34 Weeks and Counting

Finally, as requested, I have posted a photo of "the bump" for all you to see. This was actually taken several weeks ago but I keep forgetting to put it up on the blog.

Yesterday we had our 34 week appointments with both the specialist and the regular doctors. At the regular doctor's office, in typical fashion, I was hooked up to the baby monitor/torture chamber and left alone in the usual discomfort. After a much shorter time than usual, the doc comes over, proclaims that the baby's monitoring is very satisfactory. I chalk this up to Ty & I finding the right chair/body positioning and adjustments of the monitors into the correct places that the staff could not seem to manage! He then proceeds to tell us that we could deliver in about 3 weeks, but being as adamant as I am that Lucanne should come into this world in her own time, this news not sit well with either myself or Ty. When asked by Ty about methods, the doc said that we could start by him manually breaking the water and wait to see what happens and if that doesn't work we could use meds to induce labor. Surprisingly c-section was not in his vocaulary at this time! Ty then asked him why we would induce labor and the doc's only response was to say that since we have worried about her this long why should we prolong the worry for the final 3 weeks. He did preface all this by saying that it really depended on what our fluid levels were doing.

I am sure some of you are asking , "Why wait for nature, when you have a doctor ready, willing and heartily able to speed things up for you?!" Well, the truth of it is this...babies know when they are supposed to come into the world. Besides, studies are now saying that labor induced by a doctor manually breaking the water tend to be more uncomfortable and are far more painful on mom; plus more medications are administered and these drugs can actually slow down the natural laboring processes. On average, induced active labor can be 3-4 times longer and harder than in a natural occuring labor. It is amazing what you can learn about when you have been on bed rest for nearly 5 months and have access to all the books Amazon and Barnes & Noble can sell you online!!

Immediately following the first appointment we went over to the hospital to see the specialist and have another high resolultion ultrasound. Right off the bat we see that Lucanne still looks to be right on target with her growth and all her organs appear to be functioning as they should. She now weighs in at 4lbs, 12ozs. I get nervous abouth the fluids, but am relieved to see that we are at 10.73cm. While this is actually lower than 2 weeks ago, it is only by 1 cm and to still be in double digits is a good sign. The specialist walks in and says she loves it when a baby proves her wrong like this!! She says we can safely consider this pregnancy a huge sucess, we should have no worries about carrying to full term, and she doesn't see any point in us continuing to go in for weekly monitoring. Both Ty and I chime in saying that our OB just advised us to induce in 3 weeks and ask her to make a point to tell him her opinions. She said it would be "ok" to deliver the baby at 37 weeks, but thought we were better off to "let her come on her own time". It is that time in pregnancy where I would normally be going in for weekly check ups and I am hopeful that we will now have some leverage to skip the weekly monitoring from here on out.

We feel it is good news all around at this time. Its playoff season for the Mammoth (LaCrosse), the Avs and the Nuggets and while they are are in good standings, we are in the home stretch and I am starting to get more and more excited to meet the little sparkplug that has been fighting against all the doctors' odds!

32 Weeks...only 8 more to go!!!

I apologize to all of you who were waiting to hear what has been happening with the pregnancy! I've been slacking on my blogging duties in order to take care of things that needed to be done in March. In the weeks since my last blog I've been relegated to returning to the specialist every 2 weeks for fluid measurements and weekly visits to the OB for baby monitoring. The monitoring is still just plain awful. My visit two weeks ago consisted of 45 minutes in the torture chair with a brief 20 second pop in of the doctor. In that 20 seconds he said that the pain I have been feeling whenever I move my left leg for the last several weeks could be a strain, sprain, dislocation or broken bones in my tailbone. Nothing to be done in any case but suffer through the pain and hope it gets better. It isn't uncommon for a baby's position to cause problems in the "S.I. Joint". And baby, let me tell you it isn't fun! That visit also didn't provide good test results, whether that meant that things looked bad on the results or that the results just didn't come out clear enough to make the doctor happy I still don't know. The week before that, at 30 weeks, we went to see the specialist and he had bad news. We dropped from 11 cm to 8 cm of fluid and they were starting to worry again.

Needless to say, little Lucanne had something more to prove to the doctors at 32 weeks! When we went in on Monday for our 32 week visit to the OB she kicked and bucked and probably would have hollered and screamed if she could be heard and the readings were more to the doc's liking. Minutes after leaving the doc's office she had more to say to the specialist! She had an increase of fluids to almost 12 cm and we were able to see her taking "practice" breaths on the ultrasound. It is such an amazing thing to watch that little lung expand and contract inside your own body. I have to admit that while all this bed rest has been a pain, both literally and figuratively, it has been well worth it to see the things we have seen in the ultrasounds!! We have seen the brain, all 4 chambers of the heart beating, the kidneys, the liver, and now have gotten to see the lungs actually working!!! I cannot begin to tell you all how that makes me feel. I had been worried about the fluids for two weeks and almost dreading going to see the specialist as much as the monitoring torture chamber at the OB's office. Our little miracle girl is proving to be such a fighter and I just know that despite all the OB's concerns about this, that, and the other thing, Lucanne will prove him wrong and we will make it all the way through to term without having to have a surgical delivery. My friend said today that karmic-ly I am on my way to an easy and swift delivery and easy first few months after all that I have been through with this pregnancy. I sure hope she is right!


Several people have been asking me about the baby's room and colors. We received a wonderful dragonfly crib bedding set from Herb & Kelly. We are still planning on painting the room in a Camelot Castle theme, but are adding the dragonflies to the design because castles were so hard to find where they didn't look like Disney cakes! (The crib bedding is cream with chocolate brown stripes and dots and light granny smith apple dragonfly bodies.)

Kevin & Kim have loaned us the bassinet that Kevin made when Hailey was born (and their Winnie the Pooh bedding set). We will be using the bassinet for at least the first few months so I won't have to run downstairs every 2 hours!

People are also asking about registries already. We are registered at www.jcpenny.com and www.babiesrus.com.

We are anxiously counting down to June 1 and pray that we have enough ticks left in the clock to prepare ourselves and the house for the coming of our little miracle baby. In the meantime I will try to be more diligent about updating the blog!! As always thanks to every one's support and good will!!!