38 weeks pregnant. Are you still with us? Some of you might give birth today or tonight. Others might still be pregnant for another four weeks. Getting sick of being pregnant is a sure sign you and your baby are ready to make the transition to giving birth and being born.

There is not much news from What To Expect. We’re all in a waiting game at this point. Baby Center talks about preparing for breastfeeding. This is sort of the week that you watch for every little sign you’re going to go into labor. Every part of your body feels heavy and awkward plus a bunch of niggling things still niggle with more intensity. These niggles include heartburn, unable to sleep, rolling over is hard, pains here and there and/or getting woken up to Braxton-Hicks contractions.

Birthing Better families want to add at 38 weeks pregnant:

Mostly Birthing Better families just keep practicing their skills. They talk together about all the sensations the woman is having. Once you’re skilled you become infinitely more consciously curious about what your body is doing. You become the observer of the changes that you have no control over.

Learning that you have to let go of control (because you don’t have control anyway) as well as be in control (able to respond rather than feel swept along) is the internal lesson of 38 weeks pregnant. You’ll take this knowledge and skill into your birth. Birth will happen to you. Your skills will permit you to consciously participate in your birth as it unfolds. While you can’t control how birth unfolds, you do control your ability to actively participate moment-to-moment in birth’s unfolding. 

It’s the moment-to-moment use of skills that gives us that sense of feeling and being empowered. We know we are perceiving this mysterious human experience, yet we don’t feel mystified. Doing the Internal Work, being able to check for ‘changes’ inside grounds us to what is actually happening.

All the skills give us the power to feel we can work with our baby’s efforts to be born.

Birthing Better skills were developed by moms and dads in the early 1970s in the US and used by many thousands globally in all types of birth. Birthing Better online birthing classes are housed in Common Knowledge Trust.

 

37 weeks pregnant

39 weeks pregnant