When our daughter James Katherine was born, I didn’t speak to God for a week.
Although I had every reason to be thankful and thrilled that we had a successful homebirth and healthy baby, I wrestled with sadness, anger, and confusion in the days following James' birth. So much of her birth didn’t make sense to me. I thought surely she would arrive sooner than her older sister did and that this labor would be quicker, too, but I was wrong on both accounts. Despite both my body and heart feeling so completely worn down, I carried a baby beyond 41 weeks (again). She was ten days overdue, beating Tessa by one day. When I finally did go into labor, it took almost twice as long to get her here. Those seventeen hours felt like an eternity compared to my previous ten-hour labor.
Read More
At 1:30am, my water broke in a few gushes, and I started having irregular, and occasionally strong, contractions. After one of the strong ones, N decided to call his mom in case things got more serious.
Around 10:30am, N and I left the kids at home with Grandma, and we went to my sister’s house so I could nurse her newborn. I had good, strong, regular contractions (~3min apart) for a while. Went to Panera to pick up lunch, brought it home to eat, still having contractions... but things calmed down by about 1:30pm. Later that afternoon I took a nap.
Read More
We started this pregnancy with See Baby Midwifery, but at our first appointment at 11 weeks, both the midwife and Dr. Bootstaylor mentioned we would be great candidates for home birth. While we have friends who have had homebirths, we hadn’t ever considered it for our family. We researched and met with Constance for a consultation, and we decided that home birth was our new plan! I loved the long and personal prenatal appointments. I loved getting to know Constance and Debbie and the student midwives. I was blown away with how peaceful and loving our home birth was.
Let me set the scene:
I’m very hugely pregnant (measuring 44 cm a week before the birth). I had about 8 hours of “practice” labor at 39 weeks. My mom came to stay with us 3 days prior to this. We had asked her to be at the birth to help take care of the kids. At the point this story begins, I have been in early labor for a day or so, with contractions about 10 minutes apart….
Monday, May 4, 2015 (41w2d)
I woke up a little after 2 AM for yet another trip to the bathroom, then again just after 5 AM. The second trip I found more bloody show. Yay! I went back to bed, but couldn’t sleep.