Well, for those of you who may not have gotten Craig’s updates, we are in need of prayers – big time.

Merry Christmas, by the way!

The good news is, our little Oscar is very healthy, and I am very healthy, except for one little thing.  I had some bleeding in the shower on Wednesday morning, and we went on to the hospital to have it checked out.  (Thank you Theresa, Justin, Craig’s mom, and my mom for taking care of the girls through all this!)  What I had hoped would be a battery of tests and getting home in time for lunch turned into two days and one night in the hospital, mostly waiting.

Life lesson: do not go to the hospital on an empty stomach.  There is no telling how long they will make you wait to eat.  (More on that later.)

So the story is that a small (they’re guessing about 1.5 cm) part of my placenta is between the baby and my cervix.  For the birth to go well, the baby has to come out before the placenta, or there can be lots of bleeding and other possible complications.  So.  What needs to happen is for the placenta to kindly move itself out of the way, which can happen, but the doctors we were seeing were not too hopeful.  Thus the need for lots and lots of prayers.

Of course, as I called our midwife on the way home (finally) and processed things more, it may be that we had some fairly pessimistic doctors to talk to.  The last one wanted to keep me another night (just in case) and schedule a c-section for 36 weeks.  We have an appointment with my own doctor (who was on vacation this week) on Monday, so we’ll have a much better idea of where we stand after that.

In the meantime, I’m on bed rest, at home, thank God.  Mom and John are here helping, and we have have had lots of other offers of help, which we greatly appreciate.  So that’s the short version.  The blow-by-blow story of the hospital visit, which I like to call, “A Case for Avoiding Hospitals”, will be appearing on this page soon.  I’m back to having time to write, since I can’t go anywhere!

And why the title of this post, you might ask?  Well, if I make it 49 days from our homecoming (the length of Lent), I’ll be at 39 weeks, which I feel like is a fairly ambitious goal.  So I’ve made myself a paper chain to count down the days, and there will be very little fasting and lots of praying until the baby gets here.