20 Weeks

Five months!!! I'm half way there!!!

I got my car seat this week. Now we have something to bring the baby home from the hospital in! Woohoo! And speaking of hospital, I had my first visit to Labor & Delivery on Wednesday.

On Tuesday night, technically really early Wednesday, I woke up in excruciating pain around 1:00 a.m. I had terrible cramps in my back. I was sweating and nauseous. Was it contractions? I could barely move. Then I realized it was on the right side of my back. Then I began to wonder if it was kidney stones, and if I should wake the husband up and go to the emergency room. I laid there for a while wondering what I should do. Finally I fell back asleep. I woke up around the time I needed to get up to get ready for work. I got up, took a shower, and started getting ready. At that point I realized I couldn't go into work. I had cramps still, and I should call the doctor. It felt like menstrual cramps times one hundred. So I called into work and crawled back into bed. At 8:00 I called the nurse's line and was told that I needed to go to Labor & Delivery at the hospital to get checked out, but not to worry.

The husband drove me to there, and we got checked in. As we were going up the elevator he asked me if we were coming home with a baby that day. I assured him that they'd be doing everything possible to make sure that didn't happen.

They ran a couple tests on my urine to check for a UTI or kidney stone. They came back clean, but they also hooked me up to monitor to check for contractions. I wasn't having any. So after an hour and a half there, I was released and told that it was probably just muscle spasms. Dang, those were some spasms.

The nurse on duty was nice enough to give us a little tour of the hospital where I'd be delivering and where I'd go for postpartum. The husband was be-bopping around, having a good time, asking all sorts of questions, and I was getting dizzy. I realized there's no turning back now. This summer I'm having a baby one way or the other. It really hit me. I'm going to be a mom here in no time. Is there any way to fully prepare yourself for that? The nurse turned on the huge overhead lights at the end of the bed, and said "when you see these come on, it's show time." That's one way to look at it, I guess.

By the time we were leaving the hospital after our tour, my "spasms" were back, and I was ready to go home and hit the couch. We discussed how it was nice to do that dry run of driving to the hospital, finding out where L&D are, and seeing the rooms. We will get a tour later this spring as part of our birthing classes, but doing the drive helped too.

The rest of the week went fine. There is lots of activity from the little person as evidenced by a couple shots we got at our ultrasound in Week 19.

Sucking his/her thumb and kicking their feet. How it makes my heart melt. It's a tiny miracle inside of me.

Week 20: March 12, 2010