Well, tomorrow is the big day. I will be 40 wks pregnant, and for a few different reasons, my doctor agreed that labor could be induced tomorrow morning. So by the end of the day tomorrow, Baby No. 2 will have finally joined us on the outside.
God I hope everything goes well.
We decided on induction because the baby has been getting big -- he's estimated at about 9/13 right now, just about the same size that Hank was when he was born. Also, I've been having contractions and dilating steadily for the last four weeks. FOUR WEEKS!! I am 4 cm dilated, for goodness sake, and I've been having contractions for a month! It has been physically and mentally exhausting to constantly be thinking that labor is about to start at any time, and then to have it not start. I've honestly been feeling like a watched bomb. No one knows when I am supposed to explode, yet they all seem to think that I know? No. I don't. All I know is that no one expected me to go this far. At this point in Hank's pregnancy, he was already a week and a half old. This one just doesn't seem to want to come out. Anyway.... I was hoping to avoid going through the pitocin experience again, but at this point the positives far outweigh the negatives.
The silver lining of the last few weeks is that Henry, Hank, and I have been able to have some really nice family time together, knowing that the shape of our family is really going to change quite a bit, and thinking it could happen at any time. My favorite memories from the last few weeks are going out to dinner at Crepevine for Henry's birthday, a favorite place from when we lived in Oakland, followed by slices of cake at Whole Foods; going to the Freight and Salvage open house in Berkeley where we square danced and played music and sang and made a banjo (that Hank has barely been able to put down since); and going to a couple of birthday parties, including one where I dared jump on a trampoline in hopes that jumping might shake the baby loose (no luck -- all it did was land me in Labor and Delivery with several pulled ligaments, and a midwife who laughed at me).
Throughout it all, Hank has been especially kind and sweet. He really seems to understand what is about to happen, and seems excited for the baby to come. He hugs my belly and kisses it and talks to the baby. On occasion he asks me if the baby has come out yet. He uses the Magic 8 Ball to suggest "names" to us (such as his current favorite, Outtadoubt. He also likes Zoom). He tells me that he has two babies in his tummy, and when it is time for them to come out, he is going to 'push and push and push them out!' (when he says this, he pounds on his tummy super quickly, and then announces 'ok, baby is out!').
Knowing that the baby is definitely coming tomorrow, we have made sure that Hank knows it too. It is a little bittersweet thinking of him losing his Only Child status. He does seem ready, but it still has so many sides to it. I keep wondering what it would have been like had that first pregnancy worked out, and we were welcoming a new baby in to the family when he would have been 18 months or so, as opposed to 3.5 yrs old. He's not a baby at all any more, and his consciousness is so much different now than it would have been back then. I know his world is going to be totally rocked, I just hope that it won't be rocked in a bad way.
We just love that big boy so much, and I hope to hell he knows how special and dear he is to us, how special and dear he always will be to us.
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