in the wee morning hours, he was born

All photos are at one week old.

Our little man is a month old today. I should be writing his one month love letter, not his birth story. Third child syndrome is alive and well in our home. I have been working on this a while and had trouble deciding what to include, how much is too much.  Despite my best efforts, it remains a very long story, and I wasn't sure what to do about it. I had to remind myself of two things. One, I'm a long-winded girl and there's no sense in trying to change that now. Two, I write for myself. Something I forget sometimes since I share it publicly. So, this is my (long) story, these are the things I want to remember. Yes, even some gross things.  

***

Sunday, November 10th, I was 39 weeks pregnant and ready to have a baby. I've never made it much past 38 weeks before, and in my opinion, no one needs to be pregnant longer than that. At 38 weeks, you still feel pretty good. At 39 weeks, you feel like a whale, beached, only able to move yourself with great difficulty. So, we visited some friends at their new house and I walked. I walked a lot, carrying Mia, up hills, in the hopes that baby boy would be encouraged to leave his cozy womb. 

The next morning, I woke up pregnant. My body was tired from all the walking, but it was still very much pregnant.  

Tuesday, I woke up pregnant again. Ugh. I realize that many women go to their due date and beyond. I commend them for not running to their doctor and demanding that their baby be evicted. I was getting more impatient and cranky and emotional by the hour. I was done. 

I can't remember what I did that day, but I do remember how I felt. Restless. A sure sign of impending labor. I had a few contractions, but nothing with any regularity. I was certain my baby was going to fall out of me before I had any real labor based on how low he felt. But, he did not. 

By Tuesday evening, I was feeling even more anxious and restless. I sat on the couch watching the girls play, feeling miserable inside. Nothing was happening and yet, I felt like something could happen.  I didn't want to get my hopes up and wake up the next morning still pregnant. What I should have done was go to bed early, but I didn't. I sat. Waiting. 

I called my mom after the girls went to bed. Based purely on a hunch, she and my dad came up to spend the night, just in case something happened. Since Mia arrived so quickly, we knew we probably didn't have a lot of time to organize things if I did go into labor. So, they came up and I paced the house for a while, and...still nothing happened. 

Around 11:00 pm, I finally took my mom's advice and tried to get some sleep. There was no physical reason to not sleep, just my crazy, busy brain keeping me up. I slept about an hour when a contraction woke me up. Woohoo! A real contraction! Then another one, then another. I'm a terrible contraction timer and didn't even have a clock to look at, but I'm guessing they were about 10 minutes apart. Nothing too serious, but I figured I should tell Ryan that, finally, something was happening. I got up to go to the bathroom before waking him when I felt something weird. 

I made it to the bathroom and my water broke. Not a little. It was like a big gush of water. And then another. And then another. And it was gross and much worse than in the movies because it wasn't like one gush took care of it all. No, it continued for hours, through most of my labor, and did I mention it was gross? Because it was.

On the bright side, it was 1:00 am and time to go to the hospital. Hooray!! And we didn't even need to rush like crazy. My dad stayed with the girls, and my mom rode to the hospital with Ryan and I. Laci was awake when we left, so I gave her a kiss and told her we were going to the hospital and I would see her in the morning. I expected a meltdown from her, but she pulled herself together, gave me a kiss, said she would miss me, and acted like the big girl I know she can be. I felt so proud of her because I knew how hard it was for her to be brave. 

The contractions got worse on the way to the hospital, as they usually do in the car, and we arrived around 2:00 am. The contractions felt pretty strong and in my head, I felt like it wouldn't be too long before I'd be done. When I got to my room and the nurse checked me, she cheerfully said I was 3 1/2 cm, like I was supposed to be excited. I wasn't. I was sure I had progressed more than that based solely on the pain factor. I had done this labor thing twice before without pain medication, but this time was different. This time, my water broke. This time, I didn't have that cushion. And now, I can honestly say from experience, that water in there does indeed provide a cushion. With both girls, my water didn't break until I was ready to push and THAT is the way it should be done.

An hour or so later (time keeping really wasn't on my mind), I was only at 5-6cm. I realize to the average person this would seem like great progress but I literally had a crying meltdown for a few minutes. I felt like I should have been so much closer to the end. Labor was pretty intense, no really intense, and I really didn't want an epidural, but I remember looking at Ryan and telling him I couldn't keep at it for hours. He, of course, looked me in the eyes and said that yes, I could, and I tried really hard to believe him. It didn't help that I had slept only an hour since I got up at 6:30 the morning before. I was exhausted. I'd been awake for most of the previous 22 hours and then labor got more intense.

There was hardly a break between contractions. I remember keeping my eyes closed and trying to remember to how to breathe. Not fancy Lamaze breathing, just plain breathing without hyperventilating. They needed to draw my blood for some reason and I don't even know what that lab tech looked like. I half opened my eyes to stretch my arm in the right direction, closed them again and did my best to hold still while she drew my blood.

I ended up asking for a shot of Fentanyl, which was the most painful, burning shot I've ever had. Then I realized I needed to pee. Great timing. I awkwardly got to the bathroom and once my bladder was empty, things started happening really fast.

I got back to my bed, closed my eyes again and listened to nurses bustling around me. It was a little after 4 am and the on call doctor wasn't there yet. I heard nurses saying, "She sounds pushy," which is clearly the official medical term for loud-woman-ready-to-give-birth. A few times I heard, "Don't push, the doctor will be here soon." Ha! Yeah right. And at one point my nurse said, "We can deliver the baby if we have to." But she didn't sound very convincing.

Around 4:15 or so, the on call doctor breezed into the room, as OB doctors often do. Arriving just in time to catch baby and take credit for a safe delivery, even though it was the steady stream of nurses who had been doing all the work the previous couple of hours. With three contractions, five minutes of pushing, at 4:30 am exactly, little Noah joined our world. It wasn't easy, he is my biggest baby and has a decent set of shoulders, but an angry woman in pain will do whatever is necessary to get that baby out (and for the record, the Fentanyl did absolutely nothing for the pain.) But what relief when that baby is on your chest!  

He didn't cry. He was quiet. But he was breathing and almost instantly pink. I had a few minutes of panic and fear when he didn't cry. I needed to hear a noise from him. I needed to know he was fine. But he didn't cry. He barely made a sound. I was assured numerous times that he was fine and when he started eating like a ravenous pig just a few minutes later, I realized that he was, indeed, perfectly healthy. Relief. Again. Though it was short lived. 

I was bleeding a little more than normal,  which means you are turned into a human pincushion. I was given a shot of this, a shot of that. I had to get an IV. I delivered three babies without any IV and now here I was, baby already born, needing one anyway. My veins were too big and rolling around, so it took a few tries to get one in. Ouch. I had two bags of pitocin and another shot of something else in my leg. And really, I was just over it. I was ready to be done with pain. But with pitocin come strong contractions. And with nursing, more contractions. All necessary to stop the bleeding, but I seriously felt like I was still in labor for a good three hours after he was born. What I really wanted was to sleep. 

BUT! Noah had arrived and he was (is) perfect and he had proved already that having a boy is different. That I can't base my expectations for him on my experiences with my girls. Delivering him is one of the hardest things I've ever done, but surely worth the little person we've added to our family.