Monday, September 6, 2010

More weirdness

I realized that while I updated my main blog more recently, I forgot to update here... Oh well, most of you read it already. I've had three (including last night) nights of really good sleep, thank the Lord, and it's definitely affected the contractions. They've calmed back down to mainly BH-like ctx and aren't as intense or regular. Whew! It was about time for a break.

BUT. In the midst of a good night of sleep on Friday night-- whoah! Weirdness again. I was woken up at around 3:30 in the morning by some violent movement from Jamie. I don't use that word lightly, folks. It felt like he was coming out both sides of my "waist" at the same time! Scared the crap out of me! He did maybe three or four major body movements and then started hiccuping! And sure enough, those little hiccups were coming from right underneath my left arm-- he'd turned breech somehow while I was sleeping.

For some reason, probably because he's on the large-ish side of the spectrum, he seems to get very upset and agitated when he's mal-positioned and has trouble getting himself turned back around where he wants to be.

After some agitated movement on my own part, I finally boosted myself into knee chest and waited. And then, gradually, slowly, I felt that hicupping, bumping head move down, down down my left side, thumpity, bumpity, till it was knocking into my left hip bone and then settled back down to it's normal trampoline action right on my cervix. Or rather, at that point, up into my cervix. Wow. Surreal. Again. Thank God for knee-chest position :)

Of course, by this time, I was pretty pumped and it took me about an hour of pacing the floor to get settled back to sleep, but the rest of the night was quite restful :)

Friday, September 3, 2010

I don't think this can go on much longer...

I hope I'm right when I say that too many more days like yesterday and nights like last night and this baby will just fall out while I'm walking around the living room. Oh. My. Word. Ctx started sometime the middle of the night Wed night and continued all. day. long yesterday. They were intense enough at times for me to have to squat or sway through them and my pubic bone feels like it's going to simply split in half from the pressure!

The midwife came last night for our Home Visit. That was fun :) Judah and Sofi got a kick out of hearing the heartbeat and watching the blood pressure gauge and all that. We discussed various scenarios and got J good and freaked out about possibly having to catch this baby himself :) See, this whole thing is eerily similar to my mom's third pregnancy (also a boy), which included SIX WEEKS of labor like I've been having, culminating in her water breaking suddenly, out of the blue, with no warning! and my brother rushing out five minutes later into my grandfathers hands! This possibility has J freaked out, as I mentioned.

Sooo, I'll be staying close to home and gathering the last few supplies we need this holiday weekend. Judah was born on Memorial Day weekend and Sofi was also born on a Saturday, so maybe Jamie will take a tip from his accommodating older siblings and make an appearance before J goes back to work on Tuesday!

But I'm not counting on it.

Thursday, September 2, 2010

Some changes

So the labor pattern for the last two days has changed a bit. The evening ctx are milder, Jamie is much more settled in the evenings and the heartburn is back with a vengeance. Last night I couldn't get settled to sleep till 2 am!

On the flip side, the ctx seem to continue all night and increase in intensity into the early morning. I am woken frequently by ctx (and a desperate need for the bathroom!) and by morning by back/legs/abs are achey and crampy. Feels a lot like a bad menstrual period. Yesterday that feeling, along with a few sporadic ctx faded by...say, 10:00-ish. Today it's almost 12 and the ctx are still rolling right along and I feel all loose and wobbly and my hips ache. I've been mostly sitting around, as we do school work, but when I do get up and move around a bit, the ctx increase significantly.

Here's where the rubber meets the road with my determination to just let things go and let my body "do it's thing". My midwife instincts are hollering at me to go out for a walk, do some stairs, take some meds (there's a whole LIST running through my head), get this thing GOING already. But deep down I really know it's not the best and wouldn't work anyway. All I'd do is wear myself out and end up exhausted and weepy by dinner time. And the ctx would have stopped :P They always stop when I get totally worn out. I know this because I just described to you the last month of both of my previous term pregnancies.

As I psych myself up for this next loooong three weeks, I try to remind myself how labor went with my miscarriage. Since I was so NOT anxious to actually go into labor (despite it's inevitability), I wasn't doing all that stuff. We had two weeks of this off again-on again labor and then in the middle of one night, bam! we kicked into high gear and after about two hours of INTENSE "real" labor... well, you know.... it was done.

That's how I'd like things to go this time. Routine, routine, routine. Deal with the ctx, but don't pay too much attention. And then one night, bam! The "real" thing. And a few hours later... Jamie :)