The end of the pregnancy

At the end of my last pregnancy post, I commented that since we were now at term with the pregnancy (this was at the end of week 37), there was now only the waiting left to do. As it turned out, we didn’t have to wait as long as I had anticipated. Storm has already made his arrival, but it seems appropriate to finish the pregnancy log anyway.

Week 38

During week 38, we attended a bunch of parties and events. We had holiday parties for Paulus’ work, and mine, and we also celebrated my birthday. And we finally made it to our infant CPR class, which was both more fun and more informative than I had expected. On Sunday of this week, it was the first Sunday of Advent, which I celebrated by lighting one of 4 candles in my homemade Advant wreath, as is traditional. On the whole, I spent quite a lot of time making our house feel cozy, and getting into the holiday spirit. And Paulus and I had what ended up being our last solo dates for a while. We went out for dinner one night after I had had yet another massage. And as proper millennials, we also went out for an avocado-toast brunch. I ate the eggs on my dish even though they were a bit too runny to be approved in a strict pregnancy diet. And Paulus declared that he would make me as many soft-boiled eggs as I could possibly want after the birth of our child. I think that must be true love. But at this point in time, we were gearing up towards a much longer wait than we ended up having. Since I wasn’t feeling any different or noticing any signs of impending labor, we were expecting that we would have another week or two before anything happened. The baby still hadn’t dropped, I had had no bloody show or other evidence of losing my mucous plug, and I wasn’t feeling more emotional than (pregnancy) usual.

I continued to eat dates every day, drank a pint of special herbal tea every day, and added a supplement of Evening Primrose all, all with the intention of toning my uterus for labor. I also still tried to get in a daily walk, but increasing fatigue made these walks shorter and shorter. Although I continued to struggle with the feeling that I shouldn’t be feeling tired, that I wasn’t big enough to warrant any kind of slow-down. Looking at the size of my belly, I still found it hard to believe that a fully developed, fully functional human being would emerge from there shortly.

Week 39

We only got part way through week 39. We saw our doula for the second visit at the beginning of this week, and then my mom arrived from Denmark. Both of these things having happened put me very much at ease. I think because they were the last things that needed to happen and or be accomplished, before we had done all we had planned before the baby. So once my mom had arrived, I prepared to just enjoy the time with her while waiting for labor to happen, planning things we would do and places we would go together.

She arrived on Friday night. On Saturday, we went to a Korean BBQ place for lunch, and in the afternoon, we prepared the dough for some Brunkager, which are traditional Danish Christmas cookies. They are made with almonds, candied citrus peel, brown sugar, syrup, and lots of Christmas-y spices like cinnamon and cloves. These cookies have to be very thin, so once you have shaped the dough into logs, you freeze the dough overnight to make cutting them easier. For this reason, we didn’t do the actual cutting and baking until Sunday, but more on that in a future post. I’m showing all the photos here anyway.

Chopping up almonds for the dough

 

Mixing butter, syrup and brown sugar

 

The finished dough

Shaping the dough

 

One log down

 

Cut and ready to be baked. Our logs had become a bit flat overnight, but my mom’s creativity managed to patch these guys back on track to the desired round shape.

 

We ran out of space for the baking trays…

 

The finished product

For dinner, we made the Sicilian pistachio pizza that I have been obsessed with recently – I wanted to get my mom in on the obsession.

On Sunday morning, I had booked us massages as an early Christmas present for my mom. After our appointments, we had coffee at Bird Rock Coffee Roasters, and then took a stroll down to the ocean. On our way home, my phone died. It’s of the infamous Nexus 5 variety, so we pretty quickly acknowledged that it was not that the battery had run out, but rather that the phone had died an inexplicable early death, like so many of its brethren. Anyway, we decided to order a new phone for me, since being phoneless when you could go into labor at any time is not ideal. What foresight! After we came home, we all laid down for a nap – Paulus and I in our bed, and my mom on the couch. When we woke up, Paulus and I lay for a moment in the bed discussing the plan for the rest of the day. And then, as I was about to get up, I felt my water break. After a moment of slight panic, we were able to reset our minds and discard all the plans for the next week. We were going to have a baby instead.

Birth story to follow.

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