are things complicated yet?

You have to admit, being born on Star Wars Day would be a special kind of nerdy

41 weeks tomorrow. YES, FOR SERIOUS.

I was thinking about birthdays last week and I decided this this week has some good options.

5/4/11: May the Fourth (be with you). Star Wars Day! HA HA HA SO NERDY! I love it! Sadly, the child would need to be born in the next 90 minutes so probably no on this one. WOE.

5/5/11: Cinco de Mayo! Pinatas every year! Margaritas for the adults! Margaritas when SHE'S an adult! This is the birthday I've been pulling for ever since we ran past her due date. It's just fun.

5/6/11: Chris likes this one because 5 + 6 = 11 and he's kind of mathy and....yeah. It's a bit of a stretch.

I have determined there are no other potential birth dates in May that make me laugh or raise my eyebrow in a "Hey, that's sort of cool" way, which means (obviously) the child will be born on 5/7 or later and totally ignore my string of 3 preferred birth dates, which also means I'll be pregnant until Saturday and, well, BLEH on that idea.

Still pregnant, still uncomfortable, still impatient. The end.

***

Edited to add that the marvelous and smart Jen has noted that 5-7-11 would be all prime numbers, which is kind of cool.  Hmmm, I could live with that. I was also noticing that this week 6 planets are aligned, which must be some kind of special to astrology people, right?

40 weeks, 4 days

Today I visited my midwife for a Fetal Non-Stress Test. (If you've never heard of it before, you can read about the test here on the American Pregnancy Association's site.) After I hit my due date last Thursday my midwife said she simply wanted to keep closer tabs on New Baby and start seeing me twice a week. But, all indications were that she was healthy and fine so this was more of a due diligence effort. She didn't have any reason to expect to find anything bad.

As expected, she didn't find anything alarming. My BP is normal, I feel pretty good and New Baby produced the right amount of activity and heart accelerations on cue to indicate she's doing fine and there's no reason to force her out artificially. No fetal distress. Good.

The whole appointment took 20 minutes and she sent me on my merry way. She didn't even check my dilation/effacement progress today.

"It doesn't really matter anyway at this point and if you aren't having a lot of contractions then you probably haven't dilated any more."

I like appointments where I get to keep my pants on so that was fine by me. She said that I can't really do anything to bring on labor and it will just happen when it happens and some patients hate that answer but really, I am fine with it. I know I can't do anything. For example, I walked 4-5 miles a day those last few weeks  with Claire and they did exactly nothing for me in terms of triggering labor.

Do I think walking might help? Maybe. Probably can't hurt. I mean, walking IS good for you.

Do I think I won't go into labor because I'm not walking? No. That's just kind of stupid. If walking really made women go into labor it is all you would see pregnant ladies doing.

(Her point was the logic behind all of those "It worked for me!" stories is a more than a little specious. Well, of course you think it worked for you because you did X and then you went into labor. MIRACULOUS! It's kind of like wearing a rally hat at a baseball game. Did it really help? Probably not, but if it makes you feel better about controlling the situation then fine.)

She didn't mention an induction or possibly scheduling one soon.  (Honestly, it's like she's not even aware the procedure EXISTS.) Instead, she noted that she'll probably have me discharged within 24 hours, which is exactly what I wanted and expected and is just a much more POSITIVE conversation topic. Rather than baiting me with visions of made-up late baby complications and dire warnings, she's assuming I'll deliver independently and she'll send me home pretty fast after. I love that.

Good appointment today, but I'm not feeling very confident that I'll have this baby in the next day or so. We'll see. That's all the update I've got.

About the news today

It's not that I think his death means an end to terror (impossible) or that it's justice well-served (how could the death of one person possibly deliver that?) or that it means the end of an era (there will always be a bad guy out there).

I'm not sure that his death has as much actual meaning as it does symbolic, particularly for Americans but also for his followers and anyone else that ever heard his name.

I think it's a milestone. I think the world is better off without his hate and hypnotizing personality that convinced so many people that what he was speaking was the truth. I think he was a modern-day Hitler and capable of a much grander campaign than he had time to accomplish. I think lives have been saved.

...

I have written about living in Kenya before, but all you need to know for today is that my family lived there 1996-1998 and left the country just weeks before the August, 1998 Embassy bombings.  While Bin Laden and his team were planning the bombings, my father worked in that embassy.

What I find myself thinking today is that I am relieved, so incredibly RELIEVED, that a dangerous man who very likely saw my father's name in print as a part of the planning, perhaps said it out loud and maybe even saw a surveillance photo of his face as he walked into and out of the Embassy, is dead.

This man who performed such incredible acts of violence and hate to nameless people? I am pretty sure he once knew my father's name. Because of his role and responsibilities, I think he probably followed him and he knew which office was his in the American Embassy in Nairobi. I think he took his photograph.  I think he didn't give a second thought to the idea of extinguishing his specific, named life when plans were finally made. The idea that he saw his name in print or said it out loud makes my chest tighten up.

Individually assessed, targeted and discarded (along with other key personnel). My God.

It's beyond unsettling to think that a person capable of such violence has probably individually targeted and surveilled someone you love most in the world. Even though he carried out his attack with a great deal of success and there's no reason to think that he ever thought of my father again, it's still creepy to have someone so crazy and irrational walking around with your father's name tucked deep into the folds of his brain somwehere.

It is even more unsettling to think about what might have been and what did eventually, tragically, happen to other people at his direction, both before and after the embassy bombings in 1998.

It is personal, but I know that I am lucky to have had a distant-yet-personal brush with an insane man and escape relatively unscathed. I hope you don't think I'm telling a story for attention's sake or trying to draw my own, more than ten-years-old experience back to present day for any reason because really, I have long-since buried it and gotten over it and there are thousands of actual experiences that ended far more badly than mine.

It's just that last night's news made me inhale deeply and sigh with a kind of tangible, legitimate relief that I wasn't even aware I had been waiting for. That's all.

The waiting game

If you listen to my old OB, Claire was born 9 days past her due date. If you listen to me, she was born 3 days past her due date.

I'm 40 weeks, 3 days pregnant, exactly as pregnant as I was with Claire, and there will be no induction today, which is great since I think we've already established as a group that for all of its medical advantages?  Being induced sort of blows and is highly, highly undesireable when not medically necessary. (I mean, what crazy person would sign up for THAT if she knew from experience what she was getting into and didn't HAVE to in the first place?)

In case anyone has not kept up via FB or Twitter, here is what 40 weeks, 2 days pregnant looks like on me:

It's a waiting game. I have been on maternity leave for two and a half weeks and every day is this weird schedule of last suppers and final opportunities that never actually turn into that last supper or final opportunity.

This might be the last time Chris and I get to go out to dinner for a while! (At first we went to nice places, but we have now have moved on to glamorous outings like Chick-fil-A.)

This might be the last opportunity I have to browse around a shop with my one manageable child! I should go do that! Even though I hate browsing around in shops!

Or, the flip side:

I don't have enough time to really start that project, so I won't. I'll stick to small things I can finish in a half a day. Which is really nothing except laundry and dishes.

I've been living in these odd 4 and 6-hour pockets of time that are really just intervals between when Claire wakes up and goes to sleep. They're the milestones I look forward to because it means that I can go to sleep as well. In the meantime I'm not a very functional adult. I have been asking Chris for lots of favors and my mom is here to help with Claire, and to be here when I go in labor so she can watch Claire, and every day that I don't go into labor it's like...well shit, that was another wasted day for not just ME but for my mom AND Chris. I am not the kind of person that gets excited about wasting the time of three adults for going on three weeks.

I try to keep thinking that this is a one-time thing and a short-term thing, this wasting of other people's time and it's okay because I am pregnant. While moving around is good for me, the honest truth is that my house would be far less clean, the meals far less delicious, freezeable or ready on time if my mom wasn't here. There would be a lot of work waiting for Chris when he got home at the end of the day. We'd all be more tired and I'm SO GLAD that she's here to help us out, but there's no way I'm going to get over the guilt of it so I'm trying my best to just sit back and let her make pot roast (!!!!) and enjoy it while it lasts.

I have an NST scheduled for tomorrow, which I expect to show nothing other than, "Yep! Healthy kid in there. Not ready to come out. Due diligence performed, now please go home." My midwife only wants to keep closer tabs on New Baby at this point, which is fine by me. Nobody is asking me to make decisions about induction or waving the panic flag or telling me about their schedule and how I need to fit into it. In fact, nobody at my midwife's office has said anything other than she's obviously healthy and active so just keep on waiting at home please. It has been really nice not to steel myself for a fight or get spooled up for every visit at this point.

Even in the face of all this boredom and wasted time I might be willing to stay pregnant forever if it means I don't have to be induced again. There is no simple discomfort that I think I can't stand that would make me choose induction. NO WAY. So even though I'm bored and not sleeping well and chewing up the time of my loved ones, I'm sort of okay with it. I want her to be born so we can get this adventure on the road but I'm perfectly content to ride it out for a while. You won't see me asking to be induced and it's this precise reason that I'm glad I chose the care provider that I did. I think I'd be having a mighty fight with almost anyone else at this point, which would just stress me out.

So, that's what I'm doing. Just waiting.