Sophia’s Birth Story

Throughout the weekend of my “due date,” (Friday/Saturday/Sunday), I had contractions off and on.  I did get the impression that they were might be “doing something,” different from the Braxton-Hicks contractions I’d been having for months.  There was more pressure or they were concentrated in a different place, or I could feel them having an effect on my cervix, or something  I couldn’t quite put my finger on.

On Saturday evening, I went to bed at about 9:00.  I didn’t get up until 10:00, so I felt super-lazy when I was exhausted Sunday afternoon and wanted a nap.  I took one, though – about 2 hours.  At this point, I wondered if I were going to have the baby that night and perhaps God was preparing me for losing sleep during the night by giving me extra sleep during the day.  That evening, though, I called Mom and made partial arrangements for meeting her the next day if we still hadn’t seen the baby, so that I could give her my flyers for the [homeschool] Convention and she could give me the food from our bulk food order.  (We were completely out of Prairie Gold wheat, so I really needed at least that.)

When I went to bed at about midnight, I was having contractions consistently.  They were about 7-8 minutes apart.  They weren’t uncomfortable, though, except for the part where something hard – my uterus – was scrunched against my ribcage.    The contractions themselves were not uncomfortable, much less painful.  I wasn’t sure if they were “real” labor or not, but I figured that either they weren’t and I should ignore them, or they were and I should sleep while I could, so I went to sleep.

At about ten ’til four, I woke up, and was still having contractions.  At this point, they were quite uncomfortable, but still about 7-8 minutes apart.  Because I couldn’t sleep, I got up and went to the living room to read (a library book – Pesach for the Rest of Us).  I wanted to wait through several contractions to be sure that the discomfort was a pattern and not just a “fluke” with a single contraction before I woke Michael up and, especially, before we called and woke anyone else up.  Because they were still so far apart, this took almost half an hour.  (I waited for three consecutive contractions to be sure.)

At this point, I went and woke Michael, and we decided it would be a good idea to go ahead and call Mom.  I went in the living room to walk through contractions and, in the meantime, called Mom.  At this point, contractions were moving closer together.  (I think that there were about five minutes between the one before my call to Mom and the one right after.)  Mom and I decided that she would leave in time to be here by about 8:00, when Ariel would probably be waking up.

I returned to the bedroom to report this to Michael.  Contractions were continuing to get rapidly stronger and closer together.  Michael asked me at this point if I needed anything from him and I said, “I don’t know.  They do hurt.”  Michael started to get up.  I think that by now it was somewhere in the ballpark of 4:45.  It occurred to me that with all of our bustle, Ariel might not sleep until 8:00, so I suggested that we call and ask Mom to go ahead and come now, after all.  Michael called her back (because at this point, contractions were too close together for me to talk to her) and was told that Dad had already told Mom to go ahead and come.  He called I and L [our friends who had agreed to pray during the birth], too.  (Maybe he called them before we called Mom back; I don’t remember.)

This was handy timing, since they were already up, being early birds rather than night owls like we are!   Somewhere in here, I went to the closet, got out our birth supplies and laid them out on the bed.  By now, the contractions were definitely painful and not just uncomfortable, and they were coming every couple minutes.  Michael went to begin filling up the tub for me so it would be ready.  He filled it up as high as he could get it with straight hot water, but that made it too hot to get into right away (as is, anyway).   I wasn’t sure I was quite ready to get in yet, either.   I grabbed a towel, folded it up on the floor beside the weight bench, and knelt on that so I could lean on the top of the bench.

Michael went and got the stool and came to sit beside me.  Over the next little while – maybe 20 minutes or so – I breathed and moaned – mostly breathed – through contractions.  I had to try really hard to remind myself to breathe deeply and keep vocalizations low.  It’s much more automatic for me to get more high-pitched, but then I tighten up.  That’s why I didn’t do as much vocalizing this time, I think.  It was much easier for me to breathe deeply than to vocalize low.  I made much less noise this time, throughout the bulk of my labor.

Michael was terrific.  He would just sit there and rub my back or hold my hand – just generally be there.  Between contractions, he was taking care of various things – getting himself tea, getting a glass of water for me (which I never actually drank during labor, as it moved so rapidly), etc.

At one point he asked me to let him know if I thought I was going to get loud, so he could go warn Ariel.  A contraction or two later, I asked him to do this so, between contractions, he went and woke Ariel.  He told her that Mommy was having her baby now, so if she heard me yelling or something that was why, and everything was okay.  He told her that she didn’t need to get up, but he wanted her to know so she wouldn’t be scared.  I don’t know if she actually went back to sleep or not, but she did go back to resting.

By now, contractions were starting to be somewhat nauseating, and were painful enough that I was feeling like I really didn’t want to do this, so I figured I was likely in transition.  At some point while I was there at the weight bench, I started to feel trickles with each contraction, so I assume that my water broke while I was sitting there but, since I was upright, the baby’s head plugged the hole and I never really noticed it.  I eventually decided I really needed the tub, so we went to check the water temperature.  It was still too hot, but that was good, as it was also still shallower than I would have liked, so we added some cooler water to it as I got in.

I took a folded towel with me to put on the edge of the tub so I could lean against it and wouldn’t just be on the hard side of the tub.  I knelt in the tub in the same position I’d been in at the weight bench – with my elbows and/or head on the front edge of the tub.  Michael still occasionally went to take care of something between contractions, but there wasn’t much “between.”  I was coping okay even when he missed a contraction or two (much better than last time!), but appreciated his sitting there, rubbing my back and/or holding my hand like before.  I would breathe and/or moan through contractions and said a lot of, “Oh, it hurts.”  These contractions were rather nauseating.

I don’t think I’d been in the tub for very long when a contraction began to feel a little “pushy.”  Unlike with Ariel’s birth, where I never felt that I should push, my body just started pushing, this time I just got to the point where I intuitively knew it would hurt a little less if I pushed some, so I did.  Not even hard with this contraction – just sort of a gentle pushing with my moan.  At the end of that contraction, I felt the baby slip back up a little in the area of my cervix, and that’s when I knew she had begun to descend.  From there, she came very quickly.  I think that it was with the very next contraction that she crowned.

I’m not exactly sure, because for a couple of minutes, the contractions just sort of ran together – there was no pattern, no rhythm, no break, nothing.  I just know she went almost immediately from my feeling her at the beginning of the birth canal to having her head halfway out.  And it really was halfway out.  She didn’t crown just a little bit.  Her head came halfway out and was sort of “stuck” that way.  It was so sudden, and it hurt so bad.  At this point, I was literally screaming.  At the same time, I was trying to explain to Michael that she was actually coming out.  There had been so little transition from just plain contractions to pushing, that it wasn’t readily apparent (except to me, since I could feel the baby!).

He asked me if I could turn around, as the plan had been for me to turn toward the wall once it was time to push, so he could reach behind me to catch the baby.  I told him no, the baby was literally coming now – her head was halfway out.  I’m sure this was not long at all, but it felt like forever.  It hurt so bad having her head stuck there – the “ring of fire” was horrendous, because she came so fast there wasn’t time for me to stretch slowly and/or gently, and I kept having these contractions all run together and they hurt, too.

I could feel her punching around inside the birth canal, which was really strange.  I remember for a split-second thinking, “what if her head gets stuck like that?”  (Not a rational thought, or even one I really took seriously; it’s just what passed through my head as I could feel her head stuck half in and half out.)  When I told Michael I couldn’t turn around, he ran out, changed from his jeans to his swim trunks, ran back, and climbed into the tub behind me – all in a matter of seconds.  I couldn’t believe how quickly he had gone and come back!

It felt like it took forever to finish getting her head out, but it was such a relief when I did that I thought maybe she had been completely born, and I asked Michael if she was all the way out.  He said that, no, just her head and told me that he needed me to give him one more good push.  But after her head had emerged, the contractions had just kind of stopped.  I told him I couldn’t, I didn’t have “any contraction left,” and it would have to wait a moment.  Of course the contractions didn’t stay gone forever and a moment later I had another.  I pushed and felt her body slip out.

Then I told Michael to get her out of the water.  He tells me that I rushed this, like I was in a huge hurry to have her out of the water, because she wasn’t underwater for nearly as long as Ariel was.  I think it just felt to me like she’d been in there much longer than she actually had because everything moved so fast.  Or maybe I had a sense of hurry because everything had gone so fast that I was concerned about how quickly the placenta might deliver.  I don’t know.  I did get to see her more readily this time than I did Ariel – partly because of my position and probably partly because I wasn’t nearly as pooped afterward.

Michael lifted her out of the water and held her sideways. She was gurglier than I remember Ariel being (but maybe that’s because I wasn’t as aware of Ariel in the first minute or two), but she was fine.  She coughed some, and started to cry.  I remember asking him if she was, really, a girl.  After she’d had a few moments to cough and sputter and just generally clear her throat (her nose was still kind of stuffy), Michael gave her to me and I tried to get her to nurse.  That silly baby, though, had her hand by her face just as she did in the womb.  I couldn’t get her hand out of the way.

It was at this point that I realized that Ariel was still in bed and had missed all this.  “Get Ariel!”  Michael, of course, had already thought of this.  He had climbed out of the tub and was trying to get cleaned off enough to go through the house.  When Ariel came in, she was a little bit disappointed to have missed it – “Aw.  I wanted to see her be born” – but got over that very quickly because she was mostly excited to see her baby sister.

At this point, Michael was sort of scrambling, because of course Mom hadn’t arrived yet, so he was trying to get mostly cleaned up, get Ariel, look after me, get blood drawn and our blood tests done, etc.  I don’t remember what exactly happened in what order because it all kind of ran together.  I know he called L while I was still in the tub, because I remember that right after she answered the phone, Sophia cried quite loudly, and I was holding her in the tub at that point.

At some point he also called Dad.  I think perhaps he made these calls before we remembered to get Ariel up; I don’t really remember.  When Ariel came in she told me she had to [insert gesture of putting hands over ears] “because you were yelling too loud.”  She seemed to have coped with things pretty well, though.

We needed to get out of the tub so Michael could reach to draw blood out of the cord, so Michael helped me to step out onto another towel.  He drew the blood, but had to set it aside for the time being because other things were more pressing.  He brought a trash bag for the placenta and we ended up tying the cord off (just as a precaution; it may not have needed to be tied) because we cut it sooner than we’d planned.  It was limp and white and had definitely stopped pulsing, but there was still some blood in it, and we needed to cut it so he could take the baby.

I was sitting on my knees on the towel outside the tub, holding the baby (where I had finally gotten her to nurse and she’d been nursing constantly since), and my feet had fallen completely asleep, so I couldn’t move to deliver the placenta without someone taking the baby so I could use my hands to help me get up.  So, Michael went and found some embroidery floss and tied and cut the cord, then took the baby.  I got up and delivered the placenta (right into the trash bag), while he took the baby (who had been wrapped in a towel at some point to keep her warm).   I think he went then to take care of the blood tests.

Meanwhile, Ariel was sitting there in the bathroom on her stool. (Well, she left for the delivery of the placenta.  I told her that there was one more part that needed to come out, and reminded her of what the placenta was.  I told her that it would probably be a little yucky, looking a lot like a big piece of raw meat.  She turned around and walked out.  lol  She came back in afterward, though.)  She was a terrific helper, going to get fresh underwear for me, bring me my pads, etc. so that I could get dressed and get up from the towel I was on.  I got a washcloth wet and washed up as best I could – getting vernix off of my arms, blood and such off my legs, etc. – and went to get the baby back.

I don’t know where she was in the meantime.  I don’t know if I’m getting things mixed up and Michael hadn’t done anything but hold the baby during this time, or if she was wrapped up and in the bedroom, or what.  Maybe he wasn’t doing the blood tests, maybe he was cleaning her up.  Anyway, at this point, I got Sophia back and sat in the glider-rocker to nurse her again.

First, Michael had Ariel come sit with me and he got a picture of the three of us.  After a few minutes, I found some clothes and went to get settled on the couch.  (I think I had started to feel slightly weak at this point.  Not bad; just enough that I wanted to recline more than allowed for by the glider.)  All of this took place well before 7:00.

When Mom arrived, this is how she found us.   She helped us get the baby weighed.  We hadn’t even diapered Sophia yet.  (She was still nursing!)  Mom and Michael weighed the baby, finished cleaning her up, got her diapered and dressed so she’d be warm, and measured her length.  Michael took Sophia and went to rest with her on our bed, while I went and sent the necessary emails to let people know Sophia had arrived.  It was only later that we even attempted to get anything cleaned up in the bathroom, at which point Michael took care of the placenta and Mom cleaned the bathtub.  Sophia apparently had her first meconium poop essentially as she was being born, because we found a pile of it in the tub – yuck!

Observations

Sophia was born at 6 a.m. on the dot.  She weighed 7 lbs. 4 oz. when Mom and Michael weighed her, but she’d been nursing constantly for probably an hour or more, so we’re figuring on her having gotten about an ounce between the time she was born and the time she was weighed.  She was 20.5 inches long.

I never noticeably lost my mucous plug, and my water never noticeably broke.

Michael tested her blood for blood type, and didn’t get to do the other blood test.  (The blood had congealed in the syringe by the time he had opportunity to get to it.)