Ready

Or, as Ingrid would say, Ready-dode! (She has a fabulous habit of adding suffixes to words. Greens are greensongers. Dinner is dinnerdond, A is Daddy-dode or sometimes Datty-dotey, I am Mama-sama or Mampa-ninta. I love this. My smart, smart girl! She already gets that language is here for us to embellish and enjoy.)

Anyway, despite some recent wrenches thrown into our plans, we are all about as ready-dode as we can be for this baby.

Over the weekend, A took Ingrid to Grandma’s house and I had an amazing, dream-like 36 hours of doing whatever I wanted. I cleaned things up and they stayed clean. I moved from room to room with total lack of drama. I had whole thoughts, lots of them, from beginning to end, without being interrupted. I sorted clothes, cleaned baby items, culled toys, washed and folded tiny onesies, made lists, read, wrote, ate, shopped for nursing bras. I also purchased, in almost insane disregard for our always tight and now even tighter household budget, these swaddling blankets. And, in the last four hours or so before A and Ingrid arrived home, I sat on the couch, watched terrible TV, and worked on knitting a sweet little light blue cotton kimono sweater.

Many, many things are crossed off the list, and I’d love it if the baby held off until my mom arrives in town and our doula gets back from vacation and we’ve sorted out the name question and I’ve had more time to hand off various duties at work, but if it happened today, I’d no longer feel so unprepared.

The wrenches all got thrown into the works yesterday: I tested positive for group B strep, which means I’ll need to be at the hospital for probably most of my labor, to get IV antibiotics. The aforementioned vacationing doula (who gets back Sunday) called to say that her backup doula is swamped because three of her clients are overdue, so there’s a chance we will need to go to backup doula number two, who is only available nights and weekends. And the dear family member who had agreed to be the main, number one Ingrid care person during the baby’s arrival was kind enough to cc us, yesterday afternoon, on a breezy e-mail giving the details of her upcoming road trip—of which we had previously been unaware—this Thursday through Sunday

Oh, and also the baby is at -1 to 0 station, and I am maybe 60% effaced and a fingertip dilated.

It sort of sounds like the perfect storm, doesn’t it? It all made me pretty teary yesterday. But, having had some time to make backup plans, I feel more optimistic. We now have some good backup child care arrangements in place, and I seriously doubt we will fall through the cracks of this whole metropolitan area’s doula network; someone will be able to be with us.

The strep thing, though, is really a bummer. I know there must be people who decide not to, but I'm risk averse enough to want to follow my OB’s advice on this one. And I had really hoped not to spend much time at the hospital. All mature discussions of the relative importance of birth vs. the whole rest of a child’s life aside, it is pretty important to me that the birth part go well, and I am both unhappy that I won’t get to labor in the comfort of home again and worried that more time in the hospital will lead to unnecessary interventions.

But it looks like this is the way it’s got to be, so I'm going to work hard at building my own little comfortable (mental) labor world to take with me into that hospital room and hope that when the time comes there’s a doula around to help guard the edges of it.

Oh, and I found out my mom was four centimeters dilated for two weeks before my brother (her second baby) was born. So maybe we’ll make it past the doula / child care black hole and most of this will be irrelevant.

Ingrid is ready-dode, too, but this has gotten long, so that part will have to wait.