tonyandkirsten.org

Now that we’ve been doing cloth diapers for nine months with Erik and five months with Kai, some of our diapers are looking…well, like they’ve been used as diapers.  Big surprise there, huh?  While I am not overly concerned about staining since I’m not counting on them holding any value for resale, I still don’t particularly enjoy looking at the lingering stains on the diapers.  I’ve read that putting diapers out to dry in the sun after washing them is a natural way of removing (or at least lightening) the stains.

Unfortunately, I have virtually no direct sunlight at my house.  All of what I do have is in my front yard, and I don’t particularly want to hang diapers out to dry on the fence in front of my house.  So, I decided to try sunning them at my mother-in-law’s house while we were in Iowa:

Most of the diapers I hung out while they were wet, and just for kicks I put some out there in a dry state as well.  I think it did work to lighten the stains to a certain degree.  Unfortunately we’ve developed a lot of new stains on the diapers since my attempt at sunning them. I am hoping the back yard at our new house (we’re moving to a new rental 2.5 blocks away next month) will actually have some direct sunlight and I will try this again.

I’ve also decided to take the plunge of trying out cloth wipes.  Here’s part of what I bought to try this:

When I first started cloth diapering I thought the idea of using cloth wipes was nuts.  After all, the wipes don’t cost that much! But, what I’ve found is that if you are already in the mode of putting things into the laundry at diaper changing time, it is almost easier to keep throwing things in the wash rather than having to sort things out and put some in the laundry hamper and some in the trash.  Some people do cloth wipes by having wipes that sit in a cleaning solution.  This made me nervous due to the possibility of bacteria growing in there, kids getting into it etc.  Then I read somewhere about the idea of using a spray bottle with plain water.

At diaper changing time I spray a washcloth with water before wiping off the offending bottom.  It usually takes only one or two washcloths.  I bought two new packages of washcloths, plus gathered up a few extra we already had.  I have about two dozen and that is more than enough for the two boys with the rate at which I am already doing diaper laundry.

So far I am just doing this at home.  I need to get a second spray bottle (that will stay tightly closed in the diaper bag) to take along.  I think we’ll actually see the greatest convenience in being able to do the cloth wipes on the go.  I can’t even count the number of times when I have been changing a diaper somewhere away from home where there was not a suitable place near by to throw away the disposable wipe.   As soon as I remember to buy the second spray bottle, I can just throw the dirty wipes in the wet bag along with the diapers.

Finally, I have discovered firsthand a disadvantage of buying used pocket diapers — they do wear out faster.  The first two pocket diapers I bought for Erik (two old-style Fuzzi Bunz) have no elastic left in them.  After a couple of messy diapers where the you-know-what ended up all over his legs because the diaper didn’t contain it, I decided they needed to be retired.  Diaper elastic can be fixed, but in reading the tutorial, I just don’t think I’m up for a complicated project like that any time soon.  I think I’ll try and sell them cheaply (or maybe  just give them away) to someone who wants to fix them, and then I’ll buy two new (or maybe used again) Fuzzi Bunz in size large that Erik will hopefully be able to wear until he is able to stay dry all night long (which might be a while if Madeline is any indication).

We welcomed Kai Russell Hill to our family yesterday (February 6th) at 3:49pm.  He weighed 7lbs, 15 oz. at birth and is 20 inches long.

For those who are interested, here are all the details of his birth.    We arrived at the hospital at 8am on Friday, February 6th for a scheduled induction.  I was 41 weeks, 5 days along in the pregnancy — 12 days past my due date.  While anything under 42 weeks is still considered in the range of “normal,” induction is fairly commonly recommended at some point before a woman passes 42 weeks gestation.

The induction began around 8:45am with a pitocin drip.   The whole morning was pretty uneventful, other than a couple times when Kai’s heartbeat dipped down for 30-45 seconds or so before coming back up to normal.  Especially since I was 12 days past my due date, they were watching this very closely because it can be a sign that there is meconium in the amniotic fluid or that the baby isn’t responding well to the stress of labor. (Luckily, neither of which proved to be the case.)

I was having contractions all morning that were growing ever so slightly stronger and closer together, but the contractions were really not very painful.  While this was great in one sense, it also meant that the labor was not progressing very quickly.  Around 2:15 or 2:30, I was having contractions that were maybe 3 minutes apart, but I was also still only 3cm dilated and 80% effaced.

The midwife went ahead and broke my water at this point.  I was very nervous about this, because the act of the doctor breaking my water was very painful in my labor with Madeline.  It was a much better experience this time, and not painful at all.  I think the water breaking was just the cue my body was looking for, since things really started to move quickly at this point.

A little before the midwife checked my progress and broke my water, the nurse had asked me if I wanted to try a birth ball in order to be up and moving around, use different muscles, etc. (It’s basically a huge ball that is inflated enough to support a woman’s weight, but is soft enough to provide comfortable support when sitting on it).  I moved back to the birth ball after my water had been broken, and I was so thankful to have this option.  The contractions were getting more painful and closer together fairly quickly, but I was able to get some great body positions while on the birth ball that made the contractions as bearable as possible.

Some time later (maybe a little before 3:30pm?) the nurse and midwife suggested I move back to the bed, partly because they were having trouble continuing to get a good fix on the baby’s heartbeat, but also because (as Tony told me after it was all over) when they could get his heartbeat it was obviously getting lower.  Also, even though they started diluting the pitocin in order to try and space out the contractions just a little bit, my body kept accelerating the contractions on its own. So, I am sure it was clear to them that I was nearing the pushing phase of labor.

I took a few very strong contractions while moving from the birth ball to the bed.  Then, just about as soon as I was laying down on my left side in the bed (the position my midwife suggested), I started to feel the sensations associated with being ready to push! I was pretty surprised, since I figured I might be in for quite a bit longer time experiencing strong, painful contractions.  After a few small pushes, Kai was really ready to make his entrance, and I gave a few more strong, painful pushes to get him out.  Tony tells me the whole pushing phase lasted about 15 minutes,  and that I was mostly on my side when Kai was born.  I was surprised to have given birth in that position, but it seemed to have worked well and I pushed for (I think) about half the time I did in my labor with Erik.

I was so happy to have made it through the induced labor relatively quickly (at least realatively quickly once things really got started) and without needing any pain relief.  I had the epidural in my labor with Madeline, and it was actually not a bad experience (and made a long labor much more bearable), but having labored naturally with Erik I knew my body was capeable of it and I wanted to be able to do that again.

Kai has been a great baby so far — he is an eager eater and yet was nice enough to only wake up once for a true “middle of the night” feeding last night, thus allowing us to get a fairly good night’s sleep.

We’ll be here at Fairview Riverside hospital until sometime on Sunday, then we’ll be heading home to begin adjusting to life as a family of five!

The little guy inside me is being quite stubborn about wanting to come out and meet us in the big, bright world.  I never thought that I would be later with #3 than with #2, but that’s exactly what has happened.  I’m nine days overdue as of today, and I was only four days late with Erik.  The end is definitely in sight no matter what — I had a midwife appointment this morning and they will induce labor by sometime on Friday if my body can’t get things going by that time. I would be 42 weeks along on Sunday, and it’s rare for doctors or midwives to allow women to go past 42 weeks these days (and of course inductions aren’t scheduled for the weekend!).

If I make it to tomorrow morning without going into labor I’ll also be having an ultrasound tomorrow to check on the fluid levels around the baby and in general how the baby is doing.  I thought it was kind of funny that I will have the ultrasound less than 48 hours before either going into labor naturally or being induced regardless of the results…but I guess that information is important to them regardless of how things proceed from there.

I feel very fortunate to not be terribly physically uncomfortable despite the pregnancy lasting as long as it has.  Of course I have been having some contractions here and there, but in general I haven’t been feeling too awful.  The psychological stress of continually not being able to make plans is probably worse for me.  For the past two or three weeks, I have been nervous to leave the house alone with the kids for fear of going into labor while out and about (my labor was very fast with Erik, so I potentially might not have much warning between the time when I knew labor was really going and the time when the contractions would be so bad that I wouldn’t be able to drive!).   Madeline likes to plan ahead as much as I do, and every day she asks me not, “what are we going to do today?” but, “what are we going to do tomorrow?”!  It has been getting old to tell her every day, “I don’t know what we are doing tomorrow — it depends on how I’m feeling and if the baby comes or not.”

Until maybe the past couple of days, these last few weeks of pregnancy really did go by quite quickly.  I spent a fair amount of time in early January working on my editing for the Spring issue of the Faithwalkers devotional (formerly Daylights), and then once that was done I tackled a ton of projects to get ready for baby’s arrival — everything from reorganizing and sorting the kids’ toys to pre-washing and organizing the cloth diapers for the new baby to getting stocked up on groceries.  The projects were pretty much done by about a week ago, so the kids and I have enjoyed lots of time to play while we waited around to see when baby would show up.

Tony is home with us now starting this week, and will be home until at least February 16th.  We’re trying to make the best of waiting for baby and enjoying the time we have to spend as just the four of us.  When Tony returns to work sometime around the 16th, he will actually be heading to a different job.  He was offered a three month contract position at a company in St. Paul doing work that relates more to the scientific computing side of his skills and experiences than to his experience in the field of Chemical Engineering.   Assuming things go as planned, they would really like him to stay on as a permanent employee once the three months are up.  But even if something were to happen and they couldn’t hire him full time after the contract position is over, he would be no worse off than if he would have stayed at his job at the University of Minnesota, since that job would have ended in May anyway.

So look for baby news to be coming soon…we’ll be a family of five by sometime Friday at the latest!

It’s been just a little over a month now since we started using cloth diapers, and I am definitely still sold on it – more than I really expected I would be! Within the first couple weeks we had figured out our routine.  I’m not changing Erik quite as religiously every two hours as I did at first.  I learned that most of the time, all that happens if I have to wait longer for some reason is that his pants get a little wet, so I end up doing a little more laundry due to extra pants being worn.  And sometimes, depending on what else is going on in my day, that is a better alternative to dropping everything at a particular moment for a diaper change when two hours has passed on the clock.  I’ve learned how to add extra layers to Erik’s diapers at night, and even at nap time, so that he can sleep as long as he needs to without an overflowing diaper waking him up.

I’m generally doing diaper laundry once every two to two-and-a-half days.  All the wet diapers get thrown in a plain cotton laundry bag, which also gets washed with each diaper load.  When we’re out and about, I throw the wet ones in a ziplock bag.  You can get some nice washable “water resistant” fabric bags to use for this purpose, but so far we’ve only actually used two ziplock bags (drying it out in between uses).  A friend lent us some extra supplies, and having a couple more covers and some thinner flannel prefolds (to use as those extra “doubling” layers when Erik sleeps) makes a big difference in being able to go as long as 2.5 days without doing diaper laundry.

The system of using “pocket diapers” at night and prefolds with covers during the day seems like a good combination for us.  Lately we’ve been fighting off various colds and other bugs in our house…and when those dirty diapers are looking more greenish purple than the normal colors…I am glad that those nasty messes are generally in my $2-ish prefolds rather than my more expensive pocket diapers.  I am just less paranoid about the stains, knowing that if we have to replace a few because the stains get too bad, it won’t be a huge expense (and some of those stains might “sun out” in a few months when the weather warms up and I can actually try drying them out in the sun!).

And we got a diaper sprayer…which has already seen three incarnations.  This has turned out to be the most unexpectedly exciting part of our cloth diapering adventure.  Having seen pictures of diaper sprayers on the web, Tony was pretty confident he could build one for less on his own.  Soon after having installed the first version of the sprayer he realized he had purchased the wrong type of tubing.  It was working for the time being, so we left it installed, happily spraying off those messy diapers.  Tony told me to keep a close eye on it, and sure enough, after maybe 2 or 3 weeks of use, the tubing sprung a leak.  I was able to act quickly and shut off water to the toilet.  Only a small wet mess was made in the process, and Tony was able to purchase new, stronger tubing later that same day.

Then, disaster struck.  The very night that Tony installed the new tubing on the sprayer, something happened in the middle of the night and the sprayer head came off the tubing.  Unfortunately, we were deeply asleep when this happened and had a humidifier running in our bedroom so we didn’t hear anything right away.  I was awoken by the sound of our downstairs neighbor banging on our door and yelling for help.  Hearing this noise combined with the random noises coming from the bathroom due to water shooting out the end of the diaper sprayer tubing, I immediately came to the conclusion that our house was on fire.  Why I thought this when there were no smoke alarms going off I will never know, but that is how my brain processed the information! This might not have been such a bad thing, because me yelling “fire” several times actually woke Tony up and got him out of bed quickly.

As soon as we were both out of bed we quickly figured out what was really going on, and Tony got the water turned off at the toilet…but not before a big mess had been made in the basement apartment below us.  Tony helped our downstairs neighbor clean up the worst of the mess right then.  Luckily there is kitchen tile right below our bathroom, so most of the damage was contained to wet, soggy ceiling tiles, which Tony went ahead and replaced the next day.

Wary of having anything constantly under pressure and connected to our toilet, Tony devised a “hook on to the sink” version of the diaper sprayer that is working really well for us.  It only takes a couple of seconds to hook it on to the bathroom sink and turn on the sink water…and then a few more seconds at the end of the spraying process to disconnect and drain the sprayer hose.  But now we can sleep easier knowing there will be no further middle-of-the-night floods…or curious children finding a sprayer and making a real mess in the bathroom (which never happened in the two or three weeks that it was connected to the toilet, but I kept envisioning that some day it was bound to happen!). We can also take this sink-based diaper sprayer with us when we travel, if we chose to take cloth diapers with us on our trips.

This whole process proved costly, in that we had to buy all the parts for the three incarnations of the sprayer, plus ceiling tiles to replace the soggy ones in the basement. It’s not to say a DIY sprayer attached to the toilet couldn’t work with the right combination of parts – we just didn’t get that right combination in time! Buying one of the commercially-available sprayers is probably the best bet for most people!

The middle-of-the-night diaper sprayer crisis actually made me realize how I am really feeling about the cloth diapers.  While Tony was in the basement cleaning up water puddles at 4am, I was lying in bed awake, worrying that Tony might tell me that we would need to be done with cloth diapers after this fiasco.  And that made me fairly sad.  I decided I had actually become somewhat attached to the idea of cloth diapering.

Tony was more than willing for us to continue with our cloth diapering, and I have had some time to think about why I am enjoying cloth diapering so much when it is actually more work (though not as much work as I feared it might be before we started).  It’s definitely not just about the money savings – I rarely think about how we’re saving money by not buying lots of disposables.  It might be a little bit about not having to make so many trips to Target just because we needed diapers, and about having Erik’s diaper rashes heal two or three times faster and stay away longer.

But I think the main reason I enjoy it is the appeal to the “do it yourself” side of my nature.  Maybe it’s the same thing that causes us to bake our own bread when it doesn’t necessarily save any money over Aldi bread and may in some ways be less healthy since our bread is not “whole wheat”.   I just like having something I can take care of myself and use over and over again.  Even in the midst of a huge snowstorm or some other crisis I could keep Erik in diapers and not have to worry about running out.  Just watch, the next thing you know we’ll be grinding our own wheat or roasting our own coffee…err, wait we already roast our own coffee. 

Needless to say, we plan on cloth diapering baby #3 as well.  I am thinking we might use disposables for the first week or two while we get used to the grueling schedule of waking up for middle-of-the-night feedings and while we will probably have family around who will want to help out with things like diaper changes.  But, I am looking forward to the continued adventure that having two kids in cloth diapers will bring!

We’re down to about two months, or about eight and a half weeks, until baby #3 is due to make his appearance.  This pregnancy has gone by very quickly, and I am sure at least the next month will go by quickly as well as we get ready for and celebrate Christmas.

I am not so sure how quickly those last few weeks will go by.  The thought of being nine months pregnant in a frigid Minnesota in January is about enough to make me want to stay inside for those last three or four weeks (or at least not go anywhere with just me and the kids).  I’m sure we’ll venture out occasionally…with a great deal of paranoia on my part as I wonder about what would happen if I went into labor while out somewhere by myself with the kids.  (My labor was right around two hours long total with Erik, so I have at least some degree of reason to be worried — I need to be able to act fast once I do go into labor in case my body wants to go through that process quickly again!).

I still have quite a few items on my “to do” list of things to accomplish before the baby arrives.  All the infant clothes are still in boxes in the garage.  I haven’t purchased any smaller cloth diapering supplies yet.  We haven’t quite figured out our final plan for how we will arrange things to fit sleeping accommodations for our third child and a third child’s clothes (along with all the clothes and beds we already need) into our two small bedrooms.  We still need to try and get our stand-alone freezer fixed so I can fill it with extra food to have on hand once the baby comes.  I’m thinking I need to find a larger diaper bag, because the one I have barely fits one child’s cloth diapering supplies for outings of any length — cloth diapers for two and other miscellaneous infant and toddler supplies would never fit (at least not for any outing longer than a quick trip to the store and back, or something like that).

While I’m sure we’ll tackle at least a few of the items on our checklist in the next couple of weeks, I have a feeling we’ll be spending those first couple of frigid weeks in January making our preparations.

In a move that almost even surprises myself, I decided to give cloth diapering a try right now with Erik.  I know, I said I wouldn’t try cloth until the new baby comes, if at all…But I managed to let myself be convinced otherwise.

The series of events that led me over this cliff began last weekend.  I went to a church rummage sale in my neighborhood on Friday to look for some clothes for the kids and a winter coat for me to wear when my baby belly causes me to “outgrow” my normal winter coat.  On the infant clothing table I spotted some cloth diapering supplies – mostly older diaper covers in various sizes and a few other items.  The prices were very reasonable (most things marked at 25 or 50 cents), but I just didn’t have time to think about whether it was a good use of money with the kids in tow.  This same rummage sale was having a “bag sale” on Saturday afternoon where any bagful of items would cost a buck.  We were all out and about at that time anyway, so we stopped by as a family.  This time, it was a no brainer to throw the diapering supplies in a bag along with other things I knew we would use.  Some of the diapering items had been purchased, but most were still there.

I brought them home and realized that I would have to continue giving cloth diapering some more serious thought, now that I had some of the supplies in hand.  I next did a bit more research into the laundry cost issue.  I found a website that breaks down the cost of laundry into its various parts — cost of water itself (which is actually paid by our landlord, anyway), heating the water, running the washer, and running the dryer. I was able to figure out that (assuming utility prices don’t change too drastically), cloth diapering would add a little less than $6.50 per month on to our utility bills.

With that information in hand, I was able to do some real calculations.  Knowing about how much we spend on disposable diapers over the “diapering lifetime” of a baby, I figured the amount to break even with one baby (after laundry costs are subtracted) would be spending around $550 in diapering supplies.  I know that sounds like a lot of money, but you might be surprised how much you can spend on cloth diapers if you want to! I asked Tony what he thought about this whole thing, and he said he thought it wouldn’t be worth it if we would only save $100 or so…and it would definitely be worth it if we could save $400…and somewhere in between could either way.

I knew it would be really tough to save $400 if the break-even point was $550.  But, if we added Erik into that calculation, the break-even point rises to somewhere between $750 and $800, making it much easier to save somewhere closer to $400.  (This is making the conservative estimate that both Erik and baby #3 potty train when they each are around 2.5 years old, and that Target generic diapers don’t increase significantly in price over the next couple of years.  If either of those things prove not to be true and they are older when they train or diapers to rise in price quite a bit, we would just save even more money if we are able to stick with it.)

I had already been noticing that my smell-associated nausea was lessening as I am entering my third trimester.  I also got to thinking that I would be better off trying out the cloth-diapering laundry routine now without a tiny baby around.  And, the laundry situation seems to have stabilized around here in general — the people living in the apartments above and below us are mostly only doing laundry during the evenings and weekends and the new girls who live upstairs are much more considerate about their laundry habits than our former upstairs neighbors were. So, I didn’t have a lot of excuses left not to try out cloth right now.

My first purchase of cloth diapering supplies arrived yesterday afternoon:

This is a trial package from Cotton Babies consisting of six unbleached Indian prefolds, two diaper covers and one “snappi” (the thing you can use instead of pins to help hold the diaper around the baby).  I also have on the way another dozen prefolds, two more covers, and three “pocket” style diapers (2 fuzzi bunz and one Happy Heinys for anyone who knows anything about cloth diapering).   This is possibly a minimal amount needed to really keep Erik in cloth diapers and do laundry every other day.  I might end up needing a few more prefolds and/or the covers that go along with them, or a few more pocket diapers if those end up being more useful for us. I decided to try out cloth diapering with a full-size set up so I could get the feel for what the laundry routine would really be like.  We still need the diaper sprayer — I will do without for a few days until Tony has time to make a Home Depot run and buy the supplies needed to make one!

I’m very pleased with the fact I’ve only spend $105 so far on a combination of new and used items. It’s a relatively small investment overall, and if I find that I just can’t make cloth diapering work, I should be able to resell many of these items and make back at least some of what I spent.  If these items do work for us and we are able to continue cloth diapering, baby #3 will be able to use them, and I will only have to buy the smaller sizes of diapers for him to wear when he is smaller.  Most of the items from the rummage sale turned out to be too small for Erik, so if any of those diaper covers turn out to be usable at all, I’ll have those for newborn diaper stash as well.  In general, I’m really hoping we are able to make using mostly prefolds with covers work for us, since this seems to overall be more economical than buying a full set of any of the other varieties of cloth diapers (pocket diapers, fitteds, or all-in-ones).

The journey begins today.  Erik has his first cloth diaper on right now!  I’ll be updating as we actually try this out!

When the topic of cloth diapers came up while I was pregnant with Madeline, I dismissed the idea almost immediately.  When I thought of cloth diapers, I thought of pins poking small babies, complicated and leaky pieces of fabric that somehow had to be wrapped around a baby, and of course, lots of smelly laundry.

The smelly laundry factor may still be true (unless you can afford a diaper service)… But in the past year I’ve learned that cloth diapers have changed a lot since our mothers or grandmothers may have used them. While it might be exaggerating slightly to say they have moved into the 21st century, innovations in style like pocket diapers and “all in one” diapers, along with closures like velcro, snaps, and “snappis” to hold the diapers in place, certainly make the idea of cloth diapering a lot more palatable.

A couple of years ago, I don’t think I knew a single person who currently used cloth diapers.  I now have a number of friends and acquaintances (both here in Minnesota and back in Iowa) who are either using cloth or are considering it. Cloth diapering is a growing trend among parents in general — between the money savings it brings during uncertain economic times, the environmental concerns presented by throwing diapers in landfills, and the health concerns that some parents have about the chemicals used to manufacture disposable diapers, more and more parents are making the switch.

So, what about us? Well, first off let me say that the soonest I would consider using cloth is when the new baby arrives.  I am super sensitive to smells while I am pregnant, and I just don’t think I could stomach rinsing off Erik’s smelly diapers, even with a nice diaper sprayer.

It’s hard to argue with the cost savings of using cloth.  We currently spend about as little as is possible to keep Erik in disposables.  We usually buy generic at Target, and our monthly cost is probably only about $25-$30 per month for both diapers and wipes.  However, that means we’ve already spent at least $450 on diapers for Erik, and we probably have at least another year left of diapering him. Once baby #3 arrives, we’ll most likely have two kids in diapers for at least 8 months (and that’s assuming Erik can be potty trained at age two-and-a-half, the same age at which we were able to start Madeline in the training process…but I’ve heard boys often train later than girls).  So, that would be a monthly cost of at least $50 over that time period.  Even with the added laundry cost, buying a decent stash of cloth diapers would definitely cost less over the long run.

I’m having a harder time being convinced about the environmental benefits in our situation.  Here in Minneapolis, our garbage does not go to a landfill — it all gets burned.  While this presents other possible environmental concerns, washing several extra loads of laundry each week causes more energy usage and water usage — which are also environmental negatives.  So, it’s a wash (pun only semi-intended) in my mind environmentally.

Then what’s left are the practical concerns.  These are more on the negative side of cloth diapering (or the positive side of continuing to use disposables).   We currently live in a tri-plex where we share one washer and one dryer with three other people besides our family.  The washer and dryer may not always be immediately available, and I would have to watch to make sure I wasn’t monopolizing the laundry facilities too much for myself.  We are planning to move out of this place around May or June of 2009, but that would mean at least four months of diaper laundry here if we go with cloth.

I’m honestly worried about the smell of the poopy diapers, even when I am not pregnant.  I am always at least a little sensitive to smells, and I fear that may still gag and feel queasy.  I worry that I might be too lazy for cloth diapering.  Now that Erik is a busy toddler, I can ignore his diaper for hours.  That wouldn’t work so well with cloth. I could avoid those problems for a while by keeping Erik in disposables until he is potty trained, while still using cloth for the new baby…but I would have to deal with it down the road anyway as baby #3 gets older.  There is also the extra work of doing more laundry at a time in life where I will have more work than ever taking care of three kids.

The question of cloth or disposables is not answered yet in my mind.  I’m glad I still have at least three months or so to think about it!

I had my weekly OB appointment today. My due date was either yesterday or today, I guess depending on how you calculate it. The doctor measured me back at 3cm dilated (this is the same doctor I saw last week and measured me at 1.5cm — not the one that measured me at 3cm two weeks ago). We don’t know for sure if this means by body has been really making progress toward getting labor going (I’ve certainly been uncomfortable enough to believe this might be the case) or if maybe I’ve been going back and forth between 1.5cm and 3cm over the past couple of weeks. All we know for sure is that right now as I write this, I’m not in labor yet!

They had me make another appointment for next Wednesday (3/28) where if I haven’t gone into labor yet, they will do the usual checks, plus some additional checks to see how the baby is doing. There is greater concern over fluid levels and so on the further things get past the due date. Assuming they don’t find something that causes them to want to induce right then, we’ll schedule an appointment for induction at that point. The doctor said she would definitely want to induce me before the following Wednesday (4/4), but I think they would be willing to schedule it pretty much any time after the appointment on the 28th. We’ll see how things are going, but I think we are leaning toward not stringing things along too much past that point and making the appointment for late next week — especially if there are no signs that waiting a few more days will be worthwhile for any particular reason.

Of course, I’d ideally like to just go into labor naturally — the sooner the better! But, I was induced with Madeline and it wasn’t as horrible as some people make induction out to be so I could survive that again. And, I think it would go a little faster this time around since my body has obviously been doing some work to get ready for labor. When I was induced with Madeline nothing had really happened at all prior to arriving at the hospital, so it took quite a while to get my body going.  Being stuck in the hospital all day long hooked up to monitoring equipment with nothing really happening for 8+ hours was no fun at all.

Meanwhile Madeline and I have tried to have some fun to make the time go by faster.  It’s amazing how slowly each day can seem to go by when you are eagerly awaiting something to happen at an unknown time.  Monday we did a few errands and went to Panera to use the rest of a Christmas gift card to get ourselves a treat.  Tuesday we went to see the “Teddy Bear Band” at the Mall of America.  Yesterday we went to the library, and this morning another mom from church came over with her daughter so the girls could play and the two of us could talk.  At least the weather is improving again, and tomorrow should be nice enough to do something outside.  I think the dreary, damp, chilly-but-not-freezing-cold weather made the week prior to today go by even slower than it would have otherwise.

Here’s hoping for more exciting news soon!

That’s what the doctor reminded me of today, when she told me that she thought I was only dilated to 1.5 cm. (You might recall I was told 3cm last week).  I saw a different doctor this week than last week, and the measurement of dilation definitely involves something of a judgment call.  I also learned that progress toward delivery can, in fact, move backwards.  Apparently the position of the baby at any given time, whether or not any contractions are taking place, and even the angle the doctor does the exam at can affect the results. So, I might have really been about 3cm last week and half that much today.

Not that it really matters all that much…I could still go into labor tonight, or it could still be two weeks.  I did feel confident enough that labor is not impending any minute to make further plans for this weekend.   We’ll see if that was a smart idea or not.

Tonight we had the pleasure of participating in a service opportunity with people from Urban Refuge for the first time.  We helped cook and serve a meal as a part of the Loaves and Fishes program.  Loaves and Fishes provides meals for the needy/hungry with no questions asked in a variety of locations around the metro area.  The location we helped out at serves meals twice a week — some locations do it five nights a week.  People from various churches, community groups and even businesses take turns helping out on a regular basis.  They currently have so many groups volunteering that people from Urban Refuge only are assigned two nights a year! It was really satisfying to help out and serve, and we had a great time while we were doing it.

http://tonyandkirsten.org/pictures

You might have noticed that the link to our photo gallery disappeared a little while ago. That’s because the WordPress API for dealing with bookmarks changed from version 2.0.x to 2.1.x, and that broke the code I had in my header for the links.

With no functional photo gallery link, I decided it was high time to switch photo gallery software. The plugin to link WordPress and Coppermine was abandoned by its author. To top that off, Coppermine has had a rash of security vulnerabilities discovered, and it’s a major pain to update when you have a large photo library. Meanwhile Menalto Photo Gallery is easily managed with the Dreamhost “One-Click Installer”. So, I one-click installed it and migrated our photos over.

With some help from the WPG2 plugin and a couple lines in .htaccess, we’ve got a new photo site to debut!

I realize that it’s not perfect yet, and may very well break on your browser. I haven’t thoroughly checked and fixed the style of the gallery to fit within the page. So, if something looks funny, comment on this post, and I’ll see if I can get it fixed.

Oh, and we’ll post pictures of our new baby when he comes!