Hi girls! I have to catch up on what I've missed here over the past few days. Thank you for all your well wishes! Our doula is going to write a birth story for us but for now here's what I can remember (my hormones took over again and made me kinda out of it during labor and birth).
I had been feeling bad back pressure on Wednesday night, similar to the pain I had felt during labor with Dylan. Also all day on Wednesday the baby was moving like crazy and I felt like he was settling down really low which was causing the back pain. So I went to bed feeling kind of uneasy and said to DS that I was worried I might go into labor soon.
I woke up wide awake around midnight and immediately thought to myself “my water is going to break”. I have no idea why I thought this, it was really weird. I just had this feeling. I laid there in bed for about 2 minutes just waiting, and sure enough I felt a pop and my water started pouring out. I woke Barry up and I and stood in the tub for a minute during the “flood” until it slowed down, then I tried to get back in bed to rest for a few minutes while we called my midwives’ office and our doula and my parents.
The contractions started maybe within 10 minutes of my water breaking and I immediately got worried because they were really close together. It was hard to even keep track because they were coming so fast, within about 30 minutes they were less than a minute apart and I was having a really hard time getting through them and keeping my head straight. I knew that I wasn’t going to make it to the hospital in time but for some reason I didn’t communicate this very well to Barry. He knew we had to get out the door ASAP so he was running around putting stuff in the car, making phone calls, etc so I was laboring by myself (back labor again!), which was pretty awful.
Around 1 am I felt compelled to get down on my hands and knees on the bathroom floor (I had been laboring in the bathroom because we had new carpet put in recently in the bedroom and I was worried about making a mess, lol!). So I put a towel down and got on all fours and immediately felt like I had to push. I gave one push and felt the head coming and got a little panicked that I was going to have to deliver the baby all by myself and how was I going to catch him if I was on all fours? I felt like I couldn’t move from that position. Barry was downstairs running around doing something and I screamed for him to come up, and I said “wash your hands and get towels”.... so he pulls out a roll of paper towels and I was like, “NO, real towels, you need to deliver the baby!!” (I didn’t do a very good job of communicating that the baby was coming, right NOW). So he got behind me and saw the head and he said “Oh my God, his whole head is out” and he got ready to catch the rest of him. He said all he was thinking at that moment was that he couldn’t drop the baby on the bathroom floor
At that moment our Doula arrived and got behind me in Barry’s place, and told him to call 911. She said on the next contraction to go ahead and push and it took about a minute before I had another contraction. Gave a big push and out came his whole body. His hand was up next to his face and this caused me to tear. I could feel the tearing and it was quite awful. So he slid out and she caught him and started rubbing him with a towel, and had me turn over to sit on the floor and hold him against me to keep him warm. He was crying a little bit off and on, but he was mostly quiet. But he was breathing fine and seemed perfectly healthy.
She rubbed my uterus and kept checking the baby and about 5 minutes later I delivered the placenta, right as the EMTs arrived. It was all pretty calm by that point... the EMTs came upstairs and they were really nice and laid back. Nobody was panicking at all so it was a really good experience. The cord had stopped pulsating so they clamped it and let Barry cut it, and I put on a bathrobe and held the baby inside of my robe, and walked out to the ambulance.
When we got to the hospital there were like 40 people standing there to greet us as I was rolled in, it was like this huge production! They took us to L&D and started evaluating me and the baby and they immediately said “there’s no way this baby is 36 weeks,” he is much closer to 38 or 39 weeks. He weighed 7 lbs 9 oz and is 20” long.
I got some stitches for my tear at that point... they said the tear wasn’t bad but because over an hour had elapsed since the birth at that point, I was really swollen so they had a hard time stitching me up.
So that’s pretty much it! I had worried throughout this whole pregnancy that I had a feeling that this labor was going to be really fast and I wasn’t going to make it to the hospital. I’m SO glad that I didn’t end up giving birth in the car on the way there and that we never made it out of the house. The bathroom floor wasn’t the most comfortable place to be but it worked out just fine. Our doula was so excited about the whole thing! Lol. I think it really helped that we planned on a natural birth anyway and I wasn’t really scared of the idea of a home birth. There was never really a point where I was scared (I think there was too much going on too quickly to be scared).. I just felt like everything was going to be ok, and it was. It was really great
Jude is doing great and nursing well- although my poor nipples are bleeding and raw and my milk still hasn’t come in. I’m hoping by tomorrow it will be a little better. I will post pics soon!!!
Jude's home birth
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