OK, here's the scoop.

T is messing with her mom.

(Before I go too much farther, here's a warning to the males reading this that I'm going into female-medical-issues, but not in TOO much detail. But consider yourselves warned.)

Friday when I went to the doctor he pronounced me 90% effaced, 1 cm, dilated, and T low in my pelvis, head down, ready to go. I didn't think too much of that until early Sunday morning when I lost my mucus plug. All day Sunday J and I went from store to store and got final things taken care of, small things picked up, and packed our bags for the hospital.

Yesterday (Monday) morning I called the doctor's office just to confirm "So hey - since I lost the plug that means I'm looking at anything from a few hours to a week or so, right?" They wanted me to go to the hospital to Labor and Delivery to get monitored just to make sure. I get to L&D and they find that I am actually contracting and that I'm just over a cm dilated so they tell me I'm in early labor and that I should go home and rest up. By the time I left the hospital, I was feeling the contractions.

I make a big deal of it at work, come home yesterday, and wait. From about 11 am to 12 midnight I experienced contractions between 6 and 10 minutes apart, consistently, but never regular. They never got to 5 minutes apart to get me to go back to the hospital. So, a very tired person, I went to bed. I woke again at 6 this morning and the contractions weren't as often as they had been. I called the doctor's office again expecting to go in and see if I'd at least progressed since yesterday before noon. Instead of bringing me in to check me real quick and give me peace of mind, she set an appointment for me for Friday and said if my water hadn't broken and that if the contractions weren't unbearable I could return to work.

So now . . . with only a couple contractions an hour . . . I have no idea if I made any real progress, if it was just Braxton Hicks (practice contractions, but I wouldn't imagine so with them going on for 24 freaking hours), if it's pre-labor, or what. Thankfully my friend C is a midwife and she's been able to inform me that it's pre-labor, not just false labor, so I feel a little less embarrassed . . . but NOW I've brought my mom up here, a 500 mile trip for her, and uprooted her from her life, I've missed a day and a half of work I can't afford, I'm tired, I'm still contracting (though not much) so I'm not comfortable, and I'm just very . . . very . . . very frustrated.

No, I'm not overly anxious for her to get here after all this, I'm just frustrated because of the uncertainty and because I honestly feel like I've been robbed of that "oh boy we've gotta rush to the hospital" moment. And . . . and . . . and . . . argh.