Saturday, August 21, 2010

Flashback: 35 Weeks Gestation

Occasionally, I have what I call a waking nightmare. When I have them, I am fully awake, sometimes in my car or daydreaming in bed. It's a very vivid daydream that something bad happens such as I get in a car wreck and Malachi survives, but I don't. It's quite horrific. Often these waking visions bring me tears to my eyes.

On Wednesday morning, I had one of these imaginings. And you know how sometimes the contents of a nightmare isn't that bad, but the emotions you feel at the time that make it bad? That's what this one was like. I imagined that I woke up in the middle of the night and was in labor. And since its too early to have a homebirth we headed to the hospital. I was afraid, both of giving birth in the hospital, and because its still a little early. I was also really stressed because our house wasn't ready for Malachi yet. Let me give you a vision of how physically unprepared we are for this baby. His room is full of bags and boxes of baby stuff we have accumulated. It was our room until about 3 weeks ago, so our clothes are still in the drawers and our trash is still on the floor where we found when we took the bed down last weekend. I guess it fell out of the trash can.

My room? Well, for one, it had about a month's worth of clean laundry unfolded in baskets. Books stacked 18 inches high on every available surface. The bookshelves half-painted in the middle of the floor in the way of everything. Joshua can't get to his side of the bed by walking to it. He has to climb in from my side. It's just that bad.

I have been working hard. Really, I have. But last weekend, my hard work consisted of making about 8 meals in single servings to pull out of the freezer for lunch and dinner each day. Without these, we had been eating out way too much, which is neither affordable nor good for our health. My hard work during weeknights consists of going to childbirth classes and midwife appointments. Between these, I am getting things done here and there, but a gestating woman a few weeks from her due date can only work so fast.

Needless to say, when I had this waking dream of going into labor with my house in such a state, I freaked out, both in the dream, and in real life. In the dream, Joshua called our friends Phil and Rebecca and told them what was going on, and would they be able to gather some people to get things organized while we were away. I dreamed that the hospital made Joshua go get a car seat because we didn't have one yet, and that he also picked up diapers while he was out.

When I snapped out of my dream-like state, I was a changed woman. I realized that this baby, though not due for 5 weeks, could come anytime now, and we. are. not. ready.

So I went to the midwife yesterday and discovered...I'm between 3 and 4 centimeters dilated and somewhat effaced. That basically means that I'm further along in the birth process than a lot of women are when they go into labor. I'm only at 35 weeks, so its a bit early for this. That means I'm off work for a few days, resting and trying to some natural remedies to delay labor. The goal is to get to 36 weeks. Then he will be full term, and I can have him at home whenever he's ready to be born.

So today, I sorted through baby clothes. My cousin brought a big stash of cloth diapers that I'll be borrowing. So now we have stuff to cover his butt and body. That's a big step!

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