Last night, Chris and I were fully prepared to pack up and go to the hospital if necessary. Today, it’s just the regular afternoon obstetrician’s appointment.
This is what comes of timing contractions.
I was having intermittent contractions last night as Chris and I were playing euchre with his mom and Aunt Kathy. They were just little bitty contractions, but someone suggested timing them. (Now if someone suggests that you jump off the Brooklyn Bridge, do you go ahead and do it? Of course not!)
They started off 12 minutes apart, then progressed to seven and later to five. Still, they were teensy-weensy, mildly crampy contractions, so I was certain they’d stop.
By the time we arrived home, they were coming four minutes apart, and some of them were fairly strong. I finished folding and putting away the baby’s clean clothes and added a few new baby items to the labor bag, and Chris put out the trash, changed the cat box and shaved … just in case I woke up at 3 a.m. with the baby halfway out. Still skeptical that it was the real thing, I lay down with a bottle of water and timed my contractions until 1:30 or so. They weren’t stopping, so I fell asleep, figuring I might not get any if I stayed up later.
But while the contractions increased my frequency of nighttime toilet visits — and decreased my already-impaired ability to sleep comfortably — they stopped, alas, sometime between 4 a.m. and quarter to 7.
Now I’ve gone from hoping that, in 36 hours, I could be leaving the hospital with our baby girl in tow to hoping that, in 5 hours, Dr. Goncalves will tell me I have dilated even just the littlest bit.
T minus 4 days.
And here, marking Week 39, are what I hope will be the very last belly pics:
