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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?

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.

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.

I had a lot of Braxton-Hicks contractions yesterday evening, after the fall, but they cooled off when I lay down. I feel very normal this morning. So we now return to the status quo, yay.

Yes, Alex is definitely anxious about the Niblet's birth. ( Read more... )

Poor kid. I know how she feels - it is weird to know that labor could hit at any time, and that we don't know what will happen next. Honestly, I don't think there's a fix for this other than birth.

I was already feeling fragile this evening before I discovered that someone had hacked Respectful of Otters.

Michael and I took the hospital L&D tour this evening. We were just there on Saturday afternoon for Alex's tour, but I guess that I was focused singlemindedly enough on her experience, or the surrounding details were different enough, that it didn't hit me the wrong way.

Tonight it did.

We were in a group of six or so glowing beaming hopeful expectant couples. A childbirth educator led us onto the L&D floor. Just across the hall from the nurses' station was the little registration room. I glanced in as we walked by, just for a second, and there was a woman sitting in the patient's chair, crying. Hand up to her face. Nonswollen belly.

This time last year I thought I was eleven weeks pregnant. I had just had my first midwife visit, at which everything looked great. I had told Alex that I was pregnant, and the two of us were looking at pictures in pregnancy magazines together. Two weeks afterward I was sitting hunched over my nonswollen belly in that same registration room, crying, having discovered that what I thought was a baby was just a bloody mess of misdirected cells. Getting ready for emergency surgery.

Everything brought it back. The brief glimpse of the crying woman. Standing at the window of an L&D room looking out at the gorgeous 16th-story view of the city by night. The childbirth educator mentioning the two operating rooms on the floor and the 24-hour anesthesiologist. Asking her about triage, did we have to go through triage, realizing only in retrospect that the reason the idea filled me with such dread was that I'd spent a good long time in triage before my D&C. Remembering how I had felt hearing the heartbeat of a laboring woman's live baby on the monitor, on the other side of the curtain, before I got my headphones on.

My due date is a week to ten days after the anniversary date of my D&C. I don't know if I will be thinking these thoughts, having these memories, when I go to the hospital for the birth. Maybe I'll be too focused on labor, too focused on my imminent baby. Maybe it will help that I've already freaked myself out now with the vivid memories that are apparently still locked on to that place. Maybe it will help to be prepared next time, because I swear that for some reason it never occurred to me that it would be hard to go back to L&D, because apparently it's not like I'm a psychologist or a reasonably insightful person or anything.

Maybe I should discuss this with my midwife and doula, but it's hard to think of what to ask for that would be helpful.

Alex has been complaining a lot about illness. "I'm sick. I don't feeeeeel good." It's been going on for a few weeks now.

She was actually sick, before Christmas. She doesn't seem to be sick now. She has the occasional sniffle or cough that just seems to go along with winter, but she's displaying no actual symptoms - no fever, no worrying change in her eating or sleeping habits, no changes in her appearance, no apparent activity limitations. Just complaints. When we ask her what hurts: "My whole body hurts." "Everything hurts." Even, she will insist if we ask more detailed questions, her toenails and her eyelashes. Every part. We've started asking "What do you think would make you feel better?" Sometimes she asks for medicine. Usually she doesn't know.

For a while it seemed like it was related to things she didn't want to do, or things she did want to do. "I can't put away my game because I'm siiiiick" and "I need to watch another video because I don't feeeeel good" are pretty easy to interpret and respond to. Or boredom-related "sickness" in the car. But more recently it's been different. Every morning this week, as soon as I mention school: "I don't feel good. I need to stay home." I will usually tell her, cheerfully, that we'll see how she feels once she gets to school. She's started asking: "WHY are you making me go to school when I'm SO, SO SICK?!"

She still doesn't seem to be legitimately sick at all.

I spent some time this morning talking with her about school. Why doesn't she like to go to school all of a sudden? Because she doesn't feel good, she told me. Is anything happening at school that she doesn't like - anyone being mean to her, any problems, anything scary? No, she said. Nothing is wrong at school, she just doesn't want to go anymore because she doesn't feel good.

This morning at dropoff, I spoke to her teacher for a while. The teacher confirms that nothing overt appears to be going wrong for Alex - no friend issues or anything like that. She will play happily for a while at school, and then come over and tell a teacher that she doesn't feel good and that she needs her mommy. The teachers have been treating this as a plea for attention. They offer her the opportunity to sit or lie down and rest when she says she doesn't feel good, but haven't been calling us or taking her temperature or anything.

I think that what may be wrong is anxiety. I think that my questions about problems at school were off-base, and that rather than worrying about school she may be worrying about separating from me. After all, that's the other thing that happens at going-to-school time. And anxiety certainly makes your whole body feel bad.

She knows that Niblet's arrival is imminent, and that I'm going to go into labor and go to the hospital and have the baby. She knows we've been making plans for who will take care of her. I'm pretty sure that she knows that it could happen at any time and we don't know when to expect it or when things will change. That's probably pretty anxiety-provoking. Also, I've started being too pregnant to do certain things: I can't sit in the back seat of the car to keep her company, I can't bathe her, I can't play active games. That might be anxiety-provoking in itself, if she's worrying about how much I love her or how much I'll be there for her.

I think this is a reasonable working hypothesis for what's happening now.

The sibling prep books we've read have focused on having a baby at home, not on the anxious weeks of knowing that major life changes could happen any moment. We're going to have a sibling's hospital tour and meet with a nurse for a while on Sunday, and I guess that could go either way - it could make her more anxious, or less.

My tentative plan: I'm going to tell her that I spent a lot of time thinking and reading about what might be making her feel bad, and that I think she has a sickness called anxiety. I'll explain that anxiety can be treated using exercises, kind of like Dad's physical therapy, and I'll try teaching her progressive muscle relaxation using some kind of PMR script for children. I'll try waking her up a little earlier so that we have time to do a PMR exercise before school.

Separately from that, I will try asking her whether she worries about leaving me or being gone from me all day, and whether she worries about what will happen when the baby is ready to come. I don't know if I'm going to get anywhere with questions like that, though. This is where you'd think that being a psychologist would help, but it doesn't, because I mostly was trained to work with adults and I have zero experience with interventions or techniques for kids this young.

I would appreciate any advice or theories that people have - especially people with lots of young-child experience, like mactavish, and people with new-sibling-prep experience. Also, if you have any alternative hypotheses about what might be causing these illness complaints, I'd be interested to hear them.