Any baby yet????

Even Mr. Ibis is getting annoyed by the constant calls, emails, Facebook messages, and texts now. He's starting to catch my mood, or maybe have sympathy-pregnancy post-40 anxiety of his own, as we were both feeling a little overwrought for the better part of the day yesterday. It was kind of nice to have company in that frame of mind, though.

We had a good talk about our current feelings and agreed that my mom's visit has probably had the negative effect that we feared it would, which was to ratchet our impatience and stress way up about the whole baby arrival deal. We remembered that when we first heard the dates she picked for her trip, we were very disappointed because we had totally mentally prepared ourselves for the probability that I wouldn't deliver by 40 weeks, and we realize now that we lost touch with that resolve when mom and sis landed in town.

I think for me I also got my hopes up too much when, first, I had progress at 36 weeks which I wasn't expecting but which got me nowhere fast, and second, my mom said she'd had all her babies early and I foolishly believed I would follow suit (my mom also smoked during her pregnancies so that may have been a factor).

There is another factor in my anxiety that seems gauche to mention, which is why I haven't mentioned it yet, but every day that I spend on maternity leave prior to the birth is a day longer before I can return to work, and tightens the savings account a little bit more... in fact, has the potential to lop days off of my leave altogether, which really makes me sad. It's not exactly a money thing so much as it's a having to leave my baby in daycare sooner thing, and it totally sucks. But ultimately it's not a good enough reason to hit the fast forward button.

So I did a little more research and discovered that the average first full term pregnancy goes 8 days overdue. I really wish someone had told me this a long time ago! I knew first moms usually go late but I guess I was thinking that meant just a couple of days. For me 8 days overdue would be next Friday, the 22nd. So I talked with Mr. I and decided that Wednesday is just too early of an induction date as long as the NSTs continue to go well. I would probably never forgive myself if I consented to induce on Wednesday and wound up with emergency surgery and I wasn't even 41 weeks yet. I am assuming that doctors don't like scheduling inductions over the weekend so I'm going to ask Dr. J if she's cool with the following Monday, the 25th. I'll be 41 weeks and 4 days. Now, it PAINS me to imagine having him that late but I finally decided I want to give him a good chance to come on his own. So that's my proposal.