39 Weeks (catch up!)

 

(This pic will have to serve as my 39 Week picture.  I took it just before leaving for the hospital on Monday, July 2nd when I was 39 weeks and 2 days.)

This is the post I should have written on June 30th or July 1st (not today on July 10th!).  The events seem like a lifetime ago but I will do my best to recap before I get into Lemon's birth story.  If I wouldn't have been so lazy sitting around being 39 weeks pregnant, I would have posted it.  I knew that I should have, somehow, but I just didn't.  So, here it is, a very brief "catch up" post.

Friday night Ian and I went out to dinner at PF Chang's.  We were celebrating the end of painting and I was so proud of him for finishing, all on his own and in the middle of an Arizona summer.  We had such a great time, just to the two of us, talking about how we can't wait for baby, how it could happen any day and how happy we were compared to last summer.  It was a long road for us, to get to this point and it wasn't easy (just read my posts!) but we were both so grateful we got through it, stayed positive and did it together.  It was a great dinner and we had so much fun, and little did we know it would be our last one out together just the two of us!

I went to yoga on Saturday with my pregnant yoga gals.  Afterwards we went out to lunch and stayed and chatted for about 2 hours.  I met so many lovely ladies at yoga, I hope we can keep in touch and get all of our muffins together.  The mommies I've gotten to know and the yoga teachers I've had in prenatal yoga I will never forget - they helped me through my pregnancy and made my mind a much calmer place.  I cannot recommend prenatal yoga enough when you are pregnant, all I can say is go, go go if you have the chance, and go every week and make friends.  

I hugged my prenatal teacher on Saturday, Alisa, and she told me good luck in case they don't see me back at yoga.  The next Wednesday was the 4th of July so I knew I'd miss that class (because there was no class) and knew I'd have the baby before the next one.  On my way out, and to lunch with the girls, I saw my step-mother's friend, Peri, who also teaches at Desert Song and whom I hadn't seen in a while.  It was so great to see her and so fun for her to see me pregnant since she had heard about it in the studio.  I am also glad I saw her because in just a few days I wasn't pregnant anymore, but I didn't know that then.

Ian finished painting our house, trim and all, on Friday.  He spent Saturday cleaning up the yard - mowing and weed-eating.  I kept telling him that I knew Lemon would come early, not too early, and not before he was done painting the house.  It was like I just knew - I knew she was a girl, in my heart, knew she'd be born a bit early and knew that my body would wait until everything was done at home before she made an appearance.  And isn't it funny that on Sunday morning at 10am I started having contractions? 

We spent all day Sunday on the couch.  I wasn't sure that contractions were what was going on but I knew something was different.  It wasn't the normal "pinchy pain" that I had so often felt in my bladder standing up or sitting down, it was a crampy pain but it wasn't bad, just kind of uncomfortable.  I downloaded a timer and started timing them and they were over 10 minutes apart and very irregular so I wasn't worried.  I knew that first time moms could also have "false labor" so I didn't want to rush things.  We laid around, watched all three Die Hard movies (for reals, I love them!) and then went to bed.

I will end here because the rest will be told in my birth story.  More to come!