Hi all.
Sorry about the lack of updates.

Things have taken a funny turn this week.
We're now 15 days over due date (40+15).

On Monday we discovered that our baby is in a breech position - this was a complete surprise as up till now we've believed it was head down (cephalic or vertex).
(apparently it's very easy to mistake certain types of breech as being head down when feeling for the baby, but ours was confirmed with ultrasound).

Our baby is in the Frank Breech (or Extended Breech position) with its legs extended.


Hospital policy over here in the UK (at least at our local hospital) is to automatically do a caesarean section for a breech.
Although we'd prefer to have a natural birth if at all possible, we have to accept that we're unlikely to have a home birth anymore, and definitely won't be having a water birth. But there we go - the baby is now calling the shots, not us!

In order to know that things were ok, we went to a private hospital in London and had a "foetal wellbeing scan" (also known as a "placental scan") which showed that the baby and placenta were all fine. The reason we had to do this privately was that the local hospital refused to do such a scan as they only support caesarean sections for breech births. Talk about being inflexible...!

We were hoping to wait until Sunday and see if labour started.
However, Karin has had her "show" and some of her waters have come out. According to our midwife, this means that if labour doesn't start tonight, then we should look at having a caesarean section tomorrow.

So there we go!

I have a *lot* more I want to add to this post, about the research we did with post-term breech babies, and the whole "natural birth vs caesarean section for breech babies" debate, but that will have to wait till later as Karin is now in early labour and having some quite painful contractions.

I imagine the next post will be to say we have a baby.