Anyone Up for A Birth Story?

If this isn't your thing, go ahead and skip it!

The day before I had baby M, Friday, I was still at work, but very uncomfortable. I'd been having Braxton Hicks every day for at least a month. Every night I'd spend two or three hours having uncomfortable contractions, about 10 minutes apart. Experience told me to ignore them as much as I could for as long as I could, though SuperDad got his hopes up more than once!

I was just so uncomfortable that Friday night. I went to bed at 10:30 p.m. And I was uncomfortable. Did I mention uncomfortable? Yeah. At 12:30 a.m. (Saturday), I woke up and was definitely in labor. Each time I've wondered if I'd know the difference between pre-labor and real labor, and I definitely knew. I could hear SuperDad snoring on the couch, so I "hopped" into the shower, finished packing my hospital bag (actually, re-packing since I'd just been in the hospital the whole week before), "ran" downstairs and woke him up at 2:30 a.m. He called his mom, the doula, and the hospital. The whole time, my contractions were about 2 minutes apart.

When my MIL got to our house, we headed to the hospital. Blah blah blah. It was about 3:30 a.m. when we checked in, and I was at 7-8 cm. They put in a Hep-lock, but nothing ever went into it. I got into the tub. Whew. Thank god for the tub. My doula came. Later, she told me I really needed to let my "next doula" (ha ha ha) know that labor didn't really get difficult for me until the very end, because she'd never seen someone talk and laugh and just chill out in the tub at 8 cm before.

My water broke. I went back down to 4 cm. (This has happened to me with two labors now.) The baby was really high still at that point (-3 station), and I freaked out a little bit. Or, you know, a whole lot. I didn't really keep my cool so much. The doula had me try squatting to see if we could move the baby down. I hated that. At that point, I hated everyone. Somewhere in here, I bit SuperDad. Yeah, sorry about that. That was a little something I call "transition."

My heavenly saint of a doctor encouraged me to get back in the tub, and he and the nurse left. Whew. The contractions slowed down to about 10 minutes apart and the doula got me back on track and I got a focal point going on and really pulled it together. I'm guessing this was that break between 10 cm and pushing that happens for some people.

Then I was pushing. In the tub. Hee. It took a lot of cajoling, but the doula got me to the bed (the hospital doesn't "allow" waterbirths. How much did I care? Not at all, really.) while SuperDad ran for the doc. We forgot all about that cord thingy we could have pulled to call a nurse.

I pushed. Really hard. I gave myself a bloody nose, actually. I kind of thought that only happened in Firestarter. Who knew?

Baby M was born at 6:30 a.m., after six hours of labor. She was put directly on my chest and I unwrapped the cord from around her. I asked to cut the cord myself, so I held her in the crook of my arm and cut the cord with SuperDad's hand over mine for leverage. The doctor showed me the placenta, as I had requested. It was gross. I held Baby M for about an hour, until after her first feeding, then asked that they clean her up so I could go to the bathroom. They weighed and measured her, 8 pounds 10 ounces, 21 inches long.

I was super super weak after this birth, probably both because I was still recovering from West Nile and because I'd only had 2 hours of sleep. Because of this, and because SuperDad had a wedding to photograph that day, I did stay that whole day, overnight, and came home the next night. I'd planned to leave the same day, but. I was tired. :)

Baby M is now 7 weeks old and a true force of nature. I'm not sure how much she weighs, (she was up to 11 pounds at 3 weeks), but she's already in 6-9 month clothes and rolling over. When she cries, it's one of the loudest sounds I've ever heard in my life. And she's gorgeous. So gorgeous.

We do good work here. ;)