Baby is a wee bit engaged! – 34 weeks 1 day

I had my 34 week OB appointment and hospital check-in yesterday. I found the hospital check-in really exciting. The midwife who did all the forms was so nice and super supportive of my wishes which were essentially: 

1. as active a birth as possible, even if attached to monitoring
2. access to wireless monitoring so I can labour in shower and/or bath
3. a desire not to be offered pain relief. I am not against pain relief and will certainly use it if I need it but I just feel I need to manage the delivery. I know an epidural is off the table after my last experience so I don’t want to peak too early. To help with that I have decided I’d like to ask when I want it as opposed to being offered. This is just because I know myself. If someone offers it to me I will think it is because I must sound or look like I need it when actually, I may just be noisy and pushing through ok. So I want to make the choice of if/when pain relief enters my birthing space.

The midwife took me on a tour of the birthing suite and it is SO NICE. All post natal rooms have a queen sized bed; birthing suites have floor to ceiling windows (don’t worry, they are elevated and away from foot traffic) with a view. Half have a view to the ocean!! Too bad we mostly seem to labour at night with babies. You never know, I may get lucky! All birthing suites have a corner spa and a shower and plenty of space for active birthing in the room. They have birth balls available for use too. It all looked super clean and nice and I felt so reassured by what I saw.

The other bonus is that they were so supportive of my desire to VBAC. I know a lot of women really struggle to get this support from their care providers in both the private and public system so it means a lot to me that not once has anyone tried to dissuade me from working towards this goal. The hospital and my OB have never even mentioned c-section to me and I find this so empowering.

Anyway, onto the big news! Baby is 3/5 engaged. Essentially engagement works through stations and different websites say slightly different things. You start at 5/5 station which is not engaged at all and then you move towards 0 at which point you would usually be in labour or close to it. Then it moves to positive (+) stations. When you reach +5 your baby is crowning and about to be delivered.

So I am almost half way there pretty much. Now a quick google search will tell you that babies can still pop back out from there and who knows what will happen to me but when I raised this with the OB he seemed to think she was going to stay settled in there now (why, I have no idea. I have quite a short torso so maybe that?). And he still thinks I will deliver early. He is predicting labour to start at 37 to 38 weeks. Again, I have no idea why this is. I guess he births a lot of babies and can tell based on certain things that he sees? Who knows.

I did panic a bit after I heard that. I wouldn’t mind if she came early (eeerrr as estimated at 3kg already) but we haven’t yet bought the cot OR the new car seat OR finalised the paperwork for the cord and tissue donation. That last one really needs to be done ASAP as they need to send us the collection pack.

So yeah, if the OB is on with his predictions then we are looking at a baby in 3-4 weeks as opposed to 6 weeks. Yikes!

Other than all that I am doing quite well. Sleep still isn’t too bad but I now have chronic baby brain. As in I say something and then 2 mins later I couldn’t tell you what it was. We were playing UNO the other day (Monkey’s new favourite game) and someone put down a reverse and do you think I could figure it out? I’m normally really good at that stuff too. So yeah, brain is getting read to exit the vagina it would seem.

Reflux has commenced which is slightly annoying but I am grateful I haven’t had to put up with it until now. This is pretty much exactly what happened for my first pregnancy as well so no surprises there. I am getting those stabby vagina pains that I am assuming are Braxton Hicks and a result of baby bouncing her head up and down on my cervix. I have been having these for awhile but they are definitely more frequent now and rather ouchy.

I literally had a massive growth spurt overnight the other night. I went to bed looking like the pic on the left (33+1) and woke up looking like the pic on the right (33+4), I kid you not!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

This dress has made quite the appearance this pregnancy. The one on the far right is the latest at 33+6. Sorry for the shitty lighting and I haven’t zoomed them the same. *sigh* Oh well. You get the picture. I’m BIG. Although fundal height is apparently measuring right on track despite the fact that the scan has the baby ahead. I will be interested in seeing what she is when she comes out. I am not worried about it which is…good? Or naive? I’m not exactly sure. Regardless, I do totally have faith that my body can birth this baby.

Now I’m off to organise dinner which is toasted sandwiches as I seriously can’t be flipping arsed cooking tonight. Not. Going. To. Happen.