Birth Story, Part One: Handling it at Home

I slept pretty well that night after my midwife appointment, although I started waking up in the early morning to pee an awful lot, and looking back, it was probably contractions that were waking me. Friday the 22nd, I finally really woke up and realized what was going on around 8:30. I got out of bed around nine and started counting contractions. In the next hour I had seven, and while they were still very mild, they were definitely a completely different ballgame then any of the "practice" contractions I had felt before.


I woke Kyle up because the internet was down and I needed to do something to distract myself. I let him know what was going on, but then let him go back to sleep, because he had a very late night and I wanted him to be well rested and not grumpy later. When he finally got up around one or two we went to the store to get provisions for the birth center, and tuna fish sandwich makings for me. (P.S. By the time I got around to making the sandwich I no longer wanted a sandwich. It made a great post-partum snack, though.) Contractions were still super manageable and I was feeling really good and really excited.


When we got home we started getting the house in order, doing laundry etc. I decided perhaps I might want to time my contractions, and they were between 3 and 5 minutes apart, and getting closer together. This was when I was supposed to call my midwife, so I did. I apparently sounded super calm on the phone, so she was pretty incredulous that anything major was happening quite yet. I was told to call back when they got more intense. We called our doula, Roxanne, around 5pm, and she said she would start to make her way over, but she told me later that she didn't think I was super far along yet, so she took her time getting to us.


Can I just say that I was LOVING labor? At this point contractions were contractions and I had to stop what I was doing and breathe through them, but it all felt so natural and it came easy to me and after each one I had this natural high. I am so not all crazy-hippie-fertility-goddess, but that's how labor made me feel. It was pretty awesome.


Around 7:30pm I felt my water break with a pop. Very very strange. I didn't have tons of gushing fluid, as baby's head was probably corking me up, but the intensity of my contractions really started to ramp up. We called the midwife and made plans to meet at the birth center at 8:30. Roxanne arrived just after we got off the phone with the midwife. She watched me through a contraction and told me that I looked like I was handling things really well, so well that she was worried that they would send me home from the center because I hadn't progressed enough. I shrugged her off; I had been doing this all day and I knew that things were changing.



Prologue | Part Two | Part Three | Part Four