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Morning came, and still no contractions. A new midwife came on shift, this one named Katherine. My first thought about Katherine was that she looked way too young to be a medical professional. (I'm sure she was much older than 16. Ed didn't think she looked as young as I thought she looked.) Since it had been about 12 hours since my water had broken, at that point, I wanted to know how hard and fast the 24-hour limit was. I'd always heard that after your water broke, especially if you were GBS positive, you had 24 hours to have a kid, or they did a c-section unless you were really clearly very close to delivery. Katherine said that they weren't that concerned, provided that I didn't have any vaginal exams and didn't run a fever. As long as no one examined me, she said, the risks remained really, really low. She noted that if I were to develop a fever, that would increase concern a lot and they might want to discuss speeding things up. She was a little concerned about the meconium but not seriously; she didn't want to let me use one of the big tubs during labor because of the mec, but she noted that this was kind of beside the point anyway at this point as I wasn't yet in labor. (This hospital has big portable Jacuzzis, basically, which they call hydrotherapy tubs, to let women labor in. I'd been planning to use one during labor.) She encouraged me to work with my doula and try different things -- walking, nipple stimulation, etc. -- to start labor, but not to feel like I was on the clock.

That was a huge relief. I did ask about the midwife who'd be coming on shift when Katherine finished -- since I suspected that Dorothy wouldn't have been nearly as blasé -- and she said that the next midwife, Michelle, was philosophically very similar to Katherine. So, cool.

Noelle, my doula, arrived after delivering her kids to a babysitter, and we spent the day trying different things to try to get labor going, while returning to L&D periodically for hourly fetal monitoring, plus antibiotics every four hours. I hopped in the shower and tried nipple stimulation. We took a walk. I sat on the birth ball for a while. Noelle tried acupressure on this spot on my ankle. We took another walk. I took another shower.

Throughout the day, I did have contractions. As the day went on, they were definitely getting more intense. But they weren't falling into any sort of regular pattern, and at best they were ten minutes apart (more often twenty, thirty, or more).

Katherine stopped in at some point during the afternoon and I asked if she had any other suggestions. Oh, I asked for a breast pump to do some more intense nipple stimulation, but they didn't have one in L&D and the postpartum unit reserves them for women who are actually trying to bring in their milk (which I can understand, actually). Katherine apparently used to work at a birth center and talked some about the stuff they used to use, but said she didn't really recommend it. "We used to dose women with castor oil because it was a birth center and we didn't have a whole lot else, but mostly it just seemed to make women sick." She was either a midwife or doula for both her sisters when they had their kids, and commented that one of her sisters really wanted to get labor going and tried castor oil in orange juice, and it put her off orange juice for the next five years. I didn't want to do castor oil anyway because of the meconium issue; the baby had already pooped once and I didn't want to encourage her to do it again.

In early evening, Noelle asked if we would mind if she went home. She wanted to get some sleep so that she'd be fresh for me when I needed her, whether that was during the night or the next day. We agreed that this made sense. Meanwhile, we called my sister and asked her to bring us in some Chipotle's burritos; this hospital totally does not object to laboring women eating, but they'd lost track of my dinner tray (and anyway the food was really bad, and Ed needed dinner too). My sister was perfectly willing to bring us some burritos (in fact, when she told Chipotle's that they were for a sister in the hospital having a baby, the staff comped the order) and we sat around for a little while eating burritos and chatting. I had a contraction while my sister was there and breathed deeply through it, and Ed joked to her that before getting pregnant, she should realize that I'd described these as relatively mild contractions.

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