We only found a few of the “My Little House books” to check out of the library for this year’s Laura Ingalls Wilder Reading Challenge – but Louis is loving this one:
County Fair, adapted from Farmer Boy
Louis
It’s a Boy!
Even though I’m not into routine ultrasounds in pregnancy, we’ve ended up with plenty of ultrasounds for both our children (let’s just say that there hasn’t been anything routine about how my pregnancies have progressed!)
With each of the ultrasounds, I’ve been careful to inform the ultrasound tech that we aren’t interested in knowing baby’s sex, so could they please keep it to themselves.
I didn’t think to tell our maternal-fetal specialist when he rolled in the ultrasound to check where baby was lying to determine our course of action the day my condition declined such that delivery was indicated.
Doctor W moved the wand across my belly, confirming that baby was still lying in the transverse position he’d so favored all throughout the pregnancy.
Doctor W explained what I already knew. We couldn’t deliver a transverse baby vaginally. I listened patiently as he explained the different ways a baby might be lying and the relative risks of vaginal delivery with frank breech, footling breech, transverse (the most dangerous is transverse with belly down, since the umbilical cord would almost certainly be delivered first and then be compressed as the rest of baby tried to make his way out.)
And once Doctor W was done explaining, I said my piece. I still wanted that VBAC. I wanted to try everything we could. Yes, I wanted the external version we’d discussed.
Doctor W’s hands moved across my abdomen. He pushed and prodded. He pulled out the wand to see what he’d done. He pushed a little more. He grabbed the wand again.
He’d succeeded at getting baby head down.
He narrated what we were seeing on the ultrasound screen – “There’s the head”. Down in my pelvis.
Just a bit above the head. “And there are his little boy parts. And there are his feet down with his head.”
I looked at Daniel as we acknowledged what we’d just learned.
“Louis,” I said his name in my head, acknowledging our son.
A while later, my nurse was working on her charting and Daniel was off doing something, collecting Tirzah Mae perhaps.
“Do you have any sense of whether the baby’s a boy or a girl?” the nurse asked.
“Well, it doesn’t really matter whether I had a sense or not – Doctor W told us,” I replied.
“Ah shoot,” she said. “I’d hoped you hadn’t noticed.”
I assured her that it was fine, really
And it was.
But now I know, if I really want to wait until delivery to find out, best to let my doctor know in advance too!
Snapshot: Happy Due Date
If Louis had arrived on his “expected date of delivery”, he’d have arrived today.
As it is, he’s two days shy of six weeks old.
While I was in the hospital, Daniel read an article that suggested that people who are chronically late are optimists. It makes sense. Optimists assume they can make it to their location more quickly than they can. Optimists fail to take into account traffic, children, and losing their keys. And, if they’re optimists in the same sense Daniel and I are, they assume they can get just one more task (and another and another) done before they leave.
Like I said, the article makes sense.
I am an optimist – and I was two weeks late to my own birthday.
But if being late is a sign of optimism, Daniel and I are raising a couple of pessimists.
Either way, we’re glad to have our early birds.
Happy Due Date, dear Louis.