Pregnancy: where's the baby

My due date is today. It's almost the end of the day and this baby is showing no signs of wanting to be born yet.

I had some contractions last Friday afternoon while Ivan, my dad and I were at Ikea so that Ivan can run around. They lasted for about one hour and then dissipated. (this was good because I was afraid that we'd end up driving to Georgetown in rush hour traffic, which would've been dreadful).

Then contractions returned for about one hour this morning at 4 am, which was about the time contractions with Ivan started. I got excited, but then they went away as well. And nothing since. Otherwise, for the last week I've been feeling like things are slowly shifting. It's like the tectonic plates are coming apart. I'm also almost 3 cm dilated and 75 percent effaced, as per today's ob appointment. So I much further along than I was with Ivan when contractions started.

The ob thinks the baby could come tonight. But she also thought that I would've delivered by now. So did I. I was convinced the baby would be here by now. I've been ready since last Monday , after I finished the last big thing at work. I worked until thursday ( the last two days from home) and even signed off early on Thursday because I started gettting a bad headache in early afternoon, which I though was the first sign of imminent labor since that was how it started with Ivan. But no.

So I've been waiting, which is really hard for me to do since patience is not my virtue. Good thing I've learned how to knit. It's a perfect activity to keep an idle and impatient person busy. I feel like a character from a quirky movie, where I keep knitting and knitting and end up knitting a scarf so long it goes on for miles.

And this baby is rather active. His feet are at the very top of my uterus and keep kicking my diaphragm while the head is low in the pelvic cavity, pressing on the bladder and the pelvic floor. He's been inthis position for weeks now. And the nonstop baby calisthenics are getting to be really uncomfortable, at times painful, and more vigorous.

Who knows maybe he's buying his time coming out because we really hadn't settled on a name until yesterday. We're still not 100% sure but we're closer than we were. That's at least a theory I could see the yoga teacher saying
.