One final March 1st update...

Here I am - it's 11:30pm on March 1st. And I've been having 30-40 second contractions, 10-15 minutes apart, since about 7pm. These are not the so-called contractions I had last night or the other morning - those were tame by comparison. These HURT... but I know, they still might not be LABOUR.

Yes I'm thinking of it now in ALL CAPS - it's elusive and hard to recognise. I hope it's what I'm experiencing right now, but of course - who can tell? My husband didn't really take all this seriously until I told him "OK, maybe this is another false alarm - but regardless, it REALLY hurts, we should time then and... if it's NOT real labour - it's a good practice right?"

He promptly threw his beer out and took me seriously. I hope by tomorrow we realise it was a good idea because this is the real thing.

But for now - I just don't know for sure... I guess I am second-guessing myself and being unsure because this is the third time I've experienced something that I thought might be the start of labour - and the other two times I was wrong.

Well - not really wrong. Because I know labour can stop and start. I think maybe what I was feeling on Friday morning was pre-labour, and last night was early labour which stalled... and then slowly picked up a number of hours later throughout the course of today... and may, hopefully, now be the real deal.

I don't know what to expect from here on in. I'm tempted to google 'labour what to expect' so I can find out - well frankly - what to expect! Yes I've read about this before - and been told by my midwife how it works --- but so far I haven't gone according to the rule book and it'd be nice to just have a bit of an idea of how this could all pan out...

OOOOO hang on another contraction......

So fingers crossed that this will just continue - and build - and I'll get to that point where Dave and I KNOW this is the real thing - we call the midwife, my Mum and my doula... and then we can hopefully feel like it's really happening. Right now we feel like we're in limbo-land - we're not going to bed, even though it's late because well... for one, I wouldn't be able to sleep. But also - we don't really know WHAT we should do! We're kind of waiting for some kind of sign ... that things really pick up or die off.

However I kind of think - we probably won't be getting much sleep tonight no matter how you look at it...