RUS's Birth Story

For those who are interested, here's the timeline of RUS's birth:

On October 13, around 12:30 a.m., I wake up to pee and notice that I'm having contractions. This isn't anything unusual, as I've had on-and-off irregular contractions for a couple weeks now. But when I go back to bed, they keep coming. I try to sleep until about 2:30, when I finally decide to get up-- I wanted to time the contractions and see if they were regular or not. Turns out they are coming about 4 minutes apart and lasting about 45 seconds. I would have thought something was happening except for the fact that the contractions are totally painless. I am just sitting there like, "Oh, there goes another one."

Around 5 a.m. they start to get farther apart again and I decide it was just a false alarm and go back to bed and sleep until about 8:30 a.m. I was pretty determined not to just sit around waiting for contractions to happen, so J's mom and I head out and run some errands. We get home around lunch time.

At this point, J and I decide to take a walk. We walk for maybe 10 minutes, during which I have several contractions. These are about 2 minutes apart, but they are only lasting 30 seconds. They still don't hurt. We get home, and decide to call the birth center just to ask them what they think might be going on. While J is calling, I am sitting on our exercise ball, and all of a sudden I have a whopper of a contraction. I have to stand up, walk around, and I'm about in tears because the pain came out of nowhere.

J tells the midwife at the birth center that we can get packed up and to the birth center by around 1:30. We load up all the bags (bags that have been packed for an entire month, by the way) and get on our way. We arrive at the birth center around 1:20 p.m. and the whole way there I have contractions that are about 3 minutes apart that I could not talk through. We wait for a few minutes before going back to an exam room to get checked. The midwife listens to the baby's heartbeat through a contraction and says the baby is handling the contractions perfectly. She was going to check me there, but I am having contractions so close together that I don't have time to get up on the table, so she decides we should head upstairs to the birthing room to do the check instead.

We finally get upstairs after a few contractions, and at this point I have no idea how long anything took. But when she does the exam, I am 8 cm and the baby is at +2 station (so it is about 2 inches below my pelvic bone). Immediately after she checks me, I flip over to my hands and knees, a position from which I do not move until after the baby is born. I work through a bunch of contractions-- really painful ones-- by focusing on my abdominal breathing, working to relax everything I can, and keeping in mind that every contraction has a beginning and an end. I'm totally oblivious to everyone in the room except for a midwife near my head who is telling me what is going on, and J, who at some point got on the bed with me and started massaging my hands.

I never consciously decided to push, but during several contractions my body pushed a little here and there, and then shortly after that I started having serious pushing contractions. J said it was maybe 3 pushes and one really long big one and the baby was born at 2:04 p.m., just about 45 minutes after we parked the car in front of the birth center.

The midwife who caught the baby slid him under my legs so I could hold the baby and I got to be the first to find out the gender-- I held him to my chest for a moment or two and then pulled the baby away and saw immediately that it was a boy and shouted, "it's a boy!!"

We just held him and stared and all that for about an hour and a half before J helped weigh and measure him-- 7 lbs 1/2 oz and 19 1/2 inches long. We left the birth center around 7:30 p.m., about 6 hours after we arrived. I was so glad to be in my own bed, and with all the comforts of home around me. We called everybody and even talked to my parents on the webcam that same night. It was absolutely amazing.

This is the picture they took at the birth center right before we left to go home.