Maya and Oliver: January 2010

Last week I tried more holistic techniques to try and turn the baby - yoga, turning upside down with hips over heart and music playing at my pelvis, going to the chiropractor (webster technique) and acupuncture (moxibustion - where oliver waves fat sticks of incense at my pinky toes twice a day for 10 minutes each time).

On Tuesday, the baby was still breech. Thursday morning, the morning of my appointment, the baby still felt breech (she was in her usual position with butt on the left of my belly button and head to the right and a little north of my belly button.

We got to the hospital at 9:30am. It was snowing and we were told to bring the hospital bag because there is a small chance the procedure could break my water and I'd have the baby that day (the part of labor I had been fearing was getting stuck in a snowstorm at rush hour traffic on the way to the hospital, so perhaps I had the right fear but the timing was wrong. I hope so - I'll take the snowstorm at rush hour on a day we're not trying to get to the hospital in a car! We took the subway so no one got stuck in traffic.)

The appointment was for 11, but we were asked to get there at 9:30. Apparently to fill out one form and sit around for 90 minutes. I was only allowed to drink water from midnight on. At 11 they took me to my room, put me in a gown and then in a bed, hooked me up to an IV for fluid (you need a full bladder), and started monitoring the baby's heartbeat and my contractions (Braxton Hicks contractions. I didn't know that's what I had been feeling all along - I thought it was the baby moving.) The monitoring was really neat.

At 12:45 the resident came in to check the baby again, to make sure she was still breech...and sure enough she had flipped on her own! She's so grounded when she comes out for putting us through all this!!! :)

The resident said they measure amniotic fluid in sacs, and that the normal range is 5-20, and that I had 19.6! That explains my huge belly (that and some, um, weight gain :). Anyway, because she is not huge (a little over 6 pounds) and I have so much fluid, she is likely just floating around in there, bopping between head up and head down. And sure enough, I'm pretty sure she moved back to her usual spot later that afternoon.

But the important thing is that if she can figure out how to get head down once, she is likely to do it again. She just has to get there come labor time.

It also seems like my stomach has dropped. I can't see it in pictures but I can feel it and a few folks have commented on it.

So is this an indicator of our baby's personality? She seems to be a bit bashful (when she's moving around and anyone places her hand on my belly she stops), she likes her space, and she likes to do things on her own time. Awesome. Can't wait for the teen years.