The day was supposed to start with a call from the hospital telling us when to come in. “Morning” to a hospital is not the same as “morning” to me, so I had taken my cell phone to bed with me because 5am is not a time I am accustomed to being awake (anymore, that is). I actually kept waking up all night, checking my phone, which didn’t ring. Finally at 8am both H’s phone and my mom’s phones rang and my OB left a message about how I was supposed to be at the hospital! Eek! (They must have had the wrong number for me or something, never did get to the bottom of that.) So I called back and said we were coming!!! And off we went.

Therefore we didn’t really get started until 10ish. The induction took off right away though, apparently my body decided it liked Pitocin this time, and things progressed nicely. It was very nice that my OB wanted my body to be mostly ready, as opposed to last time, and I think it was. But that’s another blog entry!

So Mr OB said we would break ye olde waters in a bit, but then around noon they broke all on their own. I was SHOCKED. Not having had that experience before, I was in the middle of a conversation with H and our nurse (We had our very own dedicated nurse. How cool is that?) when I stopped talking, and after a moment said something along the lines of “Either I just peed, or my water broke.” Thank god it was the water. Having your water break is plain strange, it’s like peeing without your consent! And then it continued to leak the rest of the day. That’s all I’ll say about that!

So this kiddo had meconium in his amniotic fluid, just like his brother! So we knew he’d be whisked off across the room to get that taken care of, and we were okay with that.

After the water event, things progressed quickly, as I knew they would because that’s when all hell broke loose with the Boo’s birth. The contractions increased and got stronger and for a long time (at least it felt like a long time) I was breathing through them and focused and calm and doing really, really well. I had wondered if I would want to get up and do different positions and things like that, but really all I wanted to do was to concentrate, focus on separating my body from the work of my uterus, and try to remain as calm as possible. Bearing in mind, of course, that we were still in the beginning stages.

Then I started to feel really bad. Jittery and nauseated, threatening to throw up, losing my ability to focus, and evidently reaching my pain threshold. By that time we were between 4 and 5cm and after three increasingly bad contractions where I started to feel like I was losing my grip, I decided I didn’t have anything to prove to anyone. I already knew how awful it could get if I lose control with the vomiting and the pain and more specifically the lack of pain management, so I decided I was done. The nurse chipped in that the pitocin should keep contractions going even with an epidural so there’s little danger of the labour stalling, which was one of many things I was worried about, so we decided it was time for an epidural. I have no idea if that’s actually true, about no stalling, but I was ready. I also dont know if it’s true that pitocin labours are harder, but either I’m a major wimp, or they are, at least a little bit.

It’s funny, I have mixed emotions about the whole natural birth thing. I do feel like it’s the ideal, better for baby, that women in general are more than capable of doing it, but … damn it’s nice being able to be calm and focused and fully aware. I know this issue is full of contention, so moving on!

Turns out I had the perfect epidural. Hurrah! It knocked out the pain while I was still able to feel everything. My legs were all pins and needles, which was mildly unpleasant, but I could still move them which was cool. I could feel most of the contractions but of course they didn’t hurt. Epidurals seem to speed things up for me, and this one did precisely that.

When we were “complete” the OB was busy dealing with something else, so we sort of hung out for a while. I kept getting this really odd sensation of something pushing down, uh, down there. That never happened with Boo, and in fact I think I had to push two hours with him. That sensation kept kept happening over and over, so when the OB came to check, he said we should do one experimental push to see if we were ready. Then he had to yell to stop because Hello! We were ready to have a baby!!

So the required people came in, we pushed and there was a baby. Seriously, it was that fast. The doc said it was one push but I do seem to remember at least two. But whatever. It wasn’t hours and there was a gurgling baby.

Of course he had the cord wrapped twice around his neck which nearly gave me a heart attack, but that was dealt with swiftly, and after the initial gurgling (I was thinking, when is he going to cry?!) he hollered, got his cord snipped by Daddy, got his lungs cleared out, weighed and measured (slightly smaller than his big bro, but not by much!) and given back to us.

It was as perfect a birth as I could imagine, and our little guy is so happy. He nursed well right away, he looks almost exactly like his big bro, i.e. adorable, he’s very cuddly and remarkably calm. He has huge grey eyes that are constantly looking about in wonder. I am so glad he’s here!

This entry was posted on Saturday, April 26th, 2008 at 7:49 pm and is filed under Preggers. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.