Here is my son’s birth story. There is one point where you might need to use your BOP as I freaked out a little during transformation… I think that this was in part due to the fact that my midwife was not supportive of Hypnobabies at all, but I didn’t know that ahead of time… I didn’t have very long to get to know her, However she was better than the OB, so I’m glad that I used her instead of him…
This was my first Hypnobabies birth. I was terrible at remembering to do the finger drop practices. But I was really good at listening to my scripts in my sleep each night! *Grin* Over all, I noticed that I was a lot calmer with this birth than any of my others, and it was all pressure sensations; intense pressure sensations, but nothing I’d call pain. I will for sure use Hypnobabies if there is a next time!
At 35 weeks I changed from an OB to a midwife.
At 36 weeks and 5 days, I went into labor, or so I thought. I kept thinking that it would be really cool to have this baby born on April 1st, as I thought it would be a fun birth date. So I was pretty darn excited when I woke up about 1:30am on April 1st to pressure waves coming every 10 minutes. I laid in bed listening to my Hypnobabies scripts and trying to rest in between them without success for an hour before I woke up my husband.
For the next two hours or so I walked, I climbed the stairs, I took a shower – all in an attempt to either get the pressure waves to get stronger or to go away. They were noticeable, but not uncomfortable. I normally wouldn’t have even toyed with the idea of calling the midwife, but I’d read so many birth stories of women who had used Hypnobabies during their labors and didn’t even realize they were really in labor because everything was so easy.
After about 3 hours of pressure waves that kept coming every 10 minutes consistently I called her. It took her 40 minutes to wake up and drive to our home. In that time I had another 4 contractions. However as soon as she got here everything stopped. She checked me to see if the contractions had been doing anything and found that I was 50% effaced and 3 cm dilated. She could feel the sutures in his skull so she knew that he was lined up in the optimum position for birth; and that the birth would probably go rather quickly when it finally started for real. Since nothing was happening anymore she urged me to get some sleep and she was going to sleep on the couch and see if things would pick up again. They didn’t… This was our baby’s first April Fool’s joke he ever played on us. I’m sure it won’t be his last. *grin*
I went to my next midwife appointment 6 days later and mentioned that I’d been having the kind of hot, sweaty episodes that I usually get AFTER birth, for the last two nights. My midwife said that she thought that the baby would probably come within the next couple days, probably before the weekend was out. That gave me a lot of hope. I was so excited to meet this little guy, and I wasn’t the only one. That morning my almost 3 year old daughter had come into my bedroom as soon as she woke up, and the first words out of her mouth were: “Did my little brother come last night?” *grin*
We kept hoping that he would come before April 8th so that we could add him to our insurance through my hubby’s old employer and he would be covered in case something went wrong within the first month of his life. However he didn’t. On Saturday morning, April 9th, my hubby went to work at his new company and found out that due to a mix up that we wouldn’t be eligible for even catastrophic insurance until after he had been with this company full time for a whole month. So now there was no way at all for Baby to be covered by ANY insurance at all at the time of birth. I started to freak out even more, but my hubby pointed out that maybe this was a test to be a trial of our faith. We knew we were doing the right thing by taking this job now. We just needed to decide if we were going to stress about this insurance thing, that we couldn’t do anything about, or if we were going to put our faith in the Lord and leave our health in His hands. We made the conscious decision to put it all in His hands. Immediately peace descended upon me and I knew that whatever happened was what was meant to be, and that the Lord wouldn’t leave us alone.
While my hubby had been at work that morning, the kids had finally filled the “bean jar” and had earned their outing to Incredible Pizza with Mom and Dad. As soon as my hubby got home we decided to go ahead and take them to Incredible Pizza that day. My mom had come over to spend the day with us, so we took her with us. The kids had a blast. I noticed with all the walking around I was having more Braxton Hicks contractions than normal but didn’t think anything of it because they were even less noticeable than they’d been on the 1st. After several hours I started to notice that they were getting stronger and more regular. When I realized that I didn’t want my kids to touch me during one, I started timing them. They were 3 minutes apart and lasting 45 seconds-1 minute long. I decided that it was time to gather everyone and head home.
We ran into a snag at this point… I couldn’t find my husband and son. We spent a half hour looking for them. We even had them paged over the loud speaker, but they didn’t notice it. They were so enjoying their time playing video games together that they had tuned out the rest of the world.
They were finally found and when my husband was told what was going on he kicked it into high gear to get all the kids loaded into the van and get us headed home. I called the midwife from the car and told her how close together my contractions were. I was afraid to ask her to meet us at our house as I didn’t want a repeat of April Fools Day… But she assured me that she’d rather have a repeat, than miss the birth. So we agreed to meet at our house.
I was apprehensive of the drive home, as I’ve heard that traveling in the car while in labor can be uncomfortable. I was pleasantly surprised however to find that my “Peace” cue helped a lot and the trip home wasn’t bad. I would just relax into the pressure and tell myself “peace”. I was actually looking forward to each pressure wave as I was getting really excited to meet my son.
When we got home, my Mom herded the kids into the house and downstairs to watch Tangled. (I had purchased it specifically for the kids to watch while I was in labor.) I headed upstairs to the bedroom to start getting the last minute things ready. I wanted the birth tub filled, but wasn’t sure we’d have enough time, so I decided to just use our bathtub instead. In hind sight, I wish I’d taken the time to fill up the birth tub as the bath tub just wasn’t big enough for me to get comfortable in, plus it was really hard and that was uncomfortable on my legs and knees… But oh well.
I got into the tub and asked my husband to put on my Easy First Stage HypnoBabies track. The water felt so good and increased my ability to relax into the pressure. Listening to the track was very calming and helped me to keep my focus. I started out just resting my head on a washcloth on the side of the tub during contractions, but before too long, I found that I kept getting on my hands and knees during contractions as that is the position that my body prefers to labor in. I’ve used that position for all of my vaginal births. Both my husband and my 10 year old daughter took turns putting their hand on my forehead and using the “relax” cue. I was actually really surprised at how helpful that was.
When my midwife got there, one of the first things I remember her saying was “Most people just throw that crap away.”, referring to my Hypnobabies track. My sweet and protective husband spoke up and said “She likes it. It is really helping her.” That caused our midwife to back off and not say anything else negative about my track. Yeah for protective husbands! (editors note: GREAT JOB BIRTH PARTNER! Also, this is a really important reason to find out what your care providers really think about Hypnobabies. If they feel this way, then they may actually undermine your Hypnobabies experience.)
After she got everything set up, she came into the bathroom to watch me labor for a few minutes. She asked to check me at this point. She said that I was 80% effaced and 4 cm dilated with a bulging bag of waters. She also mentioned that my cervix was tilted really far backwards, which I’d told her previously that it was. I’ve always needed to have my midwives pull it forward during labor, and then once they do, birth is eminent. She asked if she could pull it forward for me, and I agreed; however I felt like she didn’t pull it forward enough, mainly because it didn’t hurt like it always had when any of my other midwives had done it. I credit that to Hypnobabies!
She then asked me to get out of the tub because she didn’t feel that I was far enough along to not have the water stall my labor. She felt that my contractions were too frequent and not long enough to be doing any real productive work. She was also not comfortable with me laboring on my hands and knees because then if I were to have a bowel movement it might get on the baby. She had me get onto the bed and lay on my side, but almost on my stomach, with my right leg extended out to the side and raised up on several pillows. She said that this position was very beneficial for helping the baby move down without tiring Mom out. She massaged my legs and back while I was in this position. I continued to use my “peace” cue and kept saying “open, open, open” to myself. After a little while, I just couldn’t stand that position any longer and so I got up and ran to the toilet. While there I had very loose stools. The midwife came in and tried to do some acupressure points on my legs, but I didn’t really notice a difference with that. When she found out that I was pooping she decided to leave us alone and went downstairs to make soup for me for after the baby was born.
For some reason, in my head, I translated that action, along with the fact that I was “only 4 cm” to mean that I still had HOURS left to go. I got up and tried to figure out where I wanted to labor. I tried the bed, but that wasn’t comfortable. I tried to get back into the bathtub, but lifting my leg over the side of the tub was too uncomfortable so I decided against that. I finally decided that I wanted to sit on the toilet backwards. While there I had a couple contractions and then all of a sudden I had a very intense one. (Which in hind sight was the start of Transformation, I just didn’t recognize it as such…)
*BOP* I started to get scared at this point because even though I wouldn’t use the word pain to describe it, it was more intense than I wanted to endure for hours. Keep in mind that at this point I still thought that I had hours to go. The midwife had never said that, in fact she said she thought it would be quick since she moved my cervix, but for some reason I was sure I still had hours left… I told my husband that I didn’t want to do it anymore and to take me to the hospital for an epidural because I couldn’t do this for hours more. He was so supportive and kept telling me that I was almost done, and that I’d be holding our new son in just a few minutes, but I didn’t believe him. *end BOP*(editors note: another example of how important the birth partner is during a birth. He knew mom just needed some encouragement. He knew the baby was almost there and was reminding mom of this!)
I then had another really intense contraction and my water broke. My water never breaks until the baby is crowning so I knew then that I really was close to the end. I got off the toilet but didn’t make it any farther than a squatting position on the floor in front of the toilet before my body was pushing. As soon as I told my husband that my water had broken he started trying to get the midwife’s attention by yelling for her, and stomping on the floor. That didn’t work. While I was getting off the toilet he raced to the top of the stairs and yelled down to her that the baby was coming.
He got back to me just as I was pushing the baby’s head out. I had reached down and supported his head as it was coming out. I never felt a “ring of fire” or anything. It was all just pressure. Which was pretty cool especially since he came out with his hand on his cheek! After his head was out, the midwife came into the bathroom… With the next contraction I was able to push the rest of his body out and I reached down and caught my Little Man and pulled him up to my chest. I loved being the one to catch him! The cord was looped around his shoulders and arm, so the midwife took him and unwound him from the cord and gave him back to me.
Then she and my husband helped me get to the bed. J.C. was born on April 9, at 7:50pm. It was 2 hours from when I first started timing pressure waves until I was holding my son.
It was so cool see him be this blue/grey color and then as soon as my placenta detached I could see him pink up right before my eyes. After the placenta was delivered, the midwife wrapped it up and put it next to us and left us alone for an hour, just the three of us. When she came back, she had Josef cut the cord and she did the newborn exam. He weighed 6 pounds, and was 18 ½ inches long. I was concerned as he hadn’t shown any interest in nursing yet, and during the exam we discovered why. He was tongue tied, so he couldn’t even stick his tongue out. The midwife clipped it and shortly after that he latched on and started nursing.
After everything was done, she brought me a bowl of her special lentil soup to help me get my energy back and to help my milk come in. The rest of the kids came in to meet their new brother. Everyone fell in love with him at first sight.
He is the most mellow baby we’ve ever had. Since he is number 6, that is saying a lot! The other kids can’t get enough of holding and kissing and touching him. We knew our family was missing people before he was born; but already I am forgetting what it was like before he was here. He has just always been a part of our family. We love him so much and are so grateful that Heavenly Father saw fit to send him to us.
LOVE this! What a beautiful team you and your husband are!
Comments are closed.