Part 1 - Labor Day - January 12, 2008

I started the morning around 6:00 am feeling crampy, but I’ve felt like this before and it didn’t mean anything, so I decided to lie on the couch and watch tv and let Larry get some decent sleep since I keep him up a lot at night. I tried to time my “cramps” but I was getting real irregular times…12 minutes, 6 minutes, 8 minutes, 10 minutes…and I was still unsure if these were cramps or contractions, plus they weren’t any worse than the cramps I’d had in the past.
I decided to call the nurse on call around 8:00 am and ask her opinion if this was the start of labor since I really was having a hard time deciding if it was or wasn’t. There were no other “obvious” signs…no loss of plug or water breaking which others talk about. She called me back and I described my symptoms. She asked about the timing, which I told her was erratic, and she asked about the severity of the contractions. She asked if I could “talk” through the contraction, which at the time I still could, and she asked if my husband could see it in my face when I had a contraction. I told her that Larry was still asleep and she laughed at me and told me to go wake him up and have him start timing me and monitoring my reactions. When the contractions were consistently about 5 minutes apart, call her back.