Eating My Own Words

I was re-reading a post from October where I was bemoaning yoga as a "workout".  What I haven't admitted in the interim is that as I've gotten bigger, and my balance and breathing both took a nosedive from the beachball that is my belly, I really began to look forward to my weekly prenatal yoga classes. 

After four full days on bedrest, plus the previous week of "pseudo" bedrest, I was so excited to have permission from my doctor to attend the last session of my yoga class.  The instructor is fabulous, I'm actually really sorry that she doesn't teach regular classes.  Just coincidentally, almost everyone in the class is in their third trimester, so as the weeks went on, she spent more time on less challenging poses and more time on poses designed to stretch hips and back to prepare for birth and to relieve all the pressures that pregnancy has brought on.  In addition, simply the time for deep breathing and meditation has been great. She emphasized again today that if we can remember to take that skill into labor with us, it will make things infinitely easier. 

Spending days and days in bed has me losing any remaining vestiges of fitness that I had, but it's given me a lot of opportunity to focus on mental discipline.  Deep breathing, visualization and focus are all skills that any athlete needs, yet they so often get sidelined by the need to get our workouts in and move on with our daily lives.  I'm hoping that this lesson learned will stay with me as I move back into a more active lifestyle.

Bedrest has also given me the chance to throw a few extra prayers "northward" as I worry for a friend's preemie, another dear friend's husband who is having unexplained neurological issues, and a family member who is "boots on the ground" in Afghanistan right now.  I've been lucky to be inundated with emails, Facebook notes and even responses to my blog postings that keep me entertained, but so many of those emails also seem to contain "say a prayer for..." messages. 

Health-wise, the upside is that bedrest seems to be working.  We'll see what the doctor thinks tomorrow, but my monitoring is showing that it is back in the normal range as long as I'm in bed.  And Ms. McNugget remains crazy active.  I've had one or two random contracts, but otherwise, nothing to indicate that she's ready to vacate her current home any time soon.  It's not too late to guess a date for her birth.  FWIW, my own husband had picked today....guess not, sweetie!