Last night I woke up at 3:30 in the morning, totally drenched in sweat and having a contraction. It wasn’t too terribly painful – sort of like doing an involuntary sit-up, my stomach muscles were literally contracting without any participation on my part. It felt more strange and uncomfortable than anything. I noted the time and tried to go back to sleep.

I kept having contractions every six minutes for the next two hours. I started to get really excited, thinking ok, obviously this has to be it, right? All the books say that false labor has no pattern to it, and that’s one of the primary distinctions between the two. And this was precisely every six minutes, so I thought it had to be The Real Deal.

I didn’t wake Dave up, because I thought that if we were going to be heading to the hospital later in the morning, I might as well let him be as rested as possible. I remembered that our childbirth class instructor had told us that early labor can take a long time, so she suggested that we (meaning the mom-to-be and her coach) try to rest as much as possible. Take naps, shower, eat, whatever – since we’ll be needing our energy later on down the road. That sounded logical to me. And besides, the contractions weren’t too bad on the pain scale, so I figured we had lots of time.

Somewhere around 5-something in the morning, the contractions suddenly dropped from being every six minutes to being ten minutes apart. Then… nothing. I fell asleep, and that was it. I woke up a few hours later, no more contractions. And other than a few sporadic Braxton-Hicks type sensations, there’s been nothing else happening all day today. Zip, zilch, na-da.

So, um, what the heck was that??

I talked to my mom a couple of hours ago, she said she has “a feeling” that I’m going to go into labor on Friday or Saturday. She’s never claimed to have any psychic abilities in the past, so I’m not sure where this is coming from. But she guessed I was pregnant before I knew I was, so who knows? Maybe she’s right.

It would actually kind of suck if I go into labor over the weekend, since my obstetrician isn’t on call until next week, and I don’t know how that works with weekends. Like, would she be there on the Saturday or Sunday before or after her week on call? I only know for sure that she’d be there on Monday. I just really love her and feel comfortable with her, and I want her to be the one who handles the birth. Which is not to say that I have any problems with any of the other doctors in the group, I just don’t know them. So really, it’s no big tragedy either way. As long as we can hurry up and get this baby out of me, I’ll be fine either way.

The funny part of going into labor over the weekend is that it makes me think that maybe the baby overheard all this talk of inducing on Monday, so she’ll decide, “All right, all right, I’ll come out on my own!” at the very last minute. That would be very apropos for a child of Dave’s and mine – the stubbornness factor alone could make her decide to beat us to the punch. It wouldn’t surprise me at all.