Tag Archives: exercise

Arse O’Clock

Like many babes of her age, Niamh often goes through a period of crankiness sometime in the late afternoon/ early evening. If I manage her day-time sleeps just right, we can avoid it. (There must be exactly three naps, and the last nap must end later than 3pm. Who knew you needed to be a project manager for this gig?!) Anyway, if we do hit ‘arse-o’clock’, as it is affectionately known in our house, there are a few options. There is the option of me feeding her to sleep for a (brief) fourth nap. That can take a little bit of time though, and be somewhat inconvenient unless OtherHalf is home early to provide Finn with some distraction. I can stick both kids in the car and drive around for awhile. This has many shortcomings – usually it results in Finn falling asleep, and not Niamh, and what with the cost of fuel just about requiring a second mortgage these days, it’s not my preferred option. I can stick Niamh in the pram and trundle down to the nearby playground with Finn, but again, the pram doesn’t seem to put her to sleep very efficiently, and this option has the added frustration of Finn complaining about his tired legs as soon as we get, oh, about 50m from the house!

Anyway, yesterday – having been out much of the day, and unable to keep to Niamh’s sleeping requirements, we hit arse-o’clock with a vengeance. But lo! I had a bit of a brainwave. I popped her in the sling, and jumped on the stationary bike – voila, multitasking! Not only did I get a spot of (seriously needed) exercise, but the motion of my body lulled her off to sleep nice and quickly (it took 5 minutes and 48 seconds, according to the readout on my bike!) I even managed to catch up on some news, as the bike fits into an alcove-y thing near our television. Ahem… I only managed another five minutes of cycling though, before I staggered off… told you I was in serious need of exercise! (On a somewhat related note, I keep forgetting to mention that I got the all clear on diabetes at my six week follow up test 🙂 )

Postscript: I’m posting this retroactively – I started writing it last Wednesday, finished writing it on Thursday, then got interrupted and never quite managed to post it. See how slowly things get done at Casa de Million Stitches lately?! After last night, I’m hoping that may change soon… of course I can’t tell you what happened, because that would be incurring the curse of the jinx, wouldn’t it?!

Ugh

Once upon a time this was a stitching blog, really it was. There’s not been much of that particular activity going on for a while, I fear. My day goes somewhat like this: get up, have breakfast, potter about for a while, do dishes, laundry, whatever, make lunch, eat lunch… collapse in a pile! I sleep on the couch for a while as Finn plays Sesame Street or similar on my laptop, then we kind of muddle through the afternoon with some boardgames/ books/ visiting friends/ grocery shopping, I struggle to come up with something vaguely resembling food for dinner, eat, then collapse in a pile again for the rest of the evening! So you see, today’s title was about the most I could come up with, given my current stores of energy.

It’s really quite surreal at the moment. When I run into people who haven’t seen me for a bit, they invariably feel the need to point out

A) how enormous my belly is, and
B) that I appear to have lost weight

which, you would think, should be mutually exclusive, but apparently are not. I have not so much lost weight, as transferred it all into my uterus! After losing about 3kg post-GD-diagnosis, I am now only 3kg more than my pre-pregnancy weight. 3kg, I’m sure you could figure out, is all (plus more) taken up by Small+placenta+fluid+etc. So, in fact, a net loss for me, yay! My face, arms, legs, backside, even breasts, are all melting into my belly. Bizzarro!

Anyway, despite the fact that I’m around the same weight, I feel ginormous, and I’m hopelessly clumsy. I had to stop regular walking due to fear of injury – I fell down a couple of steps the other day, and I seem to regularly be straining my abdominal muscles. I bought an uber-cheap and uber-crappy stationary bike instead, and so far we are getting along just fine.

In other Small-news, her scheduled birthday has been pushed back two days from June 20 to June 22. I don’t actually know why, I received this information via my answering machine, so I’ll have to ask the doctor next Thursday. My suspicion is that the hospital has just changed their regular surgery day from Tuesday to Thursday. Anyway, while my first thought should have been “great, an extra 2 days to possibly result in a normal birth…”, my first thought was actually “not another two whole days, please, no…”! But yes, the extra two days may well be useful. That brings me to 40 weeks + 2 days for the scheduled c-section – I’m actually really surprised they didn’t bring it back in the other direction. Anyway, pretty soon I’ll be requesting all the “go into labour” vibes and old-wives-tales you can spare :giggle: