I Sing the Body Incompetent

So, we went to the doctor yesterday for our probably LAST MATERNITY VISIT EVER. She was surprised to see us at all, and more surprised when she did the pelvic. "You're completely effaced," she said. "Like, 90%. You can't get any more effaced without, you know, it being gone."

Not only that, but the baby is so low that she actually had to feel around the kid's head to get at the rest of the cervix.

HOWEVER, I am still only 2 cm dilated. No matter how many other signs and symptoms of labor I might have, until things, ahem, open up, the child stays put.

"Haven't you had ANY contractions?" she asked. I said I had had some Braxton-Hicks, but that was it. Nothing real, nothing substantial.

She assured Aaron and me that when I finally did start having contractions, it would probably go quickly since everything else was ready to go. I, of course, no longer believe anything that doctors say, and am therefore preparing myself for 52-hours of hard labor following by 7 days of pushing, or something like that.

Anyway, whether my cervix gets its act together or not, we WILL have a baby by the New Year. We reminded the office that we wouldn't be coming back since we had an induction date scheduled on Monday, December 29. Our doctor really did schedule it, but no one actually filled out the paperwork because he didn't tell anybody. In fact, he wrote a note next to it saying, "If baby not delivered before then" (well, duh, but it was his way of saying that he was only scheduling this induction to appease us and in his medical opinion was pretty sure that we would have the baby well before then). Filling out the paperwork was just a formality, since the hospital already had us down on their calendar (the most important part), and while doing so, the nurse also exclaimed her surprise that Dr. Lockhart had been wrong. He has been practicing for many years, and she said, "If he says you're going to go early, you usually go early."

Yeah, well, there you go, right? Tell something like that to Aaron and myself, and we usually do our dardest to do the exact opposite. It's like the time that I was having my wisdom teeth taken out, and the doctor gave me some sort of medicine that was supposed to knock me out completely, but right before I slipped into unconciousness, he said, "You won't remember a thing," at which point I woke myself up enough to remember the whole thing, but I couldn't tell him because I was too drugged up. Stupid, right? And then I went and married a man who also loves to do the opposite of whatever anyone tells him (this makes our marriage interesting sometimes, for both of us), so it makes complete SENSE that our child would be the same way.

Seriously, I expect if the doctor had tut-tutted in early December and said that nothing was really progressing in the labor front, our child would already be a few weeks old.

Anyway, if nothing happens before Monday, and I don't think that anything will, we will head to Riverside hospital by 7 AM (I am fine with this, because it means that we get everything done with pretty early in the day; my husband was aghast since he doesn't get out of bed until 8 AM most days, and doesn't actually wake up until about 10 AM). SO, one way or another, we will have a baby before New Years (unless, of course, the induction doesn't work; I know this one teacher at school who had to be induced 3 times, but we're not thinking about that, oh no, no, no...)