Postcards from the Mothership

Forget I said anything. Nothing to see here today, folks. Contractions? What contractions? Sigh.

I’m truly at a loss as to how one can go from 12 hours of *real* contractions (this is baby #3, I know from contractions) every 2 to 6 minutes to nothing. I wouldn’t even mind, if I weren’t so bloody tired now — and can’t sleep a wink because of the damn restless legs.

Anyway, thanks for all your kind words and comments! Check back again in two weeks, cuz he’s got to come out eventually…

Just after 8:30 am. Contractions are sporadic and not too intense. The midwife suggested I go back to bed – as if!! If I couldn’t sleep overnight, there’s no way I’ll be able to sleep now, despite the long sleepless night.

I have no experience with false labour, and was in fact just yesterday saying to a friend (guess I should have touched wood) that I would far prefer the interminable waiting to the series of false starts and unproductive trips to L&D she recently had with her third baby. The midwife said this could go either way at this point. If baby is nice enough to be born during the day, my mom will be able to be there at the birth, but if not, she’ll have to take care of the boys. I’d really like her to be there, so here’s hoping things get moving soon!

It’s 7:30 am and I’m not sure what to think. The contractions almost completely died out after my last post while I was taking a shower, but are now back with mild intensity and regular frequency. Just put in a call to the midwife to see what she thinks. I guess I should wake up Beloved?

Sheesh! I can’t take the ambiguity!

It’s 4:30 in the morning and the house is silent. Everyone is asleep except for me and the dog, who has followed me downstairs with faithful if not bleary curiousity.

I didn’t sleep more than 45 minutes last night. I suppose this means I am biologically unable to bring a child into the world without giving up an entire night of sleep. Sleep deprivation, my old friend…

My contractions started some time around 8 pm last night, but were the mild and sporadic Braxton Hicks type for most of the evening. By the time I turned off my bedside lamp around 9:30 or 10:00, they had a mild intensity but rather startling regularity. I tracked them in six to eight minute intervals throughout the night, and they crowded as close as just two or three minutes apart for long stretches.

I contemplated calling the midwife for a while around 11 pm, but was reluctant to wake everybody up for nothing. Even Beloved is still blissfully unaware of my long, quiet and watchful night. Sometime around 3 am I dozed for a while, and the contractions seemed to switch places with the annoying twitches of restless leg syndrome. For the last hour, the contractions have been mild but noticable, and part of the reason I came downstairs was to see if they were really contractions or just some strange nighttime hallucination. After eating a banana in the freezing cold and dark living room, I noticed the computer and thought I’d see if anyone else is awake this early in the morning. In the time it has taken to type this, I’ve had three or four more mild contractions.

Hmmm, at a glance only Sheila guessed January 25 as Baby’s arrival date — think she might be our big winner?

Since this might be the last time I post for a while (cross your fingers for me!) — or not! — I’d be remiss if I didn’t poke you one last time to remind you to vote for me in the final round of the Canadian Blog Awards! Hey, if I can think if YOU at a time like this, the least you could do is throw me a vote!

Ouch! Hey, that was a long and painful contraction… huh, maybe this is the real thing after all!

Back a couple of weeks ago, Rebecca from Adventures in Mommyhood tagged me for the “seven weird things about me” meme. I think the blog is a testament to the fact that there are far more than seven things that are weird about me, so I’m going to twist this one into the new all-uterus-all-the-time format of blog and adapt it to be “seven things about the end of this pregnancy” meme.

1. I feel like I’m caught in suspension between two worlds. It’s been almost a week since I’ve been at work, but baby shows no signs of arriving. Theoretically, it could be as long as seventeen or even twenty days (whimper) until baby arrives, but the midwives are now so concerned about his size that they said they won’t make me go much over seven days past my due date. Every twitch and twinge is cause for serious – and ultimately disappointing – analysis. Does anybody else find it terribly ironic that pregnancy is bookended by an obsession with finding, or not finding, some predictive smudge on the toilet paper?
2. Further to point one, I have now made it my full-time occupation to entice this baby into leaving my womb. Beloved hasn’t gotten this lucky since the good ole days of trying to get knocked up in the first place, and I’m chugging red raspberry leaf tea like it’s going out of style. I walked loops around Bayshore Shopping Centre for a while yesterday morning, and took the dog for a rather frigid walk around the block after dinner. I swear, I haven’t had this much exercise since the good ole days of trying to get knocked up in the first place!! So far, I have tired feet and an incredibly sore pelvis, and one good contraction to show for my efforts. Bah.

3. I have two emotional channels right now, and I vacillate randomly – and regularly – between them. One is a blissful sense of contentment, where all I can think about is how much I love my boys, how wonderful they are and how great my life is. The other is a deep and dangerously cranky annoyance with the entire universe and its conspiracy to irritate the shit out of me by any and all means possible. Aren’t you glad you aren’t Beloved right about now?

4. Speaking of Beloved, he’s an angel. No, really, you have no idea how great he has been during this last stretch of pregnancy. From turning the other cheek again and again in the face of my increasingly irrational hormonal outbursts to taking on the lions share of just about everything around the house to not blinking an eye when I ask him to massage my poor beleaguered tailbone (I can’t help think of Peggy Bundy saying “Rub my toushie!”), he’s been a superhero.
5. Despite the fact that I’m nearly catatonic with exhaustion, I can’t sleep more than an hour or two at a time during the night. It’s getting so bad that I’ll roll over to look at the clock (itself an effort of Herculean proportions!) and whimper with dismay when I see that it’s still only three or four o’clock in the morning. More than once, I’ve found myself thinking, “Oh my god, is it not even morning YET? Will this night never end?”
6. I have become a space cadet. I can’t tell you the number of times I find myself, during the course of a day, sitting and staring off into space – often while holding a half-folded sock in my hand, or in the middle of looking for a can of soup in the cupboard. My brain has deserted me entirely.
7. I have three speed settings right now: slow, really slow, and glacially slow. Our phone rings four times before the voice mail kicks in, and more than once I have missed a call because four rings isn’t enough for me to haul myself off the couch and make it the fourteen steps around the end of the couch and into the next room to get to the phone. My new theme song is Mussorgsky’s “The Ox Cart” from his Pictures at an Exhibition symphony, which Beloved hums at me regularly. (And yet, I still love him. Go figure.)

Now if you’ll excuse me, it’s time for my next dose of evening primrose oil and I have to massage the accupressure points on my ankles…