Its official – we have moved into our new house!
Little batches of stuff had been trickling to the new place over the preceding week. However, our official moving day to get everything out of the rental was this past Saturday. We were super lucky and had a bunch of strong, manly guys [insert grunting noises here…] to help us make the process go as smoothly as possible. Everything was loaded into our new house by noon, with the moving boxes generally going to the correct rooms (or at least the correct floors of the house).
We went back to the rental on Sunday and cleaned the heck out of the place so that it’s ready for the next renters. So it feels good to be done with that and fully on to our new house. Now, it’s just a matter of unpacking everything and making the house into our home.
Of course, it looks like we might have a little less time to do that then originally anticipated. At my doctor’s appointment on Friday we discussed the specifics of my double diagnosis of gestational diabetes and cholestasis.
It seems like the gestational diabetes will be manageable, just really annoying. Basically I have to eat a super healthy diet and keep an eye on the amount of carbs I’m ingesting. I have target carb goals for each meal that I need to stay under, so figuring out what I’m allowed to eat is taking a little more thought than usual. Since I don’t like the taste of diet sugars, this also means I’m going cold turkey on soda and coffee until the end of my pregnancy. Yikes – I miss the caffeine already! I have a handy, dandy little insulin testing machine that honestly doesn’t hurt much at all. It’s actually kind of cool in an immediate gratification kind of way to see whether I’ve done well at each meal by testing my blood sugar an hour later.
The cholestasis is a bad mamma jamma though. Basically if I go all the way to 40 weeks of pregnancy, the baby may die. Actually, he can die at any time due to this condition and there is nothing I can do about it. Which is pretty much the most terrible and scary thing a doctor has ever said to me.
Starting this Thursday and continuing twice a week for the next 6 weeks, I get to go to the doctor’s office to do a special test where I spend 1 ½ hours hooked up to machines to check on the baby. As of now, the plan is to induce me to deliver at 36 or 37 weeks, but if he seems as if he is in distress I may have to deliver sooner.
It’s pretty understandable that I had a bit of a crying freak out in my car after leaving the appointment. However, I have an amazingly awesome friend who also was considered a high risk pregnancy that talked me down out of my hysteria. She went through the twice-a-week tests for another condition, ended up delivering early and her baby is perfectly fine. So it helped me a lot to hear her take on things.
Now that the news has digested a little bit, I’m able to concentrate on the bright side. Although cholestasis is quite rare, many women do end up having perfectly healthy babies. Hopefully our baby will be healthy and born at 36 weeks, which is considered full-term, probably just a little skinny (which is most likely a good thing considering my husband is 6’4” and I’ve been concerned about having his giant baby).
Until then, we get to see our baby a lot with twice weekly ultrasounds. I now have an incentive to learn how to eat healthy again, which is good news for dealing with that post-pregnancy weight. Also, since I will be induced then I won’t have to worry about spontaneously going into labor at an inconvenient time or place. I’ll know exactly when it’s going to happen so that I can plan around it with both my work schedule and life in general. This is pretty much the most awesome thing ever for a Type A personality like me.
So instead of having until April 13th to get everything ready for the baby, we now have until March 16 (ish). Which means the next 5 ½ weeks should be quite interesting!