Update on Friday

I'm going to try to post everyday now, mostly for the readers that I don't actually know or coorespond with in my day-to-day life. We're in the home stretch now and Grace could be here literally any day.

First of all, I am sorry to report that the contractions I had all day Thurday, pretty much amounted to nothing on Friday. I had a couple in the morning, but they weren't in the 20 minute apart range and then by lunch time, nothing was happening. The upside was that I made it through a meeting/conference call that I've been working on putting together for the past couple of weeks and now my fill-in person will be much better prepared to work on my renewal while I'm gone. I'm actually really happy about where I am at work, except that I've been waiting on this one piece of information from one of my clients for the last month or so. I'm working on a project for them and can't really do much more until I get this information. Well, they decided to send it finally at 4:30 p.m. on Friday. That's nice. Now, I will have something else to try to finish up if I go back on Monday.

I also called the doctor again yesterday morning. This time the nurse called me back in a timely manner. She said that Dr. D is fine with scheduling an induction next weekend and wants to do Saturday 12/18 (which is what I requested). The only problem is that the hospital won't allow scheduling more than a week in advance, so they have to wait until Monday to book it. My parents are going to go ahead and book their flight for Thursday afternoon and will just change it if we end up going sooner. So, now that I know at the very least, we'll be going in on Saturday, I could pick a last day of work. I still have 2 personal days that I haven't used for 2004 that won't be carried over to next year. I requested that I use them on Thursday and Friday next week (assuming I could otherwise work). I got the ok, so at the latest Wednesday will be my last day of work before my maternity leave. Yeah!

Friday night we had a decent evening. We were trying to get things moving a bit. I was really achy yesterday, so afterwork I came home and took a hot bath and then a 30 minute nap. Eric didn't get home until almost 7:00, so when he got home we went to the mall. We took back the jeans I bought for his birthday that were too small. Then we found some other jeans, bought him some new shoes for work, he got 2 new Colt's hats, and we picked up our final gifts for Eric's family and are now officially done Christmas shopping. We were at the mall until 9:00 and they shut down. Then we went to Chili's and had some dinner. After that we came home and I sat on the big exercise ball that Eric bought me for Christmas. He gave it to me Thursday because I couldn't get comfortable sitting on the couch and mentioned that I wish I had one of those balls they had in our childbirth classes to sit on. He bought if for exercise purposes, but it was nice. Then before we went to bed we tried one more old trick for getting labor started, but we don't need to share the details here.

So now it's Saturday morning, my water still hasn't broke and no contractions to speak of. It's hard to believe this is my last Saturday to just sit around and be lazy. This time next week I'll either be a Mom or at least at the hospital working towards that goal. All I have planned is to write the receipts in the checkboook, do a couple of bills, and when Eric gets home we're going to attempt to install the carseat base. Other than that, I may just be sitting with my feet up crossstiching or bouncing on my exercise ball.

One last thing to write about. My feelings keep sort of flip-flopping about the induction and when I want to have this baby. I've been thinking I wanted it to happen this weekend, but now with nothing really going on in the contraction department, I'm thinking that may not happen. Now I'm thinking maybe it wouldn't be so bad for her to wait a bit longer. I still would prefer to go into labor naturally, but it would be great if that happened on Thursday or Friday. My parents will be here by Thursday night. If we wait that long, I could have my Mom present for the birth. She could be at the hospital with me. I'm sure you ladies understand, how sometimes you just want your Mom? I've been preparing myself for the likely possibility that it would just be Eric and I and she probably wouldn't make it in time, but now she really could be here! So I'm a bit torn. I want Grace to come as soon as possible, but if she waits just a couple more days, I could have my Mom here too. I suppose it's good that it isn't my decision. She will come when she's ready and the rest of us will deal with it when it happens.

Ok, I'm going to go do a little minor cleaning and those bills. I'll update tomorrow with anything exciting that happens today or just to say I'm still here.