I fed my kids and myself waffles for dinner tonight.  Not homemade waffles, which are superior to anything else in every way except prep time/effort.  We ate Eggo waffles for dinner, with syrup on top.  Not pure maple syrup, but a simple sugar syrup flavored with immitation maple flavoring that I made myself a while back. I remember when I was little I always wanted to fill each individual waffle hole with syrup before eating and hardly ever got to do it before Mom or Dad stopped me, protesting the amount of sugar and the number of diners left to share the syrup with.  “Save some fore Virginia!”  Did I do that tonight?  No, but I remembered it while I ate and it made me smile to think that I could do it if I wanted to.

This unhealthy fare was a celebration, or perhaps an adamant denial, in honor of my bloodwork results from my prenatal doctor appointment last week that I found online today when I logged in to my insurance web page for the first time.  My blood sugar was a point over normal on my gestational diabetes glucose one-hour screening test.  Very likely when my OB gets back from vacation tomorrow she’ll be calling me to let me know I have to go in to take the 3-hour version of the glucose intolerance test, and I consider it even more likely that I’ll test positive for gestational diabetes.  And that means no waffles with syrup for a few months unless I’m willing to starve one morning in favor of a few bites of one of my favorite foods.

So, before the diagnosis is official, and before that placenta gets big enough to cause serious blood sugar spiking, I had myself a good stack of waffles.  I miss breakfast food when I’m on a diabetes diet.  For breakfast on that diet, I can have a total meal of about one Eggo with a dollop of Cool Whip (no syrup) if I want to go the waffle route.  Or half a cup of breakfast cereal with half a cup of milk.  I can have all the eggs and bacon and sausage I want, but through some sad twist of irony eggs and bacon and sausage all make me nauseous to one degree or another during most of my pregnancy.  Strawberries and cantaloupe are better choices with larger volumes allowed, but I sure miss those breakfast grains.

I get that an official diagnosis won’t change whether I actually have it now or not.  It’s still not good for me, diabetes or not, to have that much sugar.  And posting this confession will hardly do anything for my arguments against the nearly intolerable fasting glucose intolerance test involving the stupidity of having a possibly diabetic person drink a huge amount of glucose and shocking her sugar-processing system.  But my waffle eating ritual calmed my misgivings about whether I can stand going through this process again.  I really don’t want any more waffles.  I think I can probably actually survive the next six months on a small brownie square interspersed here and there among my healthier alternatives.  I am steeled for the news, prepared as much as I can be.

P.S. I also ate an artichoke with my waffles.  I feel pretty good about that.

Their house is on a little lake or pond with fish and ducks and John Sherwood took Degen over to the shore several times and let him watch him feed the fish and look at the ducks.  Degen loved that and may still be talking about it tomorrow.  They grilled shish kabobs and corn on the cob for dinner and then we had watermelon and pie for dessert.  Everything was super yummy.  Someday we need to get a house with a porch and a big grill like that to entertain friends.  It was an inspirationally entertaining evening with our new friends.

After dinner, they pulled out their PS2 and we all played Guitar Hero.  It was my first time playing and I lost both times I tried, but I think I got better the second time and I'd like to play again.  Guitar Hero is more fun than I expected!  Colin plays the demo every time we go to Walmart (we don't have a game system at home, so he has to get in some gaming whenever he has a chance), so he was somewhat familiar with the game.  I wish it had more songs I know and that the characters were portrayed in a more appropriate way, but I guess that's how rock concerts are.  I've never actually been to one, unless you count Reba Mcintire at Stadium of Fire at BYU a few years ago, but that's country music and I didn't love that, either.

The Dewalls both work in the medical field and are now on the lookout for a good endocrinologist for Colin's weird diabetes.  The Sherwoods own a couple of pet stores and now we know who to go to if we ever decide to get a pet.  Maybe we should start out with a fish…

In the international section of the grocery store, usually near the soy sauce or rice or rice noodles, you'll find little gold boxes of curry mix. You brown up some meat or poultry or seafood or tofu (protein something or other) with onions, add whatever veggies are in your refrigerator or freezer, simmer it for 10 minutes while you put the rice on to cook, take it off the heat and add in the crumbled up curry mix and stir it up until it's all integrated. Then you simmer it another five minutes and you're ready to eat!

Tonight I added frozen squash as the veggies and used some beef I've been meaning to use up (oddly, even though I believe that curry is an east Indian food, the package recommends using beef). Colin's family likes to add what I think of as Hawaiian Haystack toppings; things like shredded coconut, raisins, diced tomatoes, chopped green onions, diced hard-boiled egg, and crumbled bacon. Tonight we used raisins, tomatoes, green onions, and hard boiled egg because it was what was on hand, but you can use nothing on top and it's still great. In fact, if you don't add veggies to the curry it's still great (but much less healthy).

So, you top a hill of cooked rice with the curry, then top that with the toppings, say a blessing on the food, and go to!

Each chapter has a few practical writing assignments at the end for you to do to help you make plans and deal with your issues. An interesting thing about this book is that, unlike any other "diet books" I've read, they work on the premise that you need to figure out why you don't take care of your body (why you put the weight on) in the first place in order to make long-lasting changes. They discuss reasons like abuse, stress, and rebellion. There's an entire chapter on forgiveness and how you have to be forgiving in order to be healthy.

Another point they make in this book and throughout Flylady's writings is that many of us are so perfectionistic that we decide if we can't do it perfectly, then we won't do it at all. We procrastinate until it's too late, then say "why bother?" That's why they advocate babysteps–because it's too easy to make a huge goal, then make one mistake and give up on everything altogether. For people like me who have this attitude, it's better to focus on improving just a little bit at a time, being just a bit better today than I was yesterday, than to focus on how much ground I still have to cover. That way, if I make a mistake today, instead of giving up tomorrow I'll keep working at it. I haven't actually done the exercises in the book yet, and I'm not resolved yet to make any changes, but it's rolling around in my head and I think I'm already making some better choices about what I eat since I read it. Thanks for sending me a happy education, Sonja!