38 weeks

Here’s me:

And here’s one of the highlights of my 37th week! Look how bright and pretty!

Melissa and Thomas came over for dinner Friday night and Melissa wanted to do my toenails for me. Not only did she do my nails but she took off my old polish, clipped and filed, massaged, and THEN painted. It was heavenly, and very loving of her. I am in love with the color and glad to have nice toes for when I have to go to the hospital. I can’t thank her enough—feet don’t gross me out but I know they do a lot of people so I feel very humbled when she takes care of my feet.

After they left I bounced on my exercise ball for a while and then Nathan and I curled up on the couch to watch M.A.S.H. Soon I started to get really bad indigestion and nausea, which I attributed to supper. Except that the bathroom runs were timeable and the “cramps” didn’t feel like Braxton Hicks. What’s worse is that my husband was the one who was pointing it out to me. Me, I like denial. Indigestion was my malady and I was sticking to it. “Besides”, I told him. “I’m exhausted. I can’t go into labor now.” (I realize looking back that my statement was not entirely logical and I may not get a choice.)

“So sleep while we watch MASH,” he says as he pulls out the stopwatch on his phone. I wasn’t about to get excited, even if they were real contractions. I continued to claim indigestion. I don’t plan to go to the hospital until I am WELL into labor so that there is less chance of too many interventions. Plus I have to be sure sure sure sure because my mom will be buying a plane ticket when I go into labor! Everything tapered off into the morning though, and eventually we went to bed. I had a few more good contractions when I got up but haven’t had anything since. Which is fine, I’m not in a big hurry. But after just those few puny little contractions my uterus felt sore like a muscle that got a huge workout. I couldn’t believe it when I got up the next day. Makes me wonder what it will feel like after the real thing! Nathan said he was excited and scared! But I’m proud of him that he paid enough attention to the Lamaze DVD that he remembered that the body frequently “cleanses” at the beginning of labor, and that he could see a little pattern in my contractions. I feel more and more confident of him as my birth partner as I see little things that show me he was paying attention and this is important to him.

I was on the internet Saturday morning and found that there are acupressure points in the arch of the foot, between the ankle and Achilles tendon, and four fingers up from the ankle bone that are said to help in bringing on contractions. The first two of those are places that Melissa was rubbing during my foot massage. So we are thinking that her massage is probably what got me contracting. (Maybe combined with bouncing on the ball?) Which wasn’t the point of the massage, but hey—progress is progress people! I have an OB appointment this afternoon and Melissa says that if I’ve had any progress that she gets to share the credit with Nathan.