The Home Stretch

Here we are at the end of February with six weeks to go until the anticipated debut of baby girl #2...except that we'll be seeing her much sooner than that. Thanks to some late-developing complications we'll probably be welcoming her in three weeks, if we can hang on that long. I've been banished to what I'm calling "couch arrest," which basically means I can get up to feed and clothe my toddler and myself; the rest of the time I'm laying either on the couch or in bed. Let me tell you, it's great fun trying to entertain a two-year-old when you can't leave the house all day. My only outings right now are to my thrice-weekly doctor's visits: two for non-stress tests at the hospital and one to my regular OB.

It's been interesting watching Clara process all this. She knows that I'm seeing the doctor an awful lot, so every time I tell her she gets to go play with a friend, she says, "Play (insert name here)? Mama doctor." Oliver played with her on campus during my first couple of non-stress tests, so now each evening when we go to pick him up from school, she expects that she's going to be left there to play with Daddy while Mama disappears for an hour or two. We've had a couple of lovely tantrums erupt when she realized that she was in fact not going to get to stay and play in the elevators or with the water fountains in the Tanner building. There is also far, far too much television being watched at the moment; I try to occupy her in other ways, but it's tough when you're glued to the couch. It's pretty sad when the first thing she says when I go to get her out of bed after a nap is, "Movie? Wall-E? Excited!" Hopefully it won't take too terribly long to readjust a month from now when the TV is banished for most of the day.

So that's the fun around here; I'm guessing this will be the story until the little one arrives. We'll have another ultrasound and an amniocentesis three weeks from today, and if her lungs look mature she'll be born either that day or the next. Oh, and everyone please pray that this kid will decide to turn head-down very soon and stay that way. She's been flipping between breech and vertex almost daily (a very uncomfortable process, let me tell you) and she really, really needs to remain head-down, as I really, really don't want to have a C-section. Really, really.