We
had our patience put to the limit as we waited for my body to kick into labor.
We had figured my due date to be February 1st based on my last
menstrual cycle, but I was already expecting that I would go over that due date
since I had gone over 13 days with my first baby and 7 days with my second. I
wasn’t, however, expecting to go as much past my due date as I did! I tried a
castor oil smoothie again (which had worked to put me into labor with Kaili) on
February 6th and the only thing it did was make me poop a lot. We
did a non-stress test at one week over and the baby seemed to be doing great,
so we just kept waiting. At ten days over, we looked over my chart and figured
that we had estimated the due date wrong. According to when Liz, my midwife,
first heard the heartbeat, the latest the due date could possibly be was
February 11th, and a more likely due date was February 5th.
Either way, I was still overdue and anxious to go into labor. At two weeks over
we did another non-stress test and the baby still seemed to be doing great, so
we just kept waiting some more.
I
really thought I was going to go into labor on Friday night, the 15th
of February, because I was having regular contractions. Even though they
weren’t painful, I was hoping they would evolve into the real ones. I went to
sleep that night hoping they would wake me up, but when I awoke on Saturday
morning after a nice, restful night I felt quite depressed. I spent that
Saturday and Sunday feeling pretty blue. On Monday morning, 17 days over my
original due date, Liz stripped my membranes. On Tuesday morning, 18 days over,
I still wasn’t in labor. I called Liz and she said to come to St. George and
that no matter what, we were going to have that baby today!
We
packed the kids up and took them to Diane’s house and then went to see Liz. She
stripped my membranes again and considered breaking my water, but because the
baby’s head was tight up against the bag and following her intuition, she
decided against it. John and I left and went walking around the mall, then got
some lunch at Arby’s and frozen yogurt at Menchie’s. We then stopped by my
brother’s house for a visit. I walked around his living room for the hour or so
that we were there and towards the end I started having contractions that I was
pretty sure were real ones! We made it back over to Liz’s house by about 7pm,
but she was on her way out the door to another birth. She let us hang out in
her guest room. John was feeling tired and took a short nap while I timed my
contractions. Over the next two and a half hours they went from occurring about
every 7 minutes to every 3 minutes. Even though Liz was still attending the
other birth, she said that she could have someone available for us if we felt
we needed it. When my contractions had been 3 minutes apart for at least half
an hour, we decided we wanted to go over to the Birth Sweet. Liz called her
business partner, Cyndi, to meet us there. I called my friend, Susie, who was
going to come and take pictures for us, to let her know it was time. As we left
Liz’s house, John was feeling pretty hungry, so we stopped by KFC on the way
and he got something for him to eat.
We
got to the Birth Sweet at about 10pm. Cyndi checked me and I was dilated to a
4. Susie arrived soon after us and I spent around 30 minutes sitting on the
couch talking with her in between contractions.
For some reason, even though I
hadn’t taken any castor oil, I had been having diarrhea all day and so I felt a
lot better about the idea of laboring on the toilet. I like having that hole
underneath me. I changed into the gown I had picked out to labor in and went
into the bathroom. I labored in there for around an hour and a half with John sitting
on the edge of the tub in front of me.
Labor went really well as I just focused
on my breathing and the sounds I made. During a contraction I would make a low
humming noise, and as they began to become more intense my mouth would open and
the noise would be a low “ahhww.” I didn’t notice the change in my labor noises
until Liz arrived a little before midnight and asked Cyndi how I was doing. I heard her
tell Liz something like, “She’s doing great and her calmness doesn’t fool me. I
can tell she’s making progress listening to her noises.”
As
my contractions were becoming harder I felt a lot of relief when Liz warmed up
the crock pot with water and placed some hot towels on my back and stomach. A
few times I would stand up and put my arms around John’s neck through a
contraction. I loved the feeling of hanging on to him, my face pressed into his
chest, as I moaned through contractions.
Unfortunately, diarrhea was still
plaguing me and it took too much effort to contract all my bum muscles to keep
the poop in while also trying to relax and breathe through my contractions, so
I ended up sitting back on the toilet again, even though I preferred standing
up with John.
Liz
checked my blood pressure and when she saw that it was really high, she told me
that I needed to lie down to bring it down. If it stayed high, then that meant
the baby wouldn’t be getting the oxygen it needed. (For some reason, the last
three weeks of my pregnancy I had been having problems with high blood pressure
and had to spend a lot of time lying down to keep it low.) I groaned when told
I would have to move to the bed to finish laboring, remembering how absolutely
miserable it was to be tied down to the bed when I was laboring with Joseph,
but of course I was willing to do what I needed to in order to deliver my baby
safely.
As
I was settled into the bed Liz told Janet, her assistant, to get everything
ready for delivery because the baby was going to be coming very soon. I
remember feeling surprised to hear that she thought I was really that close to
delivering. Sure enough, the contractions began getting really hard once I was
on the bed and I know through at least one of them I dug my fingernails into
John’s arm. He carried those marks for a day after! I began transitioning and
Liz and John helped lift my legs and put pressure against them while I pushed
through my contractions. I remember my noises becoming very loud. They were
still a low “ahhww” sound, but I was bellowing them out now. I remember Liz
telling me during those contractions to channel my energy down and let it push
the baby out. I appreciated that because whenever she told me that, I realized
that I had been tensing my body up and just trying to bear through the
contraction rather than focusing on making the contraction do what it’s meant
to do. I could feel a difference in my body as I redirected my focus after
being reminded to do so.
(these pictures were taken, starting at the top left and moving left to right, from 52 minutes to 4 minutes before I delivered)
Sometime
around this point, Liz realized I had a small bit of skin at my perineum that
was bubbling up. She told me it would be really painful if left as is, so she
was going to pull it out during my next contraction in order to get it out of
the way of the bag of water that was on its way out. I remember pushing hard on
that next contraction in order to break my water. Liz said it was really a
tough bag of water! In the next contraction I was crowning, and just like I did
with Kaili, I pushed my baby out in one contraction, although I did it a little
bit slower because the cord was wrapped around his neck and all over his body.
But Liz did a great job at quickly getting him untangled. I was happy to discover later that I didn't even tear with this delivery! That made recovery so much nicer.
John
announced that we had a baby boy! He was born at 1:00 am on February 20th,
2013.
I felt such an immense surge of relief and gratitude as I heard his
first, beautiful little cry and had him brought up to my arms. I was so happy
he had made it here safely.
I spent the next while relishing in the newness of
the life in my arms. His big surprise to us was that in spite of how overdue he
was, he was really small. He hadn’t
been weighed yet, but Liz knew he was one of the smallest babies she’s
delivered in a quite a while. Liz gave him a little oxygen while we spent some
time admiring our new little son.
After
the cord stopped pulsing, it was clamped and John cut it (although he does not
particularly enjoy that experience.)
Then Liz reminded me that I still had to
deliver the placenta. I did so and when it came out Liz said something like, “what
in the… weird placenta!” She spent the next few minutes holding it up,
inspecting it, trying to figure out why it looked so strange. I don’t know
anything about placentas or what they are supposed to look like, but according
to her, it was oddly shaped (like an oval, which she had never seen before) and
it had a hard vein running through the middle of it. She said it looked like I
had hemorrhaged at some time earlier in the pregnancy, but she didn’t know for
sure. I had never had any bleeding during my pregnancy. Anyway, we later
concluded that Lyle’s low birth weight was most likely a result of that
malformed placenta.
Once
he was on his own, he was passed over to John for some daddy love.
Then I was
able to hold him again to try nursing him. It took a long while for him to get
a latch worth calling a latch, but it still wasn’t the best latch. I could tell
we would have some struggles with the whole nursing thing.
Finally, our curiosity
got the better of us. We all wanted to know how much he weighed! So Liz took
him and took his measurements and finished his APGAR test (which he scored an 8
on). He was 18 inches long and weighed 5 lbs ½ oz, but since birth weight isn’t
recorded in halves, we rounded up to 5lbs 1oz. He got his footprints made and
then was washed up, dressed, and returned to my arms.
A
little over an hour after he was born, Susie left and then, once everything was
cleaned up, Janet went home too. We settled down to sleep with our sweet new
baby boy while Liz caught some sleep in the other room. In the morning, we had
finally decided to name our baby boy Lyle Asher. We were torn between that name
and Benjamin Lauren and were just waiting to see what he looked like.
Liz made
us a delicious breakfast. We got everything ready to go and then, as a safety
precaution, because of his low birth weight and because there had been meconium
in his water, we wanted to make sure that all was totally well, so we took him
to see a pediatric doctor. Although he certainly was small, according to the
doctor he was in perfect shape. Everything else looked and sounded great and he
also affirmed that he had all the markings of a full-term baby. After leaving
the doctor’s office, we stopped by my brother’s house to pick up some extra preemie
boy clothes that my sister-in-law had. Then we drove to Doug & Diane’s
house to introduce the newest member of our family to our two other children.
It is a special experience, being a family of five now!
