36 Weeks Pregnant- Long Weekend Fighting with Former Landladies, Shopping for Stuff for the Fetus, Chiropractor, Lunch with Friends, Massage Therapy, Packing a Hospital Bag, a Baby Shower, and Continuing to Unpack the House

Irises in the spring are always beautiful.

Today, I hit the 36 week mark in my pregnancy. I only have four weeks left until my due date. My terror has been switching from the pregnancy ending by miscarriage or stillbirth to me ruining this child’s life with bad parenting decisions. I know a lot of women at this stage are dreading labour and while I can’t say that I’m looking forward to it, I’ve had some horrific surgeries and there are pain killers available, so I’m sure I can survive it. My existential worries plague me more. Will my child be sitting here 37 years later mired in angst caused by my parenting choices? I hope not.

36 weeks pregnant.

Last weekend was a long weekend and should have been a lovely time for my husband and I to catch up on some rest and time together (our last long weekend before the due date), but instead we had to finish cleaning our former apartment before handing the keys back to our landladies. I had spent days cleaning leading up to the Saturday, so that we would not have to spend our whole weekend cleaning there. On Saturday, we cleaned for hours and hours and we thought the place looked much better than the state that we had received it in (our landladies complained repeatedly that the former aged tenant had not cleaned well enough- oh could that be because she was over 80?!). We asked the landladies to meet us the next day to inspect the place. The next day we went over and only one of them was there. She walked through and said how wonderful the place looked. Strangely, she had no condition inspection report from the Residential Tenancy Act documents that are required, but we thought that her friendly parting of wishing us well with the baby, saying what a good job we did, and her taking the keys from us and saying that she would send us the damage deposit and the last ten days of the month’s rent that she had said she would pay back for us leaving early was enough. Well, think again.

We spent the rest of the weekend entrenched in an acrimonious email chain as she kept coming back with more and more things that were wrong with the place, more and more that she wanted to deduct from our paltry damage deposit (we had already spent over $200 of our own money towards getting back our $625 damage deposit on cleaning the blinds in the place professionally because they required us to, even though the company couldn’t even clean some of them because they were so old they just needed to be replaced). Eventually we just offered that one hour of minimum wage be deducted from our damage deposit for them to hire someone to clean the oven further which is what they kept whining about the most (even though when we moved in the oven had a gap in the glass and it was never repaired or replaced the whole 4.5 years that we were there). They moaned about how it would cost at least double that to get the oven cleaned and we knew that (what?! We don’t know how much it costs to hire people to clean ovens, as we don’t have that luxury). We told them that if they wanted anything more they could go to an arbitration with us. This really pissed them off, but they backed off after some they made some more nasty comments towards us. The whole experience has been so stressful and negative, it almost makes me never want to rent again, but then I remember that the average property price on the market in our area of Victoria is $1.94 million and I think, oh yeah, I can’t buy (and this market is due for a major correction).
We did some more organizing in the new place and shopped at Walmart and managed to acquire a few more things for the fetus. My round ligaments and back were feeling so sore that I also looked for a pregnancy support belt (they are supposed to lift and support your growing stomach to help your back and hips and everything cope with the strain of the added weight and the unbalanced nature of the weight). Unfortunately, this proved to be difficult to find in Victoria and I ended up ordering one online from Amazon. It arrived yesterday and I’m still getting the hang of wearing this support belt that comes in three different pieces. It does feel like it holds things up and in more, but I can’t tell yet if it will actually help my pain and strain. Also, while they say that one could wear it under clothes, with all of the Velcro, I doubt that this would comfortable and unlike the listing, I think that people would definitely notice this bulk under your clothing. I’ve just been wearing it around the house over my clothing.

A side view of this pregnancy support brace.

I started having Braxton Hicks contractions again at the end of the weekend. This was particularly uncomfortable on Tuesday morning when I went to the chiropractor. My pelvis felt really separated and painful too (I’ve been hobbling around in pain especially when I get up from bed or the couch and I’m all stiff), I suppose because it’s preparing for the birth and as usual I’d done too much cleaning, organizing, and unpacking. My low back was also sore. Plus my neck was sore with pain and numbness radiating into my shoulders. Not that anyone wouldn’t have been tense after that weekend. After the TENS machine, heat, and an adjustment, I left. I’ll see him in a few weeks unless things worsen. Then I suppose I might not see my chiropractor again until after the birth.

The next day, I didn’t really feel the cramps from the Braxton-Hicks contractions and I went and had lunch downtown with friends. I also dropped by to see my husband at the office. And I went to Value Village to search for things for the fetus. Well, I totally overdid it, because the next day I was exhausted, sore, and felt very low. All I managed to do was go for massage therapy and do some cleaning and organizing around the house. At massage therapy my mid back and neck were feeling awful. My massage therapist says it’s probably not just tension, but also the weight of my increasing chest pulling things forward and down. My hips and thighs were really sore too. The pregnancy is really starting to feel more extreme. The belly is sticking out more and more and the thing still seems to be in a really high position. Its kicks and/or hits are really, really strong now. I don’t know if this is from the decreasing amniotic fluid that happens around this time, the decreasing room as it grows by a pound a week, or what, but when I’m hungry and haven’t started eating, it gets really angry and lets me know it.

Sen Zushi never disappoints for lunch in downtown Victoria.

All the books have been saying for a while to get a bag for the hospital packed for the mother, the partner, and the fetus. Everyone tells you different things to pack. It’s confusing and overwhelming. I mean, I don’t want to show up there with giant suitcases like I’m moving into the Four Seasons for a month, but I also don’t want to forget something because I’ll be there a little longer than “normal” pregnant women just due to the medications I’m on and the fact that they have to do blood tests a couple of days after the birth and put me on a new dose before I can leave (and observe me to make sure I’m doing okay). We have a tiny pile of stuff that we’ve started to take to the hospital, but I can’t pack a lot at this point, because my clothes are in use- I don’t have many at this point, so it’s not like I can just pack them up for potentially a month give or take days or weeks. But having something ready to go does seem like a good idea, because I doubt I’ll feel like packing when I have labour pains (the Braxton Hicks contractions feel like menstrual cramps and I certainly don’t enjoy them, so labour will undoubtedly feel much, much worse).

My husband and I have also been reviewing worksheets in the books given to us at the prenatal classes to figure out what to do leading up to the trip to the hospital (there might be 12-18 hours to kill before it’s time to go, but while I’m in early labour). The suggestion of the instructor to bake a cake seems like a delicious one, so maybe we’ll do that.

Today, my husband’s firm had a baby shower for us. I was shocked and overwhelmed that they wanted to hold one. I had kind of thought we’d skate through this whole pregnancy baby shower free. We had lunch at the firm, played a trivia game with my husband’s colleagues, and they gave us some very beautiful and thoughtful presents to open. Their kindness and interest in our pregnancy made us feel very special.

A view from a parkade downtown.

The new place is starting to feel more like home and readier to have a baby in, but I still really can’t picture what it will be like. It’s such an alien thought having something or someone else live with you when you’re used to it just being just the two of you or perhaps the two of you plus a cat (although now we don’t even have a kitty, so we are truly alone). But I guess we’ll find out soon enough. Apparently only 2-4% of babies arrive on their due date, so who knows when we’ll actually find out what it feels like, but now that I’m 36 weeks, it feels like more of a certainty that we actually will know what it’s like to be parents after a seven year odyssey to get there (including a miscarriage and a full cycle of IVF to get pregnant this time).

36 weeks pregnant.