Those of you who know me well, know that I get to the gym very early in the mornings. So this morning, as I was pulling out of my driveway at o-dark-thirty, and wondering how in the hell it could be quite so cold, I noticed the moon. I hope some of you also saw the moon either last night or this morning. It was one of the most beautiful full moons I’ve ever seen. So big and bright and just glistening there – it immediately lifted my spirits. If only I didn’t have to keep my eyes on the road, I wouldn’t have been able to stop looking at the moon.
My great mood lasted only until I got to the gym and started watching the news. First, the local news was depressing enough and then the anchors busted out with how today is branded the most depressing day of the year. I’m sure there’s some bullshit reasons why that’s the case, something about it being three weeks into a cold month and no holidays to lift our spirits, everyone’s fat from over-eating, everyone’s given up their New Year’s Resolutions by now (ah ha! yet another reason to not make any – then you have nothing to feel bad about today) and the credit card bills from the holidays should be arriving this week (I’m definitely going to be feeling bad when that one drops through the mail slot. Any chance I can hide it from my husband??)
So, I was starting to come off the high from the bright glistening full moon, and then a segment came on about caffeine and pregnancy and miscarriages. Unfortunately, we all know someone who has experienced the pain of a miscarriage. I feel like I always hear the comment that it’s only the people who get pregnant the first time they try, that we all hear about – but who is actually talking about the frequency of miscarriage?
The thing is, in my circle of friends, though I hear this same comment, I feel like everyone is pretty open about miscarriages, the emotions that come with it, and her experience with it. I hope this is the case for everyone, not just KT’s BFFs, because it’s something that is so common and beyond our control.
That being said, everyone is always struggling with balancing what they can and cannot do when pregnant and handling caffeine is always one of them. So Kaiser just came out with this study of 1,000 women in San Francisco and the miscarriage rate among this group during the first three months of pregnancy.
Here is the finding: http://madelynfernstrom.ivillage.com/health/2008/01/caffeine_and_miscarriages.html?par=today,wb
“Those women with the highest caffeine intake (more than 200mg per day, daily) had double the number of miscarriages as those women who did not consume caffeine at all. 25 women out of 100 miscarried in the high caffeine group, compared with 12 in the 0mg caffeine ingestion group.”
So, if you haven’t heard this news by now, you might be wondering what 200mg amounts to? Sadly, not much coffee, read on:
“What does 200mg of caffeine look like? it’s two small cups of coffee, four cups of tea, or five cans of soda. ”
I must admit, I didn’t realize that two cups of small coffee is equivalent to five cans of soda. That’s actually really nasty. I mean – who in the world drinks 5 cans of soda in one day? But me, I definitely enjoy more than two cups of “small” coffee in the morning.
What I also heard on the news but isn’t explained in the above link is this: Caffeine constricts the blood flow to the placenta – thus making it not a good thing to digest for pregnant women.
In the interest of full disclosure, personally, when I was pregnant with my darling daughter, I basically cut out all caffeine the day we first started trying to get pregnant and I stayed completely caffeine free until I was through my first trimester. I’ll never forget the day that I was reunited with some caffeinated tea on that 13th week of pregnancy, it felt so good. We were long lost buddies, me and caffeine. From that point on, I probably had a cup of caffeine a day or every other day, for the remainder of my pregnancy.
Imagine my surprise when no one warned me that discipline with caffeine would persist for as long as I was breastfeeding. Talk about a buzz kill.
And speaking of buzz kills, by the time I was done working out, I was totally over the joy of the moon. From now on, maybe I’ll stick with watching E! instead of any news.
So to end this entry on this most depressing day of the year, I offer you this link, a predictor of your child’s height at the age of 18 brought to you by our friends at BabyCenter.com. I question its accuracy because it’s predicting my daughter will be 5ft. 11 inches by the time she’s 18….and that seems kind of extreme:
http://parentcenter.babycenter.com/child-height-predictor?pe=eiU70g&scid=mbtw_post26m:20080114:0:0:0
someone in my sunday morning yoga class was commenting on how beautiful the moon was – I’m sad I missed it. Also, I could see how your darling daughter would be 5’11” – you and hubby are both tall! Let’s get her a basketball or volleyball scholarship stat.