False Alarm

Sometimes the unexpected is hard to decipher.  Yesterday was a very long day at work.  My feet and legs had swollen to where I couldn't move them, my back felt like it could break in a million pieces, and I was just plain drained.  After work we went over to Dave's parents for dinner, and just about the entire time that we were there I felt like I was having contractions.  They didn't seem like they were going away any time soon, so Dave starting writing them down.  This is where my confusion set in.  I've been told that "I'll just know" when real contractions are happening; however, I've known before that something was not happening, but here I couldn't say for sure either way.  This felt like something I had never experienced, and I just assumed that it was my bean sprout trying to come out.   After three hours of having them, most of which 5 to 7 to 10 minutes in between, we thought we'd better call Dr. B.  He told us to go ahead and make a trip to labor and delivery. 

I suppose I'll call this our trial round.  I was hooked up to all the monitors and everything was checked out by a very nice nurse.  Said nurse told me that I wasn't anymore dialated, but I was 56% effaced.  This was good news to me since I wasn't really effaced when Dr. B checked last.  This didn't mean that Griffin was on his way out last night, however.  But it did mean that we were given the opportunity to hang out in there for an hour, watching Griffin's movements via lines on a computer screen while eating ice chips.  I guess we've had worse Friday nights.   We did use this opportunity to ask the very nice nurse lots and lots of questions, questions that we really hadn't had til now.  The nurse assured me that I wasn't crazy for thinking that I was going into labor, and explained that I could have contractions all day long and still have no cervical change, which is really what labor is.  There is only one way to detect cervical change, and it takes a professional.  So I slipped my fuzzy blue slippers back on, took the Ambien they gave me to finally get some sleep after a week of none, and slept like a rock till 10:30 this morning.  Now all I need to do is get to Wednesday; that shouldn't be too hard, right?