"Oh, This is Getting Serious!"

December 12, 2011...Monday- The day started out normal enough with the alarm sounding at 6:30am, which I promptly crawled out of bed at 7am, fed the dogs, jumped in the shower and proceeded to go through my usual morning routine of Braxton Hicks contractions...or so I thought. By 8am I was at work and starting the day off with a few back aches here and there. By 9am the back ache was getting more distracting and around 10am thats when the thought occurred to me "Oh, this is getting serious!" At this point the "Other Aimee" (my coworker) suggested that I just might be in labor, to which I responded with complete denial... I wasn't due until December 24 and I had a lot of things still to do at home. The car seat wasn't even in the car, I hadn't packed a hospital bag and most importantly I still needed to buy a birthing ball!

Somewhere around 11am the "Other Aimee" decided to be the voice of reason and suggested that I go down to the hospital and get checked to see if I was in true labor and how far along I was. I called my mamma "I need a ride", I called my husband "How do you feel about becomeing a daddy today? Because we may just have a baby today! I'll call you back." So off to Kaiser I went, with mother at the wheel (oh, but not before I made her stop at the Hospice Thrift Store to donate a trunk full of stuff (remember the big storage clean out from the day before), so after that stop...Off we went!

Its now around 1pm and I was checked in and getting the lowdown: 100% effaced but only 1/2cm dialated. What?! At this point the midwife told me I could either go walk the mall (haha- yea right) or go home and let things progress, that it could be 2 hours or 2 weeks...well that leaves it wide open (thanks lady). I chose to eat (when all else fails, eat) but not before we stopped at Target for the coveted "birthing ball" everyone swears by (more on that one later).

Next stop was lunch, mind you that this whole time I'm having contractions that could not be ignored but as I would soon find out were nothing compared to what was to come.  Ok, so back in Auburn now, lunch sounded awesome since I was starving at this point (plus if I was gonna do this "giving birth" thing I would need my energy) and what better to eat before giving birth... Mexican food! Not really, but hindsight it 20/20 and a taco AND giant bean burrito with hot salsa and jalapenos sounded so good. And it was! I stuffed down every bite while enduring contractions that reminded me birth was eminent.

After lunch I had another great idea to go home and clean the house. Driving is not recommended for a person haveing contractions, I'll just stop there on that one. Once home, I got the neighbor kids to blow up my birthing ball, I got my Wiff (Sandy) to put the carseat base in the car and I got my bag packed. That is pretty much as far as I got (oh I did manage to squat on the laundry room floor and toss laundry into the washer- why this needed to be done, I'll never know). Things from this point are pretty much a blur but it included some crying, a long miserable hot bath, some more crying and a few texts and phone calls in between "Where was Matthew" you ask, He was working overtime in Truckee (I told him things would probably progress slowly so just come home when he got off work). My goal at this point was to wait for Matthew to get home (@7pm), take a shower and clean up from the day and then off we would go. But that wasn't gonna happen.

Somewhere around 6pm Sandy came over to check on me and found me laying on my bedroom floor moaning and panting with my feet up on the air. At this point my contractions were about 1 minute 15 seconds long and less then 4-5 minutes apart. ( I had to look up "timing contractions" online earlier haha). And that birthing ball did not do shit to help, I kicked it down the stairwell. Liars.

So.... my Wiff (another voice of reason) decided that husband or not, it was time to get into the car and head to the hospital, to which I only put up a slight argument (I was still thinking Matt was gonna come home and shower). So I pulled myself up off the floor and together, ran around the house trying to pack Matt a hospital bag, grabbing last minute items I may have needed and taking care of the goats (What?! I had to feed and put the goats away).

So again for the second time that day...off we went! We met Matt in Auburn, switched drivers and proceeded down to the hospital.