What Month/Week?
Month 9, Week 40
How Big is Baby?
Baby is the size of a small pumpkin, weighing approximately 7 and a half pounds and measuring around 20 inches long.
Weight Gain
12kg
Symptoms
General tiredness; a bit of Pelvic Girdle Pain and Pregnancy Ligament Pain. All normal and nothing too disruptive though. Started to get Braxton Hicks contractions.
Cravings
None
Food Aversions
None
Reflections
The majority of this month passed by in excitement, anxiously awaiting the arrival of our little one. I began maternity leave from work, and enjoyed resting and relaxing whilst preparing to welcome my long-awaited baby to our lives. I was over the moon and couldn’t wait to give birth.
However, during the last 3 days I was pregnant, things changed completely. My entire pregnancy I had been classed as low-risk, and had enjoyed a fairly easy pregnancy, however at my 40 week midwife appointment, when I was 1 day overdue, my fundal height measurement recorded was a little bit under what it should have been, and had not changed since my last midwife appointment 10 days before. Because of this, I was referred for an emergency scan to check on baby’s size, where the sonographer’s compared baby’s full term size to the estimations of the full term size they had created at my 20 week scan. Baby was recording under this estimated size by more than 25 centiles, and so hospital policy dictated I needed to be induced.
Up until then I had loosely planned on attempting a pain medication-free, water birth at my hospital’s midwife-led birth centre, however this new-found situation with baby’s size meant I was no longer allowed to give birth at the birth centre, and would instead have to be induced in the Central Delivery Suites whilst being monitored. I admit, this change of plan upset me a little, and I was concerned as to how the induction process would change the intensity of the contractions I would experience in labour, however my baby’s health and safety was the most important thing to me, so I just rolled with the advice and on October 16 was admitted to hospital to begin the induction process.
The rest of the story will continue in my labour and delivery video and blog post.
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