Submitted by Anonymous
It was a Tuesday or Wednesday in early May when I got the feeling that the baby was ready to come. I wasn’t ready and the house wasn’t ready.. My plan was for our baby to arrive in June. That way we would have more time to finish our home addition and get things organized. The baby’s room didn’t even have a finished floor or trim yet.
Heidi, our HypnoBirthing instructor, said we should talk to the baby and tell her things. So, I let her know I had a lot to get organized at work, we needed a plumber to fix the leak under the kitchen sink and the house was filthy, if she could just wait until the weekend it would be better.
So, she did. I left work early on Friday and picked up a set of mini blinds and a flat of impatiens. When my husband got home the house was clean, the plumber had come and gone, and the plants were planted. We went out to dinner to celebrate.
That night I stayed up late unpacking all of the shower presents and moving them into the baby’s room. I even hung up the blinds. Around eleven we finally went to bed, but not for long. An hour or two later I felt a funny trickle, then another trickle. I was so excited – this is what we had been waiting for and it was finally time.
I woke up my husband and we scurried around the house making a huge pile in the living room of things to take to the hospital (it was two weeks before my due date and we had not gotten this far yet). We had pillows, Gatorade, granola bars, a boom box and tapes, my address book, cell phone, our birth plan, HypnoBirthing handouts, slippers, change of clothes, baby stuff, etc. My husband went back to bed and I stayed up cleaning and placing things in and out of this pile. Eventually I went back to bed too.
Around five I woke my husband up and told him that he’d better take the dogs for a long walk. He looked out the window and saw that it was very dark and said he’d go in an hour. By now I was starting to feel the beginnings of surges and told him he had better go NOW. At about six we called our doula, I took a shower and we headed in to the hospital. I was disappointed to learn when I got there that I was only slightly dilated, but was fully effaced. We had to decide whether to go or to stay. It was a tough decision, but we opted to stay.
Once we got into the birthing room things started moving faster (for me at least). I remember feeling panic every time the doula left the room – something about her presence gave me confidence. I remember wondering why it hurt so much. At one point our doula had me do a few lunges on a chair between contractions – after that the baby was really ready to come. I had had tailbone pain for much of the pregnancy so sitting or lying on my back was uncomfortable, so I spent most of the labor on my hands and knees – rocking. As the pain got more uncomfortable my husband would just tell me to relax my shoulders which reminded me to relax everything. Details of this stage are very vague in my mind and time just whizzed by.
When I was ready to push I was on my side, my husband was in a headlock and the doctor was holding up one leg. Pushing felt awesome and primal. But I was definitely frustrated with the baby not coming out. At one point I did reach down and feel her soft, soft head. When she was finally out I held her right away and nursed. We had already known her sex, so our big surprise was a full head of red hair.
From the time my water broke to when she was born was 12 hours. We left the hospital a little bit more than 24 hours later with a healthy little girl!