Unhooked...and unhappy

So I decided to cut back on my caffeine intake and switch over to decaf coffee. It's not like I drink a ton of the stuff, just two nice big mugs of the stuff in the morning and that's generally it. But I certainly do need my morning coffee, and John and the kids joke about Mommy needing her "go juice" when I'm grumpy in the morning. On a particularly bad morning, I might swing through the Starbucks drive-through and get me an extra boost of coffee. You gotta do what you gotta do.

But, well, we've decided to perhaps try to start for baby #3 (WOO HOO!), and I read recently that there is a new study out that says women who drink 200 milligrams of caffeine a day, the equivalent of 2 nice big mugs (ahem), have a 25% chance of miscarriage. And I'm one of those totally paranoid women when I'm pregnant. I spend the first trimester living very much in fear of something happening, even though I've now had two babies and no miscarriages. Even just writing this is making me tense, as if it's possible to jinx something that doesn't even exist yet.

In any case, it seems prudent to pull back on the whole coffee addiction thing, and even more prudent to do it now and let my body adjust, instead of waiting for the total exhaustion of early pregnancy to happen at exactly the same time.

So when we were at Wal-Mart this weekend (do we know how to party or what??), we got a little coffeepot and some decaf coffee for me, since John has no plans on giving up his caffeinated stuff in the mornings. And he very gallantly made my first pot of coffee this morning and presented me with a cup of the stuff with a flourish. And sure, yeah, it tasted basically the same and life went on as normal. But then when I was driving Sabrina to preschool, I realized that I felt as if I was walking chest-deep through water, all sluggish and slow and altered. This was no fun at all.

The feeling generally persisted all day, despite a couple of big tall glasses of decaf iced tea for lunch, which I was hoping might perk me up a bit. When I put the kids down for their afternoon nap, I crashed as well. This helped until the headache hit this afternoon.

So yeah, not loving this detox biz. I liked my caffeine, thank you very much. And I miss it quite a bit. But maybe tomorrow will be better. And maybe by the time the next baby is on board, I won't miss a beat when I get handed my morning cup of decaf. We'll just have to see.