Is it normal to have irregular contractions at 37 weeks?
First of all, congratulations, you're 37 weeks, you've reached the full term mark and that's very exciting. That's huge. Hopefully you'll have your baby in the next 3-4 weeks. You mentioned that you started to have regular contractions that just died out; you want to know if that's normal. It actually is very normal. It's something that your body is doing in efforts to prepare itself for labor. First of all, your cervix has to be prepared for labor. It needs to actually move forward in your pelvis, soften, and thin out a little bit. Then when you're actually in labor your brain will start to release oxytocin which is a hormone that tells your uterus to contract. If that hormone is trying to act on your uterus before your cervix has really been prepped for labor it may not do anything. So your body, in efforts to prepare itself, may have some, I call it irregular regular contractions, where you contract regularly for an hour or two and then they die out. This may go on for weeks unfortunately; you probably don't want to hear that. The only way you can know if it's true labor or not is if you go to the hospital and get checked out. The true definition of labor is cervical change, not just contractions. A lot of women think that since they contracted regularly for five days that they were in labor for five days before they delivered but that's not true. You're only actually in labor from the point that your cervix starts actively changing until the time you deliver your baby. We really don't always know exactly what that time is, we can only know if you're in labor by coming into the hospital, your nurse would check your cervix, shut the door, cross her fingers, tell you to work hard, come back in an hour, and see if your cervix has continued to change. If it has you get to stay. If it hasn't then you'll go home. It's the unfortunate truth that a lot of moms are sent home at least once before they're kept in the hospital, especially if it's your first baby. Because you don't quite know what to expect, you don't quite know how intense they're going to be. The key is intensity and frequency. Once your contractions are about 3-5 minutes apart, they're intense, and that's been going on for at least two hours, that does increase the chances that they'll be changing your cervix. That would be a good time to go to the hospital for contractions. However, there are other reasons that you should go sooner even if you're not regularly contracting. If you feel like your water broke, if you have any vaginal bleeding, or if you're feeling your baby move less than usual you should go to the hospital too. I hope that all of this information helps you and congratulations ahead of time on the birth of your baby and if you have any other questions for me feel free to ask them on our Facebook page and recommend us to your friends and family too.