Thank you VERY much to everyone who read this blog! In case you're interested in how the actual birth went for us (sans epidural), here is the play-by-play...
On Thursday, March 13th, 2008, I went to my midwife for a 1pm visit. Since I was due on March 17th, she asked if she could do an internal exam and if I wouldn't mind if she stimulated the cervix just a little bit with her finger to nudge things along. She said this was nothing like inducing, but just a little nudge. I said okay. When she checked me, she said the baby was really low, my cervix was 75 percent effaced, and I was dilated about 1 to 2 centimeters. She said the whole picture made her very optimistic that we might be having a baby that weekend. She also mentioned that the internal exam and her slight stimulation might cause some cramping.
That afternoon, I did feel cramping and had some bloody show -- and I didn't know if it was just a byproduct of the internal exam or if it meant labor was beginning. That night I started to feel a lot of cramping. By midnight I started to think that the cramping was coming kind of regularly and that maybe this was contractions. Still, I thought it could be nothing or "false" labor, so I tried to go to sleep. But I was in too much pain to sleep, so I finally woke my husband up around 5 am and told him I thought something might be happening. We started timing the cramps and found they were coming fairly regularly -- around every 10 minutes -- but sometimes they were coming every 7 minutes or every 15 minutes. We decided to wait until my midwife's office was open on Friday morning to call. When we reached her around 9 am, she said that this could be very early labor or this could go away. She said to keep monitoring the contractions.
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