Your Friday prompt for Stream of Consciousness Saturday is: “do/dew/due”. Use one, use two or use all three. If you start and end with two of them, you get bonus points.
Due date to a woman often means only one thing - the day that you expect your baby to be born. It's easy to become fixated on it. 9 months can seem a very long time and as the due date approaches you can struggle with a variety of emotions, many of which will have you dewy eyed. Impatience. How can 9 months seem so long? Well it's more like 10 months when you can confirm a pregnancy so early these days. Trepidation. Will you be able to cope with labour? Excitement. Finally you will get to meet your baby. Of course once the due date comes, and goes, those feelings become more intense. Anxiety can creep in. Why isn't the baby coming? Will there have to be interventions?
I was fortunate with my children. The first was a day late, the second and third were both a week early. Everything was fine. Well I'm glossing over the difficult deliveries of 1 and 2 but the end results were pretty good. Actually the end results were more than good. My children never cease to amaze me.
Now one of them has had her own due date. Except she never got near her due date. Baby Nathan decided that he wasn't going to wait for that. He was early, very early, but thankfully not too early. He's progressed really well and seems to be fine. He's now 6 months old.
That whole experience though reminded me that we should never take anything for granted. Nothing is guaranteed. Sometimes things don't go to plan and maybe due dates should be given a new name, why not anticipated date or provisional date? Due date makes it sound like it should be a definite and it's anything but definite. About 95% of births do NOT happen on the due date but still, having been an expectant Mum I know how we count down to that due date. After all if a package is due to be delivered tomorrow we don't expect it to arrive later. It might be a nice surprise if it arrived early but it definitely wouldn't be great if it arrived late and caused disappointment.
So there's my SOCS for today which of course is the due day and will need to be linked back to Linda's site here.
You can check out all the rules (I broke one by looking up that birthing statistic) and see who else is participating. Why don't you give it a go?
Very nice. I had one of those babies, actually 2 of them come on the expected birth date. One of them was an actual count down from the date of conception which I knew and the other was the drs due date. Imagine not one my 2 born when actually due.
ReplyDeleteNo experience with due dates, but I enjoyed the read.
ReplyDeleteFiguring out a due date is at best an inexact science, usually more like a shot in the dark. They can come close, and sometimes they get it spot on, but usually they're either early or late. Plus, as you learned with your grandchild, a lot can happen in the meantime. Good read.
ReplyDeleteNone of my kiddos came on time. The first two were over 3 weeks past the due date. The last was to be induced on week two after due date but I had him the night before induction. Waiting on a baby's due date can be long. Thank goodness they are better at predicting now days.
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