39 Weeks, 3 Days
I'm not in labor, and there is no external baby yet. ARGH.
Monday started off at 2am with a 8-hour run of 5-20 minute apart contractions. Surprisingly enough, neither of us got much sleep. I was pretty jazzed, actually, hoping for a 10-10-11 birthday, and they weren't that hard to breathe through, so in between me breathing and C using the acupressure points that our doula had shown us, we double-checked that our bags were packed and were ready to call the OB & doula and head to the hospital once they got to the one-minute-contraction-every-5-minutes point. But they never got there. I paced around the apartment, spent a lot of time sitting (i.e. the toilet), took a warm bath, ate a big delicious breakfast of leftover Burmese food, and C checked in code for work. We even played Portal 2 for a bit. And then we went back to bed when it was clear at 10am that I wasn't having any more contractions.
Contractions feel very much like muscle cramps, which makes sense, given that's what they are. You can't really control them, most of the time you feel it coming on, there's no way to predict/control your reaction to the clenching, and when it's over you'll still feel some lingering soreness in your muscle. For me, having C push on the two acupressure points in my lower back decreased the cramp sensation by about 50%. The points are very close to the dimples in your lower back, so I could do it by myself occasionally, or use the two-tennis-balls-in-a-sock trick.
In hindsight, Monday morning was an example of false or pre-labor, but at the time it certainly seemed like it was the real thing. In our case, the two pertinent specifics that we either didn't remember or know are that real labor "progresses" - the contractions get less spaced and increase in length, and that in real labor the pain tends starts higher in the stomach, whereas in false labor the pain tends to be felt in the groin/lower abdomen. C was timing them using an iPhone app, and they seemed pretty consistent, but I guess the lack of progression was what should have tipped us off. There was bloody show, which did make me think it was real, but my water didn't break...basically there are all these things that contribute to labor that happen in no particular order, and there's no way to know for sure besides the non-exact checklist of how many of them have happened. So I totally understand why tons of women end up getting sent home from the hospital because they aren't actually in labor - it's so easy to think it's the real thing! We spent the rest of Monday in a dazed anti-climactic funk - like "What the hell, body, we totally could have been sleeping."
Before Monday, I'd been pretty content to let the pregnancy ride go as long as necessary before it happened naturally. But now I'm getting kind of antsy thinking "when is it going to happen???" The contractions I've had since then have been a bit more intense, but much less predictable when they happen, and I'm not very patient with waiting. Knowing that it could happen any time makes me hesitant to do anything...which is a waste of time. So I've been making myself do things to try and fight that. C's mom came over yesterday and we walked to lunch and a bakery, and then I finished another novel and got some real sleep last night, so I think I'm recovered from the Monday all-nighter and less anxious about having it HAPPEN ALL READY. Maybe :)