Mmmm--lox, anyone?

Okay, I am truly grateful to be pregnant, and to be able to breastfeed. I do know that many many people would love to have those chances.

So please take this with that grain of salt.

If you include the time during which I have been 1) trying to get pregnant, 2) pregnant, 3) breastfeeding, and 4) breastfeeding and pregnant simultaneously, I have been avoiding various foods since mid-2001.

And, assuming I am lucky enough to breastfeed this new coming child for another couple years, I'll be avoiding ingesting anything that's unwise for my children to ingest for quite some time.

Throughout this time, I have given up:

• caffeine and thus real coffee--I know, you can have a cup or so a day, but I am just NOT good at having SOME coffee but not much... I am a coffee-binger. During my first pregnancy I refused to walk down the coffee aisle in the supermarket because the smell made me crave coffee, really really really crave coffee.
  
• virtually all alcohol--under five drinks in the past four years, all of them while not pregnant, though I was breastfeeding--not right at that moment, people, but in the general time frame
• any high-mercury fish--which as I am often unsure of the list means I eat fish pretty rarely
  
• virtually all tuna--as I can't ever remember which tuna is the safer one and I can't keep track of whether I took my prenatal vitamin in the past 24 hours, never mind how many OUNCES of tuna I ate in the past week.
  
• peanuts and peanut oil and peanut butter--as fetuses and breastfeeeding children who have a family history of any sort of allergies are thought to be at higher risk for peanut food allergies if they are exposed to peanut products in utero or vias breastmilk or anything else in the first three years of life)

And also, while I could eat the following while breastfeeding, I shouldn't while pregnant:

• soft cheeses... brie, goat cheese, blue cheese, feta cheese...
• smoked seafood
  

Sadly, as I didn't psychically know I'd get pregnant, I didn't spend the breastfeeding-but-not -pregnant months eating as many types of soft cheese as I could as often as I could.

I think at the hospital post-delivery I'm going to ask G to bring me a full deli-style plate of his bread-machine oatmeal bread and an assortment of soft cheeses and smoked salmon.

And the day I stop breastfeeding, sometime in 2007 or 2008--assuming that we don't miraculously conceive a third child in my forties--I'm going to have a cosmopolitan with a peanut buuter sandwich. And I'll chase it down with another cosmopolitan.

Then for a week I'm going to have a tuna sandwich every single day. Maybe two a day.

Woohoo, I'm clearly a force to be reckoned with, huh? Just wild, I am.