Week 9, Day 6. The day after the 30-refresh Tuesday. Brooklyn. Baby is still the size of a raspberry.
I bought the cottage cheese. That's the news.
Yesterday I wrote eleven hundred words about refreshing a choline tracker thirty times. Today I walked to the bodega on the corner, picked up a 16oz tub of Friendship Whipped 4%, paid $4.79, walked home, and did not refresh anything for ninety minutes.
Quiet day. On purpose.
9:14 AM, alarm went off normally
Yesterday I was at my desk by 7. Today I slept until 9:14. The alarm went off. I let it go for two cycles. I got up. I drank water before doing anything else.
Eleven hours of laptop yesterday earned me a slow morning today. I took it.
Jake is still asleep as I'm writing this. He had pasta and patience all evening yesterday. He gets to sleep until ten if he wants.
Half-caf, and a no to the second cup
One 8oz half-caf in the white ceramic mug. Maybe 65 mg of caffeine. ACOG says 200 mg is fine in pregnancy and I am nowhere near it.
The second cup is sitting there in my brain. I'm letting it sit there.
Pre-pregnancy I was a two-cup person. The second cup is the one I miss. Not the first.
I'm not making it today. Not because of math. Because I don't actually want to. That's a different feeling than "I'm not allowed."
Cottage cheese, in three bites
Two big spoonfuls on toast. A little salt. A few raspberries on top. Sixty milligrams of choline by lunchtime, more or less. The taste is nothing. That's its whole virtue right now.
For the first three bites I made myself sit at the kitchen counter, look out the window, not type. Bird on the fire escape. Garbage truck on the street. The hum of the building. None of this required refreshing.
By bite four I started narrating the breakfast in my head as if I were going to write about it. So clearly I'm not as cured as I sound. But the difference between yesterday and today is I'm narrating one breakfast. Not building a spreadsheet about a hundred.
I went outside
Twenty-minute walk. Down to the park, back through Ditmas. Brooklyn in late April is the part of New York I never get bored of — the magnolia trees on 7th Street are doing the thing where the petals carpet the sidewalk, and somehow my stupid hCG-flooded brain still knows how to be happy about it.
Yesterday I wrote that the light had gone golden and I was going to skip the walk. Today I took it. Same light. Different decision.
I passed our usual sushi place on the way back. Last week I literally stood outside it for five minutes pretending to "just look at the menu." Today I walked past, registered the smell of soy sauce, kept moving. Cooked rolls scratch enough of the itch. The grief about raw fish is, on a calm day, just grief about a thing I can have again in seven months.
What I'm choosing not to refresh
Six things I haven't checked today and I'm proud of all of them:
- The choline tracker
- The OB portal (no test results pending)
- r/BabyBumps "choline first trimester"
- Sushi-grade fish freezing rules (I read them yesterday, they have not changed)
- The list of things you can and cannot eat in pregnancy according to seventeen different countries
- Whether anyone replied to my Reddit comment from this morning
One of these is going to break before bed. Statistically. Probably the Reddit one. I'm okay with that.
The point isn't never refresh. The point is don't make refreshing my entire day.
What yesterday taught me, doing today
Yesterday's tracker post was the loudest version of me. Today is a quieter version of the same person. Same baby. Same hormones. Same bookmarks bar with fourteen Reddit threads I am not opening.
The thing the calm version knows that yesterday's spiral version forgot: the choline target is a daily-average, not a per-meal scoreboard.
Three lower days followed by one higher day still hit the weekly average. Cottage cheese tomorrow. Salmon Friday. An extra spoonful of peanut butter Saturday. The math works. I do not have to refresh the math.
Jake, still asleep
It's 11:08 AM as I close this. Jake just shuffled into the kitchen, kissed the top of my head, opened the cottage cheese, said "is this what we're doing now?" with the gentlest amusement I've ever heard from him. I said yes. He took two bites with a spoon, standing.
That's a marriage at week 9. He woke up to find me eating a tub of dairy I bought at 9:30 AM as if it were a public art project, and he just joined in.
The raspberry is the size of a raspberry. The raspberry is fine. So am I, today.