Hold on for the ride

Many things are unclear right now, but we do know that the boys are going to have to come through in a big way on Mother's Day each year...

This Friday I got a text at work from Kristen - it was time to play ambulance since her contractions had spiked to 12 an hour. Even after having her contraction limit adjusted upward, this was still too high. So we took off to the hospital on a nice sunny Friday afternoon. SF was full again, so we opted to visit our friends in Hayward again.

I think the best words to capture the experience of our third trimester are "rollercoaster". After being called out of comfortable home bedrest on Friday (that pleasant, slow climbing on the rollercoaster), we arrived at Hayward in the triage department where Kristen was promptly examined by a doctor who told us we may be delivering babies the next day (this would be that sudden cliff-like drop in the ride where everyone looses their stomach and screams before going through 5 upside-down twisty turns). Kristen got put on a very heavy dose of anti-contraction medication, which made her feel very hot and groggy. She also got put on a clear liquid diet (meaning only can eat popsicles and soup broth - diabetic popsicles and soup broth mind you). When I came in Saturday morning she was looking pretty miserable from the drugs, but the upside was the contractions slowed dramatically and it looked like we would probably stave off delivery for at least another day (sudden corner turning and ascent up another big hill).

With a full day of hospital ahead of us, we decided to have a very scaled back baby shower (aka - just a few people came to visit). It was great and I think Kristen really appreciated seeing and hearing from everyone. I personally want to say a big thank you to everyone who calls and visits etc. - it is a huge help physically and mentally to have so many caring family members & friends and I know there is no way we would have gotten this far without you (I for one would have lost my mind long ago).

Saturday night Kristen and I had dinner and a movie in the hospital - Chipotle and a DVD from the Blue Planet series (the ocean version of Planet Earth). That's pretty much what a date night looks like for us right now, but we both enjoyed it.

Sunday we are still in the hospital although Kristen may get to go home tomorrow if her cervix behaves itself. The head labor & delivery doctor informed Kristen that the drugs they have at their disposal haven't been scientifically proven to actually postpone pre-term birth (rather they slow the contractions - which aren't 100% correlated with delivery surprisingly). So his advice was to just stay as relaxed as possible and lay low as long as possible since the women who seem to last longest in this situation are the ones who stay relaxed.

To that end we are going to up the bedresting efforts and try to keep Kristen laying down and relaxed as much as we can. We are almost at 30 weeks (Tuesday) and are going for every extra day we can get!

Thanks again to everyone for their thoughts, prayers and help!