Brie Fit

Hi!

I can’t really explain my absence other than that I needed to step away from the internet for awhile after Charlie was born.  It was just all very overwhelming and I needed to focus on him, and me, and our family.  Hopefully you understand.

But now, he’s 11 weeks old, and I have something of a groove back, so I figured I might try again.  So here are some quick updates.

On Charlie:

He is fabulous.  Healthy, growing, and a fairly “easy” baby (though not without certain difficulties, such as a general refusal to nap anywhere but physically on my person).  He gets more and more interactive every day, which is all kinds of awesome. Also?  Adorable.

On me:

Was diagnosed with postpartum depression in C’s first month.  It’s real, it sucks, but thankfully I caught it early and have gotten appropriate help and am feeling much better (although admittedly not 100% yet).  Physically, healed well from the whole labor and delivery business.

On fitness:

Still a whopping 25 pounds above my pre-pregnancy weight.  I’ve been back at CrossFit a few times a week and also doing Couch to 5K on our treadmill, but nothing is budging weight-wise.  This is probably because breastfeeding makes me ravenous and I’ve taken sampling every flavor of Target’s trail mix as a personal challenge. So take the “fit” part of this blog with a grain of salt, as I clearly am not exactly a shining example anymore.

On work:

Going back after the first of the year.  I’m nervous but also a little excited.

On breastfeeding:

Got lucky and it’s been super easy for us.  Charlie is probably close to 13 pounds now, so we’ve got a good thing going.

On cloth diapering:

Love it.  Easier than expected.  Adorable.

On holidays:

Charlie had two Halloween costumes:

And appropriate Thanksgiving garb, too:

On motherhood in general:

Man, I love this kid a lot.  He is pretty fantastic.  I will say that I felt horrible in the beginning that the immediate mama bear overwhelming love didn’t really hit me right away—it was definitely something that took some time to grow.  But he gets more fun and adorable and sweet every day and I am so, so, so lucky and thankful to have him.  When I think back to where I was this time last year…man. 

Thank you for the comments and e-mails saying you’ve missed me.  I appreciate that you’ve been thinking about us and I’m sorry I disappeared.  Again, no promises going forward, but..hi, again.

I started the 100 squats challenge a day on Tuesday.

And I’ve kept up with it for three days!

My legs were a little sore the first day, and I felt a little stiff, but all in all, I feel good that I’m doing SOMETHING.  I generally split them into sets of 25 with a short break in between.  It’s just a few minutes out of each day, which is about all I can commit to right now.

How are YOU doing?

Sorry for disappearing for awhile.  It’s been really, really hectic here—but in a good way!  I just got back from Chicago for my baby shower, and the weekend before we had friends in town, and in between, well…there was just a lot to do.

So, yeah.  The wheels are falling off the proverbial bus, my friends.

I vented awhile back about how I just wanted to quit exercising.  But I started going to night CrossFit classes, which seemed like a workable solution for a few weeks.

Except now, it’s not really as workable anymore, because it’s still 100+ degrees every night for the evening classes, and I just don’t know if I have the fight in me to keep pushing through that.  My hips, tailbone, and sciatic nerve pain is a main culprit—after sitting on my butt all day at work, they are just fried, and it hurts to move.

I’ve had a pretty easy pregnancy, all things considered, but this shit’s getting real, folks.  I am uncomfortable and I really just want to rest, but I also don’t want to feel like a quitter.  I don’t know.  I’m going to try again this week and see how it goes.

Had a doctor’s appointment this week, though–I’m on an every two week schedule now!  Highlight reel:

• Baby’s heartbeat was 138; attempted to elude Doppler but failed.  Ha!
• Baby is head down but still up pretty high.  I liked the doctor I saw this week–she actually showed me how to find the head myself ("it’s like a baseball in there") which was cool.
• Blood pressure was spot on at 120/73.
• Weight gain is higher than "normal."  I say this because I am tired of hearing from people who are all, "I gained the very minimal prescribed amount of weight and no more!" that make me feel like a failure.  I eat healthy, I exercise as much as I can, and my body is still gaining like crazy.  I am just riding the wave at this point–there’s not much I can do except try to keep up my healthy habits and hope for the best after delivery, since everything else this pregnancy has been the picture of health.  I don’t look particularly swollen, but my wedding rings got the heave-ho last week so I know I’m hanging on to some water weight.  My doctor is not particularly concerned given that everything else is perfect and I’m still active and not downing junk for every meal, so I’m trying not to feel like too much of a failure.
• Fundal height was perfectly on track at 32 weeks.  At my 30 week appointment, I measured a week ahead, but now I’m back to measuring on time.

This week, in fun news, I had my baby shower!  I only managed to snap a few pictures, but baby is very, very spoiled.

Pre-shower, almost 33w bump:

Decorations!  (Slash gifts.)

There were baby rubber ducks that were supposed to float around with the mama duck in there, but apparently they started sinking and had to be removed.  Whoops.

I found this one a little creepy, but…fruit salad baby! 

The haul! 

(For those of you who were wondering—I returned the large items to Babies R Us and re-bought them here in KC.  The rest I checked in two large suitcases, thanks to Southwest, except…one didn’t make it home.  Yet.  Please cross your fingers.)

Let me tell you—looking through the candids of me opening gifts…oy.  Not at all flattering.  Hello, double chin. 

Can we even discuss the wee baby shoes my cousin made?

Hand soap favors.  My family is not into throwaway trinkets, thankfully.

Anyway, it was a lovely time, and now I’m in nesting mode.  The nursery should be for real done in the near future.

Seven weeks to go.  OMG.

So tonight I got home from work and it was 106 degrees.  And I was tired.  And we have friends coming down from Chicago for the weekend tonight (yay!) and food needed to be made and the house needed to be cleaned.

So I was like, “whatever, I’ll just walk on the treadmill a bit for exercise.”

And then I got dressed in my workout clothes and was like, “well, I might as well go to CrossFit.”

One of the perks of night classes (also a drawback, potentially) is that you can usually find out what the WOD is in advance.  I’d seen the one on tap for tonight, and it looked like something a) I could physically do; and b) I liked. 

So I went.

We started tonight with 5-3-3-3-1-1-1 sets of clean and jerks.  The point is to find your 1 rep max here.  I can’t really clean very efficiently because of the giant belly—you want to keep the bar as close to your body as possible, and I sort of have to go out and around it these days.

I maxed out at 77 pounds.  Not great, but I know I can do more non-pregnant.  I attempted 82 pounds, but no dice.

It was pretty tough, mostly because of the heat.  I took it pretty easy, and subbed step-ups for the box jumps. 

My CrossFit pregnancy friend from this post (and the last seven months!) had her baby last week, and she came to visit tonight with the baby.  She’s so wee!  Granted, she was pretty small at birth (right around 6 pounds), but…holy crap.  I’m going to have one of those of my very own (with slightly different parts, but whatever) in less than two months.  What?

Anyway, off to wait for our friends to show up!  I can’t wait to see them!

When you are 31 weeks pregnant…

…you can still lift heavy weights like a badass…(102 1RM push jerk!)

…but no matter how many Kegels you do, you will still pee yourself a little bit trying to do double unders.

Sigh.

Another 100 degree day here, but I’ll put one more tick in the “successful workout” column.

We started today with finding our one rep max on hang squat cleans.  We did sets of 3-3-3-1-1-1.  I maxed out at 72#, which was a little disappointing.  I know I can lift more than that, but the clean motion just doesn’t really work with a giant belly in the way.  After 72#, I was just too nervous about clocking the baby with a barbell, so I stopped.

I staked out a spot in front of a giant fan for today’s WOD.

Deceptively simple sounding, but it’ll kill your arms good!

I did knee push-ups, arm/leg extensions instead of sit-ups, regular air squats, and banded pull-ups.  No speed records here, but these days, I’m happy just to finish!

(Yes, there is someone who finished in 7:54.  Um, crazy.)

I felt good and paced myself well during the workout—I could feel my triceps really burning by the end!  I broke the sets of 100 into 5 sets of 20, and allowed myself a little break after each set.  It really helped.

I’m off for some ice cream and to put my feet up.  Have a good one!

That is all.

(Arm/leg extensions instead of sit-ups, 26# KB swings, banded pull-ups, very slight decline push-ups instead of HSPU.  70 effing burpees.  Suck it, cheesy prenatal workouts!)

So, you all know that for a long, long time, I did all my workouts after work.  I swore up and down that I’d never get up before I absolutely had to.

Then, I joined CrossFit, and started going to 5:30 am classes because they fit best with my schedule.  I grew to really enjoy the early morning classes and crowd, and getting my workout over.

But, again, things are changing, and I need to adapt.  I just haven’t been able to keep up with my 5 am alarm anymore.  Third trimester is kicking my butt, and I’m more tired than usual.  It just isn’t happening on any sort of regular basis.  And instead of continuing to ignore that 5 am alarm, and then feeling bad all day and writing it off, I’m shifting my schedule. 

Being real for a minute: I feel like I am desperately grasping at straws here when it comes to workouts.  I’m 30 weeks pregnant (and change, and measuring ahead), it’s hot, I work full-time, my back hurts, and I usually can’t feel my left buttcheek.  It seems like in all the pregnancy/fitness blogs I read, the blogger happily bounces to the gym (or prenatal yoga, or on a scenic brisk walk) until the kid falls out on the treadmill one day.  That’s…not happening for me.  I’m going to go as long as I can, but it’s hard as shit, and sometimes it sucks, so just so you know, guys.  

(Besides, I’m too cheap to pay for a Bradley Method class or whatever, so my only hope is to continue to subject myself to strange forms of physical torture so that maybe I can squat this baby out.)

So, tonight I went to a 7:30 pm CrossFit class.  The heat’s let up a bit, so I figured it wouldn’t be awful.

It wasn’t!  I mean, the WOD was actually really awful.  But it felt good to move, and stretch.

Yeah.  50 clean and jerks, 5 burpees on every minute.  Sounds deceptively easy.  Is actually REALLY HARD.  I was dripping sweat.

I finished in 8:07 and did it with 52 pounds. 

All in all, night classes might not be so bad.

I’m happy to say that I got TWO workouts in this weekend.  Every one is a major victory these days!

Saturday morning, I made it to CrossFit early enough to beat the 107 degree temps we’d see that afternoon. 

It looks confusing, but it was two rounds of doing as many reps as possible of each of those exercise for 45 seconds, as a team of three.  We rested for five minutes between the two rounds.

I feel a little bad doing partner and team WODs lately because I have to do so many modifications, and I can’t really pull my weight, so to speak, anymore.  Luckily, it’s all in my head because everyone is so nice! 

The mods I did for this workout were:

• Lunges instead of parallette pass-throughs
• Burpee step-ups instead of burpee box jumps
• Arm/leg extensions instead of weighted sit-ups

My team and I thankfully avoided a running penalty by doing better our second round than our first!

(I was on team K, J, B, and baby—I guess we had an unfair advantage since we had a fourth team member!)

We spent the rest of Saturday running errands and working on the laundry room painting project that will. not. end.  I bought a replacement knob for the baby’s dresser, we went to Good Ju Ju and did a little antique hunting, and then we  visited The Local Pig for meat shopping.  Tim was very impressed with some meats he’d had from there at a party, so we stocked up!

Everything they stock is antibiotic and hormone-free and most of it is local.  We wound up with burgers, beef tenderloin, rosemary and roasted garlic sausages, and thyme and porcini mushroom sausages.  We grilled the burgers for dinner last night and they were fantastic—can’t wait to try the rest!

Then, this morning, I walked for half an hour on the treadmill despite not really wanting to.

I walked 1.75 miles in half an hour, watching an old episode of 16 and Pregnant on my Kindle Fire.

(I’m not going to lie—during labor, Farrah said, “I’m so glad I kept working out while I was pregnant!” and it was, in fact, motivational to me.  I’m so ashamed.)

I think part of the reason I’m not enjoying walking is because it’s not physically comfortable for me.  After half an hour, I got very crampy in both the ute and the feet and had what I think are probably a few Braxton-Hicks contractions.  With CrossFit, my position is always changing, so if something’s uncomfortable, I can shift out of it quickly…but there’s really no option to find a more comfortable walking position.  I wanted to keep going for another 15 minutes, but it just didn’t feel very good so I stopped.

Something is better than nothing, right?  It’s so humbling to be in a position where WALKING is a challenge.

What were your weekend workouts like?

This was the week where maaaybe I started to feel uncomfortably pregnant.

I think the baby had another growth spurt this week.  I woke up on the Fourth of July, looked in the mirror, and was like, "um, hello."  Plus, I’ve been starving and tired.  I am glad he’s growing, but a little nervous at facing the scale at the OB’s office on Monday. 

Randoms

• I thought the baby was breech a few weeks ago, but it seems like he’s done some flipping.  I feel lots of kicking going on on my right side and up higher than before, and a butt-like bulge a little higher than the kicks.  Also, there’s a lot more pressure on my bladder than I ever felt before.  So, if I had to guess, I’d say he’s head down, punching and kicking my right innards.  I’m going to see if the OB can tell where he is at my next appointment.  I have the self awareness of a hippopotamus, though, so don’t be surprised if I’m completely wrong.
• I’m nesting.  Suddenly, the laundry room wallpaper/painting project had to GET DONE RIGHT NOW OMG WE’VE BEEN WORKING ON IT SINCE DECEMBER.  And I have organized the baby’s sock drawer about five times.  If a registry gift arrives, I set it up immediately, and then move it around the house twelve times until I find the perfect spot for it.  And when the hell are my glider and ottoman and curtains and crib skirt going to be ready OMFG? 

• My movement is getting more and more restricted.  It’s hard to get up off the couch and out of bed.  "Hoist" is being used as a verb more and more frequently.
• Middle of the night bathroom trips are back.  There were a ton at the end of first trimester, and then they waned for awhile in second trimester, and now they’re probably here to stay until the bitter end.
• We booked a newborn photographer and tentatively scheduled a date for those pictures.  (Whoa!)
• It is really damn hard to exercise these days, between still working full time, being exhausted and huge, and the 100+ degree temperatures here.  I’d like to get at least 3 workouts a week in, and even that seems ambitious to me, but I don’t want to give up completely just yet.
• Food-related: I want banana coconut cream pie.  I still have mild aversions to Greek yogurt and scrambled eggs.
• I’d like a beer, please and thank you.  Sigh.

Week 30 ahead!  Bananas!