How Many False Alarms Until A Full House?

As I mentioned in the last post, waiting for baby is not a game I particularly enjoy playing. It's a bit like waiting for someone to drop an 8 pound bowling ball on your foot: you know it's going to happen and that it's going to hurt like crazy but there's just nothing you can do about it one way or the other. For the past two weeks we've been having "false alarms;" it seems that the baby is set to arrive within hours only to have all symptoms splutter and die just when you think it's really on a roll. This is not fun. This is frustrating. While there is a ton of advice out there on how to get baby's arrival moving, the bottom line is he's not coming until he's ready, period, the end. Last night after having contractions for 2 hours every 6 minutes we decided we should head over to the hospital and see what there was to be seen. We knew of course that there was a very good possibility that they would pat us on the head and send us home snickering quietly at our tender hopes that baby was indeed coming at last, but we went anyway.

Let me just say that while I'm glad of the "dry run" it makes waiting for the actual ordeal all the more unpleasant. I won't go into details but this is a hospital after all and not a 4 star resort. The gowns they hand out are a lovely shade of puke green and are suspiciously lacking in buttons, zippers, Velcro or even safety pins. Apparently they're not made to be closed up anywhere; they're more of a glorified sheet really. Anyway, after keeping us for an hour for "observation" which really means that they're laughing at you and your gown in the other room, they did just what we were afraid of and sent us home. While I was certainly having contractions, (they were right there on the monitor being tracked by a blue line), they weren't "progressive" and so they sent us off. After another half hour at home, the contractions stopped all together. I felt gypped! Really that awful gown alone should have meant that I deserved to go into real labor! The excitement that was once felt upon every twinge and pain has been replaced by a deep mistrust of what those feelings really mean. As far as I'm concerned, they're just another opportunity to cause embarrassment and humiliation and give the hospital staff a good laugh (I mean the green really did clash awfully with my hair)!