 | Diary Navigation:
|
December 21, 2003
Weeks 30 and 31—December 21st, 2003
I posted an entry on Dec. 18th covering weeks 25-29. Finally, I’m caught up!
29 Week Prenatal (December 8th)
The morning of my appointment, Jeanne called to say that she had a mom in labor and she’d let me know later whether that would affect my 5:30 prenatal. After lunch she called back to say that she hadn’t even been called to the other woman’s house yet, so Dan and I would just be meeting with Kim instead.
Dan was glad to see Kim again, although in four prenatals, we haven’t managed to have both Dan and I and both midwives all together. I love Kim’s house—she has a 1920’s bungalow, and I’d love for my next house to be just like it. Her kids and her pets are always running around and it feels like such a cozy place to grow up.
The pee stick showed a trace of protein, but that happened the last time I had an appointment just before dinner, too, so she wasn’t too concerned. We later found that my intestines were making more noise on the fetoscope than the baby, so it was clear that I needed to eat more than anything else.
Checking my vitals showed that my weight gain was now up 25 pounds (I really hope this four pounds every fortnight pattern doesn’t keep up much longer) and my blood pressure was 98/50. I’ve never had a bottom number that low and Kim asked if I’ve been dizzy. I haven't, and apparently that's the only potential bad side effect of such low blood pressure, so I’d rather it go down than up! If it stays this low through to the end, it’s probably better that I wasn’t counting on an epidural, since that would lower my b/p even more. My fundal height measured exactly 29cm—that’s the first time I haven’t measured about a week behind.
I laid back so she could measure me, and Kim, Dan, and I all looked at my belly and gaped. My right side was sticking WAY up. The baby's never been over there before! And to make it more interesting, I was apparently in the middle of a Braxton Hicks and had no idea. She palpated and decided that the baby was lying breech posterior, on the right. That's the exact opposite from two weeks ago when he/she was vertex anterior. Silly kid, doesn't he realize that moving around isn't going to help? There just isn't going to be any more space in there. He must have shifted sometime since the day before, because I started feeling kicks low and to the left all of a sudden, and they were high for weeks before that. So crazy. Since the baby's back is squished against the placenta, she had a heck of a time getting a heartbeat. She eventually counted it at just under 140 beats/minute but couldn't keep the fetoscope at a loud enough spot for me to hear it. We tried coercing the baby into moving, and he did move a bit, but wouldn’t budge enough for the heartbeat to be obvious. I did hear my intestines making quite a racket.
Kim also began checking for swelling this time. She pressed my skin near my ankle and it popped back normally. She said that if the indentation had remained, she would have kept checking every couple inches up to my knee to see how far it went. Maintaining low blood pressure and no swelling is really reassuring since those are the most common things that would lead me towards risking-out of homebirth.
We spent some time discussing the possibilities if the baby stays breech. I’m really not worried about it since the baby has been flipping around so much in the past couple weeks, but it was good to know what could happen. By 34 weeks, if the baby remains breech, they’ll send me to a pair of chiropractors to try the Webster technique. If that (and other approaches I could try at home) aren’t successful, they’ll recommend that I transfer care to one of a few obstetricians in the area. These ob’s have the experience to vaginally deliver breech babies and they get along well with my midwives, so I wouldn’t have trouble with their being at the hospital for the birth. My midwives have delivered a number of breeches at home, but since I’m a first-time mom, their preference is that I transfer care. As long as the choice isn’t to homebirth with them or have a C-section, then I’d be okay with an ob-attended hospital birth where I’ll be respected and have a high chance of a vaginal birth.
We discussed my exercise—or lack thereof. Since the weather here has been below freezing with regular snowfalls, it’s been easy to skip regular exercise. Kim recommended going to malls and walking whenever possible (and not just meandering past window displays). Between the weather and our busy evenings, we still haven’t walked much (bad Amy!). I’m realizing that labor is an awfully athletic event and the more prepared I am, the better it will be. But the staying on the couch is so much easier!
Now that I’ve been seeing them for two months, we finally talked about how we’d be paying them. Although Kim and Kathy had an exact payment schedule delineated when we interviewed them, things weren’t as cut and dry as we first thought. Kim and Jeanne charge different amounts, so we even needed to settle that. It turns out that both of them are willing to work out whatever payment plan we can handle, as long as we explain what we’ll do so they know they’ll be paid eventually. We agreed on $2500 (the lower of the two charges), with half to be paid in the next few weeks, and the remaining half to be paid around 36 weeks. Kim usually charges the extra $500 to have someone fight the insurance company for us. Instead, she’ll submit the paperwork to the insurance person, but we’ll deal with the aftermath. We’ll be able to call their person for advice, so I think I can handle it. They’ve told us that the insurance company will almost certainly reject the claim the first time around, but if we keep bugging them, they’ll cave eventually. Apparently, nearly all clients who continue after a rejection or three will get most of their money back at some point.
Symptoms During Weeks 30 and 31
I had a couple weeks of relief in the acid reflux department. I have no idea why it eased up (maybe it has to do with the baby’s position?), but I’ll take it! Breathing hasn’t become difficult—yet. My mom says she never really had trouble with that, but she didn’t get stretch marks, so I’m no longer assuming that I’ll have things as easily as she did. She didn’t get kicks in the ribs, which makes sense if she is so long-waisted that her babies never reached that high. So far so good for me, there. My kid seems determined to stay pretty low, so if she ever goes head down and stretches out, then that could change.
The Saturday that I hit 30 weeks (which was an exciting milestone—down to the single digits to go!), after eating little meals throughout the day, I got hit by the worst acid reflux yet. I spent a couple hours that evening trying to find some position that wasn’t horribly painful. I can’t imagine dealing with that constantly. Other than that day, I’ve had hints of it returning, but nothing quite that bad.
I had a few weeks without nighttime leg cramps (the first was around 20 weeks, after which I began taking a calcium supplement), then got them two nights in a row. I used to wake up from them, but I think that now I’ve been waking up and stretching and that’s what causes the cramp. They happen in the early morning and I usually flip over a couple times and twist around until it fades. Dan doesn’t wake up and only notices if my twisting leaves him without any covers.
Pre-pregnancy, I was generally a tummy-sleeper. Since that stopped being possible, I’ve really tried to sleep on my left side. However, I find myself waking up on my back a lot. Particularly when I get leg cramps, lying on my back seems to be more comfortable than any other option. If I settle in that position, I end up dreaming that the baby has dying for lack of blood flow. No matter how ridiculous that might be, it’s very comforting to feel the first kicks of the day.
Speaking of kicks, they’re getting much more interesting these days. I still don’t think the baby kicks as much as most moms say theirs did. But my kid has some very active days now. On Thursday (the 18th), I thought the baby was trying to tunnel out of my right side. For a couple hours in the morning, and then again most of the afternoon, I could feel a foot scraping against my side. It’s so hard not to stare at my belly and laugh. Until now, the baby stayed pretty calm while I was at work. After an hour of the spelunker, I couldn’t sit still anymore and had one of my co-workers feel a few kicks. He had asked if he could feel the baby move around at some point, and the baby gave him some good shoves. He hadn’t ever feel a baby kick before and thought it was pretty exciting. He was surprised to hear that I’ve been feeling movement since October. It’s hard to ignore now that I can watch my belly ripple if the baby’s particularly antsy.
The next day, apparently the child realized the futility of digging out through my right side. Instead, he flipped around and tried his luck with my left side. After an hour or so, he settled down and gave up. At least the learning process was quicker this time!
Since the baby seems to flip around almost daily now, most evenings Dan and I try to figure out what position the baby has settled in. It seems that the most common position is low and transverse, with legs going up towards my right. We aren’t too sure of what we’re doing, but it’s usually pretty obvious where the baby is, if not which part is which. There’s enough space left that my whole uterus isn’t full of baby yet, and sometimes the baby is hiding more towards my back and we can’t feel his body parts as clearly. Whenever we start poking and pushing my belly around, the baby tries to move away and goes farther from the surface. It’s so much fun finally feeling like we’re interacting with the baby!
I haven’t yet begun freaking out about delivery (everyone says I will at some point), but the reality that we’re going to be parents soon is beginning to dawn on us. One morning I asked Dan, “Who let us do this?!” To me, it seems like the baby will somehow come out and I can’t really control how that happens, but parenting is a completely different story. There are a million choices we need to make and a ton of books all recommending contradicting advice. I lean towards Dr. Sears and attachment parenting, but then I worry that my baby won’t co-sleep and will want to breast-feed 24 hours a day, and then what? I don’t want to say that I’ll attachment parent for certain before I find out what my baby is like and how we interact with each other. I know that we can start with certain ideas, and if they don’t work, just do whatever we have to, but the unknown of it all is pretty mind-boggling. It simultaneously makes me anxious to meet our baby and terrified that our pre-conceived ideas will fall down around us when the time comes. Oh goodness.
Last Bradley Class
After skipping class number nine (which was mostly role-playing hospital situations), we went to our last pre-birth Bradley class on the 15th. Dan thought she might give us a test. Luckily, it was much more fun than that. We first watched a video about touch that showed how doulas help during labor and how massaged babies are healthier than those who aren’t. Then, two sets of new parents came in and told their children’s birth stories. The first couple had a doctor they’d never met fighting them throughout the whole labor. He mocked them for passing up drugs and wore her down until she accepted the episiotomy she’d insisted on avoiding, then manually extracted her placenta for no reason. Two months later and they were still pissed about it. The second couple had had a troublesome pregnancy with their doctor telling them the baby would be too small and not healthy and who knows what else. She ended up being induced with a different doctor who worked with them and gave her the best birth experience she could have hoped for. Both their babies were adorable, healthy infants who looked like spitting images of their parents. I continue to be grateful that I’m avoiding both the unknown-doctor and the fighting-during-labor possibilities by having a midwife-assisted homebirth. In the worst possible situation, I’ll be dealing with an emergency transport and having an immediate C-section, in which case the bedside manner of the on-call doc won’t matter much. Any non-emergency situation will mean that I’m transferred to a doc that my midwives know and trust.
After the couples gave their stories, the instructors had the dads diaper and dress dolls. She had a variety of cloth and disposable diapers, and watching the guys do this was hilarious. I know I wouldn’t have been much better, but that didn’t keep me from laughing at them! I assume that we’ll be changing our child often enough that we’ll get the hang of it quickly. She also showed us how to swaddle a baby. Then, she put the moms at a table of feeding equipment and gave us a list of questions to answer while she showed the guys how to make homemade wipes. The questions varied from “where do you go for breastfeeding advice” to “what bottles and nipples are best for the baby” and others. When she went over the answers with us, we usually were close, but had no clue on some things. I wonder how long a breast-pump will look so confusing.
Sometime this spring, our Bradley group will get together with our babies. The five couples are due anywhere from early January until mid-March, so it’ll be awhile. It’s hard to believe that the next time I see them, we’ll have babies with us!
Non-Pregnancy Odds and Ends
A couple weeks ago, we spent a Sunday afternoon walking up and down the aisles at Home Depot. I’m not impressed with the helpfulness of the staff. Granted, we couldn’t find tile on our own either, but you’d think it wouldn’t take that long for someone to show us where it was. We checked out sinks, toilets (no, we don’t have a toilet in our kitchen, but I DESPISE the one we do have, and I’m contemplating replacing it now and not waiting until we do the rest of the bathroom in the next year), plywood (for bookshelves), brackets (bookshelves), faucets, screws and caulk (to fix our front door), and tile. All we left with was the tile ($150 worth) and the door-fixing stuff. I still need to call the contractor to clear up questions about the bookshelf materials, and we managed to forget to look at counters. After Christmas, after Christmas.
My husband is a die-hard Lord of the Rings fan. After two years of marriage and five years of dating before that, he’s gotten me pretty hooked, too. I’ve now read the series twice—once just after we started dating, and once this fall, when I was starting to get the books and movies mixed up. One theatre in our area was showing the extended versions of the two early movies for a week each, so we bought tickets two months ago to be sure we could see them. I knew I wouldn’t be able to handle seeing all three in one day (and tickets sold out immediately anyway), but we ended up seeing FOTR on Thursday the 11th at 8:45, then TT the next day at 8:40. I may have zoned out a bit around the halfway point of each, but for the most part, I enjoyed being able to see the long versions on the big screen. Dan went to a midnight Tuesday showing of Return of the King, but I’ve held out until this weekend so I can watch it at a reasonable time of day. I haven’t seen it yet, but I can’t imagine that I won’t really enjoy it. I’m glad all three movies are out pre-baby because it certainly made it easier to see. We haven’t gone to many movies this year, but I couldn’t have skipped this. I’ve had fun since the first movie watching the box office earnings and seeing how LOTR compares to other box office blockbusters.
This is the first year of our marriage that Dan and I have both had full-time jobs, so it seems only fair that we not be completely scroogy with Christmas gifts. I braved the mall the day after Thanksgiving with the other women-folk in my family and managed to buy gifts for some of the hard-to-shop-for types. Then a week ago, it occurred to me that only a few people were taken care of, and I went crazy on Amazon. Well, not that crazy, but another five people got crossed off the list of 22. We bought a few odds and ends at church last week to add to the pile. Today (Saturday the 20th), I sat down with the list of remaining recipients and figured out how to finish the shopping without entering a mall. We filled the car with snacks and survival gear, and braved the crowds. After making a half dozen stops along Grand Avenue (sort of a main street of restaurants, independent shops, and the occasional chain store), we headed towards a satellite area around a mall. Without entering the mall itself, we parked the car once and got to a bookstore, office supply store, and toy store with minimal pain. Four hours and many dollars later, our shopping is done. I think everything we got is useful, and most things were specifically requested, so we’re probably safe. We’re hoping to get a tree tomorrow, wrap everything in the next couple evenings, and decorate the tree Christmas Eve. I’ll let you know how that turns out.
TTM: Does anyone else out there have a baby who only kicked sporadically at this point in pregnancy? What’s your caregiver’s policy on breech babies? Did dressing a baby come naturally to you? How did your ideas about parenthood change once the baby arrived?
Next time, I’ll talk about my 31 week prenatal, our Christmas celebrations, and my first baby shower, all of which are scheduled for this upcoming week.
 |  |
|
want to keep a diary on iParenting?
Authoring a diary on the iParenting network allows you to chronicle your family's story, preserving it for years to come. It's also a great way to get the most out of the iParenting community. Click here to start...
|
The iParenting Media Awards program helps parents find the best products for their families. 
