Waiting

After hearing about the importance of a baby's first 100 days in other cultures and running across a baby titled Your First 100 days, I knew I wanted to make sure I took the time every day in my new baby's life to document the special, the mundane, or the hilarious. It was last night, while not sleeping very well, that I thought it might be best to do this on the internet. Since our family is thousands of miles away, they can watch their grandson/nephew/great grandson/great nephew's first 100 days via the internet.

Who has time to make several phone calls every day? And yet, we want the details! Tell me what he did today! I'm already over my cell phone minutes this month and I haven't even had the baby yet!

Which brings me to right now. I am currently four days past my due date, not a big deal for most folks, but enough to make me crazy and sad. We are scheduled to go into the hospital on Thursday night (appointment is at 7pm, we need to show up at 6pm for any paperwork, etc) to prepare for an induction that will happen on Friday. Dr. McKenzie (who is just a wonderfully kind, open, honest and sweet soul) says that we will start Thursday night with a prostaglandin to ripen my cervix. They will do this twice that night and then on Friday we will prepare for what happens next. The next interventions are to break my water and then administer Pitocin for contractions.

I had been hoping to do this whole thing naturally, but I know deep down I need to be flexible. I also realize that the Pitocin may make the contractions stronger and closer together, leaving me very little relax time in between. Laboring entirely in the hospital, too is not ideal. I will be hooked up to an IV and machines instead of having the ability to be at home with any position or distraction available. However, I also know that I can be strong and it isn't a failure to get an epidural, some of the strongest women I know have used this intervention. Also, no matter what happens, a healthy baby and a healthy me is the only result we want at the end of the day Friday. I can even accept a c-section if that is the only way to get our ending.

So that is where we stand right now... and while I wait for my sweet baby to arrive safely, I plan to use this time to write about my pregnancy experiences. More than a month ago, Amanda asked if I was keeping a journal. I, unfortunately, did not. Inspired by her question and the many books I read about other women's experiences, I kept putting "journal for Amanda" on my To Do lists. I never did it, but I did make a list of what I would write about. Maybe this baby won't come until I actually write some of these experiences down. So the first blog posts will be about these experiences. If you only want to read about the baby, you should skip ahead.