Full Term, Baby!

I am having a really hard time posting lately because there is just so much going on. I keep thinking, “oh, I’ll post tomorrow because tomorrow such and such is happening” and then the next day something else happens that compels me to put off writing an entry for yet another day.

I suppose I’ll start with last week’s midwife appointment, even though I covered that a little bit in the previous post. The appointment was originally scheduled with Katrina, but she was whisked off to a conference somewhere and so Katrina’s student Jenny (who we were meeting for the first time) saw us. Afterwards I made a comment to Tim about how Jenny seemed not quite as calm, collected and confident as Allison (the previous student who graduated and left us to our own devices). Jenny seemed a little nervous to be left to deal with us all by herself; but as Tim pointed out, this is probably the difference between someone just starting her internship and someone finishing. Jenny asked us all the usual questions and I got to tell her the gory details of my experience with more-frequent-now contractions of varying intensity. She took my blood pressure, but was distracted by Elizabeth (who came in and saw us at the end of the appointment) knocking at the door and had to do it again. I admit that I made things more complicated for her by having a contraction just as she was trying to determine the baby’s heart rate; this made the baby’s heart speed up, briefly putting it slightly above normal. Of course, when Elizabeth re-checked the heart rate everything was fine. Despite all these fumblings around, Jenny was very competent and will become even more so as she becomes less nervous. She already looks like a midwife; she’s got short, spikey red hair, crazy-looking glasses and lots of piercings!

So Tim and I are now officially outnumbered; there will be more midwives at my birth than we few hapless birthers (if you can consider Tim a “birther”?). That should make the skeptics feel better.

This week—my 37th week of pregnancy—is full of appointments. Today the people from the diaper service are coming to drop off our first delivery of cloth diapers, along with the diaper pail and one diaper cover that Aunty Belle purchased for us to try along with all the wool that we have in our stash. On Wednesday, some friends of my grandfather’s are coming to drop some things off for the baby that they brought all the way from Africa. On Thursday we have our home appointment with Elizabeth, and then on Friday we may or may not be heading to the cottage where we will wait out the full moon hopefully uneventfully before heading back to the city.

On top of all these appointments, Tim and I have been doing quite a bit of preparatory work (ie. shopping). On Saturday, Tim’s mom came in her new car and we did a major grocery shop, stocking up on canned goods as well as things like caffeinated drinks for the midwives should the birth happen at some ungodly hour. On Sunday Tim and I headed up the street to the mall in search of blinds for the living room window and a few other things. We didn’t end up getting the blinds due to a problem with the colour, but they are being shipped to us from another store and we should have them within the week. On Sunday evening, after dragging ourselves home from the mall with all the necessary faucet and hose adaptors, Tim and I filled up the pool that has been sitting in the office for a week or so now and tested out the efficacy of the water bed heaters we got from Tim’s mom. It was a little bit chilly; we could only get the water up to around 32 degrees as one of the heaters decided not to work even though it seemed to initially. All the same, we had fun floating around the office, though it was a far cry from my dream of kicking back in the nice, warm pool after a long day of trudging around the mall, with some sort of fruity drink in hand, appropriately adorned with a brightly coloured umbrella.

We now have a huge pool full of very cold water in the office and all efforts at siphoning the water out so far have been thwarted by the uncooperative laws of physics. Ah well, we’ve got maybe three weeks to figure out how to get the water out before we have to put it back in again; this time for real!