Waiting for Baby

I go back and forth. Some days, I'm excited by the fact that this baby will surprise me with it's arrival -- that I have no idea where I'll be or what I'll be doing when I go into labor, that I don't know how it will start (sudden water breaking? gradual increasing regularity of contractions?), that I don't know what our baby's birthday will be, etc.

If I were guaranteed that it would happen in the next 12 days, I'd probably be fine with the uncertainty, and even continue to be excited by it. But it's so hard to deal with it when it could be tomorrow, it could be a week and a half from now, it could be three and a half weeks from now . . . Twelve days is kind of my maximum window of excitement -- being told that something could happen anytime in the next 26 days is a little too much.

So I'm trying to distract myself, but it's hard when I'm not at work anymore and everything that happens in my body feels like it could be labor. Here's the rundown of what I'm experiencing:

1. Contractions. Irregular, painful, and generally pretty long. This is not really anything new, though, which is frustrating. Nothing really seems to impact them one way or another -- not how hydrated I am, whether or not I'm in a hot shower, whether I'm resting or upright, etc. I don't feel like I have a very good handle on them, though -- it's hard to tell when one begins and ends, and since I haven't been timing them or anything, I couldn't really tell you how many I have a day. Part of me thinks I should be paying closer attention and collecting more detailed data, but another part of me worries that it will only make me paranoid.

2. More hiccups. I've noticed that the baby gets the hiccups about once a day now, whereas before they would be more rare. According to a little Googling, if anything, hiccups mean that labor is not imminent, since the baby stops its practice breathing 24-48 hours before labor.

3. Cervical twinges. I'm not sure if this is an accurate description because it's hard for me to tell what I'm feeling in my cervix vs. vagina vs. pelvis in general, etc . . . but I will often have a weird, painful feeling in what I can only assume is my cervix. Maybe it's a baby kicking or maybe it's a baby burrowing its head down, or maybe I'm feeling my cervix dilate? I also kind of feel like I sometimes feel my cervix pulsating or something. Not sure how to describe it. It's like it's doing some quick involuntary contractions on it's own that are separate from my uterus. Almost like involuntary kegels? But not really, because they feel more internal. They kind of have the same rhythm as the practice breathing, so maybe it's just that I'm feeling the baby practice breathing, but because his/her head is right on my cervix, it feels like the cervix is pulsing.

4. Mucus. Just a little, and nothing unusual. If it were 3 months ago, I wouldn't think anything of it, but of course now I'm thinking, "Hmm...mucus plug?"

5. Lightening. It's still hard for me to tell just by looking in the mirror, but I'm pretty sure that the baby is dropping.  Others have remarked that my belly looks lower, and I feel a little more comfortable in terms of my belly height. The shirt that I wore yesterday seemed to fit more loosely, but when I looked in the mirror, it actually looked tighter at the lower part of my belly. Before it had been snug up top and loose on bottom.

That's about it, though. I'm not nesting, there's no bloody show, and I'm generally not feeling an eerie sense of "today's the day" or anything. Everyone says that "when you're in labor, you'll know." So I'm trying to just roll with that and figure that if I'm not getting a strong, "This is labor" vibe, then I'm not in labor. No matter how many twinges I get or how many contractions send me to my knees, if I'm not convinced it's labor, then it probably isn't.