Last day of pregnancy

will be updated at some stage (at least, that is my plan ;-)

 My cousin came over for the day. From the train station it is only a short ferry ride & walk to the new building of the film museum. A special expo on Oskar Fischinger 1900-1967 .He did animation to classical music before the invention of the computer. Ballet for coloured blocks...
Best bit was sitting in the sun in the cafe

because the whole walking thing was getting a bit tiresome. And my mother had simply forbidden to go on those endless stairs.

On the way home we had to take a break for what I thought were some Braxton Hicks, and sat on a bench in the sun at one of Amsterdam's lovely bridges.
Around 3-ish I was getting a bit uncomfortable and my cousin left so I could take a nap. We were wondering if this was the start of anything, but nothing regular...

I had loaded an app on DP's tablet to time contractions. To ease my mind I started using it around 5 maybe, but realised that with 17 and 44 minutes apart the occasional 5 minutes didn't mean much. I thought we would be in for a night where the books said I might fall asleep because it was only a practice run...
While the really long intervals disappeared my belly still was doing it's irregular thing, and never much longer than 20 seconds or so. Around 10 DP wanted to go to bed, so I tried.
Belly started to get a bit painful.
But our instructions said not to worry before we had had an hour long of contractions 5 minutes apart, lasting 60 seconds.
Between 23 and 23:20 however contractions were suddenly 3 minutes apart (but still not lasting a full minute) and I asked DP to inform the hospital, and ask them what to do.
Their answer was quite simple: come in.
Taxi arrived within 10 minutes.
The books also said that quite often on the road to the hospital the contractions stop, but no such luck. I was wriggling through them on the back seat (and DP had wisely chosen the front seat)
I was still half afraid that we would be sent back, as I still wasn't sure if this was the real thing...
At the hospital reception desk they wanted to send us to ER, figuring we were there with a sick baby in the maxicosi. I admit that my yoga pants weren't exactly flattering, but geez, can't you see I'm as pregnant as I'm ever going to be?