Whoa. Kid. Part 1: The Waiting

Our baby (henceforth to be referred to as Burrito) is now 28 days old. Whoa.

So much has happened. I’m filled with so many emotions. I have to start somewhere, so I suppose I’ll start with the days leading up to labor & delivery.

Starting about a week an a couple of days before the due date or thereabouts, I started to have painless contractions that were starting to fall into a pattern. I’d time five hours of 30 second contractions 15 minutes apart until I got bored or had to focus my attention elsewhere, like on eating. 😀

The due date came and went, with nothing major happening, except that the baseline state of pregnancy changed from uncomfortable to fairly painful. I also started to get a little worried about the various complications that could arise from a longer gestation period.

The doctor and the two of us agreed that we want nature to take its course so we’ll just start monitoring things as we waited. We started going in for semiweekly non-stress tests.

A non-stress test is done by strapping two monitors to your belly: one for monitoring the contractions, if any, and another for monitoring the baby’s heartrate and activity level. The “non-stress” part means that the test involves no application of external/artificial stress on the baby. If the mother experiences three or more contractions during the monitoring session, then that is considered a spontaneous stress test. Apparently, there are rare cases when a stress test might be applied, but most regular monitoring such as I was getting wouldn’t involve externally applied stress.

I was scheduled for four visits before we’d talk about induction.