Saturday, March 17, 2007

No baby yet

So there's still no baby, and we are swiftly approaching the due date. The doctors don't seem really confident that there will be a baby on the due date, and I'm not seeing any of the changes that the books say could happen before going into labor. OF COURSE, everyone ALSO says that any of that could change at ANY time, and in fact I could go into labor right now and all of this would be moot. Yesterday I went into the doctor to see if I couldn't get any more information on this whole induction thing (which the doctors recommend that you set up ahead of time so that you don't have to wait... apparently they can either only do so many, or this is a very popular service) and, in her medical opinion it seemed worse to wait it out, than to induce. My big concern is the size of my baby, babies seem to run large on my mom's side of the family (8,9,10lbs) and I didn't want to wait to induce and then have a gigantic walking/talking child trying to pop out of my womb, so I asked the doctor if she could give me some kind of estimate. I was thinking that she would probably have to reschedule me to do an ultrasound or maybe pull out a ruler and do some math, or something. But no, the *apparently* scientific method of estimating baby size is to put one hand near my pelvic bone (where the baby's head is) and one hand at the top of my belly (where the baby's butt is), give a little shake, and compare what they feel to a 5lb bag of sugar. According to the doctor, it is not as small as a 5lb bag of sugar, but it also does not feel like two 5lb bags of sugar! She guesstimated about 7 or 8lbs. So we have scheduled the induction for Monday the 26th and if nothing pops out by Sunday the 25th I will be going into the hospital for some ripening drugs and the preparation for delivering the baby. If all the other “mommies” that I know were not so dead set against the whole induction process I think I’d prefer it this way, it takes the guess work out of am I in labor? Which as far as I can tell, I have not even begun…. In theory it will be a big difference from the non-painful contractions that I have but, who know. I don’t want to do the whole go to the hospital only to get sent home again thing.
Anyway, it’s just a waiting game at this point, and baby, just so you know, I’m real good at this game. :0