Four centimeters? Not today.
Yet another doctor appoint today, the last one in fact. We arrived promptly at 7:50 a.m. for the 8:00 a.m. appointment only to learn that Erin's appointment was scheduled for TOMORROW at 8:00 a.m. Fortunately, Dr. Stark made room in her schedule for us. Much to Erin's dismay though, she is still at 3cm and they want her to be at 4cm before they will do anything to get labor started before the 38th week. After the exam they hooked her up to the NST (Non-Stress Test) machine for 20 minutes to measure her contractions and track the babies' heart beats. She had a couple of contractions in those 20 minutes and the babies' heart rates were just dandy.
I had read somewhere that to the baby an ultrasound sounds like a helicopter hovering close over the top of your house. Since we've had at least 10 of these NSTs and the babies start moving a lot when they turn on the machine, I'm fairly convinced that they can hear those ultrasound waves. During one of the NSTs, they could not find the heart beats with the sound monitors so they brought in the ultrasound machine to visually find the babies' heart locations. When the sound monitors picked up the echos from the other ultrasound, what do you think it sounded like? Uh huh, just like a helicopter hovering. Fortunately, just one more marathan monitoring session for these girls though, and that will be sometime between now and September 6th.
If Erin's body hasn't kicked into gear by September 6th, then at 6:00 a.m. on the 6th Dr. McBride will open the floodgates to get things moving. With luck, the girls will be out into the world by the afternoon. For Erin's sake, I hope it's early in the afternoon rather than later since she's not supposed to eat after midnight the night before.