False Alarm
Last night was quite exciting. I had some of those braxton-hicks contractions, and when they hadn't gone away after a couple of hours, we began to wonder if they might be the first sign of things moving.
It was at about the time that we'd decided to start timing and measuring the buggers in case they were the beginnings of labour, that Vince noticed something quite alarming. A large bulge had formed in the living-room ceiling just over the door...
We've had plumbers on and off over the last two months, rather in the same way that people have persistent colds. They're alright, in that the quality of their finished work is good. However, they're dreadful for either not turning up at all, or managing to fix one thing while breaking another or discovering still more things that have been broken for a good long time.
Having previously discovered a slow leak in our heating system that had been encouraging dry-rot in the floorboards of our linen cupboard, they had replaced the pipes connecting the attic radiator to the rest of the system. Sadly, they had only got around to re-pressurising the heating system right before they went home last night, so hadn't left time to notice that the new connection was even leakier than the old one.
Vince is a lovely calm and capable man, so even when he panics he does so in such a deadpan-comedy fashion that it is a pleasure to behold. As the contractions got steadily stronger and closer together and little pockets of water began forming behind the living-room wallpaper, he stood up, picked up a towel and told me: "Stop going into labour. I'm going to phone the plumber and milk the walls."
Luckily the plumber was available to come straight back even at an unreasonable hour of the night and fix the problem in a very short time. Even more luckily, Vince was able to milk most of the worst of the water out from behind the wallpaper. The living room is just a bit damp now, rather than being in anyway ruined or unsafe, though it now needs to be redecorated even more than it did when we first bought the house.
Luckiest of all, the contractions disappeared completely, possibly as a consequence of how hard I was laughing at the time. This morning the n00b is grumpy and kicking me very hard indeed, but at least there is now time for the living room to dry out again before we need to put the midwife in there...