Still waiting...

Well, my due date has now come and gone and still no baby. At this point we are just glad that she wasn't born yesterday, which was Blondie's birthday. As of my midwife appointment on Tuesday the baby still hadn't dropped and I am definitely more uncomfortable than I have been at the end of my other pregnancies. The baby always seems to be up in my ribs, making it hard to bend over or even sit upright comfortably. Since my last 2 babies were 6 and 10 days early, I didn't think that I would last this long with this pregnancy. The frustrating part is that next week is the S. family reunion and assuming I have the baby before it begins on Wednesday, I am not going to be in much of a position to participate much. The other hard part is that I feel like my life is on hold until I have this baby - I can't really plan anything day to day and it would be nice to just know at this point when she will be coming. My only baby to this point that was born past the due date was Blondie - and she was only two days late (which would be today for this baby).

I have definitely gotten a lot of interesting questions at church the last couple of weeks about this pregnancy - How far dilated am I? Has the doctor checked me yet? Is the doctor going to induce me? Have my other pregnancies started on their own? When you consider that I use a midwife and have my babies at home, some of these questions are kind of silly (although to give them credit, most people don't know that I have my babies at home). I have definitely talked to a lot more people about it with this pregnancy than I have with my others though. So to answer some of the questions: I don't know how far dilated I am because I haven't been checked. Really there is no point because a woman can be dilated to 3 or 4 cm for several weeks before she ever gives birth. Plus, internal checking just increases the risk of infection - and who wants that? Yes my other pregnancies have started on their own and since I am still only 2 days late I'm not too concerned at this point. At my appointment on Tuesday my midwife said that if she were to guess the size of my baby right now, she would guess around 7 1/2 pounds - so we're not concerned about the baby getting too big. My kids have all been in the range of 7 lbs 6 ozs to 8 lbs 4 ozs.

So, while waiting for this baby I have gone to the temple a couple of times, taken the kids to see Toy Story 3 and set up the pools out back for the kids to play in. (And can I just mention that Monday morning is the best time to go and see a movie. We were one of only two families in the theater for the 11 a.m. showing of Toy Story 3. It was great!) I try and get a nap in during the afternoon because I'm not sleeping too well at night. I have been reading a lot and doing a lot of shopping to make sure we have everything we need. Plus it always seems that we're running out of something from the grocery store. I've done birthday shopping for Blondie and M&M and also done some shopping for M&M to go to YW camp on July 27th!! Blondie and Luke start school on July 26th - just over a week away. Kitty starts kindergarten the following week and I just found out that there will be no kindergarten buses this year so I will have to drive her to school everyday and then she will ride the bus home with the older kids. I'm not sure if I mentioned it in a previous post or not but Kitty got assigned to afternoon kindergarten. I tried to get her switched to morning, but they said that they had more requests for morning kindergarten this year than they ever have in previous years so some of the kids had to be put in the afternoon classes. So we'll just have to give it a try and see how we like it.