Okay, NewBaby will be making his appearance any day now.<\/p>\n
I am 37 weeks pregnant, and although Milo was born 4 days AFTER his due date, I am convinced that his little brother is going to make an early appearance, despite being told at my last midwife appointment I was only 1 cm dilated and not looking like anything was going to happen anytime soon.<\/p>\n
That was on Tuesday morning. However, last night my uterus decided to do some gearing up and for two hours straight I had some pretty painful contractions that were coming anywhere from 3 to 5 minutes appart, lasting about a minute each. Changing position, lying down, and having a big glass of water didn’t help. But because the contractions didn’t seem to intensify with time, we decided to hold off on calling our midwife and birth assistant, which I’m glad about, because it turns out it was only false labor.<\/p>\n
But today I feel like I got hit by a truck! Seriously, my body is actually sore from the work it did last night. Which brings me to the serious kick in the ass I needed to finish getting ready for NewBaby.<\/p>\n
Things are so much different when planning a homebirth. It will be worth all the work in the end I know, and I feel so, SO lucky that we live in an area that even covers homebirths by insurance, but there’s a lot to do around the house to set up for the birth of a child! Things I never would have thought of if I had been trying to plan this on my own. So for those of you who might be curious about what it all entails, here is a bit of my to-do list:<\/p>\n
1. Clean “birth room,” which happens to be our dining room since I plan to utilize a birth tub for pain relief during my labor. This means removing all extraneous junk, moving the dining room table to one corner of the room, rolling up the rug, vacuuming underneath it, mopping the floor, and setting up supplies on top of and underneath the table (rendering it useless for meals until NewBaby arrives… which is also a problem since we are having guests visit us in a week).<\/p>\n
2. Hang sheets over huge window that looks directly into our neighbor’s (who happen to have two pre-adolescent boys in the house) kitchen and in dining room, as neither we nor the neighbors have window treatments. Oh, and the HUGE sliding glass doors where neighbors occasionally walk past as they walk their dogs in the woods behind our house. Hello, free show!<\/p>\n
3. Set up birth tub in dining room (it looks complicated- that will be your job, Andrew).<\/p>\n
4. Fill up birth tub (takes about an hour to fill, plus an hour to heat up)<\/p>\n
5. Clean both upstairs and downstairs bathrooms.<\/p>\n
6. Set up care for Milo, including packing snacks and\/or an overnight bag depending on what time of day it is… though we are going to try to keep him here to cut his little brother’s umbilical cord with dad.<\/p>\n
7. Set up mattress (complete with vinyl shower curtain to protect mattress if my water breaks on it, and not one but two sets of sheets- clean newer set on bottom, vinyl shower curtain, clean old sheet on top to dispose of after birth) in dining room.<\/p>\n
8. Test oxygen tank.<\/p>\n
9. Review “Emergency Home Birth” worksheet… in case we are idiots and call our midwife too late, and baby is born before she arrives (apparently something that happens pretty frequently with second and subsequent births).<\/p>\n
10. Make sure directions to back-up hospital are printed up and within reach.<\/p>\n
11. Oh, yeah. Get this one: set out snacks and drinks for midwife and birth assistant. Our birth assistant recommended throwing some chocolate chip cookies in the oven. Right.<\/p>\n
So… do I do this now, or wait until the throes of labor? Eeeek! Obviously some of it has to wait, but what about the major set-up? It seems like an awfully daunting list to deal with when I am having contractions three minutes apart.<\/p>\n
My next appointment is this Tuesday at 8:30am, so we’ll see if I’ve made any progress… I’ll keep you posted!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Okay, NewBaby will be making his appearance any day now. I am 37 weeks pregnant, and although Milo was born 4 days AFTER his due date, I am convinced that his little brother is going to make an early appearance, despite being told at my last midwife appointment I was only 1 cm dilated and … Continue reading “Baby Watch 2009”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_exactmetrics_skip_tracking":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[105],"tags":[52,48],"class_list":["post-483","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-family","tag-homebirth","tag-motherhood"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.crumbbums.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/483","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.crumbbums.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.crumbbums.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.crumbbums.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.crumbbums.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=483"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/www.crumbbums.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/483\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":11106,"href":"https:\/\/www.crumbbums.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/483\/revisions\/11106"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.crumbbums.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=483"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.crumbbums.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=483"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.crumbbums.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=483"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}