Conor Anthony's natural home birth (long, PiP)

LuckyInIreland · March 2012

Conor Anthony was born yesterday at 11:30 weighing in at 7lb even and 20 3/4 inches long.

I started having contractions around 5:30pm on Wed but I did my best to ignore them since I'd been having BH for what seemed like forever. Around 9pm they started getting more intense but we decided to go to bed and try to sleep through it. Ha, yeah, that was not working very well. Around 12:30am I went downstairs to try to sleep between them on the couch, leaving Hubby in bed to try to get some sleep himself. At 2:30, I lost my MP. At 6, I woke up DH 'cuz I didn't want to work through them on my own. We started timing them and they were a minute+ every 3-5 minutes. As soon as we hit that magic hour mark, we paged the midwife. She thought we were still kinda early in labor and would have the midwife coming on duty (Andy) call us in about an hour to see how things were going. In the mean time, she suggested I take a warm shower to help get through the contractions. Andy called us a few minutes later and said she would stop by just to check on me since we were on her way to the birth center. She arrived just as I was getting out of the shower. She checked me and checked me again, and again because she couldn't believe it- I was at 9cm already! 9cm with a bulging bag, when at my appointment on Monday, I had been at 1cm with a Bishop score of 5. She quickly called the office to let them know she wouldn't be in and found an assistant who could get there quickly. After that, things moved fast! By the time we got the pool set up, there wasn't really time for me to get in it. I was feeling the urge to push-which is impossible to ignore- but still had a lip. Andy had my push through the next contraction while she pushed at the lip and POP went my water everywhere! I pushed for about an hour, hour and a half, then crowned for an hour and a half. That was kinda intense. Once his head was born, oh the relief! His body just kinda shot out of me with the next push, along with the rest of my water. DH caught him and said, "Meet Conor!" He was all tangled up in his cord- wrapped around his neck, arm, and leg- but Andy and Ashely the assistant just calmly untangled him and set him on my chest.

I had 2 small tears that didn't /need/ stitching, but Andy felt they might heal together if she didn't stitch them up the way they should be. 2 on one side and 1 on the other, no big deal! Then everyone left the room and it was just me, DH, and our perfect son.