One Year Ago

One year ago tonight, I sat on the sofa, huge and miserably uncomfortable, realizing that my hopes of labor had been crushed. The night before I had gone into labor...or so I thought.

I didn't realize that labor should actually be somewhat painful at the beginning. Take a shower? Check. Blow dry and style my hair? Check. Apply a little makeup? Check. I should have realized when I called the doctor's office at 8am on the 12th, calmly and in one smooth breath told them, "I think I'm in labor!" and I got, "Well, ok...why don't you come on in?" with a hint of sarcasm.

As soon as I walked into that office, those little contractions got irregular. Once I was hooked up to the monitor, they all but disappeared. As I layed on the table, wondering what the heck was going on, my mind remembered an appointment I had a few months prior. While waiting, a couple came in and excitedly blurted out, "I'm(She) is in labor!!!" The mom-to-be just stood around waiting to be seen, with a huge smile on her face, calm as can be. She was obviously in no pain. It got me all excited thinking about the day when I would tell the hubs it was time. Now my guess is she was so not in labor.

Needless to say, we were sent home. I was given Vicodin to help me sleep since I'd been up the whole night before with "contractions." We called my mom to tell her the disappointing news and went to eat some fiery salsa at Santa Rita's. I went home and passed out, Shaun went to work for the remaining few hours of his day.

So there I was, on the sofa. When I got a little twinge. Eh, I thought to myself. Just false labor. The doctor had told me that false labor contractions usually get worse at night, so I was just going with that. And off to bed I went with my big pregnant belly.

At the exact same time as the previous night, 2am, I awoke with a mildly painful contraction. Oh great I thought, here we go again. For about 1 hour, I layed around in bed having contractions. All the time thinking there was no way this was the real deal.

Yeah, 3 hours of pretty darn painful contractions on the couch - 3 hours of watching some cake show (which FYI is not what you want to watch when you kinda feel like your gonna throw up but I was too tired to get up and get the remote) marathon on TLC and some serious pacing later, I finally gave in and called the nurse. I would have called much sooner, but I would have to call the on-call nurse at 5am to tell her that I was in (false) labor. I just did not believe it.

I think what convinced the nurse was how I couldn't even make it through "I think I'm in labor" without sounding like "I......th......in........k......................I'm....hang on........in....la.................bor"

And off we went to have a baby girl.