Asher's Birth Story -- 2 1/2 Years Late

Getting ready for another baby to be born gave me enough motivation to finally write Asher's birth story, which I promised to post here more than 2 years ago.  Warning: I'm pretty blunt. So if you don't like birth or medical stuff or may never be able to view me the same way after having me use the word cervix, I'd suggest you skip it.  Plus it's dang long.  :) 

According to the midwive’s magic wheel, Asher was “due” on August 31, 2009. I was pretty positive I had ovulated a little late, though, and thought his due date was more like September 1^st or 2^nd. Both Evan and Caleb having been born 5 and 4 days, respectively, past their due dates, I did not expect Asher to make his grand entrance before September 5^th or 6^th, though I thought there was some possibility he might come a bit sooner than that, as he was my third and Caleb (#2) had come a day earlier than Evan (#1) had.  In fact, after Asher’s due date had come and gone, I remember having dinner at the home of some good friends, whose oldest son had been born on September 9^th.  He expressed the thought that maybe Asher would be born on his birthday.  I didn’t say so, but I didn’t think there was any way my 3^rd child would be born a full 10 days late, even though a birthdate of 9/9/9 would be pretty cool.

The due date(s) came and went.  Days went by with no signs of this baby being born.  I finally started to get impatient.  There was even one day when I was nearish 41 weeks that I had Scott come home from work/school early because I was pretty sure I was in labor.  It fizzled into nothing.   Never happened to me before.  I felt like a first-time mom who couldn’t tell the difference between real and false/prodromal labor.  I went in for my 41-week appointment and asked the midwife to strip my membranes.  If I recall correctly, that was my first cervical check and I was hoping that maybe the prodromal labor was at least doing something.  Nope.  I was only dilated to a 1-2, just like I always am before I hit active labor.  (Maybe one of the reasons I have long labors?)  The membrane stripping was uncomfortable and also ineffective.

Because I was more than a week past my due date, we scheduled a non-stress test after for a few days later (after the 3-day weekend).  I did not believe I would make it to that appointment.  But I did.  Fortunately, Asher looked fine on the monitor and there was no need to induce.  I asked the midwife to strip my membranes again and authorized her to be as aggressive as she reasonably could be.  It did NOT feel good (I believe she said she was able to stretch me to 5cm, though of course I didn’t stay there), but I started having more serious contractions on our way home.  We stopped at Olive Garden to pick up dinner for ourselves, my mom, and Evan and Caleb.  I recall having to stop a couple of times on the way into and out of the restaurant to deal with contractions.  I did not want anything to eat, but I was pretty darn sure I was finally in active labor.

We went home after that, and this is when things get pretty hazy for me, especially since it all happened 2 ½ years ago.  I think I just kept dealing with contractions while my mom and Scott took care of the boys.  I remember kneeling backward on the couch a lot, and I’m sure I must have gotten in the shower at one point, but I really don’t remember much of any of that.  I do know that after a few hours I began feeling very frustrated because I did not feel like I was dealing with the contractions as well as I had when I was in labor with Caleb.  Somewhere around midnight (I think), I started to make comments about going to the hospital soon.  Scott appropriately ignored my requests for a while.  It wasn’t until I threw up once that he decided we should head in.  I know by this point I was vocalizing during the contractions.  I continued to feel like I wasn’t handling them well.  I was much more aware of the time in between contractions and was not able to zone out as well as I had been able to with Caleb.

We got to the hospital around 1am or 2am.  Don’t remember much about that.  I do know that we had called ahead and told them we wanted the tub set up.  I was happy to see that the midwife on call, Leila, was one I had met recently and really liked.  (I switched hospitals and midwife practices only several weeks prior, so I had not met all the midwives.)  It was a slow night and Leila ended up being in the room with us for almost the entire night.  Talk about awesome labor support.

Here again the details are hazy. I don’t remember how long it was before I could get in the tub or what I did in the meantime.  I *think* they monitored the baby for some period of time first, and I know that I was 6cm upon arrival.  I also know that I loved being in the tub.  It was big and deep and constantly warm (it had a heating mechanism to keep the water at the appropriate temperature).  So I sat and labored in the tub for quite some time.  Contractions kept coming but didn’t seem to get any worse.  Scott and Leila chatted away, with me participating a fair portion of the time.  It was all comparatively pleasant.  A little too pleasant.  After a few hours of that and seeing that the contractions didn’t seem to be getting any more intense or frequent, Leila expressed some concern that perhaps the tub was a little too effective for me, that it was relaxing me too much and stalling labor.

This was particularly concerning because I was getting really tired. Also really hungry, which was a new experience for me in labor. Usually I don’t want to eat anything.  So Leila offered a cervical check (sure enough I was STILL at a depressing 6cm) and suggested I try laboring out of the tub for an hour to see if that moved things along. She also suggested I consider having her break my water, as that might speed things up.  I was reluctant to allow any sort of intervention, though, and so declined at that point.  The nurse also brought me some peanut butter toast, which I was not really able to eat, despite feeling hungry.

Unfortunately, the only thing getting out of the tub helped with was making the contractions hurt more.  I definitely felt them more strongly and was having more difficulty coping with them, but an hour later I had still made no progress. Leila again brought up the possibility of breaking my water. She told me that it was entirely up to me, but that she was worried, based on what she was seeing, about my having enough energy to keep things going for several hours more.  She mentioned that if she broke my water we might be able to have the baby here in as soon as an hour.  I really was feeling remarkably exhausted at that point, in a way I had not with the longer labors of both Evan and Caleb, and so agreed to the AROM.

Literally within seconds of having my water broken, I had the most horrendous contraction and began throwing up.  I didn’t see it, of course, but Scott told me that Leila and the nurse smiled and nodded in satisfaction when that began to happen.  Someone (I can’t remember if it was the nurse or Leila) suggested I try sitting on a birth ball in the shower to try to encourage the baby to move down and get into a more favorable position.  I HATE sitting on the birth ball when I’m in labor because it makes everything hurt so much more (probably because it opens the pelvis up and makes the contractions more effective), but I was desperate to be done, so into the shower and onto the birth ball I went.

Unfortunately, all of this happened right at the beginning of shift change for the midwives.  So after having spent nearly the entire night in the room with us providing fabulous labor support, Leila had to leave to get ready to hand things over to the next midwife coming on duty.  The nurse was in and out of the room at this point, while I sat on the birth ball and Scott sprayed hot water on my back.  And. I. Wanted. To. Die.  The contractions were so awful, I wasn’t sure how much longer I was going to be able to handle them, but I was also pretty sure I was too far along for an epidural.  I even remember thinking that I might be willing to take a c-section at that point, if someone were to offer me one, just to make it all stop.  And the biggest problem was that I was thinking I still had a good 45 minutes to an hour left before Asher would be ready to be born.  (It had only been 10, maybe 15 minutes since I’d had my water broken.)

A couple more contractions and I just couldn’t take being on the birth ball anymore and fell to my knees.  At this point I began to feel this odd stinging sensation and wondered (quite stupidly, in hindsight), what on earth it was.  It took another contraction for me to realize that, duh, that feeling was the baby crowning.  I just so had it in my head that I had an hour to wait that it simply did not occur to me, until I had an intense urge to push, that maybe everything was so intense because it was moving along a lot faster.  For a minute I thought Scott would be delivering Asher by himself on the bathroom floor.  I somehow managed to communicate to Scott that the baby was ready to come and he needed to get the midwife.  He yelled for the nurse who ran to get Leila, and I was able to make it through the contraction without pushing.

Leila and the nurse came back in and asked whether I wanted to deliver in the tub, bed, or elsewhere.   To be honest, at that point I didn’t much care, but I chose the tub.  They helped me get back into it, and I got on my knees and leaned my arms against the side of the tub, facing outwards.  At this point, Scott tells me, there were at least two midwives in the room, Leila and the midwife who was coming on duty, as well as the nurse.  But they were all kind of scrambling because they could not find the special gown and gloves they were supposed to use for a waterbirth. 

I, however, was completely unaware of this as another contraction hit and I again felt that intense need to push.  What I could not figure out, though, was why no one was helping me or saying anything to me.  In fact, I think I even said, “Help me” a couple of times.  Everything was happening very quickly, though, and no one responded to my request because they were frantically trying to find the stupid gloves and gown.

Well, I thought for a minute about waiting until someone told me whether it was ok to push or not, but then I decided I was already in water, no one needed to catch the baby, and I was going to push anyway.  Probably not actually a smart thing to do, but what woman in labor is rational?  So I pushed once and the head came out, and I pushed a second time and the whole body came shooting out.  Like a torpedo, Scott said.  In fact, he’s the one who would know because he was the only one to actually see Asher be born.  After Asher was out I remember saying, “Where is he? Where is he?” and someone said, “He’s right behind you.”  So I turned around and scooped him up.  I was the first person to touch him or hold him, which to me is still one of the most amazing things about his birth.

 

(Holding Asher minutes after he was born.)

The cord was around his neck, but they untangled him pretty quickly and he had good Apgar scores, though I don’t actually remember what they were.  I got out of the tub to deliver the placenta, had so little bleeding that the midwives actually remarked on it, and had only minimal tearing that required no stitches, despite Asher’s extremely rapid entrance into the world.  All told, I went from 6cm to Asher being born in about 15 minutes, maybe 20.  Leila said that we could just have stayed home since we didn’t end up needing her to do anything.  We were also told by another midwife who was coming into the room as Asher was being born and *kind of* saw him being born, that it looked like he might have come out turned a little funny, which would explain why I got stuck at 6cm for so dang long. Who knows, though.  Altogether, it was quite the experience, one I’m pretty sure was shared around the midwives office because the receptionist seemed to know about it when I called to schedule my post-partum visit a week later.

(With Leila, my awesome midwife).

Air Travel with Kids Is Fun

Our big summer trip to California began at 3:30am EST, when we woke the kids up and buckled them in the car. Forty-five minutes later we were at the airport and being informed by Southwest that to have Asher fly as a lap child, we needed to have his birth certificate or immunization record to prove his birth date. We had neither. I used to fly with the boys' birth certificates, but then no one ever asked me for them so I stopped bothering. Not to worry, the airline informed us. We could simply purchase Asher a seat right then, and they'd even give us the infant rate. And we would "probably" be reimbursed by the airline later if we sent them the receipt and proof of Asher's birth date.

It was 4am. Our suitcases were packed, our car was in the long-term lot, our boys were full of anticipation, we had a rental car scheduled for pick-up in Sacramento at noon. We bought the seat.

This is Asher.

This is Asher's new backpack.

This is Asher pulling his backpack.



Apparently, this is some kind of magical cuteness formula, because never in my 5 1/2 years of being a mother has any of my children garnered the kind of attention Asher and that backpack did. People of all ages, genders, races, and nationalities stopped to stare and giggle as he pulled it down the terminal or ran with it down the moving walkway. Even groups of tattooed twenty-something young men commented. It was like traveling with a B-list celebrity, without any autographing. Scott has decided that if I'm going to die, I should do it soon so that he can use Asher and his backpack to find a new wife.

So we're at the airport in Chicago. The airport in Chicago has lots of moving walkways. The boys LOVE moving walkways. We went up and down the moving walkways while we were waiting for our connection until I found myself chasing Caleb, who was running gleefully away from me in the wrong direction on the moving walkway, while what felt like the entire terminal stopped to watch and everyone on the walkway jumped out of the way to let him go by rather than, I don't know, stopping him for me. That was the end of playing on the moving walkway.

I've already blocked out the details of the actual flights except for a general recollection that Asher reinforced my belief that kids from 18months to 2 1/2 years or so are the worst to travel with.

Once we finally arrived at the airport in Sacramento Scott had to go get the rental car while I waited in the terminal with all the kids and bags. Caleb continued to enjoy running away from me, so he got to spend some time sitting in his car seat on the curb while a very nice airport police officer on a Segway tried to distract him. The getting of the rental car took longer than expected (doesn't it always?), so I let Asher out of the stroller to run around (with his backpack, of course). While I was chasing after him and talking to Scott on the phone about when he was going to be there, Evan, who was sitting in one of the car seats on the curb, pulled one of the plastic car seat bags the airline had give us over himself. A couple of women walking by stopped him and then proceeded to give me the longest, dirtiest looks I have ever received in my 5 1/2 years as a parent. Apparently they were unimpressed with my parenting and supervision skills.

Eventually Scott arrived with the car, we discovered the only way we and all of the luggage could fit was with half of our stuff sitting on our laps, and then we were off. Caleb fell asleep in about 30 seconds and Evan spent the next 2 hours asking us 162 times if we were almost there. Finally, a good 16 hours after we left our house in Massachusetts, we arrived at Grandma and Grandpa's house in Redding.

Hiking to a waterfall on a very uncharacteristically cold day.

Scott explaining rock formation, erosion, or some such thing to the boys.

Throwing sticks in the waterfall.

Asher trying to fling himself in the river.