Birth Story, Part Three: The Pushening

I pushed for just under three hours, alternating between the birthing stool, and various positions on the bed. Most of the time Nicole had her hand all up in me, pushing back the lip of my cervix. It was not fun. I had heard from a lot of  people that after a tough first stage of labor pushing was a relief or even felt good, but for me it was the worst part. I was still puking through all of it, but it actually felt better and helped make my pushes stronger. It was all water by that point anyway, which makes me feel better about it splashing out of the bowl onto Nicole.

After struggling on the bed for a while I asked to move back to the stool, because my pushes felt much more effective there. Gravity, and things. Kyle sat behind me on the bed and made sure I had access to water and chapstick.  After a bunch of contractions we finally got him past the lip of my cervix. Nicole kept asking me if I wanted to see his head in the mirror or reach down and feel him and I was completely uninterested. I just wanted him out of me.

It was really intense when he was actually in my birth canal. At that point I stopped waiting for contractions and was pushing pretty much continuously because it hurt too much not to. My moans were turning into screams, and Roxanne had to remind me to keep things low. It felt like my clitoris was ripping in two! I was not prepared to feel pain there, and I was scared that I might be doing permanent damage to it. But in between all the pushing and the screaming I would look around at my birth team and my mom and Ashley and I felt very supported and amazing.

It was such a relief when his head was finally out. His cord was around his neck, so Nicole had me breathe through a contraction while she slipped it over his head, no big deal. The rest of him was easy in comparison.

He had apparently passed some meconium during labor, so they had to suction out his mouth before they handed him to me. I was totally agog. Looking down at him he seemed way too big to be a newborn baby, and instead of love I felt disbelief that something so huge had just come out of me. He didn't cry at first, but after a few seconds of holding him and stroking him and talking to him he started whimpering and then let out a healthy wail. He was born at 2:30 in the morning on Saturday, July 23, 2011.

I barely even remember birthing the placenta, but it certainly was no big deal compared to my enormous baby. We got into bed with our son, and my mom called my dad and my sister to announce Tycho's arrival and have them make their way over to the birth center. Kyle called his parents to tell them the news.

Everyone was shocked by how big he was. (Two days previously they had written in my chart that they expected him to be around seven pounds.) We all made our guesses on how much he would weigh, and Nicole was right on the money: nine pounds, two ounces.

I apparently had a pretty huge placenta, too. Nicole did her examination of it and showed us all of its parts. We tried to get Tycho nursing, but he must have been overstimulated, because he would only latch on for a minute at a time.  After some more visiting, everyone left to go home and get some sleep. 

Prologue | Part One | Part Two | Part Four

Birth Story, Part Two: Centered

We ended up driving to the birth center with me kneeling over a yoga ball in the back of our SUV. It's about a 25 minute drive, and in the back of my mind I was worried that  we might get pulled over. Kyle talked me through the drive, telling me how close we were and reminding me to breathe. My midwife Nicole and the student Tara met us there. BFF (and photographer!) Ashley and my mom made their way in as well.

I was still doing pretty well when we got there, and everyone was worried that I wasn't really that far along. After listening to the baby through a contraction Nicole checked me and I was 6cm dilated, and my cervix was paper thin. Victory! It was so reassuring to know that my instincts were right and I had already done most of the hard work, and I was still under control. I could totally do this!

I got into the tub almost immediately after they checked me. It felt wonderful, and reset me a little bit. I was breathing through my contractions, in a world of my own. I was mostly doing well, although baby boy had a mean habit of thrashing about just as my contractions were dying down and I started to relax. Everyone laughed  when I kept shouting at my belly for him to cut it out. But besides that, things remained manageable for me. We had spent so much time in class talking about when you can no longer handle contractions and your partner needs to swoop in with his take charge routine, but I never really got there, and I kept wondering when it was going to happen. 

After a while of peacefully lying in the tub and breathing through my contractions, I think I hit transition. I suddenly NEEDED to change positions, and started to vomit at every contraction.  I leaned over the side of the tub, and Kyle made sure that I was drinking in between my contractions to keep hydrated.

I was starting to feel kind of push-y but I tried to ignore the urge. I did okay for a while, but all of the sudden it was getting to be too much, and I wanted OUT. OF. THE. TUB. Nicole checked me again. I was almost completely dilated, but I had a small stubborn lip of my cervix. I tried to breathe through a few more contractions, but the urge to push was getting really strong.

Prologue | Part One | Part Three | Part Four

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

Are we there yet?

I am so totally and completely over being pregnant right now. I don't even know what else to say about it, other than I am DONE. I would like my body back, I would like to be able to sit or lie down comfortably, I would like to not be woken up in the middle of the night by the worst heartburn I have ever had, I would like to be able to pick something up off the floor without thinking too hard about it. I would also really like to fit into more than three of the things in my closet, but that seems slightly less worth whining about.

37 weeks

38 weeks

Everything seems to be going just about as boring as smoothly as possible, so that is good. We've been head down for almost as long as they've been checking, and he seems happy there, so that is a good sign. I've been feeling awfully crampy lately, and I've been having a ton of contractions, so while there aren't really any signs that labor is imminent, I feel like I can assume that some progress is being made, and my body is getting itself ready. I hope.

We have officially hired our doula and had our pre-labor meetings with her, so that's one more thing checked off the scary list-of-doom in my head, and one more thing that makes me feel ready to get going with this birth already. I still have things that I would like to have done before we have a baby, but at this point they are all pretty superficial, and I would welcome labor at any time. Like right this moment. So I don't have to stay at work all day. Or go back again at all for a while.

Thirty five and then some.

I really do intend on writing posts on a regular basis, but like, life seems to happen and omg what day is it now? Fuck.

Pretty much. Thirty five weeks as of this past Wednesday. Which means I will be offficially full term omg the baby can come anytime in TEN DAYS. Let me repeat that, TEN DAYS. WHAT! I am not exactly ready. Between trying to get everything done and being freaking exhausted from all the gestating I'm doing, yeah, blog posts have been few and far between. But watch me end up going right to 42 weeks or something and writing three posts a day out of boredom because I have nothing else to do. I hope not.

Things I still have to do: hire a doula, pick a doctor, install my carseat, write my birth plan, see a shrink, clean my entire stupid house, and oh yeah, figure out what the hell to do about daycare, because the solution we thought we had fell through and oh my god there is nothing left in the city of Seattle available before January, apparently. And that's not even including all the "little" things. Ten days. I spend a lot of time trying not to hyperventilate.

I swear one of these days I will have enough time to write something of substance.

34

You know what sucks? Rain. Still messing with my all dresses all the time plan. I am probably unecessarily angry about this. I think I went through 12 outfits today before I settled on one that didn't make me feel like crying, and I wasn't really even planning to leave the house or do anything productive. This last bit of pregnancy? Infuriating.

34 weeks today. I need to get my shit together. Today I googled every single family practice and pediatrician covered by my insurance so I can get going on finding a doctor for baby boy. It's 2011, you'd think the internet would be a lot more helpful when it comes to finding a doctor, but no, not really. Rarely did I find a doctor that had reviews, and almost never was the information in the reviews helpful. That's nice that he had a friendly receptionist, but what's his attitude on vaccines? Ugh. I keep getting the feeling that I'm going about this all wrong, because if it was this hard for everyone I would have heard about it, right? Maybe?

But hard as they are, things are going. Kyle is going to put our childcare deposit down tomorrow, assuming the space is still open--cross your fingers, because otherwise we are shit outta luck on that front. Our childbirth class is going well. Penny Simkin is truly the bees knees. I wish she could be my doula.  We're setting up appointments with doulas, too. Better late than never, I suppose. And I got myself accepted into a pilot study about placenta encapsulation and post partum mood disorders, so get that done for free. And I'm like, participating in science, woo. Tomorrow mom is coming over to help me paint our "nursery." I don't know why I am using the quotes there, since it is just the nursery, but it doesn't really feel real yet. Something.

I've gone down to four days a week at work. Three this week because of the holiday. I'm not super happy about it, and I'm only doing it because I have PTO I have to use up by the end of the month. I was hoping it would last a little longer and I could roll it into my maternity leave, but no such luck. But honestly, I think I kind of needed to step back a little anyway, because I am exhausted.

Too exhausted to think of a way to wrap this up. The end.