Kind of Like the Movies...

Fair warning: this post is about labor and delivery.

Back when I had Abby, I was very unimpressed by the portrayal of labor in movies. It's always like "Hey, my water broke!" and an hour later there's a baby in the mom's arms. Whatever. But I guess sometimes that's not too far off the mark...

Flash back to April 9th. I had just returned from a doctor appointment where she told me I was 3-4 cm dilated. After the appointment, I started having regular contractions, but they were about 8 minutes apart. Intense, yes, but not frequent enough to warrant a trip to the hospital. After having sounded a false alarm the Friday before (stupid false labor) I was reluctant to claim that I was actually in labor. So I waited. And waited. And waited for them to get closer together. Abby went to bed. Alex went to bed. I stayed on the couch, dozing for 8 minute stretches. And then at 1:30 am, I swear to god there was an audible "POP!" Oh. That's what it's like when your water breaks. And all of a sudden the contractions were 2-3 minutes apart and hellish. I woke Alex up, he called Brian to warn him that we were descending on him, piled Abby into the van, and we headed out. When you're REALLY in labor, riding in the car sucks. Every time a contraction came I made Alex turn the radio up so Abby couldn't hear me groaning. To his credit, Alex only ran a few red lights on the way. We dropped a sleepy Abby off with Brian and headed to the hospital, only to find out that we had no idea where to go. Darn. I guess we should have done that hospital tour after all. We finally found the right place to park and headed up to Triage. We made it there by about 2:15 am. The puking started, and when they checked me I was 6-7 cm dilated. Clearly real labor. They sent me up to my room--I insisted on walking, much to the nurse's confusion--she must have offered me a wheelchair 10 times on the way. I arrived to the room around 2:45 am. They had a tub of warm water waiting for me (awesome!) but I hadn't been in it for 5 minutes before I suddenly HAD to push. Since I had an epidural last time around, I wasn't really prepared for what it feels like to NEED to push. With Abby, they kept saying "Push when you feel like you have to" and I was thinking "What the hell do you mean? I don't feel like pushing, it hurts!" But wow. When you don't have an epidural, there's really no stopping the pushing. Then, at 3:27 am, he was born! He was moving and crying and clearly quite healthy (compare Abby's apgar score of 1 to James' of 9). They put him on my chest and let Dad cut the umbilical cord. Walla! I mean, it wasn't easy. In fact, I burst all the blood vessels in my face pushing him out. But boy, you can't beat short.

The only wrinkle was the post birth hemorrhaging...but a little morphine helped me get through that part juuuuust fiiiine.

I am ITCHING to go running, but they tell me I have to wait 6 weeks. I might wait 4, we'll see.

I'll wind up with just a couple of pretty pictures of our son.