abc family

Happy Home Again

We survived a week without Bryan!

(You can stop over at Faith & Family to find out how it went.)

He was due home around 11pm Friday so it wasn't until about 8pm that I let myself miss him.  And then he walked in the door just a few hours later!

I took my parents out to dinner to thank them for their help but in justice I should have bought them, at minimum, a new car.  That is how much they did.

Bryan has traveled on business before, although usually just one night at a time instead of six.  I've never liked it but until this trip I never realized how much worse it could be.  

He was in Lousiana, on Central Time, one hour behind us.

(Digression Poll: did YOU know Michigan is in the Eastern Time Zone?  I am constantly surprised by how many people do not know this.)

He was leaving his hotel each morning at 6 and not getting back until 11 each night.  With spotty cell service and the time difference, plus my going to bed around 10 to maximize my sleep time, this meant we couldn't talk on the phone at all.  I didn't hear Bryan's voice between Monday morning and Friday afternoon. 

I think that might be the longest I've gone without hearing his voice during our entire marriage!  Almost seven years!

I felt awful for my poor husband working such long days, so while he was gone I wrote him emails and left him voice mail messages and took pictures of the kids and me to send to him.  He missed them a lot.

And who wouldn't?

Have you ever seen a bed this big?

This afternoon I sent Camilla into the other room to get a rattle for Blaise, but she returned empty-handed. 

"Mama," she said worriedly, "there is some kind of ant in there."

"Some kind of ant" turned out to be a huge moth, crouched threateningly on the floor near the rattles.  Have I ever mentioned how much I hate moths?  Only junebugs creep me out more.  I'd rather find a spider in my house any day.

Fortunately the moth is dead now.  (Turns out he was striking a lethargic rather than a threatening pose; his reflexes weren't up to much.)  But hours later, I'm still shuddering at the memory of his presence, and I keep imagining I see fluttering things out of the corner of my eye.

The imagined flutterings are making it hard for me to relax, but I need to be relaxing right now, because both kids are sleeping.  I know!

Here is one thing I'd forgotten about having an infant: how much the topic of sleep consumes your life. 

These are problems under constant consideration at our house:
1) How to get the baby to sleep,
2) When the baby should be going to sleep,
3) How to get the baby to take a nap longer than forty-five minutes (currently a near-impossibility),
4) How to get the baby to wake up fewer than three times per night,
5) Whether it is even possible to arrange our lives so that we, the parents, get enough sleep in spite of our baby's sleeplessness, and
6) If so, how to do that.

What makes it really confusing is that the answers to several of these questions are completely different than they were when Camilla was a baby. 

We were so ready to tackle the sleep problem the second time around.  Having had a child who hadn't slept through the night for 22 months, we assumed we had seen it all when it came to baby sleep.  We were VETERANS.  We could do this.

And while it's true that we can do it, it's turned out that the bag of tricks we developed to deal with Camilla are not so useful with Blaise.  Children are unique individuals with unique needs, apparently.  Go figure.

With Camilla we bought a co-sleeper before she was born, thinking it would be convenient to have her nearby at night.  But I was sure she would sleep in it, not in our bed.  (This was back before I had children, when I thought that you could just put babies down and they would obligingly sleep where you'd left them.  That turned out to be SO HILARIOUSLY UNTRUE with Camilla.  Ironically, it is mostly true with Blaise.) 

I didn't think we'd be a co-sleeping family.  I had nothing against it, I just kind of assumed it wasn't for us.

Turns out I was a little clueless about the parents Bryan and I would turn out to be.  Because we are not just a co-sleeping family.  We are a hard-core co-sleeping family.  And we love it.

It's a joke among our family and friends that we don't just have a bedroom, we have a BEDroom at our house.  As in: the room is almost completely taken up by the bed.  And it's not a particularly small room.  It's just a lot of bed.

Camilla never slept in the co-sleeper, so we removed it and she slept in between us in our bed.  Around twelve months, we bought a crib and set it up in a side-car arrangement with our queen bed.  She did okay with the crib, but crawled into our bed often enough that it still felt crowded, so we bought a king bed and moved our queen into the guest room, freeing the twin that had been in there to be Camilla's bed.  So we had a twin bed next to the wall for Camilla, and our king bed next to that.

When Blaise was born I assumed he'd sleep in our bed for at least the first year like Camilla did, but that didn't work with him.  Reflux means he can't sleep flat, so we set the crib back up and elevated the head of the mattress so he'll be more comfortable at night. 

I'm kind of sad that I don't get to sleep with Blaise right in the bed with me, but we do have the crib set up as a side-car to our bed (one of the sides removed, attached to our bed frame with luggage straps) so I have very easy access to the baby in the middle of the night.

And now we have the hugest amount of contiguous sleeping space I've ever seen.  Twin bed, king bed, and crib all attached to one another.  It's crazy.

I never thought we'd be co-sleeping parents, but it turned out to be what works most easily for our family.  So instead of fighting it, we embraced it and made it work for us.   In our BEDroom, we're all pretty much as comfortable as we can get.

Blaise's Birth: Part 12 (The End!)

Part 1 is here.
Part 2 is here.
Part 3 is here.
Part 4 is here.
Part 5 is here.
Part 6 is here.
Part 7 is here.
Part 8 is here.
Part 9 is here.
Part 10 is here.
Part 11 is here.

After the cord stops pulsing, Elaine clamps it and offers Bryan the scissors so he can cut.

It amazes me how steady my husband is.  This is a man who, during our NFP class before our marriage, once had to leave the room because a too-technical discussion about cervical mucus was making him nauseated.  Yet through two births Bryan has been a rock, not the least bit squeamish.  He takes those scissors and cuts the cord like he's been doing it all his life.

I ended up only getting two-and-a-half hours of antibiotics, even though we've been at the hospital for almost five hours by now (we arrived just after midnight; Blaise was born at 5:26am).  So the baby has to have some blood drawn for a culture, as well as being weighed and measured and all the other stuff they do right after birth.  I need to get cleaned up too.

I tell Bryan to stay right with the baby, which he does.  Elaine works with me.

We deliver the placenta - one last push, but nothing like the ones required to get the baby out - and she shows it to me and makes sure I don't want it.  (I don't.)  Then the examination.

It turns out I have only a tiny tear.  Elaine says she waffles on whether it even needs to be stitched up, but ultimately decides to take a better-safe-than-sorry approach.  My tear requires one stitch, which I find amusing.  Last time I talked about "my stitches" healing, this time I will refer happily to "my stitch."

During this time I am suddenly freezing cold.  Ros brings me blankets from the warmer but I cannot get warm enough, and I will not stop shaking for ten or fifteen minutes, until I have my baby back in my arms.

I get his stats: 7lbs, 11oz.  20.5 inches long.  I was right that he is bigger than his sister!  And he is certainly a good size for being a full two weeks (or more) early.

Our hospital has a labor and delivery unit and a separate mother-baby ward; the normal time for staying in the L&D postpartum is only an hour or two.  But because of the 7:00am shift change, we will end up being in our room for almost three hours after Blaise is born.

They apologize, but I do not care.  With the adrenaline and hormones coursing through me, there's no way I could sleep right now.  I just want to hold and nurse my baby.

Once I've been stitched and changed into a clean gown, I get new bedding and new blankets.  I'm finally warm, and I get my son back.  He latches on like the champion nurser he will prove to be.

Ros asks us if we have a name for the baby.  She's filling a card for his bassinet and assures us she can just write "Baby Boy Mosher" if we haven't decided yet.  But I've felt for months that Blaise is our son's name.  In the later weeks of my pregnancy Bryan threw around some alternatives, but he was the one who suggested Blaise in the first place, and he's on board with it.

Our sweet little boy is duly named: Blaise Alexander.

Bryan, who doesn't have the benefit of a huge hormone high, is exhausted.  Thanks to the shift change, we won't be leaving L&D for a while.  I suggest that he lie down and take a nap.  He does. 

I hold Blaise and nurse him, ten minutes on each side and then another ten minutes on each side, because he keeps wanting more.  Finally he dozes off and I hold my beautiful baby close and enjoy him.

Ros and Elaine have both left by now, giving me hugs on the way out.  Ros thanks me for letting her be part of my birth; I want to laugh at the thought that she is the one who benefitted.  I tell her how grateful I am for her help, how much she made the experience better for us.

Elaine tells me that she's delivered five babies this weekend.  All good births, she says, "but this one was the best."  She, too, thanks me. I thank her more.

After being focused for so many hours on making it through my own pain, after burrowing inside myself in order to cope, I have suddenly gone to the other extreme.  Still riding the high from giving birth, I feel like a radiant kaleidoscopic bubble of emotion.  I am relieved that labor is over, thrilled to be meeting my son, grateful to have had such a lovely birth experience, and touched that these hours have been good, have mattered, for other people too.

Between Blaise's birth and the time we leave L&D, all the various staff comes in to see the baby and me.  (Remember how I said it was a quiet night on the floor?  I think our baby was the only one born during that shift.)  The nurses from triage, the one who did my IV, the nurse who sat with us during Ros's break.  They congratulate us, say all the normal stuff about the baby being beautiful... and comment on the rumor which is apparently flying around the halls.

"We heard you were smiling during a contraction at nine-and-a-half centimeters!" they say incredulously.  I'm sure it wouldn't be a story any other time, but on a slow night I'm glad I've given them something to talk about, even something that's not quite true!

The nurse who will take us over to the mother-baby unit introduces herself and apologizes that it will be a while yet because of the shift change.  She wonders if I am hungry.  I am ravenous.  She raids the labor-coach snack room and apologizes for the paltry offering, but I am so hungry that I don't care.  I eat Rice Krispies and a ham sandwich (from a box, and a little stale, but it tastes delicious) and chug cartons of milk and juice.

Finally we get to travel across to the mother-baby unit.  I am in a wheelchair, holding our little son.  Bryan pulls the duffel bag.  We settle in to our tiny room, we call family, and Bryan goes to get Camilla so that she can come meet her little brother.

It's been a crazy twelve hours, but here we are.  A family of four.

New Name, New Look

This is no longer the blog it was when I began it in 2004, a blog of trying to conceive.  It is the blog of our family, of the enormous blessings God has bestowed on us.  It needed a new name.

When it was just Bryan, Camilla, and me, my mother-in-law dubbed us the "ABC Family".  Adding Blaise to the mix didn't change the initials, although my husband the math geek says we should now call it the "AB²C Family".

I figure if God blesses us with more kids, "ABC" can become "Arwen, Bryan, and Children."

It could also stand for "Always Being Catholic" which we are.  If I want to go the slightly sanctimonious route, I could make it into a motto: "Always Be Charitable."

Or "Absolutely Beyond Crazy".  That one's true for sure.

The new blog design is by Ashley.  You can contact her through her blog and buy adorable, affordable accessories at her Etsy shop (she's just as talented with textiles!).

Blaise's Birth: Part 11

Part 1 is here.
Part 2 is here.
Part 3 is here.
Part 4 is here.
Part 5 is here.
Part 6 is here.
Part 7 is here.
Part 8 is here.
Part 9 is here.
Part 10 is here.

When I gave birth to Camilla they turned on lights in the ceiling at the foot of the bed.  Surgery lights, lights so bright I wanted to keep my eyes closed even when I wasn't in the middle of a push. 

This time there is none of that.  No one makes a move to turn on the lights - Elaine is calmly putting on her gloves, Ros is wheeling the Doppler machine over so she can monitor the baby's heartbeat while I push.

(Days later I will remember that I was originally told that I could only have intermittent monitoring until it was time to push, at which point I'd have to wear the monitor belt.  Ros doesn't make me do that.  Instead, she holds the Doppler sensor on my belly the entire time I am pushing, while also holding one of my legs and coaching me.  She is a superstar.)

There are no stirrups.  We've discussed what position I'd like for pushing, and I want to start with what I did last time, sitting on the bed.  If that doesn't prove effective, we'll try something else.

Bryan holds one of my legs and Ros holds the other, and I prepare to push.  With Camilla I spent forty minutes moving her down the birth canal - the hardest physical work of my life - and I'm expecting something like that again.  As I wait for the next contraction to hit I tell Ros I might need a reminder about how to push.  She's confident and calming right next to my head, such a reassuring presence.  She tells me to take a deep, cleansing breath and then push with the contraction.

I feel the squeezing pain start.  I breathe deeply and push. 

And...

"He's crowning!"

I am shocked that the baby can be crowning already.  With Camilla it took so much work pushing to get to this point.  This time, I've barely begun and we're already in sight of the finish line!  I'm incredibly relieved.

I'm also taken aback by the topical pain that I'm feeling.  All of a sudden I know what they mean by "ring of fire!" 

Since the birth I've figured out that when I had Camilla, the doctor attending the birth gave me a pudendal block without my explicit consent.  (I think I probably mumbled "okay" when she said, "I'm going to numb you a little bit here.") 

So the perineal pain that goes with giving birth is a new thing for me.  It's certainly painful, but after the pain of transition contractions, it doesn't seem like such a big deal.

Now that I know the baby is crowning, so close to being born, I'm impatient to meet him.  I keep pushing even after my contraction ends.  I want to just push and push until the baby comes out.  Ros gently reminds me that without the help of a contraction my pushing isn't going to be very effective, and I know she's right, so I lean back and rest.

After another push-with-all-my-strength, the baby is still firmly in place, and I find myself once more trying to keep pushing through the space between contractions.  I'm so excited about meeting this baby, so enthused by the prospect of ending the pain and meeting the post-birth hormonal rush, that I just want to keep sprinting until I get there.  But I know it won't do any good, and I need to rest.

To me, in the middle of it, it feels like time is crawling, but Bryan will tell me later that it was just a few minutes that I pushed.  Ten or fifteen, maybe.  After the third or fourth contraction, Ros sees that I'm getting discouraged and tells me to reach down and feel my baby's head.  It is slimy, warm, strange and wonderful.

Elaine, in true midwife style, is working the perineal massage.  I will tear as little as possible under her watchful eye.

Then, suddenly, the final contraction.  Combined with my own all-out effort, it moves the baby out.  Whoosh!  And he is lying on my stomach, blood and fluid and vernix getting all over my gown.

I am elated, delighted to meet my little son.  He looks slightly larger than Camilla did at birth (it turns out he weighs 11 ounces more) and he is bright red and squirming.  His yell is loud and strong.  They leave him on my belly, still attached to his cord, so we can have a few minutes to get to know him.

It is not until this moment that I realize just how much Camilla (whose first APGAR score was a 2) did not look like a healthy baby when she was born.  She was limp and purple, and we would not hear her cry until hours later, after they'd suctioned a good bit of fluid out of her airways. 

Blaise (APGAR 9) looks so different from her, and I am incredibly grateful.  As a first-time mother I did not understand how much I was missing by not getting to spend those first hours with my baby, but now I know.  I would be sad if I wasn't getting this time with him.

Part 12 is here.

Blaise's Birth: Part 10

Part 1 is here.
Part 2 is here.
Part 3 is here.
Part 4 is here.
Part 5 is here.
Part 6 is here.
Part 7 is here.
Part 8 is here.
Part 9 is here.

Bryan helps me climb on to the bed so that my midwife, Elaine, can check my cervix.  I only have a minute or two between contractions so she understands the need to be quick, and she is, smiling at me as she announces that I've progressed very well.

"Nine or nine-and-a-half centimeters," she says, then asks if she may go ahead and break my water now.

I've read about the risks of early amniotomy (infection, cord compression, etc) but since I figured an intact sac this late in labor would never happen to me, I haven't researched whether it's a good idea to break it now.  I trust Elaine, though, and figure there's no reason not to have her break the sac for me; I've been expecting it to break any minute this whole time anyway, since the resident declared it "bulging" hours ago.

After Elaine uses the hook to break the bag, there is a small gush of fluid, nothing like what I experienced at the beginning of my labor with Camilla.  The midwife says this is because the baby's head is already so far down.  And I believe it.  I can feel the pressure.

Finding out I am so near to the end is heartening and rejuvenating.  It's well after 4:30am. (There are two clocks in the room, an analog and a digital, and they're telling times about twenty minutes apart.  I'll find out later that it's the analog that is correct, but during my labor I am continually confused about what time it is.)  We've now been at the hospital for four-and-a-half hours.

The midwife and the nurse ask if I'd like to get back off the bed.  Elaine says she noticed in my birth plan that I thought I might like to try pushing in different positions, and she's happy to do whatever I want.

And oddly, with the options open to me, I find what I really want to do is stay on the bed.  I'm sitting cross-legged which seems to relieve some of the pressure of the baby's head, and I think I'm as comfortable as I can get for now.

The lights are dim in the room.  Bryan has pulled his chair next to the bed and is sitting to the left of me, holding my hand between contractions and offering his support and encouragement.  Elaine perches on a stool near the foot of the bed, no urgency about her: she's just hanging out and making conversation while we wait for my body to do its thing.  Ros, comfortably quiet and competent, is moving things around and getting ready for the birth.

I'm in regular and excruciating pain, so it's strange that I am reveling in this moment.  Later I will remember it as the most peaceful time of my labor.  My spirits have lifted since I found out that we are so close to the finish line.  I have no doubts that we can make it there.  I am loving having Bryan close to me, loving the knowledge that we have weathered this labor on our own, loving the strength of our marriage and our family in this moment.  I am happily anticipating getting to meet our son.

It's labor as a metaphor for life: enduring the hard for the good, turning the hard into good.

The contractions are just as painful as ever, but now that I know how well they are working, how close they are getting me, I am having a much easier time enduring them.  During each one I close my eyes, tip my head back, rock side to side.  I am abiding them, and as each one passes I welcome the peace that follows it.

Elaine and Ros both tell us that it is a pleasure to be with us for this birth.  We seem so happy, so peaceful, they say.  "Births like this are the reason I became an L&D nurse," Ros tells us, and with the hormones coursing through my body it is all I can do not to burst into gratified tears.  Both women are contributing so much to my good experience of this labor that I am happy to know it is a good experience for them too.

I probably ride about ten contractions while I'm on the bed, and one of them is milder than the others, ending about fifteen seconds early.  I can feel it starting to ease unexpectedly and I smile with my eyes still closed as I come out of it.

"I can't believe you were just smiling during a contraction," Elaine grins at me.  "This is unbelievable!"

And as much as I insist that I was smiling after the contraction, I'll find later that my smile has inadvertently made me the story of the night in the L&D ward.

Elaine isn't going to check me again; she says my body will tell us when it's time to push.  I know mere rectal pressure doesn't necessarily mean we're there yet - I've been feeling that for a while - but as time passes the downward force is getting stronger with each contraction.  With the last few of them I get frantic, wringing my hands and whining a little.  I'm definitely starting to lose my cool.

I'm struck, again this time, by the strangeness of this whole prospect.  The force of the pressure is so strong that it seems impossible my body is still intact.  And yet somehow I'm going to push a baby out of me?  And then afterward I will feel better?  Incredibly bizarre.

But during contractions I'm beyond thinking about that.  Finally one of them hits that increases the pressure so much I can no longer hold my cross-legged position.  I almost jump out of it onto my knees.  "I think it's time!" I say, shakily but forcefully.

Elaine is reaching for her gloves, Ros is moving equipment around.  I vaguely register another nurse or two coming into the room.

This baby is going to come out.

Part 11 is here.

Blaise's Birth: Part 9

Part 1 is here.
Part 2 is here.
Part 3 is here.
Part 4 is here.
Part 5 is here.
Part 6 is here.
Part 7 is here.
Part 8 is here.

I'm on the birthing ball, I think, for about an hour, starting at 3:30am.  During that time, my nurse Ros takes a fifteen-minute break, and another nurse named Courtney comes in to hang out with us while Ros is eating.  She tells me that Ros has given orders not to let her miss anything important - she wants to cut out of her break and come back if I get close to my birth.  In my heightened, exhausted state, I'm touched by this.

Courtney is friendly and talkative, and although during contractions I have to check out, I can still hold a conversation.  We make small talk and she's encouraging, mentioning how well I am doing.  I'm grateful for the encouragement.

While Courtney is in the room we talk about my doing the birth drug-free and I tell her that although I know I can do it, there will inevitably be a point in my labor when I second-guess my decision.  Immediately, an extra-strong contraction hits and I laugh ruefully as it peaks and passes.  This is that moment, I tell them.  This is the moment when I'm wishing I'd opted for an epidural.

I know transition is arriving, and I'm becoming too tired to sit upright on the ball during my contractions.  My body needs more support.

During my labor with Camilla I spent transition in a recliner-style rocking chair that was in the room, and there's a similar chair in this room.  I want to move into it.

I tell Bryan and - because there's no nurse in the room - he moves some pads from the bed to the chair so I can sit in it, pulling a hard-backed chair nearby for himself.

Despite the prediction of the resident in triage, my water still hasn't broken.  I'm expecting that any time.

The transition contractions start to come just as I expected they would, just as they did last time.  They're usually in pairs, with little time to rest in between.  They seem long to me and I have Bryan time one: it lasts three minutes.  That's an unusually lengthy one; most of them are only lasting a minute and a half or so.  But what they lack in length they make up for in strength.

I have lost my zen now.  I'm not panicking because I know I must not.  I'm not vocalizing because it doesn't help me.  But am I not calm either.  My insides churn after each contraction because I know another one is coming.

This is the hardest part of labor for me.  It was last time, it will be so this time as well.  This is the part where the pain is so all-encompassing that when I am inside it, time nearly ceases to exist.  With each earlier contraction I had the consolation that it would soon be over, but with these I am so overwhelmed that I cannot believe it.  Each one has the potential to last three minutes.  From inside that pain, there is little difference between three minutes and eternity.

I weather them the only way I know how: rocking in the chair to feel the cold floor on the bottoms of my bare feet, gripping the arms of the chair to send the tension somewhere, anywhere, so that I can keep the rest of my body relaxed.  I have to fight the pain by refusing to let it conquer me.  If I tense, I will no longer be able to cope.

Ros comes back into the room and I tell her that I think I am getting close.  She goes to wake the midwife.

When Elaine comes in the room, bleary-eyed but cheerful, I'm overcome by self-doubt.  What if I've just woken her for nothing?  During my labor with Camilla I went through six hours of fairly painful contractions and failed to progress at all.  Those contractions were nothing like these, but anything could happen, right?

I laugh shakily, self-consciously, as I tell Elaine I'd like her to check me.  Throughout this labor I've been confident in my instincts but I am suddenly uncertain of myself.

"If I'm still at five centimeters, I'm getting an epidural."  I try to make it sound like a joke, but I'm quite serious.

Because what I'm really saying, of course, is, "I'm tired of this.  I'm ready to be done." 

Ros assures me that there's no way I'm still at five centimeters.  Elaine smiles too as she pulls on her gloves.  She seems to hear the meaning of my words rather than the words themselves.

"Don't worry," she says.  "I'll check you.  And if you're at nine, we'll break your water and have this baby."

Part 10 is here.

Blaise's Birth: Part 8

Part 1 is here.
Part 2 is here.
Part 3 is here.
Part 4 is here.
Part 5 is here.
Part 6 is here.
Part 7 is here.
Part 8 is here.

While I'm on the birthing ball, I manage pretty well.  Yes, I'm no longer interested in being touched, but I'm weathering each contraction with no real difficulties.

As time moves along, the pain is deepening, strengthening.  Earlier in my labor I could isolate it, relegate its effects to one part of me, but now each contraction brings pain for my whole self.  I center my mind on my uterus with each excruciating swell; I've learned that refusing to sink into my contractions means losing my ability to ride them.  I have to... sort of... join myself to the pain.  I have to accept it to make it through it.

Labor pain is unlike any other pain I've felt.  It's harder, yes (although I've heard there are other types of pain that are even worse) but that's not the main thing.  What makes the difference for me is that this is productive pain.  I know that each contraction serves a purpose, that my body is opening up so my baby can move down and out.  Keeping that purpose in mind stops me from tensing and fighting the pain.  I work with it.

But I have to be in my own space to do that, which is why I can't have Bryan touching me during my contractions.  Between them, I want to hold his hand, hear his voice, have the comfort of his presence.  Inside them, I have to go it alone.

(Although it occurs to me now, retrospectively, that perhaps the reason I was able to go it alone was that I was decidedly not doing so.  As I prayed, "Abide..." through the pain I never felt I was alone in my head.  I could feel the presence of God who gives life as his gift, and during my labor I was aware, in a subconscious but very real way, of the fact that this whole deal - our child's existence, his growth, his birth - was a miraculous testament to God's glory.

I never thought about that, consciously, at the time.  But four-and-a-half months later it seems so obvious that it was the awareness of God's presence and providence that made Blaise's birth such an incredible experience for me.)

During contractions, even the ball on which I am swaying and bouncing ceases to exist for me.  It's just me, riding the pain.

Part 9 is here.

Blaise's Birth: Part 7

Part 1 is here.
Part 2 is here.
Part 3 is here.
Part 4 is here.
Part 5 is here.
Part 6 is here.

I'm loving the tub.  But even as my contractions are getting longer and stronger, they're also spacing out and failing to come at regular intervals.  This happened during my last labor, too - I was fairly comfortable lying on my left side, but felt instinctively that I needed to be upright to get things moving.  Lying down I'd been stalled out at 4.5cm, but once I got up I went from 4.5cm to birth in three hours.

I feel the same way this time: I want to stay where I am in the warm water, but I feel that I'll end up with much more labor to manage if I don't get it moving along.

There is a key difference between this time and last time: with Camilla's labor I felt external pressure about the progress of my labor.  The doctor actually mentioned the word "c-section" only eight hours after my water had broken, and I knew more and more Pitocin would be coming if we didn't get the baby out.  (My labor ended up being only eleven hours, quite short for a first delivery, and Camilla never showed signs of distress.)  The doctor or one of the nurses was checking my cervix for progress every one-and-a-half to two hours.

This time, I know the midwife who is in charge of my care will not pressure me about lack of progress for a very long time.  She came in at 2:30am, bleary-eyed.  She'd been at the hospital for a birth at 11:30pm and had just gotten home when she got the call to come back for my birth.  She was ready to offer labor support for me, but we told her to please go ahead and take a nap in the on-call room - I actually feel she'd probably rather have my labor take a while longer!

Ros, my wonderful nurse, isn't pressuring me either.  No one has said a word about artificial labor augmentation, and Ros told me when I asked that they wouldn't be checking my cervix until I was feeling like pushing.  "Your body will tell us when you're ready," she said.  (I kind of wanted to hug her.)

But after being in labor for more than five hours, and because it's the middle of the night, I want to speed my labor along so that we can meet our son and relax.  So, with the help of Ros and Bryan, I get out of the tub and back into my gown.  It's around 3:30am now.

Thinking about moving forward, I have the idea of resting on the bed for ten minutes or so before going into the next stage.  But as they help me on to the bed, I can already tell it's not going to work.  My contractions are too strong for me to be stationary during them.  There is no way I'm going to be able to sit still, let alone lie down!

Every room in the L&D ward has a birthing ball, and I want to try using it.  I didn't have one during my labor with Camilla (silly backwards hospital also let me have nothing but ice chips - during this labor I've downed several large cups of ice water and a few small ones of juice) but during our birthing class I tried the ball and thought it was pretty cool.  I wasn't in labor then, though, so I don't know how it'll work now.

Ros suggests that we lower the bed and set the ball next to it.  We put a pillow by my head, and I sit on the ball, facing the bed.  I bounce and sway through each contraction and rest my upper body on the bed between them, laying my head on the pillow and closing my eyes.  It works surprisingly well.

Bryan's sitting in a chair behind me, putting his hands on my back and shoulders for comfort as the contractions hit.  For a while this feels good, but after a while I don't want him touching me anymore.  With each contraction I need to be along in my head and my body to make it through the wave.

I'm not positive, but I'm guessing that my newfound desire not to be touched - along with the still-strengthening contractions - means transition is arriving.

Part 8 is here.

Blaise's Birth: Part 6 (Special Double Edition)

Part 1 is here.
Part 2 is here.
Part 3 is here.
Part 4 is here.
Part 5 is here.

After it is determined that I am 4cm dilated and will be admitted, the triage nurse brings in Ros, the nurse who is to win my heartfelt gratitude and allegiance in the coming hours.  I'm not sure our hospital accepts requests for nurses but if I have another baby there I am going to try my darnedest to get Ros as my nurse again, so terrific is she.

She comes into the triage room carrying a pile of linens and she seems very quiet so I am momentarily worried.  I have a fear of trying to deal with passive-aggressive people and often the quiet ones turn out to be that way.  But I learn very quickly that Ros is awesome - she is immediately on board with my all-natural birth plan and she gets us started working toward it right away.

I want to get into the Jacuzzi tub as soon as I can - our hospital's L&D wing has only two rooms with tubs, but it is nearly empty that night, so I get one of them.  The hospital is okay with intermittent monitoring (it requires a Doppler check every half hour) but you have to do 20 minutes of baseline when you first get to your room, so Ros puts me on those monitors and then goes to fill the tub.

(It seems silly to me that I need 20 minutes of baseline monitoring when I'd been on the monitors in triage for more than an hour and a half, but I guess that's just how hospitals roll.)

I am still managing my labor quite well at this point.  I sit cross-legged on the bed and chat with Ros as she moves around the room doing various things.  She has a peaceful energy and a soft voice, and I can tell that she's going to be good to have around in the coming hours.

Contractions require me to concentrate and breathe deeply, but they are still easy.  The 20 minutes are up in no time.

Somewhere in there the IV person comes and puts one in my left arm; they start me on antibiotics immediately because I need four hours before the baby is born.  (Heh.)

Ros helps me get undressed and into the tub.  The warm water, as I expected, feels wonderful.  Being in the tub is a little awkward because of my IV, but because there is nothing I can do about that, I don't waste time being annoyed with it.

I have Bryan bring me my book and then send him to get some coffee.  By then it is 2:30am and he's been up since the previous morning; I can tell he is really starting to drag.

I read a little in between contractions - probably about ten pages total - but soon abandon my book because I am losing my ability to concentrate.  When the pain of one contraction ends, I lean back and rest until the next one comes.

The hour I spend in the tub is the hardest, mentally, of my entire labor.  It is also the only time I doubt my birth plan even a little bit, not because the pain is unbearable yet - it is nowhere near - but because Bryan is so tired, and I hate to think of the toll the coming hours of having to do labor support will take on him.  For his sake there is a tiny part of me that thinks it would be better if I just got an epidural and we could sleep for a while.

(I don't tell him what I am thinking, of course.  Weeks after the birth I will tell him about it, and he will look at me in disbelief.  "You thought about having an epidural for my sake?  But you were the one doing all the hard work!"  He's such a great man.)

After he's had his coffee, though, he starts to perk up.  He is sitting on the steps by the tub, holding my hand during contractions and telling me how well I am doing. 
Between contractions we relax and talk quietly together, mostly about the huge change that is coming to our lives in just a few hours.

Ros comes in twice with the Doppler while I'm in the tub.  I have to sit on the edge and wait through a contraction so she can listen to the baby's heartbeat.  He sounds great, and I am thankful for that and for the fact that I don't have to be on continuous monitors.  The cold, hard edge of the tub against the back of my thighs reminds me how important positions and comfort measures are for labor support - a contraction is much, much more bearable when I'm immersed in the warm water.

My contractions are longer and stronger now, and it's while I'm in the tub that I develop the coping strategy that will take me through the rest of my labor.  As each one comes I anticipate it with a deep breath (I found during my labor with Camilla that this was crucial, and it's still true), and as the contraction washes over me I tip my head back and sink into it.  I center myself and work with it, thinking of the baby moving down and things opening up.

And in my head, the small part of me that still has cerebral energy left, I sing.  There's a song we sing at our parish, a simple one, and the chorus goes like this:

Abide, oh Lord, abide, oh Lord
Never cease to make your home in me.
That I might abide, oh Lord, abide, oh Lord,
Making my eternal home in thee.

With Camilla, my labor took me so by surprise that I had not prepared for it spiritually at all.  This time I've thought about it in advance; I know what intentions I want to offer.  Only between contractions am I thinking directly of those intentions, but in each contraction I am inviting Jesus to be with me and in me, and I am doing it through this song.

(Later in my labor I will lose the mental acuity to make it through the song's entire chorus, and the words that get me through the pain will be simply "abide, oh Lord" and eventually just "abide, abide, abide".)

It makes all the difference.

Part 7 is here.