Monsterous

It's okay, I'm the monster here, we haven't given birth to one. Not yet, anyway.

My wife is still in the throes of the early stages. Contractions all through the night, increasingly painful, but nowhere near regular enough that the hospital will accept her as a card-carrying birth-giver.

On the other hand, I'm clearly a monster because I had one of the best nights of sleep I've had in a long time. Other than my innate callousness, a few things contributed to this. Fresh sheets (I changed them before we left yesterday), being very tired and best of all, not sleeping in the snow.

Her body temperature has been up during the pregnancy, so that we slept with the windows open at all times, even to the extent of waking up in a Stockholm hotel with an inch of snow on the floor. But now she's feeling the cold again, as welll as feeling cooler. We both noticed it. Once I'd noticed it, I went to sleep immediately.

Neither of us have had many good nights of sleep for a while, I guess. That's likely to continue, of course, so I'll take what I can get, thanks.

It may be a girl.

We've been fairly sure it's going to be a boy for a while. This was based on a scientific process involving the size and shape of the bump and the sprinkling of a decoction of moonbeams around an orchard at midnight. One of the midwives yesterday referred to the scan as a she in very definite terms, and tried to take it back in a defensive burst including claiming we'd called it she first and she'd assumed we'd already known and gosh, look at the time, I think someone's calling me next door. So the cat may be out of the bag on that one.

The baby's still in the bag, though. My wife says today, for sure, no way will she put up with another 24 hours of this. We'll see what the midwives say today, we're going back in for another check-up.