3 am. No, nothing's happening

Well, I AM having a contraction right now, but it's not a "real" one. I just can't sleep. I did yet another load of laundry. Every time I wear something, I think that I won't get to wear it again until after Maggie is here. Then I do another load of laundry and, ta-da! I can wear it again, and she still isn't here. I also need to make sure all Charlotte's clothes are clean, since she's suddenly too big for so many things that I considered staples just a week ago. She tells me they're too small by saying, "Too tight, Mommy! Too big!" At first, I thought she was telling me some clothes were too big, but now I understand she was referring to herself as too big for the clothes. She often follows that statement with, "Save for Maggie."

Tonight, Charlotte woke up crying 3 hours after going to bed. She almost never wakes up in the middle of the night, and even when she does, she's usually pretty quiet and goes back to sleep after rearranging her blankets. So, when I heard the crying, I picked her up and held her. She calmed down immediately and then asked to see Maggie. She stood in front of me while I sat in the glider, lifted my shirt and started talking to her baby sister- "Hi, Maggie. Birthday soon? Charlotte hug and kiss Maggie." She patted my belly, gave it a kiss, and pulled my shirt back down. And looked me in the eye and said, "Charlotte eat some food now. Yes!" I was hoping she sensed something I hadn't, that maybe Maggie was plotting her exit. But here we are 4 hours later and I'm awake only because I decided to throw another load of laundry in the dryer.

Speaking of which, the dryer just buzzed. I'll try sleeping now. I should be able to squeeze in about 4 hours of shut-eye before Charlotte wakes up for the day.

as pregnant as one can be

I don't know if I gained weight overnight or if Maggie just shifted, but today ALL of my maternity clothes are snug. Yesterday, they were still somewhat roomy, the way I like to wear my clothes. The belly doesn't look any lower, but I can feel something-sometimes pressure and sometimes just a presence- just above my pubic bone. I believe she's dropped a bit, and I am hoping like mad that she's about ready to make her way out. I am soooo done with being pregnant. This is how I felt when I told my boss on a Friday that my maternity leave would start the following Monday, whether Charlotte had arrived or not. And Charlotte was born less than 72 hours later.

NST tomorrow. Hoping not to need it.

a normal day

I just felt like writing that nothing appears to be happening today. I may get to watch the Super Bowl after all. (But I am hoping to have jinxed that by saying that nothing's happening, because that's what I did last time)

So yeah- nothing, aside from a lot of wishful thinking.

39w1d

I had what I hope will be my last OB visit today. Once again, I declined the cervical check. Realistically, it wouldn't have told us anything useful. Women have been known to be a couple of centimeters dilated for weeks before going into labor. And some women don't dilate until labor has set in. Maggie's heart rate was consistently between 132 and 140, as per usual. My blood pressure was perfect, and fundal height measured in between 39 and 40 weeks. All is well.

I finally asked the big question- if Maggie has not emerged by my due date, what are our plans? Since I have the same doc as last time, I was not surprised to hear the same explanation I got with my previous pregnancy- "at 40 weeks, a woman over 40 has the same risk of stillbirth as a woman of 27 at 42 weeks." The combination of AMA and GD usually translates into induction at 39 weeks, but they're "letting" me go for now to see how much longer this pregnancy will continue on its own. I have a 40w1d OB appointment next Friday (which I hope will not be needed) at which we'll discuss an induction procedure in more detail. My doc is not comfortable with going beyond Monday, 2/13, so if Maggie's not out on her own by then... yikes.

Truthfully, I suspect that my own mental state has something to do with the onset of labor. We've been so relaxed thus far that there has been no real reason to go into labor "early." I say that with quotation marks because anything after 38 weeks is considered full-term, so nothing since 1/26 would have been considered early. I don't complete things very well without a definite deadline ahead of me. I like to finish a little early, but I was never one of those students who could write a paper over the weekend when it wasn't due until Thursday. So, knowing that I have until the 13th might be enough to get things rolling.

That and the Super Bowl. As with my previous pregnancy, the due date is a Thursday. My water broke on Sunday evening at 8:00, and Charlotte arrived 5 1/2 hours later. My husband is trying to come to grips with the fact that he may have to watch the game on the small, slightly fuzzy, hospital room TV if we follow the same timeline as we did with Charlotte's emergence. And since I haven't seen a complete football game all season (we do have a toddler to entertain, after all), why should I be able to watch this one? My ideal would be... oh, who cares what my ideal would be. It's not as if I can plan this, try as I may.

Charlotte has been a little under the weather the last couple of days. She threw up last night at dinner- only the second time in her entire life that she's done more than infant-y spit-up (I am very very lucky) and had a temp of 101. This morning it was down to 99.6. I forgot to check tonight, but she still felt a teensie bit warm to the touch and she's a bit more sleepy than normal. She also has a runny nose, but nothing that appears to bother her at all. In fact, she seems to enjoy the excuse to ask for a tissue every few minutes so she can swipe it across her face and deposit it in the closest trash can "all by yourself." She also likes "catching" fake sneezes in her elbow whenever I remind her to catch her coughs and sneezes there. We have a plan in place, should Maggie arrive while Charlotte isn't quite 100%. C will bring Charlotte to the hospital, and he'll stay in my room with Maggie while Charlotte and I have a lunch date in the cafeteria. I can't imagine not seeing her for the couple of days I'll probably stay at the hospital (where I won't have to cook or clean.... bliss!), but she obviously can't be in my room with Maggie if she's not completely healthy.

My bag is (almost) completely packed. Maggie's bag is packed. The camera is charging now. All our February bills have been paid (that's my job- C doesn't even know where all our bills are). The bassinett is ready. My parents are on stand-by. The nursery is nowhere near complete, but I'm OK with that. We're ready enough. I'll post when something happens.

"all by yourself"

That's her favorite expression lately, "all by yourself." Sometimes, it's "Charlotte do all by yourself." She wants to dress herself, walk up and down the stairs solo, push the stroller, make my coffee,... The strange thing isn't that she wants to do all these things, it's that she CAN. There are so many things she can suddenly do that I wonder how long she was able to do them before learning to express her desire to do them for herself. She puts on her pants, only needing help to pull up the back. She puts her socks on so expertly that when she awakens from a nap, I assume she kept her socks on the whole time. Then I notice later that they're on different feet (a design on only one side of each gave that away). She finds her sleeves herself while putting on a shirt, and unless the neck is really snug manages to pull it over her head too. She WALKS down stairs now without holding my hand- not that she's suddenly tall enough to fully use the railing, but she's figured out how to lower herself on one leg until the other foot reaches the stair below. And going up, which she's been doing on her own for a long time, she's no longer happy with herself if her knees touch the steps. She dances on her own when music is playing, no longer demanding to be in my arms as we both bounce around the room. She opens packages, puts her hats on, stacks blocks and knocks them down... "by yourself. No help Mommy." She even wipes her own nose.

A few other milestones have been hit in the last couple of weeks. She finally caught some air while jumping off a door mat at the paint store (she'll jump off anything... especially likes the thresholds between rooms in our house). She's on her way to potty training herself, requesting a trip to the potty on a few occasions when she really did have to go- entirely on her own, without any training or suggestions from us, and not only when we're trying to get her into bed. Her speech is incredible, not just in the number of words she uses, but how she uses them. Asking for something, she knows how to say please and how to be specific, or vague, when it's appropriate... "Please Mommy, watch Abby Flying Fairy School on TV?" "Please Mommy, watch something on TV?" She conjugates verbs, not always correctly, but logically... "Charlotte waked up from nap." She tells us what's polite or not-so-nice... "Somebody sneeze, say 'bless you.'" She says "Thank you" for just about everything... "Thank you babies!" after swim class every week, "Thank you, Uncle Dan" whenever she wears an outfit my brother gave to her. She thanks the mailman for stopping at our mailbox, the sun for shining, and trees for giving her pine cones to play with. She tells me what she loves (hot dogs, spaghetti sauce, Mommy, Daddy, Maggie, the cat) and all the things that other beings love ("Reilly loves Charlotte." "Mommy loves Charlotte sooooo much." "Daddy loves pizza."). She explains things to her babies (her dolls)- "Poopie diaper smell yucky." "No eat socks." "Mommy Charlotte go bye-bye, you sleep here." "Knuckle on cheek sign apple." And she still comes out with words that she learned from who-knows-where.

Sleep-wise, she's suddenly having a hard time with naps. Yesterday, she was demonstrably tired, but played in her crib for two hours before crying for a couple of minutes then falling asleep. For 25 minutes. I usually put her down around 12:30, and until recently she'd go right to sleep and wake at about 3:00. It was heavenly, having those hours in the middle of the day when I could get something done and take a nap myself.

Nighttimes are still a breeze, but we've changed our explanation of how to know when it's time for bed. We used to tell her she could read 3 stories, or build some number of towers, but she would find ways to stall- refusing to knock over a tower (so we couldn't build the next one) or select a book, sometimes requesting we read a different book when we were halfway through another one as if an incomplete book didn't count against the bedtime countdown. So, last week I introduced her to her clock. I told her that it would be time for bed when the slow hand was on the 3. Stall as she might, the clock kept on ticking and it was bedtime before we'd finished even a single book. I showed her the clock, and she didn't argue with me! For a week now, we've wrapped up our bedtime routine based on the clock and it's gone well. Some nights, she gets 5 or 6 stories, plust time to build towers. Tonight, she got one story and one song and that was it. And she went down without a fuss. It's fantastic! And it only works because she knows her numbers.

Speaking of which, she can consistently count things up to 3, sometimes as high as 5 but usually just to 3. She can recite numbers through 12. She recites the entire alphabet and can identify about 10 letters consistently. She knows her colors and her shapes (well, not octagon, hexagon, pentagon, etc. Those are really hard). Every week or two, we return books to the library and check out some new ones. She always picks one book as her favorite and wants to read only that one, over and over. She sings songs, currently including "Jingle Bells," "You are My Sunshine," "Twinkle Twinkle," "Itsy Bitsy (complete with hand gestures)," and "It's Raining, It's Pouring." She follows along with instructions within songs (i.e. "Feel the rhythm in your hands and go clap-clap-clap"- and she claps).

We can't help but compare what she does today with things she could do 6 months or a year ago. It's amazing how much she's grown as a person. She has an incredible confidence about her- not an arrogance, but the confidence in herself to walk into a room full of kids she doesn't know and to make herself at home there, to find a friend or a special toy to play with. I hope she never loses that.

still pregnant

Less than two weeks from the due date now. Yippee! I'm hoping this girl decides to be a little early. I'm learning that I got off remarkably easy with my frist pregnancy, as sciatica and carpal tunnel syndrome have settled in. I sleep with wrist braces on, but my fingers still manage to go numb, and it feels like there's a dagger beside my tailbone. But we're SOOOO close now. Maggie moves a lot. The weekly NSTs have been textbook, and I'm measuring perfectly on-target (no weight gain in the last 3 weeks- the promised plateau after rapid gain early-on). I had BH contractions last night for about 90 minutes, 7 minutes apart, and caught myself wishing they were the real thing. But the nursery still isn't painted (Charlotte helped picked a color- Sherwin Williams "Breathtaking"), so we're not really ready.

I'll post some about Charlotte at 22 months soon. She's developing more personality every day, and has begun quite an independent streak.

training herself?

Charlotte's latest favorite stall tactic at nap and bedtimes is to announce, after she's in bed and covered in blankets, that her diaper is poopy and should be changed. She says it this way, as though it were my idea that she needs a fresh diaper- "Change diaper, please, Mommy? Poopy. Yes, OK!"

Well, one evening, I called her on it. The diaper was not only poop-less, it was completely dry, so I asked her if she wanted to try pooping on the potty. We've had a potty chair in the bathroom since she was 15 months old, or thereabouts, and she likes to sit on it when I use the bathroom (I'm not shy about it, and it seems like a good way to teach her that potty use is completely normal). She said she wanted to poop on the potty, so we went in and, for the first time ever, she sat on the potty with a bear bum (except for once or twice when I hastily pulled her out of the bathtub because she looked like she was trying to do something). She stood up every 30 seconds to see if anything had materialized. She grunted and pushed. Finally, she decided there would be no poopies that night and started to walk back to her room. I didn't notice at first, and I don't think she realized it either, but she did manage to pee in the potty. Woohoo!

So, now she knows that asking to have her diaper changed can buy her 2 or 3 minutes out of bed, but asking to use the potty gets her a LOT more time. That's good enough motivation for me... if that's what she wants to use as the impetus to potty train, I'm all for it. I wasn't planning to start anything until summer, but if she wants to start now, I'm on board. Time to get some potty books from the library!

On the baby front... three weeks left until the "due date." My doc has not mentioned induction, and I have not brought it up because I don't want to open the subject. Maybe she'd "let" me pass my due date this time since things went so well with Charlotte, but I'd prefer not to find out. I feel huge. Music classes with Charlotte wear me out, with all the standing up and sitting down and standing up again. My belly rests on my thighs when I sit, whether on the floor or on a chair. I've asked my mother to join Charlotte for waterbabies classes now that my bathing suit top isn't long enough to cover the underside of my belly, let alone tuck into the bottoms to keep it from floating up. I can sleep for about 2 hours at a stretch before something wakes me up- until a few nights ago, it was numb fingers from carpel tunnel; last night it was achey hips. Wrist braces are heaven-sent, but there's no cure (except delivery) for the hips. And if I manage to shift off the painful hip in my sleep, I wind up on my back and wake up because it's hard to breathe in that position. I remember now why I was so convinced we should buy a recliner if I managed to get pregnant again. We didn't buy one, and with just 3 weeks left of this, I'm not about to spend the money now.

I have had 4 NSTs now, and Maggie has been wonderfully reactive and cooperative at each one. BH contractions have been occuring more and more frequently, and I've enjoyed watching the scale of them on the monitor- comparing the relative intensity I feel with the numbers I see. Nothing painful, but they do command my attention when they strike. I don't know if I'm optimistic or naive, or naively optimistic, but I am hoping and planning for a delivery as smooth as Charlotte's this time around. I haven't attended any birth classes or spent much time practicing my self-hypnosis and breathing, but I did re-read the Hypnobirthing book. And I've been telling anyone who'll listen that my preferred labor position is ALONE and private.

The nesting impulse has struck, but in my case that means that I filled the freezer with healthy-ish convenient foods for after Maggie arrives. I'm doing laundry tonight so I can pack my bag and have it ready, just in case. Everyone has been reminding me that subsequent deliveries are usually much quicker than the first one. Only about 3 hours elapsed between my first real contraction and Charlotte's emergence (5 1/2 hours from when my water broke), so the consensus is that I'll have no time to dawdle once Maggie announces her intention to come out. Of course, that has no bearing on the early/late/on-time part of the equation, but once it starts I may not have time to shower, eat, and pack like I did last time.

So, huge, achey, and tired but feeling quite well otherwise. Charlotte is excited to meet her baby sister and made a teddy bear for her this week, complete with recorded message, "Happy Birthday, Maggie! I love you." She made one for herself too, and insisted on picking the identical bear for both herself and the baby. The nursery is not ready, and we still need to get the guest bed out of Charlotte's room so my mother has someplace to sleep. Therefore, I am confident that Maggie will not be more than a week early...maybe 10 days, giving us time to finish all the preparations. I'll do my best to post before heading off to the hospital, so if you don't see anything for a week or two, assume I'm still pregnant.