I figured it out!

Yesterday was another "Oh! This feels just like the other day but I SWEAR this is real!" I was having what felt like constant ligament pain, which lasted for hours during church. Then when we were driving home I started having contractions. A couple of hours later they eased off, and I was left wondering...am I really that easy to fool?! (Thankfully I only called my Mom to say that MAYBE this was it...no sleepovers this time).

This morning I realized: It's the smoothies! My sister is starting at Bastyr soon to become a nutritionist and bought my Mom a smoothie recipe book at the Bastyr bookstore. Mom lent it to me. The grape & strawberry popsicles are going to be a HUGE hit today...HH and I took sips of the leftover bit, unfrozen but SO VERY DELICIOUS! And so easy.

Anyhow, I digress. For myself I made the smoothie that has raspberry leaf tea in it. Raspberry is supposed to be a uterine toner--it doesn't start labor, but it helps your uterus to be stronger, so a shorter pushing phase & less chance of hemorrhage (as well as other complications), and it also helps with milk production for new moms.

On Wednesday night and again on Saturday night I drank this smoothie--each smoothie had about a cup of tea in it (among other ingredients).

This morning I made the connection that Thursday and Sunday...about 12-14 hours post-smoothie were when I had so much going on, but at the same time so little going on : ) Sunday's episode lasted a shorter time than Thursday, I assume because I needed less toning the second time. But that explains why I didn't dilate at all, but I did have contractions.

This is still an untested hypothesis...I'll drink some more smoothie tomorrow night and see if Wednesday has the same results (I don't really want to feel like that tomorrow--too much going on). Some might say that I should just stay away from it altogether, based on the difficulty of the results, but I do think that the results will lessen as my system gets stronger. We'll see on Wednesday.

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Unrelated: I'm down to 3 2-pg layouts + 2 partial pages for Monkey's book!!