Category: Postcards from my uterus

Beloved has resorted to drastic measures. He leaned in close to my uterus this morning and said, “We have candy! We have TV! We have video games! Just c’mon out and it’s all yours — follow the light!”

We were in the car later, and decided the lyrics of this song are surprisingly applicable right now:

Closing time – time for you to go out, go out into the world.
Closing time – turn the lights up over every boy and every girl.
Closing time – one last call for alcohol, so finish your whiskey or beer.
Closing time – you don’t have to go home but you can’t stay here.

I know who I want to take me home.
I know who I want to take me home.
I know who I want to take me home.
Take me home…

Closing time – time for you to go back to the places you will be from.
Closing time – this room won’t be open ’til your brothers or your sisters come.
So gather up your jackets, and move it to the exits – I hope you have found a friend.
Closing time – every new beginning comes from some other beginning’s end.

Yeah, I know who I want to take me home.
I know who I want to take me home.
I know who I want to take me home.
Take me home…

Closing time – time for you to go back to the places you will be from…

I know who I want to take me home.
I know who I want to take me home.
I know who I want to take me home.
Take me home…

Closing time – every new beginning comes from some other beginning’s end…

And yet, like the party guest who won’t leave long after you’ve cleaned up the kitchen and washed off your makeup and even put on your fuzzy slippers, he just won’t leave!

By the time I figured out that the contractions were not the real deal yesterday morning, I was in a pretty foul mood. I felt supremely betrayed by my body, as false labour was nowhere near my radar screen, and it was outside the realm of the conceivable that what had started would not simply escalate into the arrival of my son. So when I realized otherwise, I was in one cranky-ass bad mood.

My mother, whom I had called early in the morning to put on high alert before the disappointment set in, called me back just before lunch time and offered to take me out – of the house, but mostly of my own head. I warned her that I was in no fit state for company, having lost an entire night’s sleep AND been recently denied something I desperately wanted (something I never take well!) and told her I wasn’t sure I wanted to spend any more time with me, so couldn’t imagine why she wanted to. She perservered, though, and we went out to the mall for a little lunch and a wander about.

By the time she dropped me off a couple of hours later, I felt 110% better. Nothing like a little lunch, a little retail therapy and some unconditional love to restore your perspective on the world. There will still be a baby — just not a baby TODAY. My mom rocks!

And then the midwife called late in the afternoon to check on me. When I told her what was (not) going on, she asked if I would like it if we had an impromptu appointment on the weekend just to ‘make sure everything was on track.’ How great is that?

So I met her at the (closed) midwives’ office this afternoon, and she checked out me and the baby. I had my first internal exam this pregnancy, and I’m a full centimeter dilated. Woot! (Might not seem like much, but I’m still six days away from my due date, and with Simon I was 10 days past and three hours into inducement hell and my cervix was still locked tight and “unfavourable” — perhaps one of the cruelest words in obstetrics.) She said my cervix is soft but still long, and she actually touched the top of baby’s head, which set me all a-tingle. She said she had been considering sweeping my membranes (basically, using her finger to separate the amniotic sac from the uterine wall, which often generates the hormones that trigger labour) but that it was her opinion that it wouldn’t do any good and would only cause me unnecessary discomfort. She did say, though, that “if we make it to the next appointment” she would try it then.

And the final word is pretty much what it has been all along — could be soon, could be two weeks. I can only laugh at this point. Could there be a worse torture for me that all this uncontrollable not knowing? I can’t imagine one!

But I received three e-mails this afternoon with varying degrees of curiousity (and the page views are insanely out of whack with the visitor count, meaning either y’all are clicking back regularly for updates or going mad with the refresh key looking for fun captchas!) so I figured an update was due — even if the baby isn’t. No real contractions since yesterday, so it looks we’re back in a holding pattern for at least a few days. And I’m okay with that!

But hey, if you need something to do OTHER than playing with the captcha oracle (which, admittedly, is a fun new game!) and you haven’t already done so, you could always mosey on over to the Canadian Blog Awards and vote for your favourite family blog…

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…

Hey, don’t say I didn’t warn you that this blog was going all-pregnancy, all the time!

I went to an orientation session at the Montfort hospital last night. I was not overly receptive to the Montfort at the beginning of this pregnancy (Tristan and Simon were born at the Civic) and I was not overly receptive to this session, but I figured it would eliminate just a little bit more uncertainty for me and I could pretend to have more control over things than I really do. In these post-SARS days, you can’t actually visit the L&D floor unless you’re delivering or delivering someone who is delivering, but they have a lovely powerpoint show with photos of the L&D and maternity areas. I rolled my eyes at the idea, but found the session interesting and helpful… even for a been-there, done-that mom like me!

I have to admit, even though I have been less than keen about the Montfort I left feeling extremely positive and pleased with our choices so far — both the midwife route and the Montfort. The private rooms are AMAZING looking, nicely painted in pastel colours with pull-out sofa beds and comfy chairs. They are as nice if not nicer than the delivery rooms at the Civic, and don’t even compare to the private rooms at the Civic. The nurse giving the session kept saying that if you were delivering with a midwife, you’d be leaving within a couple of hours after the birth, and I finally had to check to make sure I had the option of staying in the hospital or not. The room full of mostly new parents laughed when she said, “Oh, you must have children at home already?” and laughed even louder when I admitted to having two boys at home and the nurse clucked appreciatively and said, “Of course you can stay, dear, as long as you want!”

One more piece of the puzzle locked into place – and I’ve even figured out that of the four different routes we’ve recently driven to and from the Montfort, there’s only five minutes and less than five kilometers difference regardless of which route you take. Not that I’m anxious or anything. Whatever gave you that idea?