Baby Kyle Update - August 9, 2013

Baby Kyle Update

[Quick note – the current situation is that we are set to go in to the hospital Saturday night in preparation to be induced on Sunday. I am going to update this as I can, but as you can imagine, I might be a bit busy!]

August 9, 2013

We came into today thinking we might get to meet Baby Kyle - very very exciting! As we were to find out later, our excitement was premature, but nothing unhealthy, just misunderstood.

After some contractions happened on Thursday, we thought that this might be the beginning of true early labor, and had planned on spending the day managing the contractions. We didn’t exactly start off on the right foot, though, as there was construction being done on our place of abode that started a bit earlier than we would want. As in, “7 am” early. Now, we had had this start on Wednesday and Thursday, but for some reason, we thought surely this couldn’t go on for a third day, could it? Dumb on my part – as we found out, it is going to continue until Monday at the latest….

So, not fun. But we are blessed with Janice’s parents living very nearby and they were willing to let us come over and try to relax there.

The contractions had continued through the night, and during the day as well. I call them contractions because they seemed like they might be contractions and we were treating them like real contractions, and they seemed to feel like legitimate contractions. So we went back to the basic contraction management activities from the night before as best we could.

Between the early mornings the past few days and general lack of sleep as happens late in pregnancy, though, Janice was pretty tired and being able to continue became more and more difficult as the day went along.

This continued throughout the day until about 5:00 when we realized that things weren’t really progressing. I personally think that *I* should have figured out a few things at this point – more later – but at the time, we had too many things in the air and a few concerns. One, Janice was having a little pressure in her face when she was having the contractions, and that was a concern. Two, Baby Kyle wasn’t moving as much as he had been in the past. Not enough to be a serious concern, but enough to raise a bit of a red flag. Third, we were tired and frustrated and had gotten a little turned around.

The construction was done at home so we thought the thing to do was go home and focus on us 100%. Not being at home, being around other people was just very distracting. Getting home was good, but it wasn’t what we had hoped – we would walk around, do other things, but rather than helping the contractions progress, they just made Janice tired. This was a fourth concern – we knew that when things got deep into the process, it was going to be very exhausting and if Janice was *already* tired….

After 11:00, we decided to go into the hospital to get a checkup. The Labor and Deliver people are great about this, and it was easy to go in and get things checked out. We wanted to make sure we knew what was going on, and just to verify that everything was okay with Baby Kyle.

The staff was very professional and understanding (not surprising, but just setting the scene). It turned out that, as I think *I* should have figured out, they were just Braxton-Hicks contractions – false labor. And everything was fine with Baby Kyle – good heartbeat and movement.

So overall, good decision to go in, and found out that all was well, we were just over-thinking things. (Me? Overthink things? Never.)

In the end, we went back to Janice’s parent’s place to get a good night sleep, which we did, and we’re back to the original plan – go in Saturday night to start the medicine to eventually be induced sometime Sunday. Basically, the peace of mind was very worth it, and now we can spend Saturday eating and sleeping and relaxing. If real contractions show their face, great, but otherwise we feel confident in how the medical professionals will handle things.