39 Weeks

I just got back from my 39 week midwife appointment. It would seem all the contractions I've been having have actually been doing something--I went from just a fingertip dilated last week to a full 1 cm, 50-60% effaced and the bean is at a -2 station. (She needs to move from -4 to 0 and then on to +4, which is at the exit, so she's started heading in the right direction!) I'm fully expecting a long wait, but having a little progress is so reassuring!

I asked our midwife to estimate how big the bean might end up being and she told me 8 - 8 1/2 pounds. Some may think me crazy for rejoicing at this news, but considering I myself was a 10 pounder, 8 pounds doesn't bother me at all. I know the estimate could be off, but I needed to hear at this point that they think she's going to be at least a tad smaller than I was, whether it ends up being the case or not.

So, the plan for next week is to have a non-stress test on my due date. If, for some reason, the bean isn't doing well they'll send me right off for an induction, otherwise I'll be offered an induction for the following week (which I'll decline). Then we'll have more waiting, I'm sure.

We're still keeping ourselves busy with cleaning and working on house projects until the bean decides to show her face. For some reason, I'm procrastinating on finishing up my diaper sewing and putting those last couple items into the hospital bag. I did, however, convince the boy that we should set up the pack and play in the living room, just in case that's what was keeping the bean. Doesn't seem to have had much of an effect, though.

We realized as we were starting to pack our hospital bags that we as yet didn't have a baby book. I hadn't really given this much thought, as I expected we'd pick something up at one of the baby stores. I knew that we'd end up with something that mentioned mommy and daddy, but figured it'd only be one page and we could work around it. Unfortunately, when we started looking at the books, most had mommy and daddy references on every page. That clearly won't work for us, so we explored our options with internet retailers and found this.

This book advertises itself for single, adoptive, and same-sex parents and has removable pages, so it can be customized for most any situation. There is even a page for information about the sperm (or egg) donor, which we thought would be nice for the bean to have. Its not quite as flashy as some of the other books we've looked at; in fact, we both thought we could have made sometime similar ourselves but we also knew it would be a project we'd think about and possibly never finish before the bean arrived.

Still, it will definitely serve our purposes and thank goodness there won't be a lot of daddy mommy references!