Soon after Jen’s last post, contractions became strong enough to keep her from concentrating on anything else. Since then, labor has progressed and a lot has happened. Mom and baby are doing well still but our baby has not yet been born. I’ll write more another time but for now I wanted to just let everyone know that we’re all well.

Well things have been going soooo slowly that I am now subject to a Pitocin drip unfortunately. I’ve been going for about 3 hours and contractions are about 2-4 minutes apart lasting for a minute and a half. The biggest concern now is infection and we’ve successfully kept their dirty hands out in order to avoid that! Of course that also means we don’t know where I am exactly. But I am coming up with new swears for the machine dispensing the Pitocin. Below is a picture from the postpartum wing’s window. Our current view isn’t much to write home about as it is of the construction site.

You could be here on a beautiful spring day. You didn’t get to meet the sheep, or the alpacas. You definitely would have liked the horses and the sheep herding dogs. But…you’re still not born yet. Four days late so far.

Turns out we are very very bad at remembering to bring our cloth grocery bags into the grocery store with us when we shop. One of our bags had to be washed because of a cat incident and the sock had gotten stuck inside of it! Monday night we finally remembered the bag and now have our full set of matching socks. We are also awaiting the arrival of our cloth diapers this evening and a demonstration! Still no baby though.

I started having rather consistent Braxton-Hicks contractions about two weeks ago. Some nights they even seem like they might amount to something, but then they fizzle away eventually overnight. So we continue to wait on pins and needles, but have no baby yet. She’s not officially due until Tuesday anyway and first babies are on average a week late. We’ve finished up our baby preparation activities but I’m a little behind in my pictures. Below you’ll see the complete set of matching baby decorations I made, the nightlight, the quilt, the lamp, the curtains and the changing table. My dad originally made the changing table for me when I was born (albeit a few weeks late) and he recently updated the fabric to match my color scheme! Mio is on the right of the changing table, George is on the left. Mio is in the windows, while Fred is in the lower right hand corner.

For the last several midwife appointments they have been concerned when they measure the outside of my stomach that the baby is getting “too big”. Despite the fact that they say that babies are generally within 20% of their mother’s birth weight (mine was 6lb 3oz and Jordi was small too). I really didn’t believe her though as their tape measure was obviously measuring belly fat too. After several weeks we relented to an ultrasound to check on this as they started to voice concerns about me using the tub for labor and delivery and shoulder dystocia (shoulders getting stuck and broken on the way out).

The results are in, and we were right, she’s completely on track. On Thursday at 37 weeks, 2 days, she is at the 49th percentile for weight, 6lbs 13 oz. Plenty of fluid and the best possible position, LOA (head down, back out and on the left side). Hopefully she won’t change positions in however many days we’ve got left. And they still say she’s a girl.

Gratuitous cat photo:

Hanging out with our friends with babies we often find them struggling with keeping socks on their kids feet. They fall off, they get pulled off, and they get left behind. We haven’t even had the kid but we washed some of her laundry to be ready for her arrival and lost a sock in the process. Hopefully it will show up stuck somewhere inside our clothes one day. At least it was one of the plain white socks from Old Navy of which I have 5 identical pairs. Now I just need to lose another one and we’ll have complete sets again.

Last weekend we put together the baby seat that uncle-to-be Javier and his girlfriend Roxy gave us. It took about a week, but Fred finally figured out how to use it. Surprisingly he isn’t bothered by the fact that it bounces if he moves. Unfortunately we are a little bothered by the fact that Fred is over the recommended weight limit for the seat, so it has been moved back into storage. This weekend, we put together the baby swing and will leave that out for the cats to get comfortable with it. Somehow I don’t think I’ll be posting a picture of a cat in the swing next week. Baby is about 35 weeks now, so that means we’ve got somewhere in the range of 2 to 7 weeks to go for a full term delivery!

In February, our friend Susan was kind enough to throw me a baby shower and friends and family were gracious enough to show up! We are exceedingly well stocked now for this babies arrival from furniture to clothes to diapers to books. Jordi’s Mom and Jen’s Aunt even made the long distance trips to attend. Thank you everyone for the thoughtful gifts! Here are some pictures that I am long delinquent in posting.

Jordi’s Mom Tere, Jen’s Aunt Sheila and Carolyn

Jen, Jen’s Mom Karen, Cousin Janet, Bonnie

Susan, Rhonda and Jen

Rhonda, Alyssa, Stef with Xander, Cate, Saru with Ryan

We’ve had a busy few weeks! One new item in the house is a rocker/glider/recliner chair for comfortably rocking and nursing the baby (and for video game play when otherwise not in use). Kaya has decided that this chair is her chair and for the first three days she barely left the chair ever. She didn’t come to bed, she didn’t spend time looking out the window, she just sat in the chair all day and all night. She’s sitting in it behind me right now. In this house, as a cat with 4 siblings, whenever something new arrives, you’ve got to stake a claim early and often or someone else will.

Perhaps she’s just admiring the newly painted baby’s room which Jordi and my dad painted last weekend? It looks great, but it isn’t very exciting to show you a picture of an off-white wall, so I won’t. Instead, here is a rare picture of someone other than Kaya (Ezzy) in the chair.