Broken Horse

Theory confirmed - pregnancy cravings are a sign of bad diet! When I was pregnant with Siiri, I barely had any cravings. There was only my relentless appetite for oranges. I also had a very nice scheduled diet. In the morning I ate porridge and two fried eggs, at lunch I ate a full meal with lots of meat, a bit of carbohydrates (2-3 potatoes or a little pasta or rice), then a fruit in the afternoon, always roughly at the same time, and a then protein-heavy dinner with lots of delicious salad. I made sure I eat a lot of protein and very little carbs.

Now I eat all wrong. I often eat my morning porridge with jam or honey, I rarely eat eggs, my lunch is always different, but often without veggies. Even when I have my dinner, the meal which should probably contain around 40 g of pure protein to compensate for the rest of the day, I usually eat carbs covered with a sauce that has some small bits of meat in it and some hidden vegetables for Siiri's sake. Siiri has an extra meal of fruits and vegetables so she's better off than I am. Now I've started to dislike sweet things and foods with too much carbohydrates. Yesterday I sprinkled my porridge with cheese flakes in stead of jam. With my diet from hell, it's no wonder that I keep craving pizza, sushi and cheese.

Pizza is really quite healthy with a large variety of vegetables and with cheese full of good protein. The little bit of bread isn't any worse than pasta. Pizza's major problems are high fat percent and high sodium content. Well, at least fat doesn't play with blood sugar so it alone isn't really all that bad. Salt is another matter. Some say it's very bad for our health. But if it's so bad, how come I'm craving it so badly?! We have reduced the amount of salt we eat at home, mostly to avoid feeding Siiri too much salt. But the tiny amount we have reached apparently isn't enough for a growing fetus. Suddenly I add more salt to everything I eat. The last time me and Erkki ate sushi, I kept soaking the maki in soy sayce and commented that it must be diluted with water quite a bit, but Erkki said it's all in my head and the soy sauce feels very salty to him.

Yeah I eat sushi. Anyone who has a problem with a pregnant woman eating raw fish can just go and find out the odds of listeria. Some say that it's always best to choose the best for your baby and to avoid all risks but I think it's never good to blindly follow some paranoid rules that have been created "just in case". When we talk about risk and odds, consider that all pedestrian roads are covered with a thick crust of ice - slippery and uneven, sometimes tilted just for extra challenge. I'm not gonna stay indoors until spring to avoid the slippery roads where I could very easily fall and break a bone or two. The odds of me being one of the dozens of people EVERY DAY who visit hospital emergency room because of falling on the icy street are much greater than say, me being one of roughly 10 people in a YEAR who get listeria in Estonia. It's all about risk assessment.

I also still go to sauna, because Sunday sauna night has been such an important part of our weekly family ritual for a while now. There have been some changes though. In stead of 80-degree (Celsius) sauna, which is already quite low, we now go to 60-degree sauna. Any less than that and we risk catching a cold in there. I can't even wet my hair before I go in, the water won't have time to warm up and that's not comfortable at all. Also, I switched my cider to non-alcoholic. That is, after I found out I'm pregnant. No worries, I was very careful with alcohol already when I suspected I might be pregnant, including on new year's eve. I drank more water than alcoholic beverages. In some countries it's still recommended that women drink an occasional glass of red wine or a bottle of beer which is full of B-vitamins and I don't know of any studies showing that small amounts of alcohol really do any harm. I think it's okay to taste something with alcohol in it, but even a glass of wine seems quite a lot and it's best avoided during pregnancy.

There is one thing I maybe shouldn't have done - I stopped exercising when I thought I might be pregnant, which was an entire month before I actually was pregnant. I just felt really uncomfortable with the idea of heavy jumping and energetic kicking in all directions until I'm sweating and panting and then at the end of the song letting myself fall to the floor to catch my breath. That can't be good for a pregnancy. I think that's just tempting fate. I know exercise in moderation is okay, but me and moderation don't really get along that well, especially when pumped full of endorphins from the cool moves, great music and the best exercise coach.

I do miss exercising. I'm just starting to realize how much I need to exercise. I have gained weight, I spend much more time moping - for a while I thought I might be on my way toward depression, I avoid walking to work and back. The slippery ice is a good excuse for that, though, so it's easy to hide that I've simply gotten so very lazy. Some of the recent changes must be from pregnancy, but I remember pregnancy making me more positive rather than negative. Maybe it will get better over time. I'm already getting my appetite back and I feel much healthier than last week.

By now the title of this post must seem very odd. No I didn't mean that pregnant women are like broken horses if that's what you imagined! We have a borrowed rocking horse at home, which Siiri sometimes plays with. Yesterday she took hold of the handles and started rocking it gleefully. She didn't notice that every time she rocked it, the horse moved a bit further until one end got stuck under the radiator. The horse stopped rocking. Siiri tried another couple of times, then stated casually, "broken.". I was on the phone but I told her from further away, "Siiri, it's just stuck, it's not broken.". Siiri already walked away and laconically replied, "is.". That's almost like dialogue!

Siiri knows so many words already. I showed her pictures from her picture dictionary and I picked the kind of words she has never said. I'll translate the words: "Siiri, do you know what this is?" (elephant) - "E", "How about this?" (Owl) - "ow", "How about this one?" (butterfly) - "utty". Yeah sure, she was unable to say the full word, but it was obvious nearly every time that she knew what the word really was.

She also learned how to jump. It was the cutest thing ever to see her train for the first time. She squats really low, almost to the floor, then pushes herself up as high as possible and ends up on tiptoes, barely keeping her balance. Then she walks a couple of steps in a random direction swinging her arms, almost like athletes do when they're hyping themselves up before a big challenge, "I can do it, I can do it..." and then goes for another try. I don't know what motivated her but the first time I saw it she spent a whole lot of time trying. Eventually her legs were so tired she kept falling into a sitting position when she squatted. Now she's been practicing a bit more and she can jump an entire inch, sometimes even more. She's very excited about it and I'm very happy for her.