Closing in on 6 months:

I think it’s safe to say I am going to be huge.

I am feeling pretty good, mostly just enormously exhausted. There are days when I consider taking 2 naps. My headaches are under control and my joints are on their way to becoming jelly. What I am losing in running fitness I am gaining in swimming stamina. I savor my 45 minutes of not feeling pregnant every day. We had a great first prenatal visit with a midwife at the birthing center last week. I am measuring a little large, but I seem to be having a very uneventful and healthy pregnancy thus far. I love feeling the baby move more forcefully each day, and I am no longer wearing a training bra!

So yesterday, I really started to feel like a mom. I officially interviewed my first daycare and we had an orientation meeting at the Birthing Center. I started the day by taking the short 1 mile bus ride down to the big family center/daycare near us. Yes, normally I would walk this, but I was drenched in the heat after about 5 minutes outside – I didn’t want to pass out while touring the infant wing. The facility was big, bright, clean, and cheery. I asked lots of questions and didn’t really see any “red flags”. The ratios were good and the price is also quite affordable. They have two infant rooms, one of which they just opened due to demand. There wasn’t anything wrong with them, but everybody just looked bored. The babies looked bored and the teachers looked bored. Now, it happened to be a quiet time in the room, so maybe I mistook chilling for boredom, and it’s not like babies can talk, but still. But it’s close, and affordable, and flexible. And diverse.

We have several other daycare options to look at. Just last week I put our names on a waitlist for the rather prestigious facility at the University where I work. Now, I didn’t even bother to “interview” this place, because I actually worked there all through college. And we will probably be on the waitlist for at least a year before even a chance of opening exists. Most people put their names on the waitlist at 6 weeks pregnant (!). It costs more monthly than our mortgage payment. It’s the kind of place that serves spinach pesto for lunch, plays Enya at naptime, teaches children how to count in Japanese, and has art classes for their 6-month-olds. It operates on an Italian early educational model that closely resembles Montessori – encouraging creativity and collaboration. Anyway. It’s probably our “first choice”, but the cost, location, and waitlist make it sort of unattainable at this point. But anyway. We have a few more solid options that I will tour, and we also hope to look at some “nanny” options. Whew, what a hard choice!

And now on to the Birthing Center. I will admit I have been skeptical of the whole concept, of not giving birth in a hospital, attended by physicians. But after our last experience with the hospital, we both felt strongly that we needed to explore our options. The orientation did a good job of expelling our fears. They have very low hospital-transfer, episiotomy, and c-section rates. My two biggest hesitations in choosing a Birthing Center with midwives has been 1) safety and 2) pain management. I am really beginning to understand that society, movies, tv, and even many of the infertility blogs that I read have led me to believe that giving birth is scary, unnatural, dangerous, and life-threatening. No doubt that it’s painful, but it doesn’t have to be any of those other things (assuming you are having a safe and uncomplicated pregnancy). I am still terrified of the pain, but last night made me realize that birth can be a calm, beautiful, empowering experience. It’s what your body was meant to do (except for the pain part, thanks a lot, Eve!) You don’t have to feel neglected, confused, and coerced!

And. It’s a LOT cheaper than a hospital birth and the nurses make you omelettes when you are done! How cool is that?

** I should insert here that I really do like doctors. I didn’t feel like any of the doctors and nurses I saw over the weekend didn’t care about me. They are just operating in a rather broken system that makes for some rather unfortunate experiences. I know they are doing the best they can. We have lots of family and friends who are doctors, and we love you! **

So our anniversary weekend is always pretty awesome because it falls on the weekend of the 4th, which means we get a day off work, cookouts, and fireworks. This weekend for us started out pretty great. We went out to eat at one of my favorite restaurants, where I gave the poor waiter a run for his money asking about how well they cook their scallops and whether or not Skate Wing is a predator fish. Once we got things worked out the meal was phenomenal. Shortly before we left for dinner, however, Matt instructed me to pack an overnight bag. I was totally blindsided, as I am not easily surprised, but giddily complied. It turns out he had arranged (with the help of some friends) for us to stay the night at a lovely downtown hotel. It was fantastic to get “away” for about 12 hours. The next day I went to an early showing of Eclipse with a friend and had a solid swim at the University. It was a great start to what I was planning on being a fantastic weekend.

Well. I woke up Sunday morning feeling a little off, just kind of crampy and uncomfortable. I figured it would pass with some breakfast and a walk. After church I felt pretty bad so I decided to have a real rest. It didn’t help and I spent the next several hours groaning on the couch. Most of you are probably thinking why did you wait so long to do something!? The truth is it really just felt like bad gas cramps, except nothing was uhhh, passing. I tried walking, every conceivable laying position, drinking tea, sitting on the toilet. Matt was getting concerned so I went ahead and called the OB on call. She didn’t seem terribly interested, told me to call back in a few hours if I saw no improvement. I still felt lots of kicking, so I really wasn’t worried myself. With no change I called her back around 7pm and she instructed me to just go to the hospital. Ugh. All I could think about was how pointless this was and how expensive it would be.

It was a little weird being in the L&D department of the hospital where we were told we wouldn’t be able to conceive. I felt a little victorious, actually. Take that, suckers! But anyway, we got checked in fairly quickly and I got hooked up to the monitoring machines. The baby’s heart rate was good and I didn’t appear to be having any contractions. The nurse left and told me the doctor would be in shortly.

We waited, and waited, and watched the World Cup, and waited. They had me laying on my back (ummm, I thought that was a no-no?), and I was just so uncomfortable. The room was tiny, the bed was uncomfortable, there was a fly buzzing around, the paint was peeling, and our room was right next to a hallway door badly in need of some WD-40. A nurse came in about after about an hour to give me my allergy bracelet and told me there was a delay due to an unexpected delivery next door. Ummm, aren’t they all a little unexpected? The only reason I agreed to go to the hospital in the first place is that I have no sense of what normal is anymore. I feel like I have lost touch with my body, it’s doing things it never did before, that working through pain is no longer a good idea, and how the hell am I supposed to know the difference between a contraction and a gas cramp?

We hit a turning point when my machines started beeping and an error message on the screen read “FHR=0″. Ok, I am no doctor, but I knew what that meant and I sort of lost it. I called the nurse, who took her time in arriving, and she just blew me off:

“It’s beeping because of your finger.”

“What does that mean?”

“Your pulse ox.”

“What does that mean?”

“It just can’t detect a signal.”

Oh Lord. She was basically telling me that the machine was not terribly accurate and that if I had actually been in my room dead, they would not have gotten any sort of error message at their station, or would have blown it off due to frequent mechanical failure. I asked when we might expect to see a doctor, as we were going on two hours with no pain improvement, she reminded me about the woman giving birth. Yeah, I got it.

I took all the machines off and rolled over on my side. Apparently the monitoring equipment was for my own amusement and I was no longer amused.

When I was finally seen, they felt my abdomen, checked my urine, and told me I was probably just “backed up”. I thought that rather unlikely, but hey, they’re the doctors, right? They gave me a script for some laxatives, and just as we were leaving, the doctor came back and and said, “you know what, we better check your cervix for preterm labor”.

Uhhhh, shouldn’t you have done that WHEN I FIRST GOT HERE!?

We stopped at Wendy’s on the way home and I got a huge, greasy, bowel-moving burger and fries. I guess I would feel good about this being a “false alarm” sort of incident except that when I got home last night the Wendy’s took effect and it didn’t really make me feel any better. I did, however, learn some valuable buzz words for getting taken seriously. Things like “preterm labor”, “pelvic pressure”, and “abdominal cramps”.

Oh yeah, and it’s pretty unlikely that the hospital birth I was planning on is going to happen.

The last 5 years is more than I could have asked for. If you had told me 5 years ago that this is where we would be now, I would have laughed in your face. So I am not going to try and imagine what the next 5 years will be like. But if it’s with you, I know it’s going to be fun.

Thanks for making me laugh every day, for being my taste-tester, for your incredible hard work, for giving me the good seat on the couch, and for being willing to see Eclipse with me (thanks to Carrie for giving you an out!). Oh yeah, and thanks for knocking me up!