Don't you just love Fridays?

How could you not? They hold the promise of a weekend - which is two days of the whole family, in most cases. In our family, these days are known as All Day Daddy Days. And my kids get super pumped about All Day Daddy Days. As do I, because not only do I get unlimited time with my best friend and love of my life, but it's so nice to have someone to share dirty diaper duty, entertain the kids and even give me some sweet time by myself occasionally. 

It's also the end of a school week and a break from our usual routine.

And this particular Friday couldn't be any sweeter as it has rained and stormed all day long. 

Plus it's cool outside and feels very much like autumn is close by...

all very good things.

I want to wrap up my week by sharing a few pictures with you from our lives and to leave you laughing with a hilarious commercial that I can't stop watching because it never fails to make me laugh out loud.

  Every pregnancy is different, they say. Just as every child is different. 

My personal experience with pregnancy is that each of mine aren't really that different from each other.

Except that with each subsequent pregnancy, the degree of misery I've experienced in my first trimester has increased exponentially. 

The thing that threw me for a loop this pregnancy was that around week 32, when the baby should start thinking about turning head down, this one didn't. At week 32, at the recommendation of my midwife, I began religiously doing the five exercises she advises to keep the pelvic bones loose, open and baby-head friendly. Those exercises are as follows: 

1) The cat/cow maneuver (a yoga move)

2) Drawing figure 8's with my hips while on hands/knees

3) Figure 8s with hips while standing

4) squats and

5) lunges.

As the weeks clicked by and I could tell this baby was still head up, although extremely active, I started getting nervous. Obviously, as the baby gets bigger, the amount of room it has to move about lessens and it becomes more likely to stick in whatever position it is in.

I have also learned from my midwives that with each subsequent pregnancy, it's more common for a baby to remain head-up longer, simply because there's more room in the uterus. The uterus has been here before and as a result, the baby just can move about more, and later. Most midwives take a proactive approach beginning around week 32 (with hip opening exercises, etc) and ramp up the interventions as the due date approaches.

As a side note, one main difference between care from a midwife versus an obstetrician is that midwives do lots of Leopold's maneuvers, which is the process of manually determining the baby's position in the uterus. Most OBs do very little of this. Most midwives do this as soon as the baby is big enough to feel. And at each visit, they keep a record of how the baby is positioned and whether that changes, etc. 

A few weeks ago, I got really nervous. I could feel a little ball of a head up under my ribs, and although I would wake up in the middle of the night to feel that ball of a head at a 3:00 or 9:00 position, and occasionally at a 5:00 position, every morning it would pop back up to 12:00. Grrr. 

I found a website called Spinningbabies.com, which is all about things you can do to help a baby get into optimal positioning for birth. Turning posterior babies anterior...turning breech babies head down...

It was extremely informative and with the ok of my midwife, I started implementing more of those interventions:

Elephant walking, inversions on an ironing board, headstands in the pool, continuing my daily swims, elevated hip positions...on top of my regular visits to my chiropractor which is a highly recommended thing for all pregnant woman. Misalignments in your pelvic and hip bones can contribute to posterior babies and breech babies. Just an FYI.

I should not leave out here that first and foremost, I've been praying that God would position this baby properly for a natural delivery. A c-section was/is the last thing I wanted.

In the world of breech babies, there is a timeline for taking action. 

About week 32, you begin (or continue) all your hip-opening activities.

Between weeks 34-35, there is something called Moxibustion which has statistically proven to be highly effective at turning breech babies.

If at week 37, baby is still breech, you typically get an ultrasound to determine baby position, location of the placenta and then you attempt to manually turn the baby. This is called External Cephalic Version, and it happens to be something my midwife is adept at. Look it up on youtube sometime....it's kind of crazy to watch it being done. 

Anyway, about a week ago, I kept coming across the whole Moxibustion thing. It was something I'd vaguely heard of, but didn't know much about. It's an acupuncture treatment, minus the needles.  It involves burning a stick (like an incense cigar) of moxa (mugwort root) just to the outside of your pinkie toes, pointing the heat at a specific spot (Bladder 67) which has been proven to impact the baby's movement in the uterus. Now, I could have gone to an acupuncturist, but really didn't want to pay for a visit, so I researched moxibustion on my own and ended up buying some moxa sticks on Amazon. They're really inexpensive! Studies indicate moxibustion has a 75% effectiveness rate of turning a breech baby compared to a 50% rate of babies turning on their own. Not a bad stat. And more importantly, it was non-invasive and couldn't hurt anything.

A week ago Friday, my moxa sticks arrived and that evening, Kyle became my Moxa Man! I got in a comfy position on our bed and made sure the kids wouldn't accidentally bump Kyle and scorch my poor pinkie toes. Then he lit the moxa stick, using a candle, and alternated holding the stick at the outside edge of each of my pinkie toes for 5 minutes at a time, for a total of 20 minutes. This is gonna sound so weird, but the minute he got the stick close enough to my toe to feel the heat, the baby literally lurched. It continued to squirm and wiggle over the 20 minutes. After that, I went to bed. 

They recommend you use the moxa sticks before bed because if a baby is going to turn, it's more likely to do so while you're sleeping.  Ha! That night, the baby was so active it was almost impossible to sleep at all.  I kid you not. The baby moved ALL NIGHT LONG.  I couldn't say that I felt it had turned or anything...it just moved a lot. A whole lot.

We continued the moxibustion treatment Saturday night and Sunday night and I had my 36 week home visit with my midwives on Monday. I also had my 36 week required visit with a nurse practitioner midwife that same morning. The NP couldn't say for certain, but she was pretty confident she was feeling a head down baby. Later that afternoon at my home visit, my other three midwives palpated the dickens out of my belly and all of them concurred that the baby was head down. I can't tell you the relief I felt hearing them all agree on this matter. I still need to be proactive in helping the baby find that happy spot and engage in the pelvic bones, but just not feeling that distinctly round little head up by my ribs is a HUGE weight off my shoulders.

So, if you're ever in a position where you have a breech baby, or know someone who does, reassure them that there is a whole range of things that you can do to promote turning.  There are circumstances where the baby just won't or can't turn and a C-section is, unfortunately (in this state anyway) unavoidable. But for the most part, there are options and possibilities and you just never know what might be the catalyst. I'd start with prayer and an active recruitment of prayer warriors.  And in addition, keep an open mind to proven techniques.  Was it moxibustion in our case? Hard to say....but I'm definitely not the skeptic I once was.  

I recently took a Design test to see what it said about how God designed me. 

Now, I'm not entirely 100% on board with the results of any test like that, simply because I think the answers may vary given the day of the week, time of day or mood you're in. Maybe not a HUGE difference, but possibly enough to alter the results a bit.

In my case, this one particular test said that I am 100% Achiever. I have elements of other things, but what this test was telling me was that I am wired to achieve. And in fact, have the process and mind-set of "achieving" utterly down pat. There are other things I am currently working on, apparently, but how to achieve isn't one of them. I am happiest when achieving. 

So here's something I'm learning about myself, in this stage of my life, that is slightly unsettling:

given this stage in my life and the choices we've made about home-schooling and stuff, there are days, possibly even WHOLE WEEKS when my "achievements" look a lot like....well, nothing.

I may start out with an ambitious list of what I will accomplish and get, oh, maybe 2 of them checked off. 

Laundry

School

Meal Plan

Grocery Shopping

Work out

Inventory Baby Clothes

Move Dorien's clothes to his big boy room

Feed Chickens/Gather Eggs

Trim plants on back deck

I'm learning to not let this bother me quite as bad as my "Design" Test indicates it should.

I'm realizing that sometimes, doing school is quite enough to fill up one day. Particularly when you factor in how many times you have to break to change a poopy diaper, fix some snacks, fix lunches and run pee yourself...

What I should do is maximize my time by getting tons done while the kids take naps. But what just as often happens is that I sit down beside Dorien and immediately fall asleep myself. Sometimes for 3 hours. I chalk it up to being very pregnant. Which often feels like quite the achievement on its own. As anyone who's ever been pregnant can attest to.

So here it is already a Thursday and I feel like I've lived 3 weeks inside this one. Even with a holiday thrown in. Because I have a hard time figuring out how to cram 5 days of school into 4 (that is entirely my Achiever part) and particularly when you fit in a midwife appointment, a chiropractor appointment, a piano lesson and Daddy being out of town for 3 days. It's tiring. That could explain the 3 hour nap. 

I find that when Kyle is out of town, we stay up later and eat later (and stranger)...we do odd things like go to the gym at 8:00pm so I can swim laps in some peace and quiet before gym childcare closes. We watch movies instead of getting ready for bed which means we sleep later. We burrow in like nesting bunnies and wait for the return of Daddy Bunny.

Normally, at this time of day, I'd be watching the clock thinking about when Kyle will pull in. But with him gone, I sit here on the bed beside a sleeping Dorien and think about how I'll try to make my evening productive since my day has been all about school and changing diapers and hilariously, walking like an elephant on my hands and feet to convince this baby I'm growing to turn head down. 

I praise God for designing us with a healthy degree of give to our nature, because without that give and flexibility, I'd be going crazy these days.  Instead, I'm learning that it's ok to bend and not cross off lists and instead, to enjoy the process of homeschooling, being a mom and a wife and a raiser of chickens and find myself full and content (if not 100% the achiever) at the end of each precious, busy day. 

I'm glad I wasn't necessarily given the life I thought I signed up for, because I continue to find that the life God has blessed me with is so much richer and fuller and more satisfying than anything I could have crafted out of my imagination. I hope you find the same to be true.