This is getting exciting!

I'll start this post by saying, I may have a baby in not too long :-)

We had our weekly doctor's appointment today so we went in and my blood pressure was a bit high again. At this point in the pregnancy, this means an automatic trip to the hospital for a non stress test (getting hooked up to contraction and fetal heartbeat monitors), so my husband and I drove over to the hospital and got settled in. This time, the midwife also ordered an ultrasound to check my amniotic fluid levels - this actually excited me because we hadn't seen the baby in what feels like forever.

Oh, I should also add that at my appointment the midwife checked me and I'm 4cm dilated with 80 percent effacement (a measure of how thinned out my cervix is). WARNING: Straight pregnancy talk, such as dilatation and effacement will continue moving forward. I'm not going to sugarcoat anything.

Anyway, so while on the monitors at the hospital, we see that the baby looks great and that I was having contractions every two minutes. They were just little contractions, and honestly I couldn't feel them when they were happening. I guess this can happen after an internal exam - and in the words of our midwife, "labor is progressive," and not to worry, I'll feel the real labor contractions when they really get heated up.

My ultrasound was fine - the baby was moving around and my fluid levels were within the normal range. Then I had to wait to get some labs back to make sure there wasn't a chance of preeclampsia (just like last week). While we're waiting, my cramping began ... so apparently those little contractions are heating up at least a little bit. Labs came back fine so we were discharged, but before we left, I asked the midwife what the odds are of me being pregnant in a week. She gave me 50 percent odds - a coin flip. Well, a couple hours and consistently annoying (I say annoying because I'm crampy, but the pain is no big deal right now) contractions later, I'm starting to think we're getting VERY close to D-Day. Or it may be more appropriate to call it B-day for the little one! Our instructions are to not worry about calling in until I'm having contractions that I can't breath through. Basically, they want me to be very angry and uncomfortable when we go in for the real deal. We'll see what happens tonight ...

More to come, but right now, we're going to go finish packing the hospital bag.