I Am The Luckiest Person Ever!

Guess what I woke up to this morning? Breakfast in bed! And not just any breakfast, but an egg sandwich complete with greens and cheese and walnuts and a perfectly toasted whole wheat english muffin and other ingredients too. My honeypot, who is working his butt off right now, made me, the "big bellied" lady who is no longer working, breakfast in bed. How special is that? Extremely special and I so appreciate the attention. He's so fantastic and for many reasons way beyond today's treat.

In not so great news, I had two leg cramps yesterday. The first one was actually in the bottom of my foot while we were watching Juno last night (a great movie). I've never had one during waking hours and that one was relatively mild. I've discovered that if I take my calcium/magnesium supplements once in a while, which has a bunch of other nutrients in it also, I don't get these. Even after the mild one, I forgot to take that supplement and it's been a couple weeks now. Oops. Well, I paid for that mistake with a pretty bad calf cramp at about 5 in the morning.

The notable thing about all this is how much better I've gotten at handling these cramps. The initial bolting upright in bed from a deep slumber to this amazing pain is still the same. It's startling and annoying. Now I immediately start to use the pain management meditation techniques we learned in our birth class and it usually doesn't last more than a minute or two. Another interesting thing is that previously I would be hobbled for the entire day because my leg would be so tight, even though I would spend lots of time rubbing it out. Well, now I'm quickly relaxing my leg in that meditation and even 20 minutes later my leg was completely normal without any pain or tightness. It's pretty exciting because, besides the lack of hobble, it reconfirms my belief in these pain management meditation techniques I've learned. Which is a darn good thing, because that's the majority of what I'm going to be using for my home birth.

For the record, I think I've had maybe 10 leg cramps throughout my pregnancy. Which isn't really that bad. Zero would be better, but 10's not so much either. I can't imagine being one of these women that have them all the time. That would be a huge bummer.

Nourishing Traditions and the Attraction to What We Can't Have

The other day I was hanging out with Krista and she mentioned this nutrition cook book whose basic angle is that whole unmodified foods are best for you. And that our society's obsession with altering food formats (by homogenizing, sterilizing, or denaturing) is seriously detrimental to our digestion and general health. This book also promotes eating fermented foods.

While I was in college I got really into this type of nutrition; and was a huge advocate of this philosophy. My philosophy is still pretty closely aligned, however I am a vegetarian and this book isn't completely on board with that. I also feel strongly about only eating foods that have a low glycemic index.

As a side, there's been studies that have linked folks who eat fermented foods with less incidence of allergies. I've been taking a probiotic recently and my honeypot took it for some days. While he was taking it he had less issues with his body reacting to certain foods. Interesting, no?

I'm going to make yogurt today, and see how it goes. Wish me luck.

On another note, my serger has been breaking needles for several weeks now when it shouldn't be. I finally brought it in to get it fixed because the timing probably is off. It'll be gone for a week and now that it's gone I've come up with all of these projects that I want to do. Why are we attracted to things we can't have? I must be patient.

sir cuss boot camp

We had a casual craft night tonight and I sewed the "backdrop" of our bm theme camp. I think it came out good. The picture doesn't really do it justice, but you can tell how wide it is. And it goes up into two points, but those parts were folded back.

I'm really excited about this year's burn. I think it's going to be fun and good.

I've had these really weird ridges in both of my thumb nails and they would grow out over time. They seemed to appear in the same frequency, every couple months or so. I think I figured out what they were. I was about to push my cuticles back a couple weeks ago and it occurred to me that this would be about the time that the ridge would start. So I didn't push my cuticles back at all at that time. And the last ridges are about to grow out. It's pretty weird and shocking to me that I was hurting myself so much and not noticing.

Burn, Baby Burn

My life "theme" has recently changed. It used to be "If it doesn't burn, it's not food." My current theme is "Food is a vehicle for hot sauce."

I love hot, spicy things. I eat some form of very hot spice around twice a day. I've gotten to the point where I use hot sauce like other people use oil and vinegar on salads or ketchup on eggs. Most of it's just not that hot any more.

We were in the city last weekend and we walked by a local grocery store. Why not buy some groceries here? (as opposed to getting back to the east bay and doing it.) So we did. And they had new hot sauces! So I bought four new bottles, and two of them are very hot! I love that.

I'm really enjoying learning about the various spicy peppers. Each one affects your mouth in a different way. Some will slowly ramp up to their peak of hotness, others will be very very hot quickly and fade away just as quick, others will only affect the tip of your tongue, while others still will only affect the back of your mouth. Yum.

Yesterday I finally got around to bottling my new beer. I'm very excited to drink it. I realized that I get so excited when I brew beer that I have historically felt the need to use hops in all the phases of brewing. And I think for my beer tastes now, it's not such a good fit. This might explain my lack of home brewing recently. But this beer only has finishing hops and has lots of blueberries. I'm guessing it's going to have only a slightly more complicated taste that bud, or something along those lines. And that might just be perfect for me now.

Oh, and as a side (for those of you who may be following this blog) I've lost 15 lbs since starting these CRON angled food changes during tax season. It's very exciting. (And I really haven't had a headache in many, many months too - thankfully.) 8 more to go and I'm done.