Difference of Opinion

Whew. What a day. I went in for my routine appointment today and saw my cute little girl on ultrasound once again. According to the measurements today (how accurate are those really??), she gained an entire pound last week and now weighs somewhere around five pounds, fourteen ounces. What a little chunk for 35 weeks. :) I followed up with a non-stress test and she passed (good girl)!

Next, I had a follow-up appointment with Dr. Rawlins, who some of you may remember is the doctor that was on-call and helped deliver Nathan when everything went wrong five years ago. He is not my regular doctor, but at Associated Physicians for Women, you can pretty much travel around amongst the doctors if yours is busy or overbooked for the day. He remembered me and remembered Nathan and said that everything looked good with our little girl, but that he didn't really see the sense in waiting to deliver her at 39 weeks. He said he thought given my history and my state of nervousness, it would be wiser to deliver at 37 weeks after an amniocentesis to make sure her lungs were matured.

SO...after a LOT of discussion and a ton of questions from me, I agreed to schedule tentatively and then pray about it and decide what the best thing to do was. Tim and I had a long discussion about the pros and cons of waiting and about the risks involved with an amniocentesis, and we prayed together for a while. I talked to a lot of different people about this at church tonight and kept getting the same response: delivery at 37 weeks by a doctor who was there at Nathan's birth and knows how unusual that situation was seems like a better choice than waiting around for delivery at 39 weeks by someone else. I am still praying. I do feel like the answer is to go ahead with the early delivery....but the amniocentesis still bothers me. I plan to make some phone calls in the morning to find out how necessary that step really is or if they can just do the C-section then without it.

My new date for delivery is now January 4th. Two weeks away!! I am excited, nervous, and honestly, quite scared. I would love to say that I am calm and feel reassured and have total peace about all of this....but at this moment, on this day, I am very much afraid. I solicit prayers from all of you who read this that God will calm my fears (and Tim's and Andrews!) about this birth and that he will protect our little girl so that she may enter this world safely and in good health.

It is interesting how different Tim and I are (as most husbands and wives are) about dealing with emotional issues such as this. I tend to want to call and talk to everybody, getting their opinion and asking for their help in praying for us. Tim, my sweet quiet husband, on the other hand, wants to crawl into bed and wake up when our baby gets here. :) At least we understand each other and know that we have to let each other deal with this in different ways. He lets me talk it all out and cry and panic. I let him stay silent and stoic and go to sleep. After ten years, we can finally let each other be, well, Each Other...without resenting one another for dealing with things differently. Marriage is good (and so are mothers and girlfriends who will cry with you)! :)