38 w 6 d--Hello there.

Let me see if I can make this clear.

Stay the fuck out of my business.

Clear enough? My body, my baby, my birth. That means I have a say in it. That means my husband has a say in it. That means that no one who once talked to me on a message board has a say in it, however nice you may be. It certainly means that no one has any business encouraging others who are still on said message board to quiz me about my birth choices. I have made them as public as I intend to through this blog and through my discussions on MamaDrama & MotheringDotCommune. I have neither the interest nor the energy to deal with the close-mindedness I know I will find on MomsWhoThink. I'm not going to play this game.

We went to the zoo Sunday. I fell. I went to the hospital and got monitored. I'm no fan of medical intervention, but I'm smart enough to use it when warranted. That is why I underwent six hours of near-continuous fetal monitoring after thinking I might have hit my stomach on the ground when I fell. That is why I let them do an internal exam and run all the blood tests that they pleased, why I put up with the first two ultrasounds of an otherwise undisturbed pregnancy.

And by and large the experience reinforced my decisions. I'm too dumb to take care of myself, of course. Funny, then, that I knew exactly how the baby was laying, exactly where my placenta was--data that were confirmed via ultrasound. Funny how both my baby and I are robustly healthy.

In other news...this long-drawn-out labor shit is getting old. I've been having contractions off & on since Saturday night. I had hoped the long walk around the zoo would kick it into gear. No such luck. I was having a butt-ton of contractions whilst being monitored, but I wasn't feeling 90% of them. Going by the ones I can feel, I'm only having one or two an hour. Enough to make me hope something's going to happen soon, but not enough to be making progress, it seems.

All of this makes me wonder how early Bobbie really was. I more or less assigned myself the 28 Feb due date, because it's the only one that really fit in with when I had sex. The first ultrasound I had assigned me a due date of 10th March. Which means she may well have been 9 days early instead of one day past due. I have to wonder what my labor would have been like with her, had my body been allowed to go into labor on its own. And would she have turned head down eventually?

This baby has been confirmed as head down via ultrasound, by the way. Which, as I said, I knew. I wonder if tension, if dread of the hospital, could have prevented the previous two from turning. Or was it a mere matter of neither of the previous two having enough time? Or was it the affirmations? Asking my baby to be head down? Bribing it with the promise of raw cauliflower and pickles?

Speaking of which, I must get more raw cauliflower & pickles...