Well, unless I were to go into labor now and have the baby in the next three hours, all hope is lost for a January baby.

Everytime we buy a new carton of milk, I look at the expiration date and think "I'll probably have the baby by the time this milk expires." Then the milk expires. Never fails. No baby. Our current jug expires on 2/11, and I KNOW I will have the baby by then.

So, I am not going to make a widespread MySpace or Facebook announcement about this, but rather I am leaving it for my faithful pregnancy blog readers. I went to the doctor today, and again the progress is pretty slow. I'm getting there, but if he continues at this rate, there is just no expectation that he will be here before 42 weeks.

So, we are going to go ahead and induce. On Monday. I'll go into the hospital on Sunday night, and they'll start the "prep," and then start inducing on Monday really early in the morning. He should be here by the afternoon/evening on Monday. I was dead set against inducing, but I am happy now to be doing it this way after talking to my midwife. I know that she'll be around the whole time rather than a random on-call doctor, and I won't have to wonder if I am going into the hospital at the right time or if I am *really* in labor. It sounds like Sunday night will be nice and relaxed (complete with a "cocktail" that will knock me out for a good night's sleep).

So, in all probability his birthday will be 2/4/08. Although watch me go into labor over the weekend when neither my doctor nor my midwife are on call now that everything is set.

I hadn't had any Braxton-Hicks contractions at all until a couple weeks ago. Now I seem to have them a lot. They're kinda creepy feeling.

Speaking of creepy...I was watching TLC last night, and this documentary came on about this lady in someplace on the other side of the world (where they have weird ways of thinking). Anyway, she was pregnant and thought she had gone into labor, but the baby did not come after 48 hours. She watched another lady die of complications and decided that she did not want to be delivered in the hospital. She went home, and the pain and bleeding stopped. Permanently. The baby stopped moving and everything, but it never came out.

Finally 50+ years later they figured it out. Apparently there is another type of ectopic pregnancy where the egg, instead of settling into the Fallopian tube, misses the uterus and falls out into the body. The placenta then attaches to the nearest organs and begins to grow from there. The baby then becomes a foreign object to the mother's body, so the body's line of defense is to form a calcification around the baby. When the woman finally began experiencing pain and bleeding again, they went in there and found this baby, probably a bit fatter than an eggplant, completely encrusted and hardened. It had been in there for 1/2 a century! Crazy. There are several documented cases, but obviously it is very rare.

Luckily, pretty sure my baby is confirmed to be in the right place.

Anyways, if I don't get to blog before Sunday, see you after the baby arrives!