The Final (ha) Push

I was pregnant for 89 weeks with my daughter.  Okay, 41 weeks.  However, if anyone is

looking to slow time, just spend a week as a pregnant woman who has gone past her due date.  It was the longest week of my life.  Like the movie, Groundhog Day, except with swelling, irritability (read: rage at the slightest provocation), discharge from all manner of places (you’re welcome), and discomfort as you have never experienced.  Sometimes, I am reminded of this when I ask women in my prenatal yoga class to “take a comfortable seat.”  When you are 89 weeks pregnant, there is no comfortable seat.  

So, this post is for those women whose due date has come and gone, who have strangers tremble in fear at their approach, who have to tell the 8th person today that “no, I am NOT having twins.”  There is so much more that I wish I could offer.  But, because I know that perusing websites for anything and everything to kick start labor gets old, I will share my own to-do list.  None of these suggestions will help you welcome your baby any more quickly.  Nevertheless, I found several of them helpful during those final (and long. so. long.) days.

• Take baths.  Long ones, with water that comes over your belly.  Close your eyes and assure yourself that labor is definitely starting tonight.
• Alternatively, if it’s 3000 degrees out, find a pool.  Buy 12 styrofoam noodles at Target and use all of them.
• Punch your snoogle.
• Play some mindless game on your phone, pausing only to film your alien belly as it morphs.
• Take pictures of your swollen legs and send them to your friends.  Encourage them to feel really sorry for you.
• Cry.  If you don’t feel like crying, cry about that.  
• Go to the grocery store (or send someone for you). Buy that food item that you never buy because there are too many calories and it’s not sensible and you might feel judged at the checkout and it won’t taste as good as you remember it tasting, so here’s to another reason for feeling sorry for yourself.    
• Strap a heating pad to some part of you that hurts.  Move it when another part of you hurts.  
• If you don’t feel like lifting yourself up off of the floor, do not do it.  
• If you do feel like lifting yourself off of the floor, get into hands and knees and round your back.  Do cat like you’ve never done cat before.  I also found that lowering onto my forearms and rocking back and forth (moaning optional.  see my last post) helped.  
• If there are things that need to “get done” around the house, make sure that you are not the one “getting them done”.
• Drink a big glass of wine.  If you have heartburn that rivals Larry the Cable Guy’s, crush a bunch of tums on top of a huge bowl of ice cream in consolation.  
• Daydream about when you’ll be able to bend at the waist again.

I promise you won’t make it to 90 weeks.