40 Weeks Pregnant...No Baby Yet!

Oh, my God, I have a PLANET attached to me. Ok, Norah, you can come out now!

I know it was only a few days ago when I said that I really wasn’t that anxious to be done with pregnancy just yet, but now I’m ready.

Psychologically, even though I have expected her to come late all along, now that my due date has come and gone I find myself wondering what’s taking so long.

Physically, I’ve been feeling different in the past few days.

Braxton-Hicks are continuing to get stronger and more frequent.

Norah’s kicking and stretching is sometimes painful. At night, even when it doesn’t hurt it’s annoying.

I keep crying over nothing. I cried in the middle of Target last week because we couldn’t decide on which blinds to buy and my feet hurt.

I’m tired. I don’t feel like doing much of anything, and even when I sleep late I still sometimes take a nap in the afternoon.

My belly is itchy and feels like it can’t stretch any more.

I have random annoying aches and pains.

That pretty much covers my list of complaints. Norah is just getting too big for this!

At today’s appointment, we found out that Norah’s head is still not engaged, and there isn’t much I can do to get her to move down. It just takes time. The midwives don’t do pelvic exams unless you ask them to, so I don’t know if I’m dilated at all or not. They don’t do it because it can introduce bacteria, and it doesn’t tell you much. They’ve had a mother who was walking around at 5 centimeters for two weeks, and they’ve had women who weren’t dilated at all and then gave birth within 48 hours. I don’t want to know, because it would probably either disappoint me or give me a false sense of hope. I feel like Norah and I are slowly but surely heading in the right direction. Other than that, I’ll just have to wait and see what happens. She has to come out sometime. I just hope it isn’t at 42 weeks in a hospital after having been medically induced.

I guess one good sign is that when we arrived for the appointment, we could hear a baby crying and learned that there had just been a birth a couple of hours earlier. The midwives are always telling us that for whatever unknown reason, their clients always seem to give birth in clusters. We also ate Chinese for lunch and Travis’s fortune cookie said that we would be surprised by a long time friend. J It didn’t say when, though.

After the appointment I felt weird. Kind of nauseous and hungry. Several weeks ago when I felt that way our Bradley instructor told me it was probably a hormonal shift. I think that’s what it was this time, too, especially since I then broke down in tears for no reason. Again. Hopefully this is also a sign of impending labor.

I felt better as soon as we got home and I could get some food in my stomach and open a fun package that had arrived: the last six diapers we had ordered! Norah’s stash is now complete. And completely adorable.

Getting Ready For Norah

Our bags are packed. Norah’s bag is packed. Our cooler full of (nonperishable) food is packed.

Our house is almost clean.

ALL of the laundry is done.

I’ve gone slightly OCD labeling things and typing out instructions on how to wash the diapers, etc., so that whoever does the housework while I’m recovering will know exactly what to do.

I think that about covers it. We’re ready. Bring on the bébé.