Asked on 5th December 2007  |  3 replies

Answered on 28th August 2008:

Gracious. Time for some happy birth stories! I've had three. #1: 16 hours. Woke at 11 p.m. with a contractions, but stayed in bed and slept between them. By five in the morning, I was too uncomfortable to sleep at all, and we went to hospital. They told me I was 2 cm and to go home until the contractions were 5 min or less apart. "FINE!" I said. "I am not going back until I KNOW this is really happening!" So we went home, and I paced, and I did the breathing, and I leaned against the wall with the contractions. I ate a little when I was hungry, sipped water when I was thirsty, I paced and breathed and paced and breathed... At noon, we went back. I was five cm! By 2:30, I was fully dilated and pushing, and at 3:16 p.m., I held my perfect baby girl in my arms. No drugs, no episiotomy. #2: It might have been the way he was sitting, but I had a lot of back pain with this prenancy. In the last month, it had gotten so bad, and I needed so many pillows to make me comfortable, that I was sleeping on the pull-out couch in the livingroom. (Strangely, it was more comfy to me than our bed.) One night, about 5 days after he was due, the backache was particularly strong. I reached around behind me for one of the masses of pillows to tuck between my legs, when I felt a sort of a "POP"... and my thighs were wet. 12:05 a.m., and my waters had broken. With that, the contractions started, hard, fast and fierce. (Of course, that "particularly bad backache" all day had likely been contractions...) We headed out immediately to the hospital. We had only been there a few minutes when it was time to push. It was all going so fast, that I panicked and started to scream. The midwife (my doc hadn't arrived yet) pushed her face into mine and said very sternly, "You are NOT helping yourself." It was exactly what I needed. I took a deep breath and started to push. Four pushed later, he was born, all 9 lb, 10 oz of him -- at 1:34 a.m. -- only 89 minutes after my water broke! (And no tearing, only some "skid marks".) #3: With a precipitous birth in our history, we considered a home birth for the third, but midwives weren't then covered under our health care, so we couldn't afford it. (Better safe at home, we figured, than in a car on the way to the hospital!) With home birth not an option, we scoped out a really nice birthing centre, staffed by midwives, in a nearby hospital. I was teaching prenatal classes at the time, and so gave my two older kids (then 7 and 4) some child-focussed labour prep, too, because they were coming to the birth. I was woken at three a.m. by the contractions. I had breakfast, and when the older two kids woke up, we started going for walks around the block. My husband timed the contractions, and my seven-year-old wrote them down in a chart. (I still have that. So sweet!) We headed for the birthing centre, where our friend (who would be tending to the older children while my husband tended to me) was waiting. We walked around the rooms, we breathed, we chatted between contractions. We cooed over my friend's 3-month-old baby, who, being breastfed, was with mama. When the time came to push, I did NOT want to be leaning back, so the midwives raised the top of the bed to make a chair-shaped bed, and I kneeled on the lower part while leaning into the upper. The midwives were behind me. At 11:46 a.m., just about 9 hours after the first contraction, my baby girl was born. "Why is she all purple like that?" my 4-year-old wanted to know. "She just hasn't started breathing air yet," his 7-year-old sister informed him. "Just wait a minute and she'll turn pink." (She's 22 now, and every bit as smart still.) We bathed her and wrapped her up, then brought out the birthday cake with five candles -- one for each member of the family. We sang "Happy Birthday" to her, then her older sibs gave her the gifts they'd brought (loved old toys, too young for them now). We went home five hours later. Every birth is a miracle!

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