T Minus 6 and counting

Little update...no baby yet.

There are times when I don't understand how I could feel so miserable and not be in labour. Yesterday was a good case in point. I had an AWFUL night with very little sleep and continued to feel rotten all day. Usually I go out around noon to do some vocal coaching at an elementary school, but I just could not make myself do it. My good friend Sonia, who normally watches my kids at that time, came over anyway and made the kids their lunch....ah, good friends are so lovely....

As evening came, I dreaded having to get myself out for choir rehearsal. I really do wonder how much this babe weighs now, as there are times where I feel like I'm carrying a couple dumbells in there. The only thing that got me out of the house was the prospect of seeing my chiropractor first. As well as my usual adjustments, she did a few things that might apparently get labour going....but no luck yet.

I still find my hand gravitating to the top of my belly a few times a day to check for head/butt status. Still good I believe.

Made it to the homeschooling convention this past weekend, which, as much as I hoped to go into labour early, was still a goal. It was a good day. James and I went out to breakfast for the first time since....we lived in Chicago, I think. I had very yummy waffles with strawberries. We made it over to the convention centre in time for the first set of workshops and spent the day taking in various seminars and perusing the large room of booths with all manner of homeschooling resources.

So today I see my midwife and perhaps have a little procedure to get labour going. Never pleasant...but worth it in the end!

So far, so good

It seems that so far, little one is sticking her nose where it belongs.

(heehee!)

I saw the chiropractor again today and she's keeping my bones and muscles in good working order so that the baby won't have any reason to go flipping around again. I'll be 38 weeks this weekend and the end could not come sooner. Today would be nice.

So otherwise, not a whole lot going on. I've got all the baby clothes washed, folded and mostly put away. I seem to be missing a fair bit of newborn size stuff, which perplexes me....I'm pretty sure I didn't loan anything out. But for sure I normally have many little newborn hats, and I can only find one.
The homebirthing 'kit' is stocked and ready....except for the baby hats.
The new cloth diapers are washed and in a neat stack on the baby's dresser/changetable. I need to get a diaper pail though.

Today I'm wearing one of my husbands shirts. I feel very....unattractive in it, but when I pulled on a maternity top, you could see every little crease and cranny....also unattractive. Maternity clothes are so small these days. Really, I mean, not just because I'm about as big as I'll get---I've noticed that the trend in maternity clothes since my first few pregnancies has changed. Why Old Navy thinks that your stomach slowly becoming the size of a beach ball is something we pregnant women want to show off from top to bottom is beyond me.

I mean, I know alot of young women, or even young-to-getting-older women like me (can I still call myself a young woman? I'm 33) have this issue with clothes and they feel they are just not attractive unless much of their clothing is superglued to their bodies. They're the teenagers that never end. Maybe I have an advantage having been a teenager in the 80's (the late 80's, I'll grant you) when loose and baggy was totally the trend. I became comfortable in that.

Now, even my non pregnant clothes have moved beyond that level of balloon style pants, cinched at the ankle (although, have you noticed? Tight ankles are back in now). I'd like to think that I'm somewhere between the two extremes. But I digress. The point is, that these women who don't feel attractive unless we can see every bulge get pregnant, and expect to wear their clothes the same way. So maternity clothing companies respond. But they forget that most of us, especially near the end of a pregnancy value comfort over style any day. I have been so uncomfortable this pregnancy because the style of pants now is to have a large swath of elastic material that goes around the bottom of your belly, or perhaps pulls halfway up, before you're too large. I carry low and out front, always have. There's not a whole lot of room there for the waist band of my pants. And to have even that much more pressure in an already tight spot is tremendously annoying. I used to have a few pairs of stretchy cotton leotard-style pants that pulled right up over my belly. Unfortunately, I loaned them away, never to be seen again. The few pairs of 'old fashioned' above the belly waist band pants I still had only lasted me to about 7 months. I sit today in the one pair that I got from Value Village. I feel rather untrendy in them, as they don't have flared cuffs (alright, I will admit that one fashion weakness). But I'm comfy. And I don't care who sees me in them.

Anyways, enough babbling. I'm ready to go. Going to take the kids to the park in a few minutes, hoping the walk will do me good---good, as in, gets me closer to labour. I'll let you know!!

Apparently

....she's flipped back. Last night---not that I felt anything, no, she's now moved 360degrees in my belly and I had no idea. I thought I would be vastly relieved, and in a small way I am, but now I'm just worried she'll do it again. Even though I've been seeing a chiropractor regularly, and it's likely the adjustments she made yesterday morning that allowed the baby to turn again, I can't help but think that any moment, little missy could decide she's not comfortable down there again and then we'd be back to square one. I've been feeling my tummy so often that now I don't know what I'm feeling. 2.5 weeks seems like a VERY long time....

Breechy Little Monkey

So last night I was feeling really achy, particularly just inside my left hip. I felt like ligaments stretching so I wasn't really concerned, it was just annoying. Even more annoying was that it wasn't going away easily. Usually just positioning to take the strain off the ligament is enough to relieve it, although I have had a few times recently that it lasted for an hour or so.

Well, 4 hours and a bath later and I was still feeling like something was odd. We had been at my parents for the day and we headed home about 10pm. When I got home, I got right into bed, but lying down, as it had earlier in the evening, made the pain worse. After tossing and turning for a bit, I finally sat up in exasperation, wondering if I was going to need to sleep sitting up that night. The baby was quite active and I put my hands on my belly.

Lo and behold, at the top of my little basketball of a tummy, what did I feel?

A head.

I sat in the dark with a very confused look on my face for a moment. James came in and looked at me strangely. As I kept my hand there, the very hard, round shape I was feeling moved around quite a bit. More and faster than any little baby butt is able to move. On top of that, I could feel little pokey movements---not feet. Hands. I had to sit for a bit to get my mind around this. Then I got up and called my midwife.

Her student answered, as she was off for the weekend. We talked a bit and I told her what I was thinking, feeling a little foolish. What baby flips to a breech position 3 weeks before she's due? How is that even possible?

The midwife assured me that it was possible. I didn't find that assuring, actually. She asked me a bunch more questions and then said she was going to call my back-up midwife for advice. After about 10 minutes she called again. She would get me an apointment to come into clinic for the next day so they could check, and she mentioned the possibility of going for an u/s if there was some question. For that moment, I could take some Tylenol for the ligament pain, and hope to get some rest. At least that part worked.

I got in to see the student midwife, and my back-up for about 10:30 this morning. The student couldn't tell which way she was for sure. I thought the large round head shape at the top of my uterus seemed pretty obvious as I lay on the examining table. My back-up, Simone came in and started feeling around. She got a bit of a smirk on her face....she knew I was right. The baby had turned.

They got me an u/s over at St. Joes for this afternoon, just to be sure. At least I got to see her again. She's sideways, essentially looking at my right armpit, with her back down the left side of my belly. One leg is curled up with her knee at her chest, the other more stretched out into the bottom right of my torso, poking into my right hip----which made for extreme discomfort when I went to stand up from the u/s, after laying on my back for 15 minutes.

And now I'm home. Every once in a while, probably every 5 minutes or so, I feel for her head to see if it's still there. I got up early this morning and did a bunch of reading on the internet about breeches. Lotsa info out there. A few different 'natural' type things I could try. Which I will. I've already made an appointment with my chiropractor, who apparently knows some technique called the Webster that could help. Other sources talked about getting yourself into positions where gravity will encourage the babies head to go down. They say to do it for 15 minutes twice a day. At this point I'm willing to do it ALL DAY LONG.

I'm upset and annoyed and frustrated that I've made it through this pregnancy, which has been such a stressful thing, with this beautiful vision in my head about delivering this baby healthy and whole in my own bed, like the girls were. This is what I've held onto since the moment they told me that Hayden was gone. This birth was going to be the final bookend for the journey I've been on since that loss. I've actually been looking forward to this birth, relishing the thought of labour starting and working through that process again, until a little girl emerged, big and strong. I've been careful to answer peoples' questions about homebirthing with the caveat that I would homebirth if everything was going well. I finally made it to 37 weeks, when my midwife said I could stay home and now look what's happened.

Blahblahblahblahetc.

It's Tuesday. I get to stay home today. I both like that and feel tired by it.

I'm somewhere between 36 and 37 weeks. I'm really not sure how far because there's the dates my midwife and I established when I first started seeing her last fall, and then there's the date from my first ultrasound. I think one puts me at 37 weeks by the weekend, and one puts me at 37 weeks tomorrow. I wonder which one my midwife will accept if I go into labour before the weekend. I really want to stay at home, which I can't do until I'm 37 weeks. I almost wondered if something was beginning when I woke up this morning. Both my daughters labours started in the morning, as I was waking up, or shortly thereafter. This morning I was pretty uncomfortable, but then again, I usually am. This was a little worse though.

I'm trying a new quiet time plan out. It's become apparent that Verity is pretty much done with naps, with, I'm sure, a few exceptions from time to time. However, we (ok, I) need the break after lunch. Jairus still plays nicely in his room for the quiet time. Honour on the other hand had gotten a little annoying. She used to sit in the 'quiet chair' and look at books or listen to a book on tape or radio drama. Well, she's sick of the cds we have and isn't interested in looking at books for an hour. Sooo, today I brainstormed a new plan. Both the girls would have quiet time in their room (right, that'll be quiet). But they have to stay on their beds and they can only play with the small selection of toys that I keep in their rooms. Or look at books, which there's dozens of in their room too.
Well, I've already taken Honour out and restationed her on the floor of my bedroom because they started screaming at each other over some toy. And while they are supposed to stay in the rooms with the doors closed, except for bathroom or some other emergency, they've both come out once each for bathroom, once each for a drink and once or twice each for some other reason.

I've cleaned up pee from two kids already today. Sigh.

I'm eagerly awaiting our tax return. We'll be paying off my student loan (yeeehawwww!!) and establishing the all important 'emergency fund' that Dave Ramsey insists you should have. After trying to follow his and Crowns ideas for the past 3 years or so with some, but not all the success I would have liked to see, we're finally going to knuckle down and establish this fund as both sources say you should do at the very start of a financial/get out of debt plan.
With the remaining money (there'd better be remaining money....grrr) we can get a few baby things. We need a carseat, I'll probably just get a used one. We DON'T have to get a new co-sleeper as I thought we would, as James opened it up and tighted all the loose spots. Cool. We need to buy some cheapie Ikea mattresses, because we're putting the girls into bunk beds. We were given some bunks, but no mattresses and I wanted to get that done before the baby comes and hopefully give the girls a week or two in the new beds before another huge change hit the house. I was looking at Honour last night in her little Dora toddler bed and she just...barely....fits. It's time. And there's a few miscellaneous things---the kids and I all need hair cuts, we should really hire an exterminator because we have a little ant problem that I know will just get worse as the weather gets better...etc.

And I really have so many things to do that I shouldn't be sitting here blogging.

So see ya later.

Get with the times

I thought we were past the phase of political correctness.

I remember being roughly in highschool when even the phrase 'politically correct' became well used. And then there were the changes in peoples' speech patterns that followed---it was like a race to see who could identify and change the most inaccurate and apparently offensive terms in western dialogue.

I have to admit, I wasn't completely immune to it. Up until this time, we had always called my sister mulatto. It was after an Oprah episode when I was a teenager that I started calling her 'bi-racial'. And not knowing many other black people at that time, if I had gone to Chicago then, I might have been caught using the word negro. For a bit near the beginning of my time in the States I likely used African American most often, but by the time I graduated, it was black. And then I've already posted about my feelings concerning the word retarded.

But I've often thought it was much ado about nothing. And perhaps it's that my patience is a little thin these days, but frankly, I think the kafuffle raised over the Toronto councilman's lapse in pc-ness and now the poor guy out west is just eye rolling.

They crucified Councillor Rob Ford a few days ago when he had the 'audacity' to lapse into his childhood speech pattern and call Asians 'Oriental'. Frankly, while I recognize that using the word 'oriental' is old fashioned, I've never heard any convincing argument for why it's offensive. I mean, it's nothing like using the word nigger; 'oriental' is just a behind the times term. It's about as offensive as wearing fluorescent. And while in defense of himself, I thought he raised a couple good points about various other public sources that still use the word oriental (some university department--I only heard the broadcast once). Hasbro better watch their tails! Pretty soon they'll be forced to recall all the Monopoly games and reprint them with Asian Avenue! And his use of the phrase 'work like a dog' to describe the Asian community--give me a break! We all know it's true and we've all thought it before. 'Work like a dog' might not be the classiest way to compliment a society on their industriousness, but I guess Ford is not the classiest guy--I really wouldn't know as I'd never heard his name up until this past week. (And yes, a bit of googling turned up a few other 'foot in mouth' experiences--I just don't think the guy should be publicly flogged for having a bit of a red neck).

Now the uproar over Regina MP Tom Lukiwski's shameful past. I'll admit, it's slightly more concerning than a political figure that can't keep up with racial terminology. I saw this on the news last night and again I was thinking, 'is there nothing more important for these people to be focusing on?'.
My issue has to do with the fact that a) This was 16 freakin years ago! 16 years ago, I was in my last year or two of highschool. The whole gay lifestyle was just starting it's rise to public acceptance. Part of that rise was the gay community embracing the word gay---remember, it used to mean happy!! Faggot was another one of those words that they commandeered and decided that it was now a positive term, just another way to describe them. This may or may not be true today, but in the early 90's, it was well used by non-gays.
B), Did you notice what was happening in that video? It's obviously a mild party scene. People were drinking, hanging around, joking and laughing, it's obviously an 'off duty' moment. Are you telling me that a politician has no down time? That he is constantly on display? Surprise people, politicians are people that have their own thoughts and opinions, but may or may not support those in public.....I think that would be a big part of their job!

And finally, C) Why the heck was this brought out in the first place? Because some idiot out there was salivating at the prospect of making this guy look bad. The news said that the video had been left in some party headquarters for years and was just recently cleaned out....so someone found this video, popped it in, saw this guy making the comments and decided....what? That he/she just couldn't bear to toss it? That they just had to call the evening news and courier the tape right over? Please. I just have a real problem in ruining a guys life over a comment he made half a lifetime ago, in a down and possibly inebriated moment, using again, an old fashioned term, a barely-registering-on-the-insult-gauge term (I can hear it now, "yeah, well you've got dirt under your fingernails" will be ruling the schoolyard for the next few years), and a, well, truthful term. Do gays get diseases? They do. Do they transmit it to other people? They do. More than a straight guy married to the same woman his whole life? Indeed. Let the guy say sorry and get back to work people.