Apparently I haven’t posted a full update on Henry and baby since NOVEMBER (sorry), so here goes… I’m currently 36 weeks pregnant with baby girl, and Henry is a strong-willed two year old. This pregnancy hasn’t been as easy on me as the last, and I’m happy that we are nearing the end and little lady will be here soon! Specifically, she will be here in three weeks and two days, which is March 17 (St. Patrick’s Day baby!). We recently made the decision to be induced because my doctor is going to be on vacation the week of my actual due date, and the induction will only be five days before I’m due (the same number of days early that Henry arrived). I’m a little nervous about the induction since we didn’t do one with Henry’s birth and I don’t fully know what to expect, but having a specific end date is like breathing a sigh of relief.

We have been going to our bi-weekly prenatal appointments with nothing especially interesting happening, but a couple weeks ago we had a teeny weeny scare. When the doctor checked baby’s heart rate she found that it was fairly high, and asked me to do a stress test to further monitor things. They should call these things “de-stress tests” because this was the most relaxed I’ve been in weeks. All it entails is sitting in a recliner with your feet up and some monitors hooked up to your belly. Oh, and I had to push a button every time I felt baby move. It was really, really hard, you guys.  Turns out that baby’s heart rate is completely normal – it rises and falls exactly as it should, and they probably just caught it on one of the rises. Hooray!

On the flip side, I’m dealing with the possibility of gestational thrombocytopenia again, so that’s super fun. Basically it just means that my platelet levels are very low, and I have to go in for weekly blood draws to monitor them. They had been on the rise (up to 138, and 140 is on the low end of the normal range), but then fell to 115, which is the lowest they’ve ever been. Then it was back up to 146, then back down to 123. And there’s nothing I can do to influence them at all. Long story short, my platelets need to get their shit together or else I will need to see a hematologist and potentially have to take steroids to get my levels back up. Absolute worst case scenario is that I cannot have an epidural because my blood will not clot, but my doctor does not seem concerned about that at this point.

On the chance that I am not able to have an epidural for L&D, I need a backup plan. Both my mom and doctor suggested self-hypnosis/hypnobirth, so I started looking into classes and found one that the instructor will scrunch into the minimal time we have left. Our first class was last week, and we will have one class a week until the baby is born. The first class was almost like an interview, where the instructor got to know us, our preferences and our needs. We also went through the history of childbirth and hypnobirth, learned how and why it works, and watched some videos of women giving birth in states of complete relaxation – it was actually really cool. At the end she walked us through how to relax ourselves completely, and sent us home with a CD to “practice” putting ourselves into that state for 20-30 minutes every day. That way when the time comes for baby’s arrival I will be able to quickly get myself into that state. I’ve been doing it when I get in bed at night and have only been able to get about five minutes into it before I am 100% asleep, so hopefully that means it is working 🙂

HAVE ANY OF YOU TRIED HYPNOBIRTHING? WHAT WAS YOUR EXPERIENCE?

Videos from the past few months: