I try to keep today’s memory as intact as possible. I don’t ever want to forget the day.
I loved being pregnant. I was fortunate to have a pregnancy without complication. I ran, swam, did pre-natal yoga, and regularly walked. Every Sunday was our weekly traipse through the dog park with Sheldon, and Sunday February 16th 2014 was no different. We went on a great walk and then headed to my parents for dinner where I munched on one too many homemade cookies. When we got home I was chatting with some friends and started to get what I thought was a “one too many cookie” pain. So I went to sleep, trying to sleep the pain off. This was 10:30pm.
At 3 am I woke up with a stronger pain. Still a pain that felt more like too many cookies and something a good trip to the bathroom would fix. By 4am, I was fixing myself a bath trying to convince Ryan to go back to sleep since he was going to have to work in the morning. By 4:30, I figured it was more then too many cookies. But everyone tells you labor takes a while. Many people go through days of labor for their first child. So I was still trying to convince Ryan to go back to sleep, assuming if this wasn’t fake labor, we wouldn’t be heading to the hospital until well after he got home. At 5 am when the bath did nothing and the yoga poses weren’t making a dent in the pain and I told Ryan the next child was being adopted, Ryan called my Doula. She suggested a few different things that Ryan relayed to me and I tried. I actually have no recollection of what these were, but I will never forget her next suggestion. Drink a glass of wine, I think she’s too worked up right now so her body isn’t able to relax in between contractions. YES! It was 5am on a Monday morning, I was 9 months pregnant and I was drinking wine. Just a small glass of whatever Reisling was available in our wine rack, but it was delightful, and did ZERO for my pain. By this point we had also been talking to our midwife. She was currently at the hospital with someone else and couldn’t come assess me at the house. By 6 am both the Doula and Midwife said we should head over to the hospital to get checked out. I will never forget that drive. In the middle of rush hour, squirming and groaning what felt like the whole time. Being buckled into a seat belt while in labor is cruel. I also remember thinking that if we got there and they said I wasn’t dilated enough to stay, I was going to loose it.
Thankfully that didn’t happen. When they checked I was 7cm and they said I could stay. Thank goodness!
The next 6 hours are a bit of a blur. I remember squatting a lot. Breathing and groaning a lot. Trying the bath and barley getting a foot in before deciding that wasn’t happening. Bouncing on a ball for like 2 seconds. The nurses taking blood in the middle of a contraction and somehow remaining still. And I remember the most incredible hand massage that I swear my Doula must have done for 5+hours of the labor.
At 10:59 am my water broke and I remember everyone in the room laughing because of my facial expression. This is when I finally had to get on the bed. But you know those Hollywood movies where the ladies are laying in bed on their backs and their legs bent, well that was not happening. I do remember trying that, but yikes! Nope no relief that way. They attached a bar to the bed for me and I hung over that for two hours. I am 99% sure I had a 2 min nap on that bar at some point. I was exhausted. I was ready to give up. I was ready to say screw my birth plan, give me the drugs and let me sleep. My Doula knew that too. I don’t know what she and Ryan did, but they talked me through. My Doula didn’t play the music playlist (full of Christmas songs) that we had talked about, but she did have me acknowledge a phone call that the L&D nurse made where she asked for another nurse for delivery. She taped into my running side. She had me recognize how close to the best part I was. She encouraged me through that last 100m sprint and at 1:01pm on February 17th I became a mom.
So tonight as all the decorations are up and the gift is wrapped, I am sitting with a glass of wine remembering a memory I never want to forget. 
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