Just gone 2 weeks past the due date for our first baby…
Everything seems to be perfectly fine; plenty of movement, scans all good, mum-to-be well and had some ‘jelly’ discharge today and yesterday. But we (mostly mum) have been struggling to relax and trust it.
After friends and family constantly checking in for updates and stirring us up we turned our phones off the other day, which helped a lot. Today mum sent a message to a bunch of them asking them to lay off until she contacts them.
All was good until this afternoon when she spoke to a midwife who said “if you get reduced movements come in immediately.” That set her off again and since then she’s been fretting on mumsnet and reading a book about it. I’m finding it hard to help her to relax. She’s really worried about missing a crucial piece of information and making a bad move somewhere. I don’t want her to be in anxiety.
For my part, I’ve actually been getting more chilled out since the due date for some reason. For a few months I was going hell for leather to get everything ready, had a couple of weeks or so around the due date of epic suspense and now it’s almost hard to take seriously that it’s about to happen.
We don’t want an induction out of pure impatience and psychodrama and, like I said, bump is fine.
Maybe this is just a rant but do you guys have any experience or reflections on this?
Many thanks
Generally you’re good until 40 weeks. If she’s at 40 weeks I would induce. You can continue to wait but she will likely need to be sectioned due to fetal size at that point.
Our first baby was late and we had an induction. It lasted for something like 14 hours, then towards the end, the baby’s vitals started dropping, so we had a surprise c-section and that lasted maybe 20 minutes from the time they knew we needed it to the baby coming out. The induction was a painful experience for my wife and had we known we would’ve just gone for the c-section from the word go, but obviously it’s not anything the doctors or us would’ve known beforehand.
Otherwise though, baby turned out fine, he’s a 12 year old baby now.
Induction isn’t necessary but a membrane sweep/strip might be just the nudge it needs. My wife had two when she was past term and the second one was the trigger.
If this hasn’t been discussed yet, it might be worth a try.