The home stretch
Monday will mark 37 weeks of pregnancy, which will officially designate Cletus as a full-term baby. We're no longer counting months, but weeks, even days, until the due date. Weekly visits to the OB/GYN began this week, and he believes I may deliver a week to week-and-a-half prior to the due date. Of course, that is an experienced and educated conjecture, but my cervix is already 50% effaced or thinned, and the baby has dropped somewhat and her head, at -1 station, is approaching the delivery point ("zero station" is the standard, and +5 is the crowning point). The dilation, or opening/stretching of the cervix, hasn't happened yet, but that's fine as long as the effacement is happening.
What can we do now besides wait? There are all sorts of myths and "old wive's tales" about how to stimulate labor: do a lot of walking; eat spicy foods; drink castor oil; etc. I might walk more, but I have always done a fair share of exercising. Spicy foods are a staple of my diet, so there wouldn't be much of a difference. Castor oil is gross and would probably just give me diarrhea. The only clinically-substantiated link is to act like kinky newlyweds, and that is actually what the doctor prescribed, although he didn't phrase it in exactly that manner.
posted by webhamstress @ 12:14 PM
1 Comments:
Not to give "TMI," but after nearly 5 months of not being allowed to do anything, we were finally given the go ahead to "act like kinky newlyweds" as you put it in my last week of pregnancy. I won't say it worked right away, but I think it did help. I think what ultimately did it for me was walking. The night that my water broke, I walked more than I had in months. We went to dinner, visited at John & Mark's, went to the movies. And we had gone to the store earlier in that day. I also want to add that the "nesting" instinct definitely kicked in that day. I thought it was a joke, but I was up cleaning, washing baby clothes and putting them in baskets and stuff all day. The guys Dave worked with said "she'll have that baby today" and my water broke later that night. So maybe old wives tales aren't all just myths. ;)
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