Today’s appointment took freaking forever, and I’m not sure why because the place seemed deserted. But seriously, we were there for 2 hours!

Well, OK – some of it was our fault. And by ‘our’ I mean the baby’s. He was being a lazy little putz this afternoon and *refused* to move around to let the nurse measure the amniotic fluid. She jiggled the hell outta my belly with the ultrasound transducer and more roughly with her hands. She had me chug half my ice water to dump it on his head. She finally went and got the buzzer. Nothing helped. The little man was just firmly set in taking a nap and nothing was gonna budge him. She was *finally* able to maneuver around him enough to get a measurement – which wasn’t good anyway. The measurement was 9.68 – lowest I’ve been so far is 12.5. They wanna see around 14. I need to drink more, especially since it’s been so crazy hot.

Then on to the monitoring room. Got me hooked up and left the room for what seemed like a longer than normal time. Come back in, take my BP (153/95) and use the buzzer on my belly + jiggle things to try to get the little man to move around. Fetal monitoring requires the kid to move a couple times during the monitoring so they can track his heartrate at rest and activity. All resting doesn’t tell them what they need to know. So, once they got him to move a bit, they left me on the monitor for a while longer. It was a tad disconcerting that they were so concerned about baby not moving. The phrase “decreased fetal movement” was tossed around.

By the time the nurse came back, it had been 90 minutes since I’d last pee’d and things were getting desperate. I asked if anyone else wanted a sample since my last two appointments required secondary samples at the end and after WAY more hemming and hawing than I wanted while I tried not to wet my pants – they asked for a 2nd sample. I come back and they took my BP again since the first urine dip stick test found trace protein. Second BP of the afternoon is 162/103 which kinda sent the nurses into a tizzy. 10 minutes of squawking at the nurses station pass and the nurse comes back in with labs for me to have drawn. I’m used to this part, that’s why I asked about the 2nd urine sample. They asked if I had a headache or blurred vision, to which I truthfully responded that yes, I’d had a minor headache all weekend and today that tylenol wasn’t helping and a teeny bit of blurred vision. (But honestly, I think the blurred vision is the normal pregnancy vision weirdness, not BP.)

So more blood work drawn today that will presumably be back tomorrow or Wednesday for sure. I imagine that if something comes back really amiss, I’ll get a phone call. Otherwise, my next appointment is Wednesday at 2:30, with Dr. Schwartz. We’ll see what he has to say then. My bag will be packed by then, just in case.

In the meantime, I got a lot of work done today – my first day in my home office. Of course, the cable went out around lunchtime and has been intermittent ever since. Cox will be out tomorrow to check it out. Perfect timing. Thankfully, I can work offline on payroll and accounts payable, so it’s annoying, but not terribly problematic. I’ll get some more work done this evening to put me at full-time hours for today. My goal is to be as caught up as possible on payroll and accounts payable every day until the baby comes so that if my boss has to take over mid-stream, things are as complete as possible.

Good first day home. And yes, I have to say that having a cat and a dog in my home office while I’m plugging away at spreadsheets is pretty damned awesome. :) Oh, having Paul at the desk three feet away from me ain’t too shabby either

*To recap BP over the last few weeks for perspective: