Hello February

It’s February!  And tomorrow marks the official 37 week count and ‘full term’.  Yay. 🙂

Today was a little bit of this and that.  We began by hustling out of the house considerably earlier than usual so that I could show up for monitoring at 9 am.  Adorably, the Icelandic term for ‘monitoring’ (more commonly known as a ‘non-stress test‘ (NST) in the US) is ‘dagönn’.  ‘Dag’ here means ‘day’ and my midwife was of the opinion that ‘önn’ is a form of ‘to care’ (from ‘að anna’?), so it literally means ‘daycare’.

The NST went well, and my blood-pressure was mostly back to the low nineties.  Afterwards, I met the OB-doctor in charge, who raised an eye-brow or two at my maternity history, and decided it was time to transfer my care from my local health-center midwife to the hospital. To begin with I’ll be on a regimen of twice-weekly NST, which is very much in tune with what happened during the late stages with Anna, so I wasn’t overly surprised.  I’ll still be seeing ‘my’ midwife on Monday, but that’ll be the end of that.

(Contrary to US customs, the delivery team isn’t the same people you see during your pregnancy, it’s just whomever happens to be on call.  I’m pretty sure all (or most of) the labor and delivery ward nurses are midwives, and there is a doctor in charge in case stuff goes pear-shaped.  Otherwise, the midwives do all the work.)

I wasn’t done at the hospital until close to lunchtime, and managed to drag myself to a place to eat lunch, before collapsing into bed at home.  I had stupidly started programming something late last night, so when I went to bed my brain was abuzz, and I had a hard time falling asleep.  I think I managed to sleep a whopping four hours before nature called, and when I got back into bed my left hip was angry and there was no more sleeping.

I managed an hour and a half long nap (total sleep time = 5,5 hours) before again being awoken by my stupid hip.

Seeing how there would be no more napping, I decided to do something useful, and read values on the hot-water and electricity meters.  The utility company now allows people to self-report the numbers on their website, although they do check to see if the numbers look reasonable, and we last did this a year ago.  This is where we were today:

Then it was time to round up the kids and head to the sport’s center.  Anna had swim practice, and Bjarki had gymnastics practice because tomorrow’s practice was cancelled due to a meet.

I decided to be brave and go swimming, and was happy to hear that I was allowed to bring my crutch all the way to the edge of the swimming pool.  Which was a good thing because my left hip/thigh had been getting consistently worse throughout the day.  I managed some 150 m of swimming before deciding my foot was too unhappy.  So then I went and water-jet massaged the most sore parts.  I don’t think it helped much at all, but it was nice to be back in the pool for a bit.

Afterwards we rounded up Finnur, who took charge, did dinner and put the kids to bed while I lay mostly comatose on the sofa with a hot pack on my leg.  Here’s hoping tonight brings more sleep!