no blogging for over a week, anyone would think I’d had a baby 🙂
Smallest of all arrived punctually last Tuesday on her due date. Apparently only 4% of babies do that. Labour in the form of irregular contractions started overnight Monday, just at the level to interrupt my sleep so that I was nicely tired as they built up gradually during the day.
Rang around lunchtime to let my midwife know that I wouldn’t be coming into clinic and why, and discovered she was off. Mw I spoke too said it sounded like I had a while to go (how do they tell that over a phoneline? they were wrong about it with Big too), but I was back on the phone to her at 16.30 as I was beginning to feel pressure. That meant we had the two nearest mws with us within half an hour 🙂
At that point though, I was only 2-3 cms 🙁 Not the news I wanted to hear. So L went away again, and R decided she’d hang on til D, the mw actually covering could get there, as she was somewhere with minimal phone coverage and proving difficult to reach. She advised that I get moving about and have some food, so Tim made me some toast.
Either the food or the toast made the difference and slightly less than two hours later I was on the bed on my side, just past 8cm. Good for the toast. R was calling L back as she didn’t think D was going to make it in time, in the end it was in the nick of time to hand me the entonox just as we got to the pushing part.
(I think she walked in and said hi, I’m D, ooh are we catching a baby? and proper introductions had to wait 🙂 )
Baby was born with just two pushes I think, a whole 5 minutes after the 8cm. She still had membranes round her shoulders as she was passed to me, and she was kind of cross about the whole thing. Have to say that the little bit of entonox made a lot of difference to that final couple of minutes – it’s the bit that I’d remembered from Small’s birth and had been dreading. Could also have been that he was that little bit bigger – he came in at 9lb 9oz and 56cm long, while s-o-a was 8lb 12oz and 52cm. A very respectable size I thought.
After we’d had skin to skin for a little while R wrapped her up and passed her to Tim so that we could concentrate on the placenta. That was delivered after about 15 minutes and then we all took a look, as it was quite an impressive size 🙂
Next order of play was shower for me while Tim and R sorted out the bedroom. And then I got to retire to my own bed with my new daughter – gotta love home birth 🙂
Since then she’s getting the hang of this feeding lark though she really hasn’t worked out night and day yet. We had a couple of days of mucousy coughing which were less than fun, but we’re well into milk now and it’s beginning to show through 😉
And that will have to do for a first post about our newest family member.
Leave a Reply