The last 24 hours

Well...a lot has happened in the last 24 hours. Thankfully, I never had to go through this with my daughter, but for some reason these boys of mine like to put me through a long, difficult pre-labor. At least I know this time around it won't go past a certain point, but it's hard to be contracting so much when nothing is progressing and we're just waiting around buying our time to have the surgery. If we make it 10 more days it will be an act of God, but we are hanging in there as long as we can!

Those "20 min-apart contractions" I'd been having since Saturday turned a lot more painful and frequent last night. They woke me up around midnight and were coming a lot closer together, so I started timing them at 5-7 minutes apart for pretty much the entire night. Not much sleep happening around here. We stuck it out till morning and called in as the doctor requested. I knew they would want me to come in to get checked, but I also knew that I wasn't in active labor which meant they would monitor me again for awhile and probably end up sending me home. But, better safe than sorry, and we want to make sure this little guy continues to do well, so we went in.

I was dehydrated (hadn't eaten or drank anything in case we went ahead with the surgery) and had a slight fever so they gave me an IV (after blowing 2 of my veins - never had that happen before and boy does that hurt!! My arm is so sore now!) My contractions continued and were still pretty strong, but became less frequent than I was having during the night.

Good news is that the baby continues to be extremely active (everyone was amazed at how active he was - he didn't stop moving the whole time we were there! he's going to come out running I think!) and his heart rate was excellent. I learned that babies that are very happy in utero have spurts of accelerated heart rate, which is a great sign they are getting plenty of oxygen, and he had welllll over the number of spurts for a happy baby.

So, we are back home resting, and going to try some pain meds tonight to get some sleep. The doctor doesn't want me to be having contractions that close together again, so if they become that frequent and are strong enough to wake me up even with the meds, we'll go back in and evict this baby! With Brad working nights all weekend, the kids and I are going to stay at my parent's house so I'm not home alone with them at night, plus I'll be closer to the hospital. (Funny thing is that if we did have the c-section today, guess who was the one on call to do the surgery...Brad! Yeah they would have had to call someone in to replace him, haha.) Hopefully things will stay calm enough for me to sleep, and we can try to keep him happy in my tummy for a bit longer. As much as I can't wait to meet him, I want him to be born as healthy and developed as possible, so the closer we can get to my scheduled date the better.

10 days (or less!) and counting!