Today penny and I headed to the lovely sequoia hospital for a Version, to try and turn the baby to a downward position.

Believe it or not, in the past few days, she's been flipping around like crazy! As you saw before, on friday of last week she was like this:



So we were hoping that she'd kinda be there ,but NO! She flipped back to the other side again and was facing like this:


The way versions work, they like to spin the baby around in a forward roll sort of way.. but if we were to do that, then she'd have to go pretty far..



So the good doctor decided to push her backwards instead, going the shorter route. That's the number 1 rule.. go the shortest distance.

They gave penny an iv, hooked the baby up to a fetal monitor (very cool to be able to see and hear the heartbeat!), and also put up a monitor to check out penny's contractions (more on this later).

Then, the nurse gave penny a shot of something that was supposed to relax her womb.. a crazy side effect is that even though it makes her woom all "woah, man.. like mellow yellow.." it makes the rest of her muscles feel like she had about 20 shots of espresso. She "woo!"ed and freaked the nurse out. :)

Anyway, after penny's womb relaxed a bit, Dr. Bluvas dug in and started pushing the baby towards her pelvis. it was quite cool watching her move the girl around.. it looked a bit painful, but my girl braved it like a surf-lifesaving champion.

After a few minutes of manipulation, we checked the baby's vitals.. and everything was still good as gold. Her heartbeat was cruzing along, no worries at all, and a quick check on the monitor revealed that she was closer to the pelvis, but not quite in it yet. So backto the good ol' manipulation action. A few more pushes and pulls and the head was in position.

Well.. I don't know about in position, but she was upside down and vertical!


Then we monitored the baby a bit longer to make sure she wasn't stressed.. Good ol trooper was still happy and active as a clam. Penny put on a couple of wireless transmitters and we went a walkin for about an hour.

You know.. there's not really that much to see in a maternity ward.. we passed by the nursery, but the only thing in there was an umbilical chord.. we walked up one aisle past a few doors (and heard a couple of new babies crying.. that was sweet!), then walked back down our aisle.. then back down the other aisle.. then back down ours.. then back down another..

then penny picked up a newspaper & bled on it (the iv leaked a bit), so we got to keep the paper (woo! free stuff!). We walked a bit more.. did a few "what's up" head nods to the guys who just had babies (we bonded). And then finally went back into our room to hang for a bit before the final checking from the nurse.

The cool part was coming back and watching penny's contraction monitor. We saw at one point that it looked like her contractions hit a value of 45 on the monitor (They start at 20!) I got all excited until the nurse said "well, the range goes into the hundreds".

ah well.

But the baby stayed down, and penny's having more and more painless practice contractions. Nothing painful at all, but it's getting exciting because we're finally nearing the end of the journey.

Of course the toughest part is yet to come, and we don't know when that's going to happen yet, could be tomorrow, could be three days from now.. we won't know until it starts to happen.

But we're getting closer, and that's really exciting!!

- jason