Just Waiting

I think everyone's kind of worried that we're just going to suddenly announce the birth of our baby one day without any prior warning.  Jenny called Kim today and the first thing Kim wanted to know was whether there was any news to tell.  

I'd really like to set everyone's mind at ease and say we'll let people know as faithfully as we can given time constraints (not sure even the most excited want a call at 3 a.m. to say labor has begun...).  The actual due date is still a few weeks away (January 31), but after the big Make-Sure-All-Is-Ready visit by Eileen the midwife this week, it looks like we might be coming up on a slightly earlier birthday for Peanut.  His little head is all settled in a good position ready to go and he's far enough down that his chances of flipping breech are a lot slimmer than they used to be.  I also have some physical things going on that indicate we're pretty close now.  And I've had so many contractions that my muscles ought to be marathon ready at this point - seriously, I had no idea I was going to do quite this much practicing ahead of time, but I'm thankful for it because moms who do this much practicing usually have nice smooth fast labors.  Hey, I can be optimistic, right?

Over the past week, I've had so many people tell me what days the baby can or can't be born on that I'm a little confused myself - someone needs to create a calendar for me so I know which days it's okay to go ahead and get on with things.  My extended family has some type of betting system going on in which everyone has picked a day they expect the baby to be born on - as far as I can tell, from here until February 1st, every day is covered so someone is going to win something.

If anyone's interested, I'll put my candy bar on the 16th.  Just for the fun of it.

Everything around here is very quiet and sleepy for the most part.  I haven't had a lot of energy, so I get a few important things done every day and then spend a lot of time with my feet up.  Grandma has learned to transfer herself on one leg from wheelchair to regular chair to toilet to bed, etc., so I take care of getting her medicine and meals and making her bed and coaching her now and then when she forgets which side to position the wheelchair on to get into her easy chair.  We had a consultation last week with the orthopedic surgeon and it looks like Grandma may be doing this for a very long time, perhaps the rest of her life, in order to preserve the hip joint that's thinning around the spacer that connects her hip to her leg.  We are investigating the possibility that she might need to get the joint replaced altogether, but it's a tough decision to make because right now things are very tolerable and doing the surgery would be extremely rough.  The question is whether keeping Grandma from walking will preserve the joint long enough for her to have a peaceful and relatively pain-free life to the end of her days or if she'll have the joint break down in a few years and cause a pretty catastrophic situation.

The orthopedic surgeon, by the way, does not think Grandma really has a broken hip but says it's very difficult to tell and to keep her off that foot until the beginning of February just to be safe.  Grandma herself still is not suffering pain unless she starts thinking about her hip having a problem; and even then, it appears what pain she's suffering is now coming from the joint and muscle stiffness that accompanies not actively using that leg.  If we do her exercises with her, the aching gets much better.  Ben is a good physical therapist.

He's also a good coach.  He's been telling me every day that he's looking forward to this baby's birth and he thinks it's going to be a very special and enjoyable thing and he has every confidence that I'm going to handle it just fine.  I haven't felt terribly jittery or anything about the upcoming birth, but I appreciate every one of the times Ben tells me, "This is going to be an amazing thing we're going to do and you're going to handle it wonderfully.  You were made to and I absolutely believe you will."  He is also patiently putting up with me waking him up by snoring at night (this is extremely embarrassing - I've always been a very quiet sleeper) and having a lot of dinners that are essentially soup and sandwiches and he sits and reads to me when I take baths at night to get sore muscles to ease up.

Yep, it's a pretty rough life around here these past few weeks.  We're just waiting and staying close to home and hopefully avoiding the outbreak of norovirus in the area (yikes...that'd be no fun to get right now!).  We had a surprise delivery of a dumpster to our driveway because of a project my family is doing a few streets away: our garage and basement are free of construction debris for the first time in a year and that was our big excitement of the week.

So for all of you betting and waiting along with us, know that currently there's nothing much going on and we will most certainly let you know as soon as we can if something is.