Midwife Checkup

Connie had her normal midwife checkup scheduled for today so we decided to stick with it even though contractions have begun.  Our midwife (Beth) felt that Connie is in the very early stages of labor.  The contractions can progress over the next few days or they may subside and it could be up to a week until she's in what they call "active labor".  They really don't want you to head to the hospital until you're at this stage.  We also have a doula (Diana) who's keeping track of where we're at.

Beth checked Connie's cervix, and she's dilated at 1 cm.  Unfortunately we don't have any previous measurements so we don't know if this is a change or not.  The contractions are about every 6-10 minutes for 20-50 sec.  They're also somewhat irregular which is another sign of early labor.

 

Uh, someone's looking a little too happy to be in labor.  This is Connie hooked up to the fetal and contraction monitors.  They basically monitor the baby's heart rate for 20 minutes, and also watch to see if there's any effect on the heart rate during contractions.  Apparently our baby has a good oxygen supply since the heart rate didn't change much during the course of the test.  Here's a look at the monitor with the baby's heart rate on the left, and the contraction level on the right.

Connie educated me on the contraction levels, and said that the values are just relative numbers.  They don't have a standard baseline they start from so the range will be different on each machine.  In this case, we saw values from ~18-45.  But you could definitely correlate higher values with Connie's discomfort.

They also did a quick ultrasound, and confirmed that the baby is still in the head down (vertex) position.  She's still high (hasn't "dropped" yet), but Beth told us not to be concerned about that.  She should move down with the contractions.  So we're basically now in the waiting mode - packed and ready to head to the hospital whenever the time comes.

Now if I can just get some plumbing work done before then...