Nutritional wanderings

Obviously, pregnancy is a time when one pays attention to nutrition. I certainly did with Biscuit--watching quantity, quality, and timing. This time around, I probably would have been more relaxed about it all were it not that I have this gastritis ruling over my digestion, and I've been eating so much rice I am actually sick of it (it's like a Parisian being sick of baguette, I think). I am just starting to venture back into protein. Green vegetables seem to still be problematic. Lucky for me, yesterday the gastroenterologist and the obstetrician agreed on a course of action for me, and I am due to start a triple-cocktail against H pylori, so relief may be coming.
Today, I delved into whether my love affair with sweet tea à la Caroline du Nord might be giving me more caffeine than I ever used to ingest. People will remember that my addiction started long before we moved South: when having lunch at Ali Baba, I regularly grossed people out by dumping a quarter of the sugar dispenser into my iced tea (hey, I also had to compensate for the slow kinetics of dissolution for sugar in an ice-cold beverage).
The sorry truth I just found out is that yes, I am probably subjecting myself and Buttercup to about 75 mg of caffeine a day, something like a Red Bull drink. Yikes. Now wonder I can feel this little one kicking already at 15 weeks! I need to get back on the wagon of brewing my own Luzianne decaf sweet and stop buying the cafeteria brew. But the wanderings did bring me to wikipedia's most excellent page on sweet tea, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sweet_tea. Don't you love wiki? This page links to an even better history of sweet tea, at http://whatscookingamerica.net/History/IcedTeaHistory.htm. Great stuff! First brought over by a Frenchie, mostly brewed green and not black until WWII, at first mostly served heavily spiked... And so now I know that a glass of Southern sweet tea probably contains 1/4 cup of sugar. It's actually sweeter than the way I made it at Ali Baba's!! Ha! When I brew it at home, I only put in 3/4 cups, a model of moderation.
Mike, who, after all, is from here, has gladly rediscovered the habit of asking for half-and-half in restaurants. Everyone here knows what half-and-half is, and it contains no dairy. Half-and-half is half-sweet and half-unsweet tea. So genteel.