On Tuesday night, after crawling around on the floor picking up Oliver’s toys, I started having mild pain and contractions.  I went to bed, slept for a couple of hours, but couldn’t lay there any longer (anticipation + pain = no time to sleep).  I got up at 3:30, cleaned the kitchen, had a cup of decaf tea, watched some BBC Canada (Blackadder, The Office, Little Britain – at least they have some halfway decent stuff on for night owls!) and tried to stop my mind racing.  The mild pain and contractions continued all night and morning, but didn’t get any worse.

I notified my mother and warned her she was probably going to have to come and stay with us (to take care of Oliver).  I sent Mark to work anyway, as I think we would have enough time for him to get home before I would need to head in to hospital.  I got a few hours’ sleep on the couch from around 7am to 10am.  I then called my OB’s office to get some advice on whether or not I should come in for my scheduled 41 week appointment.  They said if I felt I didn’t need to be in hospital, I could still go.

The first part of the appointment was a scan to make sure everything was okay – my OB indicated the week before that there is a certain number of ‘points’ you need to achieve on this scan, and if there’s any issues (e.g. low fluid), they’ll send you to hospital right away.  The technician said everything was fine, and sent me up to the OB’s office.  They send up the results of the scan, and the admin assistant helpfully says to me, as I sit and wait for my appointment, HOLY CRAP EMMA, 9lbs 15oz!!

Can I just point out that’s over 3 pounds more than Oliver weighed.  Bloody hell. Also, I am well aware that these scan guesses of weights are quite inaccurate (they predicted Oliver was bigger than he was), but still.  Scary.

Anyway, the scan sort of did me in a bit (I felt like the contractions and pain were getting worse as she prodded me), but I still had to lie down and let my OB hear a heartbeat and do bump measurement and all that stuff.   And then we had to have the nice chat where we both freak out about what weight they are saying and she has to tell me that if he weighed anymore, she’d be booking me in for a c-section.  And because Oliver was stuck at 6lbs 10oz (I never wrote his birth story, mostly because I didn’t want to, but it involved a failed ventouse/suction and eventual forceps), someone at the hospital is going to have to make a clinical decision about how we are going to proceed if I need to turn up for my scheduled Friday induction.

But, you know, I was already having contractions, so everyone in the office wished me luck, and that they continued, and that things would proceed as they should.

Last night my mother came over to stay in case we needed to head to hospital, I maintained some sort of balance between moving around a lot (possibly getting things going?) and sitting still (resting is good when you are in pain), and went to bed at normal time.  I felt as if the contractions and pain got slightly worse at bedtime.  But then, really, slept not that badly because I stopped having contractions and being in any pain.  So my mother has gone back home, to go to work.  Mark is at work.  And I am at home again, having a normal day.  Except I did go back to sleep from 7am until 10am because Oliver was awake at 5:30am for some unknown reason and I was just exhausted from entertaining him.

So tomorrow, I will get called in the morning and unless everyone else in this part of the world is having a baby tomorrow and there’s no room at the inn, I will have to go in for an induction.  And maybe it will turn into a c-section.  Exactly what I wanted to avoid both pregnancies.

This has just been so different compared to how things ended with Oliver (water broke at 39 weeks, and things proceeded from there).  I totally don’t understand.  Is there something I should have done differently?  How the hell did I end up 41+ weeks pregnant with a gigantor baby??

I’ll update again after I deal with the unpleasantness of this weekend.  At this point, I am thinking I would rather just continue being really pregnant.  I mean, the baby seems happy in there, can’t he stay?  I’d prefer that to surgery.   Wish us luck.  Or just survival.