Internet Challenged

Right now, our dsl is down at home and I'm stealing a few moments on Susan's laptop. I tell you this so I can give you a link to look at for nice pictures of Valerie: Andrea's flickr stream. Once the Internet returns to our house I'll add more for your (okay, yes, and mine) viewing pleasure.

The Moment We All Were Waiting For

Began at 1:26 pm on May 16, when Valerie Marta emerged after an emergency c-section. At that point, I'd been in labor for 31 hours and it became clear that even though I was fully dilated, her wee rump was simply not coming down. When I was wheeled into surgery, it was still right up against my ribs. Labor was harder than I'd ever imgained and about 1000 times tougher than all the hypnobirthing books would have you think. But I'll gloss over all that and tell you about Val. She was 7 lbs, 10.5 oz, 20 inches long. It took her a minute to cry - the longest minute of my life. Finally she did though, a teeny little one that was enough to satisfy me. Andrea peeked over the curtain and got some pics of our daughter emerging. I'm biased, yes, but she's gorgeous. Totally gorgeous. She breastfeeds like a champ and is very alert. More soon, please excuse me because those breasts have been requested at her highness' dinner table.

Groundhog Day

Here we are, at 38 weeks, 4 days and the baby is (by our doc's account) not really any closer to making her appearance. She's still really high up and I'm only a teeny bit more dilated. Sigh. At this point it's like having the same day over and over again.

Sleep like crap, wake up to pee every time I need to turn over, wake up, shower, still be pregnant, nap, run errands, still be pregnant, eat, then lay down for another night of lousy sleep. Repeat.

If our little friend hasn't made any more progress by next Tuesday's appointment, we're going to start talking seriously about induction. Though I so want this HypnoBirthing thing to be how we deliver, I want to go post-term even less. Much less. The advantages of induction include knowing when (within a day or so) your kid is going to arrive, of being able to have all the mundane details we need to wrap up before we go to the hospital wrapped up.

So we're planning to spend the weekend walking walking walking, staying upright as much as possible and using the HypnoBirthing techniques to visualize my muscles stretching out to let her drop. Hopefully that will cause some positive changes by my next appointment.