DnA Family

Annette and I started this blog over a week ago. I wish I had a picture of her/us to put in here with this blog. Right now, we are still waiting to move into our own place. The lease has been signed and we should hopefully be getting some help from the ward to move our stuff out of storage this Saturday. In the meantime, I am still using a loaner computer at Brian and Sarah's place. It does not have the convenient little slot to insert our camera's memory card. We'll have to transfer the pictures we've taken so far at a later date.

We don't have any pictures yet of a little child, just of a pregnant mother-to-be. This reminds me that I need to swap the batteries in the camera so that we keep a charged pair in there at all times. We don't know when that run to the hospital may yet come.

Annette has reached the first due date she was given, and it has passed without a trip to the hospital. She told me that this is a first for her family. We don't intend to worry at this point. Maybe at two weeks "overdue." Not now. Just because she's reached her due date doesn't mean anything is wrong. Due dates are estimated dates based on most probable conception dates. There is really nothing rock solid about them. Annette made a comment last night that she wondered how her family would react if they knew that most of my brothers and sisters were born naturally well past their "due dates," usually in the order of weeks.

On a definitely positive note, the doctor told Annette that the child's head has entered the birth canal. I suspected something like that had happened earlier when Annette told me of some changes she had felt recently.

Last night, she told me that it felt like her uterus was moving position. If I have any fears at the moment, it is that her body might be doing a bunch of positioning work now so that near the end all it needs to do is take care of dilation and efacing. This might mean that I may not have much response time from when labor kicks things into gear since some of the prep work that is normally part of first stage labor may already have happened. Still, I am going to wait for now. I won't ask Annette to start sucking her thumb until over a week from now, if our child has still not come.

- Dan

Note: We were taught in our birthing class that sucking the thumb pushes on a pressure point in the roof of the mouth and can stimulate child labor. However, the expecting mother is not supposed to do this during any sort of contractions, unlike another "trick" we were taught. While pushing on the roof of the mouth in the right place can do the same thing, sucking the thumb is simply easier to do.