Three days before your due date you woke me up around 2 am with a new kind of contraction. I'd had lots of false labor contractions throughout the pregnancy, so didn't get too excited about these. But they felt different, they were more consistent and ran across my back and down my thighs. I laid in bed for about an hour and then got up and paid the bills and cleaned the kitchen. I went back to sleep from about 4-7 am, and then Ty woke up and I told him I thought we might have a baby today. He looked like maybe he didn't believe me.
We drank coffee and sat in the hot tub for a few minutes, and talked about going for a walk to help the labor progress (that's what all the books say to do). Ty had a report for DEQ to finish before you arrived, so he worked in his office for most of the morning while I cleaned the house, washed the sheets, and ordered baby clothes (green and white kiwi hat, tattoo onesie, and blue hoodie sweater) online in between contractions.
Around 11:00 Ty came out and loaded an iPhone app to time contractions for me and then went back to work. At noon, he finished up his report and said, "OK, should we go for that walk?" I'd been timing contractions for about an hour and they were about 4 minutes apart and lasting 2-3 minutes each. I said, "I think we should go to the hospital instead". The contractions weren't bad at that point, but getting slowly stronger and closer together. We packed up our stuff and drove to the hospital around 1:00. I remember saying to each other, "Wow. Hopefully the next time we drive back this way we'll be parents!"
We walked into the ER entrance and there was nobody at the admitting window. Ty walked around the corner saying, "Hello?? Is anyone here?" and this guy came out looking flustered and annoyed and said, "I'm sorry, I'm with a patient right now! Please just have a seat in the waiting room and...(looking at me)...oh. You'll need to go to the birth center. Uh, hang on a minute". He disappeared for about 10 seconds, then came back and said, "Go up to room 234. They're expecting you."We were the only people it seemed in the unit when we walked into the quiet birthing wing. We weren't really sure what to expect when we arrived at the hospital and were both prepared to get sent back home.
We met our nurse, Vicki, who was about 60 and possibly the only old-school nurse still working at Hood River Hospital. She was hilarious. One of the things we'd been counting on to get us through us a natural birth was the support of the labor and delivery nurses at the hospital--many of them double as doulas on the side and support natural birth with enthusiasm. Well, not Vicki. She asked us if we had a birth plan and as she read through our one-pager that said things like "please don't offer pain medications" and "we'll use movement and massage to deal with pain" she hemmed and hah-ed. When she finished reading, she said curtly, "Well, this all sounds very nice, but I will say this: people do not have babies because it is fun, and many people say they want a natural birth, but they don't actually know what that means. Have you taken any classes or done any reading? Do you know how you will actually deal with the pain of childbirth?" We told her that yes we had and when she left the room we both just looked at each other and knew we were on our own if we wanted to have a natural birth. I cried, for the first and only time that day.
Vicki had an elaborate pain scale that she performed with the precision and rigor that must come from years and years of being both a nurse and an extremely awkward care giver. It included things like, "At a 2, you can watch your favorite TV show and not miss any of the story line, but you might get up at the commercial to take an ibuprofen...At a 5, you begin to have trouble paying attention to your favorite TV show because the pain is too distracting, and you might have to ask the person next to you to fill you in on what's happening...At a 7, you are feeling so much pain that you can no longer sit through your TV show and you beg the person next to you to take you to the hospital...At a 10, you are willing to admit to a crime that you haven't committed and sell national security secrets if it means the pain will go away."When we arrived at the hospital, I was dilated to 3 cm. They did a test to see if my water had broke, and when it came back as positive, they said I could stay. By that time I was shivering, and got into the bath tub for almost an hour. The hot water felt nice and I labored on my hands and knees and with all the jets on until I was prunie and overheating.
I'd made a big deal about wanting to labor in my own clothes instead of one of the hospital gowns and when I got out of the tub I put on my cute little skirt and sports bra. I stood by the bed for a few minutes and then thought I'd try side-lying (the books told me that, too). Ty helped me climb onto the bed and as I did, my water broke for real. It felt like about 10 gallons of water shot out all over the bed and all over my cute skirt. So much for that idea.
From that point on, things get a little fuzzy in my memory. It was fast and intense and the passage of time blurred. I was at 4 cm around 4pm, not much progress since we got to the hospital, but I wasn't discouraged. I labored on the bed on my hands and knees, rocking back and forth and kind of doing cat/cow yoga poses and push ups during the contractions. They seemed to come really close together, one on top of another, but I breathed and rocked and it wasn't too bad. Tyler was great about guessing what I needed and he mastered the hip squeeze, pinched my toes together as hard as he could, and got ice packs and cold wash cloths for my neck and shoulders.
I remember having an ice pack made out of a baby diaper on my forehead and Ty was feeding me ice chips at the time. Some of the ice fell out of the diaper/ice pack and I picked it up off the bed and ate it. It was covered in weird little diaper absorbing crystal things and as I spit it out on the bed I remember saying to Ty, "I just ate some diaper" to which he answered..."Why?!?"At some point, Nurse Vicki came up with her face right up next to mine and said, "Would you say at this point that things are getting HOT and HEAVY?" Even in the midst of transition, I remember thinking to myself, "Seriously!?! Did she really just say that?" She checked me again and to everyone's surprise I was 9 cm dilated. I went from 4-9 in about an hour and forty minutes. Ty says that Vicki got pretty flustered at that point, rushing off to call the doctor. Funny, because the whole time she'd been talking about how "Monday's child is fare of face, Tuesday's child is full of grace" implying that I wouldn't be having a baby until tomorrow.
Dr. Dillon got there pretty quickly. I was having strong contractions and didn't try to talk to her, but I remember hearing her say that she'd been heading out on a mountain bike ride when she got the page, and turned her bike around and rode to the hospital. She also said she'd rather miss her bike ride than get called in at 2 in the morning. Other than that, she didn't say much. I didn't notice, but Ty said she just sat in a chair off to the side with her arms crossed, looking out the window. Vicki checked again and said I was at 9.95 cm (oh, my gosh, what a piece of work--she wouldn't even give me a 10!) and that I could try pushing if I wanted. I asked her to put up the squatting bar, which went across the bed and was supposed to support you, but it was really not a great design--it was too low to hang off of and too high to lean on, so I ended up sort of choking myself over it more than anything else.
Dr. Dillon hardly said a word and at one point I remember saying, "Is this working?!?" They all said it was, so I just kept at it. Then, suddenly nobody was paying attention to me any more and everyone was intensely focused on my croch :) Dr. Dillon seemed to whirl into action, laying out a big drop cloth and barking orders at the nurse. One or two more pushes and you came flying out--I have this image in my memory of the doctor catching you on the way out and sort of spinning you out onto the drop cloth where you slip and slid through the gore. The whole time, I was just locked on your big dark eyes, which were WIDE open, scanning the room with this look like, "What the HELL just happened to me?" About then, your dad peeked over my shoulder and said, "Linds, it's a girl!" I hadn't even looked, but I was so excited to find out we had a little girl.
I feel like they dabbed you off and handed you to Tyler, but there are pictures of you laying on me while Ty cut the umbilical chord. I do remember Dr. Dillon saying later that ours was the "mellowest" natural birth she'd been to in 15 years of practice. She said, "I've seen lots of natural births, but there's usually a lot of shrieking involved."We hung out in the delivery room for about an hour trying to figure out breastfeeding when one of the nurses said, "Do you guys know you have people waiting outside?" Ty went out and got Noni, Grandpa, and Aimee who were waiting anxiously in the room outside the birth center.
Another thing I remember about you being born was that right after you came out, the doctor and nurse were both saying things like, "Oooh, she's sturdy--I give her 8 lbs easy". As they went off to weigh you, you were a perfect 7 lbs 6 oz, but you did look pretty hefty, with a nice round belly and chubby little cheeks.That first night in the hospital you hardly slept at all, and when you did sleep, I found myself laying wide awake. I think all the adrenaline, for both of us, kept us going for about 24 hours straight. The hospital stay was great, everyone was super nice, but it got tiresome to be woken up for vitals every few hours and the food was, well, hospital-like. The doctor was worried about you because you'd tested positive for some condition (that I can't remember the name of it now--nice parenting!) that had to do with our incompatible blood types and bilirubin levels. So, they pricked your poor tiny feet over and over. In the end, it was no big deal, but it seemed like a good reason to stay the full two nights.
From the very beginning, you were alert and thoughtful. Even in those first moments and leading into the following days, you were soaking everything up, observing, processing, and forming opinions. You big eyes would fix on things and I just knew you were working on figuring it all out. You laughed and smiled in your sleep from the beginning, too, and I remember thinking that you were going to have a good sense of humor.
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