OK, here's my birth story. Please don't read any further if you're not interested in reading about my girl parts!
To set the stage, I'd been telling people for months that I was trying to convince the baby to wait until 38 weeks to be born. But after having preterm labor starting at 32 weeks, everything was looking VERY stable and "unmoving" at 37 weeks. My cervix was long (37mm) and closed, I was having Braxton Hicks contractions but they weren't doing anything, and the baby was so high that my doctor was concerned she would turn again before birth and end up transverse or breech. In addition, my mom and step-dad arrived last Tuesday and are leaving next Thursday (one day before my actual due date) and I was starting to worry that they would come and go before the baby arrived.
Anyway, last Thursday I woke up feeling a bit funny. My Braxton Hicks were a little more uncomfortable, but they weren't regular or increasing in frequency at all. I joked several times to Chris that he shouldn't wander too far off b/c I was probably going to go into labor. Then I got a huge spurt of energy and cooked a bunch of food for hilltot and made my mom sit through my long explanations of when and what he eats, what his schedule is, etc.
That evening after hilltot was in bed, Chris and I headed to a BBQ for Mark and Rebecca, who were visiting from Austin. They had their 17 month old Luke with them and we were bringing over our pack-n-play for him to sleep in (although I included the caveat that we'd need it back if we have the baby while they were in town). As we left the house for the BBQ, I made Chris turn the car around and go back home to pick up our hospital bag "just in case". He rolled his eyes but we went back to get it anyway.
We were at the BBQ for awhile and I kept bugging Chris not to drink in case I went into labor. It became a joke, b/c people kept handing him drinks and I'd shoot daggers at him. Later we were all out on the patio and I was sitting on a wooden chair with a cushion. I joked, "Oh, I'd better move to a chair you can hose off more easily" and the women laughed while the guys said, "Ew!" I moved to a metal chair.
Not 10 minutes later, I suddenly looked up into Lori's eyes (she was standing directly across from me) and said loudly, "OH CRAP". She said, "What? Are you OK?" and everyone went silent as my water broke and GUSHED all over the patio. My water never broke with hilltot so I hadn't experienced that before, and I had a LOT of fluid with this pregnancy. My doctor had already warned me that if it broke, it would be a waterfall. I sat there for another couple minutes as my waterfall continued to flow and everyone took pictures, videotaped, and passed around champagne while exclaiming, "We're having a baby tonight!" Carrie got me a towel to wrap around my waist and Chris and I made our way to the car (which had the hospital bag already in it...HAH).
We got to the hospital and couldn't remember which floor L&D was on. (Why would we have taken the hospital tour again? We just had hilltot 20 months ago!) Luckily there was another couple there who was clearly heading to the same place, and they told us to follow them. We hung out in triage for awhile as they monitored my contractions (yep, I was having them and yep, they were strong) and they got ready to check us into a birthing suite. Chris tried on all of the different gloves and played with the different machines, and also loudly announced "Honey, I'm not wearing any underwear" (he was wearing his board shorts b/c he'd taken hilltot to a wading pool earlier that day), which the nurse thought was hilarious. He also started to recite Bill Cosby jokes, but I told him he wasn't as funny as he thought he was so he stopped (I was a bit on edge). I was feeling pretty strong, but I got very sad when I realized that I had had my last day with hilltot as an only child. I wish I'd known that before.
They finally moved us into a huge birthing suite and we met our nurse Erin and the doctor who was going to deliver, Dr. Burdick. Both of them were fabulous -- we were very lucky to have gotten such a fantastic team.
After monitoring my contractions for awhile, Nurse Erin announced that I have a "mighty uterus". Also, I had a lot of fluid (no kidding). Apparently my uterus is very strong. I entered the hospital with barely noticeable Braxton Hicks and within an hour was going off the charts with double and triple contractions, coming right on top of each other. However, my cervix wasn't quite keeping up b/c I was only 1-2cm dilated. Chris asked if the contractions I was having were "normal" and Nurse Erin said, "She's not getting a break. Normally you have 1-3 minutes between big contractions, and hers don't even come down to baseline before the next one hits. She has a very high pain tolerance." Lovely.
High pain tolerance or not, I'd decided earlier that I wasn't going to hold off on an epidural like I did last time. I wanted to do whatever I could to be calm enough to have a successful VBAC. So after about 3 hrs of laboring, I asked for the epidural. Of course, it couldn't be as easy as that -- the anesthesiologist was in the OR and the back-up was nowhere to be found. It took over an hour and a half for someone to finally get there, and then he had to insert the catheter twice b/c he got a blood vessel the first time. In addition, it turns out that pain medication doesn't work very well on me (we kind of knew this already from hilltot's birth, but thought that was just a fluke). I continued to labor with just a bare amount of pain relief, and finally the doctor came back to up my dose to make it more bearable. By then, I was already 8cm dilated but it was SUCH a relief to finally be able to rest for a little bit.
Another thing I was worried about was the baby's position, especially since there was so much fluid and she hadn't descended into my pelvis before labor started. Plus, hilltot was posterior-facing, which was part of what made his labor and delivery so difficult. So during one of my cervical checks, I asked Nurse Erin if the baby was posterior. She felt around and said, "I'm sorry honey, the baby is posterior...oh...wait a second...uhhh...well then. Not posterior anymore. The baby just turned around!" Such a good baby.
I rested through another 40 minutes or so of contractions, and at 4:30 AM it was time to push. According to Nurse Erin, not only do I have a mighty uterus, but I'm also a champion pusher. After an hour of pushing, baby Sophia made her entrance! Dr. Burdick let Chris announce her gender, and it was so funny. He looked at Sophia, then looked at Dr. Burdick and Nurse Erin and said, "It's a...girl??"
Sophia came out kicking and screaming and I got to hold her right away. It was so different from hilltot's birth, where they whisked him away to do CPR on him and I didn't get to hold him for a long time. I held her while I was stitched up (2nd degree tear) and she nursed almost immediately. It was just magical.
She passed all over her newborn tests and scored a 9 on her APGAR. After she was cleaned up, we saw that she has a head of strawberry-blonde hair and dark slate blue eyes. Her skin looked pink and fair right after birth, but a lot of that may have been the newborn rash that she had. Now that the rash is going away, her skin is starting to look a bit more like hilltot's did, with the olive tone. She has daddy's coloring for the most part (jury's still out on the skin) and some of my facial features, and she actually looks a lot like hilltot did at this age. Except for the light hair and blue eyes. She's just beautiful.
I am so happy with how this delivery went. The VBAC was so much easier on me than the c-section, both physically and emotionally. Nursing has been going pretty well, although I am in the midst of the fiery depths of nipple pain right now (Sophia has a clampdown reflex, which she will hopefully outgrow in the next couple of weeks). She generally sleeps for 3 hours at a time, and at night she's been doing one longer stint (4-5 hour stretch). So far she's been a very happy and calm baby, and she seems to be as healthy as can be.
We are just overjoyed. And just as I'd asked, she was born at exactly 38 weeks.
