I try not to read a lot about childbirth and labor – I want to be informed but not over-saturated – but I happened to read today a BabyCenter journal entry from a woman about to give birth to her first child. She commented that she just had a false alarm: she thought her “bags of water” had broken, and she rushed to the hospital. The first thing I thought when I read this was, \u00e2\u20ac\u02dcHow could she think her water had broken if it really hadn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t? Isn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t that something you should be able to tell pretty easily?\u00e2\u20ac\u2122 (According to my mom-friends, it is!) The whole idea that something that major could happen (or not happen), and a woman could not know it (or get confused by it) is pretty scary (and intriguing) to me.<\/p>\n
Of course, that made me think about labor in general – and how to determine when it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s really happening. I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ve recently experienced what I assume are Braxton Hicks (“practice”) contractions, and each time I feel them now, I wonder “Could this be it?” And, “How will I know if it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s the real thing or not?” Books and people assure me that I *will* indeed know (I assume the contractions will hurt – oh, about 100 times as much), but it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s hard not to worry a bit about it.<\/p>\n
On a related note, I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ve felt (perhaps optimistically?) throughout my pregnancy that I would deliver early. But now that the date is closer, I don\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t want to! I really just want to finish up my week at work and have a week or two to relax (sleep in!), finish up some things around the house and just *be.* We\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ll see how that all works out…\n<\/p>\n
-M<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I try not to read a lot about childbirth and labor – I want to be informed but not over-saturated – but I happened to read today a BabyCenter journal entry from a woman about to give birth to her first child. She commented that she just had a false alarm: she thought her “bags […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-54","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-prearrival"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.zoe.browdy.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/54","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.zoe.browdy.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.zoe.browdy.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.zoe.browdy.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.zoe.browdy.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=54"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.zoe.browdy.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/54\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.zoe.browdy.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=54"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.zoe.browdy.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=54"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.zoe.browdy.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=54"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}