Swimming and babies

My visiting teacher in my ward has a lake house on one of the lakes by us, Lake Keowee, and she was so kind to invite us over to swim and have dinner yesterday afternoon/evening. It was one of the loveliest afternoons I've had in ages. Spencer and Genevieve love the water this year. They have vests they use to float and while last year they were totally unwilling to test them out, this year they're all over it and they had a fabulous time swimming around and floating. My mom is here and she swam with them while I helped Aaron, who was not as excited about the whole water thing, and that was wonderful too. She's so great with the kids and they love her to pieces.

Aaron was freaked out by the waves that came in when boats went by. He was similarly weirded out when we were at the beach last month, so I can't say I'm surprised, but thankfully he calmed down after maybe an hour and we got him in his puddle jumper and playing more in the water and on the beach. He's usually such an adventurer that I was kind of surprised, but we'll get him excited about the water soon enough. :)

This is the only picture I got while I was there. Lake Keowee is the most beautiful lake I've ever been to, and it's 10 minutes from my house. It's almost entirely surrounded by private property, so we can't really go just any day, but we have a few friends with property there, so we get to go occasionally.

It was wonderful to sit in the water this far pregnant and feel so much lighter. Here's to more of that this summer, especially after the baby arrives. Sometimes I forget how much I love swimming and how it's not actually that huge of a deal to get the kids ready to go do it. We've got to take advantage of so much water around us while we're here in case wherever we settle after graduation doesn't have that. So here's to more swimming this summer. :)

38.5 weeks

I've now entered the stage where I feel like I will be pregnant forever, so might as well not worry about it, lol. But seriously, for the moment I've found my calm groove again and am just waiting a bit more patiently for when labor starts for real. Blessedly, I'm less uncomfortable at this stage than I've been with any of my other kids, most likely related to the fact that I'm smaller, even though this is my fourth. I didn't expect that. I popped out so fast and looked bigger early on, but it has really slowed down this third trimester.

I've been taking a supplement recommended by my midwife for the last month called Gentle Birth that is supposed to tone down the intensity of labor a bit. I believe it is what is causing me to have so much seeming action towards labor without actually going into labor. Hopefully that means that when go time actually hits it will be much faster than with my others. Aaron was my shortest at 12 hours, so I'd love have a bit shorter this go around.

In the meantime I've gotten a surge of energy and have been getting things done like crazy. I spent the last couple days madly finishing the quilt top for a baby quilt. Bill gave me some fabric for my birthday back in January for just that, and I finished it yesterday except for the border. I tried out paper piecing for the first time and I am really pleased with how it turned out. It's impossible to get that kind of precision any other way that I know. It wasn't nearly as hard to learn as I thought, and so rewarding.

My mom is flying in today and to prep I got a sudden urge to bake a zillion things, so yesterday I made some sourdough bread, bagels, granola, and even made food for the kids for their meals, ha! That feels hard at times, but I had all this energy and it was awesome. 

I'm still feeling all energetic this morning, so we'll see what the day holds. 

One day down, four to go

Before I got pregnant Bill and I factored in the piece of information that he would have a conference in Boston that he wanted to go to and present at a couple weeks before my due date. Back then it sounded like no big deal. I could totally handle it.

Fast forward nine months and day one is past and we have four days to go. So far this morning I've already finished my work, done some yoga, and we ate breakfast that wasn't cereal. So pretty much day two is in the bag too as a success and it's not even 9AM. Hahaha!

But really, it's a little crazy to be 37 plus weeks pregnant with three kids and no husband. And we did it to ourselves. And it will be just fine. And if it's not, and for some crazy reason the baby comes earlier than any baby I've had in the past, it will make for a crazy story for ever after. But I think that won't happen. I think we'll have an uneventful week and get Bill on Saturday and my mom next Wednesday and then Miss Chloe will make her appearance much closer to her due date. And my fingers are heavily crossed for this result. :)

And then the calm disappeared

And with a simple phone call this morning my calm evaporated. I got a note a couple months back stating that my insurance was getting bought out and going away, but all services would be the same. I still did my due diligence at the time to make sure that was the case, and thought it was. But SC has a stupid law about if you want to use midwives you have to have two appointments with an OB to "approve" going to them. The legislative babysitting drives me insane. Well, that OB, the only OB any of the midwives go to, because where I live is incredibly underserved for midwifery care, and the OBs won't help partner with them, applied to that new insurance and they rejected their office. I didn't think to call them to check. It wouldn't have mattered anyway because I couldn't change and keep my midwife. 


So I spent two hours this morning talking to multiple different places trying to find someone that will take the new insurance and also do that second OB visit I need to satisfy SC law. I finally found someone who should work. And I'll be driving an hour and a half to get to them. Ridiculous! And they were kind of punky about it.
I kind of want to say screw all of them. I chose my method of birth because it's what is best for me and my baby. I don't live close enough to a hospital to use my preferred provider without having significant risk of having my baby in the car. Last go around the hospital sent me home because they didn't believe I was in active labor, and I had Aaron 30 minutes after rushing back since transition started ten minutes after I arrived home from being sent home. So just pay for the services already and think of what's best for the health of me and my child, not what is the mainstream normal method! I hate, hate, hate, hate, hate dealing with insurance companies. And don't get me started on how I'm still up in the air waiting for services to be covered for Spencer too.
I don't even know if my midwife services will be covered now. I do have a letter that promises they will. I talked to her and she's like, well, we'll work something out if they can't pay. Awesome. That's code words for we'll put together a payment plan for you to pay the rest like you're self-pay. I have no doubt I will be fighting them about it for months after I have the baby. I'm so incredibly ticked about all this. I can't imagine the amount of tension bottled up in me right now is particularly good for my current state of health. But I have a really strong desire to start throwing punches at several different parties. Messing with the 9-month pregnant girl just isn't a good choice, folks. 
But the worst part, I'm stuck. I will be fighting with insurance. Likely I will be paying more for my birth than has been planned for the last six months. Of course we'll make it work. No, I don't need to be bailed out. I just hate it all. I hate being in an income bracket where I have to deal with the Medicaid crap and don't really have another option. I hate how broken the medical industry is. I hate that my choices are severely limited because the state legislature is a bunch of idiots who are scared of maternal care that is mainstream in every other country in the world. I kind of want them all to burn. And mostly I just want to be past all of this. Past having the baby, past paying for whatever all this will take, past grad school, past wondering where the heck we're going to get a job and where we're going to move and the sheer uncertainty of life for the last few years and at least the next one or two more. I'm so ready to get to a point where we can pay off our debt, start putting money away, have some peace of mind about our forward motion. Some days just feel really crappy when I think about the actual situation we're in. This suddenly became one of them.

Home Birth

It's June 1st! I've made it to the month Chloe is going to be born! That feels great. Yesterday was my first home visit from my midwife. I believe I've mentioned I am going to have this baby at home this go around. I have several reasons for that.

First and foremost, I nearly had Aaron in the car on the way to the hospital that was 35-40 minutes from our house. He arrived 30 minutes after we got to the hospital, albeit for the second time that evening. They didn't believe me when I said I was in active labor. I was right. They were wrong. We've since moved further away from that hospital, so now it is an hour's drive. I just didn't have an inclination this go around to do transition in the car and be concerned the whole time about how that would go down.

Second, I live in a part of South Carolina that is very underserved for midwifery. I've had all my babies with midwives and I vastly prefer that arrangement to going to an OB in a typical hospital setting. I did have all three others in a hospital, but under a midwife's care. With Aaron I had wanted a birthing center, but finances and the group I picked didn't have their center open yet, so that didn't work out. Anyway, I had a rather bad experience at the beginning of this pregnancy with the certified midwife group I had used last go around and it turned me off using them again. I was left scrambling 12 weeks into my pregnancy trying to find a different provider that I trusted. Turns out the closest birthing center to me is an hour away not factoring in traffic. With as fast as the end of Aaron's birth went, that made me super uncomfortable. Pretty well the biggest stress for me of any pregnancy has been what to do with my kids when it's time to deliver the next baby. It really bothers me, when very little else does.

Second, my husband is a grad student so I qualify for Medicaid when I'm pregnant. It's a nice benefit for being in such a low income situation, I guess?? No really, I'm super grateful for that. Having a baby can be super expensive. The birthing centers didn't take that insurance. So even if I wanted to drive an hour for all my appointments plus to have the baby, I'd have to pay out of pocket. So there I was again, 12 weeks pregnant, not having luck finding a provider. I did a bunch of internet searching and finally found two independent midwives that came highly recommended. I spoke with both of them and one would charge me literally half what the other would because she took my insurance for at least part of the cost. I was sold.

In going with an independent midwife that means I jumped straight into the world of home birth. I'm totally okay with this. It's my fourth baby. I've had no complications with the others. The lack of stress knowing I don't have to go anywhere when I'm in labor is incredible. And if anything did happen, I do have a hospital just ten minutes down the road and my midwife would come along. So really, it took out all the things that stressed me with previous pregnancies. And aside from the financial affordability, I really like my midwife. She is great. She has four kids of her own not much older than mine. She's nice, fun to talk to, efficient, low key, and just a genuinely nice person. I feel really blessed to have found her.

So yesterday was my first home visit now that I'm 36 weeks pregnant. It was amazing to not have to leave the house. She brought the birthing pool. I'm going to try that approach this time. Chloe is looking absolutely perfect as far as this stage of pregnancy goes. She's head down, way low already, and in the optimal position for birth. In fact, she was going crazy with contractions all afternoon and evening yesterday, enough to make me worry just a bit. Bill's headed out to a conference to present and we need her to wait until he comes back to come. I've never had a baby more than a week early, but hey, she could throw us off. Things are all calm today though so I think we're back to the waiting game and I'm not worried anymore. Honestly, if she did decide to come early we would work through it however worked best and have an awesome story forever after. Three weeks left. All good things happening. I'm feeling pretty great.