It will be a good plan for you to have in readiness, by about the end of the seventh calendar month, all of the dressings and other articles to be used during the confinement. This is in case you should have a premature labor, for which the same dressings are needed as in a normal delivery. The baby’s clothes, however, will be in time if they are ready by the end of the eighth month. A baby born before this time would probably be so frail that he would be wrapped in cotton at first, instead of being dressed in the clothes ordinarily prepared for a fully developed baby. If you will make such preparations for the baby’s arrival as I have suggested, you will be doing a great deal toward securing his safety and well-being, as well as your own. CHAPTER VII THE BABY’S ARRIVAL During the past nine months you have had the happiness of guarding the little life within you and of making soft, warm garments to have in readiness for the baby when he comes. You have prepared your room and his; folded up the packages of gauze and cotton and prepared all sorts of other things to be pressed into service upon the baby’s arrival, and through it all you have dreamed and planned and built the loveliest of castles in Spain. And now, at last, the baby is coming! It almost takes your breath away to realize it after all those months of waiting and dreaming, and though it scarcely seems possible, the waiting is almost over. This same waiting grows very hard toward the end for you are tense with expectation and suspense. The hours and days seem endlessly long, as they pass without giving the looked-for signs that the baby has started. You find it very hard not to grow discouraged and impatient, he seems so long in coming. Your physical discomfort is aggravated by the greater pressure made by the baby during this period, and you cannot get away from it day or night. The desire to urinate is almost constant; your back aches; your feet feel heavy and swollen and the baby disturbs your nights by his increasingly vigorous kicking. But this does not last long, so try to minimize the fatiguing effects of it all by resting and sleeping as much as possible during the day. The time does slip by and the baby really does come and you don’t want to be tired before the big event. The miracle of the baby’s origin at the moment of conception; of his growth and the development of the intricate parts of his little body, is equaled only by the miracle of his birth—his separating from your protecting body and coming into the world as a new human being when the time comes that he is able to exist separately and independently.