We had a labor false alarm toward the end of the night. After making the lasagna to bring along with us for the next day’s trip, Laura said she needed to talk to me about something. She felt like she had been leaking fluid for several days and today there had been more. None of my labors ever started this way so I called my sister who used to be a birth doula and who was on her 18th anniversary overnight outing with her husband. She didn’t answer. So then I called my sister who has six kids.

And is also pregnant with her seventh. She didn’t answer either. So I called my mom and she answered. She helped me talk it through to where the plan was to go have Laura call the numbers for the after hours call lines. She called the one in Nebraska and the midwife on call told her it was not a good idea to wait until getting to Nebraska which we were supposed to do the next day. This was upsetting to Laura because she had really been hoping and planning to have the baby there.

So then she called the on call number for the place where she’d been going this summer. They told her to come and get checked out to see whether or not the leaking is actually amniotic fluid. I know that’s what we were going to have to do but it was a matter of getting the official instructions on what to do and also where and how to go. Thankfully when you’re an established pregnant patient you get to bypass the ER and go straight to the OB floor where they can evaluate everything there.

She asked if she could take a shower and I said yes. If you’re going to be giving in a different place several weeks before you were expecting it the least you can do is take a shower and feel more comfortable that way. This all was happening at a much slower place and from the time when she first said something to when Laura and Ethan plus Josh and I were walking up to the labor floor labor floor at ten past midnight it had been a little over two hours. They went back to a triage room.

The nurse was nice and told us that we didn’t have to go back down to the patient waiting room on level 2. Unless they got super busy, it was okay for Josh and I to wait in the patient waiting room next to the triage rooms. Ethan send us texts that the amniotic fluid looked good on the ultrasound. Eventually he said they were able to go home and things were fine. We decided instead of leaving at 7:30 we would leave closer to 10 in the morning. Everyone was back home and in bed by 2:30am.

Josh said he was trying not to but he’d been excited to hold the baby. I had more been contemplating the ever present truth of needing to be fluid with our plans. Before that we had had a very good and busy day of going to church in Auburn where they were acknowledging workers from camp, swinging by Laura’s house to pack up their baby stuff (her parents are currently on a 2-week vacation traveling Route 66 and were in Arizona or California where they are also visiting their son).

We went to the beach in the afternoon. I didn’t expect them but the kids are very good about coming down when they sense I’m trying to have a family time thing. One of the boys was trying to talk to and figure out words to type to a girl he’d met at camp. After the beach we had some rest time before going to supper to meet my mother-in-law in town. We got to have my family game time downstairs in the basement where I’d been wanting to have a time where we used the new carpet.