Tuesday, September 25, 2012

And the survey says...

Here I am at 37 weeks.



It's hard to get an accurate picture.  I feel like a tank.

38 Weeks...

It's the FINAL COUNT DOOWWWNNNN!

(feel free to read that again, singing it this time.)

First off.  Here I am:


The boy is LOWWWW.  And my hair is LONG.  He's on my sciatic nerve, and sometimes the pain just FLIES in there and I want to cry.  Sometimes it takes all I have not to just fall to the ground. 

The other pain we should talk about here is the pain I lovingly refer to as the , "knife in the lady parts" pain.  Lauren and I coined this term, because there's no better way to explain it.  It literally feels like someone has a small knife, and is just inserting it up there and then pulling.  It's sharp, it's intense, and it takes your breath away.  It it not a lasting pain, but you know it when you feel it.

I go for my next appointment on Thursday.  At 2:30.  With the midwife.  And I'm going to request, if they aren't going to do it on their own, to be checked and measured.  With an internal.  *shudder*.  For anyone who is tuning in, and doesn't know how this is done, the practitioner will physically stick their fingers up and up and up until they reach your cervix.  Many times they will push down on the baby's head so they can REALLY feel where that cervix is.  Then they measure the opening with their fingers.  One finger equals one centimeter.  So as you can imagine, it's not a walk in the park.  (Just to put this all in perspective; a penis- you know, the thing that got you there in the first place?- cannot reach the cervix...  just in comparison).  This is the honest blog, friends.  I do not sugar coat things here.

What you DON'T want to hear, after all of this, is "Nope, closed up tight!"  Because that means that all the pain has been for naught.  Even if they say, "Well, we've got one centimeter so far!"  At least that's a glimmer of hope.

And so on Thursday, as my husband and I sit expectantly in the sterile doctor's office, we're hoping for that "Any day now!" diagnosis.

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I'd like to point out that I'm ready to be done being pregnant.  Don't get me wrong, I have enjoyed being pregnant, and I will most likely do it again.  But there's a reason why your body starts to fade at the end.  Because God knew that if He didn't create the process like that, we'd never do it again.  "I'm feeling fine!"  We would say.  "Why would I want to put myself through the pain of getting the baby out?"  The way it is now, women are more likely to say...or maybe exclaim in an outside voice, "PLEASE PLEASE let this be done now.  I'd do ANYTHING."  And then you start to push.

One of the things that makes this so unnerving at this point is that you're literally... just...waiting.  Like when you go to a haunted house, you know you're going to be scared.  Eventually.  You're waiting for someone to jump out at you.  And you practice what you're going to do when this person does actually jump out at you.  You may repeat to yourself, "I will not pee myself when this person jumps out of nowhere......." But the more you dwell on what's going to happen (you don't know when...) you just get more and more uptight.  If you were walking through the same haunted house, this time with the knowledge that at 10 paces you were going to be scared, you'd still feel anxious, but at least you'd know what to expect.

Birth is like, "Well, sometime AROUND the estimation of this date, you will go through this whole process- it will hurt like a...well, like, a lot.  And then your entire life will change forever.  So now just practice for something you've never felt and we assure you that you'll forget all that went wrong...as soon as you hold your child.  Oooookay?"  Yeah, sure.  Whatever you say.

People (like my mother) keep asking what's going to happen after.  "When will you need me?"  She asks.  Was there ever a more loaded question?  Bottom line, is I don't know.  Hope am I supposed to know when I've never felt any of this?  I probably do get snarky, but I would like to just be left alone to go with the flow sometimes.  And don't ask me questions I don't have answers for.  The end.

More on this later!  Pretty soon I'll be posting a picture of our beautiful Son :)