Guess Where I Spent the Night Last Night?

Labor and Delivery...

Don't worry -- the girls are still in here!

I started contracting (painless) around 6:30 last night and was contracting every 20-25 minutes. Called Scott's mom (the OB nurse) for advice around 9:00, she suggested calling L & D, which I did. They had me page the on-call doc, who didn't get back to me. D'oh! By this time, I'd drunk nearly a gallon of water and was falling asleep on the couch and it seemed like the contractions had stopped, so we went to bed.

Woke up at 2:30 to pee (hello, gallon of water) and noticed I was contracting again. Laid there timing them and realized they hit every 10 minutes, which was way closer than I was comfortable with, so we called the kids' college-aged sitter to see if she'd come over. Sweetheart that she is, she was at our house in 15 minutes in the middle of the night.

Went in and got registered for the hospital (hadn't done that quite yet, oops!) and got hooked up to the monitors, where they could see contractions every 7-8 minutes. And two very lovely, reactive babies, which was great -- nurse (who was very pregnant and darn adorable) said they were both doing very well. Then, naturally, they went on the run and both flipped head down during the monitoring, LOL, so she had to chase them for a while.

They did the group B strep test, a fetal fibronectin test, and checked for amniotic rupture. My water had not broken (yay), my cervix was only .5cm dilated and not effaced at all (yay), the fetal fibronectin test was negative (yay!) and they sent me home.

I knew I wasn't in labor, bur preterm labor can be sneaky, so that's why I went in -- neither the doc nor the nurse thought I'd made a bad decision, especially because the chances for pre-term labor go up when carrying multiples.

I have my regular NST and appointment with my OB on Thursday and part of me is wondering if she's going to take me out of work. If she does, she does -- my supervisor is fine with that. With 6 weeks till full-term, 4 weeks till no likely NICU time, if I'm pulled from work I feel pretty good about what I've been able to do to this point.

I was running a low-grade fever part of the evening, pretty sure I caught whatever the kids had last week. Plus, with Scott gone all last week, it was darn stressful -- even with my mom helping out.

I had jokingly told the girls that they weren't allowed to come until Daddy got back, perhaps I should have been more specific...