Contractions

For my non-pregnant friends I wanted to enlighten you on the joys of contractions. I'm doing this partly because they're not at all what I expected them to be like and partly because every time I mention that we're inducing a week early, I get the "Why on earth would you want to do that?" response. Well the answer in short is that my contractions started this time last week. No joke. We were at my in-laws house last Saturday night when I felt the first one. It was like having an invisible corset cinched tight around my big belly. At first they were about 30 minutes apart and easy to time. I was actually excited to feel them. Yay! Here comes the baby! But I didn't tell anyone yet because I knew we were still a long way from going to the hospital. The corset will tighten and then slowly release over and over. Sometimes it doesn't release all the way and then it feels kind of like your abdomen does when you're doing the type of crunches where you're just holding your head up for a long time.
Things started getting painful three days later. On top of the corset-tightening pain there was a muscle cramping type pain. This most likely had to do with the fact that my uterine muscles had been contracting non-stop since Saturday night. That corset-type pain has been non-stop even in my sleep since last week. But thankfully the muscle pain comes and goes. I've even had a few days since then where I didn't have the muscle pain at all during the day. Today we've added a third type of pain on top of those two. The muscles in my back are really tight and they seem to tighten when a contraction is really strong. It makes you want to bend over and hold your belly so that the weight isn't on your back anymore.

And I almost forgot - there's another component to all of this too. In order for Bri to come out she has to "engage" which means she has to fit her head between the bones of my pelvis. That's a very strange sensation too. It sort of makes you jump and it feels uncomfortable but it's exciting because that means she's close to being ready. I haven't had her stay engaged for longer than 5 minutes at a time so far though. At least, not that I could feel. So basically, all this discomfort has made me very willing to go ahead and induce labor. I know that active labor (the next stage - the part they always show on "The Birth Story") will be loads more painful but at least it will have a definitive ending point and an epidural and more importantly a BABY on the other side!! :o)