False Alarm

Saturday night I started having a lot of contractions. I have actually been feeling contractions for about the last 14 weeks (that's right... I started feeling Braxton Hicks sometime around 22 weeks... which as of today, comes to a total of just over three months of having contractions!!), but this time they were coming very frequently, and I ended up spending the entire night tossing and turning, feeling contractions every time I woke up. Around 3 in the morning I finally decided to get up and start timing them since I wasn't really able to sleep anyway. For the next 3 hours they were coming every 3 minutes and lasting anywhere from 45 seconds to a minute. They weren't terribly strong, but since I am only 36 weeks along, I decided to go ahead and wake up Kyle so we could head to the hospital-not knowing if I was truly in labor, and if so, if they would try to stop it or not.

Just in case this turned out to be my last day being pregnant with little Jovi, I wanted to get a belly picture since I haven't done so well about taking them throughout this pregnancy... so here I am in all of my 6 am-sleep deprived-36 week pregnant-glory:

Well, needless to say, the second we got there and the nurse hooked me up to the monitors, my contractions pretty much completely stopped. For the entire 2 1/2 hours I was there I think I may have had about 5 contractions. My nurse told me that the nursing staff jokingly calls the beds in triage the "magic beds" because it seems like every time a woman comes in "in labor", the second they lay down on one of those beds, their contractions magically stop.

While I was hooked up to the fetal/contraction monitors, Jovi's heartrate dropped slightly during one of my few-and-far-between-contractions, and the on-call doctor decided to send me in for an ultrasound to check my fluid levels just to be on the safe side. Everything was fine, and my fluid levels looked great, but it was neat to be able to see an almost full-grown baby Jovi in her cramped space doing cute little things like sucking and whatnot. I also had an ultrasound in the hospital when I was pregnant with Minnette on the day she was born, but this time around I was able to take home a couple of pictures that the ultrasound tech printed off for me.

We don't have a scanner, and taking pictures on our camera without the flash makes them a little blurry, but the first picture is of Jovi's little profile up at the top:

And some further evidence that we can keep the name we picked out and don't have to rush and buy any boy's clothes before this little one comes:

We also did find out that I am already dilated to 1 cm, and that if I were to go into labor today, or any day after, that they would not stop the baby from coming. My mom will be coming into town in exactly two weeks, so holding out until then- for convenience reasons- would definitely be ideal. But honestly, I am just so excited for little Jovi to finally be here that, for me, now that she is far enough along to be perfectly healthy, the sooner she comes the better! I think I will be going on lots of walks this week. ;)