesterday I checked my blood sugar nine separate times. I'm trying to figure out when my insulin is peaking, so that I can appropriately time meals. With the insulin and the manic-obsessive measuring of portion sizes and the daily exercise, I have managed to keep my blood sugar levels more or less in the target range most of the time, which is good. It occasionally rises up slightly above where it should be, but I haven't had a super-high reading for weeks now. (I am not counting New Year's Eve, when I deliberately went off my diet and had a lot of potato chips and shrimp with cocktail sauce.) So hopefully all this measuring and injecting and testing and walking will pay off, and the baby will be perfectly fine when he (at long last) decides to make his grand entrance into the world.
Have I mentioned that it would be OK with me if said grand entrance were sooner rather than later? Although, I do have to admit I'm sort of going to miss the seismic eruptions he causes in my belly all the time. I look down and my tummy is sort of gyrating wildly from side to side, like the ground during an earthquake. Then I give the baby a good tummy rub, and he usually settles down. For a few minutes. He seems to especially like the non-stress tests I go in for every week now. I lie down on my left side, they strap a fetal heartbeat monitor to my belly, and I stay there for twenty minutes and click a button every time I feel movement. The idea is to make sure that the baby's heartbeat goes up whenever he moves. Well, apparently I have a champion test-taker, because every time we go in for a non-stress test, he wakes up and starts zooming around my tummy, and thrashing, and kicking, and punching, and just in general giving us a fabulous chart reading. Last week, the nurse said, in tones of disbelief, "Is he ALWAYS this active?"
Yes. Yes, he is. He is very, very active. He is the all-dancing, all-kicking, miraculous flip-flopping baby. (Actually I don't think he does much flip-flopping these days, as it is rather crowded in there and he has been head down for the past four weeks at least. But still.)
Well, it seems to be time to go stab myself in the finger and check my blood sugar again, so I shall sign off for now. More updates later this week, I swear to God! I mean it!