The Lemon Juice Test

I had a very stuffed up nose a couple weeks ago. I chalked it up to a cedar allergy since Kurt and I had been working in the yard that weekend. I was clearing all the cedar crap that has fallen in the last uumm six years. I don’t normally have any sort of allergy problem but this was the fourth time this year I had a “cold” but wasn’t really sick. All I had was a serial sneezes and a stuffy nose. This last time the stuffy nose just never went away. I was a mouth breather for quite a while. I even tried using a Neti Pot, which I imagine feels similar to water boarding. I kept sneezing and my sinuses clogged right up again within minutes.

A few friends on FaceBook told me that the Neti Pot only works after multiple times and was encouraged to give it another go. Kurt told me the Neti Pot only works when secrets are shouted out like, “Osama is in the cave!” I tried the second time and it merely resulted in my sneezing salt water until I couldn’t breathe, again. Is there a way to convert FaceBook friends to an enemy list?

I later learned that I am pregnant, and pregnancy hormones can cause mucus membranes to swell. It’s likely that my pregnancy made me more sensitive to the allergens and just made the whole thing a more miserable experience.

I was pretty sure I was pregnant without even taking a test. I wasn’t even very late. I mean I’ve gone longer between cycles without being pregnant or even thinking that it was a possibility. Why was I so sure *this* time? Lemon Juice. There simply wasn’t enough citrus in the house. I didn’t have any food cravings quite so early with my pregnancy with Sophia, and nothing quite so intense. At first I squeezed some lime juice on snacks that I normally eat with added citrus and salt, but that wasn’t enough. I soon ran out of real limes and had to switch to bottled “Real Lemon Juice”. I didn’t dilute it, unless adding salt is considered diluting, I simply poured it into a glass and drank it.

I looked up food cravings and found that only about ten percent of preggos share my mouth-puckering craving, and another site suggested, “adding a little lemon juice to fish in order to satiate the craving”. Clearly they don’t understand the meaning of “craving”, but Costco certainly does. Only Costco knows that one 48-ounce bottle of lemon juice just might not be enough, so they sell them in sets. I finished the first bottle in about three days and opened the second one. I think I finished about a quarter of it before the craving turned to total revulsion. I may need to throw out that second bottle as just looking at it makes my stomach turn.

Kurt watched in disgust as I downed a few glasses of lemon juice, “That can’t be good for you, do you know how much acid is in that?”

“Yes,” pointing to my glass, “about this much”.

Everything creates a learning opportunity for a toddler from taking things apart in order to learn the inner workings to watching mom and dad. In this case, congested Sophia applied knowledge gained from Dad’s constant sinus infections. Our mimicking little monkey learned to blow her own nose today, granted she doesn’t blow quite hard enough.

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