The Home Stretch, Again

I feel like people start talking about the home stretch when you hot your 3rd trimester, or maybe when you hit 30 weeks, or maybe when you get to your last month. Everything is suddenly the home stretch. But you know, the last week or few days is REALLY the home stretch, and man, it's a STRETCH.

Yeah, I'm still pregnant. I've been having contractions on and off for 8 days now. It's called prodromal labor. Look it up. Apparently, it's super normal, especially for second babies, and I know that with every contraction, my body IS in fact laboring and doing work that doesn't have to be done later (which is simultaneously a relief and also a bit scary since everyone says that this ensures that labor will be fast once it actually happens... uh, fast is good, but I don't want to have the baby in the car on Huntington Ave, OK?)

Everyone keeps telling me all the secrets to make the baby come, but to be honest, I don't really believe in that stuff. I really believe in the natural process of birth (sorry, hippie mama came out there) and that the baby will come when its her time. I'm still 6 days away from my due date, so I'm not ready to freak out that she isn't here yet, but the false alarms are a bit mentally exhausting. For a week, I have woken up to 1-2 hours of painful contractions 7-8 minutes apart in the middle of the night, and when you wake up in pain, it generally sucks, and your body kicks in its adrenaline and you start thinking, "OK, this is it" only to fall back to sleep eventually and wake up hours later. Hmmm.

So, I have resorted to denial-- I can't tell you when I last had a contraction (OK, that's a lie-- I had one while I typed that last paragraph) or how many I had in the last hour (that one's true, I swear). My doula suggested that I make plans for every day this week and go about life as if everything's totally normal, and I think that's a great idea. I think part of the problem is that everyone and their freaking mother has been like, "Oh, that baby is coming any second now" for the past week, and I'm just really sick of everyone being like, "Oh, you're still pregnant? What the hell is going on?" Uh, I'm still pregnant; that's what's going on. And I'm still 6 days from my due date, dumbass.

So, yes, the baby's head is still ridiculously low (so much so that I get crazy muscle cramps in my groin when she pushes down) and she's now in a better position for labor, and that's good, so now all we do is wait. I took a long walk around the pond today to see if that would help, but I ended up with a damn backache. So I guess I just need to wait. And chill. And pretend that nothing is going on. You know, I saw a thing on bears once on PBS, and apparently, they give birth while they're hibernating-- seriously. They go take a nap for a few months, and when they wake up, they have babies hanging out next to them. Could I be that lucky? Denial *is* a powerful force...