Almost baby time!

We had our outdoor maternity photos taken yesterday (Saturday) and today we had more intimate/nude photos taken at home with Kari. I was on the floor posing a lot and it really hurt my hips, which laying on a hard surface has been doing. Kari said maybe you're going into labor. I thought that was silly because it wasn't a different pain that I was having it was just the floor. Well we finished up at about 3.30pm and we got everything all cleaned up and then at 4.09pm I got a contraction.

At first, they were only about every half hour or so with lots of variation. We went about our day for a while. Then about dinner time, we decided to try some of the "is this really labor?" tests. I tried to relax, took a hot bath and had 4 oz of red wine. I still had contractions. We packed some more of our "hospital" bag, but we still weren't completely packed. I mentioned that maybe we'd want to do 'something' one last time because it seems like we're going to have a baby soon and also, this is another test. Well after we did that, contractions jumped to about every 6-7 minutes, this was at 10.11pm. We tried to go to bed but that was not going to happen. Ian had been timing the contractions on a list and they were starting to get closer now. At 10.44pm we started timing the duration of the contractions as well. Ian kept wanting to call the midwife but I knew that she would say we weren't ready yet and that we'd be waking her up and she'd probably still be awake the rest of the night if we did call so I kept wanting to wait. I knew we had a long time being my first baby and that they weren't going to take us until 3 minutes apart and lasting 1 minute. At 1am we finally called and she asked me to go up and down the stairs sideways to get my hips loose and open. At 1.38am I had my bloody show. At this point when I wasn't walking the stairs I was laying on the guest bed (our bed is very high off the ground) with the lights off and Ian had finished packing and loaded the car. Ian called again at about 2.45am and Darlene (our midwife) said that we could come now but it'd take her like an hour to get there and get set up. I was mad that we had to wait another hour. It did go by very fast though. I was surprised when Ian came back and said that we had to start getting in the car to go. We got there at about 3.45/4am. The ride was so bumpy and I had to ask Ian to drive really slow. I had my eyes closed the whole time. When we got there Alicia took my picture as I tried to get out of the car.