Checkup: 33 weeks 2 days

We had a little more excitement yesterday, culminating in another visit to the hospital just to be sure. The CTG didn't pick up any contractions, cervical length via ultrasound was 4.1 cm, and manual examination of the cervix showed it to be tightly closed and moderately firm. I came home feeling like a normal person instead of a walking time bomb, if only for a little while.

The entire staff reminded us to call again no matter how wispy the symptom: better that we call 100 times for nothing, said Dr. Dietz, than that we don't call and that nothing turns out to be something after all.

Today's regular checkup went very well. Weight 66.25 kilos (146 lbs), up a whopping 1.25 kilos (3 lbs) in 4 days. Surely some of that was my sweater. Cervix is 3.2 cm, CTG was lovely (the baby slept through it this time around), no contractions. New was the abdominal ultrasound to check on the baby's growth. All his parts look wonderful (and boy did we get to see male genitalia up close and personal, no mistaking the sex) and he measures just under average by Dutch standards (remember, these are the tallest people in the world). That puts him at an estimated 3.5 kilos (7 lbs 12 oz) at full term, and just over 2 kilos (4 lbs 8 oz) now.

We asked about the back-and-forth cervical length measurements, which have ranged from 4.6 cm to 2.7 cm in the past 3 weeks. Dr. Dietz said anything more than 1.5 cm is "long," but you can't glean much more information than that from the numbers. They'll vary from day to day, even moment to moment, based not only on the angle and person involved in the measurement, but also because the cervix itself changes length for non-labor reasons--if the baby shifts position and puts more or less pressure on the cervix, for example. We're just happy that what looked like a downward trend hasn't continued.