The last few weeks.

It's been five weeks since she was born and fifteen weeks since my last post, so I need to get this out now!

All in all, my pregnancy with Margot was smooth and relatively stress-free. Since Aisling was born five weeks early, the expectation of an early delivery consumed the final two months of my pregnancy. As it turns out (probably because of all that preparation), Margot was born at 39 weeks, only four days before her due date.

At the 32-week ultrasound, which I needed due to a low-lying placenta that they wanted to make sure had moved sufficiently away from my cervix to not interfere with a vaginal birth by bleeding, they measured the baby and found that she was above the 95th percentile for estimated weight, head and abdominal circumference. This meant that they wanted me to come in at 38 weeks for a "growth scan" to make sure baby wasn't "too big.' Because these growth scans are associated with interventions that don't actually change outcomes for babies (and can actually lead to negative outcomes for mothers), I refused this scan. But the knowledge that this baby, like Aisling, was on track to be 9+ lbs was still intimidating.

The last few weeks of my full-term pregnancy were, as I had always heard, agonizing. It was consistently >90 degrees and the little AC unit we'd bought for our bedroom barely got it cool enough to make me comfortable at night. Luckily, baby was great about sleeping all night with me, so other than the heat I was sleeping pretty well. Because of the heat and baby's drain on my body, my physical activity plummeted in the last two months -- I'd been hiking and walking 4-5 miles per day, on average, in March-April; but I just couldn't keep it up once I hit 30+ weeks.

In mid-June, my friend Carrie flew out for a "Babycation" in Carmel. We stayed at a lovely resort hotel, ate incredible food, and shopped and explored the little town of Carmel-By-The-Sea, a great little local getaway. It was on this trip that my belly "dropped" for the first time, pressure in my pelvis increased, and I began having crampy braxton-hicks contractions. I say "dropped for the first time" because it dropped several times over the next six weeks or so, and every time the baby would slowly grow back up to fill the space made when I dropped.

Life with an almost-preschooler was busy, so I made plans to free myself up when baby came. Time would have flown if I'd been comfortable instead of increasingly miserable. Aisling turned three in June, and in July her three-day daycare schedule went up to full-time, because I thought I'd deliver in July and would need the respite from her threenager attitude. But instead, I remained full of baby. My consulting work died down, and I found myself increasingly bored. I was too uncomfortable to do anything physical, so I turned my nesting instinct to the digital realm and compiled all of my videos of Aisling into 10-min chapters by month, and uploaded them to the cloud for safekeeping.

In the last 3-4 weeks, I noticed little stretch marks forming under my belly button, on either side. I was much bigger than when I delivered Aisling. My clothes were starting to not fit any longer, and it was difficult to find a comfortable position when sitting or laying down. I didn't swell up or get particularly short of breath, but I felt very tired all the time.

I was wondering what it would feel like to go into labor on my own. Every evening, I started to have crampy, regular contractions from about 6 until after I fell asleep. They were usually gone when I woke to pee sometime in the night. It was getting difficult to pee and poop as the baby's head pressed into new places.

My doctor's appointments were uneventful until the last week. Baby always measured on pace, but I could tell she was going to be a big girl and, even though I wanted a natural birth, I was getting nervous. I wasn't nervous enough, however, to want the doctor to do anything about a "big baby" like induce me.

At my 39-week check (Friday July 22), I did go ahead and let the doctor sweep my membranes, which was not nearly as uncomfortable as I'd heard. I had lost my mucous plug earlier that morning. My blood pressure was elevated at this check, so my doctor sent me into L&D for monitoring. It came right down, and they sent me home with advice to check it all weekend in case of hypertension. On Sunday it was creeping up again, so I went in again, but it was totally normal in L&D, so home I came. On Monday, I had another Dr appt, and she swept my membranes again. I was at 3 1/2 cm dilated and 60% effaced. That evening I didn't even have the usual 6pm-bedtime cramping, so I thought there was no hope of delivering that night.

I was wrong.