Pseudo-labor

On Tuesday morning (18 November), I woke up at about 0300 to Vashti moaning. She'd been having Braxton-Hicks contractions fairly regularly for the previous few days, but this was obviously more intense. We called the midwives at about 0500 and when they checked her a little later that morning she was at 6 centimeters and progressing nicely. The picture above was taken at about 1100 Tuesday morning.

During the course of the day on Tuesday Vashti continued to have contractions at least every 15 minutes, sometimes as frequently as every 4 or 5, but they weren't super intense, and we were even able to go take a short walk.

When the midwives checked her at 1800 on Tuesday she was at 8 or 9 centimeters, so she decided to give the pool a try. The picture above was taken at about midnight.

1300 Wednesday afternoon... throughout the night she kept having contractions at least every 15 minutes, which precluded anything other than catnaps. When the midwives checked her at about 1000 Wednesday morning she hadn't progressed past 8 or 9 centimeters, and it looked like the possible reason for this was that the baby had turned posterior (still head down, but face up instead of face down - not impossible to deliver, but more difficult, and slower).

So we started praying a lot. We wanted to have the baby at home just because it seemed like a more natural environment, and while we weren't completely opposed to going to the hospital we realized that eventually it might come to that just because Vashti was going to run out of energy. I should point out that the midwives checked the baby's heart rate and Vashti's blood pressure regularly, so we weren't ever worried about their health, and we would have gone to the hospital immediately if there was a problem. It was definitely a trying time for us (and way more emotionally draining than I expected).