Do you believe in magic?

I do! I do! On Monday evening, Mike and I had another doctor's appointment. Everything looks good: the baby looks healthy (her thigh bone measurement is still a week ahead of everything else), and I'm gaining weight (too much for Japan, of course!). Only one problem: The baby is in breech position (butt down). At 29 weeks there's still time for her to move, but Dr. Kato would like to be a little more proactive and, with a slightly self-conscious look, tells me to make an appointment this week for acupuncture and moxibustion. Eh? For what? It's an old Chinese herbal-burning therapy that seems to encourage babies to turn. It also explains why our clinic smelled like some kind of wacky tabacky that day. :) So yesterday afternoon I went in for my treatment. I took off my shoes and socks, laid on my back on an examining table, and bared my belly. The woman doing the therapy tapped my tummy and swirled little bitty acupuncture needles in five places on my tummy. Then she took these little cylindrical things (about the size of a cigarette filter) that looked like cork, stuck some adhesive on the bottoms, and affixed them to my belly in these five spots. Then she lit them. On fire. On my belly. Crazy! Okay, they weren't really burning, they were smoldering, and I was instructed to tell her when they started to feel hot while she stuck some needles in my feet and attached some burning cork to my feet, too. After doing this a couple times, she had me roll onto my left side while she did the same thing to four points on my back. Then I was instructed to get up and sit in a chair while she did something similar to my feet. That part actually hurt a little bit, because she couldn't use the burning corks here - the acupuncture point is on the outside base of the pinky toenail. Instead, she used cork fluff, and I got a little singed a couple times -just enough to make me jump. The whole thing was done in less than forty minutes. I was told to go home right away and lay on my left side for at least one hour (the baby being camped out head-up on my right) and to make sure that I slept that way that night. So I did. Today, I went in for an ultrasound to see if the baby had moved or if I needed to another treatment appointment for next week. And, if you hadn't guessed from my title, the baby had indeed moved! She is now in perfect head-down position! Amazing! Magic, I tell you! Dr. Kato kind of smiled and said that he had initially been quite skeptical of this treatment and had no idea why it worked, but that he had found it to be a very effective therapy. I appreciate his willingness to try it. I was a little nervous, but this was much more comfortable than any of the other options I've heard: being hung kinda upside-down on an ultrasound table as Mom was with Mark, external cephalic version, or a c-section. I highly recommend it! :)