The birth story

I was pretty uncomfortable by the end there - ready to have my VERY swollen legs back to normal.  It was bad enough so that when I walked up the stairs at night the backs of my knees hurt from the tightness as I bent them.

I was scheduled for an induction on Tuesday, December 4th if I didn't go into labor before that.  I had a non-stress test that Saturday December 1st in the morning.  I had lost at least part of my mucous plug the night before so I had hopes that something might be happening.  The NST was routine and I went home to wait it out.

Sometime after noon on the 1st, I began to have some contractions.  They weren't too painful, and not too close together, but they kept coming all afternoon.  I still had things to do, so I spent the afternoon doing normal stuff, like mopping the kitchen floor (lots of contractions during that!) and other things that needed to get done.

By around 7 pm my contractions were getting stronger, more painful, and more organized.  T made dinner and I lay on the sofa timing my contractions with contractionmaster.com.  (I finally got a chance to use it!)  They were pretty consistently between 3 and 5 minutes apart, but I've been in labor before, and they didn't feel strong enough to be dangerous.  T kept asking me how close together they were, but I was afraid to tell him because I thought he was going to freak out.  He was worried that we were going to have the baby on the highway during our 7 minute drive to the hospital, but I was worried about going too soon and being sent home.

A little before 10 pm, I called my friend H, who was our "on-call" person for Saturday night.  I told her I wasn't sure, but that I thought I should probably go to the hospital, so she came to stay with the kids overnight.  After she arrived, we were on our way to the hospital around 10:30 pm.  It was kind of weird to go to the door at L&D and say "I think I'm in labor" over the intercom, after having been there so many times for NSTs!

When the nurse checked my cervix when I arrived, I was at 4 cm but the baby's head was still high and my water was in tact.  I labored in the bed for an hour or two, falling in and out of sleep.  When I was next checked, I was still only about 5 cm dilated so the doctor and I agreed that I would get an epidural at about 2:30 and would start on a small dose of pitocin at 3 am to increase the strength of the contractions.  The epidural was a sh**show.  The guy couldn't find the right space for the tube, and had to try four times (four different sticks in the spine) to get it in.  However, once it was in, it made it all worth it.  Sweet relief!  (For any first time moms, don't be freaked out by this.  It was the only time of the three kids that I had any problem with the epidural.)

Once the epidural and pitocin were placed, T and I both slept for a while, until about 6 am. Around 6:30 I began to get a little more uncomfortable even with the epidural in place.  About five minutes before 7, my water broke on its own, and I called the nurse.  My cervix was 9 cm at that time and the baby's head had finally dropped into the birth canal and engaged for delivery.

The on call doctor was at a neighboring hospital delivering another baby at the time, so she was paged.  By the time she arrived, I was ready to push.  For a little added excitement, another mom had just arrived fully dilated so there was some question about who would be delivered first.  When the nurse asked me about my previous deliveries and I told her that E was delivered after three minutes of pushing it was determined that I would deliver first!

You may want to skip this part if you're not into the gory details...

With my first push, the baby's head crowned and they told me to stop pushing.  They then said, "you can push with the next contraction" but I was in so much pain that I said, "Can I just push NOW???"  With that, he was born, shooting out into the world, in a literal TIDAL wave of amniotic fluid.  According to my husband, neither the two gallon bucket at the end of the bed, nor all of the towels around were any match for the amount of fluid that was there, and the doctor actually had to "catch" the baby because he came out so fast! He was born at 7:37 am.

He cried almost before he was out, which was wonderful, and he was placed on my chest.  There had been meconium in the fluid, so he was quickly taken to be checked by the NICU doctor.  He was taken to the special care nursery for a couple of hours because his blood sugar was low and his Oxygen saturation was a little low as well.  I was sad that I wasn't able to nurse him right away, but luckily it didn't cause any significant nursing issues.

While I was in the hospital he slept mostly on me/in my lap, which began a long saga of sleeping with him on me because he wouldn't sleep any other way.  Thankfully, we've made it over that hump and he is now sleeping in his bassinet and has been for a couple of weeks, since he was about 2 1/2 months old.

I'm going to share his name here with you since you've been on this journey with me, but I will be deleting it for anonymity after a little while, so please don't write his name specifically in the comments.

Baby G was born at 7:37 am on December 2, 2012 weighing 8lbs. 6 oz. and 21 1/2 inches in length.  We are in love.