Welcome to The Blog of Becky:

How NOT to give birth.

SIIIIIIIGH.

My friend who was due two weeks ahead of me now has a happy, healthy 5 week old baby.

My OTHER friend who isn’t due for another two weeks just gave birth last night.

The Squidgelet, on the other hand, appears to be dug in like a tick and showing no signs of evacuating any time soon.

Spicy food is ineffective.

Walking is nice exercise, but it doesn’t really do anything.

Nipple stimulation, which is about as sexy as it sounds, can bring on contractions, but as soon as I stop, they stop.

Raspberry tea tastes like crap… AND it’s ineffective.

Prostaglandins applied, errr… well… “Bean”-ically… well, let’s just say that it’s more fun than gallons of raspberry tea, but it’s still not really doing anything.

Plus, sex while 1,342 weeks pregnant (or is it just 41 weeks? I get confused…) kind of resembles a toddler attacking a Weeble-Wobble:

I sincerely doubt they’re going to be choosing The Bean and I to be the feature stars in any naughty movies anytime soon.

As far as progress, I have no idea if anything is even happening down there. My doctor hasn’t checked me to see if I’m dilated at all, and frankly, I’m okay with that.

For those of you who are blissfully ignorant, starting a few weeks before your due date many doctors will start checking to see if your cervix has “dilated” or are “effaced” at all.

The easiest way to understand what these terms mean is to think of a mayonnaise jar vs. a ketchup bottle.

When you are not pregnant, your cervix is shaped like the mouth of a ketchup bottle… very narrow (not dilated at all) and rather long (not effaced at all).

As you progress through labor, your cervix dilates (going from closed to a gaping 10 centimeters wide in diameter) and effaces (growing thinner and thinner, until like a mayonnaise jar there’s barely any “bottleneck”.

Back before I was pregnant, I always assumed there was a fancy, special little instrument that they delicately placed against your belly and threw back some kind of electronic reading of your labor progress.

Here is an artist’s depiction of how I thought this would go down:

Hah. Hah, hah, hah. Oh, how I wish.

Oh, no. No, no, no….

The reality is a lot worse than that. When a doctor checks to see your progress.. basically, he just rolls up his sleeves and diiiiiives on in.

He doesn’t even buy you a drink first, or make small talk.

It is, quite possibly, the most awkward experience a woman will ever go through.

To make it even worse, my doctor doesn’t even have the normal stirrup-type tables that I’ve grown accustomed to. Instead, he has these evil torture-chamber type chairs that mechanically flip you upside down like a beached turtle while he pokes about.

It basically goes down like this:

Thankfully, my experiences in the chair of torture have been few and far between. This is because I have the laziest doctor EVER. My appointments with him last between 45 seconds to a minute, and consist of him wandering in, asking if I have any questions, and wandering out.

I would complain, and ask him to be a little more proactive, but I have my reasons for keeping him at bay.

In fact, they are two very solid reasons.

Two very large, solid, GIGANTIC reasons.

My Ob/Gyn has hands like a silverback gorilla.

I’m not sure what I’m dreading more— labor, or the thought of having his gigantic hams coming anywhere near my va-jay-jay.

Oh, the joys of pregnancy.