Bipedal, again

So the wife is once again upright and semi-functional. She's officially off bed rest as of Wednesday morning, and is done with terbutaline. So she can breathe, her blood pressure is once again normal (108/62 today, if you can believe that!), and she can help with chores. Right, honey? Just say, "Yes, dear."

So that's the good news. The other news — and please note, this is not "bad" news; just other — is that we spent Tuesday night in the hospital. Apparently, as the wife stopped the drugs, not only did her uterus get all sorts of irritated, but she started having regular contractions about three-and-a-half minutes apart. So.

The doc said we oughtta go to OB since those are fairly serious sounding contractions. We did, and it turned out that while the contractions were hard and regular, they weren't really doing anything to change the wife's cervix. We spent the night in the luxurious OB department beds, then had a long day yesterday.

The wife went back to work, I worked, and then we went to my winter jazz band concert and heard just exactly what near-fatal train wrecks sound like coming from the bandstand. It wasn't our best concert ever, but that's beside the point. The cool thing is that a few weeks ago, the wife dreamed that her water broke in the middle of the concert and we rushed out of there to have our kid.

While we didn't do the ol' splash-n-dash, the wife did say goodbye to the mucous plug that was protecting her cervix from the evil and courupting elements of the outside world. I don't know how many of you have ever seen a mucous plug, but lemme tell ya, it's a sight to behold.

Since things seemed reasonably under control, we decided to take a break from the OB ward and try the Deepwater instead. A bunch of us went out for the wife's last hurrah before this kid comes. We had eats, drinks, and some great conversation. And came home late, just in time to add to our rapidly accumulating sleep debt.

Today, the wife went to work while I went to job-shadow at the local PT's office. I figure I've got to do something since CJ is apparently taking back the work she pitched my way, and while I enjoy being a paint boy, seven dollars an hour just ain't gonna cut it. So I'm exploring my options. Next week, I go to Hurley to job-shadow a bouncer at one of the titty bars on Silver Street.

Anywho, while I was in the middle of things at the PTs' office, I got a call from the wife. "AJ," she said, her voice a half-octave higher than usual, and with that special tenseness I'm coming to recognize, "We need to go to the clinic because I'm leaking." That'll get a guy's attention, all right..

So we went to the clinic and saw the doc and the wife got examined (Guys, be thankful you don't have to go through this; speculums are not your friends.) and the doc said that the wife is a little more dialated ("a generous three") and efaced (eighty percent), and that the kid is engaged. But that we shouldn't worry because the amniotic sack is still intact, though bulging, and it could be days, or even weeks, before labor kicks in for real.

I think this is sort of how America was during the cold war. "Hey, guys," we yelled to all our allies, "uh, I think something's happening here. Oh. Uh, wait. Never mind. But it could at any moment. Say, would you mind brining us a pizza?" I think that's kind of where the wife and I are at, but we've got a better reason for this sort of wierd, highly unstable behavior than did Uncle Sam: we've got a kid on the way. Uncle Sam only faced nuclear anihalation.

The pattern of action on the kid front over the last couple weeks has convinced me that I can control when the wife will go into labor. All I need to do is drive about twenty or thirty minutes out of town on a back road and either get a flat tire or smash the car on a deer. Right at that very moment, Mercury will slip into retrograde, Phobes will reverse the path of its orbit in a spectacular figure eight, Jerry Bruckheimer will say to himself, "You know Jerry, I'm getting sick of fireballs; Let's explore our inner emotions," and the wife's belly will harden, she'll pant a little, then call me on the phone. And I'll be the one hitching the ride on the 1953 Alice Chalmers 23 HP Field Hand.