Same old, same old

38 weeks 1 day

Here's a list of things that have not worked in starting labor:

1. Measuring at full term (for those who have not had children, the doctor measures your belly and how many cm it is roughly corresponds to how many weeks pregnant you are.  Thus, my belly is 2 cm too big).  I feel like measuring 40 cm should give you a free pass to labor and delivery.  It doesn't.
2. Walking.  I've walked and walked and walked.  I read in "Do Chocolate Lovers Have Sweeter Babies?" that walking does not speed the onset of labor, but I thought it might at least serve to wedge the baby down into my pelvis... or something.  It would appear that this is not so.  Also, it's like 95 degrees outside at 7:30 in the morning, when I go for walks sometimes, and upwards of 108 during the day, so I've also been doing a lot of sweating.  Which brings us to number 3:
3. Dehydration.  In the afore mentioned book, the author mentions that a dangerous way to start labor is to dehydrate yourself which would concentrate the oxytocin in your blood, theoretically starting labor. Although I'm not doing it on purpose, I'm probably perpetually dehydrated given the amount of sweating I've been doing and the fact that I can drink and drink and drink and not pee any more than usual.
4. Drinking raspberry leaf tea.  This, on it's own, is not supposed to induce labor, but it's supposed to tone your uterus, making your contractions more efficient.  Since I've been in labor for 4 months, I thought it might help move things along and then I could do like I did with Ethan and just show up at the hospital 4 cm dilated and having contractions and convince them that I was in labor.  However, I am not dilating like I did with Ethan and, at last check, was only a piddly 2 cm.  I may have started crying, or yelling, or both when they told me that.
5. Drinking black cohosh.  This did give me more forceful contractions with a higher frequency... for about two hours, then I fell asleep watching TV.
6. Having Tyler massage my feet with some supposed labor-inducing essential oils given to me by my neighbor.  Perhaps one needs to have more faith in accupressure for this to work.  But, hey, I got a nice foot rub out of it.
7. Heavy lifting.  I've been telling my kids for the past 8.75 months that I can't carry them up the stairs because I have a max carrying capacity of one child.  No more- I've been carrying them with reckless abandon for the past week or so.  Nothing.
8. Uh... the thing that got us into this situation in the first place.  Nope.
9. Making and eating a spicy curry.  It actually wasn't that spicy.  This only served to cause my children to cry tears of joy because it was so delicious and they wanted to eat thirds, but I wouldn't let them.  (That's a lie. They hated it.  Nora told me that she didn't want to eat it because it had worms(?) in it.)

I don't want any other suggestions, AND DON'T TELL ME TO TAKE CASTOR OIL, I WON'T DO IT. I just want to have this kid and be done with pregnancy forever.

In Lillian's nighttime prayer the other day, she prayed that "mom can have the baby so that she can be in a good mood."