Week 38 visit

Eric came with me to this week's midwife appointment--he figures he might want to start meeting the people who are going to be in the delivery room with us, plus we'd meant to talk to them about this whole "birth plan" business (and the back-and-forth I keep getting from them about the specter of induction), but we totally forgot that last part.

Instead, I got my first cervical check. This involves the midwife--the student, Jennifer, in this case--donning a pair of gloves and *WARNING: GRAPHIC GIRL CONTENT* putting her hand inside my you-know-what to see how many fingers she can put through the cervical opening, and how thick it is. Jackie had described the cervix as being like a turtleneck; it can be tightly closed and all thick and bunched up, as is normal, or it can be open and thin, which is what will happen when I'm ready for labor. After some pushing and leaning and telling me to put my fists under my hips to tilt me enough for her to get to the right position, *END WARNING* she determined I'm one centimeter dilated and somewhere around 25ish percent effaced (she didn't sound very confident), -3 to -2 station (baseline is -4). In other words, not very far along at all. But it's kind of nice to know that something actually is happening.

"You're just about where I'd expect a new mother to be," she told me, *BEGIN WARNING* pulling off her blood-tinged gloves, "where not much is going to happen for another couple of weeks. You might spot a little tonight," she added thoughtfully as she disposed of the gloves. "The cervix is so vascularized at this point." *END WARNING* The exam was not actually painful, but definitely uncomfortable, and Eric looked kind of alarmed.

Everything else looks fine, baby seems to be occiput anterior (her back to my front, which is what we want), and I got them to give me a doctor's note to excuse me from the jury duty summons I got for August 10. We're figuring that's not going to work out so well, unless they want the twelfth member of the jury to be a bleeding, sore, hormonally unbalanced new mother, and the thirteenth member of the jury to be a tiny evil overlord.