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Hey There!
Sorry for the radio silence. We had a bit of a big week. I had a plan for how the next few blog posts were going to go, but Little Bit decided to shake things up, so we’re going out of order.
Remember how I said that I thought LIttle Bit was going to be late and hoped she had no intention of arriving before my due date? Well, I was wrong, and she was early!
She was so early, in fact, that she was barely an October baby at all. I’d like to share our birth story and experience with using a Birth Center instead of having a hospital birth with you. I’ll try to keep it fairly concise, and I’ll skip anything too messy.
Last Tuesday about 2:30 in the morning, I woke up completely annoyed with The Fellow. I felt like he was taking up more than his share of the bed. I’d been sleeping at a weird angle causing my back to ache, so I grumblingly decided to go sleep on the couch.
I soon realized it wasn’t a backache when my water broke. Now, both the birth class we had taken and the midwives had said that if you go into labor in the middle of the night, call and let them know, but just relax and try to get some sleep because it’s usually a long process and you’ll need the extra sleep.
There was no additional sleep.
About an hour later, after realizing that I was definitely not getting any more sleep, I called the midwife on call and let her know. She said if things didn’t progress she would call and check-in around the 6-hour mark. (I’ll save you my thoughts about that statement.)
At that point, I was ready to go to the center, but she told me we should wait, so wait we did. Twenty or so minutes later, I finally woke The Fellow up and bless his heart he tried to help, but if I’m in pain, I’m very much a hands-off person. As he kept trying to comfort me, I kept telling him not to touch me, so he just went back to bed and lay there while I whimpered or occasionally yelled at him.
Another hour passed. I started to feel really crummy and was sick, so he called the midwife again and told her that I was more or less insisting we go in, and she said that she’d head in . . . it was an hour drive for her and a 9-minute drive for us . . . so we waited. Again.
Finally, it was time to go. We loaded into the car . . . only for The Fellow to say he’d forgotten to take his allergy medicine and ran back inside. (I know. I almost murdered him.) Finally, we were ready to go. Unfortunately for me, the delay to allow for the midwife’s drive time meant that the “worst” part of labor, the Transitional Stage, happened at home . . . and in the car. Not going to lie, I snapped at The Fellow a few times during the drive.
We made it to the Birth Center, up the ramp, and then to the worst part – the stairs. And at the top of the stairs was a midwife whom I had never met. There are two main midwives at that location, and one was out on her own maternity leave, so the owner who usually works at the other location was covering clients while she was out. Thankfully, she was super sweet. She greeted me, gave me a hug, and said that we were going to have a wonderful birth.
Now, this was one of the things I had wanted to avoid by going to a Birth Center instead of a hospital – having strangers around who I didn’t know and who I didn’t trust, so I may have had a mini panic moment, but she was wonderful and everything was fine once we got into the swing of things.
It was now 6:30 or so in the morning, and the midwife was insistent that she check how far along I was, and I was insistent that I get into the tub. Pretty sure that the first thing I really said to her was “What can we do for the pain?” Knowing full well, the only real thing was getting in the tub. She made the check and just went, “Oh, we’re going to have a baby . . . soon.”
Since I was a first-time mama, she was expecting this to be more of a lengthy process. The tub wasn’t even fully filled before we were full-on pushing.
The tub was amazing. Seriously, amazing. I don’t have anything to compare it to in way with medicated births, but it felt great for me.
She was born less than an hour later at 7:34, even before the nurse and trainee midwife arrived!
One thing that I hadn’t planned on doing was catching Little Bit myself. I had fully intended to let the midwife handle that part because trying to scoop a newborn baby out of a pool of water sounded absolutely terrifying, but when it happened I just instinctively reached for her to pull her to me. It was a beautiful and terrifying moment.
My mother arrived shortly after the baby was born and was there for all of the post-delivery things, and we headed home with Little Bit around 12:30.
Nothing can really prepare you for childbirth. Everybody has their own experience. Thankfully, it wasn’t as terrible as I was expecting it to be. I’m glad that Little Bit is finally here. We love her so much. They’re right when they say you don’t realize you can love someone you’ve just met that much, but you do, you really, really do
I’m so glad that I went through the Birth Center. I felt in control, looked after, and there was 0 judgement. It was such an amazing experience. I can’t imagine doing it any other way.
We’re still trying to adjust to Little Bit and get everything figured out, but we’re loving every minute of it!
