rivka

I am now quite sure that I'm in labor.

Contractions continue to come in a regular pattern and are much stronger than they were overnight. I am now comfortable describing them as "painful." I wouldn't really say that they're active labor contractions - I don't need to focus on coping with them, I can just note them and go on - but they are definitely early labor, not false labor/prelabor. And they're progressing.

I've checked in with my midwife (who says come to the hospital whenever I feel like it), and my friend Emily who will be acting as my doula, and Dorian who will be picking up Alex after school if everything isn't all over by then. I've left messages for work. I've finished packing my hospital bag. I am about to wrap the presents that we got for Niblet to give to Alex. Then I need to decide if I have enough time and energy to bake his birthday cake. (We have a zero-shaped candle ready and waiting...)

Michael is at work. I don't yet feel that I need someone to pay attention to me through my contractions, which is my mental dividing line between early and active labor. If necessary, he'll be able to get home pretty quickly.

Can you believe it? It's my due date. Or at least my original, calendar-derived due date - they changed it to the 11th partway through based on ultrasound results. Still, I may wind up being one of the only 5% of women who actually deliver on their due date. Wouldn't that be crazy?

I meant to do a developmental update in January; Alex is actually more like three years, ten months right now. But I realized that if I don't post one now I may not have another chance for quite a while. So here goes.

( Cognition )

( Play )

( Social/Emotional Skills )

I just cried and cried when I watched this video joedecker posted. Tears streaming down my face.


"Fidelity": Don't Divorce... from Courage Campaign on Vimeo.

At least some of the strength of my emotional reaction may be hormonal, I guess. But I see the love and joy and bliss on these couples' faces in their wedding pictures and know that they are truly married in every way that matters. There is no difference between their marriage and mine... except that there are people out there who want to rip their families apart and destroy their lives in service to some imaginary ideal.

This. Is. Wrong.

Last night, while I was reading bedtime stories, I noticed that my continuing Braxton-Hicks contractions were starting to be both longer and more uncomfortable. So when I came downstairs, I timed them. Over the next hour, they came almost exactly eight minutes apart and lasted about a minute each time. Each contraction was not painful, but noticeable and uncomfortable.

"That looks like a pattern," I said to Michael, showing him my list of times. He agreed that it did.

"So here's what I think we should do: You clean up the living room a little in case someone winds up having to come over here. Then we should both go to bed."

We went to bed. I had some more contractions in bed. Then I went to sleep and slept all night, thus proving that I wasn't in labor. But at least the living room is clean.

Still not getting overexcited, because I did this sort of thing for weeks with Alex, but I am starting to feel like progress is happening.

So now it's time for a poll. I've been working my way through Patrick O'Brian's Aubrey-Maturin novels in my copious free time. I've made it to #16, The Wine-Dark Sea. I'm a reasonably fast reader. So your poll question is: how close am I going to get to finishing the series?

[Poll #1343401]

It's been a year. (If you're pregnant, please don't click through the link.)

I would have had a six-month-old now. Playing with toys. Maybe sitting up.

If that pregnancy had not ended, I would not have become pregnant with the Niblet who is, at this very moment, trying to batter his way out of my belly with his feet. He would not exist. I will always look at this baby and know that great grief made him possible.

I have no great meaning to extract from what happened to us a year ago. I can only say that you endure what you must because there's no other choice, and eventually it ends. Suffering is finite.

I haven't forgotten; I don't think I could. Who I am has been shaped by what happened a year ago. I can still contact the sadness. But I'm not there anymore.

I survived.

This is a story that starts out a little scary and has a happy ending.

My midwives have never asked me to keep "kick counts," but I definitely have a strong sense of when I expect Niblet to move, and how much. His most active time of day is right around when I go to bed. At 10:30 or 11, I expect a good 10-15 minutes of active kicking and rolling - enough to make the surface of my belly ripple visibly.

Last night? A couple of mild kicks, and that was it. So this morning I was more alert than usual for fetal movement, and again, there was much less than I expected. Putting a bag of frozen broccoli on my belly for a minute or so didn't wake him up. Eventually, after much inward focus, I felt a couple of slight, subtle movements. Enough to reassure me that he wasn't dead, but not enough to reassure me that nothing was wrong. It was weird. And scary.

I called the midwife on call, and she had me go to the Center for Advanced Fetal Care at the hospital - where I'd just been on Tuesday. They did a biophysical profile, which is a combination of an ultrasound to assess the baby's "practice breathing," movement, muscle tone, and amniotic fluid level, and a nonstress test using an external fetal monitor to identify appropriate heart rate accelerations with movement.

And! Pretty much as soon as she started the ultrasound it was clear that Niblet has turned head-down, just as he's supposed to be. His feet are up by my right ribs. We've canceled the external version scheduled for Tuesday - I'm just supposed to go to my regular midwife appointment on Wednesday to have his position checked again. I can't believe I didn't feel him flip!

He passed the biophysical profile with flying colors. It was hard for the nurse to get him moving - she had to do a lot of repeated jabbing and pushing with the ultrasound wand and roll me from side to side a few times - so it wasn't just my imagination that he was less responsive than usual. But once he did move, he looked great. The nurse's theory is that I felt such a strong difference in his movements because he's moved head-down and is in a more natural, comfortable position.

I am so! Relieved! I cannot even begin to tell you. I've been trying to mentally prepare myself for a C-section - and then, this morning, I was quite genuinely scared by the drop in apparent movement. I am SO HAPPY that he is all right, looking well, and VERTEX.

Also, apparently I'm contracting much more than I realized. My contractions are painless and mild, but during the nonstress test they were happening every 3.5 to 5 minutes. This doesn't mean anything with respect to labor imminency, but it's certainly a good sign that my body is preparing itself.

Last night Dorian was here to go over some things in preparation for being our labor&delivery childcare. I let her feel a hard bump of baby sticking out on my right side. "That must be his bottom," I said trustingly. "Because it's round, and we know he's head down."

Yeah.

This morning I had my 38-week midwife appointment. All went well until she put me up on the table to assess Niblet's position, heartbeat, and size. At which point it became clear that he is not head down anymore, and that the hard round thing sticking out on my right side is in fact his head.

The good news is that he's still floating; no part of him is engaged in the pelvis, so he's not wedged in this way. He was transverse (crossways) when the midwife examined me, with his head kind of down by my right hip. She sent me over to the hospital for a confirmatory ultrasound, and the sonographer noted that he had turned breech: his head was still over on the side, higher up, and his feet were on my cervix. Then I was examined again by an OB, at which point he was fully transverse again. So he definitely has room to move.

We've scheduled an external cephalic version for Tuesday, February 3, when I'll be just about 39 weeks pregnant. I'll be seeing the OB I saw today, whom I liked very much. His name is Dr. Atlas, he's the chair of the Obstetrics department, he works with my midwives a lot, and he's very supportive of natural birth. I thought he struck a good balance between being warm and kind, and not holding back any information.

In an external version, the doctor literally flips the baby over into a more favorable position by pressing on the outside of the belly. ("Emphasis should be on gentle persuasion of the fetus as opposed to forceful movements," says the article, fortunately.) The article I linked to is kind of old, but offers a good description of what happens. They cite a 65% success rate. Here's the potential outcome tree Dr. Atlas outlined for me:

1. The baby is successfully flipped and then stays head-down, and I go into labor naturally.
2. The baby is successfully flipped and then flips back to breech or transverse, at which point we either schedule a C-section or wait until labor begins and do a C-section.
3. The baby can't be flipped. We schedule a C-section or wait until labor begins and do a C-section.
4. The baby becomes distressed by the procedure and there is an immediate emergency C-section.

Obviously that last one is a low-frequency outcome, but nevertheless the procedure is done on the L&D floor with an OR and an anesthesiologist nearby.

I've read that the success of ECV is heavily dependent on the skill and experience of the doctor, and it seems like I'll be in good hands there.

So, uh, we'll see what happens. Apparently it's not out of the realms of possibility that he'll turn back rightways round himself. Here's hoping.

In the grocery store today, we had one of those really classic parenting moments.

Alex pointed to a package of Always Maximum Protection Super Giant-Sized sanitary pads Michael had just put on the checkstand and asked, in her clear, piercing three-year-old voice, "What are those?"

"Those are Mama's," Michael said.

So she turned to me. "Mama, what are those?"

"Those are pads for me to use after the baby is born," I told her.

"What are they for, for after the baby is born?" she persisted. I could see ears perking up all along the checkout line.

Fortunately, Really Classic Parenting Moments have ready-made Really Classic Parenting Answers.

"I'll tell you when we're in the car," I said. And all along the checkout line, disappointed heads turned away.

My grandfather, my mother's father, was the son and grandson of coal miners. He went to college and graduate school and became a professor of mining engineering at Pennsylvania State University.

It was the custom of his department to send a letter to every young man who was the valedictorian of a Pennsylvania high school, offering a scholarship to Penn State to study mining engineering. One year - this would've been in the 1950s or early 1960s - the responsibility of sending those letters fell to my grandfather.

My grandfather did not know that there was a difference between the name "Francis" and the name "Frances." And so he inadvertently sent a letter offering an engineering scholarship to a young woman, and she wrote back accepting it.

The general feeling in the department was that the scholarship offer had been made in error, and should be withdrawn. But my grandfather dug in his heels. It had never occurred to him that a woman might like to be a mining engineer, but now that the evidence proved him wrong, he was going to stand by her.

Frances came to Penn State, was mentored by my grandfather, did well, and graduated. Over the years he mentored other female students, and in his will he established a scholarship for women in mineral engineering.

I like this story because it reminds me that sometimes it's possible to blunder into doing a good thing, as long as you keep your eyes and your mind open.