Contractions: Timing and Tracking

Well, Ms. Brielle decided last night that she would fake me out.  Around 10pm, I began to have contractions.  They were 1 to 3 minutes long, occuring every 3-5 minutes and then all of the sudden when we reached 55 minutes of timing, they stopped.  Just like that and not another until around 9:30 this morning.  All day today they've been spuratic. 

I did want to share with you two extremely useful pieces of information I learned yesterday. 

TIP 1:  When timing contractions you should look for a 5-1-1 pattern.  That is contractions occuring every 5 minutes, for a least 1 minute, continuting for 1 hour.  At that time you should be safe to contact your doctor and head to the hospital. 

TIP 2:  Long gone are the days of pencil and paper calculations of timing and tracking contractions.  I used a contraction counter that I found on The Bump.  This was absolutely amazing.  Every time a contraction would begin, I would click start timing.  When the contraction ended, I clicked stop timing.  There was a continuous counter at the top, so I could track for a minimum of one hour.  There is also columns to track length of contraction and frequency of contraction, so you can make sure they are at least one minute long and less than five minutes apart.  Best of all there is an email and a print option so that you can take the information with you as you head out the door.