Matteo Gian has made his arrival!

nabiasi · July 2010

So it's my turn for a birth story - I'm almost two weeks late in sharing - he arrived on July 13th and 9:05pm. My due date was the 10th, but we think it should have been more like the 12th or 13th so he was right on time!

Sunday Jul 11th I was having mild contractions every 5 mins apart for several hours (5-6) before I decided to call the on-call doctor. We decided it was best to wait it out. No real progress over night or through much of the day Monday.. until... well I was working from home.. sitting on an exercise ball with my laptop on the ottoman. I decided to bend forward (sort of squatting) to pet my puppy. When I went to return to the sitting position- the ball had rolled away and I landed straight on my butt. I felt some fluid leak and had a relatively painful contraction after that. After changing my underwear four or five more times due to minor fluid discharge.. I decided to call the doc office before they closed. I was given the green light to head to L&D.

We got to the hospital around 6pm.. but didn't get examined until 7pm... I was convinced my contractions would have stopped and I'd look like an idiot so I made sure we walked around a bit and even took the stairs up to the L&D floor. No signs of fluid leaking from anything they checked.. until they did a sono and found low fluid levels around the baby. At that point I was admitted.. and definitely freaking out. I was convinced I'd be sent home!

Due to the low fluid.. they decided it was necessary to speed things up - so I was given cervadil over night - and about 10am I was started on pitocin. I only made it to 3cm by around 1pm (from 2cm the night prior) so my doc decided to fully break my water.. that's when the REAL contractions started. I was still on a pretty high dosage of pitocin when this happened so I wound up having extremely bad contractions every minute and a half lasting about a minute.. yup 30 seconds of rest. I lasted about 2 hrs before giving in to the epidural.. which I was trying to avoid. But.. so glad I did. it was heaven. DH and I rested most of the afternoon.

4:30 I was checked.. still only 4-5cm. 7pm... FULLY dialated - which again I was not expecting (being such a pessimist!). They gave me a half hour to let him move down a bit more before pushing. I began pushing at 7:35pm.. as a first timer it took a little bit to get the hang of it. I really had trouble holding my breath for a long time for each push. But we worked through it. I wound up with an hour and a half pushing time. The time in between contractions was honestly the worst b/c I was still having major pains with him down in the birth canal. The pushing actually provided some relief.

9:05pm Matteo Gian entered the world, 8lbs 1oz, 21 inches long. Pretty big for a 100lb mama.. but I was expecting worse b/c I started out at 9lb 6oz myself! We are so in love.. Best of luck to all you ladies for speedy deliveries and healthy babies!