On Wednesday, January 20th at 12:30 a.m. Reed and I head off to bed and I lay down and with a few tears streaming down my face I ask God to please let this little boy come into the world soon, I don’t think I can stand being pregnant and uncomfortable one more day. Later that night at 1:00 a.m. I get up to go the bathroom and lay back down in bed on my left side and Gavin started to move in my belly for a solid hour and I could not go back to sleep for the life of me. So at 2 a.m. I decided to roll on over to my right side figuring that he was moving so much because he didn’t like me being on my left side. Well, he squirmed and wiggled for the next hour again after I rolled over, and again I couldn’t go to sleep. At this point I am thinking to myself “maybe he is packing his things up for the big move?”
So somewhere between 3-4 a.m. I finally fall back to sleep and at 4:00 a.m. I slightly adjust the way I was laying and I felt this slow wet trickle, and I wonder to myself, “did my water just break or am I peeing myself,” so I slide out of bed and walk to the bathroom where a huge gush of water came running down my legs and I knew that this was it! I cleaned up and tapped my then sleeping husband and said, “You ready to have a baby today because my water just broke!”
Reed gets up and says “Okay, so what do we need to do?” and I look at him and say, “Well, we left the kitchen a mess and we need to get set up for our home birth!” I call my midwife Peggy and tell her what just happened and she tells me to call her when my contractions start! So we change the sheets to the bed and head down stairs to tidy up the house a little. Yes, at 4:00 a.m. Reed is unstacking the dishwasher and I am sweeping the whole house. At this point in the night I am thinking that labor will start at any minute and we would have the baby in the next 12 hours. Around 4:30 a.m. I look at my tired husband and realize how tired I am myself and thinking to myself “why in the world am I cleaning, I want to go back to bed!” So I look at Reed and tell him that we need to go back to bed and get as much sleep as possible and like a good man he agrees!
Reed went to bed and I took a long shower and I tried to go back to sleep but I just had to much going through my head and I just lay there waiting for the first contraction to start. At 7:30 a.m. the girls woke up and we carried on our day with no sign of labor starting at all. So after lunch I call the midwife and she tells me to just take it easy and try to get some sleep, so I do.
At 3:00 p.m. Reed and I go for a short cold walk around the neighborhood with the twins to see if that would help get things going and I think I had 2 very small contractions during the walk. So at 4:00 I check in with my midwife and she tells me to drink 4 oz of castor oil (is a strong laxative) and hopefully within 3 hours that will do it’s job and get some contractions rolling on top of it. So, I throw back the castor oil, which I would mention is the vilest stuff I have ever swallowed, it doesn’t have any flavor but it has the thickness of drinking motor oil and it’s really hard to swallow something with that kind of viscosity. Reed took a small sip of it and immediately started gagging and had to run to the bathroom to vomit… I on the other hand drank all 4 oz… I told Reed, “That’s why women have the babies not men!”
So, around 6:30 p.m. the castor oil hits me and so do my contractions. At this point they are about 10 minutes apart. I call my midwife and she tells me to call her when I am ready for her to come. At 8:00 p.m. Reed and I put the twins to bed and call the midwife to come on over. Reed and I spend the next 2.5 hours sitting in front of the TV watching Myth Busters, while I am sitting on my exercise ball and Reed timing my contractions and waiting for the 3 midwifes to show, they all got there around 10:00 p.m.
From 10:30-11:30 p.m. Reed and I relax/sleep upstairs on our bed and the midwives make themselves comfortable in our living room chatting and sleeping them selves. Around 11:30-12:30 a.m. I get out of bed because I am just ready to get this show on the road and I know if I get back up onto my exercise ball things will move a lot faster. So, I decided to sit on the side of the bed on my ball and Reed lay on the bed helping me relax and remember to breathe during each of my contractions.
At 12:30-1:30 a.m. the midwives thought it would be best if Reed got some rest while they helped me through my contractions for a while. So during this hour while Reed rested some of my strongest contractions happened and I started to vomit and I knew things were changing and I was getting close.
At 1:30 a.m. I had one really big contraction and I called for Reed to wake up and I knew it was time to push. At this point all the midwives were in the room and they set up the birthing stool to see if that would be something I would want to use during the pushing phase and after trying to push one time on it, I just knew that it wasn’t the way I wanted to be positioned to push so I got off and dropped to my hands and knees on our bedroom floor and continued to push like that until baby Gavin was born into his Daddy's hands at 1:51 a.m.
When he came out he had his cord wrapped around his neck 6 times, but it wasn’t a big deal and from the moment he was born he was with me and in my arms which was amazing and beautiful to have that time to bond with him before anyone else touched him. Then Reed got to cut the cord when it had stop pulsating and from there I got to breastfeed and hold him until I was ready to let them evaluate him.
It was a beautiful and amazing birth experience and it was better than I had pictured it would be. It was quiet, relaxed, loving, calm and easy. There wasn’t a single intervention done to me or baby, I just labored and gave birth to my baby safe and sound. I can’t thank Peggy, Kim and Purvine enough for giving me this gift of a beautiful birth that I knew was possible without hospitals and doctors.
